Checking his watch he saw that an hour yet remained of the three hours stipulated. Blegg concentrated, slinging his consciousness out in search of the attack ship, and picked up fractured communications . . . missiles on your ten . . . rail-gun . . . Where did it. . . but they said . . . Also fractured images of broken hulls belching oxygen fires into vacuum, with no gravity to give the flames shape . . . growing spherical explosions, glittering trails of wreckage, a man screaming as he fell towards the world, spacesuit intact but beginning to heat up.

‘Blegg,’ came the communication from Yellow Cloud, ‘I’m sorry.’ A U-space signature followed, as the attack ship fled the system.

Returning to the surface of the world, Horace Blegg looked up and discovered that not all those lights up there were stars. He turned and gazed at his two companions.

‘We have a problem,’ he began.

Light, magnesium bright, dispelled the twilight. Looking to his left, Blegg saw only flames now where Tuscor City had been, a wall of fire eating up the intervening terrain.

‘Yeah, that’s a problem,’ the commander had time to say.

Then it was upon them.

- retroact ends -

The moment the King of Hearts surfaced into the real, it came under intense and massive scanning, and thousands of objects began to stir within the gas clouds. King scanned them in return, but the images received remained hazy until some of the same objects began to enter clear vacuum. King expected to see recognizable ships—those that departed the Polity with Erebus—but there were none like that visible. What the AI saw here instead seemed entirely alien. It appeared the attack ship had landed itself in some vast trap and on every level something was trying to grasp hold of it. King opened secure coms and tried to separate out something coherent from the layers of informational assaults.

‘I am not with the Polity,’ sent the attack ship AI.

No single voice replied—it all seemed the maddened howl of a mob.

‘Let me speak with Erebus.’

U-space signatures now, where those mysterious objects gathered—then close by.

Something big dropped into being first, then the surrounding spacial density began to increase sharply as other things arrived. Less than a microsecond afterwards, the AI detected growing U-space interference and the hot touch of targeting lasers, and dropped the King of Hearts into U-space, an instant later surfacing 100,000 miles away.

‘Speak to me—I am not an enemy.’

The reply was a consensual scream, ‘Open completely!’