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Pirius, have you ever heard of a Brun maneuver?”
    “No.”
    “Pilot school scuttlebutt. Somebody tried it, oh, a year or more back.”
    Pirius hadn’t heard of such a thing. But the turnover in pilots at Arches Base was ferocious; there was little opportunity for field wisdom to be passed on.
    “It didn’t work—”
    “That’s reassuring.”
    “But it could have,” Dans said. “I looked into it—ran some simulations—thought it might be useful some day.”
    “Two minutes thirty.”
    “Pirius, listen to me. Stick to your course; make for the flare. But keep listening. I’ll compute your maneuver for you. A way through the flare.”
    “That’s impossible.”
    “Sure it is. And when I download the new trajectory you’d better be prepared to splice it into your systems.” Dans peeled away.
    “Where are you going?”
    “If this doesn’t work out, don’t touch my stuff.”
    “Dans!”
    “That’s the last we’ll see of her,” Enduring Hope said laconically.
    “Two minutes,” Cohl said. “One fifty-nine . . .”
    Pirius shut her up.
             
    As the
Claw
fell through space there was no noise, no sense of motion. The Xeelee’s slow convergence was silent, unspectacular. Even the neutron star would be invisible for all but a few seconds of closest approach. It was as if they were gliding along some smooth, invisible road.
    The crew continued to work calmly, the three of them calling out numbers and curt instructions to each other. The
Assimilator’s Claw
was drenched with artificial intelligence, sentient and otherwise, and its systems were capable of processing data far faster than human thought. But the systems were there to support human decision-making, not to replace it. That was the nature of the greenship’s design, which in turn reflected Coalition policy, under the Doctrines. This was a human war and would always remain so.
    There was no sense of peril. And yet these seconds, which counted down remorselessly inside Pirius’s head, would likely be the last of his life.
    There was a flare of blue light, dead ahead, FTL blue—and then a streak of green. It was a greenship, cutting across his path. Suddenly data was chattering into the
Claw
’s systems. It was a new closest-approach trajectory.
    Pirius saw Cohl sit up, astonished. “Where did that come from? Pilot—”
    “Load the course, Navigator.”
    A Virtual coalesced before Pirius: Dans’s head, disembodied. Her face was small, round, neat, with a wide, sensual mouth, a mouth made for laughing. Now that mouth grinned at Pirius. “Boo!”
    “Dans, what—”
    “It’s not me, it’s a downloaded Virtual. The real Dans will be hitting the surface of the star in”—she closed her eyes, and the image wavered, blocky pixels fluttering, as if she was concentrating—“three, two, one. Plop. Bye-bye.”
    Pirius felt a stab of regret through his fear, bafflement, adrenaline rush. “Dans, I’m sorry.”
    “There was no other way—no other trajectory.”
    “Trajectory from where?”
    “From the future, of course. Pirius, you’re twenty seconds from closest approach.”
    He glimpsed a splash of red, wheeling past the blister. It was the neutron star.
    Dans said, “You need to cut in your GUTdrive. On my mark—”
    “Dans, that’s insane.” So it was; the antiquated GUTdrive was a last-resort backup system.
    “I knew you’d argue. Your sublight won’t work. Do it, asshole. Two, one—”
    In the heart of the GUTdrive, specks of matter were compressed to conditions not seen since the aftermath of the Big Bang; released from their containment, these specks swelled immensely. This was the energy that had once driven the expansion of the universe itself; now it heated asteroid ice to a frenzied steam and forced it through rocket nozzles. A GUTdrive was just a water rocket, a piece of engineering that would have been recognizable to technicians on prespaceflight Earth twenty-five thousand years before.
    But it