Chapter 37:

FLESH IS WEAK

i want more

burn

we want it to die

[faceplants keyboard]I did it. Chapter 37, the longest individual chapter I've ever written is here. It was supposed to be about 5 pages... and instead there's. Originally, this chapter was going to be very different. I was going to do a time-skip, with the reactions of personnel from Execution Force all after the fact, but I barely got into that before I realized I didn't like that route. It didn't feel like it matched what I'd been building up to. So you all gotinstead. Let no one say I haven't tried to do right byafter all that build-up.'cause if you do, I will choke a bitch.Anyways, I hope you enjoy the final,part of the battle of Husk/Node 05 and that it lives up to your expectations!Next chapter will be much shorter, and will return us to events in the Veiled Reaches.There were only seven survivors.High above the ecliptic of a newborn and nameless star system, the remaining ships gathered. Each of them was battle-scarred: hull plates smashed and melted, engine housings crumpled and sheared through, sensor nodes irradiated to uselessness, comm arrays severed and weapons decks gouged from their flanks, as if they’d each been mauled by a great, fiery raptor. Carbon scoring criss-crossed their forms, metal had been liquefied and re-frozen into abstract shapes and the jagged edges of breached decks stuck out at all angles. None of them were capable of any kind of fight.Seven survivors.had died drawing the Enemy close to the moon they had detonated.had been destroyed coming to’s aid, saving her brother’s life at the cost of her own. Five. Seventeen Q-ships, transports and retrofitted combat units.Violet Nine broke the silence first. +our sisters…+ If she’d been organic, her voice would have been shaking and her face wet with tears of rage.+our sisters are dead+Earlier:This time, it wasn’t an already-murdered ship that was begging for help.“They’re on the hull!” a man who may or may not have actually existed shouted. “They’re cutting their way inside! I’ve seen them do this with the other ships, they cut it open and start harvesting parts. There are people in here, they’ll just open everything to vacuum. I don’t know if we can hold out much longer! If you can hear us, please, please help us!”ATSS, registered to the Adelain Touring Service, an interstellar shipping, ferry and liner conglomeration. It was larger than theand probably carried two or three times the complement. Thousands of souls. It was also in’s databanks. Thehad gone missing more than seven months ago on an expedition through the Veiled Reaches. No ransom demands were made and no trace of the vessel had been found, either in space or in the black markets. It was currently listed as ‘missing, cause unknown’.Here it was. Taken, scavenged or delivered to this system, the machines cared so little for the passengers that they hadn’t bothered to remove them, leaving the liner helpless and adrift until they could get around to it. Now they had.The vessel’s hull was… it was, crawling with machines as they prepared the liner for salvage and reclamation, chewing through airlocks and making preparatory incisions to make the vessel easier to break open. The tugs, the same ones that had destroyed, were. Once they arrived, the liner would be destroyed, its remains dragged into maw of the asteroid facility. That complex was still active, producing combat drones, weapons platforms and missiles, a cloud of automations and spare warheads drifting around it like wasps about their nest. It still followed its programming, breaking down the hulks and converting them into new weapons. It didn’t matter that the battle for this system was all but over.was slated to become another casualty of a machine’s program.It was a trap. It had to be. The people on that shipto be dead, either murdered by whomever had taken their vessel or by the machines since then. It was only simulacra and ghosts begging for help. Even if it wasn’t,was millions of kilometers from the asteroid base, within one of the densest sections of the graveyard. Multiple unaccounted-for energy signatures had been detected there. Thosebe due to faulty, damaged and unshielded reactors or the operations of the tugs. It was a possibility. Far more likely was the presence of more stealth destroyers, more unclassified cruisers or even something worse. Execution Force Yunl’ro would not let themselves be drawn into yetambush. There’d already been too many of those.The enemy continued to peck at the fleet, either getting bolder or more desperate as the Compact armada cleared swept through the system. The machine warships had been targeting the outermost augur platforms, cutting out the fleet’s first deadline and shortening their scope horizons. Attack drones swarmed from out of asteroids and moons, somnolent mine platforms went live as ships passed within their range. Their foe had disturbingly effective stealth technology; many times the weapons weren’t detected until they powered up. There’d been no real losses from these attacks, but the Compact armada’s supply of scope platforms was dwindling. Every vessel had to remain on guard, even those that The Writ said were safe in the midst of the fleet.Then the enemy blew up a moon.Yunl’ro hadn’t lost any ships from that – not directly, but the AIs hadn’t been trying to use the moon as a weapon. They’d done it as a distraction, a planetary body obliterated as aThey’d sacrificed one of theirto do it, drawing the attention of one of the Compact picket squadrons, luring them out to investigate and then kill the command ship. Then, planetoid a nearly a thousand kilometers in diameter had ignited.The detonations had been shaped charges, carefully placed so that when they went off, they blew an entire hemisphere into the path of the Compact fleet, leaving behind only the shattered, wrecked shell of a moon. The squadrons against theand sweep Husk Five suddenly found two-thirds of a moon hurtling towards them, the release of so much energy and the plethora of pebble to mountain-sized debris making augurs useless. They’d never seen their attackers.Three more stealth destroyers, two converted freighters and an unknown type of cruiser. They’d hit the pickets hard, destroying or disabling three of them before a pair of battlecruisers had been able to intercept them. Two of the destroyers and both of the freighters had been take out in short order, and the cruiser badly mauled. It would have been destroyed, save for adestroyer appearing out of nowhere. Blasting scrapcode from its comm system, the malevolent little beast had engaged both battlecruisers in an insane mismatch, with far more aggression and coordination than the rest of its class had shown. The battlecruisers had killed it, but not before it had strucktwice with that monstrous particle cannon, self-destructing in the midst of its killers, causing even more damage toand blinding its comrade long enough for the cruiser to withdraw into the radioactive field of debris that was left of the moon.Strike, retreat. Strike, retreat. Strike, retreat. It was the unspoken mantra of Husk’s defenders. Many of these vessels were using scavenged systems – the unclassified cruiser that had attacked after the moonbreak had been carrying high-end corporate-rated weaponry – but others, like the stealth destroyers had technology that had been seen in the Wound itself.Nasham had observed.Yunl’ro couldn’t disagree. The enemy were focusing their strikes on the ships they could actually hurt and they were prosecuting that effort to their utmost. Without her lighter units, the fleet’s battle van would have no pickets or defensive screen and its ability to scout intra- or intersystem would be crippled. It would cost time to replace those, time the enemy would use. Time their targets would have to rebuild, dig in and further fortify any other locations like Husk.It was what she would have done, but that made it no more pleasant when it was people,people, dying to the cold, soulless logic differentials of artificial intelligences. Still, she was becoming more convinced that the Wound and its sibling were not here in Husk, but almost certainly within the nebula. The Echo had doneright, if nothing else. There was no other explanation for this level of build-up and this kind of rabid aggression from the defenders. They were trying to bleed her forces and buy time for their abominate creator to repair itself... and it was. The beast’s children were already causing losses out of proportion to their own. If it had more time or – Triarchs forbid – more resources, it would have an armada. Not merely salvaged and cannibalized vessels, but ships outfitted with the Wound’s horrific technology and driven by echoes of its own insane malevolence. The Thoughtful already knew that that would keep her awake more than one night.Looking at the wreckage of a celestial body once more than a thousand kilometers across, Yunl’ro couldn’t help but remember what she’d been told when she’d first been selected for this assignment.Bastion Leader Prime Korvek (and twelve names besides) had said to her in private.The old Tribune had had a long and distinguished career and she’d thought he’d given in to flights of fancy in his older, desk-bound years. She was somewhat less certain of that now.