The branch came down a second time, and the Gaz burned away a full ten additional percent of her mass. It had done severe damage to her nano-structures. Destroying one nanite on purpose should have been impossible. Like taping a railgun to a butterfly. But that ridiculous mass of wood had destroyed a solid fifty-percent in one blow. If Gaz had kept her cortical matter anywhere but her gut, she would have died instantly.

  Nanites burned a channel into the wooden floor and the branch came down a second, third time, over and over in its mindless attempt to smash her into bits.

  By the time she reached an open area, she’d lost a fully three quarters of her original mass. Gaz’s body couldn’t assimilate new mass quickly enough to counter-act the constant damage she was taking from her environment. Her sensors could not identify the source of that damage, as if they were inherently blind to it. Not thermal, not radiation, not quantized energy pulses. Therefore: magic.

  Having lost all contact with her team, Gaz assumed them… gone. Not Alaya, they’d said not to kill her.

  Every cell of Gaz, the tiny parts of her which comprised the whole, objected to their course. She wanted to stay and save Alaya. And if she had the slightest hope, she would have done exactly that. But as it was, Gaz would die on her way back to her charge and might die on the way out of the ship. Hard to say exactly. Her only chance was to escape and return with reinforcements for Alaya.

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  The parts remaining to her grew smaller, which meant she had to expend less to push herself through the matter of the Root system. Minutes rolled by as automated, or seemingly automated, systems attacked Gaz, though they could do little to slow her progress. They were just wooden arms and bits of vegetation come alive. Whatever the massive branch had become or however it had been reinforced, none of the rest of the ship could simply smash through Gaz.

  Few spacers welcomed the vacuum. Space, the whole verse, was inherently deadly. And the vacuum represented the foundation of the universes’s “field of death,” as an ancient Earth scholar had once dubbed it. But in this rare case, it saved Gaz’s life.

  Sealed against the vacuum and capable of generating energy directly from captured matter, the vacuum was practically Gaz’s home. Rather, she was made for the vacuum of space. Normally, she would have had a good deal more mass to commit to her various life support and navigational processes.

  Not now. Coprocessors shut down, non-essential systems such as Net access were all disabled by emergency energy conservation algorithms. Fast time kicked in as Gaz abandoned primary cycles in favor of power generation and mass accumulation. In effect, she rocketed across the cluster, headed for the one person she hoped might be able to help her. Or at the very least the one person who might respect her credit. In a ship such a journey might have taken hours, maybe a few days.

  It took Gaz eight months.