Starplex

Thor rocked the ship the other way, and ice pellets were flung toward the fourth remaining ship. By this time, its pilot had come up with a counterstrategy. He rotated his own ship so that its fusion exhaust cone faced toward Starplex, and he fired his main engine, melting the ice into water drops, which immediately boiled into vapor before they could hit his ship.

But the pilot of one of the other remaining ships had been unprepared for this maneuver, or too preoccupied with saving his own tail by heading toward the shortcut. His course took him in the path of his comrade's fusion exhaust, and the white-hot flames tore into his vessel.

It exploded, leaving only two ships — one of which was Gawst's.

The expanding ring of water pellets deflected most of the ship debris away from Starplex, but the crew of the Waldahud craft that had tried the fusion-exhaust trick wasn't so lucky. A large, jagged piece of hull rammed into their shipt it spinning away, out of control — directly toward the field of dark matterlot seemed almost to regain control when he was a few million kilometers away from the closest of the great gray balls of gas, but by then he was already caught in its gravity. It would take hours for the deadly trajectory to play out its course, but the ship was destined to crash into the darmat — STARPLEX, and, at that velocity, even the kind of soft impact that occurred when regular matter hit dark matter would be enough to pulverize the vessel.

Gawst's ship was still intact, holding station with a tractor beam beneath the central disk. There was no way Thor could aim the ice-pellet stream there. Still, Starplex could keep spinning until GaWst ran out of fuel, if need be…

"Uh-oh." PHANTOM's translation of the rippling lights on Rhombus.

Thor looked up. "God damn," he said.

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. " Jesus."

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 spre ad 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.