The Agni drifts, a dark wound across Terra’s curving blue. The proud battlecruiser is more than a mile long, bristling with weapons along its spine and blunt-nosed bow, and though its engines now emit barely a flicker of maintenance-power, its heavy deflector shields still shimmer like oil in starlight. Two heavy cruisers flank the capital ship, their own reactors pulsing gently like dying fireflies made of metal.

Mars Fleet’s attack plans, theorized and then formalized by the Vulcan and her sister ships over the long hours of acceleration, await Commander Atsuya’s final confirmation.

Atsuya tries to push his reluctance aside, but he finds it difficult to shake the Vulcan’s words: if those ships are no longer corrupted, what a waste it would be…

Atsuya clenches his fists. Better that he makes this decision than one of the other commanders. Yes, to spare them that weight, if he is mistaken—that is his sacrifice, and his duty.

“Vulcan, confirm launch sequence,” he thinks, accessing the prepared targeting matrix, needlessly re-checking that the ordnance loads are primed and ready. Even his mind-speak feels gravelly with reluctance.

Confirmed, the Vulcan instantly responds. Artemis and sister frigates report: ready. Weapons helmsmen await your mark, Commander.

Atsuya nods to himself, and spares a final glance to one of Terra’s proudest constructs. It must be done.

The order is on the cusp of actualization, less than a second away, when then the stars begin to shift.

Throbbing alarms rip the Vulcan’s attention away from its wonderfully complex attack plan, full of targeting feints and scout drone detonations. Its mind freezes for a fraction of a moment as it struggles to make sense of what is occurring.

Can it be real? a part of the Vulcan’s mind whispers to itself. An object, larger than any Fleet schematic designer would dare dream of, begins to emerge from a Warp tear between Mars Fleet and Terra.

Then the Vulcan’s mind bristles, like the tail of a cornered cat:

Androvan Spire Ship detected, Commander.

No.

The Vulcan’s AI suppresses its shock and springs to work, attempting a reference-frame analysis as the massive ship shudders into existence, bending both time and space to the breaking point in its wake. It puts the behemoth’s computed mass at twice that of Terra Fleet’s entire orbital tonnage—twice, that is, before disaster struck. It recalls an esoteric briefing from Fleet’s archives, Class Five classification, reserved only for Fleet Commanders and ship AIs, and shoves it into Commander Atsuya’s mind.

To call the Androvan Spire a ship is perhaps a misnomer: it’s more like a sharp-shaped moon, a ribbed dagger on an impossible scale, replete with its own habitats and dockyards. At least, that’s what Fleet’s spy networks have hypothesized, whispers that have been sparsely correlated by the Fleet diplomatic corps stationed on Ghosen, one of the few Androvan worlds willing to accept such delegations.

Fleet gave a seventy-three percent likelihood that Spire ships were the Androvan equivalent of a joke, or an elaborate counter-espionage plant used as some sort of an intimidation tactic. They may, in fact, not technically be Androvan at all, Fleet hypothesized, but rather some splinter-species of the moth-like beings, who choose to live amongst the stars rather than be bound to any planet.

After all, Fleet has never actually seen one of these bloody monstrosities. But the myth-like description, along with the Androvan-adjacent architecture, is unmistakable.

Atsuya is momentarily too dumbstruck to respond to the Vulcan. He simply stares at the horrifying thing, his mind struggling to comprehend its presence. But then the Vulcan gives him a nudge, a kick in the reproductive organs, so to speak, and the ten-thousand hours of Fleet training override his instinctive terror.

Recalibrate weapons? The Vulcan asks, a tinge of—bafflement? Bemusement?—dripping into the normally emotionless AI’s mind-speak.

Atusya gives the Vulcan’s fresh tactics analysis a cursory glance; he’s fully aware of their firepower, having pored over their kinetic output for the past twelve hours. He doesn’t need the Vulcan’s mind to tell him what he already knows: perhaps a pristine Terra Fleet, or the battle-hardened Third Vanguard Fleet, would have a puncher’s chance, but it’s laughable to think they could land any kind of blow.

Terra’s location has always been humanity’s most closely guarded secret. And yet here, at their most defenseless, is one of their oldest enemies.

Terra is dead.

Atsuya snarls, and pulls up the Vulcan’s brutally unsentimental tactics analysis once again.

But don’t let them say we didn’t fight.

His mind is suddenly sharp as he relays instructions to the Vulcan’s weapons helmsmen, instructing them to peel off portions of the Vulcan’s mind for emergency weapons launches; perhaps a guided missile or two will manage to evade the thing’s defenses and strike deep into some impossible vulnerability.

Yes, the Vulcan and her sisters will unleash every scrap of ordnance at their disposal at the alien ship, and then pull blackout gravs while overloading the cores. A right fitting send-off we’ll give old Terra…

Not that it’ll matter—

He’s about to give the new irreversible command, barely five seconds after the Spire-ship’s arrival, when again his attention is pulled away by a fresh alarm, this time an emergency channel request from the Vulcan’s Navigator, Bennu, that scratches against his occupied mind.

Atsuya ignores it.

Between the threat of the corruption and the Androvan ship’s presence over Terra, the idea of a Warp jump is laughable. He’s about to override the emergency request for an open channel, protocols be damned, when Bennu’s screaming thoughts bleed into the Vulcan’s AI mind, twisting their essence into Atsuya’s consciousness like ink through water.

THEY’RE INSIDE MY MIND! she screams.

Atsuya becomes aware of Bennu’s body, her long dark limbs slamming against the confines of her navigation pod, her blood pressure skyrocketing and her heart coming into a brief arrhythmia.

Atsuya feels Vulcan scrambling to isolate her linkage into the ships’ systems, but it's too late— the battle-comm chatter amongst the Vulcan’s crew and the Mars Fleet ships, an ever-present background hum in Atsuya’s mind, vanishes. It is replaced by a void that is somehow louder.

Bennu goes still, as if paralyzed. When she speaks again, each word lands like a reverberating gong. The language may be Standard, but the voice is not her own.

“THIS SHARD ACKNOWLEDGES YOUR PRESENCE.”

The words layer themselves in a dozen inflections, as if multiple voices speak at once—some guttural, some like the humming of distant stars..

“We detected the shudder of the Enemy as it fled your sphere.”

Outside, the Spire-ship drifts, its tessellated spires catching Sol’s rays in black and gold.

“Yes. Your defiance is noted.”

A tremor passes through the Mars Fleet ships, as if they have caught the ripples of a far-off earthquake.

“You may continue your existence.”

The Vulcan’s comm systems flare back online, and Mars Fleet’s battle chatter explodes in disbelief at what’s just occurred. Atsuya feels Bennu’s eyes roll forward as the Vulcan administers a cocktail of drugs. She is unconscious, blood dripping from her nose and eyes, but she’s alive.

Atsuya doesn’t know what to think. He supposes it doesn’t matter. The Spire-ship floats, unbothered, far above Terra’s curve, slowly drawing away from the fragile planet.

If that bloody thing changes its mind, we’ll need the Agni and those cruisers ready, Atsuya thinks.

There will be no suicidal attack on the Spire-ship, no destruction of Terra’s last ships. Atsuya lets the Vulcan relay those orders while he turns to a long-ignored ping.

He opens a comm channel to Terra-side Fleet.