Surface Detail

Everything wheeled again, the ship continuing to gyrate wildly, carving a gradually increasing hollow space of smatter debris out of the centre of the cloud of swarmers. Multiple incoming registered as pops and clicks, ringing the mirror field. Meanwhile Auppi had been loosing missiles into the depths of the swarm, sending them off to start their own spreading blossoms of destruction.

∼Two grey on half-main each? she suggested.

∼Doing, the ship agreed, and the depleted grids lit up, firmed again. She flexed, distributing unseen rays like benedictions. She concentrated on the two foci of the main armament. A single unsullied brightness flicked on in each, then faded neatly. The other swarmers being engulfed in glowing debris clouds all happened elsewhere, unworthy of notice. Further afield still, the missiles careened about their own little patches of sky, dispatching all they could.

∼No? she asked

∼No! the ship said.

Another wild twisting about the skies, and Razhir the gas giant was suddenly there, filling the view, its banded face instantly rashed with the aim points. The ship’s main armament had resumed targeting a full-power blast on individual grey targets.

∼Motherfucker. Analysis?

∼Bigger than average, non-ablating reflectivity, moving quicker. Complicated. Lot of wreckage. Accounting for fewer total targets.

There, she thought; she’d known there was something wrong about their being only ninety K swarmers when they’d been expecting more. The fucking outbreak was switching production mix again, going for complex survivability rather than sheer numbers.

∼Grown-up power signatures, the ship continued, as Auppi unleashed another salvo. The incoming laser hits sounded like hail on a glass roof.

Another hurried tumble, one more array of targets snapping into focus, caught and steadied in the aiming grids. Even as she readied to fire, Auppi was scanning for the grey contacts preferentially now, picking out where they lurked in the red sleet-storm of other contacts.

Tiny patches of the sensor view were outing briefly now as the sheer weight of laser bursts incoming forced the mirror field to occlude the sensors, producing little hexagonal pixilations like clutter; they came and went almost before she had time to register them.

She flung out the latest manic light-burst, like shaking water droplets from her fingers.

With the main armament taking one target at a time it was possible to up the collimation on the secondaries for short- and medium-range targets, bringing their salvo total back up again. There might be a few more wounds rather than outright kills, but that was acceptable.

∼That one just took off, the ship said, indicating one of the two grey targets they’d tried to waste two salvoes earlier. ∼And there goes the other one.

∼See them, Auppi sent. ∼They’re fast! She had another reduced set of targets sliding across the view; she let fly at them. The two fleeing grey contacts would be out of range in seconds. ∼Any missiles we can put in their way?

∼Not the first one. Second, yes.

∼Get the other missiles to concentrate on the greys, she suggested. She wanted to fire a lot more missiles, everywhere, but they were out of missiles now too.

∼Shit, we powered them, the ship sounded upset.

∼Didn’t know you swore, ship.

∼I didn’t know swarmers could use incoming laser to power them to that sort of speed, the ship replied, fixing an unlikely-looking vector line across the points representing where one of the grey contacts had been when they’d hit it and where it was now, still accelerating.

∼We need to chase those, she sent.

∼You think so.

∼It’s prioritising them.

Another small set of targets, swiftly dispatched, while another slotted instantly into view. The weaponry was falling out of phase now as the differences between the varying re-charging intervals started to add up and the additional collimating on the secondaries introduced its own slight delay.

∼Maybe it wants us to do the same, the ship suggested.

The incoming sounded like drumming, heavy rain now. The pixilation outings were spattering across the view like manically invasive subtitles in an unknown language.

∼I don’t think it’s that smart.

∼You want to chase?

∼Yes. That one. She indicated the first one to set off out of the cloud of contacts at the same time as loosing another half-salvo and marking a swathe of fresh targets across the red cloud around them.

∼Okay.