Captain Kadie Bangura waved her head-researchers onto the bridge with an impatient flap of her hand. Darweshi and Liam quickened their steps but both were rumpled and vaguely raccoon-eyed.
Kadie cut into Jewel's babble with enough steel in her voice to stem the tide of words. "Jewel, Dar and Liam are here now. Can you start over?"
The viewscreen's streaming columns of tightly-packed figures and graphs lurched, a cascade of color rippling through them, matched in intensity by the sheer exuberance in her voice. Jewel’s high-speed and high-energy chattering creased Liam’s face into a wince while Dar struggled to ramp his sleepy self up to the AI's level.
"Guys I'm so glad you're up I pulled us off-course just a tetch early when the gravimetric readings went bonkers There's something huge out there and I want you to guess whaaa-aaaat!"
Dar folded one long-fingered hand around a fist, game to play along. Sleepy features firmed into concentrated lines on his mahogany face, high forehead wrinkling. "How huge exactly are we talking?"
Jewel giggled, her display rippling again. Rather than create an avatar she'd chosen to represent herself to the crew as a condensed and incredibly info-rich feed of her running processes and various metrics. "Almost a hundred million miles across!"
Liam pushed a fringe of pale blond hair back out of his eyes. "Too big to be a planetary debris field. Composition?"
Jewel hesitated. "Is that cheating to tell I guess not It isn't as if you couldn't call up the scan info in a second anyways Advanced alloys, polymers, silicates and an abundance of other elements!"
Kadie grunted, lanky frame reclining back into her seat. "If that's a fleet of ships or uh, used to be, I'd hate to run into whatever ruined their day. It has to be manufactured at least, with stuff like that in there."
Dar nodded, growing more excited by the second. "A megastructure?! Is it a Dyson sphere, Jewel?"
"You're so warm you're burning hot oh my gosh I can't wait anymore It's a Niven ring or chunks of one!" Jewel finally brought up some images and video but quickly moved to some wire-frame models when it became clear there was no way the cameras could do justice to the massive wreck orbiting a brown dwarf star.
Dar and Liam chattered at each other, all human sleepiness banished. Kadie frowned at some navigation charts, brushing back some tightly-woven braids while leaning over a screen. "Is this on our Confluence charts?"
"There was a quarantine order on this system but nothing about the ring and before you ask the quarantine expired about a century ago so it's worth popping by to update the records right?"
Kadie patted the console. "Yes Jewel, we can poke around. Still, send Command a message for more details on that quarantine if they have any."
"Look at the size of these pieces of debris... There may have been multiple rings!" Dar tapped one of the wire-frame models. "Is the Confluence capable of building anything like this?"
Liam shook his head. "The materials engineering part, barely, but no one's been on-board yet with the resources and labor needed to actually build one. Jewel, was this built in the last century or has it been around before the quarantine?"
"Let's find out There's some debris even out this far but can't be sure of its source So let's go get some samples and do science!" Jewel accelerated towards the star and the mess orbiting it. The nearer she approached the more awe-inspiring the scale of the ring became. Entire civilizations could've lived and died on the interior of just the chunk of ring she was nearing. It was large enough to have its own gravity well, but Jewel was alert and guided herself down onto its surface with a thistle-light landing.
The ring-segment had looked uniform from miles away but up close it was a mosaic of enormous plates, interrupted by the occasional maintenance hatch, sensor package, or other structure. The chunk was a tiny fraction of the theoretical ring's whole, but Kadie estimated the entire Confluence navy could've landed on it and still had room for a mid-size planet's population.
Captain Kadie used a booted foot to casually nudge her top scientists off to their respective bridge consoles, listening to them feed off each other’s excitement. She spread her feet apart and leaned over Jewel’s primary console, bringing her lips closer to the microphone. “I appreciate that we’re all excited but I’m concerned, Jewel. Anyone with the knowledge and resources to build this thing is bound to be a major player, but we’ve never heard of them? And someone even bigger comes along to smash their toy?” She took a deep breath and released it in a hefty sigh. “We’re not just doing science today. We’re gathering intelligence.”
