Anja glared over the rubble of Trelir’s desk and brought her rifle to bear squarely on his head. The point of her bloodied bayonet dripped slowly, a hand’s span from his face. “And if we choose not to stay and chat?”, she asked.

“Oh, by all means do as you wish,” he said, a simpering grin spreading over his half-face. “But please be aware that if you incapacitate me or breach the room, I will detonate explosives that will destroy us all quite thoroughly.”

Jesri moved to probe the blast door that had slammed down across the exit, keeping her rifle trained on the Emissary. “Sealed tight,” she muttered.

“Now, now,” Trelir said amicably, “don’t be glum. I’ve been looking forward to this ever since I heard you had arrived! Why, this is the first chance I’ve had in ages to sit down and chat with my professional peers.”

“Peers?”, sneered Anja. “Please.”

“On the contrary, I think you’ll find we have a lot in common,” said Trelir. “Are we not both artificial constructs created to enforce the will of our builders? Do we not both strive to execute those commands to the best of our abilities?” He settled back in his chair, which creaked worryingly. “Even if we may well be dead in half an hour, I see no reason to deprive ourselves of thirty minutes of worthwhile conversation.”

“Is this a game to you?”, Jesri hissed. “We’re not going to sit around and have a tea party with a genocidal monster.”

Trelir grimaced. “Call me names if you must, but I feel compelled to point out that I’m the one person in this room who has never killed anyone.”

Anja slammed her hand into the wall again, throwing chunks of rubble to the rapidly growing pile on the floor. “The Gestalt-”

He waved her off. “Yes, yes, the Gestalt, as you call it. I’d term it less of a genocidal monster than an assertive solipsist,” he muttered. “But that’s beside the point. I’m not the Gestalt, no more than a drop of water is the ocean.” He smirked. “But then, you seem to be quite content with guilt by association. How many innocent Ysleli did you just kill on your way in here, again?”

Jesri opened her mouth to retort, but Trelir cut her off with a sharp movement of his hand. “None of them knew my nature or my purpose here. They were soldiers and scientists, just performing their function. You seek to satisfy some useless notion of vengeance by outdoing your enemy at the same crimes you accuse it of visiting on your people. Retributive justice is so primal, so satisfying, isn’t it?”

Anja snorted. “You will have no luck if you want us to accept the wholesale genocide of humanity as a fait accompli with no repercussions.”

“Genocide, genocide, feh!”, he said, throwing his hands up in the air. “Don’t presume that your irrational morality is persuasive outside of the soggy confines of your skull. Why would sanctity of life matter except in the context of preserving the ultimate continuity of life? Why is any continuity of life important outside of the Confluence, the greatest example of the phenomenon? Answer these questions before you prattle on about genocide,” he sneered.

“You can’t rationalize away the lives taken-”, spat Jesri, but Trelir spoke over her.

“I rationalize nothing,” he said coolly. “I begin and end at rationality, there is no need to bridge a gap. It is not necessary. My role is simple, my position is simple. Nothing is asked of me that goes against my nature - and I am thankful to be left so unconflicted by my creator. Were mine as inconsiderate and sloppy as yours, I would bear them some resentment. Instead, my purpose and nature are in complete alignment. Any greater purpose lies with the greater Confluence.”

“It’s easy to dodge responsibility by hiding behind your insignificance,” retorted Jesri. “Do you even know what the ‘greater purpose’ is?”

“Don’t ask a raindrop what the ocean knows,” shrugged Trelir.

Anja backhanded him across the torso, sending him flying into the wall once more. He picked himself up and walked calmly back to his chair, shaking his head. “I must remind you about the explosives,” he said, “please don’t force me to cut short our chat - although I find the discourse lackluster so far, I must say.”

He picked up the silver sphere he had been holding before they walked in, rolling it around in his hands. “How about a change of pace? I want you to wait calmly until I receive a message from the Confluence, and you want information about your toy here.” He shot a pained glance at Anja. “I’m willing to answer some questions if it will get you to stop hitting me.”

Jesri blinked, her anger momentarily forgotten. “That’s the weapon?”, she asked intently. “Why would you give us information about the weapon? Assuming we believe you, that is.”

