They transitioned.

Was it another exploded planet? Was it a radiation field, frying their shields and defiling their bodies? Was it a temporal weapon, hexing them into a bubble of accelerated time, emerging in a universe where a million years had passed and all their races were dust?

The initial scans, the blaring alarms, the bitter taste in her mouth all indicated the same unsettling truth – the Flagship and its many, many retainers had stood their ground.

It would be a straight fight, then. They were outnumbered, outgunned, barely able to communicate against a foe whose tactics had crushed them at their best, but…

She was doing a quick estimate on how much they were outnumbered when she saw three Federation craft explode. There was no video feed, not even any names beyond the alphanumeric desginations the ships had been given for this action, but the flaring energy readouts followed by silence told the half story. The alarms indicating laser fire, incoming missiles, discharging beam lenses, ion charges and hostile teleporters told the other. The Rebellion's opening salvo released more energy than the human race had harnessed in its first ten-thousand years, and though the Federation expected this, it could not have fully prepared.

The Federation was responding, dispatching swarms of attack drones and teleporting kill teams aboard the Rebel ships, but they were still readying their guns after the jump. It would not be long, but the moments dragged on.

And she saw the Flagship.

Even if it did not house the great enemy of her people, even if it wasn't the body of the creature that had single-handedly brought the Federation to its knees, it would have been terrifying. It was super-dreadnought class, big as a city, the kind of ship that the Federation had been trying to build for decades now. Its shields were hardened to a degree she'd only ever seen on zoltan ships, a closely-guarded secret of the ethereals that the Rebels, it seemed, had unraveled. It bristled with next-generation armaments, array after array after array after array of piercing and slicing lasers, of concussive and incendiary projectiles, of crippling ion projectors, all pulling enough power that Brant wondered if this thing would even need fleet support.

It could murder them all on its own.

She turned back to the gunnery console, training them on one of the monster's shield generators and waiting for them to charge. Their weapons seemed woefully inadequate, but she would wait for their capital ships to fire and then join in the volley – altogether, they might be able to do a dent, but…

Toh laughed over the line.

"Something funny, flyboy?"

"Look at that stupid thing!" he said. "It's too big!"

"Not…cracking up on us, are you, Toh?" 78 asked.

"What? Oh, no, I just – whoa." The ship lurched to the side, the grav compensators absorbing almost all of the sudden jolt of the course correction, but the remainder nearly throwing her out of her seat. She tightened the straps. "Sorry, missile. What kind of idiot makes a ship that big? I don't care what experimental materials they cooked up to reinforce it – that thing takes a few wrong hits and makes a sharp enough turn, it's gonna start coming apart."

"May have taken a few too many lessons on human psychology to heart," 8 mused. "Most potent force in galaxy, but afraid not everyone will know it. Takes on disadvantageous design traits just to show off how special it is."

Their weapons finished charging, and she itched to return fire.

"How resentful should I be right now, that this is the human stereotype?" Karl asked.

"Good notes, everyone, but maybe let's allow that having more guns and armor than God might grant it at least some benefit?" Brant said. As if on cue, the shields popped and crackled with laser rounds, and she saw that the Rebel fleet's barrage had not stopped, only slowed as they transitioned into a staggered firing pattern. Two more Federation craft gave out, individual dreadnoughts and cruisers coordinating fire on one Federation ship at a time and sustaining until it died. When the Kestrel's turn came, she'd have Toh fire up the stealth drive, but this would only buy them a little time – once they broke stealth and rounds started connecting with them, they wouldn't last long, no matter how tightly Toh's Shaper and Preserver held them in His hand. Another laser shot pinged off their shields, and another, likely only testing shots to determine their shield strength and nimbleness so that the Flagship could coordinate only as much firepower as necessary to kill them later. It was probably calculating exactly how efficiently it could wipe them out. It probably liked its chances very much.

Her wrist unit sang, and the capital ships of the Federation fired their first volley. She confirmed her target and checked her aim, and issued a full salvo, the ship groaning as weapons discharged. One of the cruisers guarding the Flagship sustained a serious reactor breach and exploded, a stupendously lucky shot, and one of their dreadnoughts took such a beating to its gun emplacements that it would be effectively out of the battle. All across the Rebel fleet, ships were bloodied, some ravaged, a few destroyed. The Flagship, sure enough, did not dance and weave around at breakneck speeds like the Kestrel; its shields withstood a bombardment that would have ruptured a planet's crust, but they finally gave in and let havoc rain down on its hull.

It was a well-coordinated, effective, and frightful show of force, but as much as it heartened her, it looked downright sloppy compared to the surgical brutality of the Rebels. She had not fought with the fleet before, only hearing about how much the Rebels tactically outclassed the Federation, and now she saw exactly how much of an edge this god-machine had bought them. It was like watching a solid chessplayer get dismantled by a grandmaster, except they at least had a chance to shoot that grandmaster in the head.

