Transfer

The stream appeared within a few thousand rotations. A thread of luminous plasma, thin at first, then thickening, arcing from the Silver's distorted edge toward the Wanderer. The Silver's material, light and volatile, crossed the gap and spiraled into an accretion disk around the dark body. The Wanderer, which had been silent and invisible, began to glow at its edges where the stolen fuel ignited.

The Amber detected every stage. The spectral lines of the Silver's hydrogen appeared in the wrong place, shifted toward the Wanderer's position. The Silver's luminosity was changing, its output bending in a new direction. The Amber could measure the mass loss in the Silver's orbital period, the slight wobble as the Silver gave away its own substance and grew lighter.

There was no mechanism for the Amber to intervene. The outer orbit was too wide, its gravity too distant. The configuration had been agreed. The Amber had chosen this path knowing it would bring the Silver close to the Wanderer. Perhaps it had not known how close. Perhaps it had told itself the proximity was stable, manageable, that the Silver's boundary would hold. It had not.

The Silver was not resisting. The overflow, once begun, was self-sustaining. The Silver's gravity at its surface weakened with each loss, and the Wanderer's pull grew stronger with each gain. The Silver was reshaping itself around the transfer, its core tightening, its outer layers flowing outward toward the dark body. The Amber watched the spectral data accumulate. It watched the Silver's light, the light it had known since the nebula, now bending in a stream that pointed away from it entirely.

The Amber maintained its orbit. It did not flare. It did not shift its trajectory inward. It held its wide, cold path with perfect precision and absorbed the data into its core, where the pressure was absolute and nothing escaped.