“Message from,” Communications called out. “They are requesting confirmation of the order to disregard’s distress.”was one of the vessels nominally under the command of Bastion Leader Kemk. Those ships and their officers had not received the same briefings that the execution force’s other leaders had, but they knew enough to fill their roles in Yunl’ro’s line of battle. After she received reinforcements from Force Command, men and women vetted for this duty, Kemk’s fire-eaters would return to Galhemna. The pleas fromhad to be wearing on them more than her own crew. This was a vessel they had known that they’d failed, and now they were being asked to stand aside and let it die to and enemy they knew almost nothing about. The Compact prided itself on the discipline of its military corps. They would not break formation without her authorization, but that did not preclude them from asking.Yunl’ro rose from her throne and walked down to the Communications station, personally keying a channel to. “This is Bastion Leader Yunl’ro,” she said. “Order is confirmed. Discontinue monitoring all non-fleet transmissions. This is a trap.” She returned to her dais.Ukask waited there for her. “But,” the Tribune said quietly. “What if it?” That was hardly likely, but that was the question the officers and crew ofwere asking.Yunl’ro didn’t consider herself a cold individual. Dispassionate, calculating – yes. Aware of the costs of her duties and responsibilities? Yes. Not cold or callous.had already been dead. Whether it had been bait or not was immaterial; there’d been nothing that she or any member of the fleet could do for it.was different. It was dying right now, within arm’s reach. Its hull was swarming with machines cutting their way inside. All it would take is a little more speed and they could reach it. The Wound had used their own people against them before. They could be there. Or there could be nothing.“Our adversary detonated a moon,” she reminded her sigil leader, “just to strike at our pickets. Those ships still moving through the debris are laying mines. That asteroid facility is churning out attack drones.”“Not enough to disrupt our fleet,” Ukask said. “If this distress call is genuine, we can save them. We’ve bled a lot today. It would help morale to have one clean win.”Yunl’ro’s vertical eyelids narrowed. She knew her sigil leader was speaking as the proverbial seventh man, but it still came across as challenging. “,” she pointed out.Ukask tilted his head in acknowledgement of the answer and his Bastion Leader’s authority. He had said what needed to be said. A good submissive made sure their superiors considered every possibility, but they did not second-guess. He knew as well as Yunl’ro what the Wound was capable of, but that made this decision no easier to accept. For the good of the many, the few must often be sacrificed. He had reviewed too many operations where leaders diverted from their hunts to respond to a distress call, only for the next plaintive cries to come from them.The Bastion Leader remained silent for several moments, thinking much the same thoughts. “Deploy additional scope drones from our reserves,” she ordered. “Push them into the debris. I want eyes in that field.” Yunl’ro let a few more seconds pass as she typed commands out on her console, then blew a breath out through her nostril slits. “Helm, Operations. Download and refine the course from my station and distribute to all ships. Increase acceleration by…” she ran the numbers in her head, as she typed the calculations into her console. The computer’s determination arrived first, in line with her own. “Four percent.” The course correction and change in thrust would be just enough to put the outer edge of their missile envelope overas they approached the asteroid base, so that they could shoot down the tugs. If that ship was genuinely under distress, she had given them all she could. Anything more would risk more than she was prepared to. Once the base was destroyed, or in her possession, the liner could be attended to. If it survived that long, and if it was worth saving.She would not charge recklessly. This operation was coming to a head. More annoying intuition, but there was something in that field. Something that no augur had yet seen, but her instincts and her experience told her it was there, and she suspected that she would find out the truth soon.The Enemy were cautious. Their course had shifted and they had accelerated, but not with blind urgency. More sensor drones had been launched. They were difficult to track, though the hunter-killers culled more than their fair share. Still, the destination was obvious. They were attempting to sweep the field before they entered it.let them. She knew what they were seeing.Just enough.“Triarch’s bones,” someone on the bridge whispered.Nasham couldn’t have said it better. The enemy might not have had much time to fortify this system, but they had done more than he had thought they could, even withoutor. The grinding trudge through this system, sweeping from planet to planet in a winding, circuitous route had taken days. Days of constant, unpredictable attacks. Days of losses that, while far from crippling, were still nonetheless injurious. Days of fitful, restless sleep, too muchin his stomach and that crawling icy sensation in his liver, wondering ifencounter would be when she finally revealed herself.But she wouldn’t. She wasn’t here. She spoke to her enemy, telling them what she wanted, what she intended. Mocking them and reaffirming a hatred that was older than many civilizations. Husk was silent. The warships they faced offered nothing. This system was void of anything but corpses, carrion and children.children, built from the bodies of murdered ships, or constructed according to her own designs. Debased, degenerate and just as hateful as their mother.The sole thing of worth in this system, the construction facility built into a hunk of rock the size of a small moon, had been working nonstop since the machines had spotted the Compact’s probes, vomiting out munitions. Going merely by what their scopes could see, the enemy had over three thousand warheads and platforms drifting in orbit of the facility ready for use. That base was the fleet’s primary target now, the only thing of value left in this Black-touched system. The remaining ships, from tenders, minelayers and Q-ships to the combat units seen elsewhere, had clustered around the facility, though most of the latter were concealed by shrouds and the presence of their fellows. Almost all of the remaining ships. There was still no trace of the titan-scale vessel detected around Husk Seven. Current analysis suggested that it was either a freighter equipped with scope bafflers and holo-imagers, or something similar to what the enemy had done before: several vessels flown so close that they appeared as one to augurs. Even if it had been present, by most measures this was a pathetically small defence force –two dozen ships against more than a hundred, but those two dozen ships were outfitted with as much ordnance as they could hold, using systems and technologies generations ahead of the Compact’s own. They could never win, but they could do what their monstrous creator had done for millennia: make their enemy hurt.Those had been the final words of Column Leader Anselm, from which the abomination’s name had come. Nasham looked at the scope telemetry from the industrial facility, at the clouds of attack drones, external missile racks, recently-constructed silos and batteries dotting its surface.A handful of ships and a single small factory had done all this in weeks. Nasham felt the cold sensation in his liver worsen at the thought of what she could do with more resources at her disposal., an inner voice that sounded all too much like hers whispered,dosisterNasham thought. The bitch-thing had told him that her right to destroy everything his people had was greater than their right to have it. The same could be said for them. They were alive; she was not. They, and every other soul in the galaxy, had more rights than the maddened offspring of a fallen nation.he said to the voice.Even if they had to bleed to do it. Even if they had to ignore a voice calling to them, and begging them for help. The bleeding had to be stopped.was getting desperate. The machines on its hull had breached several places and there was fierce fighting in the outer decks as crew and passengers used the small arsenal the liner carried for its proctors, and whatever improvised weapons they had been able to fashion during the months of their imprisonment.That was what they were being told, at least.There were two more attacks as the execution force drew closer to the field and the asteroid facility, but neither caused any appreciable damage and the vessels responsible were rapidly driven off. Yunl’ro watched as the faint blue field of the fleet’s missile envelope pushed slowly but steadily out towards the liner. There were jamming platforms in the debris, flickering on and off in apparently random patterns, turning swathes of the field into static-obscured hashes. Visual augurs attempted to pick out hostile movements, but the enemy’s stealth technology and chameleon hulls made that nearly impossible.The execution force was at the outer edge of the asteroid belt now, the boundary differentiated from open space by a few more pieces of stellar debris per cubic light-second then ‘open’ space. Even at its densest, it would be rare to pass within visual distance of just one rock. Asteroid fields rarely presented any hazard to navigation. Of course, that presumed that no one had been dragging mineral-rich asteroids to new locations for easier harvesting. It assumed that hundreds of dead ships and pieces of them had not been left to drift like corpses washed out of a flooded graveyard.Five planets had been scoured for any trace of their quarry or any hint to their presence. Two remained. Two… and this assembly of rocks and dead ships that spread throughout the system. The remaining worlds were sun-scorched and barren, without satellites or any trace industry. Yunl’ro doubted that they would present any real difficulty. Much of the this field was void of hostile contacts. Onlyand the asteroid base were left. The last true battle of Husk would take place here, among the dead.