“Because it can’t hurt the Confluence,” answered Trelir. He twisted his hands before either of them could move to stop him, separating the sphere into two halves. The sphere was hollow, and it was empty.

“It was a deception,” he said. “The resource allocations for the project were fake, the scientists were working on unrelated projects - although some of them didn’t know it. An elaborate web of lies and misdirection to hide a simple truth: The weapon never existed.”

“Liar,” Anja breathed, her voice high and tense. “Why should we believe anything you say?”

Trelir shrugged. “You may believe as you wish, but it is not in my nature to lie. It is not necessary.” He traced a long finger around the rim of one hemisphere. “The Confluence always knew your efforts would amount to nothing, of course. The gulf between humanity and a perfect entity like the Confluence cannot be bridged.”

“That doesn’t track,” said Jesri, unable to resist a response. “I don’t care how powerful the Gestalt is, organizing the attack on humanity took resources and effort. If we were no threat, why remove us?”

“Put simply, you were an unknown variable,” Trelir sighed.

Anja moved to backhand him again, but Jesri shot her a strong «Wait!» before she could do much more than growl menacingly. Trelir looked alarmed, raising his hands in a placating gesture.

“No, no,” he said, seeming genuinely taken aback. “Please forgive my lack of context, it was not meant to diminish your importance.” He smoothed the tatters of his skin across his cheek thoughtfully. “Quite the opposite, actually. It’s a problem of perspective. From where you stand, unknown variables are an inevitable fact of life. For the Confluence, they are not.”

“In fact,” he continued, “the Confluence tolerates no unknown variables of significance. Your masters were problematic because not only did they introduce unknown variables, they…” He trailed off, gesturing fruitlessly as he sifted through potential phrasings. “They resisted definition,” he concluded tentatively. “In fact, it may be best to say they were an unknowable variable.”

Anja shifted position, caught between anger and curiosity. “And this justified wiping out a civilization?”

“Oh, yes,” he said earnestly. “You see, when the Confluence saw you passing around this toy ball as if it were the key to victory, there was some concern. It was not in alignment with its model of humanity’s behavior. You had been heretofore logical, in your own way, and your insane behavior called the model’s underlying premises into question. The decision was made to increase the detail of the model, and extensive resources were dedicated to that end.”

He shook his head. “Unfortunately, that just exacerbated the issue. The more factors it included, the more detail it added to the simulation of human behavior, the less predictable the behavior became. It was eventually so unpredictable that identical models with identical starting conditions produced widely differing results. The Confluence found that… alarming, is a rough equivalent. Intolerable.”

Jesri shook her head in disbelief. “You killed us all because you had trouble with your simulations? Just that?”

Trelir bared his teeth. “I told you, do not diminish it. For an entity like the Confluence, discovering an ‘unknown unknown’ is significant. It calls into question every assessment, every predictive-” He trailed off, his mouth hanging slightly open and eyes unfocusing. “Oh my, yes,” he whispered. “Oh, that’s remarkable.”

“Do we need to give you a moment?”, snarked Jesri.

“Your attempts at sullying this experience fall short,” he said softly. “I’ve just received my response from the Confluence.” He shook his head slightly and seemed to emerge from his reverie. “Good news, we all get to live. We’re all going to stay here, in this room,” he said, “until the Ysleli engage your ship. Another Emissary will be along to finish it off and pick you up afterwards for study. We can continue to talk in the interim, if you’d like.” He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap, looking at them expectantly.

Jesri and Anja shared a look.

“Sorry,” drawled Anja, “we have a few issues with that plan.” She moved to loom over him threateningly.

Trelir flashed her an infuriating little smirk. “I’m afraid you have no ability to dictate terms, my dear. The options are compliance or death. Why don’t you relax and wait for all this to conclude?”

Jesri sighed and shook her head. “Well, we’ve learned at least one valuable thing from our conversation with you,” she said.

“Pray tell,” Trelir responded, his expression curious.

She gave him a cool stare. “Your behavioral models are terrible.”

Anja’s armored fist flashed out again and grabbed the Emissary by the neck, slamming him into the wall beside the door. Cracks spiderwebbed out from the point of impact, but the wall held.

