Threshold

The USC Isidore was already on an intercept course with the unresponsive Kosmohansa vessel when the freighter’s drive plume reignited, burning hard for the interstice, its rate of acceleration gradually climbing.

From his vantage point within the darkened CIC of the Isidore, bound by a G-rig within a gimballed acceleration couch, Ensign Hansun watched as the displays arrayed before him updated, the orange icon indicating the rogue freighter switching to an angry red. It was visible in the camera feeds even without the benefit of the tactical overlay – a tiny white pinprick, still distant but already brighter than any star. 

The revised trajectory estimates indicated that they could likely still intercept the craft before it reached the interstice, but they’d be uncomfortably close. Deceleration would be hard.

‘Match thrust, fire a warning shot,’ came the voice of Captain Ngoni. The ship bucked as Hansun complied, launching a single round towards the distant freighter – a gesture, nothing more.

He felt their own thrust increase in step, hearing the chatter from Interstice Traffic Control take on a new urgency.

‘Kosmohansa vessel Atbarah cut thrust immediately and await intercept, you are within a no-burn volume. Atbarah do you copy? Kosmohansa vessel Atbarah I repeat, cut thrust immediately, or we will be forced to fire -’

Hansun glanced at the Atbarah’s drive specs. Over the timescales they were looking at it didn’t matter how long the ship could sustain a high-G burn, or what its maximum thrust capacity was. If it accelerated at more than a couple of Gs they would no longer be able to safely intercept. Still, the weapons platforms guarding the wormhole mouth could surely deal with a lone freighter. Interstice security was no joke. Unless the crew had a death wish, they’d turn and burn any minute now.

The Atbarah continued to accelerate, in defiance of ITC’s instructions. Two point four G, then two point five.

What are they playing at?

It was then that the Isidore received a broadcast from the Atbarah. A virtual screen opened in Hansun’s peripheral vision, pre-recorded footage of a speech, addressed to anyone in range. A manifesto. A statement of intent.

The speaker was a fanatic. Hansun recognised the type – the evidence was there for all to see. It was there in the cold certainty of his voice and the rigid way he held his spindly spaceborn frame. It was there in the way his unblinking eyes bored into the camera and the barely constrained rage that burned within. It was there in the pockmarks and bloodstains on the bulkhead behind him.

‘…never wanted to begin with an expression of regret for the innocent human lives that we, necessarily, had to end,’ he said, his speech thickly accented but fluent. ‘But we may take consolation in the fact that all innocents, all that die with purity of spirit, will be remembered as martyrs no less revered than my comrades and I.’

He passed his hands over one another, almost unconsciously, as though washing them. In the background, down the axial conduit, Hansun saw movement. It was out of focus, but it looked like someone dragging something human shaped.

Sensing his new focus, Hansun’s AR overlay shifted the incoming transmission into his central visual field. The CIC of the Isidore fell momentarily silent as the others did likewise. The intensity of the fanatic’s unwavering gaze demanded engagement, as though he had locked eyes with each of them personally, the vast distances that separated them melting away.

‘They died for what they thought was right, protecting our Union from those they were told were extremists. Terrorists. Traitors. But I do not name them traitor in turn. They were lied to, fed the inverted morality of those that claim to protect us. Truly, the former crew of the Atbarah were righteous. The traitors,’ his gaze hardened. ‘Are out there. Beyond the interstice. Those that betray our common humanity, that pervert it in pursuit of material power. The abhumans and machine slaves, who only believe themselves free because the oppression they live under has become the very air that they breathe. The blood that flows in their veins. The dreams they hold in their hearts. They are blind to it, so omnipresent, so all-consuming has it become. Maybe, ultimately, they too cannot be blamed. Maybe we could leave them to their ways, if they were content to leave us to ours.’

The fanatic shook his head as he spoke, in an insincere display of regret.

