More screams and barks of joy echoed round the concourse.

Another camera, another screen: a section of the StormWall was bulging, dark gas streaming around some huge rounded cone forcing its way through the storm as though it wasn’t there.

A huge Dreadnought flowed out of the storm, trailing streamers of gas like vast banners. Shrieks of encouragement and great, air-quaking cheers resounded down the wide tunnel of the concourse, making it resonate like a vast organ pipe. The new Dreadnought silvered in an instant, white beams scattering off it as it flew into the clear gas heart of the storm’s colossal eye.

“Fuck me,” Fassin heard himself say. “They were waiting for them.”

The silver Dreadnought powered straight towards the fleet of dark ships, which, after starting to close in on the spectating fleet, were now swinging and swivelling to reconfigure and face the new threat.

The Dreadnought raced forward, fire bright around its propellerless tail, guns firing and flashing. Its silvery skin, reflecting sky, storm and dark depths, sparkled with jagged scintillations, bouncing beams off in random directions like bright thrown spines. Two more of the dark ships detonated and fell, sending the Dweller screams in the concourse — and the bets -towards even wilder heights.

The Dreadnought tore onwards, shaking under the weight of fire falling upon it. A missile from the fleet of Mercatoria ships slashed across the view, was missed by a fan of interceptor fire from the Dreadnought and slammed into it.

There was just the hint of the start of an explosion, bursting the Dreadnought apart as though tearing open the wrapping round a piece of star, then the screen went utterly white before hazing out completely, blank. Lights in the concourse flickered and went out, came back, then faded again. The warbling sound, there but effectively unheard all this time, cut off, its absence in the sudden silence like a hearing loss. The Dzunda quivered like a struck animal.

Other screens wavered, went black, filled with static. Some screens, now providing the only light in the concourse, remained working. Gradually more light filled the long tube, as low emergency lighting strobed on, caught and held.

A low muttering sound of Dweller trepidation and resentment started to build. One camera swung to show the huge rolling mushroom cloud filling the space where the Dreadnought had been. A few tiny pieces of wreckage fell, far away, thin claws from a tumorously bloated fist. The dark ships started to close in again on the spectator fleet, currently composed of vessels commanded by two sorts of captains: those who thought it best to clump together and those who regarded scattering and even taking their chances with the storm winds as the safer bet.

The stampede of Dwellers from the access tube which Fassin was trying to push Valseir towards was slowly forcing the two of them back into the centre of the concourse. More people were flooding into the wide space from every other access point.

Somebody was screaming, “Look, look!”

One distant screen image was suddenly repeated across several more. At first it looked like a replay of the entrance of the first Dreadnought, the great nose bulging out through, the curtain of streaming cloud, dragging gas like long flags of war. Then the view pulled back and the screen showed the Storm Wall bulging in another place, then another and another and another, until a whole vertical forest of the great ships was visible, hurtling out of the storm and towards the great column of black circling spacecraft hanging like a giant pendulum over the spectating fleet.

The Dzunda shook, rippled and screamed like something alive as the shock wave of the earlier nuclear explosion seemed to pick it up and rattle it. Dwellers swung this way and that across the concourse, banging into each other, walls, floor and ceiling, filling the gas with oaths and debris. Another pair of screens cut out but enough remained to show the closing fleet of mercury-coloured Dreadnoughts livid with fire outgoing and incoming. Lasers sheened off, fans of interceptor projectiles and beams combed the gas and sundered darting, twisting missiles. Two more of the dark ships, then a third, exploded or crumpled and started to fall or spiral down, but two more of the giant Dreadnoughts disappeared in massive, screen-hazing detonations.

A couple more Dreadnoughts were suddenly caught in a fiercely bright beam from immediately above, from out of the clear yellow sky. The beam fell between them, making each massive ship wobble as if stumbling in the gas. Then it split into two parallel shafts, each violet rod narrowing in an instant and chopping through its targeted Dreadnought like an axe through a neck.

The concourse — half dark, filled with wild scents and the frenzied bellowing of Dwellers unsure whether to wail laments or shout huzzahs, lit by the spastic, spasming light of the battle views swinging wildly across the screens — achieved a sort of chaotic transcendence as very loud but defiantly soothing-sounding music started to play, product of some confused automatic guest-management system waking to insanity and trying to spread tranquillity.

“What,” Fassin heard a nearby Dweller say, quite quietly but distinctly through the pandemonium, “the fuck is that?”

(Another dark Mercatorial ship, another silver Dreadnought, ripped to shreds and blossoming in nuclear fire respectively. Another pair of Dreadnoughts shaking in the first beam-fall of the violet ray flicking from on high.)

And on the screen opposite, looking downwards into the wide bowl of the storm’s dead heart, a huge darkly red-glowing globe was rising from the sump gases of the storm floor, dragging a great flute of gas after it like some absurdly steady fireball. It was kilometres across and striated, banded like a miniature gas-giant, so that for one crazed instant Fassin thought he was watching the palace of the Hierchon Ormilla floating smoothly upwards into the fray.

A crumpled scrap falling towards this apparition — a ruined and smoking Mercatoria spacecraft — appeared to lend a scale to the huge sphere, seeming to be about to fall just behind it, making the quickly rising globe three or four klicks across.

The wrecked ship fell in front, instead, and upped that ready estimate by a factor of two.

A couple of filament-thin yellow-white beams suddenly joined with the massive globe and seemed to sink into it without effect. The violet beam from high above swung onto it, spreading briefly as though to measure the full seven or eight kilometres of its diameter before starting to narrow.

A pattern of black dots appeared on the surface of the giant globe.

The Dzunda shook again and again as further blast waves crashed into it. Fassin stared at the great rising sphere even as Dwellers on either side thudded into him and he lost his hold on Valseir.

There were maybe fifty or so of the black spots, spread as though randomly across the upper hemisphere of the huge globe. One appeared to be in the centre of the rapidly narrowing, focusing violet beam. Just as that ray grew too bright to see the ebony dot at its centre, it seemed to pulse and spread. Then it disappeared, just as each spot suddenly became the plinth for an intensely bright, thin column of pure white light. The beams lasted for an eye-blink, disappearing almost as soon as they’d been produced, only their image lasting, burned into any naked eyes and insufficiently buffered cameras trained on them.

Silence, even as another manic convulsion shook the Dzunda, making the whole concourse ripple and creak. More screens went out. The loud soothing music cut off. Two remaining screens nearby showed the dark ships, whole squadrons of them, entire flocks of them, reduced for most of their length to sparkling, wind-blown ash, only the long needle noses and tailed, finned rears remaining intact to fall like meteors, unreeling scrawny trails of smoke into the storm’s tenebrous depths.