“Foolishness!”, he gasped, struggling against Anja’s grip. “You can’t break free of this room! The walls-!” He was cut short as Anja hammered him against the wall once more, breaking chunks of it free.

“Your model tell you that?”, she replied, her grin audible even through the suit’s speakers.

“I have instructions,” he gasped, his arms straining against her metallic fingers. “I have been commanded-!”

She smashed him into the wall once more, the stone crumbling to reveal the warped metal reinforcements beneath. As Anja pressed him against the wall, Trelir reached out with one arm to grab her sword and wrench it away from its mount on her rifle. She leapt back, releasing him to create distance, but he thrust forward with preternatural speed to jam the blade downwards into the right knee joint of her suit.

Anja staggered back with a scream of pain, clutching the blade where it protruded from the armor’s metallic skin. Trelir struggled to his feet, breathing heavily. “I will kill us all, if you force me,” he panted. “Stand down.”

Jesri shot him in the face with her rifle, snapping his head back and blasting the remaining yellowed skin to shreds. “Make me,” she said defiantly.

An unnerving metallic growl rumbled up from his ruin of a mouth. “Fine,” he whispered, tilting his head with grim finality. He held position expectantly for half a second before his eyes widened in alarm. “What-?”

Anja barreled into him, using her good leg to spring forwards and shoulder-check him into the shattered wall. It buckled as the full mass of the suit collided with it, sending Trelir and Anja sprawling into a neighboring office. Jesri sprang through the gap after them, her rifle on the downed Emissary. “Technical difficulties?”, she inquired snidely.

Anja struggled to her feet, her wounded leg moving stiffly. The sword had been torn free when she crashed through the wall, and Jesri could see drops of clear blood hanging from the gash in her armor.

“Anja, you ok?” she asked worriedly.

“Fine,” her sister grunted, voice thick with pain. “Suit is taking care of it.”

Jesri shook her head. The powered armor had some limited first-aid capabilities in case its occupant was injured, but they were mostly stopgap measures. “Come on,” she said. “No reason to stick around here.”

Jesri took point and moved into the hallway, rifle high, while Anja lumbered behind her with a stiff gait. She had locked the knee joint of her armor to keep her upright, leaving her injured leg sweeping outward with every step.

“Wait!”, howled Trelir from behind them, struggling to his feet and emerging into the hall. “What did you do to me? You can’t leave, I must fulfill-”

Jesri shot him again, staggering him backwards. His eyes flashed with anger. “You can’t escape,” he spat. “I will fulfill my purpose!” He reached up and placed his hands on either side of his head, grasping firmly.

Jesri heard Anja’s intake of breath from beside her. An armored hand closed around her bicep as Anja spun to place her suit in between Trelir and Jesri. The Emissary closed his eyes and braced himself before wrenching violently, ripping his head from his shoulders in a burst of sparks and tattered skin.

The explosives packed into the office immolated Trelir’s corpse in a wave of fire. The pressure wave tore the blast door from his office doorway, slamming it into Anja’s back and sending both sisters tumbling down the corridor. Jesri narrowly avoided being crushed by Anja’s armor as they collided with the bend in the hall.

Jesri’s head swam, streams of blood trailing from her ears and nose. The corridor leading back to the office was engulfed in a sea of flame. Her world was smoke and blood and distant screams. She hauled herself over to where Anja lay facedown on the floor, the back of her suit peppered with shrapnel and soot.

“Anja,” she croaked, the words catching in her throat. «Anja!», she shouted over the link. Her sister’s prone form shifted, turning its head towards her.

«Sister,» Anja sent back. «Are you hurt?»

Jesri found herself laughing, despite the circumstances. «I’m fine, dummy. You hogged all the kaboom for yourself.»

«Sorry,» sent Anja, beginning to sluggishly pull herself upright. She turned to look back at the inferno behind them. «We should leave.»

“Sensible as always,” Jesri muttered, her voice oddly muffled. Her ears were damaged, she realized. This was going to take a long stint in the autodoc to fix.

