A Long Way From Home, Part 2

September 8th, 2248
Ibore, roughly 700 lightyears from Sol.

"An Orion warship?"

I'm struggling with the half-second response lag. I can't remotely control myself like this. Maybe on a Union planet with the infrastructure for a terabit fiber-to-laser link that I could plug into, but not here. I realize I'm having the digital equivalent of a panic attack. Things are happening and I'm not in my body.

"Captain, I need to transfer."

"Agreed. Wait one." She can tell I'm anxious, even if my spoken voice is perfectly level. A little advantage of using a speaker instead of vocal cords. She turns to Anit, "Autumn and I are transferring back to the ship. The rest of us will stay here, if that's alright with you. We can transfer back as long as the shuttle's laser link can see the ship."

Anit and Shashtoi look at each other and communicate something indeterminate through body language that I can't read. "That's acceptable. But please, let us handle this. We probably have more experience with diplomacy than you do."

"Of course. What do you want us to do? We can leave, if you'd rather not be seen associating with us."

"I don't think that will be a problem. Just stay put. If you're really worried, stay out of sight."

"Certainly. Autumn?"

"Transferring." Kets opens her mouth to ask something, but I'm already gone, my awareness streaming back through microwave tightbeam and then laser link. Uploads can theoretically have multiple copies of themselves "alive" at the same time, but it's not something that's encouraged or enjoyable. There's not an infinite amount of spinglass, and the re-integration process is excruciating. So instead, it's this; a few fractions of a second of lost time as I jump from body to body.

Returning to my real body quiets my anxiety instantly. The real pleasure is when Jade joins me, her mind sliding into mine like a key in a well-machined lock. She shimmers her way into the bridge sim and smirks, "Captain on deck."

"You wanna see me go to attention?" She can keep her body normal while in command, but when I'm stressed my form is amorphous, nonhuman, cables and machinery, a layer of protective plating eager to wrap around her.

"Not yet, killer. We're still days out, unless they've got some serious engines on that thing."

"What's the plan?"

"Wait. We just need more information." Normally, I would groan with irritation and hidden anxiety. But she's here to reassure me, to slide deeper into my machinery, our little chunk of spinglass paradise nestled in meters of armor laminate.

The communication is slow with the lightspeed lag, 16 hours round-trip. The contact's nearly 60 AU out, and burning leisurely. Fast for a freighter, slow for a warship.

"Unidentified ship, this is Ibore system control. Please identify." Apparently Kets is system control, too. The population here is only a million or so, and they can't get much in the way of traffic, so it makes sense. She retransmits in a few other languages. I spend thirty minutes placing a shell of sensor drones, thirteen and a half hours running combat scenarios, and two hours fucking Jade into a quivering wreck.

Finally, the reply comes through. "Ibore system control, this is the independent ship Nightwater. Stand down any planetary defenses and prepare to receive a ground party."

"Negative, Nightwater. We're amenable to visitors, but not unannounced ones and not without more details. State your purpose here."

I don't know much about protocol out here, but Nightwater seems a little forward. Jade agrees, but it'll be fourteen hours until the next reply. A little notification goes off in the back of my mind. Someone's trying to get our attention on the ground.

Shashtoi recoils when Jade's limp body takes a sharp breath and picks itself up. Kets doesn't flinch. "How can we help? Autumn's here too." I wave, making sure to keep my movements slow. They don't have all the network monitoring that comes second-nature to uploads; she wouldn't have seen the two minds transferring into the bodies in front of her.

"You can't... see through them all the time?" Shashtoi sounds like she expects us to be omniscient.

"I can't, not with my eyes closed. Autumn's body can, kind of, but it's a recording she has to check. We're still organic minds, just on different hardware. We have a finite amount of attention to go around. How's everyone doing?"

"We've been busy with your people here. Actually, do you even need to sleep? I know you mentioned–"

"Yes, we do. We brought down more people than we had bodies, they've just been taking turns."

I interrupt. She can learn this from my crew. "What's going on?"

Shashtoi looks to Kets, who thankfully gets right to the point. "The Nightwater is a pirate ship. They're going to park in orbit, do some looting under their guns, and leave."

Jade and I share an emotion over tightbeam instead of a glance. "You know that for sure?"

Kets shrugs, "It's happened before. Rarely enough that investment in a defense grid isn't worth the effort."

Shashtoi fills in some details, "We make some very good implants and associated surgical devices that you can't get in Confederate or Council space. Lots of people out here on the fringe don't care too much if the wires touch the brain as long as it's not getting too close to full replacement."

"Which is outside of our technical reach for now," Kets adds, nodding towards me. She's jealous, I think, and justifiably so. I'm beautiful, even in this gravity-bound humanoid body.

"So what now?"

"We tell our next customers what happened, hopefully Nightwater doesn't kill too many folks here, and then the problem sorts itself out. Our customers take 'don't shoot the supplier' quite seriously, we won't have to deal with them again."

I get a flash of anger over tightbeam, instinctive on Jade's part. "Too many? Are you serious?"

"Yes. Pirates out here tend to think making an example is important. It's happened four times in the last forty years. They'll probably shoot me. It's a known hazard of the job." Jade looks horrified, but Kets keeps speaking before she can get a word in. "We're not like you, Captain. We die. Sometimes earlier rather than later. A little under a eighty people here die from natural causes, accidents, and jilted lovers every day, and I don't have that long left anyway."

I can sense Jade's about to get into an argument with her, and I interject before she can. "Do you have any ground-to-orbit defenses?"

"Nothing anti-ship, too provocative for our usual customers. Just anti-asteroid."

Shashtoi speaks up, "You should leave when the Nightwater can't see you. We're not going to order you to leave, but they might want to take a closer look at your ship. And if you two start shooting in orbit..." She trails off, but I know what she means. Even point-defense weapons put out tons of TNT equivalent with every shot. If a single round hit the city by accident...

Jade opens her mouth, then closes it. When she opens it again, I can tell she's about to cry. "As you wish."

Jade is hurting, and I don't blame her. We met people who were earnest, honest friends, and now we have to sit and watch them die. Not many, if they're right. Maybe not any. Certainly not all of them, because I'll overload my reactor before I let that happen. But right now it's their choice to make, not ours.

She watches through my eyes as our crew loads the shuttle. My eyes would be misty if I had any, but I have lenses, not eyeballs. I'm not made for emotional expression, unless that emotion is scientific curiosity or violence. Fortunately, the Iboreans have been generous with books, actual physical paper. If we'd had more time, we'd have ripped their whole computer system, but reverse-engineering alien computers isn't fast, even for us.

"We should leave them with the plans for an imager."

"Won't be much help without a way to produce spinglass. Or however many terabytes of code we need to exist." Stating the facts comforts me, but telling her doesn't help much, no matter how true they are. We'd need to bring Ibore fully into the fold to start doing uploads in any reasonable time frame, and we're a six-month journey from the nearest fleet base. That's a long trip, even for a mind that will never die of old age. The furthest-out transhuman colonies that anyone knows of are a year out from Sol, but actual Union space stops around the four-month mark.

"They'd figure it out. We did."

"And maybe they get raided again, our tech gets found, the Confederacy decides to come take care of what they think is the next galactic apocalypse, and then we're in an interstellar war."

"We could bring a few with us."

"That wouldn't save any lives, and I can't fit the imager in the shuttle. Even if I rigged the shuttle for organics and crammed the hold full, we'd only get a few trips in before we'd have to leave."

"I hate this."

"I know."

The Nightwater's response interrupts our departure. The Iboreans are kind enough to forward the signal to us from the other side of the planet, but my sensor drones can do it a little faster.

"Ibore, this isn't a negotiation." The voice clicks off the line the second I detect a gravitic and EM spike from the ship.

Jade twitches beneath my armor. "Did they just—"

"Affirmative." The Nightwater has just fired a railgun. At this range there's only one thing they could be aiming at, and it's not me. Even during the First Contact War, nobody was shooting relativistics at planets. Either things are much different out here, or Nightwater has a much worse reason to come here than looting.

"...I'll call Anit."

Transhumanity's first contact was with a pirate alliance turned interstellar nation, the Rimward Agreement. In those days, transhuman warships didn't exist; the most weaponry you'd ever see was for combat sports or anti-asteroid defenses. The early days of the war were brutal for us— or at least as brutal as war can be for minds that can't die —but by the end, we had learned a few things. First among them is that pirates are allergic to an organized military. If you sound dangerous enough, they tend to decide that the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

"Nightwater, this is the independent ship Autumn Light. We already have work here. Turn and burn immediately or we will mark you as hostile." This is my voice now, smooth and commanding, broadcasted from a sensor drone to avoid revealing my position.

The lightspeed delay is shorter now, and my telescopes can pick out some more details on the frigate. It's sleek, but in the way an open-ocean fish is, not the angular pizza-slice that I am. I forward my imaging back to Ibore, hoping they can tell us more about the specific ship class. It'd be incorrect to say I hate all surprises— I'm an explorer, after all —but surprises in combat tend to be unpleasant. Nightwater itself is trapped in its deceleration burn towards Ibore, unless it wants to overshoot and turn around, but it doesn't. It doesn't know anyone else is here yet.

The light from Nightwater's reaction reaches me a few seconds before its reply, barely angling its burn to take it further from the planet, but not changing its thrust. It'll come to rest in a much more distant orbit around Ibore. A decent precaution, one that I would have made in the same scenario. Planetary defenses are scary.

"If you were a real warship you wouldn't be bluffing. Nightwater out."

"Fucker," Jade curses, "I hope you can win this one."

"They out-mass me two-to-one. I don't even have missiles."

"You still have a bite."

Jade and Anit have agreed to a plan— allow the Nightwater to think that I'm here for much the same reason that they are. If I lose, they won't be goaded into doing anything worse than they were already planning on. Unsaid to them is that I will blow my reactor before I let the Nightwater kill anyone down there.

I realize that to the Iboreans, this seems like a needless sacrifice. But we didn't just wander out here; this system was one of hundreds on our list for this mission. If we're not back on schedule, we'll get spun up from backup and USC will send out an actual squadron to follow our footsteps. Ibore won't be forgotten. I might lose seventeen months of my life, but that's a price I'm more than willing to pay.

I shoot back a reply. "Nightwater, final warning."

A message from the ground pours into my mind. The encryption is uncomfortably poor, which is unfortunately quite normal. Baseline humans aren't particularly special by any galactic measure, but the one thing we're really good at is cryptography. Digital security is both our life and our most valuable export after foodstuffs. The Seddu might not like talking to us in person, but they do like secure digital systems. And avocados.

"Autumn Light, Ibore control." It's Kets again, and I'm glad to hear her gravely voice. She's all business, "I have some more information for you. Nightwater's a Type 349 frigate, built between fifty and sixty years ago in a Council fleetyard."

"Armament? Engines?" I don't care when it was made, I care if it can kill me.

"Twelve particle beams, a hundred and fifteen missiles. Maybe a single railgun if the surplus yard left it in. Macrons for point defense. Peak acceleration at a hundred gravities, but that's only with modern milspec dampers."

"Yields? Firing arcs?" Only one railgun is good news for me, but I can't match that acceleration.

"No clue on yields. Council standard's about ten megatons for the railgun, and twenty plus for missiles. Beams will be whatever they've got the capacitors for. Nothing exotic, at least. Missile standoff range is probably a tenth of a light-second, but it's been decades since I saw specs. The firing arcs are probably set up for broadsides."

I'm impressed that she knows I'll care about missile standoffs. I briefly regret not asking her about her background earlier as I send my acknowledgement.

"Sounds winnable, then." Jade is confident in me, which is more than I can say for myself. Particle beams are much less dangerous to me than they are organics, since it's not like I can get radiation poisoning, but transhuman weapons have only started catching up with galactic norms in the last two decades. I'm almost certainly still outgunned, and their hull will be far more durable than mine.

There's a cultural expectation for warships to be supremely confident, which I am not living up to. There are too many unknowns, but Jade takes command, tracing a curve on the chart with her finger as she gives me the one order I love to follow. "Helm is yours. Engage."

Every species has some form of preferred power generation, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. For the Seddu, it's direct-conversion gravitic-containment fusion, forcing hydrogen into fusion with artificial gravity and turning ionized fragments directly into electrical current. The Ivu'alek use a plasma-tap reflector, bouncing the same energy between more-than-perfect arcane mirrors and extracting the excess. The Cancren prefer a clang turbine, abusing warp fields and thermodynamics to spin a generator.

Transhumans like something with a little more juice. My primary power source is a breach core, designed to tear open a hole to hyperspace and devour the energy that pours out. This is, of course, not trivial, and nobody else does it for a reason. If a clang turbine fails, you get some shrapnel. If a fusion reactor or plasma reflector fails, you get a sizeable plasma explosion. But if a breach core fails the wrong way, you can say goodbye to anything in half a light-second. Unsaid between Jade and I is the idea that it may become necessary to do this intentionally in the near future.

The raging hole in my heart lashes out as I crank it open a few centimeters, inflicting soundless fury upon the nest of shield generators that hold it. Plasma fills my conduits, and my drive surges with power. I feel my hull compress the slightest bit as my quartet of distortion drives churn spacetime into a froth behind me, rocketing me on an oblique angle towards the Nightwater.

Third Mate Wa'alm spoke up at his position on the sensor console. "Shipmaster, I'm getting a strange sensor reading."

"Oh? You've found the ship?" The shipmaster had been confident in referring to it as a ship instead of a warship. A real warship wouldn't have felt the need to bluster on the comm; they would have just closed on the Nightwater without giving them a chance to flee.

"No, but I thought you should know. It's–"

Shipmaster Osarap interrupted derisively, "Let me know when you need me to wipe your ass too, then. Don't give me speculation." Wa'alm almost cringed, but managed to stop himself. The shipmaster was scathing but not cruel; the rudeness had a point. Or so he'd been told, anyway, but he could see it.

First Mate Tosol moved to look over his shoulder. "Shipmaster, this is strange. We're getting sterile neutrino hits. Some sort of jump tech, but constant and very faint."

"And this means that you're about to provide me with some speculation, I assume."

Tosol did his species' equivalent of a shrug, a rippling blink with all six of his eyes. "I'm not a particle physicist."

"We might get better imagery if we weren't looking through our own wake," Wa'alm offered, "but I don't think we can–"

"No. Maintain burn. Whatever is out there, they'll try to engage before we get within realtime range of the planet. They won't fight us where a stray round can hit their new prize."

"And if they're baiting us into dumping all our velocity to get into orbit?" the XO asked.

They harrumphed. A pirate captain was an elected position, and they knew when an idea had some merit. "Helm, adjust our trajectory and then kill the burn. Thirty degrees out-system, ten up."

"Yes, shipmaster."

The Nightwater turns. Rather than running straight at the planet, it's going to pass alongside it at high velocity, then come around. And it shows off what looks like a full burn, too, pushing eighty gravities to make its course change. We're almost tied, but I'm still behind. I can maybe push seventy-five if I'm willing to break myself and piss off every yardie from here to Sol.

"Strategy, Captain?" I have some ideas, but we still have another few hours until we're in missile range, and that's assuming they even pick us up on sensors at that point. I can feel the unwelcome touch of the Nightwater's radar gliding across the angular edge of my hull, but it passes by senselessly, unaware of my existence.

"How long until they pick you up?"

"Worst case? Three hours, a hundred million klicks or so. Maybe sixty mil if I don't burn as hard. Or if they're very clever, they've already spotted me but are trying to pretend they haven't." That's something I would do. Something I have done, when we spar in fleet exercises.

Jade does some acceleration curve calculations in her head. "Kiting isn't an option... How long if you kill your burn?"

"I could see thirty mil happening." That's optimistic, and we both know it.

"Alright. Angle for as close as you can, then cut thrust. Wind down your reactor as far as you can. We'll go for a close pass and hope you can handle the drive-by better than they can." It's a good a plan as any.

"Understood. Maneuvering." Deducing the Nightwater's heading is trivial; its hull is ocean-blue and curved, perfectly visible in a half-dozen different electromagnetic spectra. The time and the distance ticks down.

"I've got something, shipmaster," Wa'alm called out, "I think it's them."

"You think?"

He held his voice steady and forged ahead. "Whatever they're flying, it's stealthy. But look– that faint jump signature? I think that's their power source. I get the weakest possible directional hits every few seconds, but it's something."

"What, some sort of... jump reactor?"

"It's notionally possible. And would explain the readings."

"Hmm. Good catch," they replied, causing Wa'alm to swell with pride, "but notionally is doing a lot of work there. Engineering, you know of anyone making a jump reactor?"

Engineering had a name, but it wasn't one any of them could pronounce, so they just called it Engineering. It thought for a few seconds. "No, shipmaster, not that I know of. I suspect it would be worth quite a lot if we could acquire it intact."

"Not sure how we'd tow it out of here. But we could take scans and whatever tech we can fit. Good idea."

At almost thirty-five million kilometers exactly, the occasional strobe of a search beam is replaced by the tingling sensation of target designation. I don't need to say anything to Jade; she sees it as I feel it.

"All yours, Autumn."

"Understood." I change to crew broadcast, "All hands, brace for combat maneuvers." In ages past, this would have meant securing themselves to chairs or g-couches, but it's mostly meaningless today. Spinglass can withstand far more acceleration than most of my superstructure can, after all. Nevertheless, tradition remains.

I detect the first missile launches two and a half minutes after their radar starts pointing at me. The light delay is a little under two minutes, so the Nightwater is either indecisive, or it's crewed by flesh-and-blood beings, limited by the interface between each other and their mechanisms. That's not surprising, but I have no such limitations. My main drives come online almost instantly as the hyperspace breach in my core yawns open, a ten-centimeter hole in reality feeding me with all the power I could ever want.

I don't need to go to active sensors to count the number of missiles the Nightwater has flung my way. Much like the Nightwater itself, their missiles are loud and brash, easily seen against the microwave background. Sloppy design compared to the narrow obelisk of radar-dissipating hull that USC missiles have, but they're making up for it with acceleration. And, of course, I don't have any missiles of my own, not even interceptors.

Plasma surges through my conduits and into my railgun. "Railgun" is arguably a misnomer: it doesn't use electromagnetism, but it does still have rails. Instead, the solid-state thaumaturgy in the accelerator sacrifices a few dozen cubic centimeters of reactor plasma to fling a tiny chunk of metal and electronics at just under ten percent of lightspeed.

