The alien vessels are also turning, but they lumber where the Lightfoot darts. Kern has calculated the sort of mass they are hauling and it is, by her reckoning, insane. Yes, the ships are huge, but even for such massive craft they appear to be carrying an absurd momentum, a thousand times more than she can account for as they utterly fail to match her swift course correction.
Of course, that is why they have launched a scattering of smaller craft, she surmises, which are tiny, each barely larger than a couple of Humans end to end and with engines every which way, apparently, so that they spin about any axis they need to, to come and bother the Lightfoot with their weapons.
She deploys more silk, aware that she is boiling away the mass of the ship, making some of that inertial shortening a permanent fixture as she cannibalizes her own substance. At least one of the incoming fighters ploughs straight into a mass of the stuff, loses half its thrusters and spins off into the void, but the rest are doggedly on her. She briefly considers consulting Bianca about permission to fire, but she is, after all, Avrana Kern. Who better to make such decisions? She has a brief fugue moment of memory: unleashing her tiny satellite’s weaponry against the Gilgamesh’s shuttles and drones, killing humans before they became Humans.
She never said, because neither Portiids nor Humans would understand, but she enjoyed herself, doing that. Cathartic, was the word that occurred to her. And once they started putting her into spaceships, she always wondered if there might be some war, somewhere, with a hostile power. She decides that some other Kerns out there might get to be proper warships one day, and wouldn’t that be fine? For now she resolves that she will try to kill a few of these drones or fighters or whatever they are. She has decided that, based on technological similarity, the ‘aliens’ here are some human successor state. Probably Portiid diplomacy will make them Humans eventually, but for now she will blow a few of them up and see how it makes her feel.
Of course the Lightfoot, hastily prepared scout craft, is not exactly a gunboat, but she has lasers – rather more so than her captain or crew are aware of, more even than the Kern instance on the Voyager knew, because she went behind her own back when building this ship-body. Now she lights them up, the Lightfoot’s malleable hull breaking out in ugly warts that each house a lens. She begins painting the dark sky with lights, trying to pin down the enemy even as they overtake her. They are very swift, though, and she begins to realize they are also good at what they do, whether they are organic or automatic. Their all-direction thrusters allow them to make lightning-fast changes in trajectory, bouncing about like monkeys as she tries to track them. She clips a couple, but they adapt to whatever minor damage she deals out. Their own lasers blister at her, crisping silk that her repair spinnerets replace as quickly as possible, frying some hubs of her ant-network. They have overshot her and are now spinning about, fighting their own momentum with a rapid patter of thrust.
Some of them open up with magnetically accelerated projectiles, and Kern laughs quietly to herself because she can mend any external holes as swiftly as they open, and the Lightfoot simply lacks the solid parts for such miniscule missiles to disrupt. They would need a lucky shot, a very lucky shot—
A string of such little beads rip through her hull. One punches a hole in a main strut of her skeleton, but there is plenty of redundancy there. The trailing edge of the salvo punches a dozen holes in the crew compartment, so swiftly that the crew themselves would not even realize, had not Bianca, the captain, been directly in the path of one shot. Her death is instant, explosive. For the projectile itself, her presence does not affect its course – she is incidental to its path, that takes it into and out of the Lightfoot in the flash of an eye.
For Meshner, the moment is experienced only in retrospect. Bianca had been at her post, stamping out orders that the machines translated only sluggishly for the Human crew – Kern was concentrating too much on their defence to spend too much of herself on the niceties of interspecies communication. Then Bianca was . . . all around them, without any transitional state, the fluid-filled sack of her body burst asunder.
Everyone is engaged in the fight, all the Lightfoot’s small crew. Bianca’s coordination has been taken from them but nobody can spare more than a heartbeat to register it. Kern may make all the decisions, but the crew is providing her with supplementary computing power in the form of their own grey matter. Portia and Viola are suggesting firing solutions, trying to understand the apparently random patterns of the enemy fighters/drones. Zaine and Helena manage energy budgeting: the Lightfoot’s drive is good, but like the Voyager it is optimized for long-term use, not extreme short-term drain, and space combat is nothing if not draining. Kern draws what she needs and the two Humans do their best to juggle other less-critical systems, like life support. Fabian and Meshner work on wider predictions, with particular reference to the big ships out there that are each erupting with weapons fire from a dozen different angles.
Meshner plots arcs and angles, trying to work out the best way to thread that particular needle. Space is a desert with no cover, and the enemy vessels have no ‘front’, meaning that any angle invites a broadside, and no sure way to know when it might come.
Fabian passes over his best guess, paths to take that might dodge the worst of the incoming fire as they accelerate out of this mess; Meshner counters. Kern shoots them both down, figuratively speaking, modelling worst-case scenarios for them that see the Lightfoot smeared across a kilometre of empty space. The acerbic computer helpfully attaches a legend identifying just which pieces of the wreckage are Meshner and Fabian, because she always has computing power for put-downs.
Back to the drawing board. Fabian stamps out a little fit of anger against his controls, which are above Meshner’s head.
There’s no way we can get clear unless we break from the fighters, Fabian insists. Even as he does so, Meshner registers that another three railgun projectiles have just clipped through the crew compartment, striking nothing vital and having no effect other than a tiny loss of atmosphere before the infinitesimal wounds in the hull seal themselves. The lasers are potentially worse, but the enemy fighters only use them in brief stabs, rather than trying to slice the Lightfoot open. Most likely the tiny ships have even more limited energy reserves than their victim and lasers are a colossal power sink.
Meshner blinks, frowning, because abruptly his view of the screen is fuzzing, lines breaking apart into spectra of colours, the controls seeming to jump and writhe under his fingers.
Not a good time, not a good time, he knows, watching his hands rattle with sudden palsy.
Also: Artifabian didn’t translate Fabian for me. He understood the Portiid’s words direct, somehow, or imagined he had. He opens his mouth to advise Kern he’s having issues. His tongue waves; words don’t come.
He turns and looks at the ocean sunset, both it and him running mad with colours he doesn’t know, and that his mind baulks at simply calling ‘purple’. When the waves crash on the shore they are silent, yet they speak to him in a roar, insisting on their own provenance and immortality before reducing to a grumbling nothing.