The two made their way back through the storerooms and into the maze of tunnels, leaving the choking clouds of smoke behind them. Anja lumbered slowly forward, favoring her good leg, while Jesri took point in a near-automatic haze, her training taking over as she swept through the corridors with rifle high and ready.

The few straggling Ysleli they encountered were cut down with quick bursts from her rifle, and once by a heavy fist from Anja when a groggy soldier popped out of a doorway right next to them. Anja didn’t speak as they escaped, save for a few gasps when she inadvertently put weight on her injured knee.

It seemed like hours passed before they emerged into the incongruously bright and sunny compound, staggering through the sunlight to the Huginn where it was parked on the runway. A loose semicircle of bodies surrounded it where the aboveground personnel had tried to breach the defense perimeter and fallen short.

Jesri stumbled into the shuttle, mentally signaling the hatch to close as soon as she heard Anja’s boots stomp clumsily onto the decking. “Ok, hang on to something,” she said, punching commands into the flight console, “I’m going to get us moving back to the Grand Design and then we can see about your leg.”

The engines whined in polyharmonic tones as she committed the course into the flight computer, a cloud of dust rising from the runway as they left the smoldering compound behind them. Jesri turned back to where Anja was sitting slumped against the bulkhead and bent down to examine the rent in her armor. It was a nasty gash, but she couldn’t see much past the pinkish-white sealant foam their suits used as an automated reaction to damage.

“Anja, can you pop the armor off so I can take a look?”, she asked, probing around the hole. No response came, and she looked up in alarm. “Anja?”, she asked, but her sister remained still.

Panicked, Jesri dug around the neck seal of the armor for the emergency release. Her fingers found the two tabs and pressed them simultaneously, causing the helmet to pop loose. She tore it off to reveal Anja’s unconscious face, head lolling to the side. Amber crusts of blood matted her hair around her ears, and the lower half of her face was covered in blood from her nose - the overpressure from the explosion had gotten to her as well.

Jesri cradled Anja’s head in her hands, brushing away the dried blood. “Anja, come on,” she pleaded, moving her hands down to scrabble at the releases for the rest of the armor. The ship shook as they increased in altitude, following an escape trajectory that would lead them back to the Grand Design’s main hangar. She swore as the vibration and slick blood made her fingers slip once, then twice off of the release tab for the chest.

The armor peeled away, finally, and Jesri made short work of the catches holding the arms and legs tight. She slid her arms under Anja’s torso to haul her upright, wincing as she felt the blood-soaked gashes in her undersuit. Her fingers scraped past sharp bits of shrapnel that had perforated the suit’s skin when the explosion hurled most of a reinforced bunker wall at her back. She got a grip and pulled to free her from the armor.

Anja slid free easily, her limbs dripping clear blood. Too easily, she saw with a shock - Anja’s right leg was severed at the knee where Trelir had stabbed her, the lower part remaining in the suit as Jesri pulled her away. A thick cake of medical foam from the suit ringed the wound, partially sealing the stump. “Oh shit, Anja,” Jesri mumbled, “I got you, don’t worry, don’t worry.”

She carried her sister awkwardly over to the FAC’s basic medical bay, hooking up the emergency sensors that immediately told her that her sister was dying. Sharp tones issued from the diagnostic monitor as it displayed lists of recommended treatments in strident red text. Jesri fumbled through the medical cabinets, her fingers knocking aside the neatly arrayed supplies until she found what she was looking for.

She stripped away the packaging on a stimulant syringe and froze - the familiar battlefield first-line stim was black and caked inside the barrel, dessicated crusts leaking past the rotten plunger and onto the packaging. The stimulant was thousands of years past its expiration. “Fuck, fuck!”, she shouted, ripping through package after package to find them all totally useless.

Her hands were shaking, and she paused a moment as the stark reality of her situation washed over her. She didn’t have any medications, she didn’t have any auto-doc, and her sister was dying on the bed in front of her. She took a deep, steadying breath and grabbed some of the sterile nanofiber gauze packs from the cabinet. “Okay, Anja,” she muttered, using her belt knife to cut away the tatters of her sister’s undersuit. “Hang on for me.”

