“No, lady,” Lance said with such absolute assurance it seemed to touch both our born-men, while all about us the hammering continued.

On all sides of us now. So all the preparations we had made, every defense Griffin had planned—all of that was hopeless now.

“Call the others to the dining hall,” Griffin said. “I want to talk to them.”

“Yes, sir,” Gawain said, and went.

So Griffin thought that there was reassurance to give us. O born-man, I thought, we aren’t like Vivien. We’ll go on working now we know the rules, because we know we have work to do for you. You don’t have to reach so far to find us hope.

But seeing Vivien cave in as she had done, Griffin believed he had to come up with something for the rest of us. He looked so distressed himself that it touched me to the heart. It was Dela that went to him and held his hand. And Lance just stood there.

“Ah!”

Vivien’s voice. A terrible sound, a shriek.

I spun about and flew into the bedroom. There was Vivien wide awake and sitting up as if from some nightmare, the covers clutched to her breast and that same stark horror in her eyes, but waking now.

“It’s all right,” I lied to her fervently, coming through the door. I ran to her and caught her hands which held the sheets and I shook at her. “Viv, come out of it. You’re in Dela’s room, you’re safe. It can’t come here.”

“Can’t it?” Her teeth chattered. Her hair was mussed, trailing about her face. She gave a wrench to get away from me and I let go. Then she looked beyond me at the others who had come in. I looked around. My lady was there, foremost, and Griffin and Lance. “It’s coming through up there,” Vivien said. “Right into the lifesupport.”

“Maybe we could move the equipment down,” Dela said.

Griffin said nothing. Nor did Lance or I, probably all thinking the same.

“It’s making those things all around us,” Vivien said. “Until it has its tendrils into us and we’re done. Nothing we do is working.”

“We lose the tanks if it gets in there,” Griffin said.

“And then we lose everything,” Dela said. “We have to move the lab.”

“No,” Griffin said. “Come on. Let’s go talk to the others.”

He took Dela with him. I delayed, with Lance, to see to Vivien, who sat amid the bed with her head fallen into her hands. She swept her hair back, then, adjusted pins, beginning to fuss over herself, which was one of her profoundest reflexes. She could be dying, I thought, and still she would do that. For a moment I felt deeply sorry for Viv.

“Shut up,” she said then, when I had said nothing. “Let me alone.” She had a way of rewarding sympathy.

“Vivien,” Lance said, “get up and come with us.”

That was asking for it, giving Viv orders.

“Or we leave you here,” I added.

Alone. Vivien got out of bed then, fussed with her suit and brushed at imaginary dirt. Lance held out his hand for her arm, but she pointedly ignored that and walked out ahead of us.

“We’re due in the dining hall,” I said, being kind, because Viv would have no idea where we were supposed to go and would have had to wait on us otherwise, outside, a damage to her dignity. So she went on ahead of us without a thank you, click, click, click of the trim heels and sway of the elegant posterior and still fussing about her hairpins.

O Viv, I thought with deepest pity, because Lance gave me his strong hand and we walked together; but Viv walked all alone. She was made that way. There was none of us as solitary as Vivien.

Or as narrow. Not even Modred.

We came last into the dining hall, Lance and I and Vivien, but not by much. It was our stronghold, our safe place, the long table under the lion banner, amid the weapons. We could hear the hammering, but more faintly here than elsewhere. We knew our proper seats and settled into them.

“Have we got a location, on the attack?” Griffin was asking.

“Middecks after section,” Modred said, “portside. And topside forward. That’s main storage and the hydroponics. As well as the action at the bow.”

“They’re slow about it,” Griffin said.

No one said anything to that. We were only glad it was so.

“We look forward,” Griffin said then, “to more traveling. To going on and on with this thing. This ship. Whatever it is. But if it travels, it leaves this space from time to time. If we could somehow break loose ...”

“If you’ll pardon me,” Modred said, “sir, the crew has been working on that possibility. It won’t work.”

Griffin’s face remained remarkably patient. “I didn’t much reckon that it would, but spell it out. Mass?”

“Mass, sir. It’s growing with every acquisition, not only the ships, but debris. Mass, and something that just confirmed itself. We’re moving. We have an acquired velocity in relation to realspace and there’s no means to shed it. This mass has been slingshotted as many times as there are ships gathered out there; if we could hazard an unfounded presumption, and even factoring it conservatively, the acquired velocity would itself increase our mass beyond any reasonable limit. We’re a traveling discontinuity, an infinitude, a local disturbance in spacetime. We arethe disturbance and our own matter is the problem.”

I blinked, my hands knotted in my lap under the table, understanding more of what Modred said than I usually did; but Modred was talking down to us. To Griffin.

“If I could reconstruct what happened,” Gawain said, “something a long time ago either kicked or pulled the original core object into subspace. And either it never had control or it lost it. So it careens along being attracted by the gravity wells of stars and accelerating all kinds of debris into its grasp. It hasn’t got a course. Just velocity. It picks up velocity at the interface and it never gets rid of it. It’s no part of our universe any longer.”

“We arein Hell,” Dela murmured, shaking her head.

“Wherever we are,” Griffin said, “we have company. And if we can’t hope to get out of it, then we have to do something about it. Lynette, you had an idea—to breach the core object itself.”

Lynn looked up, eyes aglitter in her thin face.

“I’ve seen a place,” she said, “not so far from the emergency lock starboard. I think we could get into it there.”

“And create what kind of difficulty inside the wheel,” Griffin asked, “if you breach their lifesupport?”

“We’ll rig a Bridge from our own side. Pressure seal. We can do it.”

Our eyes went from one face to another—seeing hope, seeing doubt, one and then the other.

“We could save time,” Modred said dryly, “by opening our own forward hatch and using theirs.”

“We can control matters,” Lynn said, “by building our own lock. By having a way round behindtheir position. We could attach to our upper airlock and have a way to attach either to a tube they might build to our upper section or to attach to the wheel itself and have an access we control so we don’t get trapped.”

“And then they move behind us, don’t they? And we don’t know what we’re going to meet in weapons. No. It won’t work.”

“Lynn could be lost out there,” Dela said, adding her force to Modred’s.

“No, lady,” Lynn said. There was that kind of look on Lynn’s face that had to be believed while she was saying it. “I can doit. Give me the chance. It’s all that can stop us being trapped.”

“It’s worth the try,” Griffin said.

“Lady,” Modred said.

“I can do it,” Lynn said again.

She wanted to so badly: she said it herself, how it hurt to be useless. We all had this compulsion to serve. And Lynn’s, I thought, might well be the end of her.

“All right,” Dela said.

“Lady—” Modred objected.

“Let her try,” Dela said. “Someone has to do something that works.”

Modred subsided. His face—I had never seen him so out of countenance—He looked like murder.