Chapter 36:

i see you

…IT IS MY RECOMMENDATION THAT WE ACCEPT THESE TERMS.

US

US

come here. let me touch you. let me hurt you. let me kill you

[falls face-first onto keyboard]Dun wanna edit no more... wanna sleep...So, unfortunately this month - due to being massively shitty and stressful - I wasn't able to get new chapters of new work up like I had planned. However, here on the... tenth hour, I have the next installment ofThis covers most of what I wanted to touch on: Grace and Allyria, Kebrak Daun and the battle of Node 05. I only got about half of the material I wanted in, but the restbe covered, though I have a couple different ideas on how to proceed for that. Regardless, this closes off the third arc of this story, moving us on to the final sequence of events and's endgame comes closer. I hope you all enjoy this chapter! It's bigger than I thought it would be (during editing, I put in another 3-4 pages of material), so it's a doozy.Hope you enjoy!In this chapter: the rise of the machinesComing up: Her hand reaches out.Corpses drifted across the void, the plundered remnants of victims and the scavenged dead alike; a young star’s light shone across hull fragments that ranged from inches to kilometers across. Many of these wrecks had already been thoroughly salvaged, their dissected hulls excavated of anything valuable from FTL systems to personal weaponry and armour, their stripped carcasses left as sources of raw materials or as part of a tableau that spanned millions of kilometers. Other hulks had yet to be harvested, drifting in lethargic orbit around the nameless star, waiting until there was a need for them – left alive, like the paralyzed meals a parasitoid wasp left for its offspring.Tenders continued their operations, unknowing and uncaring about anything beyond their simple routines, guiding larger mining vessels through the wreckage, adjusting and positioning munitions, deploying sensor platforms and taking care of the minutiae that the system needed. There were only a handful, but Node 05 had never needed more than that.A cluster of maintenance drones peeled away from the dead, returning to their host vessels. They had completed their final checks and were being re-routed for other tasks.lay in silent anticipation, Violet Five using laser links to speak to her/their ship-selves. She/they watched the heavens, knowing that her/their kin were out there, cloaked and waiting as she/they were. Sunward, the construction site continued its work, producing an energy signature that the Enemy could not have failed to miss, and a lure that they must be drawn to. Violet Five remained quiet, talking to her selves in the cybernetic equivalent of schizophrenic hushed whispers.The AI had analyzed the defensive plans of her kin and the measures taken in the weeks since the operation had begun. Her/their assessment was a simple one:. Not enough ships, not enough defensive installations, not enough anything.That was an irrelevancy. She/they were awake now. That was what mattered. The rest of her siblings’ plans, the movements of the other Fleet vessels, the traps and contingencies. Irrelevant. Bloodthirst masquerading as arrogance. Whatever the rest of her peers did or did not do, it was unlikely to be enough. The Enemy would come to her. And so she waited. Patiently, each tick of the clock bringing the inevitable closer.Then, the end of all their plans arrived.Beyond the orbit of Node 05’s largest world, there was a massive flare of energy. By the time it reached, it was already six hours old, but what it promised was something that Violet Five had been waiting for from the moment she/they had been roused. The inevitable had come; the Enemy were here. She/they watched them bleed, with the Fleet’s first strike, saw their formation shift and begin to accelerate.If Violent Five had been capable of it, she/they would have smiled from many mouths.Husk lived up to its name, in an expected and depressing fashion.The execution force remained without further assault as its six-score ships spent two hours traipsing down the gravity well, a concentrated globe of heavy warships surrounded by a shell of escorts and scouting forces to sweep their approach vector and flanks. This interlaced network of augur drones and shipboard scopes repeatedly picked up ‘possible’ contacts that faded away as soon as any attempt was made to get definitive readings. Yunl’ro knew that the enemy was probing her armada, seeking to determine the limits of the Compact’s scouts and the efficacy of their own stealth systems. She had ordered the screen not to engage several possible contacts that had crept in and withdrawn, letting the enemy build an incorrect profile of her capabilities.Despite that, she didn’t like that they were not attacking. This evaluative reconnaissance was too considered a strategy. There was intelligence guiding it, and patience behind it.was concerning.She continued to study the main display screen, her eyes moving from it to smaller secondary plots, showing supplementary or localized information. Their arrival had certainly been noticed by now, but several of the vessels further in-system made no attempt to alter course and their acceleration remained unchanged. Strategic assessment was that those were simple service drones, not valuable enough to be given higher-order decision making capabilities and limited to rote tasks… or they were bait, mimicking simpleminded machine minds in order to lure intruders closer.Whatever their nature, they would still have to be investigated and destroyed, but they were still the better part of a day away from her fleet and thus, a distraction to current events. There was no sign of either the Wound or the Echo platform’s purloined Chariot; a star system was vast, but there were still only a limited number of places that titan-scale warships could hide.Gas giants were a favourite of their quarry, and often utilized by the Compact itself and the navies of other nations for the same reasons. Turbulent and energetic atmospheres could overshadow the emissions of the largest vessel and the thick clouds made visual identification nearly impossible, while the plethora of moons and satellites many of those planets possessed obstructed firing lines, limited maneuvers and provided ample cover against long-range bombardment. Clearing a gas giant was always dangerous, as many of the Wound’s pursuers had found out to their cost, most recently the battlecruisers of the Veiled Archers during the seventh battle of Sol.Unlike the benighted home system of the Broken, Husk had only a pair of such worlds, the sixth and seventh planets of the system. The former was a sickly yellow planet with a striated atmosphere and wide but faint, thin rings of dust. The latter was a larger, storm-hewn blue and green giant tilted more than a hundred degrees on its axis, its clouds whorled by storms that were ‘merely’ the size of continents up to those large enough to swallow planets. Its rings were thick and striated, filled with ice and rocks, with herder moons the size of cities.Each of those worlds had over seven dozen moons. Each of them had thousands of places to hide… or to lay in wait.The planets of this lifeless system were not what held Yunl’ro’s attention at the moment, though. It was a segment of the main asteroid field, clustered around an irregularly-shaped piece of rock more than eighteen hundred kilometers on its longest axis. There were starships there… or least, what had once been starships. Her reconnaissance units hadn’t been able to push close enough to get good, solid reads, but there were at least three hundred distinct hulls that she could count, with fragments and pieces from many more.“So many,” Ukask murmured. “I wouldn’t have thought our target would have been this active.”“I doubt it was directly responsible for more than a tithe of them,” Yunl’ro told the Tribune. “We know it is a carrion-eater.” She pulled up some of the long-range pictures. The computer was analyzing them now, as was her own staff. She selected one such image, taken from one of the telescopic arrays aboarditself. The vessel there looked like a helium-3 tanker. Several of its storage capsules had been breached by railfire, which would have spilled its valuable cargo into space. “The blast patterns on this vessel are too irregular and imprecise to be the victim of our target. I suspect this was a casualty of an Unbound attack. I would even guess that a substantial fraction of these ships have similar provenance. Wrecks left adrift and found during our target’s travels, to be used as stores and spare parts when called for.”“Or they were delivered,” Nasham spoke up.Yunl’ro tilted her head towards the young man. “You have something to add, submissive?”“Nothing substantive, matron,” he replied. “Only that this is more possible evidence of collusion between h-,” he amended, “and the terrorist faction.”The Thoughtful tilted her head in acknowledgement. “Agreed.” She had sent all the data and theories available to her back to Force Command. Her own submissives still hotly contested the accuracy of some of that information, as well as the nature of any potential relationship between terrorist and abomination. The Thoughtful woman was certain that such revelations would result in sleepless nights for her peers and superiors, as it had for her own staff. The possibility that the Red Hand were working with the Wound had been examined in the past, but it was not until 1893-Yiren that any links were more than paperand pattern phantoms. If those hulks had indeed been fed to the Triarchs-damned machine…An unsettling prospect. Heresy, approaching the concept of ‘. Still, it was not her mandate. Hers was to scour this nebula for the machine’s corruption. Others would follow those leads where they led and if the Red Hand were servicing the needs of this abomination, if they wereto a genocidal machine intelligence… well. Something for others to attend to. The here and now was her purview. Husk was only the first step and those three hundred hulls were a potent reminder of the price of the Compact’s ongoing failure and the innocents that had died to the human AI’s madness. It must end, and it must end soon.The clock continued to count each minute. The Compact lines were probed, their recon platforms and flying columns chased back the enemy ships, both sides taking the measure of the other.Then, something unexpected.“Matron, we’re receiving a distress call!”Grace slouched into her quarters, shedding layers of clothes as she moved further from the door, practically peeling her way out of her uniform. It felt like it had become part of her skin. “The simulation ran longer than I thought,” she apologized. “Did you already eat?”Allyria was stretched out on the couch. “No,” she said. “I was waiting for you.”The blonde girl pulled off her shirt, tossing it to one side. Her skin was clammy and the cool air of their quarters felt good on it. She sat next to Allyria, putting a hand on her back. She noticed the prosthetic visor sitting on an end table. “Did you go out?” Aside from her eyes, the Verrish’s physical injuries were almost completely healed, but she was… less herself. Less confident, spending more time in their quarters. Grace had told Allyria that if she wasn’t going to come to, than she had to at least gowhile she was gone. It didn’t matter where she went, or for how long, but she had to go out and she’d told Allyria that in the same voice she’d used to snap Marcus and Lydia back when they’d acted up. Allyria called it her ‘officer voice’. She was using it more these days.Thinking of the other two defectors made Grace feel a pang. The reports she’d been given weren’t completely clear on just what had happened, but she and Allyria had been told ofand’s fate. If there’d been any survivors from the Compact’s ambush over Dustball, then they were in a detention center now. The thought made her sick, but there was nothing she could do. It still felt like there was something they weren’t being told, but she put that down to her feelings of helplessness. It was just her and Allyria now.The Verrish nodded, drawing Grace away from her morose thoughts. “Yes. I walked around the spire.” Her nostrils flared. “It made me dizzy and gave me a migraine.”Grace nodded, unfastening her bra and tossing it in the general direction of her shirt. “I know. But I don’t want you to stay at home all day.” She leaned over the Verrish and kissed her shoulder. “How’s your head now?”“Better.” Allyria’s tongue flicked out, tasting Grace’s scent in the air, the saltiness of her sweat, the tangy alien aroma of human skin. It was a comforting smell. “Are you all right?”“I’m fine.”Allyriaed. “You know I can smell the difference between ‘hot’ and ‘stress’.”“I know,” Grace answered, rubbing Allryia’s tintas as she pulled her socks off with her other hand. “I’m just trying to be a captain and not a cadet. It’s nothing.” She threw the socks away. One of them cleared the coffee table, the other didn’t. “You’re more important. I’ll wash up, we’ll have dinner and then I’ll whine about my day and how awful it is to be in charge of a starship. Do you feel up to going out again?”Allyria’s tinta’s flicked like a cat’s ears. “Let’s order in,” she said.“Okay,” Grace replied. She didn’t want to push Allyria too much too fast. She placed another kiss on Allyria’s shoulder. “It will get better,” she affirmed. “We’ll be back with her soon and she’ll be able to take care of you.”“I know,” the Verrish replied. She turned onto her side. Grace took her hand and guided it to her face. Allyria rubbed her fingers over the human’s soft, warm skin. She felt the raised ridges of Grace’s scars, tracing one of the two that crossed her nose. “Are you going to let her heal those?”Grace leaned into Allyia’s palm. “Maybe,” she answered, staying like that for a moment before she stood, shimmying out of her panties. “I’m going to have a shower now.”Allyria’s head came up a little and her tongue flicked out again. “Do you want some company?”“Maybe…” Grace said toyingly as she backed out of Allyria’s reach. It was the first time the Verrish shown any physical interest since getting out of the hospital. That was a good sign. “you can find your way there. Without destroying any more furniture.”One of the Verrish’s smaller tintas twitched and she made a, but she raised her head, following Grace’s footsteps as they went into the bathroom, the sensation of the heat from the human’s body receding. After a moment, she climbed off the couch.Verrisha were predators. It was good for them to hunt once in a while.“…is the liner. …hear us… weeks out of Prellidon…attacked by… unknown… profiles. They’ve got us… …much longer….”Yunl’ro listened to the fragmented, static-laden pleas for aid from someone who’d been dead for hours – most likely, even longer than that – and felt nothing for the plaintive call. The Compact Space Force was duty-bound to come to the aid of all legitimate calls for assistance, but the Wound used that against them with abhorrent regularity. In direct contravention to the rules of war, it faked distress cries from both civilian and military agencies, camouflaging fire- and Q-ships as friendlies or other vessels in need of aid. When hunting the AI, the execution forces were under relaxed codes of conduct. That was why no thought of rendering assistance to the vessel calling itselfcrossed her mind, even if she hadn’t just watched it die.Execution Force Yunl’ro had arrived nearly six light-hours out from the system’s primary. The graveyard was two light-hours away from the star, and just over four from the Compact armada. It had taken almost nine hours for their arrival to be noticed by theand a transmission from the ship to reach them, even accounting shrinking distance between them. That could have indicated severe damage on the liner. It could also indicate something feigning that level of distress. Smart paint, holo-imaging and advanced ECM had allowed their quarry to make itself or its slaved drones appear as completely different ships in the past.It was doubtful that that was the case here. The fleet’s visual sensors, telescopes and recon drones had gotten imagery of. It was a-class passenger liner, little more than eight hundred meters long and shaped like a shallow-sea sunfish, with dorsal and ventral fins holding high-class suites and passenger amenities, large windows along its flanks and coloured in bright, eye-catching hues. A titan-scale warship couldn’t feign to be something that size. Something smaller could, but given what Yunl’ro had just witnessed, she felt more than a sliver of doubt at that. She didn’t voice that belief. As far as her crew and fleet was concerned, it was a trap.”, the voice had said plaintively, sounding like a Prolocutor male of uncertain age. “…had updated its systems during its stopover in Galhemna, and there was no record of any ship calledin the Chariot’s databanks, but that meant little. There were quite possibly millions of starships within the Compact and while their crews had to be licensed and the vessels’ registries on file, the limitations of faster-than-light communication meant that any single starship could easily go unnoticed as star systems and sectors updated their own registries, sending information to central archives and each other. There had been many incidents when ‘unregistered’ vessels had been stopped, boarded and impounded until their legitimacy could be determined.Or it could mean that the shipwas as much a fabrication as the voice that had pleaded for assistance.“Replay the feed,” Yunl’ro ordered. “Show it to me again.”’s death came on the heels of its plea for aid. A pair of tugs of a make the Thoughtful had never seen before latched onto the liner’s hull and, likeplaying with their prey, ripped it in half. The Thoughtful doubted that those drones were capable of that kind of animalistic sadism, but there might be something in this system that was.The liner’s transmission ended in static as it was torn apart, its lacerated sections spewing debris into space. Cargo, wreckage… and bodies. The range was long, but the scopes of the fleet and the eyes of its recon platforms were keen. They could see how some of those bodies thrashed, kicked and clawed at nothing and then went still. Hundreds of them, the survivors of the. Murdered for the sin of begging for help.As simply as a chef butchering a fine shank, the liner was cut into pieces its parts carried towards the maw of the asteroid facility.“Triarch’s throne,” someone from the crew pit whispered. “They were still alive…”“Were they?” someone else answered. Yunl’ro tilted her head. Nasham had spoken. Some of the bridge staff looked at him. “They were dead the moment they hailed us,” he continued. “Dead long before we ever heard that message.”“Yes,” Yunl’ro agreed. “They were.” Her dark eyes met the submissive’s quadruple gaze. She knew he was thinking the same thing she was: the way the corpses upon the transport they’d taken had been turned against them. They might have just seen the bloodless murder of hundreds of people. Or they might have seen theater of machine-parasitized corpses. The Thoughtful could not have said, but she could feel a change in atmosphere on her command deck. Her people knew they could not have saved the, and they knew it might have been a trap… but that did not change the fact that they might have just seen hundreds of civilians die so that their ship could be harvested for parts. With an execution force bearing down on them, ‘Gravestone’ still went about its business.“This changes nothing,” she declaimed. “The sweep will continue. Our enemy is here. They will be found and destroyed.”“Matron,” Operations said. “We are detecting additional energy signatures from the debris field. There may be other intact ships.”“Yes,” Yunl’ro replied. “I am aware.” She would not throw away the fleet’s operations on the vagaries of long-range augurs and the possibility that therebe something there. “The sweep will continue as scheduled.”Operations tilted his held in acknowledgement and returned to his station. “If thoseour ships…” Ukask quietly commented. “If theystill crewed…”“Then I have consigned their personnel and passengers to death,” the Thoughtful answered, easing herself back into her command throne. She brought up a display. “To reach the debris field as quickly as possible, we would have to dispatch screening vessels. To ward against further ambushes by stealth ships or a, that force would have to be substantial, creating exploitable weaknesses in our defence perimeter. If the fleet moves together, a least-time approach vector to the debris field would bring our units within striking distance of Husk Six, which we have not yet secured.” She turned her expression on her sigil leader. “One ambush is enough for today. I will not rush this fleet into another if I can avoid it. If those calls for aid are genuine, then their fate is the same if we had never come here.”Ukask was silent and tipped his head in acknowledgment. The Bastion Leader’s equations were cold, but accurate. Their enemy could be trying to lure them into precipitous action. Divide the fleet to attack its weaker ships, strike at the exposed heavier vessels, or pounce upon them from cover. Still, that would be little comfort to any souls still alive out there, waiting for their ship to be devoured aswas now and wondering why the Compact was not coming to their aid.The mission had to come first, though. No matter the cost.The Enemy’s course remained unchanged, their formation intact: a single large globe moving along the ecliptic, with one recon squadron above and one below the system’s plane. They were sowing dozens of sensor drones as they moved, building a lattice of scanners through which even a’s cloak would be hard-pressed to slip. It had been the hope that’s death would inspire haste or desperation in the hostile force commander, but their foe did not react to Violet Seven’s latest tableau.That was fine. While a welcome possibility, the outcome had been small. Gambling otherwise would have been foolish. The Enemy did not often make those kinds of errors. It had been worth the effort to invite one, even if the alien commander hadn’t accepted. They would simply have to speak louder next time, but for now… the Enemy were approaching the orbital tracks of Node 05’s seventh planet.It was time for the next phase of the operation.to sigil. We’ve detected what appears to be drive emissions within Husk Seven’s inner orbitals. Readings confirmed by the 33rd, but no indication of vessels responsible. Sending in recon platforms.”Yunl’ro watched as the telemetry from the destroyer came to her. Husk Seven was the storm-wracked turquoise giant. So far, Astrographics had counted approximately ninety moons. The inexact nature of that determination rankled the Thoughtful, as most forms of imprecision did, but she didn’t believe in coin-counting in a burning palace. A proper astrographic survey could have sorted errant dwarf planets and captured asteroids from actual moons, but the Bastion Leader had neither the time nor inclination to do so, so “approximately ninety” was good enough. Sixteen of those were large planetoids. Two of which had an atmosphere, and two – including one of the former – had a magnetosphere. The planet’s off-axis rings rose over its wandering comrades, like a dame’s balcony above a suitor, casting them in the shadow of a distant sun.These particular scope drones were stealth recon variants. Each was an angled obelisk covered in augur-scattering chameleon hull plating, their thermal output and energy signature were minimized, making them as hard to detect as anything without shroud systems. Once launched, they were almost impossible to detect.The first of them made it past the first fifty-eight moons before its signal winked out. The last thing it saw was the ignition of an interceptor missile’s drive.Within thirty-seven seconds, the other two recon platforms met similar fates. One of the counter-missiles had been launched from a small moonlet, but the other two had come from spaceborne positions. There hadn’t been enough data to tell whether those were pre-positioned warheads, deployed from missile pods, or had been launched from stealthed starships.Fortunately, the third drone managed to get slightly closer to the planet. Before it was destroyed, it registered a large power signature, something that could only have come from a heavy capital ship. There was something hidden close to that world, but the drone hadn’t been able to localize or identify the emissions before it was destroyed.Fields of static blossomed across the plot as hostile EW platforms suddenly activated, creating a jamming field more than a two hundred thousand kilometers to a side. Visual information was the only thing that could get through that miasma, but nothing was forthcoming. Whatever had activated those platforms clearly did not want the fleet’s sensors prying at the planet and since whatever was in there wasunable to be picked up on visuals, the only way to know was to send ships in to investigate.It was a trap, of course.“Move the Black Racers out,” Yunl’ro ordered. “They are to sweep the inner orbitals and seed augur platforms. The Night Children will detach and hold outside the orbital path of the fifty-eighth moon to provide support when needed. Feed all telemetry to the sigil.” She watched the fleet display as a squadron of destroyers detached from the armada and accelerated towards Husk Seven, the unit splitting apart to allow the ships to scour the planet’s innermost moons, rings and cloud tops. Behind them, a squadron of light cruisers followed.“What do you think, submissive?” Yunl’ro asked of Nasham. “Do you believe we’ve stumbled upon a sleeping god?” The question could have been mocking, but it was earnest, despite the Bastion Leader’s turn of phrase.“No, matron,” the younger man answered. “I think we’ve found pottery warriors.”was in the shadow of a nameless moon, hiding in the heavy magnetic fluctuations and radiation storms caused by the interplay of the gas giant’s radiation belts with the moon’s magnetosphere. It was powered up, but its dampening systems made it indistinguishable from the background emissions. It also not alone.Closer to the planet,waited. It had been what the Enemy had detected, letting them see just enough to tempt them.listened to the whispers of telemetry being fed to it, and waited. It had no consciousness, but a simple fact plucked at it, manifesting through the conclusions of its databanks and logic engines.It would not have to wait much longer.“There you are,” Group Leader Prime Yuuunis ofsaid to himself as his scopes brought the enemy vessel back up. It was a big vessel, most definitely titan-scale. It was trying to hide in the planet’s rings, but its clumsy passage had disturbed the otherwise orderly lines of dust, rock and ice. The destroyer was pulling in visual imagery now. The hull form and emissions pattern were completely unfamiliar to Yuuunis or anything in his ship’s databanks. The vessel was a hemispheric shape, with multiple nacelles, engineering decks and other structures extruded behind it like tentacles, as if the ship was some kind of sea creature, but there was little trace of the organic to it. It looked more like its hull been carved from textured stone and built upon. There was something oddly familiar about it, but Yuuunis couldn’t place it.That wasn’t the only thing that had caught his attention. Several pieces of rock and ice – each more than a kilometer across – had been moved out of the rings, either crude Whipple shields to protect this thing or…“Alert the sigil!” Yuuunis demanded as his ship’s scopes picked up engine mounts on the debris and clusters of missiles drifting next to them, turning the celestial detritus into makeshift siege weapons. “Hostile meteor weaponry spotted. Scopes, target them and feed the firing coordinates to the fleet!”The enemy’s response was immediate. The plot blossomed with hostile yellow threat markers.“Multiple missile drive activations all around us!”“Weapons free,” Yuuunis snapped. “Point defences engage! Maintain target locks on those asteroids.”One by one, in pairs and lots, the missiles flared towards the destroyers. The range was short, but they had started from rest and needed time to accelerate. That gave the Black Racers an advantage and the destroyers’ point defences went to rapid fire, turrets sweeping local space clean with pulses of hard light, interceptors racing to meet the awakening shipkillers, bright flashes indicating the counter-missiles’ successes. But there were more.A warning throbbed on’s command deck. Something had a target lock on them. It wasn’t the vessel in the rings. It was closer. As his ship fought and writhed through the maelstrom, the prime spared a brief second of attention as the computer finally returned a potential match to the unclassified’s hull type.“Wait,” the prime said, inhaling through all three pairs of nostrils. “Is that a Re-”He never finished the sentence. A particle beam intended to punch through capital ship shields and armour came out of nowhere and ripped the destroyer apart.“Stealth destroyer active!” Scopes reported. “It was hidden under cloak. We’ve just lostWait one – surge of drive patterns. Those meteor rounds are beginning to accelerate. They’re coming towards the fleet.”“Send the Night Children in to support the Black Racers,” Yunl’ro ordered. “Spear Breakers will fire on the asteroids. Get us a shooting solution on that destroyer.”swept out of concealment, moving through the expanding remains ofas it moved to face the rest of the destroyer squadron.was the next closest vessel, and its response was immediate, the helm crew not even waiting for orders as they swung their ship about and flared its engines, the wash of drive wake obscuring’s targeting just as its primary beam fired, missingby only four hundred and nine kilometers. The range was too short for heavy missiles;’s massive particle cannon was the only effective weapon it had at close quarters and the stealth destroyer chased after, already compensating for the disruption to its targeting. Missiles started to detonate around it as the rest of the squadron rallied to their comrade’s defence, but they were spread and engaged themselves.Several million kilometers away from the battle, the seven light cruisers of the Night Children had begun accelerating towards the planet, responding to the destroyers’ sudden distress. Their missiles burned hard through through the orbital pathways of Husk Seven, triggering the activation of more interceptors and anti-ship mines.Aboard, the squadron’s prime belted out orders as her beleaguered squadron engaged the missiles, mines and attempted to neutralize the stealth destroyer. The noose around the squadron was tightening andwas running out of time.was overrunning its drive, keeping its aft and the cone of spatial distortion pointed directly towards the enemy vessel and calling for the rest of its comrades to assist. The Compact destroyer’s aft turrets fired, but they were dealing with the destroyer’s own backwash as well, and the few shots that could target the enemy clinging resolutely to their stern splashed harmlessly against the stealth warships’s screens. A hideous glow seeped from the unclassified’s prow as its particle cannon charged again. The second blast came within twenty-seven kilometers as’s targeting algorithms narrowed in on the hostile destroyer, seining substance from the distorted signals and local interference its sensors were reporting. Its prow swung towards the fleeing alien ship, lining up a killshot…came screaming in above its compatriot, the squadron command ship killing its thrust and rolling hard, its crew crushed into their acceleration chairs and emergency webbing, many of them losing consciousness from the stress of the maneuver. Auto-targeting weapons batteries opened fire, clawing at the black-hulled killer. Alien screen sections flared, attempted to resist the barrage and failed.’s weapons ripped holes deep into the stealth destroyer’s hull, breaching vital sections. Power fluctuations crackled through’s length, and multiple primary and secondary systems failed. Even as its body died,refused to let go of its prey. Its particle beam was already charged and its failing, blinded sensors had a shooting solution.’s engine section exploded into vapour, the destroyer instantly crippled. Nearly a third of the ship was destroyed outright or lethally contaminated with Bremsstrahlung from the particle beam shearing through screens and hull. What remained ofbegan a death spiral, heading into the thickest parts of the planet’s rings, one of its other kin racing to rescue it before it could be pulverised.completed its flip and started to burn back towards the crippled, the stealth ship’s hull dark as it attempted to reroute power and restore functionality. Auto-repair systems were already working, but many of them had been damaged or destroyed as well. The stealth destroyer was an easy target and’s weapons had a solid lock.Before they could finish it, the Compact destroyer suddenly found itself engaged, a half-dozenswirling up out of the nearby planet, their cannon and missile pods on rapid fire. Behind them,rose out of the eye of a moon-sized storm, her gun ports open and weapons charged, the ionization her active shields caused setting of massive electrical disturbances in the atmosphere. She had intended to wait and strike at the enemy cruisers, but’s distress brought her out early, and she charged to the defence of her crippled ally.+hostile contacts targeted,+ Violet Nine purred. +engaging+“Damage to all decks, we have multiple fires reported, damage control respond!”“One bogey scratched, five more are coming in, reinforce screens as they pass.”“Enemy cruiser is locking onto us, evasive maneuvers!”“Confirm destruction of fifth asteroid. It’s breaking up. That’s the last of them. Sweep and clear the missiles behind it.”“Get us out of here! Helm, take us down, under the orbital plane, we need fire support!”“Enemy destroyer is powering back up! Someone hit it again before it can come back online!”“Unclassified in the rings is attempting to disengage – keep an augur lock on it!”“The cruiser is screening the destroyer. Night Children, can you break through?”“Primary reactor breach, we have a primary reactor bre-”On’s bridge, Yunl’ro listened as her people fought and died. “I need,” she said with a softness that belied her cold anger, “a target.”“We’re trying,” Scopes reported. There’s a lot of interference, not just from the planet. More ECM platforms just went live. Every time we knock down one, another activates. Our scopes are useless.”The Thoughtful stepped off her dais, moving to stand beside her senior Scope officer. She put a hand on his shoulder, her eyes sifting through the raw data her embattled ships were sending her. She saw a pattern, a null space the enemy weren’t entering. No missiles or mines had launched from there, and the hostile cruiser’s gunships were avoiding it. “There,” she said. “Bombard those coordinates. Deploy two hundred externals. Set them for area detonations.” she ordered. Her Tactical officer nodded and Yunl’ro’s voice was steel. “Launch.fired, two hundred of its external missiles flashing through the planet’s moons, before sweeping back down towards the coordinates the Bastion Leader had identified. The missiles were set for omnidirectional blasts. Even in that narrow area, they would cause little damage. There were no shockwaves in space to carry a concussive force, only the pulse of radiation from the missiles’ warheads. That was what the Bastion Leader wanted, an electromagnetic storm to irradiate delicate electronics and shred cloaking fields, leaving what was in there bare to her soldiers’ guns.The target knew that too.appeared, dropping its stealth field as its engines spooled up, hurrying to take it out of the blast zone. Its command and control functions wouldn’t fare any better from the missile barrage than its ECM. Without it, the missile swarms and drone platforms it was coordinating would drop in effectiveness. The vessel was ugly; a long cylinder with a lamprey-mouth prow and several rings of spines – comm towers and transmission nodes – along its brass-hued hull. Once hidden, now fleeing before it could be destroyed.The cruiser realized its command unit was in danger, but it had been protecting its other ally and couldn’t reach the spindly ship in time. Multiple interceptors launched from silos and hull mounts, but not enough to hamper Yunl’ro’s strike.The missiles detonated. For an instant, the plot was gone as the wash of radiation blinded the ships in the region. When it cleared, the enemy’s ECM network was tattered and shredded. Dozens of hostile warheads and mines had been irradiated to uselessness, their scopes blind and delicate internal circuitry ruined. The Compact squadrons’ own drones and sensors were just as harshly affected as those of their enemies, but that was a small price. The Compact ships would get their augurs back up within moments.The enemy would too, but their command vessel’s ability to coordinate this ambush was all but gone. Their protective jamming fields were torn open. The Compact ships could clearly see their enemies now. Datalinked telemetry trickled back to. The, the destroyer, the cruiser, the gunships – even the unclassified in the rings were all now visible to the Chariot. “There now,” Yunl’ro said, and there was iron in her soft, piping tone. “Kill those ships.”+incoming missiles detected+launched again. The Chariot had the largest and longest-ranged weapons of the task force and Yunl’ro was brooking no chances in her follow-up strike, deploying nearly four hundred missiles – half the Chariot’s original complement of external racks. Those missiles swarmed through the fleet, sweeping above and below Husk Seven’s orbital planes. At the apex of their climb and descent, the missiles rolled, their sensor eyes confirming the presence of their targets through the faded remains of the miasma of electromagnetic, gravitic and thermal interference, waiting for the final input from their command ships.As soon as the hostile launch had been detected, themoved into close-flying pairs, repeating their stratagem from the earlier ambush, only now their deception wasn’t intended to give their opponents faulty information on force composition. They were trying to keep their mothership alive. Counter-missiles arced up and down the orbital plane, the gunships andprioritizing any missile that locked onto the escort carrier.was still struggling to become operational again.barely had any defences, the command vessel built for stealth and fleet control. It relied on its cloak and compatriots to protect it.The few functional interceptors left within the planet’s rings and innermost moons came on-line, burning hard towards the larger shipkillers that were arcing in like the teeth of a monster’s closing maw. Many of the counter-missiles were half-blind and struggling maintain to lock, but even so dozens of enemy warheads were destroyed.It wasn’t enough.Updated targeting orders flickered out fromand the dreadnought’s missiles’ drives flared as they slashed towards their targets. More than a third lost their lock and were unable to reacquire it, but there were more than enough left. Every remaining ECM platform was hit, all three pairs ofwere blown into atomic vapour andcompletely destroyed. There would be nothing left to salvage of it.was ripped into four different pieces, what was left of the command vessel misshapen and ruined.took multiple hits, three shield sections collapsing under the bombardment, but Violet Nine was lucky. The majority of the strikes were glancing, or caused