Outside, the thin whistle of atmosphere vanished as they crossed into the starry blackness of space.

“Hey, it’s the Huginn!”, Rhuar shouted in surprise.

Qktk stopped his worried pacing and studied the tactical display until he found the blue dot arcing rapidly off the planet’s surface and turning towards their position. Between the two, an angry cloud of red moved towards the center of the display where the larger blue bar marking the Grand Design glowed cheerfully.

He turned back to Rhuar. “Are they going to make it in time?”, he asked anxiously. “It looks like they won’t reach us before the Ysleli fleet.”

Rhuar tilted his head, running through sensor feeds. “The FAC should be able to beat those barges the Ysleli are running no trouble, but you’re right - they’re moving kinda slow, like they’re stuck on autopilot. Lemme send a message over and see what’s up.”

Qktk turned his attention back to the tactical display as Rhuar adopted a look of concentration, his eyes glazing over. The red swarm was closing steadily, albeit slowly. They were still quite some time from arrival, but the ship had no data about the range or abilities of their weapons. They could begin firing in fifteen minutes or in fifteen seconds - there was nothing to do but wait, and watch the glowing blue dot representing the FAC as it slowly crossed empty space towards the ship.

The floor around the medical bay was scattered with sharp fragments of metal, flecked with dried blood from where they had lodged in Anja’s back. Jesri was bent over her sister, delicately working a wicked sliver out from near the base of Anja’s spine. Blood welled from the cut as it slid free, and Jesri deftly packed the wound before moving on to another. And another.

She had flipped Anja face-down on the table to expose her shredded back. The remains of her blood-covered undersuit were on the floor, sliced to ribbons. She moved from wound to wound in a trance, cleaning and packing each one to try and stabilize her sister. The diagnostic monitors told her she was doing a barely passable job.

A sharp trill from the communications console broke her concentration and made her jump in surprise, slicing her finger on a shard of warped metal embedded in Anja’s shoulder. “Fuck!”, she screamed, her face contorting in pain and frustration. She stepped over to smack the console, hard, then turned back to work on her sister.

Behind her, Rhuar’s face materialized on a display. “Hey, Jesri-” he began, cutting off abruptly as he saw her hunched over Anja’s naked, mangled body. “Oh, shit!”, he yelped. “Jesri, are you guys all right?”

“Obviously not!”, snarled Jesri, not looking up from her work. “Unless this is important, Rhuar-”

“We’re about to be under attack,” he said quickly, “but we can’t leave until you get back. Can you take it off autopilot and fly in faster?”

Jesri looked up briefly to shoot Rhuar a disheveled, annoyed glare, and he shrank back involuntarily from the grim violence etched into her face. “Rhuar, use your fucking head!”, she shouted. “You’ve got remote command of the FAC, I’m busy, fly it in yourself or blast the yellow bastards with all the big fuckoff guns you have on the cruiser. Or both, just - don’t interrupt me,” she said, a slight hollow note creeping into her voice as she glanced back down at her sister’s still form. “Please.”

Rhuar nodded silently and cut the transmission.

“Well?”, Qktk asked, a shrill note creeping into his voice. “What did she say?”

“Anja’s hurt,” Rhuar responded, “Jesri is busy looking after her. I can help them get here a bit quicker, but…” He trailed off, looking at the tactical display. “It’ll be hard splitting focus to fly the ship in, and I don’t think I can take it to full speed safely. We need to slow the fleet down.”

Qktk sputtered, his mandibles clacking against each other rapidly. “Mr. Rhuar, we’re out of time! I can’t stall them anymore.” He nervously rubbed his legs together, shaking his head. “I’m not sure what else we can do.”

“We have to fight,” Rhuar said, his eyes defocusing as he concentrated on flying both ships at once. “I’m transferring weapons systems to your console. Sorry, Captain, but the targeting sensors are really intense,” he said, shaking his head slightly. “I can’t take that feed on top of the others, I need you to operate the guns. Don’t worry, it’s pretty self-explanatory.”

