A shining, electric-blue path appeared in the complicated Virtual sky before Pirius. Projected by navigator Bilson it was his computed course, designed to take him to the hundred-kilometer closest approach distance. Though they would pass vanishingly close to the event horizon of a supermassive black hole, there was nothing to fear from tides: Chandra was, paradoxically, too big for that, and in fact they could fall all the way down through the event horizon without feeling a thing.

Seconds left. The last million kilometers fell away, the immense curved surface started to flatten beneath the prow, and the mist of tortured matter cleared ahead of him—

To reveal a shining netting.

“Pull up!” Bilson screamed.

Pirius dragged at his controls, but the ship’s proximity sensors had reacted before he did. The ship climbed up and away. The electric-blue path disintegrated and vanished.

Suddenly the texture of that wall was fleeing beneath his prow. He made out an irregular mesh of shining threads, spread out like the lights of an immense city, all of it obscured by a storm of infalling plasma. This close he could see no signs of curvature; the event horizon was effectively a plain above which the greenship fled.

Bilson started to bring up magnified images. That structure really was a kind of net, a mesh of silvery threads. Small black shapes crawled along those threads—but they were “small” only on this tremendous scale; the shortest of those threads must have been a thousand kilometers long. The dominant structure was hexagonal, but the hexagons were not regular, and the effect was more like a spiderweb than a net.

Bilson breathed, “A web big enough to wrap up the whole of the event horizon. I think those black things are ships.”

Cabel asked, “Xeelee?”

“I guess. Not a design we’ve seen before. They seem to be trapping the infalling matter. Feeding off it. And look, there are more ships coming up from inside the mesh.”

“Then this is the central Xeelee machinery,” Bilson said. “What they use to make their nightfighters, to run their computing. This netting is the engine of the Prime Radiant. It must have taken a billion years to build.”

Lethe, Pirius thought. What have we got ourselves into?

Cabel called, “I hate to hurry you. But those flak batteries are waking up.”

Pirius called, “Bilson—”

“Understood, Pilot.”

A new path was laid in, a shining blue road that ducked down into the netting. The ship started to track the new course—but it bucked and swept up again.

“It’s that mesh,” Bilson shouted. “We weren’t expecting structure over the event horizon. The netting is actually under our hundred-kilometer ceiling, but the ship’s fail-safes won’t let us get close enough.”

Pirius thrust his hands into the controls. “I’ll override.” Even as he pushed the ship’s nose down, the systems fought back, and the ride was bumpy. “But I can’t hold this for long. Cabel, get the range finder working.”