In the dark void 'above' the spinning disc of the Andromeda galaxy, a long string of ships was traveling thousands of times the speed of light; to any watcher, they would be an eyeblink; unless they were on one of the ships themselves. Even then, only the rearmost vessel of the fleet could truly 'see' the rest. On the ship at the head, the Gaze of Wrath, the captain could only see a long string of lights on a console display.

With the exception of one pale-skinned, black-haired young woman sitting beside him, none of the crew knew exactly why he was staring at the strange display of lights, as well as of the spatial patterns of distant stars and dust on the display; but normally he wore a helmet while he worked, leaving the three green eyes and close-cropped brown hair covered by the typically featureless silver orb of armor.

For most of the bridge crew, this was the first time they'd seen what was normally in that helmet while he managed to steer them around the sort of tiny, imperceptible debris that could utterly destroy a vessel traveling at ten thousand times the speed of light under warp. It looked... like a series of simple green lights, roughly two hundred of them; the number of starships currently in the fleet. The lights appeared in roughly the formation of the fleet; and he had both a joystick commanding the Gaze of Wrath's own course, a simple lever to accelerate or decelerate; and, probably the reason for the lack of helmet, a touch-screen that would let him adjust the positioning of the ships in the fleet with the tap of a button.

The screen hadn't seemed to change for over an hour now, though Eyeball kept making tiny, subtle changes here and there; moving the joystick a few millimeters here; ordering a ship to move there; if it weren't for the insane speed the fleet was traveling, it would seem like an ordinary, mundane day on the bridge.

Svetlana leaned back in her chair, smiling; and tapped a button on her armrest. Suddenly the bridge went silent, aside from herself and Eyeball; though he could still see that massive display. "I can't help but be fascinated and excited by this every time. If you were to make the slightest mistake, the only two humans in the galaxy, thousands of members of various species, a whole fleet of two hundred ships would all be dead. And if I were to tell a computer to plot this course, the most advanced computer in this galaxy, every single time it would lead to that fleet being obliterated. Finding the right path is like threading a thousand invisible needles. But... you make it happen."

Eyeball chuckled. "Feels like cheating, doesn't it? The odd thing is that, despite being able to predict thousands of years into the future, Apollo claimed my power was stronger. He knew for centuries that something would happen the day the Jotun arrived for round 2, that would wipe out most human fleets and military bases, and cause an enormous explosion. He knew that relocating them, hiding them, wouldn't help. No idea what it was. And... my power manipulated me like a puppet through a string of stupid mistakes, to collide with and remove it."

She studied the display, as Eyeball dragged the formation slightly, pushing the rear further to the right. "Lightning?"

"Mark. A good, decent guy; who, if he'd been mind-controlled, could have eradicated all life on earth, and then himself, in the span of a quarter-second. If they'd gotten him, they would have done a carefully tailored amount of damage to minimize military resistance, but still leave a fair amount of more harmless life."

He glanced over at her for a moment. "I could've sworn you'd already known all that. How much did you get from Ascension?"

She tapped her forehead. "Organic brains can't store that much. I can access everything Ascension knows; but I don't really know it, if you get my meaning. Its like I have six browser windows in the back of my head that can run a search for whatever I want, and usually are when I'm doing research, but I don't really know know it."

The two went back to just staring at the display. The sounds from the rest of the bridge resumed when she tapped the same switch once more; and they remained fairly quiet as the width of Andromeda sped by below them.

***

"So. We've got maybe a day or two before arrival at hub five." Eyeball and Svetlana were walking down the long central hallway of the Gaze of Wrath. "I know, of course, that you like to design your own equipment. And with your abilities, I suspect that's probably worked out well so far; you know whether or not it will work before you put it on. But I think you should take a look at what I've been working on; most of it is for the fleet, but some of it you might find a use for."

Eyeball chuckled as she opened a door; the familiar gate at the entrance indicated this was yet another extradimensional space, purpose-built for whatever was inside. "Honestly, I've wanted to see what you were working on, but didn't want to bother you. Back when I ran Eyetech I had a general rule against interrupting their work; usually I had a lab tech or the like who could feed me details, or they could themselves when they had a breakthrough. I like to think that worked out well."

Svetlana nodded. "Well. It's a double-edged sword. Sometimes it produces amazing results, and sometimes it gets things that are just... crazy. Half of what I remember was nonsense like... a project to build a giant robotic death-spider. Or to clone some random soviet leader and modify the clone into a super-soldier."