Jewel’s readings surged and receded, neon lines on graphs breaking at the margins like ocean waves. “We’d need a thousand years to survey this wreck completely working alone so the best we can hope to do now is answer some basic questions and it looks like Dar and Liam are chewing over some already I don’t think this happened too long ago because so many of these chunks seem large and with the forces at work I’d expect them to collide and smash or grind away at each other to produce much finer debris!”
Kadie watched as Jewel launched a couple of probes and dropped an autonomous drone onto the surface of their ring-chunk. More data flowed to the Jewel and its eponymous AI gobbled it up, refining it for Liam and Dar’s consumption.
“Some kind of corrosion was in play but I don’t think that’s the whole story,” Liam called across the bridge. Close-ups of crumbling alloy stained a strange blend of brown and black sprang up on Jewel’s monitor.
Kadie gripped the console until her fingertips turned white. “Is there any chance that junk could spread to Jewel?”
Dar wagged his head. “We’re just seeing traces. This reaction might still be happening elsewhere but not on this chunk.”
Kadie relaxed and retired to her seat, calling up a tactical display just to keep track of all the objects near the ship. “Alright. Get your samples and readings, then we’ll meet after lunch to brainstorm and theorize.”
“Captain I think there’s a more interesting chunk we should visit once we’ve finished preliminaries here It’s still warm and there’s even a thin film of atmosphere clinging to it Can I send over a probe pretty please?” Jewel wheedled, already hungry for more data despite the terabytes her processors were already crunching.
“Nope! And don’t pout, I see those numbers sagging. I’d like a more cautious approach. See if Annie wants to go peek.”
“I’ll ask her right now thanks cap’n!”
Kadie watched, one leg crossed over the other’s knee, boot wagging in the air as Jewel established a line to a portion of the ship open to vacuum. A visual feed popped open, showing the fuzzy darkness of their most alien crew-member.
Jewel translated her instructions into into spikes of radiation, stirring the ephemeral darkness of Annie’s shape. The space-dwelling lifeform was largely energy, anchored to a chunk of exotic matter. She defied classification, though Dar had compared her more than once to a ‘weird energy lichen clinging to a fancy rock’ in his more frustrated moments.
Annie’s translated response chirped from the console, and Kadie again found herself wondering how Jewel had chosen the voice she gave the alien. It was husky, breathy, and a bit on the low side. Anything Annie said came across as flirtatious in her smoky tone, and it was so incongruous that certain crew had practically giggled themselves breathless more than once.
“There’s a new mystery to taste-scout? I can go, and creep-sneak up on fresh secrets. Can I go quickly or must I mosey?” Annie had no visible eyes, much less other features for humans to fasten onto for cues. She tended to shape herself into a coiled length of sooty darkness about eight meters long when at rest.
“Mosey please, Annie. If anyone is alive, biological or technological, I don’t want to startle them…especially given the implied capabilities the ring-builders and ring-destroyers have.” Kadie consciously unclenched her jaw.
The soft-edged darkness twisted, vaporous coils stretching out through the converted cargo bay she called home. “I will glide across their senses like a dream-madness. I am the night,” she chuckled.
Liam snorted. “Jewel, were you translating movies for Annie again?”
“Of course I try to get her as many cultural touchstones as I can so we can communicate better and it’s so cute watching her lose cohesion when she gets excited!”
The captain rubbed the back of her neck. “Batman is a cultural touchstone? I don’t know if that’s the influence we want here. There’s a command structure and no room for vigilantes. Annie—“
Jewel’s console blipped in a visual hiccup Kadie had grown to recognize as ‘apologetic.’ “She’s already gone cap’n.”
Liam’s suppressed snort and Dar’s rapid-fire laughter spoiled whatever rebuke Kadie might have been mustering. “Just keep an eye on her as best you can, Jewel.”
Kadie watched a display where Jewel projected Annie’s course towards the warm ring segment. It was sensibly cautious, spiraling and slaloming towards the target, giving her time to abort if anything reacted to her presence. Sensors picked up no change from the distant, lazily-tumbling chunk of megastructure. “No news is good news.”
