Acceptable risks. If we hadn't been up for them, we might as well have stayed home.

And so we waited: four optimized hybrids somewhere past the threshold of mere humanity, one extinct predator who'd opted to command us instead of eating us alive. We waited for Rorschach to come back around the bend. The probe fell smoothly around the well, an ambassador to the unwilling—or, if the Gang was right, maybe just a back-door artist set to B&E an empty condo. Szpindel had named it Jack-in-the-box, after some antique child's toy that didn't even rate a listing in ConSensus; we fell in its wake, nearly ballistic now, momentum and inertia carefully precalculated to thread us through the chaotic minefield of Ben's accretion belt.

Kepler couldn't do it all, though; Theseus grumbled briefly now and then, the intermittent firing of her attitude jets rumbling softly up the spine as the Captain tweaked our descent into the Maelstrom.

No plan ever survives contact with the enemy I remembered, but I didn't know from where.

"Got it," Bates said. A speck appeared at Ben's edge; the display zoomed instantly to closeup. "Proximity boot."

Rorschach remained invisible to Theseus, close as we were, close as we were coming. But parallax stripped at least some of the scales from the probe's eyes; it woke to spikes and spirals of smoky glass flickering in and out of view, Ben's flat endless horizon semivisible through the intervening translucence. The view trembled; waveforms rippled across ConSensus.

"Quite the magnetic field," Szpindel remarked.

"Braking," Bates reported. Jack turned smoothly retrograde and fired its torch. On Tactical, delta-vee swung to red.

Sascha was driving the Gang's body this shift. "Incoming signal," she reported. "Same format."

Sarasti clicked. "Pipe it."

"Rorschach to Theseus. Hello again, Theseus." The voice was female this time, and middle-aged.

Sascha grinned "See? She's not offended at all. Big hairy dick notwithstanding."

"Don't answer," Sarasti said.

"Burn complete," Bates reported.

Coasting now, Jack—sneezed. Silver chaff shot into the void towards the target: millions of compass needles, brilliantly reflective, fast enough to make Theseus seem slow. They were gone in an instant. The probe watched them flee, swept laser eyes across every degree of arc, scanned its sky twice a second and took careful note of each and every reflective flash. Only at first did those needles shoot along anything approaching a straight line: then they swept abruptly into Lorentz spirals, twisted into sudden arcs and corkscrews, shot away along new and intricate trajectories bordering on the relativistic. The contours of Rorschach's magnetic field resolved in ConSensus, at first glance like the nested layers of a glass onion.

"Sproinnnng," Szpindel said.

At second glance the onion grew wormy. Invaginations appeared, long snaking tunnels of energy proliferating fractally at every scale.

"Rorschach to Theseus. Hello, Theseus. You there?"

A holographic inset beside the main display plotted the points of a triangle in flux: Theseus at the apex, Rorschach and Jack defining the narrow base.

"Rorschach to Theseus. I seeee you…."

"She's got a more casual affect than he ever did." Sascha glanced up at Sarasti, and did not add You sure about this? She was starting to wonder herself, though. Starting to dwell on the potential consequences of being wrong, now that we were committed. As far as sober second thought was concerned it was too little too late; but for Sascha, that was progress.

Besides, it had been Sarasti's decision.

Great hoops were resolving in Rorschach's magnetosphere. Invisible to human eyes, their outlines were vanishingly faint even on Tactical; the chaff had scattered so thinly across the sky that even the Captain was resorting to guesswork. The new macrostructures hovered in the magnetosphere like the nested gimbals of some great phantom gyroscope.

"I see you haven't changed your vector," Rorschach remarked. "We really wouldn't advise continuing your approach. Seriously. For your own safety."

Szpindel shook his head. "Hey, Mandy. Rorschach talking to Jack at all?"

"If it is, I'm not seeing it. No incident light, no directed EM of any kind." She smiled grimly. "Seems to have snuck in under the radar. And don't call me Mandy."

Theseus groaned, twisting. I staggered in the low pseudograv, reached out to steady myself. "Course correction," Bates reported. "Unplotted rock."

"Rorschach to Theseus. Please respond. Your current heading is unacceptable, repeat, your current heading is unacceptable. Strongly advise you change course."

By now the probe coasted just a few kilometers off Rorschach's leading edge. That close it served up way more than magnetic fields: it presented Rorschach itself in bright, tactical color codes. Invisible curves and spikes iridesced in ConSensus across any number of on-demand pigment schemes: gravity, reflectivity, blackbody emissions. Massive electrical bolts erupting from the tips of thorns rendered in lemon pastels. User-friendly graphics had turned Rorschach into a cartoon.

"Rorschach to Theseus. Please respond."

Theseus growled to stern, fishtailing. On tactical, another just-plotted piece of debris swept by a discreet six thousand meters to port.

"Rorschach to Theseus. If you are unable to respond, please—holy shit!"

The cartoon flickered and died.

I'd seen what had happened in that last instant, though: Jack passing near one of those great phantom hoops; a tongue of energy flicking out, quick as a frog's; a dead feed.

"I see what you're up to now, you cocksuckers. Do you think we're fucking blind down here?"

Sascha clenched her teeth. "We—"

"No," Sarasti said.

"But it fi—"

Sarasti hissed, from somewhere in the back of his throat. I had never heard a mammal make a noise quite like that before. Sascha fell immediately silent.

Bates negotiated with her controls. "I've still got—just a sec—"

"You pull that thing back right fucking now, you hear us? Right fucking now."

"Got it." Bates gritted as the feed came back up. "Just had to reacquire the laser." The probe had been kicked wildly off-course—as if someone fording a river had been caught in sudden undertow and thrown over a waterfall—but it was still talking, and still mobile.

Barely. Bates struggled to stay the course. Jack staggered and wobbled uncontrollably though the tightly-wound folds of Rorschach's magnetosphere. The artefact loomed huge in its eye. The feed strobed.

"Maintain approach," Sarasti said calmly.

"Love to," Bates gritted. "Trying."

Theseus skidded again, corkscrewing. I could have sworn I heard the bearings in the drum grind for a moment. Another rock sailed past on Tactical.

"I thought you'd plotted those things," Szpindel grumbled.

"You want to start a war, Theseus? Is that what you're trying to do? You think you're up for it?"

"It doesn't attack," Sarasti said.

"Maybe it does." Bates kept her voice low; I could see the effort it took. "If Rorschach can control the trajectories of these—"

"Normal distribution. Insignificant corrections." He must have meant statistically: the torque and grind of the ship's hull felt pretty significant to the others.

"Oh, right," Rorschach said suddenly. "We get it now. You don't think there's anyone here, do you? You've got some high-priced consultant telling you there's nothing to worry about."