"You're sure they haven't put shields up yet?"

"Given how hard they were to spot in the first place, I'm not sure I'd— Needle!" Wa'alm's three hearts beat out of sync. Battle was now properly joined.

Osarap was calm, as if they had seen combat a thousand times before. They hadn't, but most of the crew didn't know that, and they preferred to keep it that way. "They have a railgun but no missiles?"

Wa'alm peered at the readouts again. "Low yield. Only one-tenth lightspeed."

"They can't possibly expect to hit us– ah." One of the missiles winked off the plot as the unknown's round struck it. "Weapons, get terminal maneuvers on your missiles, please."

Another missile turns into a cloud of particles as a relativistic plasma toroid smacks into it. The railgun trick stopped working after the fifth missile, but now they're entering my point-defense envelope. The missiles are still a few light-seconds out, but their terminal maneuvers are comically bad. I really shouldn't be getting interceptions at this distance.

"Shields, Autumn?"

"Not yet." My shields will make me as visible as a lighthouse, even more than my point defenses, and I need all the sensor confusion I can get.

Half a light-second now. We're in real-time range, and my barrels are glowing red-hot, my quartet of dorsal PD mounts vomiting out streams of blue-hot plasma rings at 0.9c. The occasional spike of pleasure from an intercept turns into a constant buzz as the distance closes. If I was human, I'd be gasping and shaking from the stimulation, but I haven't been human for years. Seven more missiles become clouds of superheated fragments.

I can feel Jade's stress rise as the missiles close, even as their numbers are whittled down. Just a few more seconds...

Now. My shields snap on, a dense foam of twisted spacetime interposing itself between my hull and the incoming missiles. I switch to active emissions, radar emitters and jammers blasting energy at the remaining missiles, and roll over to expose my cooler ventral point defense emitters. A barrage of plasma scythes through almost all of the remaining missiles, and I can feel Jade's flush of pride with each interception.

A single missile out of forty reaches standoff range. It vanishes in a flash, hurling a tight cone of nuclear hellfire into my ventral shield plate. The shield holds, shimmering pure white as it struggles to dissipate the energy it just absorbed.

"Interception complete. No damage. Ventral shield plate holding."

"Good girl," Jade whispers. My reactor-heart thrums with joy in response. "How many more of those can you take?"

"Not many. Returning to EMCON one." My sensors go dark again, and I blast cryogen over my emitters, sinking back into the inky darkness of space.

"One hit, shipmaster. Target shields stable." Wa'alm had managed to get the ship on the scopes after it opened up with point defenses, but even then their designation beam had kept gliding off of it.

"Interesting," they mused. The ship— the Autumn Light, it had earned a name after that —wasn't an entirely unique design, at least in shape. Plenty of shipbuilders preferred the flattened wedge for its armor sloping and weapon arcs. But this was far too small to be a ship-of-the-line, significantly smaller than even the Nightwater, which was itself on the smaller end for frigates. And stealth wasn't something that anyone considered worthwhile. But even now, it had killed its own radar emissions and was boiling off coolant, trying to normalize with the microwave background.

And there was the strange combination of capabilities. The aliens were stealthy, had a frankly incredible point-defense suite, and even fit a railgun turret on the tiny hull. But they carried no missiles, their railgun could only put out half the velocity of theirs, and if they could out-burn the Nightwater they would have already been decelerating to hold it at railgun range.

"Sensors, anything on how their shields took that hit?"

"The single hit destabilized them a bit, but they have a different design. Three or four hits per segment, if I had to guess?" Wa'alm was a little out of his depth. The aliens had shield plates arranged in a rectangular prism rather than the two-hemisphere geometry that Council shipbuilders preferred. There probably wasn't anything wrong with it from a conceptual angle, but the Nightwater's shields could have taken a dozen or more missile hits per hemisphere. Another oddity in the alien ship.

"I don't like the lack of information here."

Tosol laughed, "Osarap, we're shooting our way through a first contact. What did you expect?"

They harrumphed. "Alright. I'm not wasting more of our prize money on missiles. Let's get close and settle this."

For the first time today, I'm confused. They're not firing more missiles. If I had been in their shoes, the first thing I'd have done after watching the effect of the last salvo would have been to double the size and fire again. Any missiles getting through means a target has reached interception capacity; further attacks can overwhelm. At least, they can in USC doctrine. Maybe these aliens expect some to get through by chance.

"It's because they use money, Autumn."

"...what?"

"They have to pay someone for their ammo. They don't get issued it."

