Bilson started to bring up magnified images. That structure really was a kind of net, a mesh of silvery threads. Small black shapes crawled along those threads — but they were “small” only on this tremendous scale; the shortest of those threads must have been a thousand kilometers long. The dominant structure was hexagonal, but the hexagons were not regular, and the effect was more like a spiderweb than a net.
Bilson breathed, “A web big enough to wrap up the whole of the event horizon. I think those black things are ships.”
Cabel asked, “Xeelee?”
“I guess. Not a design we’ve seen before. They seem to be trapping the infalling matter. Feeding off it. And look, there are more ships coming up from inside the mesh.”
“Then this is the central Xeelee machinery,” Bilson said. “What they use to make their nightfighters, to run their computing. This netting is the engine of the Prime Radiant. It must have taken a billion years to build.”
Lethe, Pirius thought. What have we got ourselves into?
Cabel called, “I hate to hurry you. But those flak batteries are waking up.”
Pirius called, “Bilson—”
“Understood, Pilot.”
A new path was laid in, a shining blue road that ducked down into the netting. The ship started to track the new course — but it bucked and swept up again.
“It’s that mesh,” Bilson shouted. “We weren’t expecting structure over the event horizon. The netting is actually under our hundred-kilometer ceiling, but the ship’s fail-safes won’t let us get close enough.”
Pirius thrust his hands into the controls. “I’ll override.” Even as he pushed the ship’s nose down, the systems fought back, and the ride was bumpy. “But I can’t hold this for long. Cabel, get the range finder working.”
Two cherry-red beams lanced out beneath the fleeing ship. Their paths were deflected in arcs, extraordinarily elegant, by Chandra’s ferocious gravity. Pirius, glancing down, saw the triangulating starbreakers slice through the netting as they passed, like burning scalpels passing through flesh. The intersection point should have been at about the level of the event horizon, but he couldn’t make it out.
“We’re doing a lot of damage,” Cabel reported. “Those flak batteries are definitely growing interested.”
“Never mind the flak,” Pirius growled. “There’s nothing we can do about the flak. Prepare the weapon. Bilson, are we at the right altitude?”
“I can’t tell,” Bilson said. “It’s not working — not the way it’s supposed to. There’s some kind of distortion when the beams pass through that netting.”
Cabel said, “We’re running out of time—”
Lethe, Pirius thought. To have come all this way and to fail, here… He held the ship steady on its course. “Do your best.”
“Yes, sir.”
Cherry-red light flooded Pirius’s cockpit.
“They found us!” Cabel yelled.
He was right; the ship was about to be triangulated by two, three, four starbreakers. Pirius snapped, “I need an answer, Navigator!”
“Now!” Bilson screamed.
“Engineer! Fire!”
Cabel didn’t acknowledge, but Pirius felt the shudder, familiar from training, as the cannon was fired, and twin point black holes shot out of the heavy muzzles mounted on the greenship’s main hull.
Once the shells were away Pirius relaxed his grip on the manual controls. The ship lifted itself up and away, twisting to evade attack, its CTC processor enabling it to respond faster than any human reaction. The cherry-red starbreaker glow dissipated.
Pirius lay back and sucked in a deep breath. Still alive.
The greenship shuddered, as if it were a toy boat bobbing on a bathtub.
“That was the detonation,” Cabel said.
Bilson was silent for a few seconds, gathering data. Then he said, “No damage. The weapon worked, but we must have missed the horizon.”
Pirius felt a heavy despair descend. “All right,” he said. “Keep gathering data. Maybe we can figure this out yet.”
“I didn’t screw up, Pilot,” Bilson said miserably. “I gave you the best I could.”
“I know,” Pirius said wearily. He believed him. But he knew that Bilson would blame himself for this for the rest of his life. “We still have work to do. We have six more chances, six more ships. The others will need our help. Keep your heads up. All right?”
“Yes, sir,” Cabel said blankly.
“Navigator?”
“Sir.”
The mood among the remaining crews, at their station high above the plain of the accretion disc, was bleak.
Torec tried to make the best of it. “Whoever went in first was almost bound to fail. But we learned a lot.”
Bilson remained very down. “We didn’t know about that mesh. We can’t see through it, and our starbreakers are distorted by it somehow, so we can’t aim. And we haven’t got time to rewrite the attack plan.”
“He’s right,” said Pirius Blue. “Those flak batteries didn’t see you coming in, but they chased you back out, Red. And the ops room say there are nightfighters on the way.”
“We have to go back in,” said Pirius Red. “Now, before it gets any worse.”
“I’ll go,” said Jees abruptly. It was the first time she had spoken since Pirius’s return.
Pirius Red said, “But your ship’s configured to carry the grav shield.”
“We don’t need it on the way back. We’ll just be running for home.”
“No, but your bird will wallow even more than the rest.”
“Then I’m expendable. And I’m your best pilot,” she said simply. “If anybody can make this work, I can.”
Torec pointed out: “Pirius. She has a Silver Ghost on board.”
“That’s irrelevant,” Jees snapped. “Its presence doesn’t affect the operation of the weapon. And now that we’re done with the shield, its usefulness is at an end. The Ghost is just cargo now; it has no say.”
“She has a point,” Pirius Blue said.
But, Pirius Red thought, the Ghost was probably listening to every word.
He called his second flight commander. “Burden? What’s your recommendation?” But, though his comm channel was clearly open, Burden didn’t reply. Again Pirius felt a flicker of unease.
“Come on, Pirius,” Jees said evenly. “We need a decision.”
Enough. “Go,” he said.
Jees had evidently been waiting for the go-ahead. Her ship immediately looped out of formation and streaked down toward the accretion disc.
She got about as far as Pirius had. Then starbreaker beams from those Sugar Lump flak stations, four of them probed for her. She held her position, got her own range-finding starbreakers working, and reported doing a little more damage to the net. But her green spark winked out before she even launched her bombs.
When it was over, just minutes after Jees had left the formation, Pirius forced himself to speak.
“Okay. Okay. Maybe there’s another way.”
Enduring Hope was still on the balcony with Nilis, Kimmer, Luru Parz.
When the news of the second failure, and the loss of Jees and her crew, filtered through to the ops room, Nilis was distraught. He wandered along the walkway, wringing his hands and wiping the soft flesh of his face. “Oh no,” he said, over and over. “Oh no, oh no. It’s my fault. We are failing, and their lives are burning up like sparks, and all for nothing…” It was a distressing sight. But Enduring Hope reminded himself that Nilis was, at heart, a civilian, with a civilian’s lack of understanding of war.
Marshal Kimmer did not react, either to the bad news from the target or to Nilis’s loss of control. There was little he could do to shape the course of events, but in this difficult time he was a pillar of rectitude, Enduring Hope thought, a model of strength and determination. Hope had never thought much of Kimmer as a commander, what little he had seen of him; but this dark moment seemed to be bringing out the best in him.