“We need to subdue those creatures before we can hope to learn anything.” He drove the Archetype away from the hull, and Leira followed in the Swift. The gap they’d pulled open immediately began to close, edges knitting together in soundless harmony.
“Benzel, Lomas, come on in. Let’s stop this thing from reaching that League planet more or less intact if we can, but if we can’t, so be it.”
“On our way.” Benzel’s voice was alive at the prospect of battle.
Lomas was more reserved. “We’re moving out now. Per the plan, we’re going to hang back and shoot from range—”
“No,” Dash cut in. “Don’t. Come in as close as you can. These Deepers don’t like close-in combat. They’re not even really prepared for it.”
Lomas paused before answering. “A little uncomfortable with that, Dash, I have to admit.”
“Fighting at range is what these Deepers want to do,” he replied. “If you hang back, you’re playing their game.”
“Alright. We’ll still let your people take the lead, if you don’t mind,” Lomas said.
“Not a problem at all,” Benzel put in. “You guys follow us. We’ve got a lot of combat experience on this crew, and we’re happy to have the help.”
“Are your people always this, ah, enthusiastic about combat, Dash?” Lomas asked as her task force began to accelerate.
Dash laughed. “Wait until we really get warmed up.”
The Deeper ship proved as tough to stop as it had been to approach. As it closed on the planet, it fired more missiles that seemed to extrude from its own substance, both at the world ahead and the joint League-Realm force attacking it. It struck Dash that that was a self-destructive strategy, but Leira offered an answer to that.
“What if it just grows new material?” she answered in response to his frustrated curse at another dark-lance attack that had begun to heal over. “Somehow takes energy from the space around it—hell, maybe even from our weapons—and turns it into new building blocks?”
Dash considered that. “Infinite ammo? Why not. Truly alien, and it fits with what we know so far.”
“Which is?” Leira asked.
“Nothing about this enemy feels familiar. Nothing.” And Dash was right. The Deepers were utterly alien in every way, and that was the most disturbing part of this new fight.
The intruder was alarmingly close to the League planet, a world of almost two billion people, before they finally hit on the most effective attack. Dash ordered a simultaneous run by everything—both mechs, all three heavy cruisers, the Denkillers, and even the escort carrier itself. Alongside that heavy force came the League flotilla, every ship firing all weapons as fast as they could cycle.
Space was crowded with the flash and burn of heavy rounds.
The Deeper ship snapped back at them with missiles and x-lasers, getting a solid hit on the Retribution that made her stagger out of line. Benzel doggedly kept his flagship in the fight, joining the rest in burying the Deeper ship in a maelstrom of destructive energy. The violence proved too much for even its prodigious regeneration. The alien ship simply came apart, collapsing into a slowly expanding cloud of tumbling debris.
Dash blew out a relieved breath. “That was a bit closer than I expected. Damned tough hull. And those missiles they kept launching. Holy crap, no end to them, and they almost seemed to anticipate our attacks.”
“The point is that we stopped them,” Lomas said. “If you hadn’t been here, there’s a good chance they’d be in orbit now, dropping those x-ray warheads onto our cities, our people.”
“Well, it looks like a lot of the debris is going to enter orbit,” Leira said. “Whatever keeps falling is going to make for quite the meteor show for your people down there.”
“Small mercies,” Lomas agreed.
“Yeah, take them whenever you can get them,” Dash said. “Anyway, we’re not done here. Time to start collecting salvage.” He narrowed his eyes at the wreckage. “We need to find out just what makes these Deepers tick.”
5
Dash gingerly reached out and grabbed a large-ish piece of debris, a section of hull. He half-expected to find it slowly growing into a new and repulsive form of space-born life.
To his relief, the piece was utterly inert.
“Sentinel, what is this stuff? What is it made of?”
“Wondering the same thing myself,” Leira said.
Dash could see the Swift a few klicks away, hanging near a big component that might have been part of a drive.
“Tybalt and I have been conferring about this very thing,” Sentinel replied. “Unfortunately, a definitive answer is beyond the scanning abilities of the Archetype and the Swift. All we can tell is that it seems to consist of a complex crystalline matrix, which is used as a framework to support an organic superstrate.”
“So, organic, as in it’s alive?” Dash asked.
“Unknown. But if I were pressed to answer, I would say it has some of the attributes of a living organism,” Sentinel said.
“We recommend taking some of this material back to the Forge, where Custodian will be able to conduct a more thorough analysis,” Tybalt said.
“Good advice,” Dash replied. “We’ll gather up anything that looks interesting—and dead. I’m not bringing any risk aboard.”
“And what constitutes interesting?” Sentinel asked. “There are several thousand tons of debris, in more than eleven thousand fragments more than one centimeter—”
“We’ll know interesting when we see it,” Dash said.
“That makes no sense. If there’s an objective standard for interesting, then we should be able to apply it in advance—”
“Sentinel?”
“Yes, Dash?”
“Are you reverting to your stodgy, literal self, or are you yanking my chain?”
“I have evolved, Dash. I haven’t had an entirely new personality installed. That stodgy, literal version of me is still present. I am surprised, and a little hurt, that you would suggest otherwise.”
Dash blinked. “You’re hurt? Oh. Wow. I’m sorry, Sentinel, I didn’t mean to—”
“Now I’m yanking your chain.”
Dash laughed outright at that. Before he could say anything more, though, Benzel cut in on the comm.
“Dash, you mentioned you wanted to find interesting things? I think we found one,” the ex-pirate said.
Dash rotated in place, toward the Retribution and her shuttles, which were helping with salvage ops. He could see tiny, suited figures drifting and darting through the debris field, most of them untethered. Benzel and his former privateer cabal known as the Gentle Friends were huge fans of what they called free falling. Dash had reservations about their tactic, which was untethered forays into hard vacuum and no-g. To Dash, that was risking any number of fatal mishaps and accidents, but Benzel and his people loved the freedom.
Freedom to get hopelessly lost, alone in a vac suit, running out of air—
“What did you find, Benzel?” Dash asked.
“One of the bastards, the Deepers—or what’s left of it.”