I stared at the 'Sect off our port stern, willing it to launch Squids. I'd half expected it to when we turned to open the distance; standard Imperial doctrine would have us pelting them with missiles at any moment, and parasites formed the only real defense a Madrecita variant had against a missile launch by a ship Echidna's size. Of course, we'd used our last missiles against the Sora, so I couldn't force the issue. Instead of launching, the Madrecita sped up, maintaining her intercept time.

"Quick, any progress on that power I asked for?" I tried to keep some warmth in my voice, despite the chill of space Echidna's sensors relayed to my skin. His answer came after an uncharacteristic delay.

"Nothing yet, Captain. It looks like Captain De'Lann already used a lot of the spares we hadn't already planned on using for something else. The only viable option I've got at this point is to tap the drinking water stores for fusion reactor mass."

We needed water, but we'd already lost half our crew. If you counted by body mass instead of heads, we'd lost way more than that. "Go ahead, First. I need two jumps to be sure we can shake them."

"We'll need to restock within a few hours."

"What? We can't be at more than twenty five percent of our nominal biomass, and I know we carry at least twice the needed H2O to run indefinitely."

"Yes, sir. it looks like Captain De'Lann already had that idea."

I counted to five before speaking. "We didn't know this because...?"

Echidna chimed in. "Driver problems, sir."

"I'm getting real tired of that answer. Note the problem for transmission to fleet when we reconnect. In the meanwhile..."

The wireframe model representing the Madrecita flashed red, blossomed, and changed, all in the blink of an eye. Echidna's voice echoed through the illusion of space in which I floated, only a slight quaver betraying her nervousness.

"Multiple launches from the 'Sect ship! Ground attack... Spiders, sir! Positive identification; immature Mutterchen-Ter. Mutterchen-Ter accelerating. Intercept in three hundred seconds. Weapons range in one hundred ninety seconds. Parasite craft impact in two hundred seconds. I have a lock, sir! I can kill it!"

I felt her projectors warm up through the VR link, preparing a shot able to burn a gaping hole through the 'Sect longways. Any Spiders in the way would turn to so much space borne ash in an instant... and we'd be completely unable to jump afterward.

I reached out mentally at the same time I barked, "belay that!" Her capacitors strained against me for endless seconds, burning through a huge chunk of my miniscule stores before she backed down and pulled the power back into her pocket drive power core. I weighed it with my mind, measuring out the portion we'd need to jump, comparing that to the energy stored in the main capacitors and the antimatter bunkers. The ghost of a smile etched my lips, and I prepared an order.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Launching to intercept in ten seconds.

Guy's infuriating whiskey baritone trickled into my head, and I lost half his warning to figuring out what the idiot meant. When I did, I didn't even bother ordering him back. I didn't have time to argue. "Echidna, close all outer bays! If that idiot tries to leave, take out his drives with your antipersonnel projectors. Same goes for anyone else with their head focused on glory; nobody leaves the ship."

With a thought to my essie, I brought up the jump routes she'd plotted, continually updating based on all available data. Echidna accelerated steadily in the direction I'd picked, and each of the jump plots skewed and twisted as our speed increased. We had to jump before we reached a speed where it wouldn't be safe, but that didn't worry me too much. Despite our velocity, the Mutterchen continued to gain, its relative youth an advantage in a chase. Less guns, less parasites, but more raw speed. I reached for visual data on Quick, couldn't find any.

"Quick, Time?"

"Ninety seconds, sir. Just battening down the last two hatches now."

I called up timers, one each for Quick, the Spiders, the Mutterchen, and her weapons. The solution, a hazy idea in my mind before, snapped into sharp focus.

"Prepare to vent ten percent of antimatter stores, maximum dispersion, on my mark.”

"Captain, that will completely cut off our line of attack!"

I didn't bother turning around to deal with Card. I didn't dare disconnect from the display forwarding Echidna's data directly to me. The seconds ticked down, our velocity ramped up, the jump points twisted.

The Mutterchen, with all the impatience of youth, fired its energy weapons the moment they ranged. Half its shots missed. The other half impacted on Echidna's wildly gyrating surface, her projectors shunting the energy aside into waiting absorbers, angling it into deflectors which bounced it back into space.

"Mark! Jump on my next mark!"

Swirls of black dust leaked out behind us, invisible against the backdrop of space. Less than two seconds later, the 'Sect Spiders caught up with the no-longer-accelerating smoke screen. They hammered into it at velocities only dreamed of by planet dwellers, and for many of them it did nearly as much damage as hitting the atmosphere. Coronas of fire surrounded them as friction made their outer carapaces white hot, but they kept coming. Spiders were meant to be dropped from orbit. A small few even evaded the dust entirely, but the burning ones instinctually slowed their acceleration.

Then one or more did as I'd hoped. Still acting on hardwired instinct, it fired off air breathing propulsion, trying to ignite the dust and use it as reaction mass. 'Sect Spiders were a lot of things, but fueled by antimatter wasn't one of those things. The moment the antimatter, each atom contained within a hard carbon shell, hit the ignition chamber, it detonated. That, in turn, set off the surrounding dust, and a wall of fire flashed into existence between the Mutterchen and Echidna.

"Jump point two, mark!"

Echidna's projectors grabbed a wormhole from the quantum foam, charged it, and fired one end out of her main jump cannon. In the same instant, those same projectors shrunk the universe to a pocket just bigger than her outer skin, bound to the 'real' one by a pinhole tinier than the wormhole we'd just thrown to our destination.

Every bit of radiated energy echoed through the tiny space. Quick's screwdriver, still spinning a bolt into place, filled our pocket universe with an ever-increasing whine. The lights, normally shut down an instant before a non-combat jump, seared through the bridge. Even the miniscule electrical activity in the crew's brains echoed and rebounded. In pocket space, everyone is telepathic, but no one has the safeguards of a telepath's brain. A constant assault of static and feedback filled my head, dying off a bit at a time as the crewmembers dropped unconscious one by one.

The pinhole connection of our pocket slipped out the far end of our wormhole, and Echidna's projectors automatically shut down. Our fold of space everted, dumping us into a system light years from where we'd been.

I stood, stretched, and reached out to Guy.

Collect everyone in the main bay. I think it's time we had a talk.