Dar wandered over with a bulb of coffee in one hand and a tablet in the other. “The structure is interesting. It’s built up like the cells in a plant. It’s possible this ring was grown rather than manufactured.”
“Grown? This big boy would’ve been the winner at the county fair for sure,” Liam called over from his station.
Kadie looked at Dar’s tablet, where a cross section of the ring’s hull was glowing.
Dar gestured at the image with his coffee. “Forged metals have distinctive structures. This material is bizarrely uniform at the microscopic level, but it’s not homogeneous. There are regularly-spaced microscopic structures that might give this alloy strength and properties I can’t guess at.” He shrugged. “Metallurgy isn’t my best field I’m afraid.”
Liam strode over to take a peek at the tablet as well, the glow of it making him look even paler than usual. He pointed back over his shoulder with a thumb. “There’s some fun gravitic stuff going on in this system. The chunks are mostly big enough to have gravity wells of their own, but the distortions I’m seeing are stronger than that can explain. If this is the state of things with the ring or rings broken, I have no idea what it must’ve been like when whole.”
Kadie frowned. “Are there signs of life on any other bodies in this system?”
Liam shook his head. “What other bodies? There aren’t even any satellites that Jewel or I have noticed. That would make sense if some fiction on these megastructures is right though. They would have used every scrap of their home world or worlds to build the ring.”
“Disturbing thought, turning your entire world into nothing but building material. They must have had a good reason, right?”
Dar spread his hands out toward the captain, palms up. “Who can say? Humans wouldn’t go that route without a damn good reason, but is that just because we’re sentimental and individualistic? This species could’ve been a hive-mind or something we’d have trouble ascribing motivations to.”
Jewel sighed, shaping the sound to suggest the happy variety. “So many possibilities and mysteries I can’t help but imagine what this ring was like at its peak Was it swarming with an uncountable horde of creatures or maybe artificial lifeforms or or OR beings composed entirely of sound waves!"
Kadie paused a moment to picture that, head tilted back.
Liam just grinned, while walking back to his console. "Speaking of someone composed entirely of sound waves..."
Jewel pouted, a row of metrics on her screen sagging once again. "It's not my fault none of you agreed to let me implant you with FANG receivers so I could finally put verbal communication behind us and work at a proper speed It's not going to microwave your brain Liam The recovery time is nil and complications occur in less than--"
Dar waved away the word-swarm and pointed to a viewscreen. "Annie's on her way back. Jewel, just because you could squirt information over to us faster doesn't mean we'd be able to process or act on it any quicker. We trip over our thoughts and words sometimes as it is! Trying to think at your speed or even a fraction of it would produce...sub-standard results at best."
Jewel lifted off of the ring chunk, politely turning Annie's cargo bay towards her. A sharp ping from a console re-focused everyone's attention.
"Weapons fire. Annie may not have moseyed enough." Liam squinted at a readout. "Coherent light, high energy, probably have a better idea what they're using as it, uh, gets closer."
"Go to meet her Jewel, get shields around her as soon as possible and we'll get out of here. We're about as combat-ready as a mean kid with a magnifying glass." Kadie strapped in, the rest of the crew following suit. She keyed on the com. "Combat alert! Secure your stations and buckle up."
Annie's voice slunk its way out of the bridge's speakers. "They were wary-ready for me. Flashy hot-pain from ship-ship-ship. I back-backed but they were not fooled."
Jewel responded as she accelerated towards the nigh-invisible trail of living darkness. "Just hurry Annie We're coming to meet you halfway You'll be in our shield radius in eight seconds!"
By now the pursuing ships were more than flecks on the display. They were anything but uniform, sporting a home-brewed/salvaged look that suggested pirates more than some advanced alien navy. They weren't coordinated, even playing chicken with each other while jockeying for position. Annie was a prize to be claimed more than a threat to be eliminated.
Annie began a spiral and broke out of it to zig-zag before her pursuers could lead their shots, then spread into a nigh-invisible plane to cross the last stretch of space between her and Jewel.
