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?”

Virtuals flickered in their blisters, downloaded by Dans. “I say we cut across the Mass to Sag A East…”

The bulk of the Galaxy’s luminous matter was confined to a flat sheet, the delicate spiral arms contained in a plane as thin in proportion to its width as a piece of paper. But at its heart was a Core, a bulge of stars some five hundred light-years across. This region swarmed with human factory worlds and military posts. Within the Core was the Central Star Mass, millions of stars crammed into a space some thirty light-years wide. The two brightest sources of radio noise within the Mass were called Chandra — or, officially, Sag A*, the black hole at the very center — and Sag A East, a remnant of an ancient explosion.

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.