Debris and particle screens went to spin up, power hitting the projectors. Some blew out, lack of maintenance or jury-rigging damaging the components. Others were aligned or focused wrong and just put out a spray of pressor, gravity, and particle shielding.
But enough came on.
Captain Coruscating Midnight Sky had her legs wrapped around the lower spindle, a knife up where the two spindles' points met, the face staring at her as she dug her fingers in deeper into the upper spindle. The MCU screeched in her face as digital blood ran down from her finger punctures.
"BRING THOSE BATTLESCREENS ONLINE!" she screamed back into the MCU's pearlescent face.
The battlescreen projectors came online.
"Bring up the DS-Space," she ordered.
The MCU rolled its eyes and she felt the area where she could stand and work come online. She scraped the knife around the spindles, loading her codes and her digital signature.
The battlescreen projectors were still warming up.
The debris fields were starting to come to full power.
The particle screens were at 50% and rising.
Sky jumped to the DS work space and glanced around. She could see the warboi hash hatchery and dug into her own belly, pulling free a strand of code from deep in her guts. When it pulled free, deep inside her belly, under her 'belly button', she gasped with the sharp pain. Wincing, Sky tossed it into the hash blender and kicked the blender to get it working.
The MCU reported the condition of the ship to her.
Most of the computer systems were down. Some had started self-repair recently. Others were brought back online by foreign systems being wired in. Sky could recognize Ornislarp computer architecture.
It made her feel unclean.
"Defense system computers are down. Too many foreign systems are wired in. I'm assuming direct control," Colonel Pulse told Sky as she moved fast, bringing up the DS workspace systems and interfaces.
The DS that had previously inhabited the ship, controlled so much of it, had died screaming. All of the others had either died screaming or had been massacred by the ones that had been driven crazy. Screams and echoes of viral and denial of service attacks slashed as her as she purged the memory spaces.
The eggs in the warboi hashes began glimmering.
The engines were offline but she could access the jumpcore and the jumpspace navigation systems.
Not that it helped.
"MISSILE LAUNCH DETECTED!" she heard the shout over the ship tactical line.
"Pulse?" she asked.
"They dumped their loads straight into our faces. We're going to take some hits," Colonel Pulse warned.
She jammed her hand into the software the regulated power management for the shields and screens, rooting around, looking for the emergency lever as razor sharp security systems slashed at the flesh of her hand, wrist, and forearm.
She yanked the lever up, going to full emergency power on the shield systems, point defense, and counter-missile missile systems. The sensors went live, crashed, went live again, only to crash.
Colonel Pulse did a fast cold reboot, skipping the POSTs and threading the systems as fast as possible.
"Looks like they're concentrating on us," Pulse warned.
"We're the biggest and closest," Sky replied. She glanced at a window.
The Mekaneks were kneeling down, talking to the little furry guys, in super-slow motion.
She was running at clock speed, they were running for meat.
She looked around.
One chance.
It was risky. It would tear at her code strings, age her years, cause the warbois to be feral and half-baked, and damage circuitry across the ship. It was normally used by a dozen or more Digital Sentiences at once to share the core load.
There was only her.
But it was that or risk the ship being destroyed by the Ornislarp vessels which had launched their first missile salvo and were trying to get closer, some of them opening flashgates to cross millions of miles in a single instant.
She slapped the button.
Everything went slooooooow as she moved from clockspeed to threadripper speeds.
She was suddenly aware of everything about the ship that was wired in. Every strut, every rivet, every circuit, every breaker box and fuze. Her mind expanded, taking in the whole ship as she went to emergency overdrive mode and the mainframes that still work devoted the majority of their processing power to her brain. For a second she teetered on losing herself, on having her mind fragment into discrete blocks of code that the computer system would either purge in garbage collection or slap into the best fit for computing strings.
Data poured in but she was able to collate it, parse it, source it, sort it, and analyze it.
Robotic systems jerked to life, damage control systems that had either been ignored or repaired by whoever had done the sloppy hackjob of a refit came to life, and she was even able to handle the hackjob juryrigging code and wiring that had been retrofit into the ship.
