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hostility they have demonstrated has been when we have come too close to them. Losing two probes in ten hours does not warrant a change in procedure, Caryl. All they have done is indicate a desire to be left alone, and they have extended that same courtesy toward us.”
    “For now.”
    “Yes, for now. Until they change their behavior, we have no reason to change ours. Besides, what else can we do but wait and watch?”
    She resisted the impulse to lash out at him. You could at least give me a fucking break. But she knew that would be unfair. She could leave the bridge at any time; fast-tracking could see her back in an hour or two, fully rested. But the thought of even that break galled her. She couldn’t leave, not when she was responsible for the lives of everyone on the Frank Tipler and off.
    Ten hours. At quadruple speed—the maximum the Tipler could maintain while simulating enough crew to run the ship—that equaled forty hours. They had turned over shifts eight times since the Spinners had come, but still she was there. Even Sivio had rested.
    She wondered what they called her behind her back. Then she wondered if paranoia was a symptom of exhaustion. It was certainly a symptom of command.
    “We’ve got something new here.” The announcement came from Nalini Kovistra, one of her two astrophysicists, who had been working almost as hard as she had. “We’re picking up gravitational waves from one of the towers.”
    “Can they hurt us?” Hatzis was a systems administrator, not a physicist.
    “No, but what’s making them might.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Gravitational waves occur as a result of sudden movements or changes of shape of massive objects, like neutron stars or black holes. If there’s something like that in one of those spindles—”
    “Could this be an attempt to communicate with us?” Sivio cut in.
    Nalini Kovistra’s reply was confident, but her shoulders lifted in a shrug. “As an alternative to electromagnetic radiation, it would be pretty poor. I mean, why juggle neutron material when you can simply point an antenna and talk?”
    “Well, if it’s not a weapon and not a communicator, what else could it be?” said Hatzis.
    “Impossible to say,” said Kovistra.
    “Maybe we should adopt a higher orbit as a precaution,” mused Hatzis.
    “I’m not sure it would make any difference, Caryl.”
    “But it couldn’t hurt, either.” Hatzis glanced at the roster to see who was on pilot duty. “Jene, give us a perigee kick to put the Tipler into an elliptical orbit, staying as far away as possible from the spindle—which one was it, Jayme? Did you notice?”
    “Spindle Six.”
    “Shall do.” Avery’s voice was crisp and efficient.
    “Is that enough, Jayme? Should we break orbit entirely, do you think?” Uncertainty gripped Hatzis in her imaginary stomach.
    “It’s your decision, Caryl. With so little information, all we can do is follow your instincts.”
    Great. She hadn’t slept for over two whole days. What did that say about her instincts?
    The Tipler indicated that its secondary thrusters were firing. Hatzis didn’t check, knowing she could leave the job in Jene Avery’s capable hands. She knew as little about the drive systems as she did about gravitational waves, but at least she wasn’t alone there. The genetic algorithms that had fast-tracked the survey program’s engineering had left many of its human designers behind; she had a niggling feeling that no one really knew how the drives did what they did. That they did it well—and had reached the required efficiencies in order to make the 2050 launch date—was all that had mattered.
    But that was a worry for another day. The ship’s orbit slowly changed shape in the main plot, giving the source of the gravitational waves a wide berth. She could rest easy on that score, at least. Perhaps—
    “I have a result from the projections team,” said Sivio over her thoughts.
    “Good. What have they come up