“No comment.”

“My, this must all be frustrating for you. Well, sorry.”

The blur of images in front of the AIs ceased. “Ready to fly.”

“Restraint cradles?”

“Patched, physiology\technology profiles amended, buffering re-parametered.”

“Well, then, let us—”

“Oh! Oh!”

“What?”

“I just had a thought!”

“What?”

“We can do this; watch.”

Quercer Janath used the Protreptic’s magnetic-field convolver system to gently shift the remains of the dead Voehn into a very close, very slow set of orbits around the Velpin and the still-attached Dweller SoloShip. “There. Isn’t that better?”

“Mad as a ghoul,” Y’sul said. “I’m injured badly. Get me home.”

“Wow, that was quick; look!”

“That is fast. I thought it would take them a lot longer to override the ship.”

Close-up on a screen, they saw a Voehn warrior appear from a suddenly open lock door on the surface of the Velpin. He raised a handgun and started firing at them. Another screen registered the Protreptic’s reactive snarl-space armour fields soaking up the beam. A pea-shooter against a battleship.

“Time to go if we’re going.”

“Definite target for something. I say we shoot that smart-arse bastard with the handgun.”

“No.”

^“Oh, come on!’

“Mistake to rely on software.” (Both bits of Quercer Janath laughed uproariously at this.) “Shoot the Velpin’s main drive engines instead.”

“More like it! Targeted. Firing.” The ship buzzed briefly around them. On several screens, including the main wall screen beyond the spine-seats, they watched the Velpin flare through violently pink into stellar white around its ring of engine pods. The ship broke in two and started to drift apart in a bright cloud of glittering metals. “Oops.”

“Ah, they’re Voehn. They’ll probably have it stuck back together in an hour and set off to hijack the Sepulcraft or something. Let’s go.”

The twin AI half-turned to look at the Dweller and the human in the gascraft.

“We’re putting your seat restraints on now. Shout if anything feels wrong.”

The great skeletal spines around him whined. Fassin felt the gas around him seem to set like treacle. “Everybody all right?”

They agreed they were all right. “Off we go!”

The stars swung around them, the ship hummed deep and loud, then leapt away. The shattered remains of the Velpin vanished.

They threaded the giant “O’ of the Sepulcraft with their stolen needle ship, just to show they could, and ignored the sorrowful, chiding signals that followed them on their way back to the Direaliete system and its hidden wormhole.

* * *

If they had been expecting some sort of ultimatum or an attempt to agree a surrender, however humiliating and abject, however calculated and designed only to be refused, they were to be disappointed. The Starveling invasion hit Ulubis system like a tsunami slamming into a beach full of sandcastles.

Captain Oon Dicogra, newly promoted to the command of the needle ship NMS 3304 which had taken Fassin Taak from “glan-tine to Sepekte more than half a year earlier — she had been promoted when Captain Pasisa, the whule who’d been in charge of the ship at the time, had been given a newer ship — found herself and her rearmed craft forming part of the Ulubine Outer Defensive Shield Squadrons. The title was more impressive than the reality: a hodgepodge of mostly small and under-armed craft thrown across the peripheral skies of the system in the general direction of the invasion force behind a too-thin cloud of what was rather grandly called interceptor material but was basically a spray of rubble, and a few mines, mostly immobile. They were to sit here, waiting behind this so-called curtain wall of first defence.

Dicogra, along with a lot of the captains — at least at this level — thought they’d have been better going out to meet the invaders rather than sitting here waiting for them to come to them, but that wasn’t how the top brass wanted to play it. Attacks on the invading fleet outside the system had been dismissed as being wasteful distractions, and too risky. Sitting here in the line of advance felt to Dicogra about as risky as it was possible to get but she kept telling herself that her superiors knew what they were doing. Even if they were being asked to make a sacrifice, it would not be in vain.

Their wing of twelve ships was arranged in a wavy line thousands of klicks long across the likely tactical-level course of the invasion-fleet components, half a million klicks beyond the last-orbit limit of the outer system. Other thin lines were deployed almost all around them, though not in front. NMS 3304 was seventh in the wing’s battle order, beside the wing commander’s ship in the centre of the line. Dicogra was third in overall command after the captain of the ship that was fifth in line. She had, naively, been flattered at first to have been advanced so quickly. Then she was frightened. They were under-equipped, poorly armed, too slow and far too few, little more than sacrificial pieces put in the way of the invasion to show that the Ulubine forces meant some sort of business, even if it was a fairly miserable affair in the face of the Starveling Cult’s preponderance of power.

The deep-space tracking systems which might have directed the Outer Defensive Shield Squadrons better had been high-priority targets for the Beyonder and Starveling advance forces over the last few months, and were mostly gone. What was left of them had almost entirely lost track of the exact disposition of the oncoming fleet when its drives had shut down and it had carried out a burst manoeuvre not far inside the Oort shell, virtually all the thousand-plus craft firing their thrust units at the same time and then effectively disappearing, heading their separate ways in a web of directions and vectors too tangled and complicated to follow.

The still-functioning long-range passive warning systems spent most of their remaining time looking hopefully for occlusions of distant stars, trying to see the weave of approaching ships through nothing more sophisticated than watching out for them getting in the way of ancient natural sunlight.

Dicogra lay semi-curled in one of the ship’s command pods, hard-synched in to the ship, her attention everywhere. She was distantly aware of her crew on either side of her. Counting her, there were only the three of them aboard, the rest of the small ship running on automatics. One whule, one jajuejein, her crew were both new, not just to her and the ship itself but to the Navarchy. They were still learning, more alien to her in their relative ignorance than in their species-difference. She’d have wanted another few months’ intensive training together before she’d have called them remotely combat-ready, but these were desperate times.

A sparkle of hard, high-wavelength radiation from a few light seconds ahead announced something — in fact, lots of things -hitting the cloud of interceptor material between them and the invaders, though nothing of any significant size seemed to be impacting.

“That’s a load of their shit hitting a load of ours,” Dicogra’s wing commander said over the open line-of-sight comms link.

Her own ship’s close-range collision-warning systems started chirping and flashing at her. Nutche, her first officer, was in charge of this side of events. She kept half her attention on him as he tried to oversee the automatics and keep them focused. Contacts like very small pieces of shrapnel travelling at significant percentages of light speed were flicking past them, all around. Nothing to do, nothing to attack, she thought. Just sit here and wait.

The bitty, distributed sparkle became a bright glitter spread across their forward view, like a shining curtain of light.