As they stepped into the first room, seemingly a perfectly cube-shaped silver chamber, he could see a table with a long row of Pale One controllers on it; in various states of assembly and disrepair. "So...When I saw the extradimensional space technology, and what it was based on... I was excited. A device to let you open a safe and steal or alter the contents without ever opening it? Perfect. I was imagining bullets and missiles that go through armor to hit targets, teleporters that let you deploy from orbit onto a planet... but no."

She walked up to one of the Controllers; more sleek-looking than the originals, the size of a common aluminum can. "The process takes a few seconds to work. Creates a sort of dimensional instability in a chunk of matter, letting something pass through it... and then fades. So while it doesn't work for bullets... its perfect for these things. I've got Pale Ones that can burrow through the toughest ship hull or armor to get at the juicy center; once. One of the advanced Pale Ones can cling to a ship's hull, let the more basic ones through, then follow, leaving the device behind. Or, if it was deployed inside the ship, it can pierce the armor... and flesh.. of one of their heavy troopers without any sort of outside help."

Eyeball stared at the tiny object with its currently tightly bound clump of tendrils. "So. You could shoot a volley of these at any enemy ship, and then just... take it all over."

"Sort-of. The whole dimensional instability thing doesn't work on shields, and shields won't stomp slow-moving objects... but they will fry internal electronics passing through. For shielded vessels, we'd need to drop them inside a faraday cage, and drop it slow; if its fast enough to dent the hull on impact, the shield will stop it."

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

He rested his hand on it, considering possibilities. "This... could have an absolutely crazy impact. Not just disabling ships, but actually turning them against their friends... nobody keeps shields up 24/7. Imagine if you could slip in close and release a swarm of these..."

"Yes, yes. Numerous possibilities. It's even useful in repair, to remove damaged components without dismantling a device. On to our next project..."

Eyeball's gaze stuck with the Controllers as they passed on. Could one of those fit in a 40mm grenade shell?

The side door slid smoothly aside; to reveal an airlock. Svetlana picked up a helmet beside the door, and glanced at Eyeball. "Button up. I'm avoiding getting this next room contaminated." He nodded. "Helmet. Activate seals, go to internal air." She settled the helmet on, and pulled a lever on the wall; and the room suddenly grew dramatically hot, as steam poured in from the surrounding chambers; only to be siphoned up into the ceiling.

They waited a few seconds; and after a brief buzzer sound, the interior door popped open. A second, smaller glass chamber was inside; with a trio of drones, a variety of equipment, various containers of liquids in different shades, and a single pale-skinned Marrick in a vacuum suit, strapped to a table. Absolutely no access from the outside. Eyeball studied it for a moment. "Separate sealed compartment. Did we build it around the equipment?"

"So far, yes. All access has been one-way only. I've delivered samples inside to test, and a single surviving Pale One we made from a Republic officer. He's... a bit worse for wear." She stepped around to the other side of the box, to provide a closer view; in the corner of his HUD, an ETA on available oxygen started to dwindle.

"Are we talking chemical weapons? Biological?"

"Both!" She smiled; her own helmet transparent; he considered momentarily the benefits of such. "A mild aggression-inducing chemical that makes them breathe and exhale more heavily, and a brain-eating bacteria that only impacts Marrick. I've been trying to get one to only work on Tier Zero personnel, but... that's a bit harder. It's not a genetic difference, strictly; its a brain structure thing."

She waved an arm. "I've got ones that will kill all Descendants, ones that would kill the Founders, ones that will only kill Marrick... I've gone through a few dozen Pale Ones for my experiments, but the only one I've found that consistently only hits the Tier Zero and Tier One victims is a parasite; extremely slow-acting, so I can't confirm results beyond only those have suffered any symptoms at all so far."

Eyeball stared at the officer on the table; he had the obvious marks and traces of a removed Controller, but he was drooling, blood was dripping from his nostrils on the strange, flattened nose common among Marrick, and the six eyes were blinking open and closed aimlessly. "...We probably want to get that parasite as far and wide as possible. The others.... some of the Marrick are tier-2, and don't know the truth. Hold it in reserve. If we start to lose... then we'll let that go as well."

She chuckled. "I'll listen to you, when I agree... which I happen to at the moment, mostly, I think we should hold on to all of them until they're fully developed... but you're not my boss. Just want you to know whats on the table. On to our next instrument of death..." She stepped back into the airlock; as Eyeball followed, she was far more casual now, hanging her helmet up as she stepped out; and once the air-lock finished, releasing them, entered the next chamber down the hall.