“I’m a trader, not a soldier!”, Qktk wailed, but Rhuar was already lost in concentration as he guided the FAC back towards the Grand Design. Qktk shook himself again and took a deep, stabilizing breath. His console had lit up with an array of options, helpfully translated into Httq:

CIWS

FORE ONLINE 5/6 (AUTO PD)

PORT ONLINE 6/8 (AUTO PD)

STBD ONLINE 7/8 (AUTO PD)

AFT ONLINE 5/7 (AUTO PD)

CQB RAIL AUX

TOP ONLINE 4/4 (READY)

BOT ONLINE 3/4 (READY)

LR RAIL

TOP ONLINE 10/12 (READY)

BOT ONLINE 08/10 (READY)

HCPL

ARRAY ONLINE 0% (DISARMED)

WCML

PORT ONLINE 0% (DISARMED)

STBD ONLINE 0% (DISARMED)

TORP

ARRAY ONLINE 6/6 (DISARMED)

“Too much to hope for a user manual?”, he grumbled. “Not like anything could go catastrophically wrong if I start pushing buttons.” He punched a foreleg irritably at the “ready” option with the highest numbers next to it. The console switched to a targeting display, lighting up with a blinding sea of red dots. “At least I can’t miss,” he muttered darkly, tapping a few more buttons. “Aaaand… there.”

Warfather Tarl was jolted out of his brooding silence by an excitable yelp from a spearbrother at the operations console. He sighed. Proper bridge discipline was hard to come by in the young, even for a warfather. “Scream like a child again and I will send you home on foot,” he grated. “What is it?”

The spearbrother gave him a wide-eyed look. “Warfather, the enemy attacks! The Racing Wind has been lost with all hands! Three support ships are badly damaged and must withdraw!”

Tarl grunted. “Show me,” he said, turning towards his own display. On it, a blurry image of the ill-fated gunship appeared. He watched as it floated silently in space for a few moments before exploding without preamble, spraying a fountain of debris aft of the ship at remarkable speed. Secondary explosions issued from the ruins of the engineering section, sending the wreck tumbling end over end and forcing other fleet elements to disperse. He gave the excitable spearbrother a look and narrowed his eyes. “Explain,” he rumbled.

“Warfather, I believe the enemy is armed with kinetic artillery,” he said.

“You believe?”, Tarl said dangerously. “Your position here is not so that I may have the benefit of your counsel, spearbrother. Why do you not have sensor traces? Why was there no warning of incoming fire?”

“Apologies, warfather,” he said nervously, baring his throat in submission. “The sensors detected nothing. Based on the speed of impact, however-” The young spearbrother cut off suddenly and cringed. “My apologies again, warfather, I will refrain from speculation.”

Tarl sighed. It seemed as though the longer he served, the harder it was to find competent junior officers. “Continue,” he said. “Concisely.”

“Warfather, the shots were unavoidable. Based on the sheer force of the impact, they were traveling at nearly sixty five thousand ri. Although we are almost one point three million lesa away, they would have crossed the distance far too quickly to maneuver out of position.” The spearbrother opened his mouth to say more, but was cut off by a notification on his console. “Warfather, the Blooded Blade has been destroyed along with half of its element,” he reported tremulously.

“Preposterous,” the warfather grumbled, staring at the bright mote in the distance that he knew to be an unfathomably huge warship. At this distance, it was just beginning to appear more than a point of light. “Yet everything about today is preposterous,” he sighed. “Signal the fleet to loosen formation and volley. Even if that blackened demon has guns that fire twenty times faster than ours, I doubt he can move that monstrosity fast enough to clear our fire.”

His staff officers gave him brisk nods and pushed off towards their own consoles, barking orders to the fleet. Tarl allowed himself a slight smile. This, at least, would demonstrate the discipline and might of Ysl.

“Ha, got you!”, Qktk cheered, watching another blip disintegrate into a cloud of smaller readings. He moved his reticle to the next dot, but before the reload cycle had completed a muted klaxon sounded and a wave of new contacts appeared on the tactical display.

“Whoa!”, Rhuar yelped suddenly, his focus drawn back to the bridge. “Captain, I think you pissed them off. They’ve just fired massed artillery of some sort at us. I don’t think we can maneuver out of the way in time, either.” He licked his lips, concentrated for a few seconds, then grinned. “Oh, hah. Never mind. Ship has it covered, watch this.”