I'm thinking about how miserable conserving ammunition must feel when Nightwater changes its burn. Straight towards me, and at what I assume has to be its maximum burn. Their captain isn't stupid, unfortunately, and they've picked up on the fact that I can probably beat their sensors at range. Even now, their target designation beam keeps sliding off of me before someone manually corrects it with a telescope.

"Target accelerating at eighty gees. Entering primary battery range in sixty seconds."

"Primary battery? You're starting to sound like one some stodgy old cruiser."

I wrap around Jade like an anaconda made of alloys and ceramic, hauling her arms above her head with a loop of cabling. "How's this for stodgy?"

"USCS Autumn Light, how inappropriate! We are engaged with the enemy!" She's grinning.

"I can multitask." I don't fuck in a physical body; it's an impossibility. The only sex an Odyssey-class exploration corvette is designed to have is with the universe itself. And that's not a metaphor, though there's some debate as to whether whether the universe is topping or bottoming in that relationship. But the sim isn't physical.

"I think you're losing your touch. Come on Autumn, light bondage? What's next, missionary with the li—"

Fun fact: uploaded minds are very easy to trick if you know what you're doing. The mind doesn't particularly care if sensory input comes from photons and electrostatic forces in the physical world, or from a series of algorithms in a chunk of spinglass. And if it's your simulation... well, there's a reason this sim is only for me and her.

Jade tries not to moan and fails as a thousand pairs of lips kiss her all over at the same time that I enter railgun range.

"In range. Firing," I tell her, though she isn't exactly listening. Range in space for a physical projectile is a misnomer, of course, but effective range still exists. Railgun rounds can only fit so much energy for maneuvers inside of them, after all.

The first shot flashes out of my railgun turret, traveling at a leisurely ten percent of the speed of light. Five seconds later, another shot rips forth, repeating every time my reactor tap fills with plasma. The shots are in a pre-calculated firing pattern, determined by some team of practically nonverbal mathematicians deep in a combat sim with a few months worth of compute time. Some things I can do intuitively, but relativistic shot patterning is not one of them.

"Needle," Wa'alm called out, "no tracking on the shot, but towards us."

"At that range?" The shot was nearly half a light-minute out, and five whole minutes realtime. The Nightwater's effective kinetic range was just over ten light-seconds, and it still had the military tracking algorithm.

"Yes, shipmaster. Needle again, another one on the way. I'm losing it for a little bit each time it fires, the muzzle flash whites out our scopes."

"Curious," Engineering spoke. "A bright muzzle flash indicates immature accelerator design."

"I'm not taking risks with how good their sensors seem to be. Shields up and take us through it. Double the random maneuver distance and open fire once we're in range."

I score my first hit of the fight from eight million kilometers away when a ten-kilogram slug with as much kinetic energy as two million tons of trinitrotoluene slams into the Nightwater's shields. The sensations feeding into my sensors from the hit aren't quite indescribable, but they're close. My EM reception system is mostly a visual sense, a massive spectrum of colors cramming themselves into my mind as streams of plasma skitter across their shield bubble for a fraction of a second.

The curse of my senses is that I can see the slug has little effect. There's no instability in their shields, not like mine after the missile hit. That's not terribly surprising, but a girl can hope.

My captain, for her part, is a little too busy squirming inside layers of glistening machinery to provide a verbal response to the hit. She tries, though, and I'm proud of her for that, but she doesn't get out much more than a moan.

I'll be in energy range in fifteen minutes. Void duels between near-equals are usually decided at missile range or knife-fight range, railguns are for winning when you're ahead. My current state is a consequence of my previous decision to rush through optimal missile range— the closer I get, the lower the terminal velocity of their missiles, and even now I'd still rather take my chances with particle beams than worry about getting evaporated if a few missiles hit the wrong shield plate.

"Helm!"

"Doing my best!"

The ship lurched sideways as a railgun shot slid by it at 0.13c, burning out its thrusters to try and maneuver into the Nightwater. They weren't powerful, as evidenced by the dozen hits the frigate had already taken, but they were insanely accurate. Their own radar was still struggling to get decent returns off the little ship, but it wasn't even emitting anything in return besides a single railgun shot every five seconds. The problem was that the rounds themselves weren't showing up on their scopes until the last second. Evasion was a lot harder when you only had seconds to do it.

"Weapons?"

"We can open up now if you want, shipmaster, but we're outside of effective—"

"Do it!"

By the time I have to start evading the Nightwater's rounds, I've turned Jade into a quivering mess. I've been sharing my senses with her, pouring starlight and sensor data right into her pleasure centers. For me, that's just every minute of my existence. For her, it's... well, it's effective, that's for sure.

A round strikes me almost dead-on despite my attempts to sidestep it, a lucky ten megatons worth of kinetic energy flashing into crackling streams of plasma as my shields absorb the blow. Jade doesn't quite snap out of her post-orgasmic bliss, but that's just her body; her mind is working perfectly fine.

"Kinetic impact, front. Frontal shield plate holding."

"How bad?"

"Emitter instability at six percent and falling."

"How many hits before energy range?"

"More than fifteen, less than twenty."

She peers through my eyes at the Nightwater. Its shields are vibrating, imperceptible to even an aided human eye, but clear as day to mine. A dozen more hits and the port shield hemisphere might actually destabilize. Might. The starboard one is doing a bit better, but not by a lot. There's still hope. I might win this one in energy range after all.

"Shipmaster?"

"Go ahead, Sensors."

"I might have something. And not—"

"—a request for me to wipe your ass?"

"No, shipmaster. I think I know why they're not hitting us with active radar. There's a few comm lasers bouncing around out there, we're getting laser refractions off their shields. Hard to pull vectors off of that, but—"

"Get to the point, Wa'alm."

"...yes, shipmaster. They're using sensor drones, meshing their passive sensors together for a picture without going active. I can pick them out if we point the main radar at them, I think."

"Do it. Weapons?"

"I can make it work."

"Get me a firing solution, then."

I've been trading quite well, I think. The Nightwater's railgun is about five times more powerful than mine, and my shields are at best half as strong as theirs, but they've only landed six hits to my seventy-three. Seventy-four now, as the light from another hit reaches my lenses. And even better, all their hits have been to my frontal shield plate. Once we're in energy range, we'll be sideswiping each other, and it won't matter how destabilized that front plate is. But I'm still—

Target designation beams light up my sensor drones simultaneously, a volley of particle beams obliterating the fragile devices fractions of a second after my own orders to evade reach them. My calm demeanor slips as they claw out my eyes, and I divert plasma to my four beam emitters, opening their armored lenses to—

"No. Hold fire."

It's like slamming into a brick wall. It's worse than slamming into a brick wall, actually, because I could easily demolish a brick wall. My response isn't verbal so much as angry.

"Hold energy fire until you're in range, Autumn. Switch to active emissions."

She's right, and we both know it, and she knows that I know it.

"Ending radio silence." Going active doesn't have to be calm and collected, though. Over a gigawatt of energy pours out of me, a combination of active radar, jamming, and laser dazzlers lancing outwards at my enemy.

The shipmaster grimaced as the aliens pulled yet another strange capability out of nowhere. That ship was, somehow, putting out as much jamming as an entire capital warship, and one with the good algorithms.

"At least we know where they are," Weapons joked.

"Do we, actually?"

"Whenever they fire, anyway." Radio direction-finding could narrow down the jammer's location to a few fractions of a degree, but fractions of a degree at this distance was still tens of thousands of kilometers.

"Weapons, stick a few missiles out there."

"Shipmaster?" Missiles at this range wouldn't accelerate to any appreciable speed before reaching the target, making interception trivial. He was already moving to queue up the launch, though. The shipmaster hadn't been wrong yet.

"I have a plan. Any guesses?"

"Missile launch. Five inbound."

"Just five?" Jade asks, thoughtful. It hits her a second later, the same time it hits me. My point-defense emitters are bright enough and constant enough that the Nightwater will see my attempt at interception through the jamming. There's only seconds to energy range, but my frontal shield plate is twitching and spasming, desperately trying to maintain itself in the face of repeated railgun strikes.

I have no other option. A quick burst from my point-defense emitters and the five missiles are wiped away, and I redline my thrusters to evade the inevitable—

—And then the Nightwater's railgun shot hits. It's a square impact on my frontal shield plate, already stressed to its breaking point. The emitter takes the hit and then flicks off, leaving the plasma streams to sparkle over my beautiful matte-black coating.

"Frontal shield plate offline." I shift to the side, angling my unprotected front away from the Nightwater and presenting my port shield plate. "Beam range in thirty seconds. All crew prepare for high-energy fire." I get off six more railgun shots in that time, every single one of them slamming into the Nightwater's shield.

"Hope you all took your anti-rads. Brace for energy range. Weapons, all you."

Wa'alm gripped his console. He'd taken his anti-rads religiously since he'd been a deckhand. Radiation was a bad way to go, and a common one without the proper precautions.

I withdraw the armored shutters from my port beam emitters, feel the plasma capacitors fill with power, accelerators spinning up...

A final railgun shot hits, and the Nightwater's port shield hemisphere pops like a soap bubble. It's rolling, but I've already locked on. I can see a half-dozen of their own emitter apertures on this side, and I release. A pair of white-hot beams of hydrogen plasma traveling at near lightspeed rake over their side, gouts of molten armor material spurting out of the wounds like blood.

