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“I am not familiar with your unit, Major.”

Sorannan laughed stiffly. “It’s newly commissioned, General—sorry you couldn’t be here for the christening.”

“If your intentions are not hostile—”

“It is not that we have any more love for you now than when we last faced you,” said Sorannan. “But we won’t fight to defend our enslavers.”

“Heave to, and you won’t be harmed.”

“Oh, no,” Sorannan said. “We’ve been here too long already—nearly thirteen years on a nine-month detail. No, General. This is good-bye. We are taking back what is ours, starting with our freedom and these ships. We leave the Yevetha to you.”

He pressed the middle and third buttons on the wand, and an unjammable hypercomm signal leaped across the emptiness to slave circuits buried deep in the command architecture of every Imperial warship deployed at N’zoth and its daugher worlds across the cluster.

Autopilots calculated jump vectors, and hyperdrive motivators called on the immense power of solar ionization reactors. Space trembled, twisted, and yawned open around the accelerating warships.

Moments later, Black Sword Command’s withdrawal from Koornacht Cluster was finally complete.

Cheering broke out on the bridge of Intrepid as the heart of the Yevethan fleet vanished from the tracking displays, but A’baht quickly put a stop to it.

“We have no way of verifying what we just heard. Those ships could jump out half a light-year and return on our flank,” he said. “Moreover, there are still forty-four T-types out there, and none of them have broken off yet. This is not over.”

There was very little time left before the fragmented Yevethan formation and the New Republic fleet met. A’baht used most of it to broadcast another appeal for surrender, directing it at the individual captains of the approaching vessels, emphasizing the superior numbers of his force.

But there was no reply, and no change in the Yevethan fleet’s disposition. Whatever orders Nil Spaar had given before disappearing were apparently still in force. That, more than anything, convinced A’baht that they had not seen the last of the Imperial contingent.

“I cannot believe that a unit that has been decimated—no, worse than that—before the battle begins, which has lost its senior commanders before a shot has been fired, and which faces a vastly superior force, would not collapse,” the general said. “By all manner of reason, those commanders should be thinking of surrender or retreat.”

“Well, they’re not,” said Colonel Corgan. “Targets eighteen, twenty, and twenty-one just opened fire on the phantom elements of Task Force Token.”

“So I am led to conclude that none of those things has happened,” said A’baht. “Their force has not been decimated, only divided. Their command structure remains intact—and they have other forces not yet committed to the battle zone. Therefore we can infer that these are low-value assets meant to occupy us, to disrupt our formations, and to soften us up for a planned counterstrike.”

“I concur that the evidence can be read that way,” said Colonel Corgan. “So how do we play it now, General?”

A’baht studied the tactical display. “We must neutralize this force without compromising our unit integrity or our mobility,” he said at last. “Pass the word as follows: Hold back the bombers. Keep the patrol screens close, and launch the A-wing interceptors only in response to direct threat from other little birds. Our operational unit for this engagement is to be the fleet squadron, and squadron commanders now have operational autonomy. All units, pursue, engage, and destroy all targets of opportunity. Since they insist on a fight, we’ll give ’em one.”

“What about the hostages, sir?”

A’baht shook his head. “Pray for them, Colonel. That’s all we can do.”

A great conflict is nothing more than the aggregate of many small struggles, and so it was with the Battle of N’zoth. There was no single vantage point from which its entirety could be grasped—not even the observation deck of