Pirius sighed. “All right. Cabel. Bilson. Yes, I intend to draw the flak away from Blue. Maybe that way we’ll give him a chance of succeeding with the mission. But you’ve been down there already. If you don’t think you can do this again—”

“Count me in,” Cabel said immediately.

Bilson was clearly having a lot more difficulty. But the navigator sighed raggedly. “You did say that if we screwed up today we’d be back tomorrow. Let’s get it over.”

“Good man,” Pirius said warmly.

“Let’s do it,” Blue said. His ship broke immediately out of the formation.

Pirius grasped his controls, and the two ships settled side by side.

Burden said, “I just want to say—”

“Later,” Red snapped.

Torec whispered, “Godspeed.”

Blue asked, “What does that mean?”

“Something I learned on Earth. Very old, I think.”

“No good-byes,” Pirius Red said. “Ten minutes, we’ll be back.”

Torec forced a laugh. “Knowing my luck, both of you. Or neither…”

In formation, the two ships swept down through the great hollow toward the shining puddle of the accretion disc.

Once again Red found himself flying low over the accretion disc; once again the event horizon itself rose like a malevolent sun before him. But this time Blue’s ship was a green spark off his port bow.

Blue opened a private loop to Red. “Of course,” he said, “if we both get killed down here, then nothing will be left of me — of you.”

“That would be simpler,” Red said.

“That it would. Take care of Torec if—”

“And you,” Red called. “Good luck, brother.”

“Yes — Lethe! I’m in flak!”

Pirius Red glanced across. Two, three, four starbreaker beams were raking the sky, trying to triangulate on Blue’s ship. Red yanked his ship sideways, cutting between. To his satisfaction, two or three of the beams started to track him, while the others lost Blue, who ducked below his nominal course. But if one of those beams touched him, however briefly, he would be done.

Red began to weave back and forth, the CTC pulling the ship through a rapid evasion pattern faster than any human pilot could — faster than a Xeelee, Pirius thought. But the starbreakers tracked after him.

Cabel growled, “I think I’m going to lose my breakfast.”

Pirius shouted, “But it’s working. Bilson! Keep tracking — it’s your job to guide Blue in.”

“Understood, Pilot.”

“Coming up on that netting,” Pirius Blue reported. “Wow — I don’t think I believed it — a contiguous structure light-minutes across! The Xeelee have been busy… Red, I’m in flak again.”

Pirius, following his evasive course, had drifted too far from his temporal twin. No time to get back under sublight.

He punched his controls. The ship jumped, a big FTL jump of a light-second or so. He heard the blister hull creak, and his displays lit up with red flags; you weren’t supposed to make such jumps in spacetime this turbulent. But it had worked, and he had lodged himself just in front of Pirius Blue.

And once again the flak beams were focused on him. He laughed out loud. “Bring it on!”

Bilson said, “I lost the lock.”

“Then get it back,” Pirius shouted. “Come on, navigator, we’re almost there.”

“I have it. I have it!” A starbreaker speared out from the greenship’s weapons pod, and hit a stretch of netting some distance before the two fleeing ships.

“I’ve got it,” Blue called. “Good work, Bilson. But we need to have a word about your flying, Red.”

“Have you got the event horizon?”

Blue said quietly, “We have a fix.”

Pirius’s cabin flared with cherry-red light. The starbreakers were close. He ignored the glow, overrode the automatics, and held the ship to its line. “Only a few seconds more, crew—”

The blister shuddered around him, and a telltale blared. He had lost one nacelle, one crew blister: it was Cabel, probably the best engineer in the squadron, gone, burned away, a scrap of flesh in this tremendous tumult of energy. Regret stabbed, but he had no time now, no time. Still he stuck to his line. “Blue, drop the damn bombs—”

“Gone!” Blue called.

Pirius hurled the ship sideways. But the starbreakers tracked him, and still the ship shuddered.

Blue reported, “Gone and — Lethe!”

“What? Blue, I can’t see.”

“The black holes converged — we picked up the gravity wave pulse, right on the event horizon. And the Xeelee — Lethe, it’s working!… Oh.” He sounded oddly disappointed.

Pirius wrenched his ship around once more. “Blue! Report.”

“The flak has got me. I can’t maneuver — I’m wallowing like a hog—”

“Blue!”

“I always did want to be remembered,” Blue said.

“So did I.”

“Maybe we will be after all. Good-bye, brother. Tell Nilis…” But his voice winked out, and Pirius heard no more, nothing but Bilson’s quiet sobbing.

In the ops room the cheering was loud.

That netting around the event horizon looked as if it had been punched open by a vast fist. The surface beneath, a mist of sheets and threads of plasma falling into the event horizon, was awash with waves of density that flared brightly — some were so dense, the monitors said, that hydrogen fusion was briefly sparking. These waves were caused by oscillations of the event horizon itself, where it had been struck a mighty punch by the coalescing black holes of Blue’s cannon. All around this part of Chandra, intense pulses of gravitational waves were washing out, and it was those waves that were wreaking such damage on the netting structure, far overwhelming the feeble human efforts.

It was Nilis’s moment of triumph. When Enduring Hope looked for the Commissary, he was nowhere to be seen.

Luru Parz watched, her eyes cold.

“Lethe, Nilis was right,” Marshal Kimmer said. “It worked! Where is that oaf? Commissary!”

At last Nilis came running onto the walkway. He was carrying a data desk which he waved in the air. He hurried up to Kimmer. “Marshal! I have it at last. Those final images of the web structure were the key — I knew there was more to this black hole than we suspected!”

Kimmer evidently didn’t know what he was talking about, and didn’t care. He wrapped one arm around Nilis’s shoulders. “Commissary, you old fool! Unlike you, I have no imagination. I had to see it with my own eyes to believe it. But you’ve done it! You’ve ripped a hole in that peculiar Xeelee nest — and we still have four armed ships left to finish the job. By the time we’re done that black hole will be as naked as the day it was formed, and the Xeelee will have nowhere to hide. I tell you, if you told me you had found a way to beat the Xeelee in a bare-knuckle fight I’d believe you now!”

Nilis pulled away forcibly. When he spoke, it was practically a shriek. “Marshal — listen to me. We have to call off the attack?

Kimmer, shocked, was silenced.

Luru Parz said, “And the remaining ships—”

“Call them home. Let no more lives be lost today.”

Kimmer looked thunderous. “You had better explain yourself, Commissary.”

Nilis waved his data desk. “I told you. I have it!”

“You have what?”

“The truth about Chandra. The Xeelee live off the black hole. But the Xeelee aren’t alone…”