· Still flare?

· Still flare, Taince confirmed. She was watching the scintil-lations ahead, where the wildly spinning, whirling, somer-saulting wreckage of the Petronel was being hit by further enemy munitions. The remains were dropping back rapidly towards the main fleet as it spread quickly outwards. She clicked up a countdown to their impact with the debris field: seventy-six seconds. She shifted the read-out to a skin-sensation to avoid cluttering her visual feed.

No positive results from the laser fire being laid down by the Mitrailleuse and Cartouche. Their missiles were still heading towards the hostile craft. No sign of reply so far.

What if we’re wrong? Taince thought. What if they’ve out-thought us and our so-neat manoeuvre? Deep in her life-pod cocoon, she gave a semblance of a shrug without realising it herself. Oh well, then we may all be dead. At least it should be quick.

· Still flare?

· Still flare, she confirmed again. Waiting, judging, wondering if this would work. Tacspace showed the second-hand, now increasingly out-of-date contacts the Petronel had spotted as a glowing, slowly dispersing cloud of pulsing yellow echoes. The two hard contacts still registering on the sensors of the Mitrailleuse and the Cartouche and now confirmed by other nearby ships were strobing red dots, slowly closing. The wreckage from the Petronel was a stippled mess of purple, dead ahead and drifting closer, slowly spreading.

It’s okay, Taince told herself. We can do this.

They had rehearsed all this, trained and exercised in VR time after time, specifically for this eventuality, this ambush and manoeuvre and response suite.

They knew that the Beyonders would anticipate a fleet being sent from Zenerre to Ulubis. There was, of course, only one quickest possible route; the straight-line direct one, its laser-clean rule turned into the shallowest of curves solely by allowing for the minimal drift of the respective systems as they circled with the rest of the galactic outskirts round the great wheel’s core, fifty thousand light years away.

So, did the fleet take exactly that route, laying itself open to ambush by other ships, and — more threateningly — to mines? (Mines, indeed; all you needed was a few tonnes of crushed rock. Smash a tiny asteroid into gravel the size of rice grains, spread it across the course the fleet would- take and — if they were travelling quickly enough — you could waste the lot; so close to light speed that you didn’t need to have anything home in and explode, just getting in the way was devastating enough.) Or did you loop further out, avoiding likely interception but arriving later?

And did you stick together (obvious but sensible) or split up, all the individual craft taking their own route to Ulubis, only regrouping near their destination (very risky, but potentially a tactic that the enemy wouldn’t have anticipated)? In the end the Fleet Admiral had chosen one out of a bunch of faintly bowed courses recommended by the strategists and their sub-AI machines, and they followed that route en masse.

It was a gamble. The chances were that they would be inter-cepted, especially if the Beyonders possessed the kind of materiel they were thought to have between Zenerre and Ulubis. The obvious intercept strategy was to station minor ships and other sensor platforms about halfway, then position the intercept units well behind that — already making high speed — to give them time to gather for the attack. In a direct pitched battle, there was no possibility that the vastly outnumbered and out-armed Beyonder ships would prevail. But then, they didn’t need or want a pitched battle, they just had to slow the Mercatoria fleet down as much as possible. They wanted skirmishes, ambushes, and to use the fleet’s own colossal velocity against it.

The Mercatoria fleet could, in theory, have gone slow and safe, assured just by its sheer weight of arms of being able to blast anything ahead of it out of the skies. Its orders, though, were to get to Ulubis as quickly as possible, regardless, and so it had to travel almost ultimately quickly and risk being torn to bits by a few small ships and nothing more high-tech than a few tonnes of pulverised rock.

They’d come up with a surprise plan of their own. Needle ships were designed to fit through narrow worm-holes, it was that simple. The biggest arteria and the widest portals were a kilometre across, but the average “hole diameter was under fifty metres and a few very old arteria were barely ten metres wide. It took a vast amount of energy and\or matter to make an arteria and its two portals, and it was difficult, expensive and dangerous to expand them once they were emplaced. There was, for the Mercatoria, little point in having a network of super-fast travel connections scattered throughout the galaxy if your ships were too fat to fit, and so the proportions of war craft — the ultimate levers of power for the Mercatoria, just as they had been for all earlier imperia, semimperia and others who had thought to enforce their peace or impose their will on the galactic community over the aeons — were derived from the width of the channels they would have to negotiate.

In the past, some great capital ships could auto-deconstruct to become a shower of smaller, slimmer components which could fit through a wormhole, and were then capable of reassembling themselves at the far end, but this had proved a wasteful way of designing war craft. Needle ships were simpler and cheaper, for all their astounding complexity and cost. The biggest craft in the battle fleet heading from Zenerre to Ulubis were a kilometre long but less than forty metres across the beam. Almost right at the enemy ship, the missile fired by the Mitrailleuse winked out, replaced by a tiny debris field. Signals from the cruiser, Sensors and Status confirmed this.

— That missile snapped a hostile profile before it was picked off, Weapons reported, side-screening the data the missile had plipped back.

— Sceuri ship, Sulcus or Fosse class, one Tactics officer sent.

So they were dealing — at least in that ship — with the Deathspiral, Taince thought. That particular Beyonder group was exclusively Sceuri; waterworlders with a hatred for the Mercatoria in general and those of their own kind who were a part of it in particular (which meant most of them). Renowned for their viciousness and without even the excuse that they were protecting their precious civilian habitats. They didn’t have any, they were almost entirely ship-based. A bunch of piratical terrorists, in other words, just fanatics. And yet as far as anyone knew the Deathspiral hadn’t taken part in the attack on the Ulubis portal.

· So that makes four, not three varieties of Beyonder oper-ating in this volume, the Admiral sent, saying what Taince was thinking.

· Two more and we’ll have the set, she replied.

Back in Tacspace, she watched the Cartouche’s missile curving to meet the twisting trace that was the other nearest hostile. It joined it, overlaying it. A white blink, then an infinitesimal spray of debris, red speckled with green.

— D-three: Hit! Hostile hit!

Taince’s two fellow tacticians aboard the flagship made whooping noises.

· Well done, D-three, said Kisipt.

· Still flare?

· Still flare. Taince ignored the celebratory noises and her own feeling of excitement. She watched Tacspace, listened to the ship chatter, felt the seconds count down.

The fleet was still spreading, the vessels’ courses fanning out like thin stems from a short vase. Taince held off and held off and held off, until she could almost feel Fleet Admiral Kisipt and everybody else getting ready to shout at her.

Forty seconds. She sent,

— De-flare. Pattern-five reverse.