McAuley, Paul - Rats of the SystemRats of the System
PAUL McAUUEY
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)
Paul J. McAuley (www.omegacom.demon.co.uk,) lives in London, England. He often 
writes hard SF, one of the group (along with Stephen Baxter, Peter Hamilton, 
Iain M. Banks, and others) responsible for the hard SF/space opera renaissance 
of the 1990s. He has three collections of short fiction—The King of the Hill and 
Other Stories, The Invisible Country, and Little Machines. In 2001, he published 
two new novels—The Secret of Life, a hard SF near-future thriller, and Whole 
Wide World, a novel of high-tech intrigue; in 2004, White Devils, and in 2005, 
Mind's Eye, both SF thrillers. It is evident that in his novel writing he has 
moved away from space opera, which characterized his early books.
"Rats of the System" was published in Constellations. It is classic McAuley, 
good fun hard SF space opera: romance, and a battle with aliens.



Carter Cho was trying to camouflage the lifepod when the hunter-killer found 
him.
Carter had matched spin with the fragment of shattered comet nucleus, excavated 
a neat hole with a judicious burn of the lifepod's motor and eased the sturdy 
little ship inside; then he had sealed up his p-suit and clambered out of the 
airlock, intending to hide the pod's infrared and radar signatures by covering 
the hole with fullerene superconducting cloth. He was trying to work 
methodically, clamping clips to the edge of the cloth and spiking the clips deep 
into the slumped rim of dirty water ice, but the cloth, forty meters square and 
just sixty carbon atoms thick, massed a little less than a butterfly's wing, and 
it fluttered and billowed like a live thing as gas and dust vented from 
fractured ice. Carter had fastened down less than half of it when the scientist 
shouted, "Heads up! Incoming!"
That's when Carter discovered she'd locked him out of the pod's control systems.
He said, "What have you done?"
"Heads up! It's coming right at us!"
The woman was hysterical.
Carter looked up.
The sky was apocalyptic. Pieces of comet nucleus were tumbling away in every 
direction, casting long cones of shadow through veils and streamers of gas lit 
by the red dwarf's half-eclipsed disc. The nucleus had been a single body ten 
kilometers long before the Fanatic singleship had cut across its orbit and 
carved it open and destroyed the science platform hidden inside it with X-ray 
lasers and kinetic bomblets. The singleship had also deployed a pod of 
hunter-killer drones, and after crash deceleration these were falling through 
the remains of the comet, targeting the flotsam of pods and cans and general 
wreckage that was all that remained of the platform. Carter saw a firefly flash 
and gutter in the sullen wash of gases, and then another, almost ninety degrees 
away. He had almost forgotten his fear while he'd been working, but now it 
flowed through him again, electric and strong and urgent.
He said, "Give me back my ship."
The scientist said, "I'm tracking it on radar! I think it's about to—"
The huge slab of sooty ice shuddered. A jet of dust and gas boiled up beyond a 
sharp-edged horizon, and something shot out of me dust, heading straight for 
Carter. It looked a little like a silvery squid, with a bullet-shaped head that 
trailed a dozen tentacles tipped with claws and blades. It wrapped itself around 
an icy pinnacle on the other side of the hole and reared up, weaving this way 
and that as if studying him. Probably trying to decide where to begin unseaming 
him, Carter thought, and pointed the welding pistol at it, ready to die if only 
he could take one of the enemy with him. The thing surged forward—
Dust and gas blasted out of the hole. The scientist had ignited the lifepod's 
motor. The fullerene cloth shot straight up, straining like a sail in a squall, 
and the hunter-killer smashed into it and tore it free from the clips Carter had 
so laboriously secured, tumbling past him at the center of a writhing knot of 
cloth.
Carter dove through the hatch in the pod's blunt nose. Gravity's ghost clutched 
him, and he tumbled head over heels and slammed into the rear bulkhead as the 
pod shook free of its hiding place.
Humans had settled the extensive asteroid belt around Keid, the cool Kl 
component of the triple star system 40 Eridani, more than a century ago. The 
first generation, grown from templates stored in a bus-sized seeder starship, 
had built a domed settlement on Neuvo California, an asteroid half the size of 
Earth's Moon, and planted its cratered plains of water ice with vast fields of 
vacuum organisms. Succeeding generations spread through Keid's asteroid belt, 
building domes and tenting crevasses and ravines, raising families, becoming 
expert in balancing the ecologies of small, closed systems and creating new 
varieties of vacuum organisms, writing and performing heroic operettas, trading 
information and works of art on the interstellar net that linked Earth's 
far-flung colonies in the brief golden age before Earth's AIs achieved 
transcendence.
The Keidians were a practical, obdurate people. As far as they were concerned, 
the Hundred Minute War, which ended with the reduction of Earth and the flight 
of dozens of Transcendent AIs from the Solar System, was a distant and 
incomprehensible matter that had nothing to do with the ordinary business of 
their lives. Someone wrote an uninspired operetta about it; someone else revived 
the lost art of the symphony, and for a few years her mournful eight-hour 
memoriam was considered by many in the stellar colonies to be a new pinnacle of 
human art. Very few Keidians took much notice when a Transcendent demolished 
Sirius B and used the trillions of tons of heavy elements it mined from the 
white dwarf's core to build a vast ring in close orbit around Sirius A; no one 
worried overmuch when other Transcendents began to strip-mine gas giants in 
other uninhabited systems. Everyone agreed that the machine intelligences were 
pursuing some vast, obscure plan that might take millions of years to complete, 
that they were as indifferent to the low comedy of human life as gardeners were 
to the politics of ants.
But then self-styled transhuman Fanatics declared a jihad against anyone who 
refused to acknowledge the Transcendents as gods. They dropped a planet-killer 
on half-terraformed Mars. They scorched colonies on the moons of Jupiter and 
Saturn and Neptune. They dispatched warships starward. The fragile web of 
chatter and knowledge-based commerce that linked the stellar colonies began to 
unravel.
And just over six hundred days ago, a Transcendent barreled into the Keidian 
system, swinging past Keid as it decelerated from close to light speed and 
arcing out toward the double system of white and red dwarf stars just four 
hundred AU beyond. The red dwarf had always been prone to erratic flares, but a 
few days after the Transcendent went into orbit around it, the dim little star 
began to flare brightly and steadily from one of its poles. A narrowly focussed 
jet of matter and energy began to spew into space, and some of the carbon-rich 
starstuff was spun into sails with the surface area of planets, hanging hundreds 
of thousands of kilometers beyond the star yet somehow coupled to its center of 
gravity. Pinwheel-ing of the jet and light pressure on the vast sails tipped the 
star through ninety degrees, and then the jet burned even brighter, and the star 
began to move out of its orbit.
A hundred days after that, the Fanatics arrived, and the war of the 40 Eridani 
system began.
The scientist said, "The hunter-killers found us. We had to outrun them."
Carter said, "I was ready to make a stand." The scientist glared at him with her 
one good eye and said, "I'm not prepared to sacrifice myself to take out a few 
drones, Mr. Cho. My work is too important."
She might be young and scared and badly injured, but Carter had to admit that 
she had stones. When the singleship struck, Carter had been climbing into a 
p-suit, getting ready to set up a detector array on the surface of the comet 
nucleus. She had been the first person he'd seen after he'd kicked out of the 
airlock. He'd caught her and dragged her across twenty meters of raw vacuum to a 
lifepod that had spun loose from the platform's broken spine, and installed her 
in one of the pod's hibernation coffins. She'd been half-cooked by reflected 
energy of the X-ray laser beam that had bisected the main section of the science 
platform; one side of her face was swollen red and black, the eye there a blind 
white stone, hair like shriveled peppercorns. The coffin couldn't do much more 
than give her painblockers and drip glucose-enriched plasma into her blood. 
She'd die unless she went into hibernation, but she wouldn't allow that because, 
she said, she had work to do.
Her coffin was one of twenty stacked in a neat five by four array around the 
inner wall of the lifepod's hull. Carter Cho hung in the space between her 
coffin and the shaft of the motor, a skinny man with prematurely white hair in 
short dreads that stuck out in spikes around his thin, sharp face as if he'd 
just been wired to some mains buss. He said, "This is my ship. I'm in charge 
here."
The scientist stared at him. Her good eye was red with an eightball hemorrhage, 
the pupil capped with a black data lens. She said, "I'm a second lieutenant, 
sailor. I believe I outrank you."
"The commissions they handed out to volunteers like you don't mean anything."
"I volunteered for this mission, Mr. Cho, because I want to find out everything 
I can about the Transcendent. Because I believe that what we can learn from it 
will help defeat the Fanatics. I still have work to do, sailor, and that's why I 
must decide our strategy."
"Just give me back control of my ship, okay?" She stared through him. He said, 
"Just tell me what you did. You might have damaged something."
"I wrote a patch that's sitting on top of the command stack; it won't cause any 
damage. Look, we tried hiding from the hunter-killers, and when that didn't 
work, we had to outrun them. I can appreciate why you wanted to make a stand. I 
can even admire it. But we were outnumbered, and we are more important than a 
few drones. War isn't a matter of individual heroics; it's a collective effort. 
And as part of a collective, every individual must subsume her finer instincts 
to the greater good. Do you understand?"
"With respect, ma'am, what I understand is that I'm a sailor with combat 
experience and you're a science geek." She was looking through him again, or 
maybe focussing on stuff fed to her retina by the data lens. He said, "What kind 
of science geek are you, anyway?"
"Quantum vacuum theory." The scientist closed her eye and clenched her teeth and 
gasped, then said, her voice smaller and tighter, "I was hoping to find out how 
the Transcendent manipulates the magnetic fields that control the jet."
"Are you okay?"
"Just a little twinge."
Carter studied the diagnostic panel of the coffin, but he had no idea what it 
was trying to tell him. "You should let this box put you to sleep. When you wake 
up, we'll be back at Pasadena, and they'll fix you right up."
"I know how to run the lifepod, and as long as I have control of it, you can't 
put me to sleep. We're still falling along the comet's trajectory. We're going 
to eyeball the Transcendent's engineering up close. If I can't learn something 
from that, I'll give you permission to boot my ass into vacuum, turn around, and 
go look for another scientist."
"Maybe you can steer this ship, ma'am, but you don't have combat training."
"There's nothing to fight. We outran the hunter-killers."
Carter said, "So we did. But maybe you should use the radar, check out the 
singleship. Just before you staged your little mutiny, I saw that it was turning 
back. I think it's going to try to hunt us down."
Carter stripped coffins and ripped out panels and padding from the walls. He 
disconnected canisters of the accelerant foam that flooded coffins to cradle 
hibernating sleepers. He pulled a dozen spare p-suits from their racks. He 
sealed the scientist's coffin and suited up and vented the lifepod and dumped 
everything out of the lock.
The idea was that the pilot of the singleship would spot the debris, think that 
the pod had imploded, and abandon the chase. Carter thought there was a fighting 
chance it would work, but when he had told her what he was going to do, the 
scientist had said, "It won't fool him for a moment."
Carter said, "Also, when he chases after us, there's a chance he'll run into 
some of the debris. If the relative velocity is high enough, even a grain of 
dust could do some serious damage."
"He can blow us out of the sky with his X-ray laser. So why would he want to 
chase us?"
"For the same reason the hunter-killer didn't explode when it found us. Think it 
through, ma'am. He wants to take a prisoner. He wants to extract information 
from a live body."
He watched her think about that.
She said, "If he does catch up with us, you'll get your wish to become a martyr. 
There's enough antiberyllium left in the motor to make an explosion that'll 
light up the whole system. But that's a last resort. The singleship is still in 
turnaround, we have a good head start, and we're only twenty-eight million 
kilometers from perihelion. If we get there first, we can whip around the red 
dwarf, change our course at random. Unless the Fanatic guesses our exit 
trajectory, that'll buy us plenty of time."
"He'll have plenty of time to find us again. We're a long way from home, and 
there might be other—"
"All we have to do is live long enough to find out everything we can about the 
Transcendent's engineering project and squirt it home on a tight beam." The 
scientist's smile was dreadful. Her teeth were filmed with blood. "Quit arguing, 
sailor. Don't you have work to do?"
A trail of debris tumbled away behind the pod, slowly spreading out, bright 
edges flashing here and there as they caught the light of the red dwarf. Carter 
pressurized p-suits and switched on their life-support systems and transponders 
before he jettisoned them. Maybe the Fanatic would think that they contained 
warm bodies. He sprayed great arcs of foam into the hard vacuum and kicked away 
the empty canisters. The chance of any of the debris hitting the Fanatic's 
singleship was infinitesimally small, but a small chance was better than none at 
all, and the work kept his mind from the awful prospect of being captured.
Sternward, the shattered comet nucleus was a fuzzy speck trailing foreshortened 
banners of light across the star-spangled sky. The expedition had nudged it from 
its orbit and buried the science platform inside its nucleus, sleeping for a 
whole year like an army in a fairytale as it fell toward the red dwarf. The 
mission had been a last desperate attempt to try to learn something of the 
Transcendent's secrets, but as the comet nucleus neared the red dwarf, and the 
expedition woke and the scientists started their work, one of the Fanatic drones 
that policed the vicinity of the star somehow detected the science platform, and 
the Fanatics sent a single-ship to deal with it. Like all their warships, it 
moved very fast, with brutal acceleration that would have mashed ordinary humans 
to a thin jelly. It had arrived less than thirty seconds behind a warning 
broadcast by a spotter observatory at the edge of Keid's heliopause; the crew of 
the science platform hadn't stood a chance.
The singleship lay directly between the comet and the lifepod now. It had turned 
around and was decelerating at eight gravities. At the maximum magnification his 
p-suit's visor could give him, Carter could just make out the faint scratch of 
its exhaust, but he was unable to resolve the ship itself. In the other 
direction, the red dwarf star simmered at the bottom of a kind of well of 
luminous dark. Its nuclear fires were banked low, radiating mostly in infrared. 
Carter could stare steadily at it with only a minimum of filtering. The 
sharp-edged shadows of the vast deployment of solar sails were sinking beyond 
one edge as the jet dawned in the opposite direction, a brilliant white thread 
brighter than the fierce point of the white dwarf star rising just beyond it. 
Before the Transcendent had begun its work, the red dwarf had swung around the 
smaller but more massive white dwarf in a wide elliptical orbit, at its closest 
approaching within twenty AU, the distance of Uranus from the Sun. Now it was 
much closer and still falling inward. Scientists speculated that the 
Transcendent planned to use the tidal effects of a close transit to tear apart 
the red dwarf, but they'd had less than forty hours to study the Transcendent's 
engineering before the Fanatic's singleship struck.
Hung in his p-suit a little way from the lifepod, the huge target of the red 
dwarf in one direction, the vast starscape in the other, Carter Cho resolved to 
make the best of his fate. The Universe was vast and inhuman, and so was war. 
Out there, in battles around stars whose names—Alpha Cen-tauri, Epsilon Eridani, 
Tau Ceti, Lalande 21185, Lacaille 8760, 61 Cygni, Epsilon Indi, Groombridge 
1618, Groombridge 34, 82 Eridani, 70 Ophiuchi, Delta Pavonis, Eta 
Cassiopeiae—were like a proud role call of mythic heroes, the fate of the human 
race was being determined. While Carter and the rest of the expedition had slept 
in their coffins deep in the heart of the comet, the Fanatics had invested and 
destroyed a dozen settlements in Keid's asteroid belt, and the Keidians had 
fought back and destroyed one of the Fanatics' huge starships. Compared to this 
great struggle, Carter's fate was less than that of a drop of water in a stormy 
ocean, a thought both humbling and uplifting.
Well, his life might be insignificant, but he wasn't about to trust it to a 
dying girl with no combat experience. He fingertip-swam to the stern of the pod, 
and opened a panel and rigged a manual cutout before he climbed back inside. He 
had been working for six hours. He was exhausted and sweating hard inside the 
p-suit, but he couldn't take it off because the pod's atmosphere had been vented 
and most of its systems had been shut down, part of his plan to fool the Fanatic 
into thinking it was a dead hulk. The interior was dark and cold. The lights 
either side of his helmet cast sharp shadows. Frost glistened on struts exposed 
where he had stripped away paneling.
The scientist lay inside her sealed coffin, her half-ruined face visible through 
the little window. She looked asleep, but when Carter maneuvered beside her she 
opened her good eye and looked at him. He plugged in a patch cord and heard some 
kind of music, a simple progressions of riffs for percussion and piano and 
trumpet and saxophone. The scientist said that it was her favorite piece. She 
said that she wanted to listen to it one more time.
Carter said, "You should let the coffin put you to sleep. Before—"
The scientist coughed wetly. Blood freckled the faceplate of her coffin. "Before 
I die."
"They gave me some science training before they put me on this mission, ma'am. 
Just tell me what to do."
"Quit calling me 'ma'am,'" the scientist said, and closed her good eye as a 
trumpet floated a long, lovely line of melody above a soft shuffle of 
percussion. "Doesn't he break your heart? That's Miles Davis, playing in New 
York hundreds of years ago. Making music for angels."
"It's interesting. It's in simple six/eight time, but the modal changes—" The 
scientist was staring at Carter; he felt himself blush and wondered if she could 
see it. He said, "I inherited perfect pitch from my mother. She sang in an opera 
chorus before she married my father and settled down to raise babies and farm 
vacuum organisms."
"Don't try to break it down," the scientist said. "You have to listen to the 
whole thing. The totality, it's sublime. I'd rather die listening to this than 
die in hibernation."
"You're not going—"
"I've set down everything I remember about the work that was done before the 
attack. I'll add it to the observations I make as we whip around the star and 
then squirt all the data to Keid. Maybe they can make something useful of it, 
work out the Transcendent's tricks with the magnetic fields, the gravity 
tethers, the rest of it…" She closed her eye, and breathed deeply. Fluid rattled 
in her lungs. She said softly, as if to herself, "So many dead. We have to make 
their deaths worthwhile."
Carter had barely gotten to know his shipmates, recruited from all over, before 
they'd gone into hibernation, but the scientist had lost good friends and 
colleagues.
He said, "The singleship is still accelerating."
"I know."
"It could catch us before we reach the star."
"Maybe your little trick will fool it."
"I might as well face up to it with a pillow."
The scientist smiled her ghastly smile. She said, "We have to try. We have to 
try everything. Let me explain what I plan to do at perihelion."
She told Carter that observations by drones and asteroid-based telescopes had 
shown that the Transcendent had regularized the red dwarf's magnetic field, 
funneling plasma toward one point on photosphere, where it erupted outward in a 
permanent flare—the jet that was driving the star toward its fatal rendezvous at 
the bottom of the white dwarf's steep gravity well. The scientist believed that 
the Transcendent was manipulating the vast energies of the star's magnetic field 
by breaking the symmetry of the seething sea of virtual particular pairs that 
defined quantum vacuum, generating charged particles ab ovo, redirecting plasma 
currents and looped magnetic fields with strengths of thousands of gauss and 
areas of thousands of kilometers as a child might play with a toy magnet and a 
few iron filings. The probe she'd loaded with a dozen experiments had been lost 
with the science platform, but she thought that there was a way of testing at 
least one prediction of her theoretical work on symmetry breaking.
She opened a window in Carter's helmet display, showed him a schematic plot of 
the slingshot maneuver around the red dwarf.
Carter said, "You have to get that close?"
"The half-life of the strange photons will be very short, a little less than a 
millisecond."
"I get it. They won't travel much more than a few hundred kilometers before they 
decay." Carter grinned when the scientist stared at him. He said, "Speed of 
light's one of those fundamental constants every sailor has to deal with."
"It means that we have to get close to the source, but it also means that the 
photon flux will increase anomalously just above the photosphere. There should 
be a sudden gradient, or a series of steps… It was one of the experiments my 
probe carried."
Carter said, "But it was destroyed, so we have to do the job instead. It's going 
to get pretty hot, that close to the star. What kind of temperatures are we 
talking about?"
"I don't know. The average surface temperature of the red dwarf is relatively 
cool, a little over 3000 degrees Kelvin, but it's somewhat hotter near the base 
of the flare, where we have to make our pass."
"Why don't we just skim past the edge of the flare itself? The flare might be 
hotter than the surface, but our transit time would be a whole lot less."
"The magnetic fields are very strong around the flare, and they spiral around 
it. They could fling us in any direction. Outward if we're lucky, into the star 
if we're not. No, I'm going to aim for a spot where the field lines all run in 
the same direction. But the fields can change direction suddenly, and there's 
the risk of hitting a stray plume of plasma, so I can't fire up the motors until 
we're close."
Carter thought of his cutout. He said, "If you have to hit a narrow window, I'm 
your man. I can put this ship through the eye of a needle."
The scientist said, "As soon as I see the chance, I'll fire full thrust to 
minimize transit time."
"But without the thermal protection of the comet nucleus it'll still be a lot 
worse than waving your hand through a candle flame. I suppose I can set up a 
barbecue-mode rotation, run the cooling system at maximum. Your box will help 
keep you safe, and I'll climb into one too, but if the temperature doesn't kill 
us, the hard radiation flux probably will. You really think you can learn 
something useful?"
"This is a unique opportunity, sailor. It's usually very difficult to study 
Transcendent engineering because they keep away from star systems that have been 
settled. Some of us think that the Hundred Minute War was fought over the fate 
of the human race, that the Transcendents who won the war and quit the Solar 
System believe that we should be left alone to get on with our lives."
"But this one didn't leave us alone."
"Strictly speaking, it did. Forty Eridani B and C, the white dwarf and the red 
dwarf, are a close-coupled binary. Keid is only loosely associated with them. 
And they're a rare example of the kind of binary the Transcendents are very 
interested in, one in which the masses of the two components are very different. 
We have a unique opportunity to study stellar engineering up close. The Fanatics 
know this, which is why they're so keen to destroy anything which comes too 
close."
"They want to keep the Transcendents' secrets secret."
"They're not interested in understanding the Transcendents, only in worshiping 
them. They are as fixed and immutable as their belief system, but we're willing 
to learn, to take on new knowledge and change and evolve. That's why we're going 
to win this war."
Following the scientist's instructions, Carter dismantled three cameras and 
rejiggered their imaging circuits into photon counters. While he worked, the 
scientist talked about her family home in Happy Valley on Neuvo California. It 
had been badly damaged in one of the first Fanatic attacks, and her parents and 
her three brothers had helped organize the evacuation. Her mother had been an 
ecosystem designer, and her father had been in charge of the government's 
program of interstellar commerce; they were both in the war cabinet now.
"And very proud and very unhappy that their only daughter volunteered for this 
mission."
Carter said that his family were just ordinary folks, part of a cooperative that 
ran a vacuum organism farm on the water-and methane-ice plains of San Joaquin. 
He'd piloted one of the cooperative's tugs and had volunteered for service in 
the Keidian defense force as soon as the war against the Fanatics began, but he 
didn't want to talk about the two inconclusive skirmishes in which he'd been 
involved before being assigned to the mission. Instead, he told the scientist 
about his childhood and the tented crevasse that was his family home, and the 
herds of engineered rats he'd helped raise.
"I loved those rats. I should have been smart enough to stay home, raise rats 
and make babies, but instead I thought that the bit of talent I have for math 
and spatial awareness was my big ticket out."
"Shit," the scientist said. "The singleship just passed through your debris 
field."
She opened a window and showed Carter the radar plot.
He felt a funny floating feeling that had nothing to do with free fall. He said, 
"Well, we tried."
"I'm sure it won't catch up with us before we reach the star."
"If we make that burn now—"
"We'll miss the chance to collect the photon data. We're going to die whatever 
we do, sailor. Let's make it worthwhile."
"Right."
"Why did you like them? The rats."
"Because they're survivors. Because they've managed to make a living from humans 
ever since we invented agriculture and cities. Back on Earth, they were a vermin 
species, small and tough and smart and fast-breeding, eating the same food that 
people ate, even sharing some of the same diseases and parasites. We took them 
with us into space because those same qualities made them ideal lab animals. Did 
you know that they were one of the first mammal species to have their genome 
sequenced? That's why there are so many gengineered varieties. We mostly bred 
them for meat and fur and biologicals, but we also raised a few strains that we 
sold as pets. When I was a little kid, I had a ruffled piebald rat that I loved 
as much as any of my sisters and brothers. Charlie. Charlie the rat. He lived 
for more than a thousand days, an awfully venerable age for a rat, and when he 
died I wouldn't allow him to be recycled. My father helped me make a coffin from 
offcuts of black oak, and I buried him in a glade in my favorite citrous 
forest…"
The scientist said, "It sounds like a nice spot to be buried."
