Explosives blew the shells apart, the seventeen deep space fortresses that were merely laminar shells containing the hardest-bitten Pilots of alclass="underline" five squadrons of SRS, fifteen more from long-range reconnaissance and other élite bands. Now they swooped like arrows, spiralled around incoming fire, and drove towards the attackers, letting their weapons rip. During the first three seconds some thirty Zajinet vessels took fatal hits, fully half of them exploding in spherical detonations, bright and sudden and silent.
++Three dexter, Stone.++
It was a warning to Roger, and he-and-ship whipped through a clockwise helix, avoiding incoming at the same time as firing, the timing ai-uchi, strike and simultaneous counter-strike, one of the attackers blowing apart as the other two peeled away.
++Thanks, Ferenc.++
Twenty squadrons, outnumbered three to one, and a part of Roger’s awareness assessed this as failure, because three thousand Zajinets were a massive enemy but surely not their main fleet, not unless the analysts were wrong in everything, but there were more immediate things to think about as a Zajinet fighter blasted into existence from mu-space, letting loose on Ferenc whose warning had saved Roger; and comms stayed up long enough to hear Ferenc’s scream. Then he and ship detonated their seppuku singularity, the ovoid blast just failing to take their attacker with them into death.
Roger-and-ship killed the attacker.
++Stone wing target two one.++
It was Havelock, identifying the objective as an angle on two orthogonal circles, each divided into twelve: a handy code rooted in mediaeval sun-dials, just as the shuttle boosters even now remained integer multiples of the width of a mediaeval horse’s buttocks, which determined the width of carts and subsequently trains and bridges constraining the transport of spaceship components from the factories that built them. Someone who had never been in combat would have been puzzled by such extraneous thoughts, but strange things run through a person’s mind during mortal danger.
Then trivia evaporated as Roger-and-ship attained the state called mushin where nothing exists but the moment; and this particular moment meant death.
Twelve Zajinets exploded, ripped apart as Roger led the eight ships in his wing to cut across them, because Zajinets on the whole might manoeuvre better than Pilots but not when it came to Sabre Three Squadron. Havelock had trained them to the point where they were beyond outstanding; and they had all been in combat before, enough to intuit the swirl of battle.
Roger commanded:
++Follow me, curl ura nine.++
Ura meant reverse, and ack-blips sounded from his wing as they hauled back through the demanding trajectory, but the payback was there: some twenty Zajinets coming in from the flank of Scimitar, and Roger’s wing broke through the enemy formation, killing only one but disrupting their attack, and that was enough to—
++Thanks, lover.++
—let Corinne focus a counter-strike and lead her Pilots around to outflank the Zajinets in turn—
++Anytime, sweetheart.++
—and she took out two of them single-handed and then Roger was busy with another flight of Zajinets hurtling this way. Just as he was beginning to wonder if they were being strategically overwhelmed despite individual success, a signal blared in every Pilot’s ship, the code they had been waiting for.
++BUG OUT NOW.++
Time to go.
Golden space burst into being.
Now they flew hard, eight hundred and two surviving ships, the tally automatic amid mutual signal-pings, and Roger was appalled because he had not realised they had lost so many, and the Zajinets would pay for this.
Those two thousand and more Zajinets that tore into mu-space behind them, accelerating.
Faster.
There was no need for a command because every Pilot-and-ship knew exactly what they had to do, which was pull ahead of their pursuers, and never mind that this was not the full fleet they had intended to face, because this was dangerous enough, with far too many of their comrades dead already, and Roger-and-ship put everything they had into simple flight, because the only way to achieve revenge was to live.
Their pursuers were holding fire but gaining on them.
Ahead, through the analogue of visual sensors, they could see the growing, infinitely complex form of Mandelbrot Nebula, crimson and violet and magnificent. Soon enough the Zajinets would realise—
++Scatter now!++
It was an all-squadrons command that might have come from any of the Pilots because that was how they operated, hierarchies abandoned at convenience, a mode of operation once more proven right because without that signal many of them might have died.
Their formation spat apart as if exploding into a sparse cloud.
Enemy!
I see them.
The realisation howled through ship-and-Roger.
They’re everywhere.
The visual illusion was this: in the reaches of golden space, clouds of tiny dots were growing, while from the flanks came shoals of vessels on arcing trajectories, and huge ships tore into place above and below; but this was illusion, born of the multiple layers of reality the Zajinets came in on, self-similar spacetimescapes whose scales differed by orders of magnitude, and to navigate so many vessels to come together at the same time was a magnificent feat.
Then there was only awe as the massed Zajinets showed themselves in normal scale, a huge curving face that dominated a third of golden space, an image whose every pixel was a massive warship, their configuration a shallow bowclass="underline" a concave whose focus was the eight hundred surviving Pilots and their ships.
The Zajinets must have numbered millions.
++Oh, crap.++
It was an open signal, but not the kind that anyone would reprimand. The answer came from Havelock.
++Nebula. Now.++
The expanding cloud of Pilots-and-ships arced towards the nebula, desperate now, and in the first few seconds the rearmost died; but then they were into their hellflight geodesics, and no one was going to target them during hellflight unless they accelerated to a significant percentage of the Pilots’ velocity: a huge task for an immense fleet, and not an order that a Zajinet admiral would give, not that anyone knew how their command structure operated, or even if they had one in the sense that humans would—
They’re following.
Unbelievable.
That vast mass of Zajinet vessels, a million armoured ships, was on the move.
And look how fast they are.
Oh, shit.
Once the signal was given, the Zajinet fleet clearly had no problems with inertia, because they were already accelerating hard, and the question was whether they could attain hell-flights from such a formation, and the answer was probably no but they were pursuing hard, and it would take only a percentage of their number to forge ahead onto hellflight trajectories and the Pilots would be overwhelmed; but then space went crimson and the nebula was open and Roger laughed aloud because the rules were about to change.
Ver nær okr, berserkrinn!
Vit erum berserkr.
Blood trickled from mouth and ears and eyes as ship-and-Roger pulled into the hardest turn they had ever attempted because there was no way they were going to flee from the next part and never mind the millions of vessels now face-on and approaching fast because this was the moment.
Nine bursts of activity around branches of the nebula, and perhaps the Zajinets had time to wonder what was happening before nine attack fleets, fifty thousand vessels in each, came streaming out of Mandelbrot Nebula intent on destruction.