Starplex

Emerging from behind the limb of the green star were one… two… five more Waldahud fighters. Gawst had not been fool enough to use all his forces on the initial attack. One of the newcomers was a giant, ten times the size of the smaller probecraft.

Starplex’s five dolphin-piloted ships had backed off, avoiding the ice barrage. But now they were linking up in formation, and heading toward the approaching attack force, determined to get to it before it could get to their mothership.

And then…

“What the hell?” said Keith, gripping his armrests.

“Jesus” said Thor. “Je-sus!”

The vast field of dark matter had begun to move, slowly at first, but now with gathering speed. It was spinning out into lumpy streamers, greenish on the side facing toward the rogue sun, inky black on the other. The streamers grew longer until they spread out over millions of kilometers, tubes of gravel with planet-sized spheres distributed along their length like knuckles on ethereal fingers.

The Starplex probeships dived above or below the streamers. The Waldahud pilots found their ships traveling in erratic courses, unable to compensate for the streamers’ gravitational attraction. In the spherical hologram, Keith could see the attacking ships staggering in drunken, weaving lines, pulled off course by the hundreds of Jupiter-masses within each dark-matter ribbon.

The streamers were growing with surprising speed. Keith still had trouble with the concept of macrolife living freely in space, but of course most life-forms could move quickly when they wanted to…

The pilots of the incoming Waldahud ships were realizing that they were in trouble. One of them aborted what had clearly been an attack run toward Starplex, and was now veering off at a steep angle. Another fired its braking jets, the exhausts four ruby pinpricks against the blackness. But the darmats continued to reach for them, long, puffy fingers against the night.

If the ships had been able to use hyperdrive, they could have escaped. But the gravity well from the green star, and the shallower but still significant wells created by the darmats, prevented that.

The farthest of the new fighters was now only a few kilometers ahead of one of the dark-matter tendrils. Keith watched as the gap was closed, the ship disappearing within the fog of gravel.

Thor provided a schematic, showing the fighter’s position within the streamer—a streamer that now was no longer reaching forward, but had started pulling back, its gravity dragging the Waldahud vessel with it…

Soon a second dark-matter tentacle had enveloped another Waldahud ship. A third fighter was trying desperately to get away; Keith could see the flash of explosive bolts as it jettisoned its weapons clusters in order to decrease its overall mass. But the dark matter was still gaining on it. Meanwhile, the two tendrils that had already caught ships were still pulling back, and—that was curious—had begun curling in on themselves, archirig away, like cobras made of ash.

The third small ship was finally caught, and its gray finger started pulling back, too. The giant Waldahud ship was also being approached from above and below by separate dark-matter tentacles. Only the fifth new ship seemed likely to get away, although Keith’s heart was pounding as he saw that Rissa and Longbottle were now pursuing it. His son’s face flashed in front of his eyes—still a kid at nineteen, the goatee notwithstanding. How would he break the news to him if his mother got killed?

The first two tentacles had arched back into semicircles, the cups of which were facing away from the green star. At the same moment as the large vessel was engulfed by the two converging streamers that had been pursuing it, the first of the dark-matter fingers snapped forward like a whip. The Waldahud fighter that had been embedded in it shot ahead, out of the tentacle, tumbling end over end. Keith saw the pinpoint lights of ACS jets firing, but the ship’s wild rotation continued unabated.

Keith’s jaw fell open. Good Christ—!

—as the ship was flung directly toward the green star.

The vessel continued to rotate over and over as the distance between it and the star diminished rapidly. The pilot finally managed to gain control, but he was too close to the 1.5-million-kilometer-wide ball of fire. Prominences licked toward the incoming projectile—

—and the ship turned to vapor in the star’s upper atmosphere.

Keith shouted, “Rhombus, hail our probeships!”

“Channel open.”

“Return to Starplex!” said Keith. “All ships, return at once to Starplex!”

Four probeships acknowledged and changed course, but one was still pursuing its target.

“Rissa!” Keith shouted. “Turn back!”

Suddenly the second dark-matter whip cracked across the night, sending another Waldahud ship hurtling toward the green star. Keith’s head kept snapping left and right between the twin horrors of Rissa’s ship receding from Starplex and the fighter’s head-over-heels rush toward destruction.