By this point the fleet formations had largely dispersed. The ships were all committing to evasive maneuvers, and the kamikaze ships had begun their advance; soon the two fleets were blending together like cream and coffee. The Flagship was not as maneuverable as the smaller craft, but she saw now that it was not helplessly adrift – its course corrections were minor, but enough to ensure that munitions landed on impenetrable armor plates instead of vulnerable engine outputs or weapon emplacements, enough to take the impact of near-light speed starships at grazing angles instead of fatal thrusts.

Toh couldn't have been the only one to see this thing and think its size was a liability. Even if focusing their fire on its hadn't been the gameplan from the start, it might have become the plan when they saw it trundling along. Perhaps it wasn't pride that had made it build itself so large, but misdirection, tricking the enemy into wasting resources firing on a deceptively agile hulk.

And perhaps it wasn't pride that had made it stand its ground here. She'd thought it was accepting a risk to make a statement, but perhaps the risk was smaller than they'd guessed. Perhaps far smaller.

"Christ, we're not making a dent," she muttered over the line.

"Well – making a dent, at least," 8 said encouragingly. "Flagship shields, taken minor damage. Boarders heading in, too."

It was true, sensors showed a small army of Federation marines beaming aboard the Flagship in various places.

That's our main chance, she thought. For the beating heart of the whole Rebellion, that place doesn't have a huge crew. There, at least, we've got them outnumbered.

The targeting computers got another lock with their missiles. She fired, seeing the shields hadn't regenerated enough to keep the physical munitions out. The energy-based weapons would be best saved for another fleet-wide salvo.

Kat should be there, gutting the bastards, teaching them fear, she thought. I should be there with her.

The ship jolted evasively again, and there was another plink on their shields, then another.

It's our best hope, she thought. But…

Plink, plink, plink.

"Ma'am?" Toh asked.

The stealth drive would disrupt their drive signatures and most other signals that targeting computers could use to get a lock on the ship, but this only bought them some breathing room – the drive was only useful in bursts, ideally just after the enemy had committed and fired off a load of rockets that would then careen aimlessly into space. The smart foe, then, would try to bait an enemy into burning a stealth burst too early and blast them as they came out of it.

Their shields gave out, and a laser struck their hull. If this was baiting them out, it was a particularly aggressive bait.

"Yeah, fuck it. Stealth it up," she said.

The Kestrel shrieked as filters dispersed the output of their engines and the shield generators worked overtime to produce masking effects beyond their usual purview. It was a normal shriek, familiar to her from their tests of the stealth module, but she still couldn't get past the irony that a stealth module, of all things, would make this ungodly racket.

Their rockets landed, again inflicting minimal damage, and the rest of their weapons maintained a lock. The Federation marines had begun their butchery, and the life signs and antipersonnel drone signatures she was reading over on the Flagship told of a grand melee that they were winning. With the crew and defenses neutralized, they'd be able to storm the AI's housing and physically destroy its mind.

And if that didn't do it, five Federation ships neared the Flagship at full tilt. The Flagship's surprising dexterity had not gone unnoticed, and they were on track to hit it at various angles, perhaps coordinating with teleported messages, perhaps deciding that their aims were obvious and they may as well use their compromised comms. It would not be able to deflect them all at once, especially as she saw two of them blink into stealth. The Flagship would take at least one ultra-high-speed impact, an exchange of mass and energy that would decimate it.

And if that didn't do it, the rest of the Federation was cooking up another salvo. It would be a pyrrhic victory, pyrrhic enough that they'd probably retire that classical allusion and just use the phrase "Federation victory" for the next ten thousand years.

The capital ships of the Federation fired.

And the Flagship, along with everyone aboard it, vanished from their sensors.

She lost target lock and cursed. "They've got stealth," she spat into the comms. "Ship the size of a moon and they figured out how to cloak it, God damn it all."

The Flagship's support craft ripped into the kamikaze ships as planned, but they also had inadvertent help. The Flagship had withheld its cloak until the suicide pilots were very close, close enough that the Federation's own rockets mistook them for their intended targets once they lost the Flagship's signal. One of the kamikazes was blown up by these wayward Federation missiles, another by the Rebels, and the last one she saw missed its mark, flying off past the Flagship's last known position and into certain death, alone with minimal shielding deep in the Rebel ranks. A moment later, the two stealthed ships reappeared, not counting on needing stealth for much longer and having allocated too little power to their stealth drives, and the Rebels shot them apart as she watched.

