Surface Detail

∼There’s a lot of these red-echo laser fuckers, Auppi sent to the ship. ∼Let’s loose all the missiles, get this over fast and jump to the re-arm immediately after, yes?

∼Yes, agreed. Suggest missiles to these locations. Leaves half.

∼Okay. Gone?

∼Gone.

∼Beautiful spread.

∼Thank you.

∼Right, we’re about there, yes?

∼Centred in one tenth…

∼Warm them up, get spinning and a-tumbling and let’s light the fuckers up.

∼Nearly there…

∼Come on come on come on!

∼Oh, close enough, I suppose. On yours.

∼Whoop-de-doop!

Auppi felt like she had a trigger beneath more digits than she possessed, as though each finger and toe was somehow curled round a little grouping of firing filaments, every one individually launchable according to the amount of squeeze she applied. She double-swept her gaze around the feast of targets, gloried in the sheer luxuriousness of it, and clutched the triggers smoothly to her, firing everything, loosing everything, lighting up every priority-one target in view at once.

The space she lay in sparkled all around like a diamond-ball bathysphere lowered into the sort of planetary depths where every organism made its own light. Rosettes, florets, side-slanted bursts, little spears and dirty flurries of light erupted on every side, filling her eyes with sparks. Whirling within the seen cacophony, the spinning, tumbling ship was already flagging up the next array of targets. She swung and spun with it, untroubled by gyrations that would have had her throwing up, pre-training.

∼What’re the grey blobs? she asked the ship as the lasers and their collimators locked into the aiming grids of the ship’s primary sensors.

∼Indicates swarmer type unclear, the ship told her.

∼Fuck, she sent, before loosing another fusillade to strew another hundred-plus bright scratches across the sky. Unclear? They hadn’t had any “unclear” before. What the fuck was this?

She could see the missiles popping open their own little pockets of destruction, two behind them, down the course the ship had taken towards the centre of the cloud, and others further away, some still just starting to fire. Meanwhile the smatter had woken up to the fact that this racing, wildly tumbling thing in its midst did not wish it well and some of the truck-size laser swarmers were starting to turn their single-mouth long-axes towards them. The ship took a hit almost immediately as one swarmer found itself fortuitously pointing right at them and at the right stage in its charging cycle. The beam struck, slid off, bounced away by the little craft’s mirror field.

∼Proportion unclear? she sent as the next layer of targets snicked into the aiming grids.

∼About one per cent. Hitting some with-

She/it/they fired, flicking destruction across the darkness.

∼this salvo, the ship continued. ∼Devoting sensory resources to analyse debris result.

They were close enough to the fabricary now to have to take it into account when they targeted; this close to what they were aiming at, and with such relatively slow-moving targets, there was almost zero chance of just plain missing and a stray shot heading straight at the fabricary, but it was possible for a blast from the main laser to go straight through one of the swarmers, and some of the latest versions had semi-serviceable laser coatings capable of deflecting at least part of a bolt from one of the secondary or tertiaries. Plus you – well, the ship, thankfully – had to think about post-destruction main-remaining-body direction vectors and shrapnel-debris-scatter profiles.

Auppi was glad she didn’t have to think about that sort of house-keeping crap; let her concentrate on just blasting stuff. They swung again, re-targeted. A few more incoming hits registered, small calibre nuisance against the heavy armour of the ship’s reactive mirror field.

∼So? she sent. The latest targets had blossomed so the ship would have had time to analyse the relevant debris signatures.

∼Zip, the ship sent. ∼All still there. Hitting nearest grey/unclear with full main.

As the ship sent this, over twenty of the contacts they’d been aiming at suddenly weren’t being targeted any more, just blinking out.

∼Fuck.

Such was the weapon’s power – and the swarmers’ relative vulnerability – the ship’s main laser usually got multiply-collimated into anything up to twenty-four separate, independently aimed beams. Devoting the whole beam on full power to a single object had been unheard-of overkill until now.

∼Nanoguns exhausted, the ship told her, confirming something she could already see from her own displays.

She squeezed off another salvo at the truncated target list. The main’s was obvious, the impacting bolt lighting up whatever was around the target itself with splash-out, freeze-framing the pelting swarmers nearby as though in a flash photograph. The ship would be watching in greater detail than Auppi, but even she could see umpteen tiny glowing traces burst glinting from the aim-point.

∼That got it, the ship sent.