Wendy didn't fit into her armor.

She'd taken my relationship advice and started remodeling herself into something closer to her last incarnation. Cosmetic changes, especially those to do with losing weight or turning muscle into curves, were child's play for an essie, and they'd had nothing else to do while she slept in the gel. When her armor closed around her, nothing fit quite right. Luckily, she'd shrunk in most dimensions, which meant she could still get everything sealed up. On the other hand, the suit connections didn't have the right amount of slack. I felt it through my link to her, the muscles of her armor permanently tense, like injured limbs being stretched beyond their barely healed capacity.

I'm good to fly, Captain.

The longing to get into space ate at her more than her desire to come to grips with our enemy, but I couldn't let either one affect my decision. If I sent her out in less-than-optimal shape, she became a liability. I weighed that carefully against the power of the foe creeping toward us.

"Captain, I've discovered something about the recovery process." Echidna's vocal emulation improved with every statement she made, with every student we woke up. Her tone conveyed a sense of sheepishness so strong I envisioned her refusing to meet my eye.

I quelled the impulse to cover my face with my hands. "Just tell me it isn't some long-term problem we've caused by our ignorance of how the process is supposed to work," I mumbled.

"Well... Sort of. I can clean it up, though."

I shook my head, waving for her to elaborate with one hand. Meanwhile, I'd come to a decision. Without Wendy, Jodi had no backup. I sent my orders while Echidna clarified.

The two of you climb to the bay's hull breach, but do not exit. No drives until I give you the order to attack. Back, stand off and support Mull with missiles and defensive fire. Mull, full engagement on my command. Target is the Soro, goal is complete destruction, don't get fancy and try to capture it.

Both of them sent wordless affirmation. Just as well, because I couldn't multitask well enough to parse their words from Echidna's explanation.

"The stasis gel is supposed to drain through vents in the floor of the stasis pod. I didn't have the proper drivers for the pods, so I had to hack things together to control the doors and the anticoagulant injectors. I just found the floor drains."

"Believe it not, that's a relief. If the only thing we've done wrong is make a sticky mess on the floor, I'll grab a mop myself and count us lucky. How long until the Soro is in grappling range?"

"Eighty seconds, Captain."

"It's at max passive?" I wanted to cross my fingers, but a Captain couldn't wish for luck. I stood silent for the few seconds it took for Echidna to examine her attacker.

"Yes, Captain. We have no external fires, and I'd never turned on my running lights. I think the only light leak we have is Tomas working on that deep puncture."

I'd forgotten about Tomas. I shot a thought to Guy to send a runner to bring him out of the Captain's office, but knew even as I did the action would be over one way or the other before any message arrived.

"Ready the main capacitors for discharge. Full spectrum, dispersion across a sixty-degree cone centered on the Soro. Don't hold anything back."

Card's head snapped around from where she knelt next to the next stasis pod. She'd finally figured out my plan, and she obviously wanted to interrupt. Echidna preempted her. "Firing solution ready, Captain."

"Excellent. Fire in two seconds from my mark. Mark."

Mull, Beck... go kill me a bug.

***

Cadet Card shouted something at me, but I had more important things on my mind. Namely, I'd just ordered Wendy and Jodi to attack a 'Sect scout ship out-massing both of them put together. It out-massed them and a hundred of their closest friends, although if I had a hundred suits of armor, we'd outgun the ugly thing. Without thinking about it, I focused on the telepathic feed from Wendy, experiencing everything as she did, the distance too close for anything approaching communication lag.

Jodi launched herself out of the ragged tear in the massive bay door, and Wendy followed centimeters behind. Her armor's ill fit left her clumsy, but only by the standards of an Imperial Marine armored close combat specialist. Jodi flowed through the gap into open space, Wendy sprinted after her, losing ground despite her haste. In seconds she cleared Echidna's horizon, the bulky 'Sect ship coming into view.

