He tried to think of his name again. It was fading, fading like a dream in the moments after waking. Gray, gray.

Pain striped along his left hand side. He cried out. The black ocean had washed a little further up the beach. He tried to scramble away.

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.