Rather than attack Jewel directly, the jigsaw’d craft floated into flanking positions, pulsing her with scan after scan.
“Annie lost a bit of herself captain but the thrill of it all seems to have made up for it She’s practically ricocheting off the walls in there and vowing revenge.”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Kadie rested a hand on her chest and blew out a long breath. “Great, thanks Jewel. Make sure she doesn’t try to leave and try to win some points back.”
A transmission burbled over the com after the scans stopped, and after a minute Jewel was able to provide a translation.
“They’re demanding we drop shields open our airlocks and surrender or we’ll be atomized the usual sort of uncivilized clap-trap You know captain this might be a novel application of the accelerated cell-growth program we’ve been toying with in the west lab!”
Dar blanched. “The ‘cancer ray?’ We can’t use that on living creatures!”
Jewel groaned, frustrated spikes traveling across her displayed metrics. “I don’t want to use it on our opponents themselves just their ships You can see they’re a different design and composition than the ring-builder’s technology but they’ve all integrated pieces recovered from the ring Scavengers gonna scav and it’s time they regretted it!”
Kadie nodded, then decided it was best to be explicit. “Go ahead, Jewel. Target the...cellular portions of their infrastructure with the...cancer ray. Gods, we have to call it something else. I’m not using that turn of phrase in my logs.”
“The uncontrollable growth laser-excited emitter?” Liam tried to keep his lips from twitching and utterly failed.
Jewel cackled. “Firing the UGLEE ray captain!”
***
On the bridge of the largest scavenger vessel, Command Node Prime re-seated its bulk in the protein webbing of the authority pyramid. It shared the pyramid with the secondary and tertiary nodes, but all three were gaining mass quickly. A quaternary node would bud off soon enough and be ejected to drift through the ship on lesser tasks, and it couldn’t happen soon enough to ease the crowding! Each node was a roughly peanut-shaped mass of organic obstreperous-ness housed in a coral analogue, using chemical signals to operate its instruments and controls.
All the nodes were impatient with the intruding vessel but ketonic excitement fizzled off of them at the prospect of fresh salvage.
Prime was formulating the order to open fire when the sensors registered an energy emission from the infuriatingly-pristine ship. Immediately, Prime was bombarded by chemical messages from the sensor suite. A portion of their hull was heating, expanding, rending the adjacent plates and tearing through the ship’s circulatory system! Secondary squirted panic into the bridge’s atmosphere while jetting piloting commands into its interface, sending the ship juke-ing out of the path of the mysterious ray. It re-targeted in less than a second, inflaming a second patch of salvaged technology harvested from the God-ring debris. Propulsion died, internal batteries ruptured, and the ship drifted gently apart in two-dozen directions as sloppy engineering and patchwork repairs all failed at once.
Primary fizzled with annoyance, uncomfortable in the resulting vacuum and nearly blind/mute without an atmosphere to carry its signals. Faint whiffs of alarm and frustration registered from Secondary and Tertiary, before a building sense of pressure in the pyramid heralded the start of the budding process. Well of course. It never rains unless it’s sulfuric acid.
***
After the disintegration of the first vessel, the other two scrapheaps accelerated back the way they’d come, firing hasty bursts of pale orange energy. Jewel’s shields took a beating but nothing she couldn’t handle by diverting brief spurts of energy from labs that could afford a quick drop.
Kadie let out a gust of breath, slumping a bit in her seat. “Alright. Now--”
“I need a little more data on the effects of the UGLEE ray captain so pardon me for a moment.” Jewel was using her intentionally-calm voice, often used to smooth things over as she did something not-strictly-approved. In this case that involved powering up all engines to maximum and hounding the remaining vessels, saturating their patchy hulls with blasts of the ray. The viewscreen showed near-misses with floating chunks of megastructure, Jewel whipping around and through a dizzying maze of drifting debris.
One of the scavengers clipped an antenna mast or bit of conduit jutting from a chunk and spun off into the distance, power flickering and dying. Jewel still swung wide to give it a zap, ensuring it was down for the count.