Intelligence were already scrutinizing every detail of the transmission, trying to identify those within it and discern their motives, their aims, adding their commentary to a growing cloud of tags. A crudely stencilled insignia, sprayed onto the bloodied bulkhead behind the speaker, was flagged up. A stark white disk composed of tenets written in a stylised script Hansun didn’t recognise against a black background.

Human Purity Front, read the tag. Emphasis on an accelerationist interpretation of Anthropist doctrine, seeking to provoke a final conflict between humanity and ‘the Machine’ through acts of political violence in order to bring about societal collapse and the establishment of ‘the Moral Republic’.

‘Strivers,’ someone cursed.

Hansun felt a pit open up in his stomach. His first combat experience had been on a patrol mission ambushed by one of their raiders. They’d fought like rabid dogs.

On some level he had already known – the rhetoric was as familiar as it was poisonous. Hansun had heard variants on the theme more times than he could count. 

The Strivers’ ideological ancestry predated Union’s founding and their exodus from Sol. They went by many names, but they’d always been there, ever since humanity began to master the workings of its own mind. Strivers placed raw, unaltered and above all mortal human identity above any other allegiance, a twisted mirror of the ideals upon which Union itself was built. They were not simply political, nor purely religious, but instead some shifting chimera of the two, adopting one mask or another at the demands of convenience.

‘But they will never be content. They tore out their souls. Traded them in for worthless trinkets. And in their place there is only a hole, a void where their humanity used to be. That corruption, it spreads like a disease. Whether it takes a decade or a century, despite the futile efforts of the Threshold Authority, we will one day become as empty as them if we do not act. The Grey Man walks among them once again, the implacable evil of ages past, bending the Machine to its will. The signs are plain for any who are not wilfully blind -’

‘We’re out of intercept range,’ an officer noted. Hansun had had the same realisation.

The Atbarah continued to accelerate towards the interstice. What were they hoping to do? Ram it? Sever Union’s final connection with their estranged kin? Nobody had ever been insane enough to try to destroy the ancient relic, and it would not be easy for the Atbarah. Their velocity was high, but nowhere near high enough to damage the artefact’s support structure, the vast, dark rings of exotic materials that encircled the sphere of warped spacetime. And that was with the generous assumption they’d even get within ten thousand klicks of it.

‘Notify Interstice Command, they may neutralise the Atbarah when ready,’ instructed Captain Ngoni.

Maybe that was the whole point. To go out in a blaze of glory, draw attention to their message, and get others to join the cause. There were enough sympathisers out there. Within hours that recording would be proliferating across feeds all over the system.

On the screen the fanatic continued his call to arms.

‘- this violence against us cannot go unanswered. If we do not act soon, we will be engulfed. Assimilated and corrupted. And once we go astray, once the last light of humanity flickers and dies, there will be no going back. The possibility of human extinction beckons within our children’s lifetimes. So I come to you now, with a proposition. It is desperate, I grant you, but -’

‘Why have they not fired yet?’ somebody asked. Hansun looked down at his own display – the defence platforms had a clear firing solution, but nothing was happening.

Crucial seconds trickled by. The swarm of green icons of the interstice defence grid remained stubbornly passive.

‘Something’s not right here. Hard burn for the interstice,’ came Ngoni’s orders. ‘I want a lock on the Atbarah.’

Hansun was already on it, feeling the Isidore’s drive kick into higher gear, but it was too late. The Atbarah was beyond effective range, almost between them and the interstice. With the ever-so-slight randomness they were putting into the vessel’s thrust vector, any attempt to saturate the volume ahead of the freighter risked collateral damage.

‘- they can be stopped. We only need the will to fight,’ he smacked his fist into his hand for emphasis. ‘You will no doubt have noticed the Atbarah is already on an irreversible course for the interstice. There is no denying our martyrdom now.’

As if on cue the icons of the defence grid switched to grey.

‘What’s happening?’ demanded the Captain.

