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  And then the Rock flew apart.

  Suddenly the Claw was surrounded by a hail of white-hot fragments that rushed upward all around it. The greenship threw itself around every axis to survive this deadly inverted storm. The motions were rapid, juddery, disconcerting; even cloaked by inertial shields, Pirius could feel a ghost of his craft’s jerky motion, deep in his bones.

  Everybody on the Rock must already be dead, he thought, as the ship tried to save him. It was a terrible, monstrous thought, impossible to absorb. And the dying wasn’t over yet.

  Pirius’s squadron leader called for discipline, for her crews to try to regroup, to take the fight to the enemy. But then she was cut off.

  Cohl shrieked, “Flies! Here they come—”

  Pirius saw them: a swarm of flies, rising out of the core of the shattered Rock like insects from a corpse, their black-as-night wings unfolding. They had burned their way right through the heart of an asteroid. Some greenships were already throwing themselves back into the Xeelee fire. But the Xeelee deployed their starbreaker beams; those lethal tongues almost lovingly touched the fleeing greenships.

  Pirius had no meaningful orders. So he ran. The Claw raced from the ruin of the Rock. The cloud of debris thinned, and the jittery motion of the Claw subsided. But when Pirius looked back he saw a solid black bank, a phalanx of Xeelee nightfighters.

  He had no idea where he was running to, how he might evade the Xeelee. He ran anyhow.

  And the Xeelee came after him.

  Chapter 2

  The battle at the center of the Galaxy was watched from far away by cold eyes and orderly, patient minds.

  Port Sol was a Kuiper object, a moon of ice. It was one of a hundred thousand such objects orbiting in the dark at the rim of Sol system. It was not the largest; there were monstrous worldlets out here larger than Pluto. But it was no closer to other planetesimals than Earth was to Mars.

  This immense belt was a relic of the birth of Sol system itself. Around the fast-growing sun, grains of dust and ice had accreted into swarming planetesimals. Close to the fitfully burning young star, the planetesimals had been crowded enough to combine further into planets. Further out, though, out here, there had been too much room. The formation of larger bodies had stalled, and the ancient planetesimals survived, to swim on in the silent dark.

  Port Sol’s human history had begun when its scattered kin had first been populated by a rum assortment of engineers, prospectors, refugees, and dissidents from the inner system. More than twenty thousand years had worn away since then. Now Port Sol’s great days were long past. Its icescapes, crowded with immense ruins, were silent once more.

  But still, lights sparked on its surface.

  This lonely worldlet had been home to Luru Parz for far longer than she cared to remember. Sometimes she felt she was as old as it was, her heart as cold as its primordial ice. But from here she watched the activities of humanity, from the bustling worlds of Sol system all the way to the heart of the Galaxy itself.

  And now she watched Pirius, Dans, and their crews as they strove to evade their Xeelee pursuers. The incident, brought to her attention by patient semisentient monitors, unfolded in a Virtual image, a searing bright slice of Galaxy center light, here on the rim of Sol system.

  Faya, her cousin, was with her. “They’re lost,” Faya sighed.

  “Perhaps,” Luru said. “But if they find a way to live through this, or even if not, they might discover something useful for the future.”

  “There is always that.”

  “Watch …”

  The tiny, remote drama unfolded.

  Chapter 3

  Aboard the Claw, a strange calm settled. The loops were all but silent now, save for the ragged breathing of Pirius’s crew. But behind them, that black cloud of Xeelee ships closed relentlessly.

  Another ship came alongside the Claw. It had taken a lot of damage. One strut had been crudely amputated, and a second blister looked cloudy; but the pilot’s blister was a bright spark of light. Pirius looked back, but nobody else followed: just the two of them.

  Pirius recognized the other’s sigil. “Dans?”

  “Large as life, Pirius.”

  “I recognized your lousy piloting.”

  “Yeah, yeah. So why aren’t you dead yet?”

  “Shut up.” It was Cohl. “Shut up.”

  “Navigator, take it easy.”

  “Do we have to endure this garbage, today of all days?”

  “Today of all days we need it,” Enduring Hope said.

