Alice was pregnant.

Little blue lights.

“I, I, I’ll go,” he told them. “I’m not running out on you, love,” he added quickly and urgently. His hands had closed too tightly on her shoulders. “We’re bringing a child into the world. The same world which, by an odd coincidence, is now the target for t-t-two hundred and thirty—”

“I’ve located the second wave,” said Brennan.

“Dammit! I didn’t need to hear that!”

Alice put a hand across his mouth. “I understand, my loyal crew. I think you’re right.”

And the air was full of the smell of burning bridges.

They stood beneath the branches of the single huge tree, watching. Brennan was occupied with a portable control set taken from his vest. Roy only watched.

The two-hundred-year-old singleship looked like a short insect with a long stinger, the cargo webs spread like diaphanous wings, the stinger tipped with actinic light. The sound of it was a shrill scream. Brennan had spent a full day teaching Alice how to use the ship, care for it, repair it. Roy would not have guessed that a day would be enough, but if Brennan was satisfied… And she was doing well. She went straight up, then turned smoothly into what had been the sun.

Roy felt a twitchy urgency, a sense that if he didn’t do something now, right now, he was committed for life. But the moment was long past. He only watched.

The sun looked odd now. Brennan had fiddled with the gravity lens, turning it into a launching system for the singleship. As Roy watched the sun shifted a bit left, dimming, to catch the singleship, dead center.

She was gone.

“She won’t have any trouble,” said Brennan. “She should make a good thing out of that ship. It’s not just a relic. It’s got historical significance, and I made some interesting changes in—”

“Sure,” said Roy. He saw that the grass was dying and the leaves on the tree were turning yellow. Brennan had drained the pond; it was a shallow sea of mud. Kobold had already lost its magic.

Brennan slapped him on the shoulder. “Come on.” He walked out into what had been a pond. Roy followed, wincing. The cool mud squished between his toes.

Brennan stooped, reached deep into the sludge, and lifted. A metal door came up with a sucking sound. An airlock door.

It was all happening very fast now. The airlock led into a cramped control room, with two crash chairs and a three hundred and sixty degree wraparound vision screen over a control board like that of any spacecraft. Brennan said, “Use straps if you want. If we foul up now we’re all dead anyway.”

“Shouldn’t I know something—”

“No. You can inspect the vehicle to your heart’s content after we’re under way. Hell, you’ll have a year at it.”

“Why so hurried?”

Brennan looked sideways at him. “Have a heart, Roy. I’ve been sitting out here for longer than your Greatly ’Stelle was alive.” He activated the vision screen.

They floated within the hole in Kobold’s donut.

Brennan stabbed a button.

Kobold receded violently. “I’m giving us a running start,” Brennan said. “We’ll get root two times the velocity.”

“Good.”

Kobold slowed, stopped, then came up like a wargod’s fist. Roy yelped. He couldn’t help it. They were through the hole in an instant, and black space ahead.

Roy turned his chair for a rear view, but Kobold was already gone. Sol was a star among stars.

“Let’s magnify that,” said Brennan. Sol became much larger — the view expanding over a rectangular section of the vision screen — and there was Kobold, receding. The magnification jumped again, and Kobold filled the screen.

Brennan pushed a red button.

Kobold began to crumple in on itself, as if an invisible hand were wadding it up. Rock churned and began to glow yellow-hot. Roy felt queasy in his soul and in his belly. It was as if someone had bombed Disneyland.

He said, “What did you do?”

“Shut down the gravity generators. I couldn’t leave it out here for the Pak to find. The longer it takes them to find artifacts around Sol, the better off we are.” Kobold was all yellow-hot and melted, and tiny. “In a few minutes it’ll all be plated across that eight foot ball of neutronium. When it cools it’ll be practically unfindable.”

Now Kobold was a blinding white point.

“What happens next?”

“For a year and two months and six days, nothing. Want to inspect the ship?”

“Nothing?”

“By which I mean that we won’t be doing any accelerating for that long. Look.” Brennan’s fingers flashed over the control panel. The vision screen obeyed, showing a tridee map of Sol and her neighborhood out to twenty-five light years.

“We’re here, at Sol. We’re on our way to here. That point is just between Alpha Centaurus and Van Maanen’s Star. When we fire up the Pak ship we’ll be heading directly into the Pak fleet. They won’t be able to get our velocity toward them without knowing our exhaust velocity, and they won’t know our transverse component at all. They’ll have to assume I’m coming from Van Maanen’s Star to Alpha Centaurus. I don’t want to lead them back to Sol.”

“That makes sense,” Roy admitted reluctantly.

“Let’s take that tour,” said Brennan. “Later we can go into detail. I want you able to fly this ship if anything happens to me.”

The Flying Dutchman, Brennan called it. Though there were ships within it, it was hardly a ship. “If you wanted to be picky about it, I could claim we’re sailing,” Brennan said cheerfully. “There are tides, and photon winds, and shoals of dust that could chew us up.”

“But you did all our steering at takeoff.”

“Sure, but I could spin us a light-sail if I had to. I don’t want to. It would make us more visible.”

The Flying Dutchman was a matrix of rock, mostly hollow. Three great hollows held the components of a Pak-style Bussard ramjet ship. Brennan called it Protector. Another had been enlarged to house Roy Truesdale’s cargo ship. Other hollows were rooms.

There was a hydroponics garden. “This is off limits,” said Brennan. “Tree-of-life. Don’t ever go in here.”

There was an exercise room. Brennan spent some time showing Roy how to adjust the machines for a breeder’s muscles. Gravity was almost zero aboard the Flying Dutchman. They would both have to exercise.

There was a machine shop.

There was a telescope: big, but conventional. “I don’t want to use gravity generators from now on. I want us to look like a rock. Later we’ll look like a Pak ship.”

Roy thought that was unnecessary. “It’ll be half of a hundred and seventy-three years before the Pak find any trace of what we’re doing now.”

“Maybe.”

And there was Protector.

For the first several weeks of the voyage they did little besides train Roy Truesdale to use that ship. He was drilled in the differences between Phssthpok’s ship and Brennan’s. “I don’t know how long we’ll want to keep up the camouflage,” Brennan told him. “Maybe for keeps. Maybe never. It depends.”

So Brennan turned the control pod into a training room by hooking sensors to the control systems and monitoring the inputs from outside. Roy learned to maintain a constant point nine two gee. He learned to feather the fields to smear the exhaust a bit. Phssthpok’s drive had not been as precisely tuned as Brennan’s, due to its thirty-one thousand light year voyage.

The control pod was much bigger than Roy had expected. “Phssthpok didn’t have this much room, did he?”

“Nope. Phssthpok had to carry food and air and recycling equipment for something like a thousand years. I don’t. We’ll still be crowded… but we’ll be entertained. Phssthpok didn’t have our computer technology either, or didn’t use it.”