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“Oh shit…”

“What?”

Sheffield was monitoring the energy densities in the whorls of computronium that surrounded Exile Kiss.

“I think we’ve woken a local daemon. There’s significant activity in the nodes around us, and…” She paused, looked at the screen again, “Yes. Effectors are gathering. We need to get out of here before the utility fog starts to eat the hull.”

“Samson Option?”

“Yes. Don’t think we have a choice.” Fingers danced on keyboards, screens flashed data, and the sirens began.

“ACCELERATION WARNING. ACCELERATION WARNING.”

Samson was entering the temple. We fell into our padded couches as the first of the enhanced radiation warheads rolled into the launch chute. Windows shuttered tight, and all but the most essential computers shut down.

“Five…”

Harnesses buckled tight.

“Four…”

“Three…”

“Two…”

“One…”

Someone kicked me in the small of the back, hard. Once, twice, three times. Soon it was a constant surging motion as bomblet after bomblet exploded, flooding the space around us with gamma rays and pushing the ship out of the depths of the Matrioshka as quickly as possible. Surfing the atom bombs we fled for the stars, leaving a sterile hole in the dying singularity.

Three Gs of acceleration for nearly twenty minutes before the computers rebooted.