Torec was having a particularly tough time. She wasn’t the best pilot in Exultant Squadron, she accepted that. And she was in Blue’s flight. Because of their complicated past, she thought—she had been with him in some other timeline, and with his own younger self now—Torec felt Blue had given her the roughest assignments, the worst ships, the greenest crews. And she knew she was never going to be allowed a crack at the most prestigious assignment of all, which was to pilot the shield-master itself.

Well, she wasn’t going to fail, not today.

As red flags flared throughout her cabin, she grasped her controls and tried to stabilize her ship. But it wallowed, its moments of inertia all wrong. Laden with its heavy singularity cannon it was desperately unresponsive; it was like trying to run with a laden pack on her back.

When she thought she had control she called, “All right. Navigator, this is the pilot. Plot us a way out of here.”

There was no reply. When Torec glanced out of her pod she could see Three sitting in her blister, strapped in like a toy, while red-flag Virtuals flared around her, and the sky wheeled. “Three. Three!”

“Give it up, Pilot,” Cabel snapped.

“No, damn it. Navigator!”

“She’s frozen. We don’t have time for this. Aim for altitude ninety. Take us straight up and out of this shit.”

A quick check of her own tactical displays showed he was right. If they weren’t capable of plotting an orderly way out, straight up and out of the gravastar wake was the only way to save the ship. She dug her hands into her displays once more, clenched her fists, and yelled her anger.

The greenship tipped up and shot out of the turbulent wake of the grav shield, and into the sanctuary of flat, smooth space.

At the end of each day Pirius Red held an “issues meeting.” Pila was at his side, quietly running the formal side of the meeting. Pirius Blue and Burden were here, along with Enduring Hope, Red’s representative among the ground crew.

Today Torec attended too. She was a bit of human warmth, alongside his adjutant, a woman from the other side of the Galaxy who hated his guts, and two flight commanders, a distracted religionist, and his own embittered future self. But Torec’s flight had crashed out today, and he knew she was bringing him issues, not emotional support.

A lot of the problems right now seemed to center on the use of the gravastar shield. So he had asked the Silver Ghost, the Ambassador to the Heat Sink, to sit in. The Ambassador’s huge, hovering form seemed to fill the little room, somehow sucking out its warmth. Burden was fascinated by the Ghost, but the two hard-faced Guardians who accompanied it everywhere ensured the only contact it had with anybody was formalized and specific.

Over a week of meetings like this, a trick Pirius had learned was to start with positives, and that was what he did now—and they were pretty big positives, too.