The model updated, showing a second salvo of missiles extending the paths burned opened by the first. These detonated at the scheduled time, in the vicinity of the containment capsule. No sensors in the blast zone survived, so there was no way to know yet if the capsule had been damaged.
“You have to stop this!” Naresh shouted. “It needs to end.”
Pasha said, “It will end when the entity gives up and departs.”
“We discussed and rejected this kind of solution long ago,” Vytet argued. “The entity’s tendrils reach into the core. You’ll cripple the ship if you try to eliminate them. You’ll destroy the reef. And you’re going to ignite an evolutionary war with the Chenzeme tissue—if you haven’t already.”
“We’ve planned carefully,” Pasha said in clipped syllables. “Griffin’s Engineer was consulted.” She turned from the model to face Vytet, her expression a mix of guilt and defiance. “The damage will be extensive but not irreparable. And the risk of a molecular war is mitigated because we’re using Chenzeme elements to carry out the attack. The activity should be perceived as a new scenario, a strategy the Chenzeme mind will find acceptable when it rids the ship of an alien parasite.”
Vytet’s voice climbed an octave. “Do you think Lezuri won’t fight back? That he can’t fight back?”
“Do you think he can fight back from the center of a firestorm?” Clemantine asked. “For all his talents, even Lezuri cannot prevent molecular bonds from breaking under extreme heat.”
“The shockwaves are being felt in the warren,” Kona reported. “I’ve let them know what’s going on.”
The dual wave of missiles had not been expected to destroy the containment capsule—no one believed the entity could be defeated that easily—but the heat prevented an immediate counterattack, while the shockwaves snapped the tendrils linking the entity’s fortress to deeper layers of the ship.
From Griffin’s high bridge, Clemantine watched as Dragon’s hull cells communicated a message of existential alarm. The coded pulses were too swift to be discerned by human eyes, but Griffin’s philosopher cells understood them and interpreted them for Clemantine.
Subminds carried the meaning to her ghost in Griffin’s library. She looked around at her assembled Apparatchiks, each in their frameless window, and announced, “It’s begun. Dragon is enduring an attack from within.”
“But is it the Pyrrhic Defense?” the Pilot asked. He glared around the circle, a dark, impatient figure, arms crossed, standing on nothing, the light of hundreds of stars blazing behind him. “Or is it Lezuri, extending his domain, making Dragon his own?”
The Scholar, wearing dark blue, looked up from his studies with narrowed eyes. “The data gate is closed,” he reminded them all. “A termination order has been received.”
“Received and immediately countermanded,” the Engineer replied from his plain brown frame.
“How can we know which instruction is legitimate?” the Scholar asked.
Clemantine said, “We’ll know soon.”
Lezuri had used Riffan’s corrupted ghost in a play to take both ships. He had failed, but the situation aboard Dragon was surely dire. Clemantine’s hope rested on the promise of the last radioed message, spoken in her own voice: We are still fighting. That had to mean the Pyrrhic Defense was launched or soon would be. There was no other way to fight Lezuri.
She waited for proof.
The Pilot spoke again, impatient to do something. “I remind you that Dragon’s velocity is now slightly higher than our own. We can match it, or we can exceed it and narrow the distance between us. Dragon is a more powerful ship and could outrun us if it tried.”
“It can’t outrun our gun,” Clemantine said. “Not at this range.”
The Engineer said, “I agree. I do not recommend an increase in velocity.”
Griffin presently trailed twenty-one thousand kilometers behind Dragon. Once Clemantine gave the word, the philosopher cells would require less than ten seconds to deploy the gun and align its lens. They would be able to fire several times before Dragon could turn to defend itself, and by then, Dragon would be gone.
Clemantine hoped it would not come to that. She desperately hoped for a chance to strike a different target—but she kept that hope locked away from Griffin’s philosopher cells.
The cells were in a dangerous state. Dragon’s alarmed communications stirred no hint of empathy among them, but instead roused their contempt and their hatred. Already a faction of cells was lobbying for attack:
<revulsion: false chenzeme>
<kill it!>
Clemantine slowed the argument:
– hold –
And diverted it:
– awaiting target –
But she allowed the cells to continue in their excited state, ready and eager to attack.
The next phase of the Pyrrhic Defense was underway. Thousands of small vesicles made of Chenzeme tissue and packed with explosives, moved into positions designated by their swarm programming. Some massed alongside the entity’s severed tendrils. Others arranged themselves in layers above his capsule.
The outermost layer of explosives triggered first. The blast erupted outward. Gasps and cries from the gathered ghosts as a seam ripped open in the hull, a geyser of boiling debris spewing from the side of the ship.
The next layer went off a second later, and the next after that, and the next, blasting open a channel down to the massive containment capsule.
On the high bridge, Clemantine felt the repeating concussions and the shock of the philosopher cells as the field tore open and a long region of cells was burned away.
In the library, she felt nothing, heard nothing. The library synthesized its own reality and it had not been designed to simulate the shuddering of the ship.
THIRTEENTH
My people, you think bitterly as the extreme heat of the firestorm begins to snap the molecular bonds that constitute your mind.
You might have annihilated them at first contact, but you chose not to because you admired them, you allowed yourself to be entranced by their cleverness, their bravery. You put your own future at risk for the chance of making them part of your world and now they have betrayed you.
Clever and brave, indeed.
Their assault is primitive, brutal, potentially suicidal—and effective. The crushing heat and the concussions both threaten your physical integrity. You must escape.
You will escape.
You prepared for this contingency. The mechanism exists. An alternate path forward. Less desirable, but in the fullness of time, you will recover.
Chapter
38
From Griffin’s high bridge, Clemantine watched victory take shape in the form of a hundred-meter rift blown open on Dragon’s hull. A terrible rupture, though only a fraction of the length of the massive ship.
Proof at last: The Pyrrhic Defense was underway!
A pulse of effluent geysered out of the rift, and then another, and another, each pulse emerging hot in infrared, but quickly cooling in a rapidly dispersing cloud that reflected the light of the hull cells—cells that flashed their rage and a stark order to Griffin to: