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not—if he destroyed himself—
Boat Gods
would simply withdraw, and print a fresh copy of him from its onboard fax machine. Or perhaps it would be flung away in ruin, and a fresh Bruno would have to be printed on Earth. Either way, it promised to be an interesting ride.
    “Attempting a docking maneuver,” he informed Traffic Control. For all the good it would do them; by the time they received the signal, he'd already be dead, or several hours into his rescue.
Boat Gods
and
Newhope
had encountered one another in the vast, cold wastes of the Kuiper Belt, where the sun was little more than a bright star, and the waste-ice dredging of a few dozen unpiloted neutronium barges was the only activity in some sixty thousand cubic light-hours of space. Civilization was a long way off.
    Anyway, survivors or no, if he could stop this ship or change its course there was profit to be made, for the hypercollapsites used in ertial shielding were among the most valuable commodities in existence. And God knew the cash would be useful! Bruno would fax himself back home and return with the Queendom's finest salvage teams. And then the derelict, stripped of any special spacetime properties, could be vaporized by any superweapon his navy (or rather, his wife's navy) preferred.
    Nor was this some trifling bureaucratic matter, for QSS
Newhope
was, alas, on a direct collision course with the sun. Her navigators, setting out from Barnard over six light-years distant, had done their job too well; aiming at Sol and driving their error sources to zero. So, in thirty-two days' time the derelict
Newhope
—moving at 2,500 kps, nearly 1% of the speed of light—would come screaming into the Inner System, passing the orbits of Mars and Earth and Venus and Mercury and then plunging (if grazingly) into the photosphere of their mother star.
    The results would not be pleasant; the sun would escape destruction—probably—and the 90% of Queendom citizens nestled beneath bedrock or planetary atmospheres should be safe enough. But the flares would be colossal, and the Vacuum Cities' billion-odd residents would have to be evacuated as a precaution. And there was
no bloody place to put them
. Ergo, the naval response.
    But first an investigation, hmm?
    How the lords and ladies of Tamra's court had struggled against that suggestion! Or rather, against his doing it himself, without assistance.
    “Dear,” Queen Tamra had said to him, intruding upon his study in the way she almost never did, except in times of real trouble. “There's a tumbling starship on a collision course with the sun.”
    “Hmm?” he'd said, looking up from the equations and sketches on his desk. His mind was bursting with wormhole physics; he barely heard her. He barely noticed the storm outside, lashing rain and tattered palm fronds against his windows while the waves hammered the beach below. He was close—he was
close
—to understanding the dynamics of the throat collapse that had destroyed every one of his test holes. And this was as important politically as it was scientifically, for a functioning wormhole would solve nearly all of the Queendom's problems. Nearly all!
    But Tamra knew this, and would not have broken his concentration without good reason. She could have printed an alternate copy of him from the palace archive, and given
it
the news, and let the two of him reconverge later on in the day. For an ordinary emergency, she'd've done exactly that.
    Ergo this was no ordinary emergency, so with some effort he processed her words. “A starship, you say? One of ours?”
    “Presumably,” she'd answered testily, for no bug-eyed aliens had ever been detected out there in the void, whereas Sol had sent ships out to a dozen and one colonies. Still, the king could be forgiven his surprise; none of those ships had ever come
back
. “It's traveling out of Ophiuchus.”
    “Ah, the Barnard Express! Any sign of our boy?”
    Unhappily: “No. The ship appears to be derelict; perhaps her