Echidna's projectors filled an entire arc of space centered on the Soro with energy. Gamma rays, X rays, ultraviolet radiation, the entire visible spectrum, infrared, microwaves, and as far into the radio bands as she could reach. She outreached the Soro, but she outreached Jodi as well. My marine dove straight for the blinded Soro regardless.

Watch out, you'll be as blind as the Soro in there!

She replied with a simple Going in.

The moment before she dove into the hard-edged maelstrom of energy and disappeared from my senses, her shielding flickered and died. Only the tenuous connection to the Jodi in the back of my head told me she still lived, and for all I knew, it lied. I switched my focus to Wendy as I spoke. "Echidna, give my essie a remaining time on the broad-spectrum fire."

A timer appeared in the upper left of my vision. Three seconds and counting down. I tossed the data directly into Wendy's mind. She clawed for distance and speed, the only two advantages she had against the Soro. The moment Echidna's capacitor depleted, she would be fighting with the 'Sect, since Echidna would have no more offensive capability until she recharged.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"Echidna, patch me through to your external sensors."

Back, I'm relaying Echidna's sensor data to you.

The timer in the corner of my vision hit zero. One instant a broad cone of energy extended outward from Echidna. The next it disappeared, leaving a glowing lump in its center. I took the opportunity to examine the 'Sect scout that had come to kill us all.

Overall, it looked something like a giant, bloated leech, a rough, elongated ovoid with a mass of long tentacles at the rear and another just beginning to emerge from the 'underside' of its tip. Across its entire surface, armored lids slowly slid over eyes burned milky white by the overload of Echidna's projectors. Other lids slid open equally slowly, some as broad across as a suit of Marine armor, some barely as wide as my own head. Huge, chitinous plates slid aside, opening irises allowing the long forms of particle cannon and the stubbier silhouettes of missiles to protrude.

Some of the newly exposed openings held neither eye nor weapon. Instead, they belched flaming gasses where the armament in the vacuole, superheated by the projector's overloaded fire, had detonated prematurely. A few more opened, heavy flaps moving away, lids wrinkling aside, even as irises slid open beneath. The Soro's projector housings; not as versatile as the Imperial equivalent, but without them shielding and pocket drives became impossible. The projectors, each one mounted on the tip of a long tentacle, snaked from within the heavily fortified openings, arranging themselves in a loose sphere around the beast.

One projector drifted free, tentacle trailing behind it. The rest writhed a few moments, then repositioned. The shimmer of warped reality surrounded the thing while its backup eyes blinked to clear themselves of accumulated spaceborne grit. Before it stopped blinking, the shimmer winked out over part of the thing's massive carapace, leaving the front half covered, but the trailing tentacles vulnerable. Without complete coverage, it couldn't jump away. Of course, that meant its choices were kill us or die trying. Every missile sticking out of the thing's orifices drifted free, then accelerated toward Echidna.

The moment after it launched, Wendy fired her first ship-killer. The Soro hadn't reacted to her presence yet. Maybe it hadn't even recognized the tiny speck in the distance as a threat. The moment her missile separated from her armor, the 'Sect spun to face her. The Swatter engaged its drive and blinked out of existence as it micro-jumped toward the Soro. It reappeared a hundred meters from the Soro's armor, just at the edge of the thing's shielding. Before it could detonate, a shoal of tiny flecks of light swarmed over it; chaff released from one of the Soro's multitude of openings. The missile detonated, but the chaff did its job; most of the energy went to burning away the obstruction.

The Soro's missiles, on the other hand, tracked us with unerring precision. Without her normal defenses, Echidna had to rely on her last line of defense, her thick, refractory armor. I only hoped we had enough to compensate for the incoming conga line of missiles.

"Echidna! Continuous rotation; don't worry about projector direction, just try to keep those missiles hitting different spots! Ship wide push; brace for impact!"

My words rang out throughout the ship, and from Wendy's point of view I saw Echidna start to spin about her pocket core like a deranged gyroscope. The missiles tracked one another, trying to hit a single spot, but my ship juked around in addition to her mad spinning. The floor beneath my feet shook as the first missile impacted, interrupting the grav plates for just a moment. Echidna rolled with the impact, rotating as she did to place a fresh armor patch in the path of the next missile. The second impact shook the gel-slick floor beneath my feet, and I landed butt first on the floor.