Carter said, "It's a good place. There are orchards, lots of little fields. 
People grow flowers just for the hell of it. We have eighteen species of mammals 
roaming about. All chipped of course, but they give you a feeling of what nature 
must have been like. I couldn't wait to get out, and now I can't wait to get 
back. How dumb is that?"
The scientist said, "I'd like to see it. Maybe you could take me on a picnic, 
show me the sights. My family used to get together for a picnic every couple of 
hundred days. We'd rent part of one of the parklands, play games, cook way too 
much food, smoke and drink…"
"My father, he's a pretty good cook. And my mother leads a pretty good choral 
group. We should all get together."
"Absolutely."
They smiled at each other. It was a solemn moment. Carter thought he should say 
something suitable, but what? He'd never been one for speeches, and he realized 
now that although the scientist knew his name—it was stitched to his suit—he 
didn't know hers.
The scientist said, "The clock's ticking."
Carter said, "Yes, ma'am. I'll get this junk fixed up, and then I'll be right 
back."
He welded the photon detectors to the blunt nose of the pod and cabled them up. 
He prepped the antenna array. After the pod grazed the base of the flare, its 
computer would compress the raw data and send it in an encrypted squawk aimed at 
Keid, repeating it as long as possible, repeating it until the Fanatic 
singleship caught up. It was less than ten thousand kilometers behind them now. 
Ahead, the red dwarf filled half the sky, the jet a slender white thread rooted 
in patch of orange and yellow fusion fire, foreshortening and rising above them 
to infinity as they drove toward it. Carter said that its base looked like a 
patch of fungal disease on an apple, and the scientist told him that the analogy 
wasn't farfetched; before the science platform had been destroyed, one of the 
research groups had discovered that there were strange nuclear reactions taking 
place there, forming tons of carbon per second. She showed him a picture one of 
the pod's cameras had captured: a rare glimpse of the Transcendent, It was hard 
to see against the burning background of the star's surface because it was a 
perfectly reflective sphere.
"Exactly a kilometer across," the scientist said, "orbiting the equator every 
eight minutes. It's thought they enclose themselves in bubbles of space where 
the fundamental constants have been altered to enhance their cognitive 
processes. This one's a keeper. I'll send it back—"
A glowing line of gas like a burning snake thousands of kilometers long whipped 
past. The pod shuddered, probably from stray magnetic flux.
Carter said, "I should climb inside before I start to cook."
The scientist said, "I have to fire up the motor pretty soon." Then she said, 
"Wait."
Carter waited, hung at the edge of the hatch.
The scientist said, "You switched on the antenna array."
"Just long enough to check it out."
"Something got in. I think a virus. I'm trying to firewall, but it's spreading 
through the system. It already has the motor and nav systems—"
"I also have control of the corn system," another voice said. It was light and 
lilting. It was as sinuous as a snake. It was right inside Carter's head. 
"Carter Cho. I see you, and I know you can hear me."
The scientist said, "I can't fire the motor, but I think you can do something 
about that, sailor."
So she'd known about the cutout all along. Carter started to haul himself toward 
the stern.
The voice said, "Carter Cho. I will have complete control of your ship shortly. 
Give yourself to us."
Carter could see the singleship now, a flat triangle at the tip of a lance of 
white flame. It was only seconds away. He flipped up the panel, plugged in a 
patch cord. Sparse lines of data scrolled up in a window. He couldn't access the 
scientist's flight plan, had no nav except line-of-sight and seat-of-the pants. 
He had to aim blind for the base of the flare and hope he hit that narrow window 
by luck, came in at just the right angle, at just the right place where parallel 
lines of magnetic force ran in just the right direction…
"Carter Cho. I have taken control. Kill the woman and give yourself to us, and I 
promise that you will live with us in glory."
… Or he could risk a throw of the dice. Carter ran a tether from his p-suit 
utility belt to a nearby bolt and braced himself against a rung. With his helmet 
visor almost blacked out, he could just about look at the surface of the star 
rushing toward him, could see the intricate tangles of orderly streams that fed 
plasma into the brilliant patch of fusion fire at the base of the jet.
