Two cherry-red beams lanced out beneath the fleeing ship. Their paths were deflected in arcs, extraordinarily elegant, by Chandra’s ferocious gravity. Pirius, glancing down, saw the triangulating starbreakers slice through the netting as they passed, like burning scalpels passing through flesh. The intersection point should have been at about the level of the event horizon, but he couldn’t make it out.

“We’re doing a lot of damage,” Cabel reported. “Those flak batteries are definitely growing interested.”

“Never mind the flak,” Pirius growled. “There’s nothing we can do about the flak. Prepare the weapon. Bilson, are we at the right altitude?”

“I can’t tell,” Bilson said. “It’s not working—not the way it’s supposed to. There’s some kind of distortion when the beams pass through that netting.”

Cabel said, “We’re running out of time—”

Lethe, Pirius thought. To have come all this way and to fail, here . . . He held the ship steady on its course. “Do your best.”

“Yes, sir.”

Cherry-red light flooded Pirius’s cockpit.

“They found us!” Cabel yelled.

He was right; the ship was about to be triangulated by two, three, four starbreakers. Pirius snapped, “I need an answer, Navigator!”

“Now!” Bilson screamed.

“Engineer! Fire!”

Cabel didn’t acknowledge, but Pirius felt the shudder, familiar from training, as the cannon was fired, and twin point black holes shot out of the heavy muzzles mounted on the greenship’s main hull.

Once the shells were away Pirius relaxed his grip on the manual controls. The ship lifted itself up and away, twisting to evade attack, its CTC processor enabling it to respond faster than any human reaction. The cherry-red starbreaker glow dissipated.

Pirius lay back and sucked in a deep breath. Still alive.

The greenship shuddered, as if it were a toy boat bobbing on a bathtub.

“That was the detonation,” Cabel said.

Bilson was silent for a few seconds, gathering data. Then he said, “No damage. The weapon worked, but we must have missed the horizon.”

Pirius felt a heavy despair descend. “All right,” he said. “Keep gathering data. Maybe we can figure this out yet.”

“I didn’t screw up, Pilot,” Bilson said miserably. “I gave you the best I could.”

“I know,” Pirius said wearily. He believed him. But he knew that Bilson would blame himself for this for the rest of his life. “We still have work to do. We have six more chances, six more ships. The others will need our help. Keep your heads up. All right?”

“Yes, sir,” Cabel said blankly.

“Navigator?”

“Sir.”

The mood among the remaining crews, at their station high above the plain of the accretion disc, was bleak.

Torec tried to make the best of it. “Whoever went in first was almost bound to fail. But we learned a lot.”

Bilson remained very down. “We didn’t know about that mesh. We can’t see through it, and our starbreakers are distorted by it somehow, so we can’t aim. And we haven’t got time to rewrite the attack plan.”