A thousand Pilots were jumping in time to pounding music on the stretch of boulevard before them.

‘Doomed to enjoy stuff like wild, uncontrollable sex,’ Corinne went on, sliding her hand down Roger’s abdomen, while the pandemonium of celebration continued. ‘How awful, that we just can’t help ourselves.’

‘Bloody hell, Corinne.’

‘Simply tragic.’

‘People can see—’

‘Jealousy’ – she licked his ear – ‘won’t help them.’

‘Ayee ah . . . Probably not.’

Kissing her deeply, he tumbled them both through a fast-path rotation into an isolated pocket of reality, a slowtime layer with respect to mean-geodesic, which meant they could take for ever and still be back in moments. And afterwards they were, back in the victory festival, in the midst of celebration, satisfied and exhausted.

Perhaps a few among the crowd noticed their reappearance and grinned for a moment.

Roger kissed Corinne softly. ‘You’re pretty wonderful.’

‘Likewise.’ She tapped her turing, and frowned at a her-eyes-only display. ‘Listen, we’ve been committed to non-commitment, or something like that, since Tangleknot. Do you think we could ever—?’

Scarlet flashing light overlaid Borges Boulevard and the dancing crowds, and for two or three seconds it appeared to be part of the triumphal pageant, but then the low throbbing of alarm tocsins caused the music to die away. For those who could hear, there was the voice of Labyrinth itself, more urgent than ever before.

=An invasion fleet approaches.=

How many thousands of Pilots exchanged stunned looks in that moment? How many cursed the trickery of Zajinets, those alien betrayers that should have been fought against since the first contact with Earth, before they gained a foothold in the human dominions . . .?

=They are Pilots. Renegades led by Boris Schenck.=

Corinne shut down her private display.

‘There can’t be more than two hundred of them,’ she said. ‘If Schenck thought our fleet would still be occupied with the Zajinets, he’s going to have one hell of a—’

=Half a million ships at least. And there may be many more.=

Schenck was no fool, then.

Roger took Corinne’s hands in his.

‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘I’m not ready.’

Had he realised this was farewell, he would have chosen different words. But he was summoning a dangerous rotation, and as he released her hands and looked into her jet-on-jet eyes for the last time, the fastpath engulfed him, spacetime swirling; and then came ejection – so very dangerous – into mid-air above that most beautiful hull, strong and black, webbed with red and gold. She was already responding to his presence.

I’m—

Falling through the chill air of the great docking bay, several thousand ships inside its concave expanse. Falling towards the dark opening melting into existence in her hull.

Caught you.

Tendrils had snapped out to slow his descent and guide him inside. Then she was sealed back up, ready to fly.

We don’t know where to engage the—

That’s not where we’re going.

They plunged into full conjunction trance, more deeply than ever before. Roger’s first thought had been that he was not ready; but together, as one, ship-and-Roger were clear on what they needed to do.

Ultra hellflight, then.

More than that. The graveyard.

Already they were turning away from the docking promenade and tumbling towards the vast cliff-like wall that led outside. It might have appeared dangerous, but Labyrinth knew everything. An opening appeared as Roger-and-ship began to soar.

I love you.

Golden space burst into being all around, the infinitesimal-point energy of the continuum itself providing power for glorious flight, magnificent and infinite. Distant black stars were inky fractal snowflakes, elegant and fine, while curlicued nebulae were strewn like fresh rivulets of blood. This was existence at its most beautiful, magnificent and heartbreaking.

They had done it once before, Roger-and-ship, making a more-than-hellflight near the insertion context of the real-space galactic core, a dangerous place from which to enter mu-space. This time the destination was less critical, granting more freedom in their choice of geodesic; but duration was everything, the effort awful and agonising, and if they survived they would be forever changed, while if they died it would be simply one more Pilot and ship lost, and in the imminent fight there would be so many deaths: that was obvious.

I would give my life for Labyrinth.

Once that had been Roger’s thought alone; now it belonged to both of them.

Half a million renegades, and maybe more.

The past four years, or perhaps ship-and-Roger’s entire existence, led up to this.

Time to prove ourselves.

Hellflight, and more.

Schenck’s timing was better than first appeared, for the fleet was depleted: exhausted from battle, some gone to recuperate on realspace worlds, most celebrating in Labyrinth, their determination low. At the same time, their ships remained massed together, one of the very few occasions when such a huge number would be located in the same place, therefore a target for a single, massive, all-out strike from nowhere.

Sen sen no sen: seizing the initiative.

It seemed Schenck was a better war admiral than anyone had reckoned. Far better. And with half a million ships! Even more, if the approaching force was just a vanguard . . .

Ships fled from Labyrinth in panic.

Abandoning her.

Dirk McNamara was disadvantaged by the stupid ceremony he was engaged in, on a floating platform surrounded by holostreamers in the midst of several thousand revellers, celebrating one victory while innocently setting themselves up for defeat by Schenck and his unexpected all-out strike, and with a fleet that was at least thousands of times larger than it should have been, perhaps even greater, and how the hell had the bastard managed that?

Not far from the ceremony’s location, some five subjective years previously – though decades by mean-geodesic time – Dirk had killed a previous Admiral Schenck: that odious, treacherous fucker who had not been able to back down from a duel, and had nearly won through the most devious of tricks.

Covert femtoscopic weapons had been floating in mid-air, set as booby-traps by Schenck inside hidden layers of reality, programmed to take out Dirk by manifesting directly inside his heart and brain while he fought; but Dirk’s perceptions were finely tuned to danger always, and he had read deception in the bastard’s eyes and outmanoeuvred him, before taking his revenge in the most appropriate way: causing spacetime to slide apart in shards, wrenching Schenck apart, while twisting the maze of rotations hard, to the mathematical limit.

The duration of Schenck’s dying was infinite, literally for ever.

Too bad Dirk had not thought of killing the entire family.

He tapped his tu-ring.

Calling for my mother. Some hero.

But Ro McNamara was the true and legendary First Pilot as well as First Admiral, and if she made an appearance, she could be a figurehead to rally morale, not to mention an aggressive tactician who fought just as he did, though perhaps without that edge of madness that took him through when rational tactics failed.

There was no reply to his ping, though, which meant that even Labyrinth had not thought of – or was not capable of – rousing Mother by reaching into whatever layer of reality she was using to skip through time, dipping into mean-geodesic timeflow like a skipping stone touching a lake. She and he both, of course, but by now she might be biologically younger than her own son.

Sons, if Kian still lived, the soft-hearted bastard. Silly fucker wanted everyone to love each other. Once, he had even said we should spend time among the Siganthians, getting to know their ways – that was a long time ago, before the place was declared a hellworld – because the aliens might be strange but they were robust and in their own fashion spiritual: fearsome to non-metallic lifeforms, but not to be shunned out of fear, rather embraced in mutual enlightenment.