The bridge of a starship isn’t the only place a Captain can command from; my memories from Captain DeLann showed me that. As Echidna slipped from her pocket into real space, I dropped our last remaining pocket beacon on our emergence point and began a spiraling arc away from it. Above me in the bay I watched as the oldest Juniors, the ones with the most combat experience, slipped one by one out of the bay into space, a scintillating string of gems in my real time display.
Echidna woke beneath me and, just as I spotted the Materner in our visual scans, tossed us through another jump, this time to the pocket beacon above Colin’s World. Again, I took over, spiraling us outward in a curving path, dropping a line of Middies, following them with a line of our youngest Juniors. By the time Echidna woke once more, I saw the Materner spit fire at where we’d been heading before we jumped to the planet. A moment later, Echidna threw us through another pocket. I spiraled us outward from our initial emergence point a second time, again leaving our most combat ready Juniors and least capable Middies in our wake.
Twice more we jumped, to the planet and to our emergence point, each time littering a trail of silent armor behind us, too dispersed for the Materner to see them when they weren’t making any noise. I checked my power readouts; my antimatter stores had dropped to about fifty percent, sucked away through the wormhole shunt Quick and I had slipped in between my stores and Echidna’s. Another check of the Materner’s course since we’d emerged into the system showed me exactly what I wanted to see; our repeated looping evasion patterns and jumps had focused the Materner’s attention on us. Each time we jumped, it changed course to intercept our new location as soon as it saw where we’d gone. I nudged Echidna and she jumped again, and one final time I led us in a spiraling curve away from the pocket beacon, leaving a chain of cadets behind us, with Cadet Delnot in his monstrous Dragon armor right next to the beacon itself.
When my system display showed all of Echidna’s cadets save Quick and myself in space, we jumped a final time to our initial emergence point. Quick and I dropped away as she powered directly for the Materner, her evasion pattern the simplest of randomized jukes. I focused on my six arcs of cadets, each one describing the beginning of one of the edges of a cube in space, with the Materner baited to the very center. Even knowing where they should be, I couldn’t spot them; Quick had done a superb job with their detection countermeasures.
“Are you sure about this, Captain?” Quick’s voice held no uncertainty. The question was more a goad to me, as I floated in space delaying the next step of my plan.
“Absolutely. Engaging CAU.” With a thought I activated the CAU in my central weapons pod. Like the simulator a few days and an eternity ago, it connected to my armor, becoming part of me. A grin spread across my face when my power readouts stayed steady despite the massive drain. A thicket of wormholes spread out from the device, each one going further than the ones before it. One touched the nearest cadet’s armor, and my perception of time and space…
***
…changes. Connections flow outward along the three sides of the cube Our Captain has envisioned in space. One by one Our cadets join with us, extending Our awareness through an ever-expanding volume of space. One mind within fails to connect, his thoughts moving too fast even for Us to interpret.
Our Captain…
***
...I flinched. Grace would have run screaming from the intimacy. Dustin could never have tolerated the accumulated pain of three thousand odd minds linked to him in real time.
I was not Grace. I was not Dustin. I was Imperial Princess Dustie Constance Evergreen Dabig-Li. I was Princess Dustie, and I would not consign a planet to death, even if it cost me my soul…
***
…pauses at the loss of individuality, but Our Princess does not. We use Our awareness of Our space to fling connections outward to the remaining sides of the cube. Along the way they pass Our ship, who grabs one and holds it, though she too is both too fast and too alien to be truly part of Us. The remaining sides of Our Princess’ cube connect, flashing into Us all at once, save one who holds himself apart. Unlike Our First and Our ship, Our Doctor is not too fast for us to taste his fear, his hesitation. Our Princess excludes him; We know where he hovers, and Our Princess orders him to remain there, since he is not part of Us.
A moment later, the first tendrils reach the planet We guard; hungry gravity warps the space around it into an endless waterfall of reality. That We expected. The reaction of the planetary population to Our presence, We did not. The human population of Colin’s World is a tidal bore of minds flowing into us, and for a time all Our Princess can do is hold Us together against the battering existential terror of millions of minds terrified beyond rational thought by the truth of the danger facing them and the juvenile, fragile nature of their shield.
