Such names, so Pirius had once been told by an overinformative Commissary, were themselves relics of deeper human history. The soldiers to whom the Galaxy center was a war zone knew this geography. But few knew that “Sag” stood for Sagittarius, and fewer still that Sagittarius had once referred to a pattern in the few scattered stars visible from Earth.

“Two minutes to closing,” Cohl reported edgily.

“Short hops,” Dans insisted. “Forty minutes to cross a few dozen light-years to East. Maybe we’ll find cover there. We regroup, patch up, go home—and die another day. Come on, what is there to lose? For you it will be easy! At least you still have a navigator.”

Starbreaker beams flickered around Pirius. The nightfighters were getting their range; at any moment one of these beams could touch his own blister. He would die without even knowing it.

“We do it,” he said.

Dans quickly downloaded a synchronization command. “The two of us, then. On my mark. Two—one—”

Space flexed.

The nearby stars winked out of existence. The general background endured, but now a new pattern of hot young stars greeted Pirius, a new three-dimensional constellation.

Space flexed.

Again he jumped, to be faced by another constellation.

And again, and yet another blue-white supergiant loomed right in front of him, immense flares working across its broad face, but it disappeared, to be replaced by another set of disorderly stars, which disappeared in their turn. . . .

Jump, jump, jumpjumpjumpjump . . .

As the jumps came more frequently than Pirius’s eyes could follow, the ride settled down to an illusion of continuity. There was even a sense of motion now, as distant stars slid slowly past. It did him no good at all to remind himself that with each jump spacetime was pivoting through its higher dimensions, or that even millennia after the technology’s first use the philosophers still couldn’t agree whether the entity that emerged from each jump was still, in any meaningful way, “him.”

First things first, Pirius.

He glanced over his systems and his crew. “Everything nominal,” he said. He raised a thumb to the pilot of the second ship, and through a blister’s starred carapace he saw a gesture in response.

“We’re still breathing,” Enduring Hope said evenly. “But take a look out back.”

The cloud of Xeelee ships had vanished. But a single dogged craft remained, its wings spread black and wide, a graceful sycamore-seed shape.

Dans said, “Stubborn bastards, aren’t they?”

Hope said, “At least we bought some time.”

“Yes. We’ve still got thirty minutes before East,” Pirius said. He waved his hands through Virtual consoles, initiating self-diagnostic and repair routines to run throughout the ship. “This is a chance to take care of yourselves,” he told his crew. “Eat. Drink. Take a leak. Sleep if you have to. Use your med-cloaks if you need them.”

Cohl said blankly, “Eat? Sleep? We’re going to die. We’d do better to review why we have to die.”