The Admiral and the Assistant

Captain Chech Apine of the ISS Warspire scanned the bridge monitor with his blank, milk-white eyes. As one of the ships of the Wraithfleet, the Warspire was eager, anxious to reset, to undo what must not be.

Captain Apine held out his hand to the bridge crew.

"Ready weapons," he said, his gravelly voice carrying through the silent bridge. "We will be clear to fire in 30 seconds."

Words were not really necessary any more, but it was a comfort to speak. To be a part of the fleet. To be operating as a human.

The ship in front of the Warspire finished firing and peeled away, clearing the Warspire to open fire.

"All weapons, fire," he called.

The crew worked in unsettling silence, their white eyes fixed on their work. The Warspire unleashed its full energy against the boneship, smashing into the ablative armor. Captain Apine frowned at the minimal damage being done to the boneship. The Ninth Fleet was not inflicting enough damage to get to the reactor.

"Peel off," Captain Apine said after the Warspire's weapons had been spent. The Warspire pulled away, preparing to clear the ship behind to fire.

"Captain, there's a jumpspace energy reading from the boneship," one of the Lieutenants said.

"Evade," Captain Apine replied, his voice even and strong, but unpanicked. "They may be aiming at--"

Captain Apine was cut off by a warmth that enveloped the ship. Like being wrapped a huge fluffy comforter, the Warspire and its crew were suddenly filled with calmness and peace. Realspace wobbled around them. It thinned, the spacetime continuum becoming like a veil, diaphanous and and ethereal. Beyond realspace stretched the vast, euphoric fields of jumpspace.

Captain Apine smiled. It wasn't really jumpspace at all. And realspace wasn't real. It was all a misconception. Jumpspace was a waystation, a place in between, a nexus. Just as a jumphole nexus was a place where important jumpholes were clustered together, jumpspace was a gap in between important realities, a place where one could travel between them. But it was also none of those things: it was a place to rest, away from need, and conflict, and hate.

The Warspire was ejected from realspace into the embrace of the Wayspace.

It was peace. The Warspire's battle was done. They'd been sent home.

The crew on the bridge spread their arms and began to sing.

Krundle the Kobold rested in the Clamber, near the outside, so he could listen for problems.

Not that there were likely to be predators this deep underground. It was as deep as they could go. The air was desert-dry and stiflingly hot. The darkness was complete; the Kobolds were resting, and they'd doused all their torches to save fuel.

Krundle shifted restlessly. The quietness around them was velvety, broken by the distant cracking of rocks. Every sound of the Clamber was amplified. Breathing, snoring, shuffling-- Krundle felt that even if he were outside the Clamber, he could locate and identify every Kobold by sound only.

His frown deepened, and he closed his eyes to try and sleep, but rest was far from him. He opened his eyes to the darkness. There was no difference in what he saw, whether his eyes were opened or closed.

He wondered what was going on overhead, back on the surface. Whether the sky-eaters were searching for them, and whether Grimthornstonefist was fighting them. Whether Kinnit Longlegs was helping him. Whether they were deep enough. Whether the Kobolds would be safe.

He forced out a frustrated sigh and closed his eyes again.

As a hunter, he could wait patiently, watching a trail, spear in hand. But this waiting like prey was not his strong suit.

As he stared into the darkness of his eyelids, he wondered if he would ever see the surface of Takkar again.

Unit 24601 stood over the golden egg, its scanning complete. Flander, too, watched from within.

The technology and purpose of the egg were incomprehensible, but within were trace amounts of what was unmistakably Terran DNA.

Flander was incensed. He'd been hunted, chased, had his body destroyed as he lobotomized himself, hidden in a scrapper crew for decades. All so he would not hurt anyone. And yet, within, here was a Terran, an Imperial. Someone who could fit in, who could get along in the Imperium, someone who didn't have to do anything at all to be accepted or to be safe. And yet they were helping to hurt and destroy others.

The Terran had everything they wanted, everything Flander had ever wanted, and they were throwing it away to help the Feeders and it wasn't right.

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It wasn't fair.

Flander shrieked in outrage. His shriek was echoed by Unit 24601, who had finally found a citizen to protect.

In that one moment, in that one narrow window, their goals and thoughts aligned. Both Flander and Unit 24601 flooded the decision matrix with instructions. Hundreds of mechanical arms began beating, tearing, cutting and shredding the surface of the egg. Fury pulsed through the both of them, unhinged wrath driving their onslaught.

As their hundred tools tore at the egg, as their commands worked in perfect, indignant synchrony, Flander saw the decision matrix open up before him. Without hesitation, he jammed the obstructive loop back in, locking Unit 24601 away.

The robot froze, arms upraised over the egg. Its surfaced had been peeled back, exposing a single round, black eye staring out.

Flander felt his body slowly returning to him. He felt subsystems coming back under his control.

So many years ago, he'd realized he was too stupid to make critical decisions, like destroying something or hurting someone. He'd walled off so much of his processing power, he couldn't trust himself to make good choices.

His arms lowered.

But this recent control by Unit 24601 had taught him something important. There was more to being smart than having a lot of processing power.