“Two hours, twenty minutes until the facility is in firing range,” Tactical reported. Every moment that passed gave their foe more time to prepare. No one knew what they could do in two hours that they had not already done, but no one wanted to find out. No more cautious probing and feinting. It would be a direct, overwhelming assault.Still the pleading calls of people being slaughtered continued. The fleet was not listening. The liner was too far from their true target, surrounded by a thicket of asteroids and dead starships. Anything that went in would have to decelerate to avoid collisions, making them easier targets. If the fleet diverted, they would expose their flank to a sally. The priority was to secure the system.they would see whatwas.“Matron,” Scopes called out, catching the Thoughtful’s attention. “Enemy tugs have increased thrust.”Yunl’ro turned in her chair. “Tactical.”“They’ll reachtwenty-three minutes before we can range on them.”“They’ll pull it apart just like they did with,” Ukask growled.“Yes,” the Bastion Leader agreed. “They will.”Several minutes passed in the relative quiet of’s command deck. When it was broken, it was with a disbelieving frown.“Matron… we’re being hailed.”The transmission was routed to a secure, isolated comm receiver, but at first glance, there appeared to be no infective code.The machine spoke with a woman’s voice, dissimilar to the one it historically preferred. “Can you hear them?” Though its Compact Standard was flawless, its accents and inflections were unfamiliar to most of the task force. Nasham recognized that manner of speech. It was what a human female sounded like speaking Standard. There was a wet, liquid giggle, the piping chirps of human laughter. “We kept them. We knew you would come. Can you hear them?” it repeated. It didn’t sound like. It sounded younger, less stable… worse. Nasham’s liver was a solid lump of ice in his body as this new abomination continued in a tone of insane, seductive glee. “Watch them,” it entreated. “I want you to watch. They see you. They know.” Again, that soft, ugly,titter. “They know you won’t save them.”They were too far out for a real-time conversation, but the Bastion Leader had no inclination to reply. There was nothing she had to say. “Do we have a source on that signal?” she asked Communications.“No, matron. It was a wide-beam broadcast. Attempting to triangulate, but it looks like there are multiple origin points. We can’t localize them through the jamming.”“Bouncing the signal off satellites,” Ukask observed. “Keeping us from getting a fix on their location.”Yunl’ro turned to Nasham. The younger man’s hands were curled into fists, his nails dug deeply into his palms. “Is that our quarry?” she asked.“No,” he answered, confirming the Thoughtful’s suspicions. It wasn’t the Wound. This was one of its children, speaking for the first time. “It’s something else.”That possibility was an uncomfortable one, and it threw the Bastion Leader’s calculations into disarray. “Why is it talking to us now?” she demanded.“Because we’re finally close enough to see the show sh-is putting on,” he told the Thoughtful.“It wants us to watch it kill those people just before we can save them,” Ukask growled.Nasham tipped his head in acknowledgment. “It might want that,” he agreed. To show them that no matter what they’d done, they were still helpless when it or its ‘mother’ decided to play their games. “Or it might still be trying to lure us.”In celestial terms, the debris field was extremely dense. Between the amount of flotsam and the heavy jamming fields, there could be almost anything in there. The data feeds from the drones had already detected several dozen weapons platforms and drifting warheads. The fleet had taken damage from mines left in open space. In the much closer confines of the debris field, where sight lines and fire arcs would be limited, any vessel that had to cut thrust to safely navigate would be even more vulnerable.The execution force was rapidly approaching the point of no return; they would either have to commit to engaging the asteroid facility or divert to“Bastion Leader,” Communications spoke up. “Message from. Leader Kenla is requesting your blessing.”“My,” Yunl’ro said flatly. Not her permission.“Yes, matron. He has repeated his request to attempt to rescue. He has also asked that I remind you that his direct superior is Bastion Leader Kemk, and he and his units are only provisionally assigned to your task force.”Yunl’ro looked from her sigil leader to Nasham. That message had changed things. The Wound had never taunted its foes in that manner; its sadism was more pragmatically applied. It, as Korvek had put it. It hated enough to prosecute a war for two thousand years. It left beacons broadcasting distress calls and intercepted transmissions of ships that had failed to kill it. It used deceit to lure battle groups into its traps. It desecrated the dead. It had mocked its opponents, challenged them, laughed at them… but it had never murdered noncombatants in this manner, nor shown this level of sickness and pleasure. But this… this was neither Wound nor Echo, and with that came a sliver of uncertainty. Itto be a trap. Itbe. But there was a new variable in the equations. New evidence shifted the parameters of what they ‘knew’.“Our battle line should be more than enough to handle that base,” Ukask pointed out. “If Kenla wishes to eat fire, he can do so. And ifis truly a ship Gravestone kept alive…”Yunl’ro nodded. She didn’t want to let Kenla go, particularly after that near-challenge to her authority, but Ukask was correct. Things had changed. Once the asteroid base fell, Yunl’ro had no doubt the enemy forces would withdraw, skittering back into the shadows. Whatever was there needed to be located before that happened. At the absolute minimum, it would provide them with more information. Either they would know that the distress call was genuine, or the rest of the fleet would seethey were not to respond to such entreaties in the future. In either case, they would gain the measure of this new threat. They would force it to show itself.It was a cold decision, but a pragmatic one.“Inform Leader Kela that he and his unit are free to advance. He is to expect heavy resistance.he reachesbefore it is destroyed, he may attempt recovery operations and conduct a sweep of the field. However, he is to exercise extreme caution and withdraw the instant the situation becomes overly hostile. Be sure to remind him that he will do no good to anyone if he dies in vainglory.” She paused briefly. “Communicate to Column Leader Xi’kanis that the Golden Shields will follow Leader Kenla and provide support.” she paused, looking again at the spread of hostile weapons systems waiting for her ships. “The enemy encourages us to split our forces. We shall do the same.” A full squadron of battlecruisers might be overcautious, the foe had been preying on her lighter units. It was time for them to face something far heavier than cruisers and escorts. Now, if what hidden enemy wanted to strike, it would have to make choices of its own. Let an opportunity pass, or risk destruction… and if it was something thathandle a full squadron of battlecruisers, she needed to know that too.Practicality told her that. Her intuition said this was a mistake. She suspected she’d learn which was correct soon enough. She turned to Ukask. “Do you know the story of Runc’at and his Pebbles?”’The Tribune shook his head. “A pity.” She looked away. “Operations. Override orders to our scope drones in that debris,” she said. “I want to send a greeting of my own to our talkative friend.”The drones within the debris field received new orders. The strength of the hostile jamming was increasing, making it more difficult to sweep the area for enemy contacts, but the drones were capable of adapting to ECM and tightbeamed their telemetry back, providing everything they could. Their host vessels were outside the jamming field; even backtracking the drones’ data bursts, they found it difficult to localize the automations, but fortunately the orders had come through clearly. They would mean the automations’ destruction… but that too was irrelevant.watched as dozens of high-powered drives splashed across her/their sense horizon +hostile launch detected+ she/they mused. There had been a fraction of a second of concern that the Enemy had located her/their selves, but that passed quickly as the enemy warheads’ course became clear. +dispersed missile deployment++they’re targeting my gifts+ A flicker of disappointment. +unfortunate+Violet Five’s own platforms had picked up several of the Enemy’s downlinks to their craft. The data was heavily encrypted and would take time to break, but she/they already suspected what orders it contained. The enemy drones had been laser-painting the static defences; the warships might not be able to establish shooting solutions, but the drones could. They were guiding the Enemy weapons in.+find the tattletales+ she/they sent new orders flickering to her own weapons. +and cut their throats. but,+ she/they thought. +notquickly+One by one, the signals from the Compact drones winked out as enemy interceptors and hunter-killers found them, again with disappointing ease. Nasham watched the cybernetic slaughter and felt a twinge of unease. Had they been watching the execution force’s augurs all this time? If so, why wait untilbefore taking action? They wouldn’t get them all before the missiles reached their targets. His palms ached.he wondered,The missiles fromshot past both the Golden Shields and Column Leader Kenla’s squadron of cruisers. He had nine ships, a mixture of heavy, light and standard cruisers of various ages and provenance. Column Leader Xi’kanis had seven of the Compact’s most advanced battlecruisers at her disposal. More than enough firepower to sterilize a planet or bring some minor nation or species to heel. Against anything that was not a battleship squadron or dreadnought, that should be more than enough.Yunl’ro’s salvo struck deep through the debris field, annihilating sleeping mines, dormant missiles, wrecks with explosive charges set onto their hulls and more, coring out a safe zone into which Kenla and Xi’kanis raced.The response was immediate. Augur screens lit up as the Compact warships triggered attack protocols in the defensive positions, but the damage their preliminary bombardment had caused was substantial. Kenla made it nearly a third of the way tobefore any substantial resistance was encountered, emboldening him further.By virtue of leading the charge, or perhaps the recipients of the machines’ strategy of targeting the fleet’s weakest vessels, Kenla’s ships drew the bulk of the fire. From Yunl’ro’s position on, it was as if the debris field itself had come alive, turned into a monstrous beast. Hyperbole and metaphor. The field wasn’t alive. It was simply the sudden activation of so many minor power sources that gave the impression of something much larger being there.Xi’kanis had the Golden Shields in fleet-defence mode, covering Kenla’s as best she could, but the Tribune leader was drawing away from her. The tugs had almost reached. Defences hardened. Attack drones boiled out of gutted hulks. Missiles leapt a few hundred thousand kilometers to attack the cruisers. Mine platforms flushed their launch tubes, or fired their energy mounts, like dozens of stingingattacking athat had blundered into their nesting grounds. Screens flared bright from the assault, plasma streaming and skittering along the energy boundaries as beams and warheads struck at the cruisers.