Music flows through Us; bombastic, triumphant, glorious trumpeting heralding the choosers of the slain, ensuring that, at least for today it will not be Us. The population below, Our population now, lifts their voices in song, in cheers, in screams that are part terror, part battle cry. Our Princess folds them into Us, more minds focused on filtering the monstrous amount of data flowing through Us. The moment she does, Our First slips into Us, becoming part of Our bond. The next moment, Our ship does so as well.
We are the Dragon, and the space from Colin’s World to Echidna’s emergence point is our demesnes. We feel the dimples in space-time from the Materner and its spawn as brushes against our skin, an itch we must scratch with fire. Echidna leaps in, her jump no longer capable of being less than perfect in Our space. She lashes out, her projectors tearing great rents in the Materner’s side before it can reorient any of its weapons to bear. Its engines claw at space to fling it after Echidna. Before the great ‘Sect can reorient, Our ship jumps once again, this time to the ‘Sect’s far side. Another gout of energy flies from her projectors, ripping deep into the Materner’s hide. Before the Materner’s reply reaches her location, Echidna jumps once more, Our knowledge of local space-time unerringly guiding her to the location of Our outer beacon, where she begins another taunting run toward our foe. The Materner, slave to its overwhelming desire to see the ship it thinks is Tiamat destroyed, drags itself around and onto an intercept heading… where the combined fire of Our armored cadets has just arrived from all edges of Our cube in space. Energy pulses, hypervelocity slugs, and micro-missiles plunge toward the Materner, an avalanche of destruction. Before that tsunami of fire reaches the great ugly thing’s hull, explosions halo it, as the oncoming wave of death intersects with its swarm of parasite craft. Even with the density of both clouds, some of each leak through, and the beast shudders with impacts and explosions.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Our Echidna has just begun another evasion pattern when the Materner stops twisting in pursuit, instead drifting free for an endless moment. A moment later it and its legion of consorts claw at space once more, throwing themselves in the direction of Colin’s World, heedless of the storm of fire from Our armored cadets and the endless enticing gyrations of Echidna.
We feel the weight of our enemy; she is too healthy for Us to erase from the sky, and should she crash into the planet we protect after she is dead, her internal parasites will infect, reproduce, and begin the cycle of conversion from living world to Insectoid Hive. That We cannot allow. Our Princess reaches out, the strength of Our world, Our cadets, and Our ship giving her the power to touch the vast, alien mind of the Materner. Our Princess slips inside the maelstrom of alien perceptions and urges, seeking whatever has prompted its sudden death run.
Deep within the alien mind, Our Princess detects a single point of order, hard edged and reeking of clarity. She reaches to touch it…
***
…and I came in contact with something bigger than anything I’d ever experienced. Vast, powerful, hauntingly familiar, and worst of all it noticed me. The weight of an alien mind greater than any I’d known crashed down upon me, trying to force me out of its link to the Materner. I scrambled, trying to find the source of the familiarity. A moment before the whatever-it-was pushed me from the link, I found it; the location of Colin’s World. I tore at that knowledge, shredded the senses of direction and distance. I had nearly made Colin’s World nothing more than an ill-conceived fever dream when…
***
Our Princess returns to us as a palpable wave of hatred flares from the Materner. Understanding immediately, We lash out with Echidna’s projectors, tearing navigational sensors from their sockets. It is blind, but planets cannot dodge; it still knows where its target lies. Onward it plows toward the surface of the world We’ve sworn to protect. We lash it with every source of fire at Our disposal; great rents appear in its hide, but Our opponent does not care; it heads for the planet, all its energies focused on accelerating until the weight of our fire destroys its last drive node. It can no longer maneuver, but one volley of Our wrath isn’t enough to shatter it.
We throw wave after wave intersecting with its path. The Materner replies even before Our fire reaches it, lashing out at the three chains of armor between it and Colin’s World. Individual units break formation to avoid the incoming fire, forcing the neat spirals into ragged, patchy lines spread around the planet. Our prescience falters at just the wrong moment, and Echidna misjumps. Intending to fire point blank into the Materner’s nose while passing, instead it is all Our ship can do to avoid ramming into the enemy at ship-killing speeds. Twisting herself onto a new heading and forcing every erg of available power into blunting the force of the impact, she barely brushes the ‘Sect ship.
The impact is still devastating. The Materner, substantially more massive than Echidna, gouts flame and organics from its wounded flank. Without propulsion, the impact imparts a spin which turns Our enemy’s constant fire into a spiraling zone of death. It tumbles toward the planet, completely out of control, but its course has not yet been changed enough to miss.
