The water around them had again grown dark and cold. Besides a thin carpet of black sediment, there was no trace of life, and where they didn’t pass, nothing moved. At this moment, the Master Captain was speaking to the ship, openly describing the damage while accenting all that had been spared. What was the mood of the passengers? The crew? Washen consciously ignored a multitude of tools, walking steadily toward an armored cap-car guarded by a second platoon of troops.

“Are they yours?” Aasleen inquired.

“Is who mine?”

“The Worms-of-heaven. Did you welcome them on board the ship?”

Washen began to answer, then hesitated. Finally, with a quiet tone, she admitted, “No. But I had to look hard to be sure.”

“We’re two very old women,” Aasleen said with amusement. “Too many memories tucked into too small of a space.”

Washen nodded, casting her mind back to the beginning again.

Finally, she asked, “Who invented hyperfiber?”

In an instant, the engineer beside her gave the same answer that her father had delivered many centuries ago. The ancient Sag A aliens had received the miracle stuff from one of the galaxy’s oldest species, now long extinct …

Aasleen hesitated.

“But that isn’t what you want,” she guessed.

“I don’t know what I want,” Washen confessed.

The soldiers from both platoons began to board the armored cap-car. Behind it, tucked into a small crevice, was a second, much smaller and infinitely less impressive car that had slipped in here by another route.

The harum-scarum officer entered the smaller vehicle. Then with a crisp command delivered by one finger, she beckoned the Submasters to join her.

“Whoever built the Great Ship was first,” Aasleen conceded.

Probably so.

“Is that what you were talking about? When you were telling me about the models that you played with when you were a girl?”

“No,” Washen admitted.

The women cut away each other’s pressure suits and discarded the pieces.

“No,” Washen said again. Then as she sat—as the cap-car began to slip away into the cold murk—she said with a grim voice, “I was going to tell you how proud I was. All those times that the awful little black holes had cut through my ship … the most terrible monstrous force in the universe … and my wonderful ship had weathered the damage with barely a trace of damage.”

THE SECURITY OFFICER was right in one awful way. The next infinity was more massive by a factor of five, and worse, it had been given its own momentum, bearing down on its target at almost ten percent lightspeed. There was no effective warning, even for the highest officers. Five days after the first impact, Washen was sitting in one of the auxiliary bridges, speaking to holos of other Submasters and picked captains and representatives from an assortment of species and crew. She was saying nothing at that moment, but she happened to glance up the length of the table, the corner of an eye picking up the flash as one of her colleagues was turned into plasma and light.

In reflex, a hundred other holo projections turned toward the flash.

Countless alarms were blaring, and as many captains and automated systems were begging for information.

In less than half a second, the black hole had cut through the ship. Endowed with its own momentum, it did a better job of resisting the hyperfiber’s tug. And worse, the black hole missed the bow by less than twenty kilometers, tracing out a perfectly perpendicular trajectory. It was close to a dead-on shot, and the damage was spectacular. The Janusian Submaster was dead. Reactors were pierced, and the plunging black hole had traveled through Fall-Away—a vertical chamber hundreds of kilometers tall and filled with some of the most expensive homes on the ship. This time there was genuine carnage. Every two seconds, new casualty lists were generated, while AIs predicted a final count approaching fifty thousand. All dead. Then after the Fall-Away, the black hole had cut through the ship’s core, and then the trailing hemisphere, missing twelve cities by nothing before it finally burst back into empty space through the ship’s central rocket, increasing the damage to the mangled and still-powerless motor.

But inside that wealth of data and cold conjecture was a notable gap.

Marrow.

Washen rose to her feet.

The image of Pamir stood beside her. With a knowing look, he told her to stay where she was. With a hand composed of compliant photons, he touched her real hand, as if he could hold her in this place.

She sat again, her energies spent.

Pamir took control of the meeting. On Washen’s authority, he gave orders and set priorities, then turning toward Aasleen, he asked, “When are we ready?”

The chief engineer flinched.

“Which one?”

“Endeavor,” he said, naming the ship’s port.

“Eight days,” she offered. “And an hour.”

The fef Submaster bent his body as far as possible, the raised face declaring, “We have extra hands.”

“Hands aren’t the trouble,” Aasleen explained. “Unless it’s too many hands, which is where I am now.”

Crash projects were always ugly and inspired, and nothing the engineers could do now would complete the impossible work any sooner. Pamir nodded and moved on. More orders became necessary. In the chaos at Fall-Away, looters were at work, and he ordered Osmium to pull troops out of the reserves. “Whatever you need to bring order and not kill anyone. Understand?”

“Agreed,” said a mouth.

Soon everyone in attendance had better places to be, and some new purpose, and that was when Washen took over again. Barely three minutes had passed, but the span felt enormous and eventful. Again, the Master was speaking to the entire ship. Again, Washen peered down the length of the table, long hands pressed with authority against polished olivine, and with a voice that sounded more flat than unperturbed, she told her audience, “Go and do your work. Nothing else.” And then a premonition took her, and with a menace that was easy to generate, she said, “This isn’t going to be a long war. From here on, everything the polypond has, she’s going to be pushing at us now.”

THEN THEY WERE back inside Washen’s apartment.

Except neither dared come close to a ripe and well-known target like this. What if the polypond sent a spray of tiny black holes at this one place, trying to murder the captains who had always lived in this district? No, they weren’t inside Washen’s apartment, and they certainly weren’t naked in her bedroom. They were at opposite ends of the ship, and the image of hands being held was nothing but a bit of pretend. Yet there was no other place in the ship where a special immersion eye sent its encoded feed. Only in her bedroom, under the olivine sky, could Washen gaze down on Marrow.

In the blackness, iron glowed red and fires burned. But the world was quieter than she had ever seen it, and it was darker, and that despite the passage of the black hole—a nearly perfect shot that had missed the center of its core by less than a hundred kilometers.

“Which is a very big miss,” Pamir offered.

She said nothing.

“The prisoner in the middle,” he continued. “Tiny as tiny can be, the estimates keep claiming. What are the odds that the polypond could actually hit that kind of target?”

Washen refused to speak.

“She might have a thousand small-mass black holes,” he continued. “Give or take, of course. And if she keeps firing them into us, each time more accurately than the last … at this current rate, with a sample size of two blasts …”

“One in a million,” she offered.

Which were bad enough odds to make them feel better. But Pamir was too honest to leave it there. “All she has to do is cut the thing out of its containment,” he remarked. “Whatever the prisoner is. A Bleak. Or a Builder. Or the Creation held up.” He let go of her hand, adding, “That’s what the prisoner tried to do, after all. Before, when it wanted to ram us into that fat black hole.”