And now good news and bad came in very fast:

"Got him!" from Jo Haugen. The red dot in Lynsnar's swarm was no more. It had passed within a few thousand kilometers of one of the drones. In the milliseconds necessary to compute a new jump, the drone had discovered its presence and detonated. Even that would not have been fatal if the target had jumped before the blast front hit it; there had been several near misses in earlier seconds. This time the jump did not reach commit in time. A mini-star was born, one whose light would be years in reaching the rest of the battle volume.

Glimfrelle gave a rasping whistle, an untranslatable curse, "We just lost Ablsndot and Holder, Boss. Their target must have counter-swarmed."

"Send in Gliwing and Trance." Something in the back of his head curled up in horror. These were his friends who were dying. Kjet had seen death before, but never like this. In police action, no one took lethal chances except in a rescue. And yet… he turned from the field summary to order more ships on a target that had acquired defending vessels. Tirolle was moving in others on his own. Ganging up on a few nonessential targets might lose in the long run, but in the short term… the enemy was being hurt. For the first time since the fall of Sjandra Kei, Commercial Security was hurting someone back.

Haugen: "Powers, that guy was moving! Secondary drone got EM spectrum on the kill. Target was going 15000 kps true speed." A rocket bomb ramping up? Damn. They should be postponing those till after they controlled the battlefield.

Tirolle: "More kills, far side of battle volume. The enemy is repositioning. Somehow they've guessed which we're after — "

Glimfrelle: Triumph whistle. "Get 'em, get 'em — oops. Boss, I think Limmende has figured we're coordinating things — "

A new window had opened over Tirolle's post. It showed the five million kilometers around Olvira. Two other ships were there now: the window identified them as Limmende's flag and one of the vessels that had not responded to Svensndot's recruiting.

There was an instant of stillness on Olvira's command deck. The voices of triumph and panic coming from the rest of the fleet seemed suddenly far away. Svensndot and his crew were looking at death close up. "Tirolle! How long till swarm — "

"They're on us already — just missed a drone by ten milliseconds."

"Tirolle! Finish running current engagements. Glimfrelle, tell Lynsnar and Trance to chain command if we lose contact." Those ships had already spent their drones, and Jo Haugen was known to all the other captains.

Then the thought was gone, and he was busy coordinating Olvira's own battle swarm. The local tactics window showed the cloud dissipating, taking on colors coded by whether they were lagging or leading in time relative to Olvira.

Their two attackers had matched pseudospeeds perfectly. Ten times per second all three ships jumped a tiny fraction of a light-year. Like rocks skipping across the surface of a pond, they appeared in real space in perfectly measured hops — and the distance between them at every emergence was less that five million kilometers. The only thing that separated them now was millisecond differences in jump times, and the fact the light itself could not pass between them in the brief time they spent at each jump point.

Three actinic flashes lit the deck, casting shadows back from Svensndot and the Dirokimes. It was second-hand light, the display's emergency signal of nearby detonation. Run like hell was the message any rational person should take from that awful light. It would be easy enough to break synch

… and lose tactical control of Aniara fleet. Tirolle and Glimfrelle bent their heads away from the local window, shying from the glare of nearby death. Their whistling voices scarcely broke cadence, and the commands from Olvira to the others continued. There were dozens of other battles going on out there. Just now Olvira was the only source of precision and control available to their side. Every second they remained on station meant protection and advantage to Aniara. Breaking off would mean minutes of chaos till Lynsnar or Trance could pick up control.

Nearly two thirds of Pham Nuwen's targets were destroyed now. The price had been high, half of Svensdot's friends. The enemy had lost much to protect those targets, yet much of its fleet survived.

An unseen hand smashed Olvira, driving Svensndot hard against his combat harness. The lights went out, even the glow from the windows. Then dim red light came from the floor. The Dirokimes were silhouetted by one small monitor. 'Rolle whistled softly, "We're out of the game, Boss, least while it counts. I didn't know you could get misses that near."

Maybe it wasn't a miss. Kjet scrambled out of his harness and boosted across the room to float head-down over the tiny monitor. Maybe we're already dead. Somewhere very close by a drone had detonated, the wave front reaching Olvira before she jumped. The concussion had been the outer part of the ship's hull exploding as it absorbed the soft-xray component of the enemy ordnance. He stared at the red letters marching slowly across the damage display. Most likely, the electronics was permanently dead; chances were they had all received a fatal dose of gamma. The smell of burnt insulation floated across the room on the ventilator's breeze.

"Iiya! Look at that. Five nanoseconds more and we wouldn't have been clipped at all. We actually committed the jump after the front hit!" And somehow the electronics had survived long enough to complete the jump. The gamma flux through the command deck had been 300 rem, nothing that would slow them down over the next few hours, and easily managed by a ship's surgeon. As for the surgeon and all the rest of the Olvira's automation…

Tirolle typed several long queries at the box; there was no voice recognition left. Several seconds passed before a response marched across the screen. "Central automation suspended. Display management suspended. Drive computation suspended." Tirolle dug an elbow at his brother. "Hei, 'Frelle, it looks like 'Vira managed a clean disconnect. We can bring most of this back!"

Dirokimes were known for being drifty optimists, but in this case Tirolle wasn't far from the truth. Their encounter with the drone bomb had been a one-in-billion thing, the tiniest fraction of an exposure. Over the next hour and a half, the Dirokimes ran reboots off the monitor's hardened processor, bringing up first one utility and then another. Some things were beyond recovery: parsing intelligence was gone from the comm automation, and the ultradrive spines on one side of the craft were partially melted. (Absurdly, the burning smell had been a vagrant diagnostic, something that should have been disabled along with all the rest of Olvira's automation.) They were far behind the Blighter fleet.

… and there was still a Blighter fleet. The knot of enemy lights was smaller than before, but on the same unwavering trajectory. The battle was long over. What was left of Commercial Security was scattered across four light-years of abandoned battlefield; they had started the battle with numerical superiority. If they'd fought properly, they might have won. Instead they'd destroyed the vessels with significant real velocities — and knocked out only about half the others. Some of the largest enemy vessels survived. These outnumbered the corresponding Aniara survivors by more than four to one. Blight could have could have easily destroyed all that remained of Commercial Security. But that would have meant a detour from the pursuit, and that pursuit was the one constant in the enemy's behavior.

Tirolle and Glimfrelle spent hours reestablishing communications and trying to discover who had died and who might be rescued. Five ships had lost all drive capability but still had surviving crew. Some ships had been hit at known locations, and Svensndot dispatched vessels with drone swarms to find the wrecks. Ship-to-ship warfare was a sanitary, intellectual exercise for most of the survivors, but the rubble and the destruction were as real as in any ground war, only spread over a trillion times more space.