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.

Nilis breathed, “My eyes—that I should live to see such a thing! You know, those stars won’t last long here. But their intense solar wind sweeps this Cavity clear of gas and dust. And when it hits Chandra—”

Cohl said, “The Xeelee are closing, Pirius.” She downloaded tactical Virtuals to Pirius’s station, so the pilot could see what she saw.

More Xeelee had come out of nowhere. Suddenly they were surrounded, trapped.

Pirius cursed. Another misjudgment. He snapped, “Options.”

“Pray,” said Hope morbidly.

Cohl had nothing to say.