Pirius Red glanced across. Two, three, four starbreaker beams were raking the sky, trying to triangulate on Blue’s ship. Red yanked his ship sideways, cutting between. To his satisfaction, two or three of the beams started to track him, while the others lost Blue, who ducked below his nominal course. But if one of those beams touched him, however briefly, he would be done.

Red began to weave back and forth, the CTC pulling the ship through a rapid evasion pattern faster than any human pilot could—faster than a Xeelee, Pirius thought. But the starbreakers tracked after him.

Cabel growled, “I think I’m going to lose my breakfast.”

Pirius shouted, “But it’s working. Bilson! Keep tracking—it’s your job to guide Blue in.”

“Understood, Pilot.”

“Coming up on that netting,” Pirius Blue reported. “Wow—I don’t think I believed it—a contiguous structure light-minutes across! The Xeelee have been busy. . . . Red, I’m in flak again.”

Pirius, following his evasive course, had drifted too far from his temporal twin. No time to get back under sublight.

He punched his controls. The ship jumped, a big FTL jump of a light-second or so. He heard the blister hull creak, and his displays lit up with red flags; you weren’t supposed to make such jumps in spacetime this turbulent. But it had worked, and he had lodged himself just in front of Pirius Blue.

And once again the flak beams were focused on him. He laughed out loud. “Bring it on!”

Bilson said, “I lost the lock.”

“Then get it back,” Pirius shouted. “Come on, navigator, we’re almost there.”

“I have it. I have it!” A starbreaker speared out from the greenship’s weapons pod, and hit a stretch of netting some distance before the two fleeing ships.

“I’ve got it,” Blue called. “Good work, Bilson. But we need to have a word about your flying, Red.”

“Have you got the event horizon?”

Blue said quietly, “We have a fix.”

Pirius’s cabin flared with cherry-red light. The starbreakers were close. He ignored the glow, overrode the automatics, and held the ship to its line. “Only a few seconds more, crew—”

The blister shuddered around him, and a telltale blared. He had lost one nacelle, one crew blister: it was Cabel, probably the best engineer in the squadron, gone, burned away, a scrap of flesh in this tremendous tumult of energy. Regret stabbed, but he had no time now, no time. Still he stuck to his line. “Blue, drop the damn bombs—”

“Gone!” Blue called.

Pirius hurled the ship sideways. But the starbreakers tracked him, and still the ship shuddered.

Blue reported, “Gone and—Lethe!”

“What? Blue, I can’t see.”

“The black holes converged—we picked up the gravity wave pulse, right on the event horizon. And the Xeelee—Lethe, it’s working! . . . Oh.” He sounded oddly disappointed.

Pirius wrenched his ship around once more. “Blue! Report.”

“The flak has got me. I can’t maneuver—I’m wallowing like a hog—”

“Blue!”