"Kill her, or I will strip your living brain neuron by neuron."
"Drop dead," Carter said, and switched off his com. The jet seemed to rise up to 
infinity, a gigantic sword that cut space in two. The scientist had said that if 
the pod grazed the edge of the jet, spiraling magnetic fields would fling it 
into the sky at a random vector. And the star took up half the sky…
Fuck it, Carter thought. He'd been lucky so far. It was time to roll the dice 
one more time, hope his luck still held.
He fired attitude controls and aimed the blunt nose of the pod. A menu window 
popped up in front of his face. He selected burn and full thrust.
Sudden weight tore at his two-handed grip on the rung as the motor flared. It 
was pushing a shade under a gee of acceleration; most humans who had ever lived 
had spent their entire lives in that kind of pull, but Carter's fingers were 
cramping inside the heavy gloves, and it felt as if the utility belt were trying 
to amputate him at the waist. The vast dividing line of the jet rushed toward 
him. Heat beat through his p-suit. If its cooling system failed for a second, 
he'd cook like a joint of meat in his father's stone oven. Or the Fanatic could 
burn him out of the sky with its X-ray laser, or magnetic flux could rip the pod 
apart…
Carter didn't care. He was riding his ship rodeo-style toward a flare of fusion 
light a thousand kilometers wide. He whooped with defiant glee—
—and then, just like that, the pod was somewhere else.
After a minute, Carter remembered to switch on his com. The scientist said, 
"What the fuck did you just do?"
It took them a while to find out.
Carter had aimed the pod at the edge of the jet, hoping that it would be flung 
away at a random tangent across the surface of the red dwarf, hoping that it 
would survive long enough to transmit all of the data collected by the 
scientist's experiment. But now the red dwarf was a rusty nailhead dwindling 
into the starscape behind them, the bright point of the white dwarf several 
seconds of arc beyond it. In the blink of an eye, the pod had gained escape 
velocity and had been translated across tens of millions of kilometers of space.
"It had to be the Transcendent," the scientist said.
Carter had repressurized the pod and the cooling system was working at a flat 
roar, but it was still as hot as a sauna. He had taken off his helmet and shaken 
out his sweat-soaked dreadlocks, but because the scientist's bums made her 
sensitive to heat, her coffin was still sealed. He hung in front of it, looking 
at her through the little window. He said, "I took the only chance we had left, 
and my luck held."
"No magnetic field could have flung us so far, or so fast. It had to be 
something to do with the Transcendent. Perhaps it canceled our interia. For a 
few seconds we became as mass-less as a photon, we achieved light speed…"
"My luck held," Carter said. "I hit those magnetic fields just right."
"Check the deep radar, sailor. There's no sign of the Fanatic's singleship. It 
was right on our tail. If magnetic fields had anything to do with it, it would 
have been flung in the same direction as us."
Carter checked the deep radar. There was no sign of the singleship. He 
remembered the glimpse of the silver sphere sailing serenely around the star, 
and said, "I thought the Transcendents wanted to leave us alone. That's why they 
quit the Solar System. That's why they only reengineer uninhabited systems…"
"You kept rats when you were a kid. If one got out, you'd put her back. If two 
started to fight, you'd do something about it. How did your rats feel when you 
reached into their cage to separate them?"
Carter grinned. "If we're rats, what are the Fanatics?"
"Rats with delusions of grandeur. Crazy rats who think they're carrying out 
God's will, when really they're no better than the rest of us. I wonder what 
that Fanatic must be thinking. Just for a moment, he was touched by the hand of 
his God…"
"What is it?"
"I've finished processing the data stream from my experiment. When we 
encountered the edge of the flare, there was a massive, sudden increase in 
photon flux."
"Because of this symmetry breaking thing of yours. Have you sent the data?"
"Of course, we have to figure the details."
"Send the data," Carter said, "and I'll button up the ship and put us to sleep."
"Perhaps there are some clues in the decay products…"
"You've completed your mission, ma'am. Let someone else worry about the 
details."
"Jesswyn Fiver," the scientist said. She was smiling at him through her little 
window. For a moment he saw how pretty she'd been. "You never did ask my name. 
It's Jesswyn Fiver. Now you can introduce me to your parents when we go on that 
picnic."