I stared at the coalescing 'Sect swarm, seething impotently. In the few weeks I'd known her, Tiamat had been more mother to me than Grace had ever been, and this lot had hunted her, baited away her defenders, trapped her and killed her. My palms itched with the need to leap in among them, ripping off carapaces to let the soft tissue inside freeze in the vacuum of space. Of course, with the numbers at the far end of the system, we'd be the ones dying, but training had long since removed whatever miniscule fear of dying my teenaged self naturally possessed.

"Sir?" Card's voice filtered into my command space, her fingers teasing my fist open to slip a thermos into my grasp. "You've cut yourself. Please be careful. We need you at your best if we're going to get back to Fleet."

Duty settled its iron yoke around my shoulders. I shrugged, lifting the thermos to my lips without thinking about it. "Quick, how soon until we've got three jumps ready?"

A few seconds passed before my First's response. "Sorry, sir. I've got a lead on a permanent solution to our power issues, but I've got to research it a little more."

"Three jumps, Quick."

"Yes, sir. I thought... never mind, sir. One hour with minimal maneuvering, sir."

"Right. I'll give you four, but we won't be static. I'll also need you directing damage control and armor refitting."

Another pause. "You're not considering taking on that swarm, are you sir?"

Gel pressed against my cheeks as I shook my head. "No, First. We will be seeing battle, though. Be ready."

"Yes, sir. Four hours to power up for our third jump. You got it, sir."

With my First working on our power issues, I dismissed them and him from my mind. I called up our current placement, the placement of our opponents, and our plotted jump routes. The information coalesced into a single path and future state in my head, and I started snapping orders as quickly as I could speak.

"All armored Cadets to armor bays. Prepare for launch." The debacles of the day before raced through my mind, and the path twitched. "Double fists, squad cross check armor readiness. Two countermeasure units per squad, cross check countermeasure settings." I shouldn't have to say that. My First ought to have taken care of it. I took a moment to plug a note to that effect to him, tracing a line through our current system map as I did.

"Echidna, prepare to alter to this course, evasion pattern Echo-nine-Foxtrot-two-November. Maintain continuous jump plot to system..." I reached out to our local star chart, marking a system with an icon indicating extremely high numbers of navigation hazards. "Marked destination Alpha. All non-armored Cadets to damage control stations. Armored Cadet squads report in as ready."

The gel around me shifted as my bodyguards moved to flank me. No trace of my command space intruded on their vision, but they knew if I snapped orders like that, we'd see combat soon. I shifted fully into my command space, all perceptions of the bridge fading to meaningless ghosts.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

The shifting mass of 'Sects reached a critical mass, and Marapis and Soros slipped out to engulf us. "Echidna, alter course on my mark." The first Soro reached a line I'd drawn across my command space. "Mark."

Echidna spun on her core, clawing at the fabric of space for purchase. I'd given her a complex combination of evasion patterns, far too much for me to trace if she'd dropped a step. I stopped trying to observe her and instead focused on my armored squads. Weller's face floated before me, and I opened a broadcast channel to my Cadets.

"Continuous readiness check until launch. Double free periods to any Cadet who spots a confirmed downcheck on another Cadet's gear." The readiness display, previously solid green, flickered with spots of yellow and red as Cadets flagged one another, argued, got confirmation or rejection of the downgrade, and generally fought to prove their armor space worthy before the time came for launch.

I turned to watch our enemies. The Materner who had shadowed us still pursued, slowly as ever, but she'd dispatched one of her Soros to join with the coalescing swarm. At least a dozen of her sisters formed the core of the 'Sect force, with more drifting in every moment. Hundreds of Madrecita variants and at least a thousand Soros formed a cloud around them, making an exact count of the larger ships impossible, and countless parasite craft filled the spaces in between with a haze of sensor contacts.

A half dozen tentacles of those parasite craft reached out for Echidna, each tipped by mother ships tentatively identified as Marapis. Our twisting, curving course pulled at them, stretching those tentacles thin and warping them from side to side, but no matter how convoluted our course none of the Marapis broke completely free of the swarm. I realized why when one got far enough away from its kin; traceries of fire filled the sky, and it broke apart, only to be consumed by the swarm-mates who had just killed it.

The jump point neared, and our convoluted path smoothed, the various evasion patterns cancelling each other out for several seconds. The entire swarm lunged, fire licking out from its leading edges. Given an apparently static target, the Marapis raced forward, trying to get to ranges where they could hamstring us for their larger kin.

A moment before the swarm of fire converged on our position, we pivoted into our dance once more. A moment later, Echidna grabbed a wormhole from the quantum foam, warped the space around us, and tossed us through. Voices tore at me, and the full weight and power of Echidna fell into my hands as her conscious mind fell to the endless onslaught of echoes in pocket space. Projectors wound down, absorbers shunted energy to waiting capacitors, and deflectors radiated the leftovers into space.

Molten rock pattered off my hull, bits of asteroid melted by my waste heat. I instinctively brushed the first few away with my deflectors. After a moment to think I used my projectors to scoop them together in a giant, glowing ball of magma. I gathered up a few more big rocks, chunks nearly the size of Echidna herself, and then the first Scouts arrived.

In the crucial first few seconds after arrival, while their carapaces leaked energy and their vision still sparkled with the aftereffects of pocket space, I struck. Sifting through the molten rock surrounding me, I plucked out the ferrous metals and dropped the rest on a vector toward the juvenile Scouts and Marapis, the ones who had jumped in pursuit without hesitation when I ran. I enveloped the closest in blankets of glowing magma, catching those further away with razor wire streams shot through tiny, low powered wormholes. The young 'Sects carapaces, not yet hardened by decades of exposure to vacuum, already heated to the brink of combustion from the rigors of pocket space, burned. They burned fast, they burned hard, leaving nothing to protect them from my following attacks. The asteroids were little more than thrown rocks, but rocks thrown at a significant portion of the speed of light did catastrophic damage to the now unarmored 'Sects.

The moment a single Marapi's shielding flickered into existence, just as Echidna stirred from her pocket induced slumber and my First pinged me with an urgent message, I micro-jumped further into the system.