Communication comes to her – her Reach connected by her undulating controls to the Reaches of her crew – that another vessel has been detected, smaller than the Requisitioner but still a substantial ship and likely better designed for warfare. Attempts at communication are being ignored. Salome feels a great need not to continue on a predictable course; her Reach gives out orders to the crew controlling the thrusters and the Homeship begins its ponderous attempt to deviate from its course, the drives on one side accelerating their mass-energy conversion to emergency levels, breaking down the atoms of fuel and channelling the resulting energy outwards. In emergencies the thrusters feed on the very water of the ship, breaking it down and breaking it down again until it combusts. A pitched battle can see an octopus vessel devouring thirty per cent of its overall volume as reaction mass.
The enemy vessel is launching: missiles first, that will guide themselves towards the lumbering mass that is the Requisitioner, fighters after that. Salome has anticipated this. Her more gung-ho crew are already in their own command centres; their smaller vessels, that had been huddled in the Homeship’s belly like eggs, now break through the outer-hull membrane in a spray of sudden ice. The largest is a destroyer that will orbit the Requisitioner and screen it from the missiles and smaller ships, the rest are a half-dozen fighters that can skitter through space in ways the larger ships could never do. These fighters mostly consist of engine and weaponry, with a tiny compartment for a single pilot, enclosed by a tight membrane, arms coiled about the controls and a recycled flow of water across their mantle. They wheel about one another, the discharge of their thrusters shaking their occupants like thunder, trying to get close to the big enemy ships. There, they will use cutting lasers to unseam the foe, to spill the fluid guts of the great vessels in long comet-tails of ice particles. Some might try magnetically-accelerated projectiles as well. The hydrostatic shock of their ripping through the Homeship would kill any octopuses loose in the water, but unless they can hit the deep-buried command core, the swift rounds will just plunge through the ships and harmlessly away, the membranes sealing behind them with barely a teacup of water lost each time.
There was no great moment when the octopuses realized they had surpassed the technological achievements of their creators, but the engineering that made the Requisitioner possible is beyond anything the Aegean’s makers would have recognized in a hundred different ways.
Salome has already sent a distress signal back towards Damascus. Most likely there are no friendly ships that could possibly intervene in time. Most likely her repurposed civilian habitat is outclassed by whatever craft was lurking out here waiting for her. Nonetheless, she will give her all, as will her crew, and perhaps whoever she fights here is as unprepared as she is. Her people hold no certainties, nor do they let themselves be ruled by tradition or history or even how they themselves felt yesterday, but they live in the moment, and in this moment Salome and her crew will fight. Tomorrow perhaps she and her enemy will be friends again, united against some other front. For now, her skin sings a furious hymn of battle and her arms calculate vectors and suggest firing solutions.
Rebekah pilots one of the Requisitioner’s fighters, crammed into its tiny central hub that is little bigger than a human torso. Her eight arms extend into the guts of the machine, linked directly to its systems. The vessel is also spherical, surrounded by thrusters, but where the Requisitioner can only lumber, a prisoner of its colossal momentum, the fighter craft weighs almost nothing, a lattice of superlight alloys about the tiny bauble of its crew compartment. It spins wildly as it flies, changing direction with the speed of Rebekah’s thoughts, burning off its reactive mass to swing wide of the ordnance being thrown from the enemy vessel towards the Homeship. That will be the job of the orbiting destroyer to intercept and shoot down. Rebekah is fired up with aggression, on the offensive.
Right now, she calls her tiny mote of a vessel That Part of Wonder That is Mine, or at least that is the closest translation to the way she thinks about it. She changes the name often, varying the theme just as she varies her own precise nomenclature: always the same ship, always different.
Enemy fighters speed towards her. That part of her Reach that is manning the sensors communicates with her colleagues in the other fighters. The consensus wins out: her mission is to press the attack. Others will dogfight with and harry the enemy. Rebekah only knows a renewed sense of aggression and righteous anger. Smite them, is perhaps the best approximation of her desire, and her Reach contorts and flexes to make such desires a reality.
Now she has a good view of the enemy’s main craft, her arms sending data back to the Requisitioner even as her little Wonder skims close. This is a purpose-made military vessel, a teardrop in space surrounded by the ugly scaffolding of its weapons systems. It has seen plenty of fighting already, though. She feels its presence like a huge old sea monster, ragged and scarred, weak from blood loss. There was a battle to take over the catch point and this ship was probably the lone survivor.
It unloads another salvo towards the far-distant Requisitioner and Rebekah feels a sudden sense of fright for her mothership. Her Reach translates this into a compact report on trajectory and payload that outstrips the projectiles to get back to Salome, who will hopefully be able to use it to shoot the barrage down.
The military ship outguns the Requisitioner, but it has no companion destroyer to orbit it and take down nimble little fighters like the Wonder. Its own fighters – a severe undercompliment, another indication of its damage – are mostly off fighting Rebekah’s fellows, but she spots one lurking along the gunship’s belly, even as it opens fire on her.
Her will is that it misses her, and it was her instinctive affinity for high-speed manoeuvres that landed her this role. Her Reach calculates and executes, spinning her about and launching her past the great gun batteries, the projectiles of the enemy fighter going wide. Her opponent is coming after her, but she has an uninterrupted four seconds of flight across the broad expanse of the gunship’s dorsal surface. She has a sense of reaching out with lethal intent, to strangle, to crush. The distributed neurons of her Reach run quick mathematics on the energy reserves remaining within the ship, how much mass they can still burn, how much power is stored within the cells that make up half the Wonder’s payload. The enemy fighter is close. Rebekah’s desires are insistent. All of it, is her wish. Strike true.
The cutting laser – not so different from a civilian tool save for the range and power it can manifest – goes into action, lancing into the silvery teardrop’s membrane. For the first second and a half the advanced heat-distribution network of the gunship’s outer skin holds her off, but she is emptying the Wonder’s hoarded energy, focusing it all into that single beam. A moment later and she hits old damage, badly repaired, and is through, the blade of energy driving deep, carving away a thruster, sawing at the edge of the weapons framework. Incidental damage: the catastrophic blow is when all that energy meets all the water within and flash-boils it into instant expansion. The tear she cut in the membrane, which would normally seal itself within .25 of a second, is abruptly a third of the ship’s length, the watery interior venting into space and becoming a great tail of ice crystals.