"Captain!"

"I'm fine, Echidna, keep spinning! Capacitor recharge is secondary to that!"

Wendy launched her two remaining ship-killers in close company, then fired her warp guns at the tiny anti-armor missiles the Soro fired as a response to her first shot. One missile at a time, at ranges I could hardly credit, she knocked the missiles out of space while simultaneously backing away from the Soro.

I reached out with one hand, trying to brace myself between opposing walls of the corridor. If I'd been in the Junior corridors, I could have done so easily. Here in Middie territory, my best reach was still a meter shy. Another 'Sect missile slammed into Echidna's armor, sending me sliding along the hallway, my arm slamming painfully into the wall along the way. Before I could get too far, my shirt snagged on something and yanked me to a stop.

The Soro lurched. I hadn't seen a missile go home, but three of its larger tentacles whipped free of its stern and coiled spasmodically as they drifted away. A gout of flame marked the demise of Wendy's third missile, a victim of one of the Soro's projectors. Wendy kept herself clear of any danger, but that couldn't last forever. She could last quite a while in her armor, but the Soro lived in space. Eventually she needed to return to Echidna, and for us to survive she had to engage the big beast. She shot outward, away from Echidna, and I realized her intent immediately.

"Echidna! Route ten percent power to projectors. On my mark, align your remaining projectors and fire on the Soro, one decimeter Gamma beams, no spread. Target the base of the tentacles, fire until exhausted."

"Yes, sir!" Through Wendy's eyes I saw Echidna's wild, rolling convulsions stabilize slightly. In response she dove toward the Soro, clearing a path through the incoming micro-missiles with a volley of warp gun fire. The 'Sect surged to meet her, its shielding failing even further as another of Wendy's missiles jumped in behind it, detonating against its hull. I hadn't seen her launch that one; I'd been too busy trying to keep myself from slamming headfirst into the corridor wall.

Echidna shook as her decreased evasion allowed missiles to slam into her in rapidly increasing proximity to one another. We had maybe five seconds until the Soro engaged Wendy with its ventral tentacles. A squad of armor could take those tentacles apart; a single unit would be a crunchy, volatile meal, but a meal nonetheless. A light second still separated us from the 'Sect scout. I wanted a better shot, but I wouldn't get one.

"Mark!"

Echidna twisted one more time. A beam of coherent energy speared out toward the Soro. The 'Sect's final three missiles crashed into Echidna, and Card fell on top of me, shaken free of the handhold she'd been clutching with her other arm. Kid’s projectors fell silent, the lights in the corridor dimming from the power drain. Her one shot raced out toward the Soro's unprotected rear.

The moment before impact, the thing twisted, thrashed, and flipped end for end. It wound up facing Echidna, forward shielding slamming into place just before the gamma beam impacted. Three more of its projectors flared and died, but its carapace remained intact. Its ventral tentacles twitched as it remembered the larger meal it had abandoned in favor of Wendy's armor. It crept toward us, barely able to make any acceleration at all with the damage we'd inflicted. It would heal once it had eaten my crew. Wendy couldn't even hope to stop it; she faced the giant ship killing tentacles on the thing's stern, now; they'd smash her like a grape if she came too close.

"What's that?"

Echidna's question threw me off my despondent stride for a moment. The Soro's dorsal hull glowed, as if some beam weapon fired despite the hatch not opening. I wondered what new deviltry the 'Sects had brewed up, whether it would kill us before we could figure out a defense.

A moment later a set of Imperial armor erupted from the glowing hide, accelerating toward us with every bit of power it could scrape together. Jodi's thought reached me simultaneously with the image of fire gouting from the wound she'd left in the Soro's forehead.

Somebody get the bay ready to scrub me down; this gunk is doing awful things to my paint.