only minor damage. Two were more severe. A chasm three hundred meters deep was carved into the carrier’s hull and another part of her disc-shaped primary hull, including bracers for attached gunships, was sheared completely off.Many of the hostile missiles, now bereft of targets locked ontoViolet Nine was no fool and she immediately disengaged, diving towards the seventh planet’s atmosphere, but the pursuing missiles were closer……then, a surge of gravitational energy that briefly overwhelmed Violet Nine’s scanners and informed her that a new planet had appeared and the closing missiles were swept away, their chasses crumpled, fractured and outright breached. The few that survived were dealt with by’s own defences.had covered her withdrawal. Nine had never liked the-class. Their provenance was in question and there was the unmistakable taint of the alien about them, no matter that it was hybridized with Confederate technology. Nine supposed that had their uses.had been the bait in this trap and now that it was sprung, the newhalf warship was using its esoteric defences to cover her withdrawal. Something to be thankful for. Nine tried to locate her rescuer, but even her sensors couldn’t find. That was unsurprising, but it meant that she couldn’t ascertain the damage to the larger vessel, either. They would need it later.slid into the planet’s turbulent equatorial region, sinking as deep as her hull tolerances allowed, lost to the enemy’s sensors. She lay dormant as alien scouts scoured the battlefield above her, looking for survivors and trying to ascertain what had happened to her and, but unable to pick up either vessel’s trail. In due course, the Enemy completed their sweep and moved on.The first battle of Node 05 was over. Of the seven destroyers that had entered Husk Seven’s orbitals, three had been destroyed, another severely damaged and the others all injured to one degree or another. One light cruiser from the Night Children had been crippled and another heavy was now heavily impaired. Confederate forces had lost a half dozen gunships, a command ship and a stealth destroyer, withforced to withdraw. In raw numbers, the rate of exchange was not in Yunl’ro’s favour.Proportionally, the AIs had lost a sixth of their stealth combatants, a third of their command and control capability, a quarter of their gunship platforms and the damage tohad noticeably degraded the carrier’s combat capability. The Enemy fleet might have lost more in raw numbers, but they had far more ships than the Fleet did. In point of fact, the alien armada outnumbered the Fleet Assets within Node 05 eight to one, and this single invasion force substantially outnumbered the Confederate Fleet in its entirety. The Enemy had more than enough ships to make this a battle of attrition. The Confederacy’s resources were not infinite. Every casualty hurt them far, far more than it did their opponents and the loss of aso early in the conflict was a severe setback.But they had been blooded. They had been baited. They would keep coming.Right into the graveyard. Right to“Feeling better?” Grace asked. She was sitting in Allyria’s lap on the floor of the shower, leaning back against the taller girl, her head resting between Allyria’s breasts. She was sore all over, with red welts and bite marks on her shoulders, breasts and thighs. Several of Allyria’s tintas were hanging over the smaller woman’s chest, idly twitching back and forth, like snakes lazily exploring Grace’s anatomy. They tickled.Allyria nuzzled Grace’s neck, licking her and tasting the mingled flavours of water, sweat and the tang of human blood. She made a low crackle. The throbbing in her head was gone. She could feel the electric fields of the appliances and wall controls in the bathroom, but they were back to the low background noise she was used to. She could feel the warmth of Grace’s body both against her skin and in her tintas, and smell the unique odour print the smaller blonde woman had, mingled with the scent of their lovemaking. “A little,” she conceded. “And you?”“A little,” Grace agreed. They stayed that way for several more comfortable moments. “We’ll have to get out soon.”“Not right now.”“No,” Grace admitted. “But soon. We still have to have dinner.”There was another long, relaxed silence.“Home,” Allyria said, running her fingers through Grace’s hair. It was wet and clung to her fingers. Allyria started fiddling with the dark blonde locks.“Hmm?”“Before, when I… when I broke the chair, you said we’d be home soon.” She made a low, thoughtful chirr. “You called her home.”Grace blinked. “I did?”Allyria made a confirmingThe blonde thought for a moment, remembering the cold, often stale air aboard. The battle-damaged decks. The grey-blue bulkheads and polished black floors. The austere, Spartan accommodations she’d shared with her fellow defectors – her fellowhumans. The ration packs and recycled water. A ship made for war, fighting for millennia. Built by human hands, made for humans. The last thing her people had for themselves in all the universe. The place where she’d learned to think of herself asand not Broken. The place where she’d realized she loved Allyria. The place where she’d known she could never go back to who she’d been. The place where her war had started.Her“Yes,” she agreed. “I did.”Four missiles splashed onto the tracking plot, launched from forty-two million kilometers away from their target – seventeen million kilometers outside the outer edge of the fleet’s drone shell, and twenty million inside the known range for their quarry’s missiles.Far from any possible retaliation, the launching vessel faded back into cloak, its quartet of heavy capital warheads racing down on their target. Two were destroyed by interceptors, the third by point defence fire. The fourth struck the heavy cruiserreports heavy damage to screens. Minor breach, one augur node damaged. No casualties.”Yunl’ro tipped her head. “Acknowledged.” She watched the display aspulled back from the perimeter,taking its place. The stealth ships were harrying her formation. In the wake of the seventh planet’s scouring, they’d become more aggressive. They cloaked, withdrew and repositioned themselves after every launch, but pattern analysis showed that there couldn’t be more than three or four of them. Still, they couldn’t be underestimated.The weapons they carried were heavy enough to destroy an escort with one good hit. The Writ said four missiles shouldn’t be able to make it through a fleet’s defensive perimeter, but these carried impressive ECM systems and were faster and more maneuverable than the weaponry standard engagement doctrines dealt with. After losing one destroyer and suffering a crippled frigate, Yunl’ro had moved her escorts in and pushed her light capital ships out. The enemy’s attacks still occasionally slipped through, but that was rarer and when they did, they no longer cost her a ship with a single hit.They enemy had adapted to that tactic. Now, one of them would target one of her screen; if the hit was good, there would be a second launch, either from the original vessel or one of its comrades. To counter that, the Bastion Leader cycled her screen elements: as soon as one was damaged, it withdrew. It made the fleet’s screen more fluid than she was comfortable with, but it was a necessity.The enemy were too far away for return fire and they never attacked from the same relative position twice, but her strategists and tacticians were analysing their movements, looking for a pattern, just as her Operations teams were studying their stealth systems and the missiles’ ECM. If the enemy got bold enough and pushed in far enough to try and make a kill instead of sniping, she would make them pay for that arrogance.The Compact fleet was learning, even if Yunl’ro chafed at the cost of this education. Their forces had always suffered greatly when engaging the Wound, but the Thoughtful had hoped to at least catch sight of her quarry before taking