“I don’t think so,” said Enduring Hope levelly. “That’s rock. A mist of molten rock. They are smashing the asteroid to gas.”

Molten rock, Pirius thought grimly, no doubt laced with traces of what had recently been complex organic compounds, thoroughly burned.

But still, for all the devastation they were wreaking, the Xeelee weren’t coming around the horizon. They were focusing all their firepower on one side of the Rock.

Still Pirius waited for orders, but the tactical analysis took too long. Suddenly, human ships came fleeing around the curve of the Rock, sparks of Earth green bright against the dull gray of the asteroid ground. The formation had collapsed, then, despite the squadron leaders’ continuing bellowed commands. And down on the Rock those little flecks of light, each a human being trapped in lethal fire, swarmed and scattered, fanning out of the trench system and over the open ground. Even from here, it looked like panic, a rout.

It got worse. All across the Rock’s visible hemisphere implosions began, as if its surface was being bombarded by unseen meteorites. But the floors of these evanescent craters broke up and collapsed, and through a mist of gray dust a deeper glow was revealed, coming up from inside the Rock. It was as if the surface were dissolving, and pink-white light was burning its way out of this shell of stone. The Xeelee, Pirius thought: the Xeelee were burning their way right through the Rock itself.

Enduring Hope understood what was happening half a second before Pirius did. “Lethe,” he said. “Get us out of here, Pilot. Lift, lift!”

Cohl said weakly, “But our orders—”

But Pirius was already hauling on his controls. All around him ships were breaking from the line and pulling back.

Even as the Rock fell away, Pirius could see the endgame approaching. For a last, remarkable, instant, the Rock held together, and that inner light picked out the complex tracery of the trench network, as if the face of the Rock was covered by a map of shining threads. The asteroid’s uneven horizon lifted, bulging.

And then the Rock flew apart.

Suddenly the Claw was surrounded by a hail of white-hot fragments that rushed upward all around it. The greenship threw itself around every axis to survive this deadly inverted storm. The motions were rapid, juddery, disconcerting; even cloaked by inertial shields, Pirius could feel a ghost of his craft’s jerky motion, deep in his bones.

Everybody on the Rock must already be dead, he thought, as the ship tried to save him. It was a terrible, monstrous thought, impossible to absorb. And the dying wasn’t over yet.

Pirius’s squadron leader called for discipline, for her crews to try to regroup, to take the fight to the enemy. But then she was cut off.

Cohl shrieked, “Flies! Here they come—”