At least the ship is probably safe. There aren’t other structures around, like Teresa had to deal with. And a model-three shuttle is too small to worry about tides.

Mark had himself convinced, almost.

The outer half of his visual field was gone, though it kept fluctuating moment by moment. Through the remaining tunnel, Mark watched a drama unfold far below, where the Ob jounced and writhed as if someone were poking it with invisible rods. Flow deformed the hills and depressions nearly as quickly as they formed. Still, the undulations seemed to take clear geometric patterns.

Then, within a circular area, the Ob simply disappeared!

It was only pure luck none of the study vessels were inside the radius when it happened. As it was, the boats had a rugged ride as the columnar hole rapidly filled in.

“Where… where’d the water go?” Ben asked.

Joining the growing ringing in Mark’s ears came the blare of a camera alert. One of the secondary pictures suddenly ballooned outward, rimmed in red. For a moment Mark couldn’t make out what had the computer so excited. It looked like another view of the river valley, but at much lower magnification, or from higher altitude.

But this image appeared warped somehow. Then he realized it wasn’t unfocused. He was looking down at the Ob through a lens. The lens was a glob of water, which had suddenly manifested in midair at an altitude of… he squinted to read the lidar numbers… twenty-six kilometers!

Mark breathed the sweaty incense of his own dread. Something tiny and black squiggled inside the murky liquid blob that paused, suspended high above the planet. But before he could order the telescope to magnify, the entire watery mass was gone again! In its wake lay only a rainbow fringe of vapor, melting into the speckles at his eyes’ periphery.

“What the… ?”

“It’s back!” Ben cried. “Fifty-two klicks high! Here…” and he rattled off some code. Another scene, from another instrument, popped into view.

Now the ground looked twice as far below. The Ob was a thin ribbon. And the portion of stolen river had reappeared at double the altitude. Mark had time to blink in astonishment. The black object within looked like…

The spherule vanished again. “Mark,” Ben gasped. “I just calculated the doubling rate. It’s next appearance could be — Jesus!”

Mark felt his copilot’s hand grab the fabric of his suit and shake it. “There!” Ben’s voice crackled over the intruding roar of static. An outstretched arm and hand entered Mark’s narrow field of view and he followed the trembling gesture out to black space.

There, in the direction of Scorpio, an object had appeared. He didn’t have to command amplification. Even as telescopes slewed to aim at the interloper Mark cleared all displays with one whispered word and stared in direct light at the oblate spheroid that had paused nearby, shimmering in the undiminished sunlight.

What strange force might have hurled a portion of the Ob out here — momentarily, magically co-orbital with Intrepid — Mark couldn’t begin to imagine. It violated every law he knew. Small flickerings told of bits being thrown free of the central mass. But in its center there floated a large object—

— a woman. A diver, wearing a black wetsuit and scuba gear, with twin tanks that Mark bemusedly figured ought to last her another couple of hours, depending on how much she’d already used.

Mark had left only a narrow tunnel of vision, but it was enough. Through the diver’s face mask he caught the woman’s strange expression — one of rapt fulfillment mixed with abject terror. She began to make a sign with her hands.

“We’ve got to help her!” he heard Ben shout over the roar of static, preparing to launch himself toward the castaway.

Realization came instantly, but too late. “No, Ben!” Mark cried out. “Grab something. Anything!” Mark fumbled and found a stanchion by the cargo bay door. This he now gripped for all his life.

“Hold tight!” he screamed.

At that moment his helmet seemed to fill with a terrible song, and the world exploded with colors he had never known.

When it was all over, quivering from sore muscles and wrenched joints, Mark gingerly reeled in his copilot’s frayed, torn tether. He searched for Ben everywhere. Radar, lidar, telemetry… but no instrument could find a trace. Of the hapless Russian diver, also, there was no sign.

Perhaps they have each other for company, wherever they’re going, he thought at one point. It was a strange solace.

He did detect other things nearby… objects that command insisted he pick up for study. These were bits of flotsam… a mud-filled vodka bottle… a piece of weed… a fish or two.

Then, preparing to head home, he went through the retro protocols several times, double-checking until Command accused him of stalling.

“Can it!” he told them sharply. “I’m just making sure I know exactly where I am and where I’m going.”

As the pyrotechnics of reentry erupted around the cockpit windows, Mark later realized he’d spoken exactly as Teresa Tikhana would have. To the mission controllers, he must have sounded just like her.

“Hell, Rip,” he muttered, apologizing to her in absentia. “I never knew how you felt about that, till now. I promise, I won’t ever make fun of you again.”

Even much later, when he was once more on the steady ground, Mark walked cautiously toward the crowd of anxious, waiting officials with a cautious gait, as if the tarmac weren’t quite as certain- a platform as the others believed. And even when he began answering their fevered questions, Mark kept glancing at the horizon, at the sun and sky, as if to check and check again his bearings.

How much difference could a month make? The last time Teresa had sat at this table, deep inside the secret warrens of Waitomo, her personal world had only recently crashed in on her. Now her grief was stabilized. She could look back at her passionate interlude in Greenland as part of a widow’s recovery, and begin thinking about other things than Jason. Of course, last time she had also been numb from a completely different shock — learning about Earth’s dire jeopardy. That fact hadn’t changed.

But at least we’re doing something about it now. Futile or not, their efforts were good for the spirit.

George Hutton was just finishing his overall status report. Their limited success so far was visible in the large-scale display where their foe could now be seen swinging about on an elongated orbit, rising briefly out of the crystalline inner sphere into the second layer — the outer core of liquid metal. No longer a complacent eater, squatting undisturbed amid a banquet of high-density matter, the purple dot now seemed to throb angrily.

Teresa approved. We’re coming after you, beast. We’ve begun defending ourselves.

That was the good news. Give or take a few panicky moments, all four resonators had commenced firing sequences of tandem pulses to convert the planet’s own stored energy into beams of coherent gravity, recoiling against Beta and gradually shoving it outward toward—