Now Cohl chipped in, “Do you want to give me some warning before you start throwing this tub around the sky? I’m trying to get the nav systems calibrated. I know that’s merely a detail to you two heroes, but I’m sentimentally attached to knowing where I am.”
“It’s all yours, Navigator…”
Virtual Nilis was wide-eyed. “Pirius — you must be glad to see your crew again. Back in their rightful habitat, so to speak. But is it always like this?”
“Oh, no,” Pirius said. “I think we’re a little subdued today.”
But it had been good when the three of them had been reunited, down on Quin: Cohl with the limp that had been her souvenir from Factory Rock, and Enduring Hope, back from his artillery brigade. Hope, amazingly, had lost weight. It turned out to be tough physical work, out on those monopole- cannon battalions, and after months of it, Hope had never looked fitter.
And it had certainly been a joy when the three of them had first boarded a ship again, which they had quickly dubbed The Assimilator’s Other Claw. It wasn’t much of a combat ship, as it was laden with a massive sensor pod that spoiled the sleek lines of its main body. And it could never be the same as their first ship, of course. But it was a ship nevertheless — their ship. They had marked their skinsuits with sigils that recalled the first Claw, and Pirius Blue felt an extraordinary surge of joy to be back in a greenship blister.
Nilis was watching him with his characteristic mixture of pride and longing. “I suppose the banter is a social lubricant. But I’m surprised you get anything done. Well, I’m privileged to be here. To see this. It’s so different. You know, we humans aren’t designed to function in such an environment. On Earth you are on a plain, so it seems, a few kilometers wide, with clouds a few kilometers up. In the sky everything is so remote it looks two-dimensional — even the Moon. There is no depth. The scale is kilometers, or infinity, with a gap in between. Here, though, you have stars scattered through the depth of the sky — space is filled up — and you get a sense of immensity, of perspective that’s impossible on Earth.”
Pirius shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“Oh, I think so.” He peered at Pirius curiously. “To comprehend a sky like this, the very structure of your sensorium, your mind, must differ from mine, Pirius Blue. Genetically we could be identical. But our minds are so different we might as well belong to alien species.”
This was uncomfortably heretical to Pirius. Everybody was essentially the same; that was the Doctrine’s decree. If Nilis wanted to believe he was some kind of divergent, that was up to him. “I’m just trying to do my job, Commissary.”
“I know.” Nilis sighed. “And my gabbling is getting in the way! Thank you again for hosting me.”
Hosting: there was something else Pirius didn’t want to think about too hard. As the whole purpose of the mission was to take Nilis through the Cavity, it had been decreed that the safest place to lodge him was with Pirius — that is, in him. All flight crew had implants of various kinds studded through their nervous systems, serving as trackers, backup comm systems, medical controls, system interfaces. It had been trivial to download Virtual Nilis into Pirius’s head. Trivial, but not welcome. But it had been orders.
Nilis held up his hands. “I know you’re uncomfortable. I’m here to observe, not to interfere. I won’t get in your way.”
Before accepting the download, Pirius had insisted on an off switch. “No,” he said vehemently. “You won’t.”
A peremptory voice called over the common loop. “This is Dray. Shut up and listen.”
The babble on the loop immediately dried up. Pirius glanced at the array of seven ships around him. Dray’s was one of a pair directly ahead, the tip of the loose wedge formation. Commodore Dray was a formidable, muscular woman, her head shaven bare, and the leader of this expeditionary force.
She said now, “Here are your idents. I am Wedge Leader…” She ran through the other crews, numbering them in sequence, one side then the other, so that Dray, in Wedge Zero, led a line of even- numbered ships, and Wedge One led a line of odd numbers. Pirius in the Other Claw was Wedge Seven.
“And here are the rules,” said Dray. “One. I am in command, and none of you is going to so much as fart without my permission. I’m talking to you, Pirius. I’ve seen your record. If it was up to me you would still be digging graves on a Rock. But it wasn’t up to me, so here you are, and if there are any stupid stunts on this trip I’ll shoot you out of the sky myself.”
Pirius had no doubt she meant it. “Sir.”
“Rule two. We are going to fulfill our objectives. Rule three. We are eight ships going in, and we will be eight coming out, subject only to rules one and two.”
A chorus of voices replied. “Understood.”
“Now, I had imagined you had all seen the briefing, but perhaps not. I also assumed you were experienced crews, but this formation is so slack I must be wrong about that, too. Form up, damn it! I’m looking at you, Wedge Three.”
“Sir.”
The seven lights slid subtly across the sky, and Pirius blipped his sub-light drive to tweak his own position.
“We’re a minute from our first FTL jump, and we’re going to hop in formation. The first hop will be the most difficult…”
That was true, for this tiny formation was about to leap right into the heart of the Galaxy.
“When we get through that, it’s plain sailing,” Dray said. “And even if it isn’t, it will be fun. Nearly time. Good luck, everyone.” Another quick chorus of acknowledgment. “Five, four, three…”
The Galaxy’s inner structure was nested around the ferocious mass at the very center.
Within the broad plane of the spiral arms was set the Core. That immense shining bulge itself contained a denser kernel, the Central Star Mass: millions of stars crowded into a few tens of light- years.
Immense streams of molecular gases poured inward through the Mass — but a few light-years out from the center they collided with a ferocious solar wind, blowing out of the very center. That solar wind created the Cavity, a hole in the heart of the Galaxy, surrounded by a stationary shock front of infalling gas, the Circumnuclear Ring. At the Circumnuclear Ring, the human expansion through the Galaxy had stalled; the soldiers who fought and died there called it the Front. The Cavity had its own marvels: the Baby Spiral, a miniature Galaxy contained wholly within those few scraped-clear light- years, and deeper still the dense, fast-moving astrophysics around the central black hole itself.
Dray and his little flotilla of greenships planned a bold FTL jump of no less than five light-years, which would take them right through the Front and into the Cavity. They were going to make this leap in the relativistic turbulence of the Galaxy center, whose violence, even as far out as this, reached up into the higher dimensions on which FTL technology depended. And they were going to do it in formation.
That, anyhow, was the plan.
When the jump came, the sky was suddenly so bright it was as if it had exploded.
Dray was calling. “Two and Four! Wedge Two and Four, report!”
Pirius ignored everything and checked his ship’s systems. The Cavity was a lethal environment, saturated with radiation and laced with massive particles fleeing at close to the speed of light. But the Other Claw had survived the FTL jump, and was protecting her crew.
When he was satisfied, he looked up.
Suddenly he was sitting on the edge of the Cavity, actually inside the central space contained within the Front. Through a blizzard of stars he could clearly see the Baby Spiral. The convoy had emerged from its jump close to the terminus of the spiral arm called East, where it lost its coherence and merged into the mush of the Circumnuclear Ring. From Pirius’s point of view, East was a tunnel of infant stars and crimson-glowing gas that wound deeper into the Cavity. It was like looking into the guts of an immense machine, he thought, a machine of gas and dust and stars. All of this was tinged with blueshift, for he was already flying further inward; the Other Claw had emerged from the hop with a velocity a high fraction of lightspeed, a vector arrowed straight at the heart of the Galaxy.