  Pirius said, “Dans, your crew—”

  “I’m on my own,” Dans said grimly. “But I’m still flying. So. Every day you learn something new, right? Those Xeelee always have something up their sleeves. If they have sleeves.”

  “Yes. In retrospect it’s an obvious tactic.”

  So it was. The Xeelee’s usual approach was to swathe a Rock with fire, trying to scour out the trenches and get to the monopole cannons, all the time harassed by greenships and other defensive forces. This time they had focused their assault on one side of the Rock, easily perforating the defensive forces there. And they had used their starbreakers to burrow straight through the asteroid and out the other side, thus destroying the Rock itself and hurling themselves without warning on the remaining defenders.

  “It’s going to take some counterthinking,” Pirius said. “We’ll need scouts further out, perhaps.”

  “Yeah,” Dans said. “And flexible formations to swarm wherever the first assault goes in.”

  “It won’t be us doing it,” said Cohl grimly.

  “You aren’t dead yet, kid,” Dans called. She was twenty, a year older than Pirius, and a veteran of no less than six missions before today.

  Cohl said, “Look at that crowd behind us.” The flies were still closing. “We can’t outrun them,” the navigator said. “In fact we shouldn’t be trying; we have orders to stand and fight. We are already dead. It’s our duty to be dead. A brief life burns brightly.”

  It was the most ancient slogan of the Expansion, said to have been coined by Hama Druz himself thousands of years before, standing in the rubble of an occupied Earth. In a regime of endless war it was prideful to die young and in battle, a crime to grow old unnecessarily.

  Under such a regime the highest form of humanity was the child soldier.

  But Dans said rudely, “I knew you were going to say that.”

  Pirius heard Cohl gasp.

  Dans said, “So report me. Look, navigator, a brief life is one thing, but neither Hama Druz nor any of his legions of apologists down the ages told us to throw away our lives. If we took on that crowd of flies, they wouldn’t even notice us. Now what use is that?”

  “Pilot—”

  “She’s right, Cohl,” Pirius said.

  Enduring Hope said evenly, “But whatever the orthodoxy, can I just point out that they are catching up? Three minutes to intercept …”

  Pirius said tensely, “Dans, I don’t want to boost your ego. But I suppose you have a plan?”

  Dans took a breath. “Sure. We go FTL.”

  Cohl snapped, “Impossible.”

  This time it was the technician in her talking, and Pirius knew she was probably right. The FTL drive involved tinkering with the deepest structure of spacetime, and it was always advisable to do that in a smooth, flat place, empty of dense matter concentrations. The Galactic center offered few such opportunities, and safe FTL use here needed planning.

  Dans said rapidly, “Sure it’s risky. But it beats the certainty of death. And besides, the chances are the Xeelee won’t follow. They aren’t as stupid as we are.”

  Enduring Hope said, “Which way?”

  Virtuals flickered in their blisters, downloaded by Dans. “I say we cut across the Mass to Sag A East… .”

  The bulk of the Galaxy’s luminous matter was confined to a flat sheet, the delicate spiral arms contained in a plane as thin in proportion to its width as a piece of paper. But at its heart was
a Core, a bulge of stars some five hundred light-years across. This region swarmed with human factory worlds and military posts. Within the Core was the Central Star Mass, millions of stars crammed into a space some thirty light-years wide. The two brightest sources of radio noise within the Mass were called Chandra—or, officially, Sag A*, the black hole at the very center—and Sag A East, a remnant of an ancient explosion.

  Such names, so Pirius had once been told by an overinformative Commissary, were themselves relics of deeper human history. The soldiers to whom the Galaxy center was a war zone knew this geography. But few knew that “Sag” stood for Sagittarius, and fewer still that Sagittarius had once referred to a pattern in the few scattered stars visible from Earth.

  “Two minutes to closing,” Cohl reported edgily.

  “Short hops,” Dans insisted. “Forty minutes to cross a few dozen light-years to East. Maybe we’ll find cover there. We regroup, patch up, go home—and die another day. Come on, what is there to lose? For you it will be easy! At least you still have a navigator.”

