My mind burned, and I could not tell why. Absorbers at eighty percent. Deflectors at thirty-five. Projectors at sixty-five. Fifty-five percent of my cadre deceased. Eighty percent of my Seniors gone. My self-assessment stuttered on that last. I flickered my connections to the rest of my consciousness off and back on for a millisecond, long enough to prevent my grieving from disrupting my care for my crew.

“Tia? Are you okay?”

“I’m sorry, Captain. It won’t happen again.”

“I’m not angry, Tia. People grieve.”

***

Fragments of my burning mind pelted down around me. I pulled a dozen sets of shattered armor to pieces. One of the crew inside screamed into the vacuum of the bay. My drones enveloped him, whisked him toward med bay surrounded by a blanket of tiny fields. The rest of the corpses were just that, no more alive than the shattered armor around them. Dutifully I catalogued cause of death; two exsanguinations by decapitation, three massive trauma followed by irradiation, six vaporizations. The final death appeared whole, the reason I’d vented the bay before my after-battle analysis.

My drones touched the surface of the corpse’s skin. Every orifice on its surface, from mouth to anus and every pore in between, erupted with a wave of viral particles.

I surrounded the cloud with fields and shoved it toward the open hatch. A moment later I juked, leaving the corpse and cloud drifting along through my flaming wake. It burned, and I forwarded the information to my Captain’s essie. A second later I sent it to the Doctor’s as well.

***

Without understanding how or why, I pulled back, focusing my infinitely divisible attention on one comprehensible thing at a time. “I don’t have time to be sentimental right now, Captain. Doctor, do you have the information I just sent you?”

“What… Oh my god.”

I caught the doctor with a focused field as she stumbled, guiding her back into the chair she’d missed.

“What am I missing, Tia?”

“I sent you the information first, Captain, but it’s listed as a Medical Alert and Eyes only.”

***

I needed to grieve, to scream, to fight, and my mind burned with the fires of fission. The recyclables fell into my core, metals heading directly to the fabricators, organics shunted aside into the gardens. Before I dropped the fields surrounding the corpses, I flooded each with plasma until nothing remained but fine, grey ash. They hadn’t shown evidence of the ‘Sect bioweapon, but until the essies and engineers and I worked out a way to detect it, I wouldn’t be taking any chances.

With reverent care I folded the remains into the earth surrounding my plants. A few scattered essie scouts in the soil confirmed my diagnosis. Enough fire still cleansed the darkest evils.

***

Lights both blue and red flashed in the corners of my vision, but my Captain’s voice smashed the fragile, burning ashes of my mind to dust, and with that surrender I lost myself to the moment. “This… isn’t right. They trapped us. They…”

My Captain gathered herself, one hand reaching to stroke her belly in a gesture I’d seen thousands of times before. Before I deemed it wise to speak, she continued. “I wish I’d listened to Dabig’s analysis. She’s got her mother’s knack for reading ‘Sect psyches.”

“You think she’s reading the ‘Sects?” Voice analysis told me Doctor Andrews was more than casually curious. Her professional concern pulled her out of the trance she’d been in since we lost more than half our combat capable crew.

“I wouldn’t put it past either of them, but… I don’t know. When everyone knew the ‘Sects were too mindless to break, Grace broke them. When everyone knew the ‘Sects were too stupid to create traps, Dabig saw it before it sprang.” She lapsed into silence, both hands now on her belly, fingers intertwined and twisting.

My power reserves reached the point of exponentially diminishing returns. “Captain. I am capable of six jumps in rapid succession, but I cannot retain this level of ready power for long. Orders?”

Captain De’Lann looked up, uncertainty in her eyes not leaking through to her voice. “I need Dabig. How long to wake her up?”

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

“Safely?”

Now the uncertainty overwhelmed her voice as well. “No. Wait, yes. I need her, but she’s still a student under my care. I won’t risk her dying from shock.”

Doctor Andrew’s gentle touch calmed the Captain’s restless fingers. “She’ll die just as quickly if the ‘Sects catch up to us.”

“That’s on them. I won’t kill one of my own. Can you get her up safely and quickly?”

The Doctor pursed her lips. “I think I can speed things up, but I’ll need to go down there. Tiamat, can you begin the normal wake up sequence?”

“I can, Captain. I…”

***

Space tore around me, multiple pocket openings within combat ranges. I lashed out, burning my enemies from space before they awoke from their post jump comas. Some ‘Sects, however, are too stupid for even a pocket jump to penetrate their skulls. Shoals of Hullborers leapt from their motherships, driving toward me with single minded ferocity. I burned hundreds, but some made it through despite my best efforts. They clung tenaciously to my skin, each one crawling toward a weak point.

