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she was sure that there would be no more delays, Hobbes expended a moment to order a medical response team to the blown bulkhead. The ship would begin acceleration in a few seconds to pull itself away from the manifold, and the medtechs would have to struggle through the pitching corridors in pressure suits. The
Lynx
was about to run stealthy as well, shutting the artificial gravity and other nonessentials for the few seconds until danger passed. It would take the medtechs minutes to reach the stricken crewmen.
    Another of the engineering casualty lights shifted to red. Two lives gone.
    Hobbes forced her attention back to the bridge’s main airscreen display. The long wedge of the
Lynx
‘s primary hull slid back from the radiant circle of the energy-sink manifold, pulling back to interpose the effulgent manifold between frigate and approaching flockers. To conceal the maneuver from the flockers’ sharp-eyed sensors, they were running on cold jets, spraying water from the
Lynx
‘s waste tubes, using their own shit as reaction mass. The ship moved with painful slowness. The primary hull would be a mere two hundred meters out of position when the drones hit—barely its own girth.
    At least Zai had his shield now, Hobbes thought somberly. Two dead, three grievously wounded, and a hull breach all before a single Rix weapon had struck the
Lynx
. But the blazing manifold now floated between the flockers and their target.
    “We’re ready, sir.”
    “Impact in ten seconds,” the watch officer said.
    “Well done, Hobbes.”
    Hobbes felt no flush of pride at the rare praise from her captain. She just hoped her sacrifice of the two young ratings would pay off.
flocker squadron
    The flocker democratic intelligence noticed a change in its target.
    The enemy prime was close, a hair over three seconds from contact. Absolute time was moving very slowly, however, compared with the speed of the squadron’s thought. The laser pulses with which the flockers exchanged data—the connections that formed their limited compound intellect—moved almost instantly up and down the tightly spaced formation. Squadrons were often spread out over thousands of cubic kilometers, distances which slowed the mechanics of decision making. But this flocker group was so compact that thought moved at lightning speeds; the intellect had plenty of time to observe as the situation evolved over these final, luxurious seconds before impact.
    Despite their quick intellect, the flockers couldn’t see very well in this formation. The straight column lacked a parallax view, and the intense radiation from the enemy prime’s energy-sink manifold had almost blinded the forward flockers, making the center of the manifold—where the prime must be—a dark patch against a vibrant sky.
    But why was the manifold already expelling energy? Of the Rix fleet, only the battlecruiser itself could have delivered this much energy to the target, and it was more than eight million kilometers out of range. The flockers suspected that the enemy prime had fired upon its own sink. A bizarre occurrence, this early attempt at self-destruction, sufficiently strange that the squadron’s hardwired tactical library offered no answers as to what it might mean.
    The flocker formation felt blind, and yearned to spread wider. Without parallax, it had no multi-viewpoint reconstruction of the target to call upon.
    The flockers voted. Laser flashes of debate and decision flickered up and down the line for almost a full second before they decided to expend a few more milligrams of acceleration mass per individual. This close to the enemy prime, there appeared to be little sand left to avoid, after all. The squadron broke its tight column, expanding to a few meters with width over the next half second.
    With this new parallax view, the squadron’s group intelligence realized that the manifold was shifting.
    The glowing disk—4,500 kilometers away and rushing toward the flockers at 3,200