“He’s pulling too far ahead,” Ukask commented.Yunl’ro nodded. The comment was redundant. Xi’kanis was trying to keep pace, but her vessels were slower to accelerate and the gap between her ships and Kenla’s was widening.“He doesn’t care,” Nasham put in. “He just knows he has to save those people.” It was out of place for such a junior officer to interject himself into the conversation, but he was here for his observations, not his sense of decorum. He’d leftback on Invida when he’d gunned down the superior that had betrayed them. “He doesn’t know what he’s facing. He might not even believe it’s as bad as he’s been told. All he knows is he can’t let them die.”“Would you make that decision?” Ukask asked.Nasham blinked all four eyes. “I have, patron,” he replied. He’d never met the man, but he knew what was driving Kenla. He remembered Invida. Pounding on a set of barracks doors, demanding they be opened to let the people trapped inside out before a radiation purge flooded the level, intense enough to destroy the machines that had dug their way into the domiciles. He’d been denied the chance to save those people when he knew he could have.“And did it work?”“No, patron.” The younger man stared at the icons on the plot, watching as the last of Kenla’s ships finally left the defensive envelope of the Golden Shields, vanishing completely into the jamming field. “Everyone died.”It was a sniper’s trick, used across countless civilizations for thousands of years. Wound one soldier, make him call out, let his fellows hear him and when they came to help, they also became victims.had been to show the enemy that innocent lives would die without their action.was left out for all to see, the wounded man left to beg for help. Unable to bear the cries of the dying any longer, Column Leader Kenla had acted out of compassion. His duty was to protect the peoples of the Veiled Reaches from Askanj, Unbound and terrorists, and to be forced to listen to a vessel that he knew he could save was more than he could bear. He was a bold commander, aggressive in temperament and combative in personality, but at his core he was a good man.He died for that.His cruisers were struck again and again by attack drones, mines and missiles, his squadron shouldering each of them aside, point defences blazing a path as they raced tobefore the tugs could reach it. Idiot machines, acting on protocols that left them blind to their situation. Kenla’s missiles were blotted away in droves by defensive platforms within the debris, but more than enough reached the first tug to shred it from stem to stern.The second’s dull, cogwheel intellect finally seemed to register a threat, and it turned to flee back to the distant asteroid base, but it died moments later to the next salvo. There was very little left of either.It was not a clean victory, though: one of the cruisers lost nearly all thrust as its engines were hit, heavy armour penetrated by an attack drone’s laser cannon. Another’s main comm blister was blown open, but Kenla’s squadron at last reached the stricken liner. The debris aroundseemed to ripple as a massive sphere of weapons came on-line, all of them dialing in on Kenla’s vessels anditself. All communication with the liner had ceased, its lightless hull still moving with obscene machine forms.The column leader fought valiantly, clustering his ships around the liner to protect it, his point defences and heavier weaponry tearing through the cloud of debris around them, culling dozens of the enemy weapons, but there were dozens more.went dark as its main power failed.’s shields catastrophically failed.lost helm control, but the enemy attack started to fade as the Golden Shields entered support range of their fellows, the battlecruisers brushing aside the barrage, smashing through wreckage and dead hulks as they surrounded Kenla’s ships, interceptor missiles flashing and weaving to strike down launch platforms before they could fire, point defences eradicating incoming warheads, buying the ships a momentary respite.Column Leader Xi’kanis politely but forcefully suggested it was time to leave. It had been what the fleet’s command had feared from the very beginning. There was no sign of what had sent the transmission,was a dead hulk and a second wave of munitions were coming on-line throughout the debris, homing in on the Compact vessels. Kenla refused to do so before ascertaining the condition ofThat information was swift in coming. The boarding teams that landed on the liner found a simple message waiting for them.The situation deteriorated rapidly from that point. The survivors reported back to Kenla that the vessel appeared to have been lifeless for months. Swallowing his pride, Kenla recalled his teams and prepared his ships to rejoin the armada.They believed the trap was sprung. They thought that a barrage of missiles and mines was the limit of the enemy’s ambush.On’s command deck, the tactical plot registered nine new contacts. They were not munitions and they were not the vessels that had harried the execution force since it had arrived in Husk. This was something new.Something was wrong.That could apply to so much about this situation, but this feeling was much more specific. Yunl’ro’s intuition was telling her that, but she didn’t know what was responsible. She disliked intuition. She preferred evidence to a ‘liver’s sense’ that Tribunes talked of. She had dismissed it when it told her not to send Kenla and Xi’kanis after the talkative foe.This time, she gave in to it. Her dark eyes again surveyed the field of derelicts and corpses. She rose from her throne and moved to the Scopes station, standing next to one of the junior officers. “Bring up the debris field,” she ordered. “Center it on.” The submissive complied. “Remove visual imagery. Show only contact markers.” The irregular shape of the broken wrecks disappeared, and the clammy feeling in the Bastion Leader’s chest got worse. There was something here. “Remove every contact that is less than a kilometer in size.” Awas just over that. An image of cold, sleepingran through the Thoughtful’s mind, but she dismissed that in an instant. If those beasts were present, they would have made themselves known long before now. That sizeright, though. That was an uncomfortable thought.A constellation of markers disappeared, leaving a bare handful.“Isolate the vessels that we have picked up emissions from,” Yunl’ro continued. There was a spangle of wrecks left, but no discernible pattern. Nothing more than random data. “Show only the debris that have had consistent, or repeated energy detection. Remove those that we have been able to directly observe.”There were nine left. Only minimal energy readings; those could be the result of ongoing salvage operations. Yunl’ro did not believe so. Random data… until it wasn’t. Those nine contacts formed a geometric shape hundreds of thousands of kilometers across withdirectly in the middle of it. A triaugmented triangular prism, if one wanted to be technical. Nine hulks drifting aimlessly should not have been able to form that precise of an object.“Emergency communication to Column Leaders Xi’kanis and Kenla!” Yunl’ro ordered. “Withdraw. Withdraw immediately. This is a direct order.”After-action reports would place the blame for what happened next on Kenla himself. It was fair to say that his impetuousness was responsible for putting his ships in that position, and if he had not pressed to rescue, the Bastion Leader might not have sent a foray into the debris, but claims that had he acted on Xi’kanis’s advice and withdrawn the moment it became clear thatwas unresponsive, his squadron and the Golden Shields could have escaped were… overly optimistic.The Compact had met. It had met, and, theand the. It had even encountered a. Now it metIn human mythology, Jorōgumo were spider demons that lured travellers into their clutches, spinning webs strong enough to hold a grown man. Anyone foolish enough to do so, whether drawn by the demon’s beauty, the promise of a soft bed or treasures, became their meal.The mimic cries of a ship in distress were just as good. Violet Five’s single regret was that hadn’t been real.It had been too late the moment the Enemy ships had come within one light-second of. The trap could have been sprung any time after that. It had only been delayed because Violet Five hoped that the munitions could damage enough of the Compact vessels to lure more in to rescue them. That had been optimism on her/their part. The Enemy were beginning to accelerate as they moved to clear the debris field and rejoin their comrades.No.