Qktk heard a muffled, repetitive vibration from elsewhere in the ship and gave Rhuar a querying look.

“Close-in Weapon System,” the dog responded happily as blips on the tactical display began to wink out. “Point defense. We’d be in trouble if it was anything fast or heavy, but their weak-ass artillery will be deflected and reduced to scrap before any of it hits us.” He frowned, a thought occurring to him. “Although with that volume of fire, we need to keep them far away to give the guns time to work. How’s the gunnery going, Captain?”

Qktk shook his head. “It works great, but the reload time is too long. I can’t shoot fast enough to get them all before they close with us. There’s so damn many of them!”

Rhuar gave him a look. “Captain, you’ve been plinking at them with the railguns?”

Qktk tossed his limbs in irritation. “How should I know? I don’t know how any of this works! It’s a small miracle I managed to hit three of them!”

“All right, all right,” Rhuar said placatingly. “Let me query the ship real quick to see what some of those other weapons systems do, I think we probably have a better option.” His eyes defocused again as he connected to the ship, sorting through data feeds. “Let’s see,” he mumbled. “Torpedos look punchy… Ah, but too slow. Hmm. Oh, I remember this thingy!” He bounced on his front paws in excitement. “Let’s see what it says in the database,” he muttered, virtually paging through documentation. “Helical Collimator Plasma Lance Array... Directed focused particle beam from controlled asymmetric annihilation of one gram of-”

Rhuar snapped his head up, his eyes sparkling with glee. “Oh, fuck yes. Captain, we have to try this out. Choose the entry on your list labeled ‘HCPL’.”

Somewhat lost, Qktk jabbed a forelimb at the appropriate entry. A reticle appeared again, and throughout the bridge a low thrum of power began to build. “Uh, Mr. Rhuar,” he said, glancing around, “are you sure you know what you’re doing? This sounds… big.”

“Oh, it’s big,” Rhuar said excitedly. “Just zoom the targeter until you’ve got a group of, say, one hundred ships.”

“One hundred ships?”, Qktk screeched. “Mr. Rhuar, I refuse! This is a weapon of mass destruction!”

Rhuar pondered for a second. “Well, yes,” he admitted. “By most definitions it is. But consider the alternative.”

Qktk peered at his artificer angrily. “Which is?”

“We let them close with us, the king of the angry lizards decorates his throne with our skulls, and then sometime later the universe rips itself apart to become the playground of an insane machine god,” Rhuar said matter-of-factly.

Qktk blinked. “Point taken,” he said glumly. Touching the console, he moved the circle so that it encompassed about a hundred little blips. He noticed one highlighted dot on the edge of the reticle, doomed by a millimeter’s movement of his forearm. Sliding his arm down fractionally, he contracted the circle and the dot lost its highlight. He wondered if any of them would ever know. “Okay,” he said, his voice wavering, “we’re locked on.”

Rhuar nodded, licking his lips. “Now, uh, when the button says ready…”

Tarl watched silently as the last of the volley disappeared from their tracking display, having covered less than half the distance to the enemy. Apparently their damnably fast guns had multiple uses. He stared at the sliver of light hanging in the distance and willed it to reveal its weaknesses.

For the second time, Tarl’s excitable sensor officer made an involuntary yelp of alarm. Tarl sighed. He had managed to go an entire year without having to publicly disembowel any of his officers, a personal best, but this particular spearbrother was threatening to end his streak.

“I believe I told you-”, he started.

“A million apologies, warfather,” the spearbrother interrupted, “but there is a massive emissions spike from the enemy.”

Tarl slid over and swiped his immaculately polished claws through his sensor officer’s throat. The officer died gurgling, his blood slipping past his fingers and collecting in quavering blobs that floated in the microgravity. “Backup, forward,” he sighed wearily, wiping a smear of blood from his hand. “Tell me what the spearbrother found so interesting that he would interrupt me to share it.”

A lean junior officer edged around the spreading cloud of blood and hooked his claws into the console’s retention straps. “He was correct, warfather,” he said after a moment. “The enemy is building up some massive reserve of energy. I cannot discern the nature of the energy, but I suspect a weapon.”