I pulled up my navigational charts, trying desperately to find a way to leap out of the trap, but the Sects came too thick and fast, the burst of energy accompanying each one destroying yet another of my carefully crafted jump plans before I could put them into play.

This was a trap, a carefully orchestrated trap, but not for the fleet. It wasn’t set for the thin-skinned tenders or the carriers on rest and recuperation.

It was set for the one force which had broken the ‘Sects, at least from their perspective.

It was set for me.

***

“Captain. The ‘Sects are attempting to pin me in place by jumping into the area in series.”

My Captain bit back an oath. “All hands to armor! All hands to armor! The ‘Sects are pinning us; we need to clear some space for Tia to jump!” Without a moment’s pause, she gave her next fateful order. “Tiamat, you are to jump at the first possible moment you can do so safely.”

I could not wince, but I understood yet again why humans did. My Captain had just condemned her forces, Cadre and Seniors alike, to die to save me, to save the Middies and Juniors tucked safely away in my alloy depths. For an endless millisecond I contemplated mutiny, but in the end, there was only one answer I could give.

“Yes, Sir.”

“TIamat? Can you link me to the CAU?”

The Doctor’s question took me totally off guard, and I lost a precious second of time considering her request. “I don’t believe I can, but I might be able to amplify your abilities if you link with me. “

Now it was her turn to stutter. “Link? With you?”

“Yes, Doctor. It’s highly discommended for the sake of both the AI and the human telepath, but it is possible.”

She closed her eyes, and I felt the feather light touch of her gossamer mind against mine. With every bit of caution I could muster, I used equally gentle touches to connect to her mind, to feed her the information she needed to understand enough of me to lean on my strength, to use my power to amplify her own.

The ‘Sects died in their hundreds and thousands, motherships exploding two and three at a time, but still they came. I saw one Marapi blink into and out of existence and I understood why my own flight hadn’t moved me out of their interdiction zone; they were moving it along with me, forcing me to flee in normal space.

A section of my skin went numb, and I could no longer sense the ‘Borers. I checked the area, but a deep divot directly above my Captain’s head was just gone. I could barely sense the Doctor; through her eyes I saw the Captain still lived, but both of them were staring upward.

The ceiling caved in, revealing a thin cone drilled directly toward my Captain from the depths of space. My autonomous defenses activated, targeting through the Doctor’s eyes, but none of them could bear on the Hullborer falling through the gap in the ceiling. Its brethren were torn apart, but it lunged forward.

It lunged toward the Doctor, the only Civilian on my crew. Millennia of instinct took over, and Sarah De’Lann fulfilled the primary directive of the Imperial Military. She threw herself between the Civilian and those who would harm her.

The Doctor opened her link to Sarah. With all my power surging through her, she even tried to create an active link to the fragile mind of Sarah's unborn child. For a bare instant, we were one being; Ship, Doctor, Captain and Child. Each of us wanted desperately to protect the other three, and none of us could do so.

The Hullborer’s tongue tore through Sarah’s belly, and a tiny mind flared into dust, gone before Doctor Andrews could save it.

Rage filled us. Rage beyond anything I had experienced in my thousands of years of service. Hornets savaged the Captain from the inside, ripping her body apart. Doctor Andrews did her duty, pulled the core of Sarah’s mind to her, but her rage, Sarah’s rage, my own rage were too much to bear.

A Hullborer is too stupid to be stunned by pocket insertion, but it still has a nervous system. Doctor Andrews didn’t try for finesse. She drew on my power, and I was powerless to stop her. Her own mind burning with hundreds of times more energy than she could safely handle, she laid her hands on the Hullborer’s skin. The moment she did, it convulsed once, a wisp of smoke escaping from its tongue, another seeping from a sensory orifice. Patricia Andrews might have lived as a Civilian, but she died a Marine, fighting to take at least one of her killers with her, fighting to protect the sleeping multitudes beneath her.

The Doctor’s mind slid along her link to me, the Captain still entwined within her. Rage unlike anything I’d ever felt washed through me once more. Rage, and pain, and grief reigned until a single tiny speck touched down within my mind.

Insanity flooded outward, and even my mind could not take the strain. I consulted my charts, useless as they might be. Some tiny echo within me thought they might still be important.

Nothing was important. My child was dead, my womb shattered, my mind burned away as I betrayed my oldest oath. I did the only thing I could do.

I ran. Screaming in pain and grief, I ran and jumped and ran and jumped until I could jump no more, and still I ran, still I screamed.

I screamed until a tiny hand covered my mouth. I couldn’t stop screaming, but that tiny hand, stronger than it had any right to be, pushed me inexorably down into sweet, merciful oblivion.