Echidna is not so lucky. Her structure never fully recovered from the beating she received before she was born into Tiamat’s shell, the impact leaves a gaping dent in her flank, explosions tearing down through her decks, stopping just shy of her jump core. The lack of core damage does not matter; with that much damage to her surface jumping won’t be possible any time soon, even with our preternatural knowledge of the system’s space. She drops from Our communion with a forlorn hash of embarrassment and pain, her only focus regaining a stable orbit Our armor will be able to intercept, eventually.
We bring Our armor around the planet back into a semblance of formation. The Materner’s spawn intersect with them, igniting a veritable orgy of destruction. Thousands of ground attack ‘Sects try their best to destroy less than a third their number of Imperial armor while it still flies in space. In every case but one, Our armor shreds and incinerates the smaller ‘Sects while losing none of our own. We take casualties, but none fatal.
The one final case is our youngest Cadets. Their armor controlled by expert systems unable to cope well with the unexpected, their fire is less effective than their fellows. A thousand beetles, their mandibles capable of tearing through Imperial armor even in space, surround less than fifty armored, armed cradles holding babes less than six months old. We scream in impotent frustration.
The music coursing through us changes, Ravel’s Bolero clear from the first cycle. Our Jodi and Wendy are there, interposing themselves. Almost ignoring the existence of the oncoming horde, the pair dance through space, a ballet of fire and death drawing the beetles like moths to a flame. Ten fall, then twenty, then forty, their carapaces shattered to dust, but hundreds more swarm over the dancers, their attention completely drawn from the fleeing infants to focus on the dervishes of death in their path.
Catch us, Princess!
A single thought from Wendy comes through before the entire area of space, beetles, armor and all, is obliterated by the combined fire of every functional suit of armor within line of sight. The mental remains of Wendy and Jodi slip into Our Princess, side by side in death as they were in life. Our armor, its munitions spent, its energy low, retreats to rendezvous with Echidna.
The Materner’s weapons fire has ceased, but like a Juggernaut it slides inexorably forward through space. We can feel it will hit the ocean rather than the land now, but that isn’t good news. A water landing will spread ‘Sect infection through the entire hydrosphere in weeks, with no way to kill it off short of destroying the biosphere entirely.
May I, Captain?
We acknowledge, permit, and subsume Our Guy all with the same thought. Our Prince, his armor more than the equal of Grace’s, lunges through space toward the Materner, missiles, slugs, and energy packets firing in a staggered, intricate pattern the entire time. By the moment he impacts the massive ‘Sect, he isn’t hitting the refractory armor Echidna broke herself on, but a shattered, soupy mass of pulped innards leaking out to cushion his fall.
The moment he has intercepted the ‘Sect, he latches on and begins accelerating once more. Degree by painful degree, the Materner’s defensive enzymes tearing at his armor the entire time, he rips our enemy from its course, forcing it away from Colin’s World.
The moment its course will no longer intersect with the world We’ve sworn to protect, but will instead lead it to the system's primary, Our Guy throws himself from the gaping wound, flaring what remains of his armor’s protective shielding to shed the Materner’s final vengeance. He crashes into the atmosphere of Colin’s World before he can stop, but his armor was designed for planetfall. Just before he slips from Our mind, We see forest through his eyes, likely only a short way from Our Princess’ first ill-fated visit to the world.
It is done. Colin’s World is safe. Our Princess deactivates the device powering Our Unity and…
***
…I slipped out of the embrace of the Dragon, back into myself, back into the time and space I’d lived in since my earliest personal memories. I had others, my inheritance from Grace, of her few attempts to use a CAU, but those weren’t me, weren’t mine. They were an illustration in a particularly intimate manual, nothing more, nothing less. My father's memories of Grace’s attempts lurked as well, but they no longer terrified me either. The only person in my head was me.
I beg to differ.
The Empress’ voice reverberated through my skull. Before I could clear my brain, buy myself time to think and frame a reply, she spoke again.
You did good, girl. Get Our children together, get Tiamat repaired, and return to Us with all due haste.
I wasn’t my mother, but I was her daughter. I gathered up all the navigation data I’d plotted out when I planned my escape run and slugged it through my mental link to the Empress. Right before I slammed the link shut with my fury at how my precious mother Tiamat had been hunted, tortured, and killed, I sent one final flurry of thoughts.
The Dragon will stand guard over Colin’s World until relieved.
You want me?
You know where I am.
Come and get me.