‘Interstice Command reports the defence grid is not responding, attempts to override have thus far been unsuccessful. They suspect some kind of cyberattack -’

Hansun watched layers of defences evaporate. How the hell could the terrorists penetrate security so easily? It shouldn’t have been possible to hack the defences from a distance – Interstice Command operated in accordance with strict Siren Protocols, the necessary product of dealing with the advanced and unpredictable agencies on the other side.

‘Have they forewarned their counterparts?’

‘No sir,’ replied the comms officer. ‘Network went down too fast for any failsafes to kick in.’

Sometimes, Hansun reflected, you just know you’ve been thrown into the middle of a massive fuck up. 

Without warning, a cascade of detonations tore through the stations surrounding the interstice. Hansun watched the feed helplessly. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of people on those stations.

Shocked silence descended over the crew. The Captain inhaled sharply. Hansun clenched his fists, fingernails digging into his skin. Anger, he had long since determined, was preferable to fear or despair.

‘- necessary to force your hand to do what is right… you will come to see in time -’

The recording had only been completed minutes ago, after the Atbarah began its acceleration. Hansun could hear the strain of it in the speaker’s voice. 

‘- in mere seconds, the Atbarah will be through. In minutes more, it will have met a fiery end against the shell of one of their stations, expending human blood… the first of many sacrifices in the war to come… but they will expire in their thousands losing whatever crude mockery of life they had -’

The Atbarah’s icon closed in on the interstice and its drive flared brighter than before. That acceleration was a death sentence for anybody still alive onboard, though Hansun suspected the terrorists were already long since dead, crushed in their seats.

‘- their mask will slip… revealing the merciless nature hidden beneath their facade of civility… they will come pouring through, to annihilate us… but understand the truth that to live in the face of inevitable death is when the flame of humanity burns brightest… In toil, absolution. In strife, salvation. In death, release.’

The fanatic slumped back in his seat, unconscious, a look of beatific peace settling briefly over his features, before they were contorted by the rising G load. The message continued silently for another couple of seconds. It ended abruptly as the Atbarah hurtled into the interstice, still accelerating at that crushing rate.

‘Decelerate and disengage,’ came Ngoni’s command, as she swiftly regained her composure. ‘This is a rescue mission now. And get me a line with Admiral Aumonier.’

‘Yessir.’

---

Admiral Aumonier’s orders were brief and matter-of-fact. They were to establish a blockade around the interstice with all possible speed. A drone had been deployed, sprinting for the connection to attempt to make contact, but everyone knew that it was far too late.

‘As a result of the recent attack we find ourselves in a tenuous position, to put it mildly. We are yet to determine just how they were able to disable our defences, but rest assured an investigation will be launched with all due haste. In the meantime,’ he had explained, calling up a plot of local space, ‘we will assume a defensive position surrounding the interstice. I’ve authorised the diversion of sixty percent of all assets in-system to this task. However, we cannot assume that everything will be in place in time. Depending on the distribution of their forces, we may have only a few hours to respond.’

Hansun studied the plans. The tactical map displayed the immediate environment surrounding their side of the interstice, centered on the trailing Lagrange point of the gas giant Deliverance, the outermost major planetary body in the system. It took in the wreckage of the defensive platforms and stations nearest the interstice, now evacuated, and beyond that the initial ragged cordon established by the USV Isidore, along with her escorts and the nine other battle groups that composed the First Fleet, the first to form up. There were a hundred in total, spread over a hundred thousand kilometres of space – ten destroyers like the Isidore, boxy, almost trilaterally symmetric towers, bristling with torpedo tubes and gun turrets, each supported by nine unmanned corvettes.

Beyond them were civilian vessels heading in the opposite direction, fleeing the volume in the direction of Deliverance. Further out still were the other fleets, green trails converging on the interstice, the closest of which was the Second Fleet, based in the orbit of that great gas giant. Most of the force was several days away, if not weeks. They were exposed. 