Kadie kept trying to give the order to stop the pursuit, but each time she opened her mouth another absurd maneuver would flash vertigo-inducing landscapes of alien wreckage across the screen, the captain’s fingernails digging into the pliable armrests.
Finally the last scavenger darted into the fractured remains of an observation dome, the expanse large enough to house Earth’s moon with room leftover. A community of scavengers, refugees, criminals and who knew what else had taken root there. Their structures grew like mold around the inside rim of the dome, and while it looked like a bare sprinkling of life from a distance it must have amounted to millions of creatures.
Similar hodge-podge craft to the first batch arrived to menace Jewel but liberal use of the UGLEE ray sent them fleeing to the safety of the dome. Finally Kadie cleared her throat and put an end to the chase.
“I think we’ve made our point, Jewel. That’s a significant colony down there, and not all of them may be as aggressive as that welcome wagon.”
Liam released his harness, bouncing over to pat Dar on the shoulder, hand fluttering there like a crazed bird. "That chunk, it must be the one with the atmospheric film Jewel picked up! You can see, they haven't bothered making many pressurized environments even though the dome has that huge crack."
Jewel displayed magnified views of the structures inside the dome. Most were quite primitive, just boxy dwellings and hydroponic farms. Solar arrays and dirty manufacturing plants sprawled in a hap-hazard way, mixed right in with the living areas. There seemed to be at least three species but it was hard to be sure since everyone visible wore protective garments of one kind or another.
Dar tapped a nail on one of the screens out of habit, then patted the console as if to apologize. "It looks like a mining settlement and a refugee camp in one, but it's so huge! Jewel, can you guess at the population?"
"Judging from the number of dwellings and adding in some structures that seem to house the sessile creatures who piloted the first ship we disabled and accounting for size disparity and adjusting for unknown population density but factoring in farm acreage and assuming no exporting of foods I estimate seven-hundred million individuals with a large margin for error Where do you suppose they all came from?"
Kadie shrugged, turning to Liam. "Maybe they’re refugees from other planets that were recycled for this ring project?"
"Sure, it’s possible. Multiple sapients evolving in the same star system isn’t without precedent, but there’s no reason to believe some didn’t move into the neighborhood either."
Jewel flashed a slow series of pastel shades across one of her monitors. "I'm picking up some strange chronon discrepancies They're nothing like the readings outside the debris field but I have no idea what could've caused the imbalance!”
Dar called up the readings, then studied the chart of the star system again. "Didn't Mehta postulate once that a megastructure could cause relativistic effects?"
Liam craned his neck to look over Dar's shoulder before Jewel simply duplicated the view on his own screen. "So, what? An object gets large enough and it not only acquires its own gravitational field but one powerful enough to influence time?"
"Ooh ooh ooh this is incredible I don't think the effect would've been enough to let an entire civilization develop in less than a few millennia but since we don't know the nature of the disaster that broke up the ring or rings it's possible space-time was disrupted or even locally wrenched out of place only to reappear as the universal fabric rebounded This is so COOL!"
Jewel spun the ship like a top, flashing all her running lights in random patterns of pure joy. Kadie slapped the button to cut off the viewscreen before the view made them all sick. "I know our whole reason for being out here is to speculate but I think we have to prioritize our safety for now, and then work out some diplomatic approach for these residents."
Jewel chirped, "Ahead of you captain I called our friend Posey at the first sign of trouble and she's en route I can't wait to see her again and I know she's going to have so much fun when diplomacy fails!"
Dar and Liam traded glances. "I hope you mean 'if,' Jewel. Some of these folks are unreasonably aggressive but desperation can make even the most civilized species act like monsters."
Jewel emitted a synthetic 'blatt.' "I mean when for sure Dar I've been picking up transmissions between ships in the scavenger fleet who are recalling their main expeditionary force from a harvest site They have a lot more ramshackle ships and at least one big one I'm trying to pinpoint their communications equipment so I can try to jam it hang on."
Liam frowned at the star system display. "Something's moving. Something big. And towards us, of course."
"Is it Posey? She's not immense but a lot bigger than us at least." Kadie switched the viewscreen back on and called up the same view.