  Starbreaker beams flickered around Pirius. The nightfighters were getting their range; at any moment one of these beams could touch his own blister. He would die without even knowing it.

  “We do it,” he said.

  Dans quickly downloaded a synchronization command. “The two of us, then. On my mark. Two—one—”

  Space flexed.

  The nearby stars winked out of existence. The general background endured, but now a new pattern of hot young stars greeted Pirius, a new three-dimensional constellation.

  Space flexed.

  Again he jumped, to be faced by another constellation.

  And again, and yet another blue-white supergiant loomed right in front of him, immense flares working across its broad face, but it disappeared, to be replaced by another set of disorderly stars, which disappeared in their turn… .

  Jump, jump, jumpjumpjumpjump …

  As the jumps came more frequently than Pirius’s eyes could follow, the ride settled down to an illusion of continuity. There was even a sense of motion now, as distant stars slid slowly past. It did him no good at all to remind himself that with each jump spacetime was pivoting through its higher dimensions, or that even millennia after the technology’s first use the philosophers still couldn’t agree whether the entity that emerged from each jump was still, in any meaningful way, “him.”

  First things first, Pirius.

  He glanced over his systems and his crew. “Everything nominal,” he said. He raised a thumb to the pilot of the second ship, and through a blister’s starred carapace he saw a gesture in response.

  “We’re still breathing,” Enduring Hope said evenly. “But take a look out back.”

  The cloud of Xeelee ships had vanished. But a single dogged craft remained, its wings spread black and wide, a graceful sycamore-seed shape.

  Dans said, “Stubborn bastards, aren’t they?”

  Hope said, “At least we bought some time.”

  “Yes. We’ve still got thirty minutes before East,” Pirius said. He waved his hands through Virtual consoles, initiating self-diagnostic and repair routines to run throughout the ship. “This is a chance to take care of yourselves,” he told his crew. “Eat. Drink. Take a leak. Sleep if you have to. Use your med-cloaks if you need them.”

  Cohl said blankly, “Eat? Sleep? We’re going to die. We’d do better to review why we have to die.”

  Dans said, “Lethe, child, there are no Commissary arses to lick out here. Don’t you find the Doctrines cold comfort?”

  “On the contrary,” Cohl said.

  Pirius glanced down at Cohl’s blister. He imagined her in there, wrapped up in her skinsuit, swaddled by machines, clinging to the pitiless logic of the Doctrines.

  Thousands of years had worn away since the first human interstellar flight, and since humanity had begun the mighty march across the Galaxy called the Third Expansion. The Expansion was an ideological program, a titanic project undertaken by a mankind united by the Doctrines forged by Hama Druz after mankind’s near extinction. In the fierce light of human determination lesser species had burned away. At last only one opponent was left: the Xeelee, the most powerful foe of them all, with their concentration at the very center of the Galaxy.

  It was already millennia since the Third Expansion had closed around the center. But the Xeelee responded in kind, just as resolutely. The Front had become a great stalled wave of destruction, a spherical zone of friction where two empires rubbed against each other. And seen from factory worlds scattered a hundred light-years deep, the sky glowed pink with the light of endless war.

  The Xeelee would not engage with mankind in any way but war. There was no negotiation, no rapprochement, no contact that was not lethal. To the Xeelee, humans were vermin—and they had a right to think so, for they were superior to humans in every way that could be measured. And so, only if each human were prepared to spend her life without question for the common good would humanity as a whole prevail. This was the Doctrinal thinking taught in seminaries and cadre groups and academies across the Galaxy: if humans must be vermin, humans would fight like vermin, and die like vermin.

  For millennia humans, fast-breeding, had toiled to fill the Galaxy. Now, whichever star you picked out of the crowded sky, you could be confident that there was a human presence there. And for millennia humans had hurled themselves into the Xeelee fire, vermin fighting back the only way they had, with their bodies and souls, hoping to overcome the Xeelee by sheer numbers.

  Pirius knew a lot of fighting people thought the way Cohl did. By keeping mankind united and unchanged across millennia, it had self-evidently worked. Many soldiers feared that if the Doctrines were ever even questioned, everything would fall apart, and that defeat, or worse, would inevitably follow. Compared to that risk, the remote notion of victory seemed irrelevant.

