If the berserker were to release its deadly cargo now, no computer on either side would find it possible to predict just what trajectory the bundle of antimatter might follow. But the enemy would be taking a great risk that all its work and planning would go for nothing.

One definite possibility was that the packet would simply fall back on Maracanda. That would certainly cause catastrophic local destruction, and heavy casualties, but nothing like what the berserkers were trying to achieve. From the purely human, badlife point of view, the best possible outcome, not a very likely one, seemed to be that the deadly bundle would go plunging harmlessly into the black hole.

Harry still had General Pike's lone Templar ship in sight, as well as the several Space Force vessels. All of them were aware of the enemy and doing their best to close with it. Trouble was that all the other human crews, starting from greater distances, were having even less success than Harry.

As soon as the Witch had settled into her course, which because of local spacetime distortion turned out to need a correction every few seconds, Harry unlocked his weapon systems. The range was not long by usual gunnery standards, but he was suddenly not confident that he was going to be able to shoot the berserker out of space.

Not only was the Witch's modest magazine out of missiles, after his previous berserker skirmish, but this space was even trickier than it looked, for purposes of gunnery. Harry quickly found that accurate aiming of a beam weapon was impossible. Sighting the target was deceptively easy, but hitting it was another matter.

The berserker craft seemed to be carrying no armament at all, except for its deadly bundle. Maybe the enemy had already computed the uselessness of conventional weapons in this odd space and decided not to bother.

Chasing it, even gaining on it, seemed simple enough, too, but distortion slowed everything down, and Harry was beginning to realize that catching up with his quarry might be as hard as hitting it with a beam or missile.

Harry wondered if the enemy had calculated in advance what size of machine they could optimally use to deliver their payload. Damn them, they had had months, maybe even years, to work out the technical details. Harry and whatever help he could enlist on the spot had only a few minutes.

The berserker craft was now hauling its murderous cargo into the very dangerous zone of spacetime distortion that encompassed both the neutron star and the black hole. So far, it was only on the subtle threshold of that zone. If it were to release its cargo now, the packet of antimatter might take an unacceptably long time to fall into the neutron star - indeed it might miss the intended target altogether, and be swept up, harmlessly, by the grim bulk of advancing Ixpuztec.

As far as Harry could tell, Lily was doing a good job keeping up with everything.

She asked him: "Are we still gaining on it, captain? I can't tell."

"Yeah, but only a kilometer at a time. Not good enough."

The Witch would have to get a lot closer to the berserker than she was, if he was going to have any possibility of shooting it out of the sky. And Harry now doubted there would be any chance worth mentioning of doing that, even at point-blank range.

Looking out now through a cleared control-room port, adjusting the window's built-in magnification, Harry had a good view of the black hole coming on, tracing the great invisible figure eight of orbital track it shared with the pulsar Avalon and the brooding mystery called Maracanda. In half a standard hour, allowing as nearly as he could for some elements of local time distortion, Ixpuztec ought to be out of the way, Avalon would have come round the far curve, and the berserker could release its burden with every expectation of hitting the onrushing neutron star.

At last the Witch had managed to clear some kind of signal path through all this noise, and a human voice, crackling and delayed, came in on Harry's radio. Pike or Rovaki (the voice was too distorted for Harry to identify) was asking: "Where are all the bandits?"

Harry did his best to transmit a response. "Still only the one bandit. But we've got to stop it."

If the berserker vehicle, still continuously accelerating, could be said to be in orbit around anything, it was none of the system's three principal bodies, but the center of the invisible figure eight, at the moment unoccupied by any of them.

A somewhat garbled voice was coming in on radio from another ship, objecting. "It doesn't look like it's going for the neutron star." The radio signal was distorted; it seemed a wonder that the equipment could bring through the words at all.

Harry was quick to reply. "It may not look that way to you, through the distortion. But I'm closer, and I can see that's what it's doing, no question."

Harry briefly allowed his autopilot to try on its own to maximize the efficiency of the pursuit. But after about thirty seconds, when his instincts told him that wasn't working, he'd turned the pilot completely off, and wasted another half minute before he could be sure that he was doing an even worse job.

At last he'd set the autopilot up in one of its auxiliary modes. Now Harry could intervene in the autopilot's work when he saw fit, while remaining subject to the Witch's own intervention when she saw disaster looming a few seconds away if he kept on with his plan.

He said to Lily: "What we need to get us through this mess is a celestial mechanic - with a big bag of tools."

He was beginning to fear that clearing his viewports, confronting this mad world face to face, might have been a mistake. His pilot's instincts were practically useless in this degree of distortion, and he had to rely on the computers anyway.

They had no good news to impart. To have any chance of success, the Witch would have to pass frighteningly close to Ixpuztec, skim in dangerous proximity to the rim of the pit, barely avoiding the point where her engines would no longer be able to pull free of the black hole's monstrous field of influence.

The berserker vehicle seemed to be taking a similar chance. Well then, Harry could do it, too.

When Harry lifted his eyes from the holostage, he saw that Lily was gazing at him.

He asked: "Did you understand what the Witch was telling me just now?"

Her chin lifted. "About skimming close to Ixpuztec? It was not good news."

"No, it wasn't. If you're still in a mood for prayer, you might give that a shot."

"If I do pray, it won't be to great Malako." And the copilot concentrated on her thoughtware again.

Contending with this maelstrom of hard streaks and swirls of dust and gas and radiation, of matter moving at incredible and unreasonable speeds, of actual space warps and mind-bending gravity, Harry thought it would be impossible in any kind of ship simply to set a direct course to the position you wanted to reach, relative to the system's major bodies. The same difficulties that delayed the pursuit were holding the berserker back from accomplishing its deadly plan.

Meanwhile, the Space Force and Templar ships continued their sporadic firing at the berserker with an assortment of weapons. But as far as the instruments on Harry's ship could tell, no part of the barrage was even coming close to the target. Beams slewed sideways unpredictably, like water from a hose, and missiles misfired or simply vanished, God knew where, snatched away like the props of some conjurer on a stage. Had the Witch been hit instead of the enemy, it would have been no great surprise to Harry.

In the random intervals when useful radio contact was possible, his allies kept assuring him they were doing all they could, but reminded him that the outcome of the struggle might be up to him. They were all even farther than the Witch was from getting into a position where they could hope to somehow come to grips with the enemy.

As for Harry and his ship, the moment of truth was upon them. He said to Lily: "Here we go. Nothing to be done at this point, just enjoy the ride."

The Witch was skimming at its closest to the black hole. If it grabbed them, only the instruments would know for the first few minutes. The world around them would still seem relatively sane and normal, the engines would appear to be working with their usual effectiveness.

With the ship in the middle of the close passage, the black hole was hurtling by, the invisible singularity at its heart clutching with tidal gravity at every atom of ship and human body, beginning to shred spacetime itself down to its raw components. The ebony bulk of Ixpuztec was magnified by intervening distortion until it filled half of the insane sky.

"Harry! "

"Yeah, I know. I know, kid. I've got my eyelids clamped tight shut. Close your eyes and hang on."

"I'm afraid to close my eyes."

Now the ship was passing on warnings of threatened power failure, warnings that Harry had no choice but to disregard. For the second and a fraction of time comprising their closest passage to the black hole, almost all the power available from the Witch's engines had to go to keeping spacetime normal inside the hull, battling the tidal effects that would otherwise have already killed everyone aboard.

Lily cried out. Harry had to look. A moment later, he shut his eyes again, to keep out the impression that the flaring flames from ebony Ixpuztec's rim of fire had burned their way into his control room.

And the injured Emily Kochi was screaming, from her berth in the Witch's medirobot. Lily was saying something to her, trying to be reassuring.

Harry forced himself to count slowly to ten, then opened his eyes again. All of his cabin furniture was still in place, despite his instinctive sense of recent havoc. He had lost sight of the enemy, but the Witch had not. There on the holostage rode the berserker craft's neat image, still carrying its world-ending burden.

Lily, the terror in her voice gamely reined in, was talking to him again from the copilot's chair, offering to do whatever she could, even wearing the gunner's helmet, but Harry had decided that in the circumstances, that was only a useless distraction.

"We haven't got anything else to throw... Wait a minute."

Now inspiration came. Or maybe it was only the kind of thing that could pass for inspiration when your brain had just been stretched by tidal forces.

Harry said, as much to himself as to his copilot: "I do still have six crates of cargo - all unpaid for. If we jettison them one container at a time, they may move faster than this ship can move, here in this space."

It was worth a try. At this point, anything was worth a try. A string of quick orders to the Witch, and the process was under way.

Harry was counting. "There they go... three... four... five..."

Together, he and Lily watched the procession of boxes exit the cargo bay, hoping that one of these improvised missiles would hit the magnetic packaging and spill antimatter prematurely all over the middle of the Maracanda system.