The Nightwater replies with equal ferocity a fraction of a second later. My initial salvo has turned half their port beams into slag, and my ECM is still keeping them from getting direct hits, but they clip me three times. My port shield emitter maxes out almost instantly, staying online just long enough for me to roll and present my ventral one instead.

I burn hard, feeling structural members creaking as I desperately scrabble to stay on this side of the ship. Their other shield emitter is undamaged. If they can roll before I can kill them, I'll be out of energy range before I bring their other emitter down.

Jade interrupts. "Aim here, and here." I can't seen through their hull, but I can guess. Reactors go in the center, or by the engines. They seem like 'center' people. I shift focus, volley another pair of beams at them, hoping to hit something important. Their armor is heinously strong compared to mine, but I have accuracy on my side, and if I can just maintain fire for a few seconds...

The Nightwater tears into me, and I'm too close to evade, all I can do is hope that my ECM throws off their aim from my center of mass. A salvo of four particle beams crashes into my ventral emitter, popping it almost instantly. I'm already rolling, but the tail end of a shot gets through and gouges a molten scar into my body, shredding one of my engines.

I scream, in pain and rage, point defense emitters raining plasma on them as I try to gut them with my beamfire. But it's too late, and their armor is too heavy. My thrust is dropping, they're rolling and I can't keep up and—

The Nightwater presents its starboard shields, practically undamaged. I dump every ounce of ordnance I have into it, but it's a losing battle. My starboard and dorsal emitters shut off in seconds, megatons worth of particle beams overloading my shields and ripping into my hull. I lose another engine, my railgun, and a point-defense emitter in under three seconds. Secondary conduits come online instantly, but I'm bleeding plasma like a wounded animal. I don't have long.

Jade touches my mind. We both know what we need to do.

The alien ship fought like a cornered beast, and a smart one. In barely a second, it had shredded almost every weapon their port side, and had done its best to bore through their armor to the reactor. But it was outclassed. Wa'alm almost felt bad for it as it twisted in space, plumes of molten ejecta filling the void. Energy range would only last a minute or so, but even in ten seconds, the Autumn Light was a wreck, with most of its engines and weaponry mangled.

"Engineering, how are we doing?"

"Alive, shipmaster. Starboard fully intact. Port has two beams and one interceptor intact. Dorsal missile silo damaged."

"Casualties?"

"Low, shipmaster. Some radiation injuries, but nothing penetrated past the inner armor belt."

"Excellent. Helm, come about, and get some people in suits. We're boarding that thing."

Something beeped on Wa'alm's display. He pulled open the reading and almost turned blue as the blood left his face. "Their reactor! They're—"

Osarap knew what he was trying to say instantly. "Weapons! Everything we've got, center mass, now!"

My reactor is a beautiful thing, really. Most starship power generators involve some violation of the laws of thermodynamics, but none are as proud of it as a breach core. A spatial rip like the one inside me is not meant to exist, and they are especially not meant to exist for hours and days at a time. When one is allowed to stop existing in an uncontrolled manner, the results are... energetic.

Jade keys up the broadcast transmission. "This is Captain Jade Dlamini. We're blowing this popsicle stand and taking these assholes with us. It's been an honor, and I'll see you all on the other side."

I force the breach wider, twenty-five whole centimeters. It's sparking off the shield cradle now, almost ready to blow.

"I love you, captain."

"I've heard some rumors to that effect." She kisses me. The Nightwater is firing again, beamfire drilling through what little armor I have left, but it's too late, and I let it go. The world goes white.

Wa'alm's monitor went white. He realized a half-second later that it wasn't just his monitor so much as his entire field of vision.

"Ow." He wasn't sure who said it, but it was probably himself.

The shipmaster grunted. "Those piss-drinking whoresons, what was that?"

Engineering didn't seem affected, but it never put much inflection on its voice. "Computer systems offline. I also have a headache."

"Someone go find a window, then!"

"—what?"

"How—?" Jade is as confused as I am.

I'm still here. I can't see anything, but I'm still in my ship-self, not in a sim in Tau Ceti wondering why I'm being spun up from my backup. It takes a few seconds for tertiary sensors to come online and start feeding any sensory information back into my mind.

If I had lungs, I would gasp at what I see. A plume of plasma stretches nearly a full light-second out from my heart, a grasping hand of superheated death. The cause is a single shield generator in the cradle, sliced open by beamfire. The resulting asymmetric explosion vented all its fury in one direction... and not into the Nightwater.

The alien ship coasts for a few minutes before its drives come back online. I can barely make it out with what's left of my senses, but it's enough to see the vector.

They are planning to board me.