She took stock of the battlefield. Not all of their weapons had discharged, and she watched for new orders. The Halcyon-class dreadnoughts were broadcasting orders in a way, powering and depowering their medbays in quick series of bursts – their comms may be down, but they were still picking up these energy readouts, and that corresponded to a sheet of codes they'd received before the fight. Morse code, essentially – the Flagship surely knew they were doing it, but odds were good it didn't have the corresponding sheet to make sense of it and would take at least a little while to figure out what the codes meant.

What she was seeing now, for instance, was the Halcyon telling the ships closest to it to concentrate fire on its own primary target, while telling everyone else to aim where its one Mk-1 laser was firing. Brant took the note, and was glad that the Halcyon did not fire all at once, giving the Kestrel another few moments of safety in stealth.

"Toh, I'm resuming fire once our capital ships do. Be ready to break stealth," Brant said.

"Aye, captain," Toh said.

Another few moments. It occurred to her that a few Rebel ships had blinked in and out of stealth already, using them in the preferred fashion of dodging an incoming volley and forcing an opponent to waste precious lock-on time. She did not, however, see any on the Federation side engaging stealth drives. They hadn't been the only ship in the fleet with stealth when the fight had started, but they'd never been standard and the technology hadn't become widespread until recently - could the Kestrel be the only ship left with stealth capability? This seemed suddenly like an important question, flanked by others like "Was the Flagship prioritizing stealth ships as targets?" and "Why?" but she'd need time to reference the fleet manifests. And as the Halcyon started firing, it was clear this was not time she had.

"8, if you've got a sec, go into the fleet data." The Halcyon was focusing on a Rebel Thunderbird, a super-heavy frigate in the Flagship's honor guard, and she locked on and joined the volley. The ship thrummed with the echoes of discharging lasers. "See if anyone left has stealth capability, up and running. Got a bad feeling."

The stealth drive continued to shriek, working as hard as ever, but she'd effectively neutralized it for the next few minutes. Though the module could mask and scramble most information that an enemy targeting system could lock on with, it was a simple thing to trace their munitions back to them – some experimental drives could mask even weapon signatures, but alas, they had the basic model. They were exposed.

And if she hit her guess, it was going to be a rough time.

The Thunderbird was an impressive beast, nearly the size of the capital ship she'd met Tully and Turzil on, the product of tens of thousands of man-hours and nearly incalculable resources, enough total credits to have kept every hungry mouth in the galaxy fed for a decade. And the guns of the Federation unmade it in a moment. Its state-of-the-art shields crumpled. Its defenses were made to stand strong against a ship in its own class or several smaller craft, but against the focused fire of a fleet, shield and armor and hull fell apart like they'd been hit by a supernova. No two parts stayed connected. The sight gave Brant some brief satisfaction – how, her primitive brain asked, could any army stand against such power? – though she quickly reminded herself that the Rebels were executing their craft in exactly the same fashion, one by one, and that the Rebels would finish the job much sooner than Brant's people. It was an impressive show of arms, but all a waste because they'd had to fire at something other than the Flagship.

"Handful left with stealth. Itemized here," 78 said over her earpiece. There was a ding, and she saw a fleet manifest with several ship designations highlighted, some in yellow, some in red. "Though looking at scans, does look like we're last one flying with undamaged stealth drive."

Brant groaned. The ramifications of this ran through her head. Stealth drives were strong, but frankly of limited use against a fleet as coordinated and numerous as this one. Even if a ship managed to dodge one volley with a stealth burst, there'd just be another enemy with guns ready when the stealth drive guttered out. They were a strange choice for a top-priority target, unless the Flagship was thinking of something she wasn't.

The clearest explanation was that the Flagship knew it was their primary target, knew they would sacrifice anything to kill it. Especially now that it had a stealth drive of its own in play, it was far from certain that the Federation fleet would be able to do the job through straight force of arms – strong as they were, they were losing firepower by the moment. If the Federation marines couldn't get the job done, and their guns couldn't get the job done, a successful kamikaze strike would be necessary. And if they were the only ship left that had a stealth module…

Her earpiece beeped, announcing hostile target locks and incoming fire. As before, it was not an avalanche, not a barrage of focused fire that would immediately murder them – just enough to overwhelm their shields, confound Toh's attempts at evasion, and put some hurting on them. She stood and jogged out of the gunnery room, no longer even considering this a hunch.

"8, meet me at the stealth module for repairs."

"Captain…" 8 started. The stealth module was not damaged, he was surely thinking. "…on the way."

She kept on jogging. Should she pause and let the fleet know? She was about to act against their orders, but there was no quick way to update the higher-ups without giving the strategy away to the Flagship.

"Toh, fall back. God help me, get some of our ships between us and theirs. Orders are to hold on until we've got stealth ready to go again, and then…" The words stuck in her throat, the two words that, she realized now, she had always known would be waiting for them at the end of this quest.

