Exactly eight and a tenth light days in from the position the Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time had held while negotiating its permission to approach, space all around the blue dot on the screen scintillated abruptly as a thousand hidden devices of a dozen different types suddenly erupted into life in a precisely ordered sequence of destruction; in the real-space holo sphere it looked like a miniaturised stellar cluster suddenly bursting into existence all around the blue dot. The trace disappeared instantly inside a brilliant sphere of light. In the hyperspace holo sphere, the dot lasted a little longer; slowed down, it could be seen firing some munitions back for a microsecond or so, then it too disappeared in the wash of energies bursting out of the real-space skein and into hyperspace in twin bulging plumes.

The lights in the accommodation space flickered and dimmed as monumental amounts of power suddenly diverted to the rock’s own long-range weaponry.

The Commander left the comm channel to the traitor ship open. Its own course had altered the instant the defence weaponry had been unleashed; now its course was hooked, changing colour from red to blue and curving up and round and vectoring in hyperspace too, looping round to the point where the slowly fading and dissipating radiation shells marked the focus of the system’s annihilatory power.

A flat screen to the Commander’s left wavered, as if some still greater power surge had sucked energy even from its protected circuits. A message flashed up on it:

~ Missed, you fuckers! the legend read.

‘What?’ the Commander said.

The display flashed once and came clear again.

~ Commander; the Attitude Adjuster here again. As you may have gathered, we have failed.

‘What? But . . !’

~ Keep all defence and sensory systems at maximum readiness; ramp the sensor arrays up to significant degradation point in a week; we shall not need them beyond then.

‘But what happened? We got it!’

~ I shall move to plug the gap the attack left in our defences. Ready all the cleared ships for immediate awakening; I may have to rouse them within a day or two. Complete the tests on the Displacers; use a real ship if you have to. And run a total level-zero systems check of your own equipment; if the ship was able to insert a message into your command desk it may have been able to carry out more pertinent mischief therein.

The Commander slammed a limb end down on the desk. ‘What is going on?’ he roared. ‘We got the bastard, didn’t we?’

~ No, Commander. We ‘got’ some sort of shuttle or module. Somewhat faster and better equipped than the average example such a ship would normally carry, but possibly constructed en route with such a ruse in mind. Now we know why its approach appeared so politely leisurely.

The Commander peered into the holo spheres, juggling with magnifications and field-depths. ‘Then where the hell is it?’