Dans hesitated. “Only a second or so at its fullest extent. Pirius, a neutron star is a small, very energetic object. Things happen fast. . . . Oh.”

For a moment Pirius had actually allowed himself hope; now that warm spark died. It was just too fast. “Right. So that millisecond is all we will have to compute our course, to lay it in, and to execute the maneuver.”

Cohl said, “It would take our onboard sentient tens of seconds to compute a course like that. Even if we had prior data on the shape of the flare. Which we don’t. Of course a Xeelee could do it.”

“Three minutes,” Hope said evenly.

Pirius sighed. “You know, just for a moment you had me going there, Dans.”

Dans snapped impatiently, “Lethe, you guys are so down. Maybe there’s a way even so. Pirius, have you ever heard of a Brun maneuver?”

“No.”

“Pilot school scuttlebutt. Somebody tried it, oh, a year or more back.”

Pirius hadn’t heard of such a thing. But the turnover in pilots at Arches Base was ferocious; there was little opportunity for field wisdom to be passed on.

“It didn’t work—”

“That’s reassuring.”

“But it could have,” Dans said. “I looked into it—ran some simulations—thought it might be useful some day.”

“Two minutes thirty.”

“Pirius, listen to me. Stick to your course; make for the flare. But keep listening. I’ll compute your maneuver for you. A way through the flare.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Sure it is. And when I download the new trajectory you’d better be prepared to splice it into your systems.” Dans peeled away.

“Where are you going?”

“If this doesn’t work out, don’t touch my stuff.”

“Dans!”

“That’s the last we’ll see of her,” Enduring Hope said laconically.

“Two minutes,” Cohl said. “One fifty-nine . . .”

Pirius shut her up.

As the Claw fell through space there was no noise, no sense of motion. The Xeelee’s slow convergence was silent, unspectacular. Even the neutron star would be invisible for all but a few seconds of closest approach. It was as if they were gliding along some smooth, invisible road.

The crew continued to work calmly, the three of them calling out numbers and curt instructions to each other. The Assimilator’s Claw was drenched with artificial intelligence, sentient and otherwise, and its systems were capable of processing data far faster than human thought. But the systems were there to support human decision-making, not to replace it. That was the nature of the greenship’s design, which in turn reflected Coalition policy, under the Doctrines. This was a human war and would always remain so.

There was no sense of peril. And yet these seconds, which counted down remorselessly inside Pirius’s head, would likely be the last of his life.

There was a flare of blue light, dead ahead, FTL blue—and then a streak of green. It was a greenship, cutting across his path. Suddenly data was chattering into the Claw’s systems. It was a new closest-approach trajectory.