“Time for you to make some noise, Oczar,” Marx said. “Extend your sensor posts to full length and activity.”

“Up to a hundred, sir.”

Marx looked down as Oczar’s craft grew, a spider with twenty splayed legs emerging suddenly from a seed, a time-lapse of a flower relishing sunlight. The interceptors around Oczar grew more detailed as his craft became fully active, bathing their shapes with ultrasonic pulses, microlaser distancing, and millimeter radar.

Already, the dense cloud of interceptors was beginning to react. Like a burst of pollen caught by a sudden wind, they shifted toward Oczar’s craft.

“We’re going through blind and silent,” Marx said to the other pilots. “Find a gap and push toward it hard. We’ll be cutting main power.”

“One tangle, sir,” Oczar said. “Two.”

“Feel free to defend yourself.”

“Yes, sir!”

On Marx’s status board, the counterdrones in Oczar’s magazine counted down quickly. The man launched a pair as he confirmed the order, then another a few seconds later. The interceptors must be all over him. Marx glanced down at Oczar’s craft. The bilateral geometries of its deployed sensor array were starting to twist, burdened by the thrashing defenders. Through the speakers, Oczar grunted with the effort of keeping his craft intact.

Marx raised his eyes from the battle and peered forward. The remainder of the squadron was reaching the densest rank of the interceptor cloud. Oczar’s diversion had thinned it somewhat, but there was still scant space to fit through.

“Pick your hole carefully,” Marx said. “Get some speed up. Retraction on my mark. Five…four…three…”

He let the count fade, concentrating on flying his own craft. He had aimed his Intelligencer toward a gap in the interceptors, but one had drifted into the center of his path. Marx reversed his rotor and boosted power, driving his craft downward.

The drone loomed closer, lured by the whine of his surging main rotor. He hoped the extra burst would be enough.

“Retract now!” he ordered. The view blurred and faded as the sensor posts on the ship furled. In seconds, Marx’s vision went dark.

“Cut your main rotors,” he commanded.

The small craft would be almost silent now, impelled only by the small, flywheel-powered stabilizer wing at their rear. It would push them forward until it ran down. But the four surviving craft were already beginning to fall.

Marx checked the altimeter’s last reading: 174 centimeters. At that height, the craft would take at least a minute before they hit the ground. Even with its sensor array furled and main rotor stalled, in a normal-density atmosphere an intelligence craft fell no faster than a speck of dust.

Indeed, the Intelligencers were not much larger than specks of dust, and were somewhat lighter. With a wingspan of a single millimeter, they were very small craft indeed.

Master Pilot Jocim Marx, Imperial Naval Intelligence, had flown microships for eleven years. He was the best.