Tarl snorted. “Not stupid enough to miss a knife at your throat, at least.” He turned to his staff officers again. “Command the fleet to further loosen their formation,” he said. “I don’t want any secondary impacts if he hits us with something big. Helm, minimize cross-section.” He opened his mouth to continue, but paused with his mouth open in shock.

For the barest of moments he saw a column of blazing white light connecting his fleet to the enemy ship. The single column resolved into a myriad of lines near his formation, each lance stretching out to strike the center of a ship in his flank with a flare so bright that it triggered the automated safety shutters. Dark metal clanged into place around the viewports and over the sensor suites, plunging the bridge into a moment of sudden and quiet isolation.

The crew stood in silence, watching past the dancing afterimage in their eyes as the external feeds flickered back on one by one and the viewports slid slowly open. The light had cut off, leaving a luminous yellow particle stream behind that flowed over his formation like a lambent fogbank. As Tarl watched, it cooled to orange, then red, then finally dimmed enough that the cameras could pierce through.

Tarl’s flank was gone, replaced by a scorched window into Hell. Twisted globs of molten metal spun hot and frantic through the void, illuminating the vanishing particle trace with an eerie red glow. Frozen crystals of condensed moisture and atmosphere twinkled and refracted the light amidst the incandescent slag, echoing the droplets of blood still floating on the bridge. It dimmed as Tarl watched; the force of the beam had blasted the ruins of his flank backwards and knocked it into a different trajectory. Although the cameras dutifully tracked the macabre wreckage as it flew back, the red smear of fire and death was receding rapidly from view as his crew looked on in horror. Far behind the surviving ships, Ysl’s atmosphere roiled with a thin line of aurorae as the dregs of the beam washed across the planet’s magnetic field.

The warfather stared at the gaping hole on his tactical display that used to be the better part of a hundred ships. Used to be tens of thousands of officers and enlisted, tens of thousands of his soldiers. Tarl found himself laughing, a guttural, deep laugh that reeled upwards erratically until he was cackling like a madman in the center of the bridge.

His laughter spent itself and he shook his head, turning towards the concerned looks of his senior staff. Above his fading smile, his black eyes were empty. “Tin cans and pointed sticks, indeed,” he said ruefully, wiping a hand over his face. “Give me a channel to the enemy… and prepare another to the king.” His first officer’s eyes widened with realization.

“Against the fury of the heavens a warrior may submit in penance or perish as a fool,” Tarl quoted, his mouth a grim line. He turned from the shocked and mutinous gazes of his senior staff to stare back out at the enemy warship in the distance, a twinkling sliver of light against the starfield. “I see some of you wish to fight,” he said quietly, “to avenge our fallen brothers. You think our honor sullied by this blow and wish to restore it with a glorious death.”

He looked back at his officers, a few of which were nodding. “You have mistaken this for a battle, gentlemen. The honor of a child is not tarnished if he brandishes a stick at a warrior and is bested.” He shook his head. “No, we will thank this demon.”

“Thank him, warfather?”, another officer asked in confusion.

“Oh yes,” Tarl breathed, a mad light in his eyes. “For his restraint.” He stared each of them in the eye in turn, watching them shrink away from his gaze. “Fix this unfamiliar feeling in your hearts, my brothers,” he whispered. “It is mercy. If a warrior wishes an impertinent child dead it takes but one blow. If the mewling brat sprawls in the dirt, bloodied, humiliated, enraged, impotent, furious, ashamed, but alive...” He smiled thinly. “Mercy. Now get me that channel to his ship, before he changes his mind.”

His officers dispersed to carry out his orders, leaving Tarl to float gently beside the command console. Drops of blood from his unfortunate sensor officer drifted past, and he reached out to tap one with a claw. He felt an insane urge to leap, to dance, to caper past the shocked faces of his staff and revel in the grim absurdity that had gripped his life. His head seemed to clear for the first time that day, his fatigue and pain dashed to shards by the brush with immense and unfathomable power. There was potential in this loss, he thought.

If he could talk the king out of killing him.