Enduring Hope understood what was happening half a second before Pirius did. “Lethe,” he said. “Get us out of here, Pilot. Lift, lift!”

Cohl said weakly, “But our orders—”

But Pirius was already hauling on his controls. All around him ships were breaking from the line and pulling back.

Even as the Rock fell away, Pirius could see the endgame approaching. For a last, remarkable, instant, the Rock held together, and that inner light picked out the complex tracery of the trench network, as if the face of the Rock was covered by a map of shining threads. The asteroid’s uneven horizon lifted, bulging.

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.