++Follow me, curl ura nine.++

Ura meant reverse, and ack-blips sounded from his wing as they hauled back through the demanding trajectory, but the payback was there: some twenty Zajinets coming in from the flank of Scimitar, and Roger’s wing broke through the enemy formation, killing only one but disrupting their attack, and that was enough to—

++Thanks, lover.++

—let Corinne focus a counter-strike and lead her Pilots around to outflank the Zajinets in turn—

++Anytime, sweetheart.++

—and she took out two of them single-handed and then Roger was busy with another flight of Zajinets hurtling this way. Just as he was beginning to wonder if they were being strategically overwhelmed despite individual success, a signal blared in every Pilot’s ship, the code they had been waiting for.

++BUG OUT NOW.++

Time to go.

Golden space burst into being.

Now they flew hard, eight hundred and two surviving ships, the tally automatic amid mutual signal-pings, and Roger was appalled because he had not realised they had lost so many, and the Zajinets would pay for this.

Those two thousand and more Zajinets that tore into mu-space behind them, accelerating.

Faster.

There was no need for a command because every Pilot-and-ship knew exactly what they had to do, which was pull ahead of their pursuers, and never mind that this was not the full fleet they had intended to face, because this was dangerous enough, with far too many of their comrades dead already, and Roger-and-ship put everything they had into simple flight, because the only way to achieve revenge was to live.

Their pursuers were holding fire but gaining on them.

Ahead, through the analogue of visual sensors, they could see the growing, infinitely complex form of Mandelbrot Nebula, crimson and violet and magnificent. Soon enough the Zajinets would realise—

++Scatter now!++

It was an all-squadrons command that might have come from any of the Pilots because that was how they operated, hierarchies abandoned at convenience, a mode of operation once more proven right because without that signal many of them might have died.

Their formation spat apart as if exploding into a sparse cloud.

Enemy!

I see them.

The realisation howled through ship-and-Roger.

They’re everywhere.

The visual illusion was this: in the reaches of golden space, clouds of tiny dots were growing, while from the flanks came shoals of vessels on arcing trajectories, and huge ships tore into place above and below; but this was illusion, born of the multiple layers of reality the Zajinets came in on, self-similar spacetimescapes whose scales differed by orders of magnitude, and to navigate so many vessels to come together at the same time was a magnificent feat.

Then there was only awe as the massed Zajinets showed themselves in normal scale, a huge curving face that dominated a third of golden space, an image whose every pixel was a massive warship, their configuration a shallow bowl: a concave whose focus was the eight hundred surviving Pilots and their ships.

The Zajinets must have numbered millions.

++Oh, crap.++

It was an open signal, but not the kind that anyone would reprimand. The answer came from Havelock.

++Nebula. Now.++

The expanding cloud of Pilots-and-ships arced towards the nebula, desperate now, and in the first few seconds the rearmost died; but then they were into their hellflight geodesics, and no one was going to target them during hellflight unless they accelerated to a significant percentage of the Pilots’ velocity: a huge task for an immense fleet, and not an order that a Zajinet admiral would give, not that anyone knew how their command structure operated, or even if they had one in the sense that humans would—

They’re following.

Unbelievable.

That vast mass of Zajinet vessels, a million armoured ships, was on the move.

And look how fast they are.

Oh, shit.

Once the signal was given, the Zajinet fleet clearly had no problems with inertia, because they were already accelerating hard, and the question was whether they could attain hell-flights from such a formation, and the answer was probably no but they were pursuing hard, and it would take only a percentage of their number to forge ahead onto hellflight trajectories and the Pilots would be overwhelmed; but then space went crimson and the nebula was open and Roger laughed aloud because the rules were about to change.

Ver nær okr, berserkrinn!

Vit erum berserkr.

Blood trickled from mouth and ears and eyes as ship-and-Roger pulled into the hardest turn they had ever attempted because there was no way they were going to flee from the next part and never mind the millions of vessels now face-on and approaching fast because this was the moment.

Nine bursts of activity around branches of the nebula, and perhaps the Zajinets had time to wonder what was happening before nine attack fleets, fifty thousand vessels in each, came streaming out of Mandelbrot Nebula intent on destruction.

The vanguards were veterans, hardened by combat, drawing the first-timers in their wake, heading for the kill; and though they were outnumbered, the Pilots had an advantage the Zajinets could never match.

Dirk McNamara commanded them.

They tore through the Zajinets like swords leaving wounds of burning fire, lines of exploding vessels, and the quantum mentality that enabled the xeno fleet to handle spacetime ambiguity did not allow decisive reaction to the deadly geometry of the Pilots’ attack.

The enemy configuration tumbled to a relative halt, firing in confusion and hitting their own kind as much as Pilots, maybe more; and Roger grinned, somehow understanding the overall picture even as he-and-ship fought their own war – there – as Zajinet after Zajinet – again, yes – died before them; and while duration became relative neurochemically and geometrically, the whole thing seemed both slow and fast, so that the reversal was a sudden surprise.

The Zajinets turned away.

Just like that: every one of them.

++Take them all.++

Dirk wanted no survivors. But why had they made themselves so vulnerable? Hundreds, maybe thousands of the Zajinet fleet perished by the simple act of turning, but there was no way this could be a trap to draw the Pilots in because there was nowhere for the mass of Zajinets to go, not without Dirk’s ships hunting them down and destroying them all.

So why?

Doesn’t matter.

Roger-and-ship let loose with everything, killing two more Zajinets from the rear.

Then a massive comms signal resonated inside every Pilot ship.

<<We leave you to your darkness.>>

Ship and Roger continued firing because this had to be a trick, for no Zajinet had ever communicated in such a singular way before; but then hundreds of thousands of Zajinet vessels revolved inwards in a way that later no one could ever recreate, not even the Admiralty’s most prominent scientists; and the Zajinets slipped out of sight.

Every one of them.

Roger-and-ship, though it was dangerous in the outer reaches of the nebula, dipped out of mu-space, black realspace shivering into existence all around but devoid of ships, other than the few Pilots doing the same. They transited back and broadcast their news of what they hadn’t seen.

The Zajinets were gone.

To neither known universe.

Holy shit.

How could they do that?

It was a question every Pilot would ask themselves and each other, over and over in war rooms and bars and private homes of Labyrinth, for years and decades to come. The debate would be enduring and never entirely resolved, and kept secret, like so much else, from the ordinary humanity of realspace who would question, from time to time, the non-appearance of Zajinets upon their worlds.