Against this astounding background, Pirius had eyes only for the green sparks arrayed around him. The array was noticeably more ragged than it had been before the jump — and seven had been reduced to six, he saw now.
“Two, Four!”
“Four here,” came a reply. “We lost Two. The FTL shift brought him too close — I was lucky to pull away myself.”
Nilis gasped. “We lost a crew? So suddenly?”
Pirius said grimly, “You can see what kind of cauldron we’re in. FTL jumps aren’t too precise at the best of times.”
“To die in a place like this.” Nilis had lowered his hands now, and the complex light swam in his eyes. “And are we already moving?”
Cohl called dryly, “The law of conservation of momentum isn’t particularly relevant if you pass through an FTL hop, Commissary. If you tweak the hop you can emerge with any three-space momentum you want. As my instructors used to say, in operations like this, physics is just a tool kit.”
“Remarkable, remarkable.”
“Let’s go to formation B,” Dray called. “Close up.”
The green lights slid around the sky; once more Dray was at the tip of the wedge, and the other ships, including Pirius’s, formed its flanks.
Dray ran through the procedures that lay ahead. “One light-day jumps. We wait one tenth of a second at each emergence; we set our formation; we jump again. Everybody clear?”
“Sir.”
“On my mark. Three, two.”
With a gut-twisting lurch The Assimilator’s Other Claw leapt across another thirty billion kilometers, across a space that could have held three copies of all of Sol system out to Pluto side-by-side, a monumental leap completed too rapidly for Pirius’s mind even to be aware of the transition before it was done.
And then the ship did it again. And again. Virtual Nilis moaned and buried his head in his hands.
It was an uncomfortable, juddering progress, a series of flickering lurches, ten every second. The miniature spiral arm was a tunnel, a few light-days wide, that stretched out ahead of the ships, leading them toward the still more exotic mysteries of the very center. But the six surviving ships around Pirius pushed on, glowing bright defiant green, their neat wedge formation a challenge to the chaos of the cosmos.
Virtual Nilis sat up and dared look around, plucking at the threadbare sleeve of his robe. His eyes were wide, and the Virtual generators artfully reflected Galaxy-center light in his eyes. “So much structure, so precisely delineated. Do you realize, even now we know virtually nothing about the details of this place — not the geography, but the why of it. Why should this extraordinary toy Spiral exist at all? And why three arms, why not one or five or twenty? Is it really a coherent structure, or just some chance assemblage, gone in a million years? We have been so busy using this place as a war zone we have forgotten to ask such questions.”
As Pirius labored at his instruments, Nilis talked on and on, about other galaxies where the central black holes weren’t sleeping giants like this one, but voracious monsters that seemed to be actively eating their way through the gaseous corpses of their hapless hosts; he spoke of galaxies racked by great spasms of star formation, tremendous eruptions of energy that spanned hundreds of light-years.
“We rationalize all these things away with our physics, coming up with one theory after another. But we know that life’s thoughtless actions have shaped the evolution of matter, even on astrophysical scales. So how can we tell what is natural? We have been waging war here for millennia. But there is evidence that the Xeelee have been fighting here much longer, tremendous ancient wars against a much more formidable foe. And what would be the consequence? Perhaps everything we see is a relic of an ancient battleground, like the trench-furrowed surface of a Rock, worked and reworked by conflict until nothing is left of the original…” He seemed to come to himself. “I’m talking a lot.”
“Yes, you are,” Pirius said tensely. “I should have left you back at the base.”
Nilis laughed, though his face stayed expressionless. “I’ll try to—”
“Flies! My altitude fifty degrees, azimuth forty…”
Pirius quickly converted that to his own point of view and peered out of his blister. He couldn’t see the nightfighters. But in his sensor view, there they were, resolutely night-dark specks in this cathedral of light.
“Remarkable,” Nilis said. “This is a three-dimensional battlefield, with no common attitude. You use spherical coordinates, and you are able to translate from one position to another, in your head—”
“Shut up, Commissary.”
Somebody called, “I count five, six, seven—”
Cohl said, “All nightfighters, I think.”
Enduring Hope called, “I’m surprised they took so long.”
“No,” said Dray grimly. “We surprised them. Pattern alpha.”
The seven greenships turned with the precision of a single machine, and Pirius felt a stab of pride.
Now the Xeelee were dead ahead. The greenships continued to plow toward them.
“Sublight,” Dray called. “Half lightspeed.”
The greenships cut their FTL drives. The Other Claw dropped back into three-dimensional spacetime with a velocity of half the speed of light, arrowed straight at the Xeelee. The enemy was now just light-minutes away, no more remote than Earth was from its sun. The greenships were closing so fast that the background, the Spiral’s boiling clouds of gas and dust, was tinged faintly blue.
As the nightfighters neared, Pirius could see how they swarmed, flying over, under, around each other, rapid movements whose pattern was impossible to follow, like the flies that had earned them their barracks nickname. Their movements were almost like a dance, Pirius thought; smooth, graceful, even beautiful. But not human.
And they were close, terribly close. Pirius thought he saw the first tentative cherry-red flicker of a starbreaker beam.
“Break on my mark,” Dray said. “Three, two, one—”
The wedge formation dissolved. Three of the greenships peeled away, suddenly making a dash for it back along the great roadway of the spiral arm. The rest, including Dray and Pirius, closed up tighter. Only the four of them now, four green sparks in this dazzling Galaxy-center light storm, four against the dense pack of Xeelee flies dead ahead.
Nilis murmured, “I don’t understand—”
“Shut up,” said Pirius.
For a time — a moment, a heartbeat — the Xeelee held their position, and Pirius thought the subterfuge wasn’t going to work. And if it didn’t he was a dead man.
But then the Xeelee broke. Moving as one, they tore after the three departing ships.
Pirius whooped, flooded with relief and exultation. There were answering cries from the other ships. “Lethe, it worked!”
Dray briefly shut down the loop, so that only her voice sounded. “Let’s keep the partying for later,” she said dryly. “Formation C. You know the drill.”
The Other Claw banked and turned.
Nilis gripped the edge of his Virtual seat. “Oh, my eyes,” he whispered, evidently more upset by a bit of aerobatics than by a head-on approach to a pack of Xeelee fighters.