It proved to be a forlorn and futile effort. The crates moved on ahead of the Witch just as Harry had hoped, but then went sailing wide of their intended target, vanishing with the same finality as the missiles had.

Anyway, dumping out the cargo would at least lighten ship. Harry could draw faint comfort from the fact that his jettisoned cargo might appear to the berserker as some new form of weapon, and it could serve as such, if gravitational anomalies were sending the crates hurtling toward the enemy at many kilometers per second.

But the unaimed missiles were no more effective than any of the sophisticated ones that were supposed to be precisely guided.

Immediately after the sixth crate left the ship, Harry took note of the fact that one more object, totally unexpected, also came flying out of the cargo bay.

"What in all the glorious hells was that?"

Lily said, "It looked like a - a bag of something. Didn't it?"

Harry pounded a fist on a chair arm. To the Witch he snarled, "You didn't tell me we had that crap on board!"

His ship's voice was as unperturbed as ever. "That is correct. It seemed to me that other matters took priority, and that distractions of any kind ought to be minimized."

When he faced Lily with the same question in his gaze, her nerves throbbed, and it was almost like he was charging her with murder. She shrieked: "I didn't know! Bulaboldo and one of his people came on board while you were gone. I heard you give them permission to do that. Kul came in here and talked to me. I must have lost track of the other man, what he was doing."

The bag of stuff was gone now, as utterly out of sight and useless as everything else they had unloaded. But they had gained a little more ground on the enemy. Harry could get a slightly better look at the berserker. Nothing that he could see offered any encouragement.

From the haggard look Lily was wearing, he thought she might be just beginning to understand that they were going to die. But all she said was "Harry. I'm sorry I let you down."

For a moment he didn't remember. "What?"

"About the grit. Letting them bring it on board."

"Never mind that now. It doesn't matter."

"Can I do anything?"

"I'll let you know, kid. It seems we can't shoot the thing, so I'll have to try something else."

The Witch kept incrementally gaining ground, gaining space.

Both objects were in comparatively tight orbits round the neutron star, but Harry's ship was one turn higher, in the unique stepwise system of Pauli orbits. The best measurement Harry could make, somewhat unreliable, assured him they were less than a hundred kilometers from the berserker, and somehow locked in step with it, even though their orbits were at different altitudes above the star. But the distance might as well have been a hundred light-years.

He said again, "If we can't get close enough to shoot it, we certainly aren't going to get close enough to ram."

But...

The boxes and the bag of stuff had moved ahead, like dropped bombs in front of an airplane. Working quickly with his thoughtware again, he soon confirmed that the problem of speed in this strange space was mainly one of size.

The Witch, built on a somewhat larger scale than the berserker, was too bulky to go directly from one turn of the spiral to another, to catch up with her enemy directly. When Harry began an attempt to force his ship across the gap between turns he was quickly compelled to abort the maneuver, seeing and feeling his vessel about to be hurled into a helpless spin that might either propel it free of the system altogether, smash it back like a meteor into the strangeness of Maracanda, or fling it right into the unbreakable grip of Ixpuztec.

A moment later, Harry was telling his copilot: "A smaller ship, a smaller shape, might do it. In fact, that's the only way. I'm going to try to shoot the gap in the lifeboat."

"What can I do?" Lily asked again.

"Just what you're doing. The Witch is going to need help. Any competent human pilot is better than none, at this stage, as long as you don't go crazy."

"I've had a lot of practice in not going crazy." She paused. "Does your lifeboat have any weapons?"

"Whatever I can manage to carry aboard." Harry went on: "Hold the helm, let the autopilot keep working on centimetering us closer. Once I'm out in the lifeboat, keep an eye open for the boat, just in case I do manage to get back - and the other eye on the berserker, just in case."

"You'll keep radio contact?"

"I'll try."

All he could think of at the moment was to try to ram the enemy with the lifeboat. But no one could tell what might happen in this crazy place, and he intended to bring his carbine with him. Suppose the boat also turned out to be too big, as the Witch implied might very well be the case? What would be his next step after that?

For the second stage, a man in a spacesuit might be adequately small.

"Oh, Harry." As if she could be somehow reading his mind.

He said to Lily: "You've got the helm now. Do the best you can. No, don't look at me like that. Playing hero has nothing to do with it. It's just that if someone doesn't stop that thing in the next twenty minutes, about a billion of us are all dead anyway."