Toh guessed them. "Ramming speed?"

"Ramming speed," she confirmed.

"…Acknowledged."

The ship rocked like a storm-tossed schooner as she ran down the hall, Toh putting it through his best evasive maneuvers as the soft patter of the shield generators deflecting impacts echoed down the corridors. Though she stumbled first into one wall and then the other, she managed to keep her balance as she ran down the corridors, 8 falling into place beside her as she passed the shield generators. Taking him off the shields would be a liability, forcing them to rely on the less-efficient automated process of recharging the shields and changing their frequencies to match incoming fire, but as they neared the compartment housing the stealth module and heard the explosions ripping through the room, she felt the risk was justified.

She looked at 8, both of them with their multitools in hand. She nodded, and his face flashed green. She ran ahead, the door opening into the battered room.

The machinery of the stealth module lined the walls, a series of heavy black boxes, thick cables, and whirring cooling units. It interfaced with the reactors, the shields, the engines, and every other system that had a traceable output, drawing significant power to filter and mask those signals to hide from enemy sensors. The lighting had shorted out and patches of the ceiling and walls glowed red, superheated by laser fire, hot enough now that even the flame-retardant plastic furniture and wall fixtures were igniting. Left unattended the flames would have spread and cooked the stealth machinery in its casings, but 8 was already picking up a fire extinguisher near the door and going to work. Pressurized coolant hit the walls and screamed like a buzz saw, steam erupting off in dense, violent gouts. She joined him, adding a second stream of coolant, and in no time the heat and fire were well enough under control that 8 moved in to fix whatever damage the unit had taken already.

"Good news: stealth drive's still up and running," she announced over the comm channel.

"That's the worst good news I've ever heard," Toh grumbled back. "I'm not picking up particularly fierce fire. Could be they don't want to be too obvious, or could be that…"

He trailed off. Brant wasn't sure if the line had been interrupted or if he'd gotten distracted, but her wrist unit made things clearer:

The Flagship had reappeared, and there was a lot to take in.

At first glance, it seemed to have taken catastrophic damage. Toh's prediction was accurate: whole tracts of the ship had sloughed off, knocked loose from damage and the stresses of evasive flying, one chunk the size of a city block housing one of the nastier beam weapons she'd ever seen. But looking at what remained, how little the loss of these sections had impacted the Flagship's overall capabilities, made her think of desert lizards who could detach their own tails to escape predators – it knew it would be the center of attention, and had designed itself with plenty of redundancies. Half of their shots so far had landed on sections that it was prepared to jettison. It wasn't wise design for a ship meant for wide production - most likely, combat analysts would be able to eventually parse the data from this battle and determine the most effective way to take it down without wasting time on the inessential components. But that ship wasn't designed to win wars. It was designed to win one climactic battle.

But the fact that they'd wasted half of their fire on it so far wasn't what made Toh seize up, wasn't what made her forget about her fire extinguisher for a haunting moment.

The Flagship's crew was all dead. The Federation kill teams were all dead. Its airlocks were open to the void and its corridors were flooded with radiation. Rather than risk the Federation sabotaging its machinery in person, it had murdered everything aboard it, waiting until it was stealthed so no one would be able to teleport out.

So it was running itself all on its own now. There'd be no pretending after this, no acting like the Federation had just tried a last desperate bit of propaganda at the end.

Her reveries were broken by a loud crash, followed by a high-pitched, deafening whistle. The remaining flames guttered and whipped about madly, stretching out toward a far corner of the wall in in long, eerie spindles. She followed the line of the flames to a small hull breach, barely larger than a melon, and the flying debris that it had sucked into itself had sealed it enough that at least they wouldn't spin wildly out into the void. The atmosphere would drain fast, but with the life support they would still be able to plug the breach and fix whatever damage the stealth system had taken.

"Hello, Charlotte."

She thought at first it must be talking through her earpiece. It must have sent another hacking module and gotten into their system. But no.

The thing that had broken through their hull stood up amid the guttering flames. It was only three feet tall, small enough to have just squeezed through the hull breach when scrunched into a ball. In frame, size, even facial features, it resembled a small child made all out of shimmering, heated metal. The flames framed it, and it turned to consider them with calmly burning eyes.

She drew her sidearm and backpedaled, firing as she went. 8 did likewise, but it leapt at them. 8's shots went wide, and Charlotte got it in the side to little apparent effect.

It got 8. It grabbed him by the shoulder and held him fast. Sparks flew from where its hand held him, 8's servos screaming with effort to escape.

"Hello, thing."

It drove its other hand into 8's chest. It ripped a handful of sparking material out. She screamed. 8 screamed, then went silent, his body going limp and his face going dark as the thing threw him to the ground.