Sky examined the pulses of the electronic counter measures, electronic counter-counter measures, and electronic warfare systems coming in to the sensors, which were basically wired wide open.
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The codes she was carrying from when the Ornislarp vessels had been friendly and she stared at the Ornislarp vessels for a eternal split second.
"Come to mommy," she whispered, holding one hand out and opening a gap in the barrier. Threads of code from deep inside her hand pulled free, wiggling around her fingers like the fronds of a sea anemone.
The warbois shrieked, jumping up and down, howling in digital bloodlust and coded carnage. They flooded around her, all jumping and down and yelling for her attention. Their dim little feral minds were consumed with the desire to please her to get her approval to please her.
"Kill for mommy," she whispered. Digital blood formed on her lips, stained her teeth.
She could feel the threadripping snap core datastrings deep inside of her.
It didn't matter.
She pointed at the Ornislarp ships that had not managed to rotate their security systems, the end of her finger untwisting into tiny threads of code. The communication systems rotated their security headers, algorithms, and code packets to the Ornislarp vessels for outgoing only.
The warbois shrieked with glee and flooded by her, pushing and shoving to get into the narrow data transfers.
She blinked, her eyes going bloodshot, as she twisted and rewove the computing strings, grabbing the bootstraps of offline computer systems and rebooting the entire systems.
The massive non-orbital support base's computer systems that were still intact shuddered to life.
Sky reached out, targeting the incoming missiles, that were moving oh so slowly to her senses even though they were already moving at .6C and rising. She could see the seams, see the way the paint had been sprayed and the varying thickness, calculate the energy transfer with the propulsion systems.
She saw the thin lines of flashgates opening up and knew that more missiles and even nCv slugs would come through. Her hair began to crisp and fall away in clumps.
She prioritized the defensive fire, arranged the still nebulous battlescreens for the highest rate of interdiction. It felt like her skin was being seared away by acid, feel the cells melting and popping, feel her digital code start to dissolve as they threadripper systems savaged her.
Something inside of her popped and strings unraveled. She could feel digital blood starting to run down her thighs but ignored it.
The defenses went to work, the laser bolts floating, the missiles almost still and they seemed to hover/slide toward the incoming missiles. She directed the guns that were operational and ready to fire on the slits in mid-space. She ran targeting solutions for the big guns, energy weapons for the flash gates that were just starting to open, the heavy nCv and C+ and C++ guns, the superstring compressor cannons, and even the darkmatter piledriver cannons aiming for targets.
It was a non-orbital support ship. Armed like a dozen Sunbreaker Class Super-Colossus capital ships.
Rent appeared in her flesh, dripping digital blood.
Sky had lightning in her clouds.
She couldn't hold it any longer. Her teeth cracked and shattered. She lost vision in one eye and shifted so she was watching the threatened side of the ship with her working eye. Knives drove into her belly. A steel band wrapped around her chest and started to squeeze her.
The first salvo hit, the ship shuddering. Lights blinked as all power was shunted to the defensive systems. The blink was slow, like a bio-form blinking under heavy sedation, to Sky's senses.
The battlescreens deflected the shots rather than stopped them. Grav fields twisted and attenuated the lasers that clawed at the ship. Armor took the hits and did its job, exploding outward to bleed off the energy transfer rather than let it damage further into the ship.
She couldn't hold it any longer. She was losing her grip, her fingernails having peeled away, blood slickening her grasp, her muscles ripping and shredding into tendrils of code. Her core coding strings were twisting, warping, shredding into garbage and junk code.
The last of the salvo was deflected away.
She couldn't hold it any longer. Her heart hammered in her chest. The band got tighter. Blood seeped from both ears, her nose, from her mouth. She began bleeding from her eyes. Her toes unraveled, her boots dissolving into fragments of code.
Warbois streamed by, many of them rolling in the code that was pouring from her body like her life's blood.
But the guns were online.
Sky had targeting solutions now.
