After fifty years of pursuit, the warship Gravity draws within three AU of Blue Space, a tiny distance compared with the 1.5 light-years both ships have crossed. A decade earlier, Gravity passed through the Oort Cloud and entered true interstellar space, where the sun became only another star behind the ship.

The chapter emphasizes the isolation of deep space. The only nearby visible objects are the two Trisolaran droplets flying in formation with Gravity, whose mirrorlike surfaces reflect the ship and even its crew. Most of Gravity's one hundred-plus personnel avoid the psychological burden of the voyage by rotating through hibernation, with only a small duty crew awake at a time.

The pursuit is described as a fuel-constrained strategic contest. Blue Space cannot accelerate indefinitely without dooming itself in empty space, while Gravity must conserve fuel for both the chase and a possible return to the Solar System. Because sophon intelligence has given Gravity accurate knowledge of Blue Space's fuel reserves, the hunter has a major advantage; twenty-five years into the chase, Blue Space stops accelerating.

Throughout the half century, Gravity repeatedly urges Blue Space to surrender, arguing that escape is futile because the droplets could destroy it even if it evades the human ship. Blue Space never responds. One year before the present moment, when the ships are thirty AU apart, Gravity enters a region where sophons lose their real-time quantum connection to Earth, forcing the ship to rely on slow neutrino and radio communication with a round-trip delay of more than two years.