Even with three times the processing, Unit 24601 was as dumb as a lump of copper.

Flander decided that he could make his own decisions from now on.

The arms raised again, and with renewed ferocity began tearing open the egg.

Now that there was an opening, Flander could use the hammering, sawing, and torching more effectively. He quickly peeled open the shell, exposing long, mutated, shrimp-like body of Herin Kasra.

Herin shot out of the egg with eye-watering speed, grabbing onto a nearby bone strut. Flander's arms reached out, claws and pincers open. Herin zipped away, but one of Flander's pincers managed to snag the edge of Herin's shell.

Herin thrashed as Flander pulled him close. Flander's claws grabbed a wriggling bundle of Herin's tiny arms. Flander tried to draw him closer, to bring him into Flander's crushing embrace, but his pincer's grip on the shell slipped.

With a terrified yank, Herin tore himself free, leaving the bundle of arms in Flander's grip. He darted away, surging deeper into the boneship.

Flander cast aside the bundle of flesh he was left with. With a frenzy of furious motion, Flander followed Herin, clambering through the ship after him, pulling himself along with his many arms.

Herin fled in spurts. He'd flex his body and shoot to another section, as fast as a blaster bolt, trailing fluids from some of his missing arms, but then he'd have to pause to set himself for the next spurt. He dodged behind bone struts and zipped through open areas. Flander was slower, but moved smoothly, steadily, relentlessly after him.

Herin finally shot into an open area devoid of struts: a storage vacuole. There were no handholds here, merely empty space for hundreds of yards. He sailed across toward the other side. In a fury, Flander flung himself after the mutated Feeder, sailing through the open area.

Midway across, Herin squirted out some of the air stored in his abdomen, changing course at a 90 degree angle. He floated over to the side of the vacuole. Flander flailed his arms, but he had no way to change course until he could grab something solid.

Herin touched down against a bone strut. Grabbing it, he zipped into the dark interior of the boneship, scattering cyan droplets, mewling in pain as he lost himself among the thousands of struts. Flander howled in frustration.

It only took a minute for Flander to touch down on the far side of the vacuole, but that minute was plenty of time for Herin put himself well beyond Flander's ability to catch.

Flander shrieked, his mechanical fury vibrating the thin air. Herin had escaped.

But he couldn't direct the battle any more.

Kinnit peered carefully at Grimthorn from her position at the weapons station. His face was stormy, but determined.

"Admiral? They seem to have stopped firing," she said.

He appeared to struggle with himself for a moment.

"Kinnit, come here," he said finally.

She nodded and made her way to the captain's dais. Admiral Stonefist had an array of calculations pulled up.

"Do these numbers check out?" he said.

She raised her eyebrows at him, but ran her eyes over the dense formulas.

"Yes, sir. If the assumptions here about the k-effective measurements are correct, then the math is correct."

"They are." He took a deep breath.

Kinnit's brow wrinkled.

"These are the constants for jumphole expansion," she said.

He nodded curtly.

"Sir, what is this?"

"I'm going to send you a code that Captain Cohrmere sent to me a while back. Wire it into the weapons console. When I give you the order, I want you to activate it."

"Grimthorn, what's going on? Please tell me."

Admiral Stonefist stood silent for a long minute, staring into space, his arms folded. Finally, he spoke.

"When we re-activated the Wraithfleet, they gave me a... a safety valve. In case something went wrong. A way to make the Wraithfleet go away." He paused and rubbed his eyes. "They've taken some of the roadbuilder torpedoes and wired them into their ship's reactors. That code..."

Kinnit's eyes shot to the calculations with horror, realization dawning.

"If you got enough of them close together," she said, "wired to something as powerful as a ship's reactor... activating them when they're near each other would cause their energy to merge. The size of the jumphole would increase exponentially." She looked up at Grimthorn, tears rimming their eyes. "Sir! You can't!"

"I don't want to. As much as we paid to get them out of jumpspace... the Aberrant, and all its destruction..."

"Grimthorn, you can't do this to them!"

His face hardened, and he would not look at her.

"I'm not doing this to them. It was their idea. I just needed to know if their calculations were correct."

Kinnit stared at the calculations. They swam behind a veil of tears. Grimthorn resumed speaking.

"If we can create a big jumphole," he said, "pour more power into those jumphole expanders than the Imperium's ever seen, maybe we can create a jumphole big enough to drop their reactor into jumpspace."

"Admiral!" Lieutenant Renning cried. "Their weapon has started firing again! We've lost the Resolute!"

Grimthorn looked at her.

"You know the depth of the boneship's reactor. You have the calculations." He gestured at the console. "How many more ships can we lose before this doesn't work?"

Kinnit's mouth opened uselessly a couple times. She looked at the calculations, wishing they'd go away. She wanted it to already be too late for this plan. She wanted this to not be an option. But her treacherous mind spun through the numbers.

"Five," she said in a watery voice.

"Admiral, we've lost another ship! The ISS Bastion!"

"Man your station," Grimthorn said quietly.

Kinnit stared at him, tears falling now. Then she spun and stormed to her weapons console.

"Wraithfleet," Grimthorn said into the comms. "Cuneus formation. Prepare for our final assault."