The object was more on the scale of the larger chunks of debris, vast and accelerating in a single direction. Liam began directing more instruments toward the object. "Definitely not Posey. Sensors are saying it's mostly ring-material, but more highly-organized. I'm launching a probe."
The crew spent a tense few minutes waiting for the probe to cross several AUs. It resolved an image before too long.
Liam squinted. "Why is it so fuzzy? Is there some distortion, radiation or something?"
As the distance between the probe and object decreased, more details became visible. It was definitely material from the rings, but the plates were organized into distinct fractals, radiating out from an octahedron. The multitude of branching structures ‘fuzzed’ the object, making it difficult to make out the shape beneath it all. Instead of the pale green of most of the debris they’d seen, this mass was colored in shades of gray, brown, and black.
“Something is wrong I’m picking up a ton of organic matter in the approaching object but there are no life-signs There is electrical activity though and it’s intensifying--” The image from the probe winked out and Jewel gasped, “Raphael no!”
Kadie nodded. “So, it’s hostile. Got it. We’re out of here! Jewel, plot us a course that swings well clear of that thing!”
“That’s not possible just now or not in any way you’re likely to approve One way takes us deeper into the debris one way leads to the scav fleet one way leads to the system’s star but I’ll do my best!” Jewel cranked the engines to maximum and piloted a narrow course between open space and the approaching chunk of...whatever. She kept one screen devoted to a view of the object and Liam cursed as it collided with another enormous chunk of debris.
Collide wasn’t the right word, as it turned out. As the two touched, segments of the strange mass organized themselves into multiple opposing rows of grinding ‘teeth,’ dragging the other chunk into itself. In less than two minutes the chunk had grown by a third, ripples traveling across its mathematically-craggy surface. Not a speck was left of the consumed piece of ring.
Dar checked his sensor readings again. “The electrical activity is stronger now, and I’m seeing patterns in it. They aren’t just random discharges.”
As the chunk continued to pursue, it accelerated, soon outpacing Jewel’s own speed and closing the gap. New details became uncomfortably visible the longer the chase continued. The plates composing the thing were a composite of the ring material and some vague organic shapes flattened like specimens under a microscope slide’s slip cover. Flickers of light from within the mass illuminated the squashed shapes, a grotesque kind of shadow-puppet show.
“Jewel? What are we looking at there?” Kadie swallowed, and dragged a water pouch from her chair’s storage bin. “Because it looks a bit like--”
“Bodies yes They’re not a species on record and all we’re seeing are something akin to vegetal exoskeletons All the gooey centers have been removed But captain with the scale of this mass that equates to tens of billions of these remains!”
Liam looked green. “I mean, I have a dumb fiction-inspired theory at this point. That mass is the same color as the ‘decay’ we noticed on the first chunk we examined. And we did wonder what became of the ring-builders. What if those husks are all that’s left?”
A transmission crackled over the com, startling the entire crew sharply enough that most gave themselves a strain or bruise. A hissing noise built, modulating, intensity rising and falling.
“It is a language and I’m working on it before you ask It’s very chaotic though and I’m having a hard time deciding what are changing concepts and what are changing voices.”
Liam nodded rapidly. “I don’t like how familiar that sounds. Multiple voices? Like maybe, tens of billions of them?”
Dar snorted. “They’re dead though, plainly. What, did this huge piece of oddly-organized space garbage combine all its victims’ minds into a horrid gestalt, re-purposing an entire dead race to serve as its nervous system?”
#We are on the cusp of transcendence. Join us on our journey. We insist.#
Dar tried to preempt sass from the others, whipping around to stab an accusing finger at Liam. “He started it!”
Kadie glared at Liam. “You just conjured up a nightmare trope with no grounding in reality. Please tell me you have some outlandish way to defeat it, too!”
Liam fastened his harness. “Janeway and Picard aren’t around, so the best I can do? Hit it with the UGLEE ray.”
Kadie almost laughed, stiff shoulders slumping. “I’d forgotten about it already! I can’t wait to see what it can do to a ship that’s entirely cellular. What’s the range on that thing anyway Jewel?”
