It’s real, Hope thought; it really is happening. He felt an odd pull. It wasn’t so long since he had been flight crew himself.

He walked quickly around the hangar. Work was going well. In fact, he told himself, if he hung around watching over his technicians’ shoulders, he would get in the way. He could be spared for a couple of hours.

So, as the last crews walked down the short corridor to Officer Country, Hope followed them.

Torec was on security duty at the door of the conference room. Hope found his way blocked by her arm. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“The briefing.” Through the open door Hope glimpsed the thirty-odd flight crew milling, finding seats. They all seemed to be here, both primary crews and reserves. On a dais at the front sat the two editions of Pirius, Burden, Commissary Nilis, and others. As the officers prepared their briefing material, Virtual images flickered tantalizingly over their heads.

“Flight crew only,” Torec said. “I can’t let you in.”

“Come on, Torec,” he whispered. “I used to fly, remember?”

“I don’t know why you want to be here.”

Neither did Hope, quite. He looked into the room. “Because it’s history.”

“Yes,” she said. “There is that. Okay.” She lifted her arm. “But if anybody spots you I’ll say you slugged me.”

He grinned his thanks and hurried into the room.

The atmosphere in there was even stranger than out in the hangars. The tension in the air was like ozone. All the flight crew seemed to be talking at once, and the air was full of noise. But the talk was meaningless, just banter, ways to drain off stress. Hope spotted pilot Jees, who sat a little apart, as always, like a half-silvered statue; with no apparent nerves, she watched the platform and waited for the show to start.

Hope found space at the back, between two burly navigators. Of course everybody in this audience knew who he was, but they had all worked with him on their ships and seemed to accept him.

Pirius Red stood up on the platform. He raised his arms for silence, but he needn’t have; the hubbub died away instantly. Pirius looked out over the crews, a complex expression on his face. “You know why we’re here.” He spoke without amplification, and his voice, gruff with tension, was precise, determined. “Operation Prime Radiant is on.” There was a rumble of appreciation at that; one or two stamped their feet. “I know it’s still not much more than a name for most of you, but that’s about to change.

“I’ve already had briefings with the flight commanders, and representative specialists — pilots, navigators, engineers — and we’ve put it all together, as best we can. Commissary Nilis here will give you an overview of the objectives and strategy, and then Blue, Burden, and I will go through the operation in more detail. At the end of this briefing you’ll be given copies of the draft Operation Order by the adjutant. After that we’ll split for briefings in your specialist groups. We have more detailed Virtuals of the mission profile, including sims if you’ve the time to sit through them.

“At every stage I want you to answer back. What we’re going to attempt is something nobody’s done before. So if you spot a screwup waiting to happen, or can see a better way to do things, say so. At the end of the day the adjutant and I will pull all that feedback into a fresh draft of the Op Order, and we’ll hold another update session in here. Is that clear?”

There was no reply. He paced, as if suddenly uncertain, and gazed out at them; the crews watched him silently.

Pirius said, “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do tomorrow, in a sentence. We’re going to strike a blow at the Xeelee from which they cannot recover. And I’ll tell you something else. Tomorrow is our best chance, but it’s not the only chance. If you screw up tomorrow, you’ll go back out there as soon as we can patch up the ships, and patch you up, and do it again. And you’ll keep on going out until the job is done. So if you don’t want to go back, do it right first time.” He glared at them, as if daring them to defy him. Then, to silence, he sat down.

Enduring Hope glanced around cautiously. Pirius wasn’t the kind of leader who cracked jokes or expected you to applaud him. But Hope saw no frowns, no pursed lips, no skepticism. If you were a flyer you didn’t expect coddling. These crews knew Pirius by now, and his older self, and they respected him. They were ready to follow him, wherever he was about to lead them. Lethe, Hope thought, he would follow Pirius, either of them, just as he had before, if given the chance.

Nilis was next up. The Commissary, bulky and much older than the flight crews arrayed before him, was dressed in a black Commission robe that was frayed at the cuffs. He fumbled with his data desks and coughed to clear his throat. Nilis seemed a lot more nervous than Pirius had been — or maybe it was just that Pirius hid it better.

Nilis began by summarizing the novel technical elements of the mission: the grav shield, the CTC processor, the black-hole cannon weapon. “That’s as much as you know, I suppose,” he said. “That and, as Pirius said, the name of the mission: Operation Prime Radiant. Now I can tell you that the name refers to the most significant Prime Radiant of all: the base of the Xeelee in this Galaxy.” There was an audible gasp at that. He looked out at them, squinting a little, as if he couldn’t quite make out their faces. “I think you understand me. After three thousand years of inconclusive siege warfare, we — you — are going to strike at the very heart of the Galaxy, at the supermassive black hole known as Chandra, the center of all Xeelee operations.”

Enduring Hope felt numb. He couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.

Nilis began to go through a bewildering array of Virtuals. Gradually the outline of the mission became a bit clearer.

Very shortly, after a billion years of drifting down the arm of the Baby Spiral, Orion Rock would erupt into the open. Emerging deep inside the Cavity, this heavily armed Rock was an immediate threat to the foe, who would surely attack. But Orion was a diversion. While the local Xeelee firepower spent itself on the Rock’s defenses, Exultant Squadron would slip away.

The greenships would fly deeper into the Cavity behind their grav shield, whose purpose, Nilis now revealed, was to thwart the Xeelee’s ability to gather FTL foreknowledge about the mission. Later, the CTC processors would be used so they could penetrate the Xeelee’s final layers of defenses. And then the black-hole cannon would be used to strike at Chandra itself, and the Xeelee concentrations that swarmed there.

As Nilis spoke on, the crews began to mutter. Hope knew what everybody was thinking. It was well known that nobody had flown so close to the Prime Radiant and lived to talk about it; even Pirius Blue hadn’t gone in that deep. All this novel technology was hardly reassuring either. A crew liked to fly with proven kit, not with the product of some boffin’s overheated brow.

But I would go, Hope thought helplessly.

Nilis got through his technical Virtuals. He said, “Your commanders will take you through the operational aspects of the mission in detail. But I want to tell you why it’s so important to strike at the Prime Radiant — no matter what the cost.”

He spoke of strategic theory. The Galaxy was full of military targets, he said, full of Xeelee emplacements of one kind or another. But those which were “economically upstream” in the flow of resources and information were more valuable. “It is cheaper, simple as that, to strike at the dockyard where greenships are constructed, to destroy it in a single mission, than to run a hundred missions chasing the ships themselves.” He brought up images of the Prime Radiant, heavily enhanced. Somehow the Xeelee used the massive black hole as a factory for their nightfighters and other technologies, he said, and as their central information processor. He spoke of the damage he hoped black-hole projectiles would do to such mighty machines as must exist around Chandra.