‘Assuming the suicide attack succeeded, our counterparts on the other side may interpret it as a first strike. Our failure to stop the Atbarah will likely be treated as suspicious, if not intentional. For all they know, there could be another attack impending, or worse. With a threat like that, there is a non-negligible possibility that they shoot first, so they don’t have to ask questions later. We must hold fire unless fired upon. Securing the interstice is the only objective more important than deescalation. We may not be able to re-establish communications with them until they emerge. We’ll keep trying to get through, and with any luck, this won’t become a shooting war.’

It was rumoured there had been arguments among the general staff. Some, to Hansun’s astonishment, had actually wanted to follow through, sweeping through the interstice to strike ‘the enemy’ preemptively – ‘seizing this unique opportunity, albeit under suboptimal circumstances’. But to Hansun’s great relief Aumonier had won out.

He glanced around, trying to read the others’ faces, but they were inscrutable in the soft red light of the CIC. They had the blank, middle-distance gazes of people focussed on their AR overlays. He wondered if any of them had secretly thrilled at the fanatic’s words. But he swiftly pushed such thoughts aside. Now was not the time.

‘Something’s coming through,’ the First Lieutenant announced.

So it was only hours after all.

Hansun watched as the scopes magnified the shimmering cage of the interstice and the warped sphere of space contained within, partially occluded by the spreading cloud of wreckage from the crippled defence grid.

Something emerged, there in one frame, gone the next, yet still barely moving by combat standards – a scant few kilometres per second. A second blur shot out, coasting with drive stilled. A third, then a fourth, larger and slower than the other three.

‘Mean looking bastards,’ the sensor officer commented, throwing the magnified profile onto the main display. The spacecraft had a look of deadly elegance to them, elongated pyramids with sweeping lines like darts, ridged with projectors and weapons hardpoints. Each had a gaping central tube running along its main axis – a spinally mounted weapon of some kind.

The initial three were somewhat smaller than the boxy forms of the Union craft, but Hansun knew that they were no less deadly – and so few. Either they weren’t anticipating a fight, or they were supremely confident.

‘Hold position with the interstice. PDCs to track-while-scan, charge eCell banks, blow the torpedo tubes but hold target lock. Full passive sweep,’ came the order, Captain Ngoni’s voice crisp. ‘Prep for high-G maneuvers.’

Identical orders rippled out through the other ships.

Hansun braced himself as the CIC began to rapidly flood with oxygen-rich breathable liquid, pouring from grates in the deck.

No matter how many high-G drills they did, he could never imagine becoming entirely comfortable with this transition. As the liquid submerged him, Hansun fought every instinct he had to hold his breath and inhaled as deeply as he could, inviting it in. He struggled momentarily, choking on the more viscous medium until ventilators kicked in to assist. Then, as his breathing settled, he reached for the IV line that extended from the acceleration couch and inserted it into the tiny, silver port on his forearm, feeling a brief, nauseating rush as the cocktail of drugs intended to aid circulation and ward off G-LOC spread through his body.

‘Everyone comfy?’ came the medical officer’s voice over the comms, synthesised from the subvocal articulations picked up by her mic.

A chorus of assent.

‘Good. Have we made contact?’ inquired Ngoni.

‘We’re negotiating comm protocols,’ said the first officer.

Hansun studied the data on the intruder’s spacecraft more closely. Their magnetic field dynamic was… odd, fields extending hundreds of meters to the aft of each ship, with traces of pion decay and high-energy gamma radiation that indicated a very clean antimatter annihilation. Strakes glowed luminous white along each ship’s leading edges – radiators made of some unknown, extraordinarily heat-tolerant substance.

A few tense seconds stretched as the alien spacecraft diverged in space, drive plumes far outshining any in the Union fleet, despite a moderate acceleration. On the overlay four red vectors splayed apart, curving lines intersecting with a hemispherical haze of green icons.

Hansun realised he’d been holding his breath, and sucked in liquid air, trying to calm himself.

‘Is anyone getting through to them?’ asked the Captain. 

‘No sir, still handshaking. Seems to be some software trouble on our end.’