  Dans said breezily, “So what about you, Tuta?”

  “My name is Enduring Hope,” the engineer said, apparently not offended.

  “Oh, I forgot. You’re one of those infinity-botherers, aren’t you? So what do you believe? Is some great hero from the far future going to swoop down and rescue you?”

  Pirius had tried to stay away from Enduring Hope’s peculiar sect, who called themselves “Friends of Wigner.” Pirius thought of himself as pragmatic; he was prepared to put up with nonsense names if it kept his engineer happy. But the Friends’ cult violated Doctrinal law just by its very existence.

  “You can mock,” Hope said. “But you don’t understand.”

  “Then tell me,” Dans said.

  “All of this”—Hope made an expansive gesture—“is a first cut. Everybody knows this. In this war of FTL ships and time travel, we stack up contingencies in the Library of Futures on Earth. History is a draft, a draft we change all the time.”

  “And if history is mutable—”

  “Then nothing is inevitable. Not even the past.”

  “I don’t understand,” Pirius admitted.

  Dans said, “If you can redraft history, everything can be fixed. He thinks that even if he dies today, then history will somehow, some day, be put right, and all such unfortunate errors removed.”

  “Hope, is that right?”

  “Something like it.”

  Dans snapped, “Pirius, the creed is anti-Doctrine, but it’s just as much a trap as the Doctrines. A Druz junkie thinks death and defeat reinforce the strength of the Doctrines. A Friend believes defeat is irrelevant because it will all be erased some day. Either way, you don’t fight to win. You see? Why else has this damn war stalled so long?”

  Pirius felt uncomfortable with such heresy—even now, even here.

  With a trace of malice Hope said, “But you’re as doomed as we are, Pilot Dans.”

  Cohl said, “What about you, Pirius? What do you want to achieve?”

  Pirius thought it over. “I want to be remembered.”

  He heard slow, ironic applause from Dans.

>   Cohl muttered, “That is just so anti-Doctrinal!”

  Hope murmured, “Well, you might be about to get your chance, Pilot. Sag A East is dead ahead. Dropping out of FTL.”

  Jumpjumpjumpjump jump—jump—jump …

  As the FTL hops slowed, they passed through a flickering barrage of stars, and electric-blue light flared around them: the pilots called it FTL light, a by-product of the energy the ship was shedding, coalescing into exotic evanescent particles. Pirius, relieved to get back to practical matters, tested the controls of the greenship and burped its two sublight drives—including the GUTdrive. This was a backup, a venerable human design, and one you would light up only in the direst of circumstances, for fear of attracting quagmites… .

  While Pirius worked, the others had been looking at the view. “Lethe,” Dans said softly.

  Pirius glanced up.

  Sagittarius A East was a bubble of shocked gas, light-years wide, said to be the remnant of an immense explosion in the heart of the Galaxy. Suddenly Pirius was at the center of a storm of light.

  Dans called, “And look at that.” She downloaded coordinates.

  A pinpoint of crimson light glowed directly ahead, embedded in the glowing murk. It was a neutron star, according to their first scans, a star with the mass of the sun but only twenty kilometers across.

  Dans said, “That’s a magnetar. And I think it’s going to blow.”

  Pirius understood none of that. “What difference does that make?”

  “Here come the Xeelee,” Cohl snapped.

  “Split up,” Dans called.

  The greenships peeled away from each other. The single nightfighter, emerging from its own sequence of FTL jumps, seemed to hesitate for a heartbeat, as if wondering which of its soft targets to pursue first.

  It turned toward the Claw.

  “Lucked out,” Enduring Hope said softly.

  “Hold onto your seats,” Pirius said. Lacking any better way to go, he hurled the ship toward the neutron star.

  Still the Xeelee followed.

  As the Claw squirted across space, Pirius called up a magnified visual. The neutron star was a flattened sphere, brick red, its surface smooth to the limits of the magnification. Blue-white electric storms crackled over its surface.