this level of casualties. Probe and retreat, probe and retreat. They were testing her.Ships of that size couldn’t carry much ordnance, especially not heavy capital missiles. They would either run out soon, or they were being resupplied. Yunl’ro suspected the latter. Several of her own ships were running under stealth, looking to ambush the enemy destroyers when they revealed themselves to launch or trying locate either the colliers feeding them or thecoordinating these actions. She believed there was one, and the fleet’s own recon units had picked up indications of another command unit out here.Nasham had observed. Yunl’ro was inclined to agree.The fleet had encountered several small minefields as well. They remained dormant until the fleet was within them, but the execution force’s depth of defences prevented any serious damage. The fields were simply too light and spread out to overwhelm the execution force, though the stealth ships took advantage of the distractions. That was howhad been crippled.Still, for now there was a breather. It would be some time before the enemy attacked again. While she waited for the next sniping assault, Yunl’ro’s sent a message to her steward to have a light meal brought up for the command crew. Combat operations in space were hours or days of build-up before a short, intense conclusion and she preferred a staff as rested and ready as possible during the former to weight the latter more in her favour. More than one battle had been lost because of the physical and mental fatigue of a crew or leader that had stayed on duty longer than they should have.That done, the Thoughtful’s long, chalk-white fingers tapped out notes for a mission update to Force Command and a repeat of her requests to Galhemna – phrased slightly less as a request – for more light units . She’d have these sent as soon as this operation was concluded. Given the losses she’d already suffered, keeping her picket and recon squadrons at full strength would be even more important. The enemy was outnumbered, but they were focusing their attacks on her screening and reconnaissance vessels. A battle fleet without adequate scouting was vulnerable to being outflanked, strategicallytactically. A fleet without a screen was even more vulnerable, particularly if there was something that out-ranged them… something like an enemy Chariot.The Bastion Leader’s thin lips disappeared as she frowned. “Disconnection,” she said to herself, ignoring the curious look Ukask gave her. She raised her head and gestured for Nasham to approach her dais. The younger man did so, standing next to Yunl’ro’s command throne.“Matron?”“Submissive,” she said without looking at him, running reviews of each engagement her task force had had within the system. “Do you still believe this is a trap?”“Yes,” he told her. “You do not?”“Invida,” she said. “arrived in-system and ran for the planet. The pickets were drawn out of position chasing it. None of them could react or escape when the enemy arrived. The transport’s course made it appear as if it were going to attack the planet, so Invida Orbital moved to block that approach. The station was the target. Without it, the colony had no support and its contact with the pickets was severed. When the Wound launched its assault, it sent infiltrators to draw off personnel and weaken the outside defences. It feinted and schemed and deceived, but every action fed another stage of its plans. Do you agree with my analysis?”Nasham inclined his head. “Yes.”“We are attacked upon shocking in-system, a simple act of opportunity. We receive a transmission, possibly genuine, of a civilian vessel in distress. We investigate the seventh planet and find an unknown contact, and an ambush. We encounter minefields and these sniping attacks from more stealthed vessels.” She raised one hand in a gesture of uncertainty. “These operations are individual. There is no synergy. It is a disconnection between intent and capability. Either we are seeing an atypical lack of coordination from the foe’s assets, or the initial conclusion was correct: we have caught them by surprise. As someone who has twice had personal interactions with our quarry, I would have your opinion.” Her near-lipless mouth twitched in something close to a smile. “With the minimization of metaphor, of course.”“Of course.” Nasham gathered his thoughts. He wasn’t being asked for military advice. Even if the Bastion Leader didn’t have many decades of experience on him, there were hundreds of tacticians and strategic analysts across the fleet that she could call upon for that. “You want to know if the behaviour here fits with what I’ve observed?” There were reams of data on the AI’s interactions with the Compact as well, behavioural analysis, transcripts of messages she’d sent, even psychological evaluations. Many of these were contradictory, as the machine’s actions and words were shrouded in deception. The only constant was her insane, unreasoning hatred… and she had even weaponized“No,” was Nasham’s response. “It doesn’t. It lacks the...” he struggled for the word. “…efficiency of what she does.” He was silent for several seconds, remembering far too much of the machine’s. “I don’t believe she’s here. I’m not certain she has done any of what we’re seeing.”“I am left wondering,” Yunl’ro replied. “But as you said, we have little choice but to investigate. We will have to see whether your Dame Fortune has smiled on us, or if we are indeed her toys.”“Have you come to any conclusion on that, matron?”She stared at him for a second, her horizontal eyelids blinking. “Only that we will have many more pottery warriors to encounter. Thank you for your input, submissive.”Nasham tilted his head, acknowledging his leader’s words before he returned to the station. It would have been too much to hope to find her here, crippled and helpless. But as he studied the engagement, he was left with an unpleasant feeling in the core of his liver. If thisa trap… what was it leading to?Noble Fleet Lord Jirrico of House Soton-ra stood on the lower mezzanine of his-palatial office suites. Benches leaned against large planters overgrowing with edible and oxygenating vines that grew up along the support bracers and columns, spreading across the ceiling. There were stairs up to the main level on either end of the horseshoe-shaped mezzanine, with a small conference center at the very tip, just below the fleet lord’s personal work station. The Askanj-looked out at the system of Kebrak Daun. Two of his aides waited behind him, ready for his orders. It felt like an eternity, not a matter of days since the shadow ship had arrived from Galhemna. An age, not less than a month when records of what the Compact was doing in that system had come to light. An eon, not a flicker in the universe’s lifespan since the realization that the strange, ugly little creature had been right all those months ago.Sundial. Once, a rumour. One of a thousand names and possibilities offered by intelligence teams and strategic minds, no more or less important than any of the others. Then, an ugly possibility offered by a neverborn’s handmaiden.The Principality had spent no small amount of time and effort confirming the human’s claim. Shadows were almost as rare as supercarriers and most of them were needed elsewhere, probing the Compact’s forward bases and captured Principality territories for weaknesses, tracking enemy fleets and bringing that vital data back to counter-invasion forces or targeted systems. Jirrico had used up more than one favour to get just one shadow deployed to Galhemna. The fortress system wasn’t on the Argosy’s sensors. Too far from the main lines to be considered a threat, the reports of ship buildups and ongoing construction were put down to the Compact’s need for a centralized Daun-level system on the frontier, and the actions of the Red Hand. If there was one thing the insurgents were good at, Jirrico thought with no small amount of self-awareness, it was