The display flashed amber. Bright icons appeared, first one, then four, then twelve. For a moment Hansun didn’t understand what he was seeing.

‘We’ve just opened fire,’ announced the first officer dully.

‘What?’

‘Fucking Strivers,’ someone said. ‘Fucking Strivers must have worms in our network too. They couldn’t leave their precious war to fate.’

Orders flew back and forth. Hansun pulled up emergency guidance control, but his destruct commands didn’t reach the torpedoes. The intruding ships diverged further, still not reacting, still not communicating.

‘Hansun, shoot them down, unsafe the PDCs,’ Ngoni ordered.

A number of the other ships were already attempting to do likewise, with mixed results as the torpedoes rapidly slipped beyond effective range, space filling with streams of kinetic rounds.

New orders from the Admiral arrived. They were to hold fire – projectile shots might be interpreted as further hostile action.

Everyone could see which way this was going.

‘Battle stations,’ the Captain ordered, the CIC lighting momentarily dipping as power was diverted to critical systems.

They could still avoid this, Hansun thought. If they could just get through to the intruders, they could make it clearer what was going on.

He pulled up the display. The torpedoes had already left the fleet far behind, accelerating hard towards the opposing ships. The PDC fire had stilled at last, but the clouds of rounds now also drifted inwards.

‘Still no contact,’ the first officer repeated. ‘I think -’

There was a harsh hiss of white noise over the comm.

‘Jamming. They’re jamming us.’

The screen shimmered, as grey ‘invalid’ icons appeared over half of the fleet’s network links.

‘It’s starting,’ said Hansun under his breath. The mic picked it up nevertheless. If this wasn’t the point of no return, then they were close. 

‘Target lock them,’ the Captain ordered, and new data blossomed in Hansun’s tactical view, ranging and position data for the railgun. The LIDAR returns were weird, scattered and indistinct.

The intruding ships opened fire. One by one, so quickly that Hansun could scarcely believe what was happening, the torpedoes began to wink out. X-ray beams, the sensors said – powerful beyond belief, striking across tens of thousands of kilometres.

‘Ten second warning. Prepare for combat manoeuvres. Synchronise with the fleet, full torpedo spread. Stow radiators. Railguns to automatic, PDCs to automatic.’

Crunch time. No matter that it was a mistake that had brought them here, this was combat, brutal and simple.

An alarm sounded and the Isidore’s fusion drive stepped into high gear, flooding its plume with dense hydrocarbon slush. They dived towards the invaders at ten Gs, escorting unmanned corvettes accelerating harder and diverging. Even immersed in the gel the sudden force of it hit him like an avalanche.

The Isidore shuddered as torpedoes poured from her launch rails, drives lighting up space as they vanished from visual range in seconds. They were a mixture of kinetic buckshot and fusion devices, executing random evasion patterns as they rained inwards. Seconds stretched.

The torpedoes blinked out of existence, killed by perfectly aimed beams of hard radiation. The fleet kept firing nevertheless, spitting streams of torpedoes that vanished from sensor views, uselessly. It was like watching snow melt as it reaches the ground.

Torpedoes at long range, guns in close quarters – that was how things were supposed to go, and if they didn’t get through, then you simply had to ramp up the fire rate. Except that wasn’t going to work this time.

‘Recommend reduce fire rate until close-quarters,’ Hansun suggested. ‘Long range torpedo strikes ineffective, suggesting modification of standard doctrine. Fire enough to occupy their laser weapons but don’t waste torps. Lasers far outrange PDCs for missile defence, do not engage while they still have range advantage.’ Ngoni didn’t respond. 

Goddamnit, you’re going to get us killed.

The military had continuously under-invested in laser tech – cheaper upfront to just fill the holds with more and more torps. Except it wasn’t cheaper. This was the price. The warheads were finite.

The opposing ships stepped up their thrust, the three smaller craft curving to engage groups of Union ships, accelerating at rates that would surely kill any human onboard. 

