On one of the tactical channels, the one I had been monitoring for some time, I could see a relayed image of myself… naked, spread-eagled on the bed, the osmosis cuff on my arm and a rising bruise on my rib cage. Diana Philomel, her husband, and one of the goons lay unconscious but alive in the splinter and broken-glass rubble of the room. The other enforcer lay half in the doorway, the top part of his body looking the color and texture of a heavily grilled steak.

“Are you all right, M. Severn?” asked Leigh Hunt, lifting my head and setting a membrane-thin oxygen mask over my mouth and nose.

“Hrrmmmggh,” I said. “Argh.” I swam to the surface of my own senses like a diver coming up too quickly from the deeps. My head hurt. My ribs ached like hell. My eyes were not working perfectly yet, but through the tactical channel, I could see Leigh Hunt give the small twitch of thin lips that I knew passed for a smile from him.

“We’ll help you get dressed,” said Hunt. “Get you some coffee on the flight back. Then it’s back to Government House, M. Severn. You’re late for a meeting with the CEO.”

Space battles in movies and holies had always bored me, but watching the real thing held a certain fascination: rather like seeing live coverage of a series of traffic accidents. Actually, the production values for reality—as had doubtless been the case for centuries—were much lower than for even a moderate-budget holo-drama. Even with the tremendous energies involved, the overwhelming reaction one had to an actual battle in space was that space was so large and humanity’s fleets and ships and dreadnoughts and whatnots were so small.

Or so I thought as I sat in the Tactical Information Center, the so-called War Room, with Gladstone and her military ganders, and watched the walls become twenty-meter holes into infinity as four massive holoframes surrounded us with in-depth imagery and the speakers filled the room with fatline transmissions: radio chatter between fighters, tactical command channels rattling away, ship-to-ship messages on wideband, lasered channels, and secure fatline, and all the shouts, screams, cries, and obscenities of battle which predate any media besides air and the human voice.

It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war.

Gladstone and a handful of her people sat in the middle of all this noise and light, the War Room floating like a gray-carpeted rectangle amidst the stars and explosions, the limb of Hyperion a lapis lazuli brilliance filling half of the north holowall, the screams of dying men and women on every channel and in every ear. I was one of the handful of Gladstone’s people privileged and cursed to be there.

The CEO rotated in her high-backed chair, tapped her lower lip with steepled fingers, and turned toward her military group. “What do you think?”

The seven bemedaled men there looked at one another, and then six of them looked at General Morpurgo. He chewed on an unlighted cigar. “It’s not good,” he said. “We’re keeping them away from the farcaster site… our defenses are holding well there… but they’ve pushed far too far in-system.”

“Admiral?” asked Gladstone, inclining her head a fraction toward the tall, thin man in FORCE:space black.

Admiral Singh touched his closely trimmed beard. “General Morpurgo is correct. The campaign is not going as planned.” He nodded toward the fourth wall, where diagrams—mostly ellipsoids, ovals, and arcs—were superimposed upon a static shot of the Hyperion system.

Some of the arcs grew as we watched. The bright blue lines stood for Hegemony trajectories. The red tracks were Ouster. There were far more red lines than blue.

“Both of the attack carriers assigned to Task Force 42 have been put out of action,” said Admiral Singh. “The Olympus Shadow was destroyed with all hands and the Neptune Station was seriously damaged but is returning to the cislunar docking area with five torchships for escort.”

CEO Gladstone nodded slowly, her lip coming down to touch the top of her steepled fingers. “How many were aboard the Olympus Shadow, Admiral?”

Singh’s brown eyes were as large as the CEO’s, but did not suggest the same depths of sadness. He held her gaze for several seconds. “Forty-two hundred,” he said. “Not counting the Marine detachment of six hundred. Some of those were off-loaded at Farcaster Station Hyperion, so we do not have accurate information on how many were with the ship.”

Gladstone nodded. She looked back at General Morpurgo. “Why the sudden difficulty, General?”

Morpurgo’s face was calm, but he had all but bitten through the cigar clamped between his teeth. “More fighting units than we expected, CEO,” he said. “Plus their lancers… five-person craft, miniature torchships, really, faster and more heavily armed than our long-range fighters… they’re deadly little hornets. We’ve been destroying them by the hundred, but if one gets through, it can make a dash inside fleet defenses and wreak havoc.” Morpurgo shrugged. “More than one’s got through.”

Senator Kolchev sat across the table with eight of his colleagues.

Kolchev swivelled until he could see the tactical map. “It looks like they’re almost to Hyperion,” he said. The famous voice was hoarse.

Singh spoke up. “Remember the scale, Senator. The truth is that we still hold most of the system. Everything within ten AU of Hyperion’s star is ours. The battle was out beyond the Oort cloud, and we’ve been regrouping.”

“And those red… blobs… above the plane of the ecliptic?” asked Senator Richeau. The senator wore red herself; it had been one of her trademarks in the Senate.

Singh nodded. “An interesting stratagem,” he said. “The Swarm launched an attack of approximately three thousand lancers to complete a pincers movement against Task Force 87.2’s electronic perimeter. It was contained, but one has to admire the cleverness of—”

“Three thousand lancers?” Gladstone interrupted softly.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Gladstone smiled. I stopped sketching and thought to myself that I was glad that I had not been the beneficiary of that particular smile.

“Weren’t we told yesterday, in the briefing, that the Ousters would field six… seven hundred fighting units, tops?” The words had been Morpurgo’s. CEO Gladstone swivelled to face the General. Her right eyebrow arched.

General Morpurgo removed the cigar, frowned at it, and fished a smaller piece from behind his lower teeth. “That’s what our intelligence said. It was wrong.”

Gladstone nodded. “Was the AI Advisory Council involved in that intelligence assessment?”

All eyes turned toward Councilor Albedo. It was a perfect projection; he sat in his chair amongst the others, his hands curled on the armrests in a relaxed fashion; there was none of the haziness or see-through common to mobile projections. His face was long, with high cheekbones and a mobile mouth which suggested a hint of a sardonic smile even at the most serious of moments. This was a serious moment.

“No, CEO,” said Councilor Albedo, “the Advisory Croup was not asked to assess Ouster strength.”

Gladstone nodded. “I assumed,” she said, still addressing Morpurgo, “that when the FORCE intelligence estimates came in, they incorporated the Council’s projections.”

The FORCE:ground General glared at Albedo. “No ma’am,” he said. “Since the Core acknowledges no contact with the Ousters, we felt that their projections wouldn’t be any better than our own. We did use the OCS:HTN aggregate AI network to run our assessments.” He thrust the foreshortened cigar back into his mouth. His chin jutted. When he spoke, it was around the cigar. “Could the Council have done better?”

Gladstone looked at Albedo.

The Councilor made a small motion with the long fingers of his right hand. “Our estimates… for this Swarm… suggested four to six thousand fighting units.”