Federations

The delegate bided her time before answering. “Admire your dedication,” she said, after a suitably convincing pause. “But you’d only be postponing a death sentence. Kinder to kill her now, don’t you think?”

• • •

Mouser entered kill-range nineteen hours later, a wide pseudo-orbit three thousand klicks out. The splinter—seventeen by twelve klicks across—was far too small to be seen as anything other than a twinkling speck, like a grain of sugar at arm’s length. But everything we wanted to know was clear: topology, gravimetrics, and the site of the downed ship. That wasn’t hard. Quite apart from the fact that it hadn’t buried itself completely, it was hot as hell.

“Doesn’t look like the kind of touchdown you walk away from,” Yarrow said.

“Think they ejected?”

“No way.” Yarrow sketched a finger through a holographic enlargement of the ship, roughly cone-shaped, vaguely streamlined just like our own thickship, to punch through the Swirl’s thickest gas belts. “Clock those dorsal hatches. Evac pods still in place.”

She was right. The pods could have flung them clear before the crash, but evidently they hadn’t had time to bail out. The ensuing impact—even cushioned by the ship’s manifold of thick—probably hadn’t been survivable.

But there was no point taking chances.

Quackheads would have finished the job, but we’d used up our stock. Mouser carried a particle beam battery, but we’d have to move uncomfortably close to the splinter before using it. What remained were the molemines, and they should have been perfectly adequate. We dropped fifteen of them, embedded in a cloud of two hundred identical decoys. Three of the fifteen were designated to dust the wreck, while the remaining twelve would bury deeper into the splinter and attempt to shatter it completely.

That at least was the idea.

It all happened very quickly, not in the dreamy slow-motion of a neurodisney. One instant the molemines were descending toward the splinter, and then the next instant they weren’t there. Spacing the two instants had been an almost subliminally brief flash.

“Starting to get sick of this,” Yarrow said.

Mouser digested what had happened. Nothing had emanated from the wreck. Instead, there’d been a single pulse of energy seemingly from the entire volume of space around the splinter. Particle weapons, Mouser diagnosed. Probably single-use drones, each tinier than a pebble but numbering hundreds or even thousands. The defector must have sown them on her approach.

But she hadn’t touched us.

“It was a warning,” I said. “Telling us to back off.”

“I don’t think so.”

“What?”

“I think the warning’s on its way.”

I stared at her blankly for a moment, before registering what she had already seen: arcing from the splinter was something too fast to stop, something against which our minimally armored thickship had no defense, not even the option of flight.

Yarrow started to mouth some exotic profanity she’d reserved for precisely this moment. There was an eardrum-punishing bang and Mouser shuddered—but we weren’t suddenly chewing vacuum.

And that was very bad news indeed.

Antiship missiles come in two main flavors: quackheads and sporeheads. You know which immediately after the weapon has hit. If you’re still thinking—if you still exist—chances are it’s a sporehead. And at that point your problems are just beginning.

Invasive demon attack, Mouser shrieked. Breather manifold compromised . . . which meant something uninvited was in the thick. That was the point of a sporehead: to deliver hostile demons into an enemy ship.

“Mm,” Yarrow said. “I think it might be time to suit up.”

Except our suits were a good minute’s swim away, into the bowels of Mouser, through twisty ducts that might skirt the infection site. Having no choice, we swam anyway, Yarrow insisting I take the lead even though she was a quicker swimmer. And somewhere—it’s impossible to know exactly where—demons reached us, seeping invisibly into our bodies via the thick. I couldn’t pinpoint the moment; it wasn’t as if there was a jagged transition between lucidity and demon-manipulated irrationality. Yarrow and I were terrified enough as it was. All I know is it began with a mild agoraphilia: an urge to escape Mouser’s flooded confines. Gradually it phased into claustrophobia, and then became fully fledged panic, making Mouser seem as malevolent as a haunted house.

Yarrow ignored her suit, clawing the hull until her fingers spooled blood.

“Fight it,” I said. “It’s just demons triggering our fear centers, trying to drive us out!”

Of course, knowing so didn’t help.