Driving the dustsled forward, employing and increasing the kinetic force created over more than decades, she pushed the mass so carefully and painstakingly gathered toward the dragon’s mouth, then, at the last moment, accelerated the dustsled toward that gaping maw, that momentary entrance into underspace-time, while separating herself from the sled and triggering the recovery beacon.
As she watched, the energy from the dustsled sealed the breach into underspace-time, while the mass she and the dustsled had gathered fused with the proto-gas-giant, accelerating it, trembling and shuddering, out of the false deformation of spacetime and along a widening orbit. Out from the habitable zone to come.
Even so . . . Laurent recalculated.
She had been late, not fatally late, but close, and the p
