As Pirius labored at his instruments, Nilis talked on and on, about other galaxies where the central black holes weren’t sleeping giants like this one, but voracious monsters that seemed to be actively eating their way through the gaseous corpses of their hapless hosts; he spoke of galaxies racked by great spasms of star formation, tremendous eruptions of energy that spanned hundreds of light-years.

“We rationalize all these things away with our physics, coming up with one theory after another. But we know that life’s thoughtless actions have shaped the evolution of matter, even on astrophysical scales. So how can we tell what is natural? We have been waging war here for millennia. But there is evidence that the Xeelee have been fighting here much longer, tremendous ancient wars against a much more formidable foe. And what would be the consequence? Perhaps everything we see is a relic of an ancient battleground, like the trench-furrowed surface of a Rock, worked and reworked by conflict until nothing is left of the original…” He seemed to come to himself. “I’m talking a lot.”

“Yes, you are,” Pirius said tensely. “I should have left you back at the base.”

Nilis laughed, though his face stayed expressionless. “I’ll try to—”

“Flies! My altitude fifty degrees, azimuth forty…”

Pirius quickly converted that to his own point of view and peered out of his blister. He couldn’t see the nightfighters. But in his sensor view, there they were, resolutely night-dark specks in this cathedral of light.

“Remarkable,” Nilis said. “This is a three-dimensional battlefield, with no common attitude. You use spherical coordinates, and you are able to translate from one position to another, in your head—”

“Shut up, Commissary.”

Somebody called, “I count five, six, seven—”

Cohl said, “All nightfighters, I think.”

Enduring Hope called, “I’m surprised they took so long.”

“No,” said Dray grimly. “We surprised them. Pattern alpha.”

The seven greenships turned with the precision of a single machine, and Pirius felt a stab of pride.

Now the Xeelee were dead ahead. The greenships continued to plow toward them.

“Sublight,” Dray called. “Half lightspeed.”

The greenships cut their FTL drives. The Other Claw dropped back into three-dimensional spacetime with a velocity of half the speed of light, arrowed straight at the Xeelee. The enemy was now just light-minutes away, no more remote than Earth was from its sun. The greenships were closing so fast that the background, the Spiral’s boiling clouds of gas and dust, was tinged faintly blue.

As the nightfighters neared, Pirius could see how they swarmed, flying over, under, around each other, rapid movements whose pattern was impossible to follow, like the flies that had earned them their barracks nickname. Their movements were almost like a dance, Pirius thought; smooth, graceful, even beautiful. But not human.

And they were close, terribly close. Pirius thought he saw the first tentative cherry-red flicker of a starbreaker beam.

“Break on my mark,” Dray said. “Three, two, one—”

The wedge formation dissolved. Three of the greenships peeled away, suddenly making a dash for it back along the great roadway of the spiral arm. The rest, including Dray and Pirius, closed up tighter. Only the four of them now, four green sparks in this dazzling Galaxy-center light storm, four against the dense pack of Xeelee flies dead ahead.

Nilis murmured, “I don’t understand—”

“Shut up,” said Pirius.

For a time — a moment, a heartbeat — the Xeelee held their position, and Pirius thought the subterfuge wasn’t going to work. And if it didn’t he was a dead man.

But then the Xeelee broke. Moving as one, they tore after the three departing ships.

Pirius whooped, flooded with relief and exultation. There were answering cries from the other ships. “Lethe, it worked!”

Dray briefly shut down the loop, so that only her voice sounded. “Let’s keep the partying for later,” she said dryly. “Formation C. You know the drill.”

The Other Claw banked and turned.

Nilis gripped the edge of his Virtual seat. “Oh, my eyes,” he whispered, evidently more upset by a bit of aerobatics than by a head-on approach to a pack of Xeelee fighters.

The four ships soon settled down into a new simplified wedge. Dray ordered them to sound off once in position: Three, Four, Seven called in. Pirius, in Seven, trailed Dray, the leader; Three flew alongside Dray, trailed by Four.

Nilis spoke up again. “We flew at the Xeelee. Why didn’t they repel us?”

“They thought we were a diversion,” Pirius said. “That the others, One, Five, Six, were the ones with the real mission — whatever they imagine it to be. The Xeelee made a quick decision, chased the others. But they were wrong.”

“Ah. Those others, One, Five Six — they were the diversion. Clever! Perhaps we are better liars than the Xeelee. What does that say of us?… But of course it would only work if the Xeelee didn’t know of it in advance.”

“We were flying anti-Tolman patterns.” Patterns intended to disrupt the abilities of the enemy to send signals back into their own past. “It’s all part of the game. It’s a gamble, though; you can never be sure what you’ll come up against.”

“But it worked,” Nilis said. “An ingenious bluff!”

Pirius saw a flaring of light up around azimuth forty degrees, a green nova. Somebody up there was fighting and dying, all for the sake of an “ingenious bluff.”

Dray had seen the same lights. She called gruffly, “Let’s make it count.”

“Yes, sir.”

“On my mark. Three, two, one.”

That juddering light-day hopping began again, and once more the stars swam past Pirius, as he hurtled along the glowing lanes of dust.

Chapter 31

Exerting her new power, Luru Parz brought Nilis and his little retinue to Jupiter. A week after the confrontation under Olympus, it was clear that she was the driver of events.

Pirius Red knew nothing about the “archive” to which he was being brought. Even Nilis, normally so loquacious, would say nothing. But Pirius’s psych training cut in: it was a waste of energy to worry about the unknown.

Besides, here was Jupiter. And Pirius thought that of all the ancient strangeness he had seen in Sol system, Jupiter was the most extraordinary.

The sun appeared the tiniest of discs from Jupiter, five times as far as Earth from the central light. When Pirius held up his hand, it cast sharp, straight shadows, shadows of infinity, and he felt no warmth.

And through this reduced light swam Jupiter and its retinue of moons.

Once it had been a mighty planet, the mightiest in Sol system in fact, more massive even than Saturn. But an ancient conflict had resulted in the deliberate injection of miniature black holes into the planet’s metallic-hydrogen heart. Whatever the intention of that extraordinary act, the result was inevitable. It had taken fifteen thousand years, but at last the implosion of Jupiter into the knot of spacetime at its core had been completed.

Once, Jupiter had had a retinue of many moons, four of them large enough to be considered worlds in their own right. In the final disaster, as gravitational energy pulsed through the system, the moons had scattered like frightened birds. Three of those giant satellites had been destroyed, leaving Jupiter with a spectacular ring of ice and dust. But even now bits of moon were steadily falling into the maw of the black hole, and their compression as they were dragged into the event horizon made the central object shine like a star.

One large moon had survived, to follow a swooping elliptical orbit around its parent, and that was Luru Parz’s destination now. The moon, she said, was called Callisto.