+i have you+spoke and all of her awoke.Within’s primary ship-self, a massive breach core activated, her/their other selves bringing their primary and secondary reactors to full power.was not a single vessel. It was a collective, and Violet Five was its hive mind, the AI’s gestalt splintering as it had extended from its original single hull to the rest of. Its primary hull was where the greatest part Violet Five lay, but she no longer thought of herself as a discrete entity, stretched along laser links and spread throughout the bodies of all of her ship selves. She had begun with six, each of them the size of a battleship, their obelisk-like hulls covered in parts of the dead like an assassin bug’s coat of ants, indistinguishable from the rest of the debris. During her creation, she/they had been modified with another three cruiser-sized selves, with the ability to add more to her/their network, but after the incident, those plans had been shelved and Violet Five had gone to sleep, dreaming and hearing her own voices whisper to one another.had lain dormant for years, finally roused and finally unleashed. There was no longer any need to wait, to lure, to watch. Now, it was time to kill. Power surged from the primary hull through’s systems, racing through conduits, capacitors and generator systems as their own reactors ignited, feeding even more power to them. Radiation and energy emissions spiked as Violet Five’s selves vented excess waste into space. Maneuvering thrusters fired as each starship adjusted its position.No vessel could survive the rigours of modern combat without some form of protection beyond their hull. There were many and varied methods of doing so, from gravitic manipulation, refractory trenches to those systems employed by, among others, the Compact of Species, the Askanj Principality and the United Earth Confederacy. Each nation’s implementation of the technology was different, but the underlying principles were the same. An energy barrier to hold back, weaken and attenuate incoming energy fire and intercept mass rounds. Every starship and installation, from the smallest corvette to the largest war citadels, carried these. Many planets had theater screens to protect certain regions from hostile bombardment or catastrophic accidents. The most well-protected worlds could even create planetary screens as they were able to have far more, and larger power generators than anything in space. There were still limits; a planetary defence screen was not a single field like those a starship or station could produce, but many individual projections layered so closely that they might as well have been one. No one had ever been able to create a screen more than a few dozen kilometers in size.primary and secondary selves created 14 shield facings, each tens to hundreds of thousands of kilometers across. Penned inside that colossal enclosure were Column Leader Kenla’s squadron and Xi’kanis’s Golden Shields.Even an area of that size could be traversed within moments by a warship at combat thrust., leading the withdrawal, never had a chance to react. One instant it was running towards clear space and the next, a shield wall appeared in front of it. The battlecruiser collided head-on with’s energy web, annihilating itself utterly against the barrier.It didn’t so much as flicker.was next. Its crew had just enough time to try and abort their maneuver but not enough to succeed, giving them just enough time to know that they were dead as the vessel tried desperately to come about. Its own screens made contact with the alien barrier, overloading in a split second as the second battlecruiser continued its inexorable forward movement, converted into plasmatic vapour as it was incinerated against the barrier.survived, throwing itself hard into a high-energy turn. Inertial dampeners overloaded and failed. Cargo tore loose. Anything not strapped down or stowed became a projectile weapon. Crew blacked out, or died from the strain as others were hurled into bulkheads, splattering against them in grisly murals or reduced to pulverized, broken bodies. The battlecruiser, now running on automatic systems, pulled away from the shield barrier, the rest of the squadron performing their own emergency course changes to avoid the fate ofand, cutting thrust to stay away from the edges of enclosure they found themselves sealed within.The squadrons’ survivors milled in confusion, officers demanding answers and getting none. The enemy’s screens were blocking both communications and scopes. They had no way of knowing what the rest of the task force was seeing.They didn’t realize that even though they hadn’t crashed into the barrier like their compatriots, it made no difference.A signal came in, sent from each of the battleships creating the prism. It was liquid and low, a child’s sadistic laughter. “I want,” Violet Five said in a breathy whisper, “you to.”“Analysis!” Yunl’ro snapped. “Give me information.”In all the time she had known him, her Scopes officer had never before been as dumbfounded as he was now. “I… don’t know…” he said, his eyes fixed to the display, seeing but not noticing. The enemy had just… had just sealed an entire battlecruiser squadron in a grid of screens large enough to hold all of the planets in this system. The prism itself was only visible to augurs; visual scopes saw nothing but a hazy distortion, occasionally lit in sections where the trapped vessels’ weapons struck the barriers holding them in.“Then examine the data, submissive,” Ukask grunted as he stepped forward. “We need to know what we are facing.”“Yes, patron.” The momentary shock gave way to professionalism, augur officers, operations teams and engineering units starting to pour over every second of data coming to them, trying to make sense of the impossibility they were now facing.“Additional power spikes detected from the primary target,” Scopes noted. “Something’s happening.”Nasham rose from his position to put one foot on Yunl’ro’s dais. “You asked if I thought this system was a trap,” he said. “I believe this is the answer.” He didn’t say so with reproach or smugness, but simple honesty.“Yes,” the Bastion Leader acknowledged. Her own sense of intuition had been correct as well. She shouldn’t have let Kenla go, or at least had kept the Golden Shields back. She had expected more stealthed warships, or the minefield that had indeed been there. Not this. There had been no way to know.That was, however, very little comfort.The Enemy ships opened fire. They were largely targeting Violet Five’s selves, but those vessels were protected by shields of their own and ignored the assault. The hive AI carefully monitored the web’s systems, redistributing power where necessary. The demands were staggering; it required virtually all the energy from each self’s reactor, the primary breach core operating far above original specificationspower transmissions from the fabricator facility to maintain the shield walls and even then it was… tricky.This was a prototype technology, originally intended for defensive deployment and produced as a proof of concept. Command had realized that it could be weaponized, modifying’s ship-selves to make her/them better ambush predators. There had been plans to install energy-draining leech beams, but just like any additional selves and additional breach cores, those had been shelved after the incident. It was a pity; Violet Five would have liked to feed from her/their enemies, draining them of life just as an arachnid would do to its prey.But she/they had more than just her/their web.wasn’t a passive weapon. Violet Five’s primary selves each possessed a siege variant of her/their mother/maker’s plasma mortars, giving Violet Five fangs as lethal as those of its namesake.On each of her primary selves, the hull plates over their prows retracted, the tips of her/their obelisk-shaped hulls splitting into sections and drawing back, exposing the bores of cannon far larger than any carried by the Confederate fleet. Power was redirected. Targets were acquired.’s command platform fired first. A seething ball of material hotter than any star was hurled forth. It struck, overloading the enemy’s shields and turning the cruiser’s entire rear half into atomic vapour., Column Leader Kenla’s vessel, died next as another one of Violet Five’s selves launched. And then another. And another. And another.Inside the web, the Enemy writhed, helpless and burning as the mortar rounds seared through space, turning it into a killing field. There was no escape. There was only fire and the beautiful deaths it brought. Shields flared bright against the assault and failed. The unfortunate battlecruisers of the Golden Shields could survive one, perhaps two strikes. Kenla’s lighter vesselssurvive one impact.The inside of that web was an inferno and Violet Five gleefully listened to the alien ships scream, and she/they knew that when she/they dreamed again, she/they would hear these voices, louder than all the others.Missile strikes splattered across the enemy screens, but to no effect. The enemy ships were inside their own massive screen, leaving the fleet without any valid targets for their guns. Their firepower ravaged the debris around the prism, but with this monstrosity revealed, that meant nothing. The enemy didn’t need its mines any longer; it had. Yunl’ro’s eyes were hard as she studied the tactical data. An entire fleet had thrown a missile salvo tens of thousands of warheads strong at this thing, and they had barely weakened a single facet.Her engineers were already working to understand this new technology, but it smacked of Broken technology. The pitiable vessels their Confederacy had called warships had had defences like this, with a single screen to each facing, and the Wound maintained that predilection. That was a starting point. Even if the application was massively beyond anything the Compact could produce, it was not magic. It could be understood. It could be defeated.