Enlightenment! Silly fucker.

What had happened to Kian, on the day he was burnt by the mob, had helped to make Dirk the consummate fighter that he was. No other response was logical.

And now, a new and unexpected battle.

His platform continued soaring above the crowd as these odd, irrelevant thoughts swirled through Dirk. They were almost welcome: a symptom of the mind under combat stress. Below him, Pilots were disappearing into fastpath rotations. But he stayed on the platform, soaring over people’s heads, because he wanted to be seen.

Heading for the fight.

‘We need a battle plan.’ This was Admiral Whitwell, his words sounding in Dirk’s ears, his face a tiny virtual holo. ‘Formations to be—’

‘I have one,’ Dirk told him.

Accelerating harder now, the platform, with the docking bay in sight, his bronze ship awaiting him.

‘What is it?’

Dirk grinned as he soared towards her, his ship.

‘We kill the fuckers.’

Her hull was open for him.

Dirk-and-ship flew.

Hard lined and old school, from a time when every flight was intrinsically a mortal risk, they had every confidence in taking down soft-living, younger Pilots, however corrupted they might be, however strong this phenomenon, this so-called darkness.

All military commanders study history. Once, Dirk knew, an admiral called Yamamoto struck with a fleet out of nowhere; and if the place called Pearl Harbor had contained the whole military and civilian population of the targeted power, the war would have ended there.

Then, they had merely woken a sleeping giant. But Schenck had the opportunity to destroy Labyrinth in a single attack; and if she perished, who would mourn or take vengeance?

Even the Zajinets were gone.

**To me, Pilots.**

They flew out to face the invaders.

Chains of explosions blossomed around Labyrinth.

Whipping from side to side, Dirk-and-ship avoided weapons fire – others were perishing all around, some destroyed as they exited docking-caverns – making their assessment: the first objective was to take out the vanguard, Schenck’s long range attackers. Failure meant too few defenders would get clear of Labyrinth, and the attackers’ main fleet would be upon them, and that would be it: the end.

Those who had flown clear were scattered without formation, victorious in simply surviving so far, but more was needed. Most were fighting one-on-one battles, except notably for nine Sabre squadrons, who had not hung around to rally others but simply soared into clear space, before turning to observe and wait until they could make a difference.

Which was now, with Dirk McNamara in command.

**Here and here. All Sabres to attack together.**

Their ack-signals came back as fleeting blips.

**Do it, while I gather up the rest.**

Dirk switched to max-power broadcast, aiming to reach the scattering ships that were not special forces and needed specific commands. Some might think of personal survival, but if Labyrinth fell then renegades would rule, and isolated fugitives would live in fear until they were hunted down. They had to understand what was at stake here.

The SRS squadrons came hurtling in, taking out a leading rank of renegades in simultaneous firebursts, while Dirk blared his message to the largest concentration of survivors:

**This is Dirk McNamara. I need you, Pilots.**

There was incoming fire, but Dirk-and-ship twisted away.

**Labyrinth needs you! Come to me now.**

Something burned across the leading edge of ship-and-Dirk’s starboard wing, enough to hurt but not to slow them down.

**Time to fight, Pilots.**

He curved back towards the battle.

And, miraculously, the other Pilots and their ships accelerated, following their admiral.

Inside Labyrinth, Pilots were still running or fastpath-rotating to their ships. Escape tunnels were forming as Labyrinth reconfigured to provide maximum exit capability, needing the vessels to get clear, as many as possible, before weapons fire started to—

=I’m taking hits.=

This was Labyrinth under direct attack.

While thousands made their panicked way to the docking bays, public broadcasts direct from Admiral Whitwell kept them appraised of the situation outside. There was a pause in that commentary, Whitwell’s voice trailing off, before coming back strongly through every Pilot’s tu-ring.

‘Roger Blackstone is promoted to brevet-Admiral.’

Corinne received that signal as, cursing, she-and-ship flew clear of Labyrinth into a rain of weapons fire that took all their concentration to dodge. Only when they were clear of immediate danger could a part of her mind ask two very obvious questions.

First, what the hell was Whitwell playing at, with such a battlefield promotion for someone so young, even if it was her Roger?

And second, where the bloody hell was Roger?

Up ahead, a makeshift squadron, one of many, was forming: some two dozen ships coming together as directed by Dirk McNamara – now there was a real admiral! – so Corinne-and-ship flew to join them. The backdrop was a vast wall of approaching renegade ships, a hundred thousand in the first plane, four times as many crowding behind, eager and menacing and simply overwhelming in their numbers.

Three ships in the nascent squadron of defenders blew up.

Shit.

Ship-and-Corinne hurtled through to take command, leading the survivors along a helical escape trajectory, an avoidance manoeuvre designed to give them time, but doing nothing to immediately hurt the enemy.

This is bad.

Two more ships exploded, either side of her.

We’re going to lose.

Corinne sent a determined signal to the survivors.

**With me, everyone.**

Her squadron turned to face the enemy.

FORTY-NINE

EARTH, 1989 AD

Gavriela used the joystick to position her wheelchair under her rosewood desk, then opened up the terminal emulation session on her Hewlett Packard while the modem blinked furiously.

She had written code back when most people thought that a ‘computer’ was a woman with a calculating machine. To her, ‘data transmission’ still evoked images of tape reels and motorcycle couriers; but here she was, at home in Chelsea and talking to a mainframe in Kensington, itself allowing passthrough to CERN.

Using her Imperial login, she accessed the astrophysics server that she needed, typing with her frail, blotched hands. Despite her eighty-two years, she had felt herself to be an old woman only since the stroke.

But she still had her mind, and the richness of memory.

       $ cd /astro/geoff/heimdall

       $ grep ‘meson’ *

A wealth of occurrences of the word ‘meson’ appeared. Using the cat command, she examined the contents of the archived research files.

The surprise was that some of the dates were recent, and she realised that her no-longer-young friend Geoff – some of his former PhD students were now supervisors in their own right – had resurrected the old project, or at least the name, while consolidating new cosmic-ray data with the old. She checked, but there were no new readings from the direction of the galactic anti-centre. No one besides her, then, had seen significance in the old data.

Message in a bottle.

Edmund Stafford had brought her up to date, and helped her obtain the necessary permissions on the necessary machines. In the world of computing, everything seemed to change so fast; but it was Stafford’s musing over the new edition of The Selfish Gene that verified her thinking on the best way to send a message into the future.

‘Dawkins is absolutely right in the new foreword,’ Edmund told her. ‘The book became the replacement orthodoxy without controversy among scientists. It was the theme’s reputation that later aroused irate discussion, mostly among the clueless. But I heard a visiting biochemist in the Bird and Baby’ – he meant the pub where Gavriela first met Rupert – ‘call Dawkins a genetic determinist, which is nonsense.’