Deep inside Callisto, Pirius stepped into the door frame. There was a flare of light, electric blue, blinding. He pushed further forward, into the light.

On the far side of the portal he felt a hard, cold surface under his feet. Ice?

The blue glare faded. He stood stock still, and blinked until he could see.

Suddenly his heart was hammering. He was still in the chamber, on Callisto, standing on the other side of the portal. He was Pirius, not the copy; he would have to leave that other to do his duty for him. “Lucked out,” he said.

“My eyes,” said Nilis. “Oh, my boy, what a terrible thing…”

Luru Parz said, “Look.”

Pirius turned. A Virtual projection hovered over the service bot, a complex, fast-shifting display, elusive, dense. Even the Navy guard was staring.

Pirius asked, “What is it?”

“Data,” said Luru Parz. “From configuration space. Coming back through the portal.”

“I think it worked,” Nilis said. “You found something, Pirius!”

Luru Parz growled, “Now all we have to do is figure out what it is.”

Chapter 32

The flight approached the terminus of East Arm.

The three main arms of the Baby Spiral, three fat streams of infalling gas, came to a junction, melding into a massive knot of turbulence. Pirius Blue could see it ahead, a tangle of glowing gas filaments. He knew that just on the other side of that central knot of gas lay the brooding mass of Chandra itself, and the powerful alien presences that infested it. No human crew had ever gotten so close and lived.

The silence on the Claw’s crew loop was telling. He remembered the words of his first flight instructor. “You pretty kids are all so smart. You have to be smart to fly a greenship. But in combat there’s only one thing worse than being smart. And that’s being imaginative.”

Pirius knew he ought to come up with something inspirational to say. But he didn’t understand how he felt himself. Not fear: he seemed to be finding a kind of acceptance. He recalled fragments of conversations with This Burden Must Pass, where that proselyte of the Friends of Wigner had mused about how it would be to reach the end of time and approach the Ultimate Observer, to approach a god. Perhaps it would be like this, the calm of being utterly insignificant.

Then the Xeelee attacked.

“Azimuth eighty! Azimuth eighty!” That was Four screaming, off to Pirius’s starboard.

Pirius glared around the sky. This time he saw the nightfighters just as the instruments blared their warnings. They were a ball of swarming ships, black as night, coming at him from out of the shining clouds. Starbreaker beams spat ahead of them, a curtain of fire. The nightfighters were beautiful, he thought, lethally beautiful. In this turbulent, violent place, the Xeelee looked like they had been born here.

No time for that.

Dray shouted, “Pattern delta!”

“Locking in,” Cohl snapped.

Pirius threw the Other Claw onto its new trajectory. The Galaxy center whirled around him, the merging lanes of gas spilling about his head.

Again the little convoy split, this time into two pairs. It was a copy of their first feint. This time Three and Four peeled off and went shooting away to Pirius’s port side, haring into the shining corridor of the Arm, as if trying to escape back to the Front. Meanwhile Wedge Leader and Wedge Seven, Dray and Pirius, went straight for the Xeelee, their weapons already firing.

Again there was a heartbeat of delay, as if the Xeelee were trying to decide what was happening. But this time they didn’t follow the decoy; this time they came straight on at Dray and Pirius.

Cohl said, “Lethe. They knew.”

“I don’t understand,” Nilis said.

“They didn’t fall for the bait,” Pirius said. “We were meant to look like a rearguard. The Xeelee were supposed to chase after the others. But they didn’t.”

“Your navigator said, ’They knew.’ “

“FTL foreknowledge,” Pirius said. “You can always tell when it cuts in. Suddenly they know what you’re going to do before you do.”

“They may know,” Dray said forcefully. “But that doesn’t mean they can stop us. Pirius, you’re less than a hundred light-days from Chandra. Make a single jump. Get in there, do what you have to do, get out.”

Cohl said, “It’s impossible.”

Pirius glanced at his instruments. This was the core of the Galaxy, full of immense masses throwing themselves around, spacetime churned to a foam. He took a breath. “Yes, it’s impossible. But we’re going to do it anyway.”

He was aware of Nilis tensing beside him, his pale fingers gripping the edge of his seat. Virtual Nilis was an authentic, fully sentient re-creation; perhaps death was as dark a prospect for such a creature as for a full human.

That knot of Xeelee were approaching; ten more seconds and their weapons would find their range.

“Commodore—”

“You’re on your own, Pirius. For those who have fallen!”

Abruptly Dray’s ship threw itself at the Xeelee, monopole shells spraying. Pirius saw the formation of the nightfighters momentarily waver; as she passed through them Dray made their wings rustle. But soon the Xeelee were closing over that brave green spark.

“Another gone,” Nilis said.

But she had bought a little time. “Cohl—”

“Laid in.”

“Do it.”

In the instant of transition Pirius could feel the instability of Galaxy-center spacetime; the jump felt like a kick to the base of the spine.

Violent blue light flooded the cabin. With warning Virtuals flickering all around him, Pirius gazed out of the blister.

To his left was a bank of stars, hot, blue-white. There were pairs, and triples, and quadruples, stars close enough to distort each other; he saw one loose giant being torn to wispy shreds by a hard blue- white companion. There was much loose gas too, great glowing clouds of it, here and there scarred by nova blisters. This was shown on his maps as IRS 16, a cluster of young stars nucleating out of the rich gas and dust that poured in along the arms of the Baby Spiral. In this environment these bright young stars, huge and fast-lived, were like babies born in a furnace.

Stars to his port side, then. And to his starboard, something much more strange.

He saw more stars — but some of these stars had tails, like comets. They swarmed like fireflies around a central patch of brightness, a background glow of shifting, elusive light. It was like a solar system, he thought, with that central spark in place of a sun, and those trapped stars orbiting it like planets. The whole of this intricate, compact mechanism was cradled by one of the arms of the Baby Spiral — West Arm, opposite the one he had followed in; it looked like a jewelled toy set on a blanket of gold. But great chunks had been torn out of the arm, and blobs of glowing gas sailed away, dispersing slowly. Everything here was jammed together by ferocious gravity, and this was a terribly crowded place, crowded with huge, rushing masses that anywhere else would have been separated by light-years. This was the very heart of the Galaxy, the immediate environs of Chandra itself. But the black hole was invisible, somewhere at the heart of that flock of captured, doomed stars.

All this in a glance.

Pirius focused on his ship. The Other Claw had come out of its FTL jump with a velocity vector which had taken it through a sharp left turn and sent it screaming through the narrow gap between the IRS 16 star cluster and Chandra. As they fled, data on Chandra was pouring into the ship’s stores through Nilis’s sensor pod, he saw. This was what they had come here for: they were fulfilling the mission objectives. But they didn’t have long. All around this cluttered panorama, black flecks flew like bits of soot: the Xeelee, disturbed, were rising to drive out the intruder.