She counted out the seconds, waiting for the wall of superheated solar gas to flare into them, boil them and the ship into oblivion. Or else, for a Concordance battleship to thunder down the cone at them, beam-weaponry blazing.
Neither thing happened. The blast wave didn"t come, and no ships appeared. She reached out with all her senses, trying to discern whether anything had changed at the apex of the cone, bouncing more radio waves off it. The telemetry was fuzzy, hard to interpret. There was still a hard surface there, but it behaved differently, scattering the electromagnetic radiation she fired at it rather than reflecting it back at her in predictable ways. So far as she could tell, there was now a disc of some unidentified substance at the far end of the cone. It was hard to be su
