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—”

Pirius saw them: a swarm of flies, rising out of the core of the shattered Rock like insects from a corpse, their black-as-night wings unfolding. They had burned their way right through the heart of an asteroid.

Some greenships were already throwing themselves back into the Xeelee fire. But the Xeelee deployed their starbreaker beams; those lethal tongues almost lovingly touched the fleeing greenships.

Pirius had no meaningful orders. So he ran. The Claw raced from the ruin of the Rock. The cloud of debris thinned, and the jittery motion of the Claw subsided. But when Pirius looked back he saw a solid black bank, a phalanx of Xeelee nightfighters.

He had no idea where he was running to, how he might evade the Xeelee. He ran anyhow.

And the Xeelee came after him.

The battle at the center of the Galaxy was watched from far away by cold eyes and orderly, patient minds.

Port Sol was a Kuiper object, a moon of ice. It was one of a hundred thousand such objects orbiting in the dark at the rim of Sol system. It was not the largest; there were monstrous worldlets out here larger than Pluto. But it was no closer to other planetesimals than Earth was to Mars.

This immense belt was a relic of the birth of Sol system itself. Around the fast-growing sun, grains of dust and ice had accreted into swarming planetesimals. Close to the fitfully burning young star, the planetesimals had been crowded enough to combine further into planets. Further out, though, out here, there had been too much room. The formation of larger bodies had stalled, and the ancient planetesimals survived, to swim on in the silent dark.

Port Sol’s human history had begun when its scattered kin had first been populated by a rum assortment of engineers, prospectors, refugees, and dissidents from the inner system. More than twenty thousand years had worn away since then. Now Port Sol’s great days were long past. Its icescapes, crowded with immense ruins, were silent once more.

But still, lights sparked on its surface.

This lonely worldlet had been home to Luru Parz for far longer than she cared to remember. Sometimes she felt she was as old as it was, her heart as cold as its primordial ice. But from here she watched the activities of humanity, from the bustling worlds of Sol system all the way to the heart of the Galaxy itself.

And now she watched Pirius, Dans, and their crews as they strove to evade their Xeelee pursuers. The incident, brought to her attention by patient semisentient monitors, unfolded in a Virtual image, a searing bright slice of Galaxy center light, here on the rim of Sol system.

Faya, her cousin, was with her. “They’re lost,” Faya sighed.

“Perhaps,” Luru said. “But if they find a way to live through this, or even if not, they might discover something useful for the future.”

“There is always that.”

“Watch…”

The tiny, remote drama unfolded.

Aboard the Claw, a strange calm settled. The loops were all but silent now, save for the ragged breathing of Pirius’s crew. But behind them, that black cloud of Xeelee ships closed relentlessly.

Another ship came alongside the Claw. It had taken a lot of damage. One strut had been crudely amputated, and a second blister looked cloudy; but the pilot’s blister was a bright spark of light. Pirius looked back, but nobody else followed: just the two of them.

Pirius recognized the other’s sigil. “Dans?”

“Large as life, Pirius.”

“I recognized your lousy piloting.”

“Yeah, yeah. So why aren’t you dead yet?”

“Shut up.” It was Cohl. “Shut up.”

“Navigator, take it easy.”

“Do we have to endure this garbage, today of all days?”

“Today of all days we need it,” Enduring Hope said.

Pirius said, “Dans, your crew—”

“I’m on my own,” Dans said grimly. “But I’m still flying. So. Every day you learn something new, right? Those Xeelee always have something up their sleeves. If they have sleeves.”

“Yes. In retrospect it’s an obvious tactic.”

So it was. The Xeelee’s usual approach was to swathe a Rock with fire, trying to scour out the trenches and get to the monopole cannons, all the time harassed by greenships and other defensive forces. This time they had focused their assault on one side of the Rock, easily perforating the defensive forces there. And they had used their starbreakers to burrow straight through the asteroid and out the other side, thus destroying the Rock itself and hurling themselves without warning on the remaining defenders.

“It’s going to take some counterthinking,” Pirius said. “We’ll need scouts further out, perhaps.”

“Yeah,” Dans said. “And flexible formations to swarm wherever the first assault goes in.”

“It won’t be us doing it,” said Cohl grimly.

“You aren’t dead yet, kid,” Dans called. She was twenty, a year older than Pirius, and a veteran of no less than six missions before today.

Cohl said, “Look at that crowd behind us.” The flies were still closing. “We can’t outrun them,” the navigator said. “In fact we shouldn’t be trying; we have orders to stand and fight. We are already dead. It’s our duty to be dead. A brief life burns brightly.”

It was the most ancient slogan of the Expansion, said to have been coined by Hama Druz himself thousands of years before, standing in the rubble of an occupied Earth. In a regime of endless war it was prideful to die young and in battle, a crime to grow old unnecessarily.

Under such a regime the highest form of humanity was the child soldier.

But Dans said rudely, “I knew you were going to say that.”

Pirius heard Cohl gasp.

Dans said, “So report me. Look, navigator, a brief life is one thing, but neither Hama Druz nor any of his legions of apologists down the ages told us to throw away our lives. If we took on that crowd of flies, they wouldn’t even notice us. Now what use is that?”

“Pilot—”

“She’s right, Cohl,” Pirius said.

Enduring Hope said evenly, “But whatever the orthodoxy, can I just point out that they are catching up? Three minutes to intercept…”

Pirius said tensely, “Dans, I don’t want to boost your ego. But I suppose you have a plan?”

Dans took a breath. “Sure. We go FTL.”

Cohl snapped, “Impossible.”

This time it was the technician in her talking, and Pirius knew she was probably right. The FTL drive involved tinkering with the deepest structure of spacetime, and it was always advisable to do that in a smooth, flat place, empty of dense matter concentrations. The Galactic center offered few such opportunities, and safe FTL use here needed planning.

Dans said rapidly, “Sure it’s risky. But it beats the certainty of death. And besides, the chances are the Xeelee won’t follow. They aren’t as stupid as we are.”

Enduring Hope said, “Which way?”