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orbit in a smooth trajectory aimed at the lone continent. Tony told his passengers to brace themselves, and exactly a hundred seconds later booted the ship. Maximum acceleration. The walls flashed past; a star of sunlight flared ahead and widened into a perfect circle;
Abalunam’s Pride
shot out of the shaft like a cannonball, still accelerating. The moon dwindled astern, and the slime planet dwindled too, rounding into a half-globe that shrank into the big dark like a pebble dropped down a well.
    The frigate sent an interrogatory message. Tony ignored it. He was back in control, back on track. All he had to do now was reach the mirror.
    It orbited the L5 point where the slime planet’s gravity balanced that of its star. Tony flew a flat geodesic trajectory, accelerating all the way. This was the part he loved. He was cradled in his command couch, ramped up on combat drugs and plugged into the ship’s bridle and her radar, EM and optical feeds. Flying free into the unknown. Master of his own fate.
    He was more than halfway there when the feeds from the cube sats he’d left in orbit around the planet went dark. No problem. He had been half-expecting it after the claim jumpers’ frigate had pinged him. But as he closed in on the mirror the assets that had been keeping watch on it went dark too.
    It was the usual rock sculpted into a long cone, with the wormhole throat embedded in its flat base: a round dark mirror two kilometres across, framed by the chunky braid of strange matter that kept it open. The only mirror in orbit around this star. The only way in, the only way out. When he had come through, Tony had dropped off a package of drones that had established wide triangular orbits around it. They had not detected anything sown by the frigate, but it had set traps all the same.
    Abalunam’s Pride
was briefly painted by radar and launchers planted around the mirror’s rim flung a cloud of disrupter needles: electronic countermeasures packaged in little blades of cubic carbon allotropes denser than diamond, designed to lodge in the hulls of Ghajar ships and paralyse their nervous systems. There was no time for any kind of evasive manoeuvre. Tony shot a drone carrying a totally illegal pinch-fusion bomb with a yield of point six kilotonnes from
Abalunam’s Pride
’s launch cannon. Ayo had given it to him just before he’d set out two years ago, telling him that it had been held back when the family’s armoury had been stripped by the Commons police, and was to be used only as a final measure in extreme circumstances. Well, if this didn’t count as an extreme circumstance he didn’t know what did. The bomb detonated scant seconds after launch, obliterating the needles in a furious fireball, and Tony screamed in triumph and blind terror as the ship slammed through the expanding shell of superhot plasma, plunged into the mirror of the wormhole throat, and emerged eight thousand light years away.

5. Breakout
    The next day, Lisa met up with Bria in Port of Plenty and downloaded everything she knew. Everything that Sheriff Bird and the boss of the geek police team, Adam Nevers, had told her. It wasn’t much. It was heartbreaking.
    It seemed that Willie had found something out in the Badlands, something too big to dig out on his own. He’d partnered up with a crew and they’d uncovered a powerfully malignant artefact that had got inside their heads and turned them against each other. Five people were dead; three, including Willie, were missing, believed to be buried under tons of rubble at the bottom of the excavation shaft after someone had blown it in, possibly in a futile attempt to contain the breakout.
    ‘Do you remember the thing in Bitter Springs, two years ago?’ Lisa said to Bria. ‘The police said it was like that.’
    A prospector had brought an artefact into the little desert settlement of Bitter Springs, the local assayer had woken the eidolon inside it, and there’d been a breakout and a massacre.