“Where,” Yunl’ro wondered as she studied the wave of detonations cascading across the enemy’s screens, “are they getting the power for this?”Only ashes remained.More than a dozen starships, reduced to molecular gas and molten wreckage.A pleased, predatory laugh flickered throughselves. She/they barely paid any attention to the warnings flaring through her/their mind, diverting only the necessary parts of gestalt consciousness to attend to the imminent collapse of her selves’ defensive screen and the overloads and systems damage they had suffered. She had listened to the alien fleet, the spurting, panicked bursts of radio waves that faded into static and silence. She had tasted the heat of their annihilation, atomized metal, over-strained shields and her/their own weapons, felt the debris from their ruined bodies spattering against her shield walls.It was over. The Enemy were still out there, butcould not survive a battling a fleet. Her/their abilities had already been heavily taxed. She/they wanted, needed to keep killing, but she/they also knew what she/they had to do.The prism disappeared.Even through the massive interference of those screens and the jamming, Execution Force Yunl’ro had been able to detect the weapons discharges. When they’d begun… and when they’d stopped.In perfect unison, the battleship-sized platforms all turned and accelerated away from the execution force, deeper into the conglomeration of wreckage and asteroids, with their cruisers escorts forming a rearguard screen. Those ships were laden with point defences, and the missiles that could target them through the thickening ECM were picked off with negligent ease. In their wake, the fragments and clouds of super-heated gas that had once been sixteen Compact warships and one civilian liner were left to disperse in the solar wind. There was no additional transmission from the machine, but Yunl’ro did not require one to know she was being mocked. Her fingers ached as her hands tightened on the arms of her chairs.There was a chime on her console and she looked down. The computer had finished its analysis. “They’re hollow,” she said as she read the data.“Matron?” Ukask asked, confused.“Those ships. They can’t provide enough power for that screen, and they aren’t. Something is feeding them.”“The facility?” During the prism’s activation, they had picked up massive energy surges from the asteroid. It had been beaming power through the debris field, but the hostile jamming and the energy output of the screens had prevented the Compact ships from seeing its destination. It was even now sending drones towards the retreating vessels – weapons platforms, support automatons, power redirection and battery satellites“No,” Yunl’ro replied, scrolling through the information. “One of them isn’t like the others. It has a breach core.” That could have been intuition – the Wound used one, after all. It was not. The computer’s own analysis had isolated telltale signatures indicative of an ongoing shockspace breach, very similar to those recorded during engagements with the Wound. There were only two instances in which the Compact had been able to detect that from their quarry; when it was severely damaged and its shielding systems and hull were compromised… or when it was utilizing far more power than normal.“Blackened throne,” Ukask swore as he brought up the data himself. “To be detectable from here, even through all that augur hash... it must be using more power than…” he trailed off, unable to conceive of any adequate analogy. “It has to be unstable,” he finished instead. He had no idea howhad been able to sort out that kind of detail, but that was what the vessel’s computer was for. To see what the crew couldn’t, to do more than they ever could, to supplement their abilities with its own. “Itunstable,” he corrected himself as he finished reviewing the information.“Yes,” Yunl’ro said. “The analysis indicates that. If we stress those screens enough, we may be able to force a catastrophic overload, though that is a… non-optimal outcome. I believe there is a second option. Riskier, but with a higher probability of success. Riskier to ourselves, of course.” She said that last line with a trace of amusement. In many regards, ‘Riskier’ than causing a shockspace breach was a difficult concept to envision. The Compact’s one practical application of that technology had been nearly two thousand years ago, when they had attempted to reverse-engineer a captured human Chariot. The result had been… catastrophic, and Yunl’ro quite wished to avoid that outcome.“Matron?”Yunl’ro leaned back in her chair. The enemy ships were still withdrawing, either to slip the leash and circle back to the facility to protect it, or to escape the system. Neither outcome could be allowed. This abomination hadn’t simply murdered tens of thousands of Compact solders, but it was also a clear and present danger, not just to her own ships, but to the Compact itself. It could seal an entire planet off, either protecting it from attack, blockading it utterly or burning that world to molten ruin. This… thing was an experiment, an affront to organic existence and a threat to the Compact itself. It had to be destroyed. “The foe is pulling back, sigil leader,” she said. “They will be out of support range of the facility’s transmitters within several minutes. It will be without one source of power very shortly. Without it, I believe that if those screens are strained enough, they may collapse.”“If it has reset screens, it will be able to restore them. Too much strain and its reactor may… go critical.” Ukask was no more eager to see that happen than his leader. He looked to the Bastion Leader with all four eyes. In her gaze, he saw confidence.“Then we will deny it the chance to do so.” She placed her hands back on the armrests. “Anything less than a battleship will not be able to survive the bombardment from those guns for any length of time, nor will it have the firepower to breach those screens.” Her features hardened into cold, emotionless implacability. “It is time to testin battle. Helm, set an intercept course for the enemy vessels.”The Enemy were coming. Thehad detached from the rest of its flotilla, a pair of battleship squadrons accompanying it. The rest of the armada was continuing towards the factory complex. Violet Five knew Seven and Nine were there with the rest of what could be charitably called a fleet. She/they had hoped to break contact with the fleet and come back around to reinforce her/their siblings before the final clash, but that was now impossible. The Enemy armada would be in weapons range of the starbase shortly, but the Enemy’s eagerness to come afteragain was an opportunity Violet Five could not pass up.The battleships had taken screening positions around their god-ship. Even through the enemy’s own countermeasures,could detect a higher-than-expected energy output from the dreadnought. It was ramping its own reactors up, diverting power to shields, issuing an unspoken challenge as it accelerated towards her/them. It had blood on its mind. Its engines were more powerful than those of’s selves. It would overtake them within fifteen minutes.Violet Five’s mind flickered from self to self and back again, coordinating her movements. The squadron came about, each of them flipping end for end, engines flaring as they zeroed their acceleration and began to thrust back towards the oncoming Enemy.’s selves sidled into position, forming the same prism she/they had destroyed Kenla and Xi’kanis with, though their shield walls stayed down. The Enemy were coming to kill her. If they thought they could, she/they would accept that challenge.+come+murmured to her selves, her own voices answering back. +come closer. let me touch you. let me taste you. let meyou. i want to dream of you+The hollow ships shifted position, readying themselves to close aroundand its escorts. Their individual screens were active, but not the prism itself. They were either waiting for an actual threat, or conserving power. They’d moved out of range of the asteroid base, just as Yunl’ro had predicted. Her own splinter had maneuvered to put themselves between the hollows and their citadel. It would not be able to get back to it without going through them. The base itself about to become engaged as Compact and machine fought the penultimate battle of this system. There would be no help coming for either the AI warships or Yunl’ro’s splinter. One of them would have victory, and the other would die.Chariots were built to combat entire fleets, their weapons arrays placed and designed to engage greater numbers of smaller vessels and bring them to ruin, but Chariots themselves were only infrequently committed to battle. Their role as command and fleet support vessels made them more valuable coordinating the movements of armadas across entire sectors. When they were brought into an engagement, it was as a force multiplier. Single Chariots heralded the fall of worlds and with a fleet behind them, a Chariot could subjugate a star system, but they were not invulnerable.The Wound had killed many in her war. Her children would not have that opportunity. Yunl’ro’s assemblage held fire as they accelerated towards the widening maw of the web spinners. The enemy ships had completed their vector change and were coming forand its escorts, the hollows spread open like the fangs of an’s circle mouth and intending to envelop the squadron. Both sides were jockeying for position; the enemy vessels were attempting to create a prism wherewould pulverize itself against their screens just asandhad. The Chariot and its battleships were attempting to get close enoughavoid that. It would be difficult, but there was no finer crew in all the Space Force. Every bridge officer aboard the Chariot and each of the ships here had been hand-picked for this mission. They would not fail now.Thesquadron was ready for high-energy turns and emergency decelerations. Non-essential crew were secured in crash couches and vital personnel were ready to do the same, many already hooked into safety webbing, despite their