Pham Nuwen shook his head. "No, no, no. The Blight's tactics down here will probably be inferior to yours. Its great advantage is at the Top, where it can control its slaves like fingers on a hand. Its creatures down here are like badly-synched waldoes." Nuwen frowned at something off camera. "No, what we have to fear is its strategic cleverness." His voice suddenly had a detached quality that was more unsettling than the earlier impatience. It wasn't the calm of someone facing up to a threat; it was more the calm of the demented. "One hundred seconds to contact… Group Captain, we have a chance, if you concentrate your forces on the right points." Ravna floated down from the top of the picture, put one hand on the red-head's shoulder. Godshatter, she said he was, their secret edge against the enemy. Godshatter, a Power's dying message; garbage or treasure, who really knew?
Damn. If the other guys are badly-synched waldoes, what does following Pham Nuwen make us? But he motioned Tirolle to mark the targets Nuwen was saying. Ninety seconds. Decision time. Kjet pointed at the red marks Tirolle had scattered through the enemy fleet. "Anything special about those targets, 'Rolle?"
The Dirokime whistled for a moment. Correlations popped up agonizingly slowly on the windows before him. "The ships he's targeting aren't the biggest or the fastest. It's gonna take extra time to position on them." Command vessels? "One other thing. Some of 'em show high real velocities, not natural residuals at all." Ships with ram drives? Planet busters?
"Hm." Svensndot looked at the display just a second more. Thirty seconds and Jo Haugen's ship Lynsnar would be in contact, but not with one of Nuwen's targets. "Get on the comm, Glimfrelle. Tell Lynsnar to back off, retarget." Retarget everything.
The lights that were Aniara fleet slid slowly around the core of the Blighter fleet, searching for their new targets. Twenty minutes passed, and not a few arguments with the other captains. Commercial Security was not built for military combat. What had made Kjet Svensndot's appeal successful was also the cause of constant questioning and countersuggestions. And then there were the threats that came from Owner Limmende's channel: kill the mutineers, death to all those disloyal to the company. The encryption was valid but the tone was totally alien to the mild, profit-oriented Giske Limmende. Everyone could now see that disbelieving Limmende was one correct decision, anyway.
Johanna Haugen was the first to achieve synch with the new targets. Glimfrelle opened the main window on the Lynsnar's data stream: The view was almost natural, a night sky of slowly shifting stars. The target was less than thirty million kilometers from Lynsnar, but about a millisecond out of synch. Haugen was arriving just before or just after the other had jumped.
"Drones away," Haugen's voice said. Now they had a true view of Lynsnar from a few meters away, from a camera aboard one of the first weapons drones launched. The ship was barely visible, a darkness obscuring the stars beyond — a great fish in the depths of an endless sea. A fish that was now giving spawn. The picture flickered, Lynsnar disappearing, reappearing, as the drone lost synch momentarily. A swarm of blue lights spilled from the ship's hold. Weapon drones. The swarm hung by Lynsnar, calibrating itself, orienting on the enemy.
The light faded from around Lynsnar as the drones moving fractionally out of synch in space and time. Tirolle opened a window on a hundred-million klick sphere centered at Lynsnar. The target vessel was a red dot that flickered around the sphere like a maddened insect. Lynsnar was stalking prey at eight thousand times the speed of light. Sometimes the target disappeared for a second, synch almost lost; other times Lynsnar and the target merged for an instant as the two craft spent a tenth of a second at less than a million kilometers remove. What could not be accurately displayed was the disposition of the drones. The spawn diffused on a myriad trajectories, their sensors extended for sign of the enemy ship.
"What about the target, is it swarming back? Do you need back up?" said Svensndot. Tirolle gave a Dirokime shrug. What they were watching was three light-years away. No way he could know.
But Jo Haugen replied, "I don't think my bogie is swarming. I've lost only five drones, no more'n you'd expect from fratricide. We'll see — " She paused, but Lynsnar's trace and signal remained strong. Kjet looked out the other windows. Five of Aniara were already engaged and three had completed swarm deploy. Nuwen looked on silently from Out of Band. The godshatter had had its way, and now Kjet and his people were committed.
And now good news and bad came in very fast:
