Among the living-crystal Haxigoji were crystalline Seekers, entangled in constant communication with their brothers and sisters, remaining alert for hostile feelers along the hyperdimensions, for the Anomaly had also enjoyed a million years in which to prepare: the darkness was not without allies among the baryonic-matter entities of the galaxy.

The location where the jet ended was designated Shadow Gate, and unless something unexpected occurred, this was where the battle would begin. For all the timescales involved in reaching this moment, no one expected this to be an extended campaign: this was a single confrontation, with everything at stake.

When Schenck’s renegades of distant memory had tried such a strategy in a different universe, they had failed and died; luckily they were the enemy. Here in realspace, Kenna and her fellow war leaders intended to do better.

The first test was upon them.

It was darkness with structure: a three-dimensional moving maze of invisible matter and energy falling upon the spotters and the lead warriors of Roger’s army: phalanxes of crystalline fighters floating in space, some in human form, others morphed into dart-like shapes, all trained to lay down devastating fire by cracking apart raw vacuum, by letting rip with zero-point energy.

The greater darkness was here.

—Now.

Warriors attacked.

Explosions and death were everywhere.

Around the fiery end of that great spindle, the galactic jet emanating from the core, spacetime burned, and gamma- and X-radiation spurted like blood, while squadron after squadron threw themselves against the dark, complex structures of the enemy: a ghost creature or creatures wide enough to devour stars, crawling along its black bridge from who-knew-what dark-matter hell, pushing implacably on into the precious galaxy, advancing despite its wounds and losses, for the squadrons were damaging it, that was certain, even as they died.

An honourable death is still extinction.

—Fall back.

Roger had delayed as long as he dared, but to lose his entire vanguard was not his purpose. A huge mass of darkness, all right angles and hollows, was growing large before him; standing on his shield, he focused along his spear and used it to direct his vacuum-splitting beam, gamma-rays and sapphire light spilling everywhere. Then he tipped back, whirling through a vertical half-circle, crouched on his shield as he accelerated hard.

Angular dark extrusions grew on either side, soundless yet seeming to clatter into place, attempting to enclose him; but he swung his glowing spear and spacetime shimmered and the darkness shrivelled back, unable to touch him as he flew to rejoin his retreating army.

Angular extensions of darkness were expanding to follow but that was all right because they had hoped for something like this.

—Having fun, brother?

—Wonderful, sis.

Freya’s death squadrons came hurtling in from Roger’s left, screaming out of spacetime distortions like sapphire starbursts, and they tore through the darkness-extrusions, breaking them apart. Complex angular structures of non-matter tumbled off, twisted and bent, apparently inert.

Suddenly they returned to life, those fragments; but Freya had foreseen the possibility and a hundred more squadrons followed, taking the smaller structures apart, wielding zero-point energy with exactitude, obliterating the enemy offshoots.

A partial victory, so early on, built confidence.

But the greater mass of darkness was still advancing.

Magni’s people materialised then, glowing blue and directing destructive energy back along the length of the darkness, but still it came. And then space was glowing the colour of sapphires, and the best part of a hundred worlds shivered into existence, transported by an unimaginable spacetime distortion.

It was all the hellworlds, linked together and teleporting into place.

The Anomaly joining the fight.

And it reached out through the hyperdimensions into the crystalline warriors’ minds, eager to absorb them. It was Magni who sent the desperate call.

—Harij! We need your army now.

Seekers were everywhere among the squadrons, but this threat was something that Harij’s people needed to face together. In his original life, Harij had been the first to break Anomalous links; now his Seeker battalions fell upon the hellworlds, disrupting the distortions that were subverting human warriors and killing Haxigoji.

They died in their millions, those diving Seekers; but in doing so, they split apart the links, separating hellworld from hellworld. Finally, they reached a critical phase transition in the Anomaly’s destruction, like a neurotoxin preventing the chemical flow of thought; and every one of those planets exploded in time, but at such a cost.

The Anomaly was dead for ever.

And so were five million Seekers or more. Kenna sent out her questing thoughts with increasing desperation, but no answering resonance occurred, no response to the ping.

No trace of Harij.

Around the glowing line of the galactic jet, Roger and Gavriela and Magni’s forces were falling back, retreating towards the galactic centre, employing ever more frequent hyperdimensional jumps as the great mass of darkness chased them: somehow the dark vanguard dragged itself faster than lightspeed towards the core.

—Break off now, Kenna commanded from a distance.

She turned to her massed battalions: nine billion crystal warriors blazing with reflected light, floating in formations like quivering arrowheads, close to the centre of the galaxy they were sworn to defend, while a billion suns shimmered all around.

—This is our time, warriors.

Nine billion hands raised nine billion spears.

—Now.

They streamed out along the galactic jet.

*

Warfare is fractal, self-similar at every scale, a truth Kenna and Roger, as one-time Pilots in the ancient past – and Freya, given her own mu-space origin – had always known, deeply and intuitively.

To follow a skirmish or a continent-wide campaign is to understand geometry and weakness, aggression and failure, in a way that translates to two creatures fighting with claws and teeth, all the way up to a battle whose field is a galaxy, the fate of billions of stars and baryonic-matter life itself the prize.

But simulation and practice, even across a million years, were not the real thing: this was many times worse and more horribly exhilarating than any had imagined, even Kenna with her knowledge of other destinies, of infinitely many modes of failure.

The battle raged along the fifty-thousand-lightyear length of the galactic jet, and it was magnificent as much as it was tragic; because everybody dies, but how many get a chance to spend everything in a cause and setting such as this? Forget mythology: they were gods, and they knew it; and everything boiled down to this: defeat the vastest of enemies or let the galaxy perish.

Kenna would not allow that to happen, and neither would her warriors.

They gave their lives by the million, by the billion.

But still it came, the darkness.

—Fall back. Disperse.

No ruse this time: not the order Kenna had wanted to give. It advanced like a galaxy-devouring worm along the pathway defined by the glowing jet: the titanic darkness that was angular and complex, perhaps infinitely so, pouring onwards towards the centre. Legions and battalions of Kenna’s finest warriors were beaten back and fell away, meaning only one thing: the beginning of the end.

Shimmers of blue grew around the darkness, surrounding it. Then new, unexpected forces spilled out into view: crystalline creatures with jagged wings, angular and strange, a billions-strong army great enough to change the momentum of the battle, led by the war leader who had been missing from Kenna’s awareness since Roger’s vanguard engaged the enemy at Shadow Gate.