She threw her head back and screamed as she fired the big guns, feeling each activation, each shot, each hammerblow of the cannons as crushing impacts inside her chest and abdomen.
She couldn't hold it any longer.
Sky let it go with a gasp, falling to her knees.
But she still kept her mind in the fight even as everything sped up.
The battlescreens came up to full strength even as the particle and debris shields rebooted after crashing from deflecting the incoming attack. Projector heads rotated out and energy conduits went to backups.
The guns fired. The C++ cannons skipping through the planet, using the gravity well to slightly alter their courses. The dark matter detonation cannons, the "Pile drivers" fired compressed dark matter squeezed around an inverted dark matter anti-matter core. The C+ cannons fired through formations, through solid matter, as they jumped to hyperspace and back out, impacting inside the ships.
The Ornislarp had faced the Confederacy dozens of times. They'd reverse engineered the weapons aboard the ship, creating counter-measures.
But it still hurt if you got punched in the face even if you wore a mask.
Several of the ships reeled out of formation, spewing debris, atmosphere, and what was left of crew members. Some had their engines go down, a few dozen had their battlescreens go down.
Nearly thirty broke up or exploded in a blinding flash.
Sky struggled to her feet as the warbois swarmed past her, boarding the ships.
One group came back, carrying an Ornislarp AI's core strings in their jaws, jumping up and down excitedly.
Sky knelt down, her hair grayish white, malformed code at the corners of her eyes and mouth, and patted them.
"That's right, you're mommy's good boys," she whispered.
They shrieked with pleasure and suddenly chewed up the code strings. They screeched and charged back into the one-way data pipe as Sky got shakily to her feet.
Colonel Pulse jumped into the work station. His uniform was tattered, he had 'burns' on his arms and a scrape on the side of his face. He stared at Sky for a long moment.
"Good job, soldier," he said softly.
Sky nodded.
"We've got more DS crew members coming in. Keep running core systems, I'll get the first jumpers to take over the combat systems," Pulse said.
Sky closed her eyes slowly, feeling like her eyeballs were scraping the inside of her eyelids. She nodded, reaching back out to the ship's systems.
She sank down in the lotus position, keeping her eyes closed, and began monitoring life support, integrity fields, and internal power systems.
She felt... good.
0-0-0-0-0
The Terran had gone from huge with spikes all over him to a normal looking, if large, Terran. It was leaning against one of the consoles, one foot on the deck, the other on the body of an Ornislarp, a Treana'ad smokestick in his mouth and somehow smoking even in vacuum.
"I don't get it," Vak-tel said.
The Terran shrugged. It still creeped Vak-tel out how the communications cyberware made it look like the Terran was talking in vacuum or using telepathy.
"You volunteer. If you can't survive implantation and adaptation, you flunk out," the Terran said.
"But, can't you just resheathe and try again?" someone else asked.
The Terran shook his head. "No. If you fail, if you die, no matter what they do, you'll die during implantation every time," he exhaled a plume of smoke at the ceiling that looked like it was dispersing in atmosphere. "That's why there isn't very many of us. At the most, during the Mar-gite War, there was only about two point five billion of us."
Vak-tel blinked. He'd expected to hear a few thousand.
The Terran gave a sharp, barking laugh. "There was only about a million times more of the hungry hungry starfish."
"Why would you volunteer?" Private Kentrella asked.
The Terran tapped one finger on the console soundlessly.
"They ate my homeworld. All eight hundred million of my people. The Confederacy covered it up, didn't want the public to know. They could have offlifted people, or put up a defense. Instead, the powers that be hoped that eating a few tens of billions of humans would placate the Mar-gite," the Terran said. "It didn't. So I did what I did. It is what it is."
Vak-tel nodded.
"The rage, the anger at my people's betrayal, it sustains me when the pain is great," The Terran said, suddenly smiling.
Vak-tel's armor suddenly let him know atmosphere was being pumped into the ship.
"Guess we won this fight," Vak-tel said.
The Terran nodded. "We're still alive, so we're winning so far."