Free Furious Gulf by Gregory Benford Page B

bringing fresh splashes of light into view.
     Toby felt a smoldering anger at the mechs who were approaching on blue-white exhaust plumes, driving
Argo
to flee. They were relentless, riding their lances of scalding plasma, an age-old enemy that would hound down any remnant
     of humanity. They had been just a light-day away, hiding somewhere in the churning murk.
    Even in this swirl of stars there was little chance to escape.
Argo
’s long-range scanners had picked up mech exhaust images coming from several directions—cutting off the easy orbits, the ones
     out and away from the Center.
    So their trajectory was being pressed ever-inward. Toward the black hole that squatted at True Center. A trap.
    Toby had listened to his Isaac Aspect consult even older, scratchy Aspects, and then go on about the huge dark star, but it
     all seemed so strange, so impossible. Through ten billion years the galaxy had fed it. Stars had been swept into it by the
     tides of gravity and dusty friction. Once, civilizations had thrived around those lost suns. As their parent stars were swept
     inward, to be baked and shredded and devoured, whole alien races had been forced to flee or die.
    Isaac’s history lessons were pretty sparse about those distant times. Much was imagined, but little known. Some civilizations
     had escaped, Isaac said. They had made strange, metallic colonies that harvested the great energy resources here. Ahead of
Argo
lay such refuges. Cities of the center—alien, enormous, forbidding. Greater than Chandeliers, and far older.
    He shook himself and turned to his task—coaxing Quath in for the Family Bishop Gathering. The bulky alien labored with the
     last walls of her intricate nest, stacking the bricks in a sheltering nook where two farm domes met.
    “Come on, big-bug, it’s about to start.”
    Quath hefted a thick slab without apparent effort. your
species’ ceremony. [untranslatable] I show respect by not attending.>
    “It’s more like a brawl with rules. Anyway, the Cap’n wants you there to speak.”
    
    “Look, dung-master, this is
important
.”
    
    “Huh? Why?”
    
    Toby followed Quath’s double-jointed gesture. Now that he swept his gaze around, he picked out a soft, ivory glow all around
Argo
. It danced and shimmered, like a mist blown by an unseen wind. “Pretty. So what?”
         of outrage. Photons of dismay and discomfort.>
    “Yeah, life’s tough. Still, so what?”
         it unsafe for you to walk this hull.>
    Toby frowned. He had always thought that
Argo
’s magnetic fields kept all the dangerous stuff away. But such fields could not stop weightless light, and he knew that the
     really harmful stuff was much higher in frequency, far above what humans could sense.
    “You can see the hard radiation?”
    
    “Ummm. I better get back inside. You’re coming too—Cap’n’s orders.”
    
    “Quath, you started tearing apart your wasp-nest and packing it away before we even knew mechs were coming. How come?”
    
    “You think so?” Quath never said anything lightly. Or else an alien sense of humor didn’t come over that way. For all Toby
     knew, losing a leg might be a great joke for Quath. Toby had seen her take off one of her own legs once and make a strange
     sucking sound. He had assumed Quath had been crying or groaning, but maybe it had been a parlor game.
    
    “Pretty fatalistic, ol’