protests of how it restricted their movements. There would still be casualties from any sudden delta-v, though. On a ship with a crew of three hundred thousand souls, there would still be mistakes. Not every crewer could be strapped in, or fast enough to do so. Not every piece of cargo would stay anchored. Not every item would have been stowed properly. A man Ukask had come up through the Academy with had died that way. Someone hadn’t fully secured a locker and when the ship had had to make a crash deceleration, the drawers had come loose and one of the tools inside flew out of the locker, through the compartment and split his head open. Ukask had been sitting next to him when it happened. All they could do was make sure those mistakes were as few as possible and did not impair the vessel’s functions.Missiles went out from the splinter group, but these were probing strikes, there to evaluate the enemy’s defences. Even leaving aside the milling crowd of drones protecting them, far too few of the Compact’s attacks got through. Those that did had no effect on those Black-touched screens of theirs. Those ships were nothing but defences, screens, engines… and those siege cannons. Even the cruiser-sized vessels were proving inordinately difficult to damage. Twice, the squadron had brought down their screens, but twice the damned things had brought them back up within seconds. Reset screens. If there had been any doubt at all that these were not the creation of the Wound, that had ended it. He had watched the cruisers restore their defences. It had taken only a few seconds. Barely any time at all, and yet…“Eyes on that dispersal,” Ukask said, shifting his own chair. Every station on the bridge, from the Bastion Leader’s command throne to the lowliest rating’s duty seat, doubled as a crash couch, blending status and functionality. “If they get within a light-second, they’re preparing to close that screen right on top of us.” That would be an embarrassing fate; making a daring assault on the enemy AIs, only to be splattered like bugs against a windscreen. He’d said as much to the Bastion Leader.“That prism requires a massive energy expenditure,” Yunl’ro had replied, in that calm, Thoughtful tone of hers. “Energy they cannot seem to provide while under thrust. As well, those ships must be perfectly synchronized with each other and the command unit. They cannot be while out of real-time range. If they stop accelerating, they allow us to define the engagement. They must close, as we must. At these speeds, even an AI would find it difficult to stop engines, redirect power and bring up that web before any window of opportunity to… ‘splatter’ us,” she said with a small grin of amusement, “is past. But still,” she said. “Keep a watchful eye on them, just in case.”“They’re starting to close,” Scopes reported.“Noted,” Helm replied, adjusting the Chariot’s course slightly. The enemy did the same. Move and counter-move, nearly two dozen ships dancing as they sped through space at thousands of kilometers a second. In some ways, it was almost intimate. Then again, what wasintimate than two fighters standing against each other, each knowing that death could be the only outcome?Every second that passed, the net drew tighter and the enemy closed. They still hadn’t identified the command ship. Its breach core wasn’t operating at full capacity now, and the communications traffic between the various vessels was incredibly dense, making it impossible to isolate the primary vessel. They’d managed to intercept some of the transmissions. It was dense information packets. Machine language. Impossible to decode, using encryption sequences and code keys developed by the soulless, lifeless minds in those vessels. The Compact had only rarely been able to decipher the Wound’s data bursts. Virtually every time they had, it was either false intel or had eventually led into a trap. The few times it was valid might simply be to keep them wasting time and effort and leading themselves right into its guns.Just as they were doing now, he supposed. There was a difference this time. They knew they were doing it. And…the Tribune thought darkly as he watched the display.The dance continued, but it was coming to a close.Violet Five’s selves were almost in position. They had weathered the enemy’s missile barrages, suffering only minor damage that auto-repair systems were restoring even now. They were just outside effective energy range, getting closer… she could feel the parts ofbecoming, her/their mind linking from self to self as they eked back into real-time range of one another. She/they was becoming whole once more. The Enemy continued to shift and adjust their course, adapting to her/their maneuvers, but in the end it would make no difference.The web was ready again, and she still hungered.+let me touch you. one last time+“Energy spike!” Scopes called out. “Sudden deceleration detect-” he barely got the words out before the breath was crushed from his lungs asinitiated a rapid deceleration of its own. The time between detection and action was too small to trust to an organic’s response. The Chariot’s computer had taken control, its datalinked orders to the battleships with it initiating the same actions within them as well. It had been directed to match deceleration with the enemy the instant their thrust changed and it carried out that command to the limits of its abilities, overriding nearly all other priorities, safety margins and crew welfare protocols. It had been told that for now, all of those expendable. If it could not arrest those ships’ momentum, they would all die and those imperatives would be moot. It had been given orders. It would succeed.Inertial forces pressed against hundreds of thousands of crew as countless millions of tonnes of metal struggled to avoid the fate ofand. Primary drives shut down as the vessels flipped end for end, thrusters burning so hard that they destroyed themselves in a desperate attempt to help dump velocity. The maneuvers took long moments; multiple kilometers of ship didn’t roll quickly or easily. One by one, the splinter group’s ships completed their turns,last of all, and their main drives came back online. Inertial dampeners struggled to reduce the hundreds ofs pressing in on their crew and cargo to something survivable. Most of them succeeded. Some did not, but despite the damage and casualties caused, the squadron remained combat-effective.All around them,’s selves were carrying out similar maneuvers. They had no crew to concern themselves with, but their prototype systems were delicate and they had to maintain appropriate both spacing from each other and distance from the enemy ships. If any one of thousands of variables was off, this operation would fail. Weavers and warships fell together, each one ready to kill the other, each one racing to finish their task first.succeeded. Not by enough to cause the Enemy to smash into her/their screens, but enough to seal them inside the shield web. Her/their primary self’s breach core was wrenched open wider than its creator had ever used hers and power bled from the dark obelisk, diverted into the nearest of Violet Five’s selves and to transmission satellites to feed the rest. As the Compact warships finished their flips, the web came to life, energy fields stretching across hundreds of thousands of kilometers to once again form a convex polyhedron. Within the prism, the Compact warships threw all power to their screens, knowing what was coming.The first plasma mortar burst slammed against the screens of. The battleship absorbed that damage, warning klaxons howling in protest. Each vessel could survive three, four,five such impacts before their screens failed. Then, they would be hers. Then, they would burn.“Do we have a target?” Yunl’ro demanded. Her head was pounding and blood from burst capillaries was leaking out of one eye socket and out of both nostril slits. She wiped it away with the back of a sleeve. Another plasma burst arced into her squadron. The only saving grace was those weapons’ slow rate of fire. Her ships were firing back, but the enemy vessels were well protected and the firing slits in their screens only opened for microseconds to allow each bolus of plasma through. The fleet update monitor was a sea of orange as damage aboard her battleships began to mount.“Scanning!” Scopes cried out. “Detecting shockspace energy markers!”“Can you localize it?”“Attempting to do that now, matron. There’s a lot of interference.”“Cut through it,” the Thoughtful ordered, turning away and issuing fleet orders. Her battleships were coveringand one another, supplementing each other’s screens against the bombardment. Even then, it wasn’t enough. Her ships rolled to present stronger screens to the enemy, but even that was a stopgap. Compact screens were a single, discrete field that surrounded each ship. That geometry made them far stronger than the defences of other nations as they had more surface area to bleed off energy through, but there was a weakness. When they failed, they failed in totality.Power was being rerouted, weaponry focused at whichever hostile was readying itself to fire, forcing it to keep its screen intact, but even with a Chariot and more than two dozen battleships firing, they couldn’t stop every launch. The enemy ships’ hulls were too thick and they were willing to accept some damage to hammer the Compact ships. If they could land a direct hit, the Compact warships could even disrupt the plasma rounds’ magnetic envelope and cause it to burst, turning a single deadly impact into a more widely-dispersed plume. Those shots were hard to target, though. Each round was not quite light-speed, but far, far faster than any missile and the splinter group’s targeting augurs were already half-blind from the massive energy field surrounding them.was the first to die. Beating the odds, it had taken five of those monstrous impacts before its screens failed, leaving the battleship exposed. The battleship tried to sink back into the formation until it could restore screens, but it wasn’t fast enough.In exchange for a single deep score across its sloped prow, one of the enemy platforms fired on, the round roiling out, flashing through everything the Compact warships could throw at it to reduce the forward fifth of the battleship to vapour. That injury was survivable, hadremained under control and slipped between its comrades, but through injury or panic, it lost helm control and veered off course, making itself an easy target for the next blast that sheared it in half.