—Ro McNamara lives still, hidden within the Logos Library.

There was a question concerning the relevance of the First Admiral’s continued existence, which strictly speaking, Kenna could not be sure of: it was now eight centuries since she, as Rhianna Chiang, had been in Labyrinth.

But her own intuition had told her to share that information.

A message from my subconscious?

Because this was it: she skated on the edge of paradox, and sometimes reality appeared to shimmer, alive with the possibility of breaking causality and all that made sense, threatening dissolution and disaster; and this was one of those moments.

Call it a memory of a future dream, inaccurate though the analogy was, for the simplest of reasons.

She never slept.

After the Kobolds removed the stunned Corcorigan from the chamber, she gave further instructions to Griell, one of her Kobold lieutenants.

—Trevalkin’s people must learn that Corcorigan is a worthwhile ally. Get word to them via the usual cutouts.

‘Straight away, ma’am.’

There were others who might usefully ally themselves with Corcorigan, and support his efforts.

—The Strontium Dragons Society have a pak tsz sin called Zhao-ji among their senior ranks. He knew Corcorigan in childhood. Get word to him also.

The resistance needed heroic figures, and Lord One-Arm was a potent symbol in their mythology.

‘Ma’am.’

Alone then, she sank into meditation, considering her own life in relation to Corcorigan’s, that mix of contingency and determination, so turbulent; and her greater goal that she could never share at risk of being thought insane: to fight a war that would make this conflict seem insignificant, a battle on behalf of every baryonic-matter lifeform in the galaxy, in a final confrontation a million years from now.

Even though the world she lived in seemed doomed to fall, very soon indeed.

FORTY-SIX

DEEP SPACE (R.A. ≈ 6h, D ≈ +40°, r ≈ 247000 lyear), 2607 AD

The feints and deception were over. Five members of Roger’s squadron were dead, in four cases along with their ships as they exploded beneath Zajinet weapons fire. Now it was all about the waiting: as it had been for every soldier across history, from legionnaires trekking across dusty plains to mech-armoured grunts at the Siege of Mare Tembrum; nerves and boredom, with nothing to do but train and joke and brood on cruelty and mortality.

Shoals of shuttles moved around the pseudo-base they called the Grey Attractor, automated craft that employed random motion and delays to simulate human behaviour, as if they were crewed and engaged on construction work. However, the seventeen huge complex volumes that seemed capable of housing thousands were pure façades, constructed of thin, fragile shells in which lurked twenty squadrons of battle trained Pilots, including Roger Blackstone and his black, red-and-gold-webbed ship.

They kept their wits about them by playing strategy games, and their reflexes in place by working out with combat gymnastics in their ship’s holds or cabins, against gravity created by virtual singularities induced by their ship’s drive cores. Meanwhile the ships pulsed in their equivalent of isometric training, flexing their weapon systems and honing their focus.

Corinne, Roger’s on-off lover since Tangleknot, was number two in command of Scimitar Squadron. He was a wingman in Sabre Three. All five Sabres were SRS squadrons, not just harder and more ruthless than the others, but trained to fight effectively as individuals as well as in coordination, able to switch modes in a way no other Pilots could.

Sabre Three Leader was Roland Havelock, one of the trio who had quizzed Roger on his first arrival at Tangleknot, and a veteran of one of SRS’s intelligence detachments that were now rolled back into the main regiment. In training manoeuvres, he had shown a practical lateral-thinking approach to taking out enemy vessels that had changed Roger’s entire way of thinking about military engagements.

It was interesting that none of Schenck’s renegades had come from special forces. Admiralty psych specialists had determined that being subverted by the darkness ruled out a Pilot from passing the cognitive-behavioural tests during selection; unfortunately there was no obvious way to use this knowledge against renegades in battle. For now, it was the Zajinet main fleet they were hoping to draw out and engage; but soon enough, it would be time to take the war to former Admiral Schenck and the Pilots who followed him – assuming he was still in charge.

On the ninth day standard, they came: an attack fleet of Zajinet vessels, mean and angular and armoured, reconfigured for war. And their attack mode was even more daring than Roger had expected: bursting in and out of realspace like a storm of stones skipping across black waves, the vacuum blazing as weapon fire cracked it open, magnificent in its violent beauty, if only you were not scared for your life and your comrades, Pilots and ships alike.

Then it was time.

A thousand hidden ships trembled with the need to release their built-up power.

Explosives blew the shells apart, the seventeen deep space fortresses that were merely laminar shells containing the hardest-bitten Pilots of all: 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: