“Do we know what’s following them?” she asked, and Two Foam shook her head in swift negation from the comms chair.
“Everything’s blank,” she said. “Just Knifepoint and dead void behind them—but they’ll be in hailing range in two minutes—”
“Get them on the holograph as soon as you can. And scramble the Shards. If there’s something after them, we’re not going to let it get far.”
“Scrambling, yaotlek,” said Two Foam, her eyes flickering in rapid motion behind her cloudhook. All around them the high clear whine of the alarm rose through Weight for the Wheel. A Fleet’s first line of defense, and most mobile: a swarm of single-pilot small craft, all weaponry and navigation, short-range and absolutely deadly. Nine Hibiscus had been a Shard pilot herself, on that long-ago first deployment, and she still felt the scramble alarm like a delicious vibration in the marrow of her bones: go, go, go. Go now, and if you die, you die star-brilliant.
With the alarm singing through her, Nine Hibiscus said, “And let’s charge up the top two energy-cannon banks, shall we?” She settled again into her captain’s chair. Five Thistle, the duty weapons officer, gave her a bright, wide-eyed grin.
“Sir,” he said.
They all wanted this so much. Her, too. The fire and the blood of it, something to do. A proper battle, blue and white energy weapons arcing through the black, shattering and scorching.
Just as the first Shards spilled, sparkling, into the viewport’s visual range, the thing that Knifepoint was running away from appeared.
It didn’t come into view. It appeared, as if it had been there all along, hidden in some kind of visual cloak. The black nothingness of space—this sector had so few stars—rippled, squirmed like a nudibranch touched by a finger, an enormous and organic recoiling, and there it was, the first ship-of-their-enemy any Teixcalaanli eyes had seen. (Any Teixcalaanli eyes which had lived to describe it, at least.) Three grey hoops, rotating at speed around a central ball. It was hard to look at, and Nine Hibiscus didn’t know why—some of that recoiling, squirming visual distortion clung to it, made the grey metal of its hull seem oil-slick and unfocused.
It had been not-there, and now it was there. Right up on Knifepoint’s tail, just as fast, and closing—
“This is the yaotlek Nine Hibiscus,” she said, wide-broadcast. “Cut that thing out of its vector and surround it. Hold fire unless you are fired upon.”
Like they were extensions of her will, of her exhaled breath, the Shards flew outward on a fast approach toward the foreign object that had dared come so very near. It took them a moment to orient themselves around the alien ship; it wasn’t a shape they knew, and it moved in unexpected ways, a slippery roll like a greased ball bearing. But the Shards were smart, and they were interlinked—each ship providing positional and visual biofeedback not only to its own pilot through their cloudhook, but to all of the pilots in the swarm—and they learned quickly. Knifepoint shot out between the glittering sparkle of them like a shuttle breaking atmosphere and was caught safely by the outreaching net of Weight for the Wheel’s hangar bay.
Two Foam had gotten Knifepoint’s captain on holo: he looked harried, wild-eyed and breathing rapidly, his hands visibly white at the knuckles as he gripped the controls of his ship.
“Well done,” Nine Hibiscus said to him, “not a scratch on you—give us a minute to deal with this thing you brought us, and I’ll bring you right up to debrief—”
“Yaotlek,” he interrupted, “they’re invisible until they want to be, that might not be the only one, and they have firepower—”
“Stand down, Knifepoint,” Nine Hibiscus said. “It’s our problem now, and we have firepower too.” They did. The energy cannons, and the smaller, more vicious, more ugly power of nuclear core-bombs. If necessary.
“I intercepted a communication,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her at all.
“Excellent. Put it in your report.”
“It’s not language, yaotlek—”
“Two Foam, deal with this? We are a little busy just now.” The alien ship did have firepower—what looked like a fairly standard but very precise suite of energy cannons, arrayed on the outmost of those three spinning loops. Soundless bursts of light blinded her through the viewport, and when she blinked the afterimages away, there were three fewer Shards. She winced.
“All right, containment is no longer the protocol—Five Thistle, tell the Shards to clear a path for cannonry.”
At their best, Nine Hibiscus’s officers didn’t need to confirm they’d heard her—they acted. Five Thistle’s hands gestured inside the holographic workspace of the weapons station, moving ships and vector lines in the embedded starfield, a miniature version of her own cartograph table—and the Shards moved in response, forming a new pattern, clearing a space for Weight for the Wheel’s main cannon banks to aim and to fire.
Electric blue. The light that Nine Hibiscus had always imagined a person saw if they accidentally stepped inside an industrial irradiator, in the brief moment they’d have to see anything at all. Deathlight, with its hum like a scramble-alarm, as familiar as breathing or ceasing to breathe.
(For a fraction of a second, she wondered if she oughtn’t try to capture the thing first—shut it down with targeted electromagnetic pulses while it was still far away enough that EMP wouldn’t fry her own ships, pull it on board—but Knifepoint had said they had an intercepted communication, and this thing had killed three of her own soldiers already. Four—another Shard winked out in a silent shatter of flame, a candle going up and going out in rapid succession.)
Full cannon power lit the alien ship like a beacon, shook it, peeled some of that slick and squirming visuality away from it—the parts of the outer ring which had been blown off looked like metal, like space debris, entirely standard. But full cannon power didn’t destroy it. It spun faster—it whirred—Nine Hibiscus imagined she could hear it spinning, though she knew that was impossible—and just before the second cannon barrage struck its inner ball, smashing it open into nothingness and destruction entire, it emitted from the second of its damaged rings some dark viscous substance that fell through null-grav in strange ropes.
Spit, Nine Hibiscus thought, repulsed.
Five Thistle was already calling get away from it on all channels, and the great reactor-fueled engines of Weight for the Wheel flared into life, pulled them backward, away from how the ropes tangled like a liquid net where the alien ship had been. What fluid moved like that? As if it was—seeking, mobile, far too cohesive. The surface tension on it—not so much that it clung together in a ball, but enough that it spun itself out in thinning, reaching strings—