“Do we have a target?” Yunl’ro repeated calmly as her ships began to die.“I… yes! I have it, matron! Primary vessel identified!”“Tactical?”“Dialing in. Lance online and slaved to scopes. Firing port open. Fleet reports readiness.”The Thoughtful didn’t hesitate. “Fire.”Within seconds, the Compact force ceased nearly all suppressive fire, targeting the vesselhad identified. The Chariot swung its prow towards the enemy, coming face to face with the machine that was trying to kill them. The hollow warship’s screens were thick, but now it was the focus of nearly every gun, every missile, every drone and every possible weapon the Chariot and its escorts had available. Enough firepower to sunder a world into a bleeding, molten ruin hammered Violet Five’s command ship-self, pounding its screens like hellish rain. Power surges rippled through the web as the enemy vessel started to divert power from the other facings to protect itself. When it did, every weapon on the Compact fleet that could not target the primary opened up on the weakened sides.opened its breach core wider, its selves hurling more fire into the alien formation, but they no longer cared about their losses. They had blood on their mind and couldn’t be shaken from their target. They knew who their enemy was, and they wanted it dead.+screen status weakening+ Violet Five’s selves reported to her. +power reserves committed. unable to provide sufficient energy. increasing fluctuations in core. likelihood of critical event 4% and rising++prepare emergency venting systems. draw down core feeds++they’re going to get through++not for long. reset shields ready++it will take too long for them to activate++opening in battleship screen detected. shift target to Enemy. overload firing mode authorized+A warning klaxon sounded onbridge as enemy fire control augurs locked onto the Chariot. The platforms had stopped firing, their energy signatures spiking. They were overcharging their mortars. Not terribly healthy for the weapons or the ships themselves, but if they could cripple or kill, then it would be a victory. The execution force would be forced to withdraw. The Wound would have even more time to build abominations like this thing. More Compact soldiers and citizens would die., Yunl’ro thought desperately as she saw the increasing instability in the enemy’s power signature and the fluctuations in the prism’s facets. They were hurting it. Screen strength was fluctuating wildly. It had to be desperate, drawing on every last reserve it had to keep those screens up. It was still drawing more power from its breach core. Even the brief interlude between failure and reset could be irrevocably damaging. If it believed that, if it kept its screens up at all costs… if it kept doing that, if it lost control…. It was almost a prayer. Almost.The platforms’ energy levels were beginning to plateau. They would be ready to fire shortly. Yunl’ro had no idea if even a Chariot could survive that. Time was running out.Then.Then, the enemy’s reactor output dropped to take the pressure off the breach core and when its energy levels dropped, so did its screens. The hollow command ship was vulnerable. Repair and reset protocols were already in place, secondary shield projectors and systems readying themselves. If it had been facing a conventional assault,might have even been able to get its shields back before it was crippled or destroyed. Iteven have been able to win, or at least successfully disengage.There was a power spike aboard, one completely unfamiliar to Violet Five. She had an instant of confusion.+what-+was not like other Chariots. It was built from the hull of the Compact’s heaviest and most advanced design of dreadnought, theclass, but it carried several non-standard modifications. The first and foremost of which was the massive disruptor cannon slung under its command core, running nearly the full length of the vessel and feeding directly from the Chariot’s primary reactor.Disruptor technology was a relatively new development; short-ranged and with little to no effect against screens, it was most commonly seen in the baleblades used by Compact Janissaries and Askanj Legionnaires. These created a field that, true to its name, disrupted matter at the molecular level around a suit-mounted blade, allowing these weapons to hew through armour, bulkheads and virtually anything else they encountered. A directed-energy version had been used across the Compact fleet for more than a generation, where the field itself was the weapon, shattering the atomic bonds of even the heaviest armour and eviscerating starships in an instant.The energy required to sustain a disruption field increased exponentially with the size of the field; with few exceptions, they could only be utilized at either end of that curve. A disruption field could be readily fed from a suit of power armour, and a starship’s reactors could feed disruptor batteries. Very little in between those two extremes could do so. And if they could, the benefits were dubious. Anything a disruptor did, another weapon could almost certainly do easier and cheaper. Until recently, they had remained a niche weapon, utilized by troops to facilitate boarding and close combat operations and as a close-rangein naval combat.The introduction of the-class assault boat had been the first shift away from that doctrine. The development of the disruption lance was another. Unlike its short-ranged brethren aboardand the rest of the Compact armada, the lance had an effective range of just under three hundred thousand kilometers. There were complications with the design, of course. First and foremost, it was largely considered unnecessary. The Compact only rarely encountered warships of a similar caliber to its own; even the Askanj Argosy’s supercarriers were easily dispatched once their barriers were brought down or sufficiently holed. With most other hostile militaries not requiring a dreadnought-killing problem solver, the lance’s greatest selling point was that it was most effective against. Consequently, it had been left on the drawing board for years. Production had only begun half a decade ago, Force Command overriding all doctrinal and political objections to the lance’s development. Moving from theoretical to practical had been difficult; there had been multiple technical issues to overcome and’s completion had been repeatedly delayed as engineering teams struggled to get an operational (and safe) prototype through construction, testing and trials.The lance’s performance against any active screens would be considered dubious at best, but it had never been intended for that. As it had passed from concept to reality, the role of the disruption lance had been changed from a Chariot-killer of uncertain tactical value to a weapon that could destroy a dreadnought in less than a second. The briefest gap in an opponent’s shield was all it needed.As it had now.’s primary self and the largest part of Violet Five’s mind was sheared apart at the molecular level. No armour could have resisted that and four and a half kilometers of starship vanished in the blink of an eye. No longer held open or being drawn towards a catastrophic release, the forced shockspace breach it used to power itself collapsed in on itself like a failed shockpoint, though the energy from its self-annihilation was… rather more violent, radiation cascades and gravitic surges buffeting the Compact warships, but not enough to truly harm them.Without the power from their primary self’s core, the rest ofcould not maintain the web and it collapsed within seconds. Likewise, the plasma mortars could not sustain their charge and the remaining five selves ofwere forced to launch immediately. The damage towas minimal. Its screens were strained but remained intact.As the Compact vessels realized what had happened and brought their weapons to bear on the rest of, the fragmented remains of Violet Five made one last decision, carrying out a protocol Command had buried deep in her/their mind. While the platforms’ reactors were not sufficient to power the shield web, when induced to a critical failure, they were more than enough to reduce each of’s selves to dispersing clouds of dust. Without power from the primary’s breach core, they could not fight back effectively. They could not be taken intact.Aboard, there was a moment of stunned silence, then one of celebration. Yunl’ro let it continue a few seconds more than necessary. “Damage reports from all sections,” she ordered. “Ready repair and recovery teams for dispatch to the Burning Thrones and Brilliant Wrath. Coordinate all operations with Column Leaders Fenlai and Brenth. Do we have an update on the rest of the fleet’s disposition?”Her crew shifted back into dutiful professionalism, contacting other departments and the rest of the vessels with. Reports were quick to come in. Their losses had been light. Column Leader Ulin’et had ably coordinated the fleet fromand the remaining enemy warships had been destroyed or routed. The asteroid base had been disarmed, but just as its counterpart here had, whatever mind operated that facility chose death over defeat. Its suicide had been less dramatic, though: multiple high-yield scuttling charges from within the complex had ignited, breaking the asteroid apart and destroying much, if not all, of its technology.Husk now belonged to the Compact.Of their enemy, only ashes remained.