Lieutenant Lucero indicated a touch pad. "And you can make gestures on this to control the swarm, but you have to—"

Tan slapped his hand on the pad and twiddled his fingers about. Outside, the swarm of spider planes jerked and shifted away from the orbiter.

"Right. Don't do that. If you move the swarm too much that way, they'll fall behind. At our speed, we have to keep them moving with the orbiter or else—"

Tan rolled a handful of dice, then toggled several console switches.

"Those, uh... don't actually control the swarm. They—"

Tan rolled more dice and hit more buttons. The swarm outside lurched.

"Stop that. You just turned off the... stop!" Lucero pushed Tan aside and undid several of Tan's adjustments. Tan ignored him and lit a cigarette.

"There's no smoking in here," Captain Rivera said.

"Dice say smoke," Tan muttered. He didn't look away from the controls.

"Okay," said Lucero. "Don't touch any of these. If you want manual control, just use these two pads. You can—"

Tan rolled dice and flipped switches Lucero just forbid.

"Jesus! Do you want the spiders crashing into each other? Leave the Autoform on. Look. The enemy swarm is firing at them now. Just... Leave the Goddamn Autoform on."

"Captain?" Josephine prompted.

"Lieutenant!" said Rivera. "Let him be."

"Fine! Just... you're not even shooting back. Here." The officer flipped one switch. "Do whatever! It's only our lives." He stepped back.

Outside the Venezia, the spider swarms were now engaging one another. Three hundred spider planes moved forward as one, firing upon a swarm of sixty drones that swerved about like drunken bees. Tan was losing planes every second. At least they fired back, but for every enemy spider that dropped, Tan lost six.

He rolled the dice, dropped his hand onto the control pad, and flopped it about like a dying fish. The swarm lurched, moving tangentially from both the opposing swarm and the Venezia. Several spider planes bumped one another. They were now out of range of the enemy swarm.

"What are you doing?" yelled Lucero.

The enemy swarm broke in two. One swarm pursued Tan's planes, the other continued its push against wind resistance to reach the Venezia. By now, the defending swarm could never catch up in time. Nothing stood between the Venezia and over a hundred enemy spiders.

Tan rolled again, dragging hard on his cigarette. This time, he merely kept one hand laying on the touch pad. His swarm kept moving tangentially, moving up windstream of the enemy ships. The enemy swarm pursuing them moved to get in between.

Lucero had to walk away. Tan's erratic behavior was too much for him to watch, but the mystery proved worse. He marched back.

Again, Tan rolled with his free hand. As he read the dice, he moved to lift his cigarette from his lips. It slipped into his lap. He jerked, sliding his hand across the control pad as he squirmed, snatching for his smoke.

The spider swarm veered. They hurled directly toward the enemy orbiters. No longer moving against the atmosphere, they accelerated wildly relative to the Venezia. The pursuing swarm easily took advantage of this, adjusting course to speed alongside Tan's swarm. They synchronized completely. The enemy swarm tore Tan's to shreds. Dozens of ships fell per second.

"No!" Lucero lunged for the controls. Tan batted him away while fishing for his cigarette. It didn't matter.

The swarm passed the enemy orbiters. There were only eleven left at that moment, and they shot by so quickly that they didn't have time to shoot once. Just like that, the swarm careened off into the distance, out of the fight for good.

Except Tan's drones hadn't had Autoform on. They had no course correction, making them nothing more than expensive meteors. The spider drones guarding the enemy orbiters easily navigated around the expensive shrapnel. However, the orbiters relied upon their deflection repulsers to push projectiles out of the way, and the spiders were traveling far too fast and had far too much mass for them to deflect them with 100% certainty. As chance would have it, two spider drones had collision courses too direct to be fully deflected.

They each glanced an orbiter. At their speeds, it was enough. Explosions of steel and pressurized gas emitted from both. The ships careened off course. One spiraled toward earth. The other crunched into another ship, causing it to explode outright. The resulting shower of shrapnel was too dense for the other ships to do anything about. One got hit on the nose with debris. It's hull peeled like a banana skin. The remaining two ships took light damage to their wings, but it was enough for their ships to drop from their course.

The enemy spider drones were now within range of the Venezia. Any of them could have fired, but none did. Winnie saw nothing but chaos inside the surviving three ships as the crews struggled to evacuate. The confirm order for the swarm strike went ignored. Within moments, the enemy swarms drifted passed the Venezia, they would not be catching back up.

"What?" said Lucero. He stared in astonishment. "Three down and... Jesus. You actually managed to—" He checked again. "They're gone. We're out."

Several men cheered. A few clapped Tan on the back.

Tan took out another cigarette, lit it with the butt of his old one, and ignored everyone.