"Here we have my personal favorites, and, normally, an enormous waste of time. The Hyper-bomb and the Warp Missile." She waved her hands at a rack of massive cylinders, each a meter thick; four of them looking like, essentially, bullets; while the others had a variety of tiny spiked protrusions.

"Absolutely no reason not to make a missile with a FTL drive; except for the insane waste of time, and, for the warp drives, material involved. Scout-ships carry the absolute smallest, cheapest warp drives the Republic manufactures; and those are still dreadfully complex, heavy, and expensive, leaving no room for a payload if they want to accelerate in realspace. The ones for their probes are literally ones that they screwed up in manufacturing, and know won't last long. Hyperdrives have far more exacting tolerances in their build than any other part of the warship, and take much longer to make; while Warp-Drives were previously believed to require Neutronium. Which... just isn't true. I'm not certain whether Ascension told you or not..." She walked up to one of the cylinders, and patted it on the side. "But warp drives just need a tiny pocket of vacuum to function at their heart. And whatever is containing that vacuum needs to be able to withstand the full pressure and force of the object's acceleration. A scout's probe contains the smallest amount of neutronium they can make into a pocket. But... we can make it out of anything. Diamond. Tungsten. It'll break, after a few launches, and won't work for a full-sized warship.... but so long as it contains vacuum, that's fine. Even if the warp drive fails after three seconds, it doesn't matter; most of these missiles will be blown up before even reaching the target."

She smiled. "Warp missiles are gonna have an atrocious failure rate inside star systems.. I'm guessing over ninety percent... but even the failed ones will, at least, still hit the target with whatever's left of them much earlier than direct-fire weapons. If I can make a thousand of them, and then seventy hit the fleet within a second, and a few seconds later a high-speed debris field hits them? Well. That's still better than a thousand missiles would do against a fleet's point defenses, so I call it a win."

Eyeball shook his head. "Okay then. And why a Hyper-Bomb instead of a Hyper-Missile?"

"Oh, easy enough. Don't want them getting any intact hyper-drives; so each of them is a two-shot device. On the way out, it uses a capacitor to go. On the way back in... it unleashes a nuclear explosion and, for a fraction of a second, that powers its trip back in. If it fails? It detonates in hyperspace, or leaves a dud there. If it works? In realspace, a nuke-in-progress appears... hopefully inside the enemy ship."

He looked at the various cylinders. "...Obviously, these are useful. But if they take so much time to make, why not just make more missiles? Or put drives in new ships?"

"There's the thing... the only time this is worth doing is on long trips like this. We ran out of material to feed into the fabbers over a week ago; our fleet count actually went up a few, if you didn't notice the board changing; they undocked and did final assembly when you went to sleep at the end of the first shift. So, I've been taking existing missiles and repurposing them as hyper-bombs, warp missiles, so forth. If we were in a system with plenty of ore to work with I could've built us another flotilla of warships instead. So.... Mixed bag."

He glanced at the two very different-looking cases for a moment. "What about MIRV munitions? Making a hyperdrive-based deployment system that drops a bunch of warp missiles, or regular missiles, as it dies?"

She stopped... and glared at him, clearly irritated. "That's... a good idea. Risky. Would need to make sure the hyperdrive was self-destructing on its way in, but not frying the payload. But..."

"Maybe multi-stage missiles with a detached armored tail, with the hyper-bomb's initial detonation giving them an extra push at the start? The armor bits at the end just becoming more fragments in the detonation after?"

She stared for a few seconds... before muttering a curse and stomping off back the way they had come. Eyeball glanced at the next door down the hall, then at the retreating figure. "Uh... was there more you were going to show me?"

She turned around. "No. No. I mean... Yes. There's more. I was going to show you all of the big, cool toys, then get down to some prototypes I had for your armor after looking at what magic had let you do with the gun and maybe talking about some magic-tech hybrid work for the ships. You've got me side-tracked. I need to get these Hyper-MIRVs in the production line, they could actually make a difference. Re-convene tomorrow? Good."

She swiftly stepped right back out the door, leaving Eyeball staring behind her; somewhat confused and amused at the same time. She glanced back at him, shaking her head. "This is why I always had colleagues. Even if they don't hold a candle to me, different perspectives can bring new ideas to light..."