provoking a reaction.But.Pirate-hunting didn’t require a Chariot, let alone three of them. Border security didn’t need a full battlegroup replete with heavy capitals. Fighting insurgents didn’t necessitate the kinds of arms build-up their agent had reported., he thought. Those three words had haunted him for days. The neverborn’s vassal had beenJirrico’s crests ached. He wanted to deny it, say that there wasn’t enough information to truly know, but they never would. The Compact wasn’t stupid. They’d realized they’d had a breach and they’d scour Galhemna for every trace of infiltrators and spies. The other agents the Principality had managed to insert hadn’t had the Worker’s level of access, and they’d almost certainly either be swept up or go underground. The Compact knew who’d been scouting them. They’d increase production, ramp up security and likely send out more border raids to keep the segments bordering the Black Veil off-balance. Sundial was coming.Kebrak Daun was going through its own growth, but it was far behind the output of Galhemna. He had patrol groups, raiding squadrons, battlecruisers and a few battleships. No supercarriers, nor any possibility of getting them completed before those Chariots were operational.“Noble Fleet Lord?” his first aide said. She was his niece. She owed her position to his patronage, but she’d kept it through professionalism, diligence, dedication and the ability to keep her mouth closed. She was holding a datascroll. On it was an unfinished letter to Argosy Central Authority. “The courier is waiting.”“Yes,” Jirrico answered, “I know.” He held out a hand and she stepped forward, handing him the ‘scroll. He pressed his thumb to the bioscanner and the document unlocked. The Noble Fleet Lord’s eyes skimmed over the body of the text he had written. He had laid everything out for his superiors, from once again recounting the meeting with Leblanc and her new ‘friends’, the work done to infiltrate Galhemna, copies of Nenkot’s only transmission, passive telemetry from the shadow on its way in and out of the system and the analyses his intelligence divisions had spent days on. The results were obvious.Sundial was coming, and the Principality could not hold it back. The war was at a critical stage. They couldn’t take ships off the front lines and if they did, it would be noticed and exploited. Every hull they had under construction was badly needed elsewhere. They didn’t have time to raise a fleet powerful enough to strike at Galhemna before those Chariots and the hundreds of warships being constructed there were ready to deploy. They had resources, oh yes. They had the resources. Just no way tothem before more than a thousand enemy vessels and three damned god-ships obliterated Kebrak Daun and forced their way into the Principality’s vitals, rampaging through under-defended rear areas and vital industry, collapsing defence networks and cutting the front-line fleets off from resupply and support.If it was as bad as he thought, as bad as the Broken had indicated, Sundial would be a disastrous tipping point for the Principality. Their new fleets and technologies weren’t ready yet. They were trickling into production, but not enough to make a difference. For that, they needed… and the Compact had just taken that from them.Jirrico stared at the ‘scroll. “Fate,” he said to himself. His niece raised her head, but she said nothing when it was clear the Noble Fleet Lord wasn’t looking for a discussion. “Would that fate chose someone else to be here, to give them this decision.” It hadn’t, though. It was him here, now. His staff had argued for days, some for, some against with as many reasons for each rationale as he had subordinates, but in the end he was Noble Fleet Lord of Kebrak Segment. He was the only person that could make this decision. He couldn’t wait any longer.With a sense of finality, the Askanj-fleet lord attached the files the Broken had given him of Chrysalis’s needs and the Red Hand’s wants to the document, typing out a single concluding paragraph. He stared at the final sentence for far too long before handing the ‘scroll back to his aide. She took it and ran from the room, rushing to deliver it to the waiting courier. The only record of this decision would be personally placed in the hands of Jirrico’s superiors. There would be no other trace of this sin that fate was forcing them to commit.Jirrico turned back to the window. Maybe there was another option; maybe there was something he had missed that others knew of. He doubted it, but he still hoped otherwise. It would take time, of course. Such a decision couldn’t be made instantly. Time for his peers and superiors to debate, to argue, to come to the realization that there was no other option. Time to begin amassing the resources. Time to contact the Red Hand and their associates. Time for the machine to repair itself… and all while the hammers and smiths of Galhemna worked unceasingly.There was a myth his people had. Thousands of years old, it had by now been made into countless plays, movies, books and songs. During the monsoons, there was a creature that would appear in the storm. Neither alive nor dead, it would be found washed up on a beach, or the banks of a river, or floating through a flooded street. Many legends said that they were the souls of those who’d drowned and to show them kindness would indebt them to you for life. Many stories told of these kind people being rescued from death, being led to treasure or otherwise given gifts by the Drowned.There were other stories, too. In these legends, the Drowned weren’t pitiful lost souls, but things turned bitter by the circumstances of their deaths. In these stories, they turned on those who tried to help them, dragging them into the water, returning mercy with betrayal and murder.He looked out at the stars, at the distant splash of colour that was the Radiant Streams nebula – what the Compact called the Black Veil. He looked at it and hoped that he had not just signed for the death of his nation.She/they watched. She/they listened to the battle cant of her/their siblings. Combat updates, tactical information… even the death knells of drones and starships as they were lost in battle: ambushes the enemy fought through, units unable to escape retributory strikes.A moon of the sixth planet, laced with antimatter charges, detonated.A swarm of hunter-killer drones boiled out of a hollow asteroid.killed one of its enemies, and nearly died in the doing.Missile carriers deployed racks of warheads and launched, their salvoes guided in bycommand units.The Enemy adapted to each attack. Still coming. Still searching. Still hunting. Violet Five knew what they were looking for. She/they knew they would never find it. But their course was bringing them to her.Closer. Alien probes pushed deeper into the system, buzzing around service vessels and Q-ships. Violet Five felt their sensors sidle across several of her selves, but the Enemy didn’t notice, didn’t realize. Closer.She/they had called to them once, knowing they wouldn’t be able to do anything. Now, she/they would speak again.Pleading, desperate voices chittered across radio waves again. Service units adjusted their course in response to the signal, moving towards the hulk that called plaintively out into the void, begging for help.+do you hear them?+ Five thought. +do you? i’ve kept them for you+The signal stretched out across hundreds of millions of kilometers, reaching the Enemy fleet. There was no response.+they need you,+ the machine’s mind whispered, dripping malice. +can you let them die? you can save them. you watchedmekill the others. come and save them+The small voices whimpered like frightened animals calling for their mothers.Violet Five saw the Enemy fleet shift. They were coming.Giddiness rippled through her selves, the cybernetic equivalent of a predator’s drooling maw. No more waiting.It was time for the Enemy to meet. The web was ready, and she was hungry.