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worked, even here. A new light flared behind the ship, a ghostly gray-white, the light of the GUTdrive.
    Dans winked at Pirius. “See you on the other side.” The Virtual collapsed into a cloud of dispersing pixels.
    The neutron star cannonballed at Pirius, suddenly huge. It was a flattened orange, visibly three-dimensional, its surface mottled by electric storms. It slid beneath
Claw
’s prow, and for a moment, continents of orange-brown light fled beneath Pirius’s blister. All these impressions in a second; less. But now a stronger light was looming over the horizon, yellow-white: it was the site of the flare, a grim dawn approaching.
    And in the same instant the
Claw
juddered, shook, its drive stuttering.
What now?
Diagnostics popped up before Pirius. Around a Virtual of the GUTdrive core, shadowy shapes swarmed. Quagmites, he saw: the strange entities that were attracted by every use of a GUTdrive in this region—living things maybe, pests for sure, feeding off the primordial energy of the GUTdrive itself, and causing the mighty engine to stutter.
    “The fly’s on us!” Cohl cried.
    When Pirius glanced at the reverse view he saw the Xeelee fighter. Its night-dark wings flexed and sparked as it swam through space after him. He had never seen a Xeelee so close, save in sims: he didn’t know anybody who had, and lived. It was more than inhuman, he thought, more than just alien; it was a dark, primeval thing, not of this time. But it was perfectly adapted to this environment, as humans with their clumsy gadgetry were not.
    And it was still on his tail. All he could do was fly the ship; there was absolutely nothing he could do about the Xeelee.
    Ahead, light flared. Over the horizon came rushing a massive flaw in the star’s crust, a pool of blue-white light kilometers wide from which starstuff poured in a vertical torrent, radiating as much energy in a fraction of a second as Earth’s sun would lose in ten thousand years. An arch, yellow-white, was forming above the star’s tight horizon, kilometers high. In places the arch feathered and streamed, tracing out the lines of the magnetic field that restrained it.
    On a neutron star, events happened fast. The rent in the surface was already healing, the arch collapsing almost as soon as it had formed, its material dragged down by the star’s magisterial gravity field.
    And the
Claw
flew right underneath it.
    Pirius’s blister shuddered as if it would tear itself apart. Those mottled surface features whipped beneath, and the arch loomed
above
him. He had never known such a sensation of sheer speed. He might not live through this, but Lethe, it was quite a ride.
    There was a punch in the small of his back, the ghost of hundreds of gravities as the
Claw
kicked its way out of the star’s gravity well.
    The neutron star whipped away into darkness. The arch had already collapsed.
    And in the last instant he glimpsed the Xeelee, behind him. No longer an implacable, converging foe, it was folding over, as if its graceful wings were crumpled in an invisible fist.
             
    The
Assimilator’s Claw
hung in empty space, far from the neutron star. The crew tended their slight wounds, and tried to get used to still being alive. They saw to their ship’s systems; the encounter with the quagmites had done a good deal of damage to the GUTdrive.
    And they reconstructed what had happened during those crucial moments at the magnetar.
    At its heart the magnetic field embracing the flare had been as strong as any field since the first moments of the universe itself. At such field strengths atoms themselves were distorted, forced into skinny cylindrical shapes; no ordinary molecular structure could survive. Photons were split and combined. Even the structure of spacetime was distorted: it became
birefringent,
Pirius learned, crystalline.
    It was this last which had probably done for the Xeelee. Nobody knew for sure how a nightfighter’s sublight drive worked. But the