“Maybe five hundred meters if I stole power from everything else but we wouldn’t do enough damage in time before it overtook and masticated us Sorry captain.”
“Remind me to get our deus ex machina upgraded next time we’re in port,” Kadie sighed.
Behind them, the pursuing mass engulfed the piece of debris they’d landed on earlier, growing again.
#You are small but not inconsequential. You have our full attention.# The voice wasn’t a chorus, but it was alarmingly manic. Volume, cadence, timbre: all fluctuated a dozen times per word.
#Reject entropy and its message of doom. Enter syntropic bliss and thrill at the order we’ll bring.#
Kadie winced away from the discordant voice. “Jewel, record everything we get from the...hive, but cut the audio translation. It’s having a negative effect on morale.”
As soon as the eerie voice cut off, a more familiar voice broke in. “Engineering here. Are you planning to run the engines on full for much longer? It’s getting awfully warm down here.”
Kadie keyed the com. “Brinks, thank you, and yes. If we don’t keep up the sprint, there won’t be any ship left to fuss over.”
Brinks sighed back over the channel. “I love you all, but joining a hive-mind with you? I’m just not ready for that kind of commitment. ...Maybe after another couple of tours.”
“Briiiiinks that hurts me it really does I thought all that time remixing fuel ratios had brought us close enough that you’d be fine with mingling your consciousness with my perky ‘lectric lobes!”
The chatter squeezed a few chuckles out of the bridge crew, hands loosening their grips on arm-rests, heartbeats slowing.
Close to open space again, Kadie and the crew watched the numbers marking the distance between them and the fractal monstrosity, value ticking down more and more rapidly.
“Silly question, but any chance we could use the surreality drive to escape?”
“Sorry captain but I can’t keep the engines on full blast and start the sequence at the same time We’d be caught before we jumped.”
Kadie grumbled, then twitched away from a ping, a new shape appearing within sensor range.
Space twisted a few thousand meters ahead, the cheesecloth of the universe wrung until a single gleaming drop squeezed out: Atropos’ Shears had arrived at last.
“I have an entire bushel of questions Jewel, but first outta the chute, how much of this is your fault?”
“Barely ANY I swear Big Sis now pretty please hit the thing chasing us with every planet-buster you have I want it blown into pieces smaller than my doubt that you would arrive in time which as you can imagine is nearly infinitesimal When you’re done I will tell you so much more about what happened than you’d ever want to know I promise!”
“Fair enough. Imma throw a tractor on to tow you, so we can make better headway. Better close down all your sensors for this.”
After drawing Jewel in close and safely behind her shield bubble, Posey launched a spread of missiles, ugly columns of tightly-packed technology that left trails of violet propellant. The glittering contrails spiraled, missiles maneuvering to avoid any countermeasures the target might launch. Nothing of the kind appeared but the hive rippled once again, drawing in all trailing ‘branches’ to present a tightly armored octahedron. At the last second the missiles spread into a shaped grid designed to impact simultaneously and blinding light flared, casting all the visible chunks of ring debris into sharp relief.
The immense blossom of silent fire sent a small spray of glowing junk flying through local space, the super-heated cloud's edges shrinking. The pure white of the destructive field of energy faded and shrank before oozing into a cowl of plasma, dragged forward by the fractal hive, un-slowed.
The blast carved out significant depressions in the hive’s surface but panels rotated into place to refresh the structure, presenting an unblemished front to its quarry within seconds.
“Six percent reduction in mass but no change in speed or electrical activity I won’t pass on what it’s saying but in summary it’s exhibiting a temper Do you have a lot more of those missiles Posey?”
“...Nope. I have a sun-imploder but beyond requiring the approval of three dozen people to deploy it, we’d either be caught before it went off or destroyed in the blast ourselves. Just out of curiosity, what does it do if it catches you? I’m not saying it’s just playing tag, but if it tucked us into a landing bay maybe we could fight our way to--”
“It literally chews you to bits with a jagged Mandelbrot maw the size of North America,” Liam blurted, raking fingers through his sweat-damp hair.
“Heard, understood, acknowledged. ...Shit.”