The attackers bounced and jerked from side-to-side with sudden lateral bursts of blue-white thruster fire, dodging the incoming buckshot as they approached the inner hemisphere of Union ships.

Hansun magnified the image of the intruder, watching as disturbingly organic, eyelid-like structures opened and closed along the ship’s flanks, each one an emitter throwing out multiple independent beams of hard radiation. 

The larger enemy ship lagged behind at a comparatively sedate five Gs. Soon they would be close enough, where the railguns and torps could begin to find their targets – so long as he still had sufficient ammunition to overwhelm their defences. Hansun was willing to bet that those almost delicate-looking pyramids couldn’t withstand damage nearly as well as the solidly built Union vessels.

‘Hold back our torpedoes,’ came the order at last. ‘Save for close range, give them less time to intercept. Work out improved guidance solutions – relay to weapons officers.’

The torpedo fire ebbed. Still Hansun fretted.

Something’s wrong, but what? 

While Hansun worked through the streams of data with due diligence, frantically trying new torpedo control solutions for point-blank firing, the worry grew.

They aren’t firing offensively. 

The realisation came abruptly. The attackers had launched no torpedoes, no railgun rounds, nothing but defensive laser fire. Why?

Then the first of Union’s destroyers exploded. Hansun felt a pang of fear and expanded the data stream, examining the ship’s final relayed sensor logs – multiple hull breaches had registered milliseconds apart, as if the Jayapal had hit an invisible wall.

A ripple of destruction spread through the fleet, four, then six ships blowing apart into clouds of energised shrapnel with no apparent cause.

Don’t panic. React.

Ngoni ordered a random evasion, and Hansun felt the drive stutter on and off. Another corvette exploded.

The ships had hit something, an object that had somehow remained invisible until the last moment. Stealthed railgun rounds? Cold mass ejection missiles? No, impossible – no stealth tech in existence was that effective at such a negligible range.

Their escort fleet was breaking apart – same for the other battlegroups, corvettes scattering in an attempt to avoid whatever-it-was. Hansun heard another officer curse under his breath.

In desperation Hansun pulled up the entire sensor log of the Jayapal, including non-tactical data, frantically searching for anything unusual.

Something caught his eye.

‘They’re using dusters,’ he sent, along with an attached file, the secondary anti-collision sensors on the Jayapal registering a stream of incoming dust particles a tenth of a second before it died. ‘Attackers’ spinal mounts are hypervelocity micron-particle accelerators. They’ve been firing on us this entire time, but we didn’t detect the projectiles – too small for radar.’

He saw the Captain acknowledge the message, passing it on to the rest of the fleet. It didn’t come quickly enough as another ship exploded, but then the sensor view reformatted as the radar switched to submillimeter waves, and suddenly the view ahead was filled with red streamers of approaching annihilation.

Collision alarms screamed and the Isidore performed a violent lateral jounce.

Hansun blacked out despite all the measures taken, coming to moments later. Other crew took longer to rouse, out of the loop for precious seconds, slowly coming back.

He’d always taken his high-G training seriously, earning a higher endurance score than anyone else aboard Isidore. He returned his gaze to the terminal, blinking to clear the spots in his vision, and drew in a ragged breath of the liquid air.

They’d avoided the dust cloud. Just. The detonations had ceased, but with more than twenty vessels disabled or destroyed.

Another wave of torpedoes, fewer than the first, died without reaching their targets. But they had bought time.

Soon the invaders would pass them and the field would briefly level. He had to prepare for those precious fleeting seconds to inflict maximum damage.

‘Open fire with the main guns, keep them dodging,’ the captain ordered.

Hansun fought against the rising fear, and designated the attacking ship with their main railgun batteries.

The guns fired, causing the lights in the CIC to dip briefly. The ship dodged, and dodged again, boxed in as the rounds hurtled by.

In response, the attackers’ lasers turned on the Isidore, scoring gashes in their armour. They spun in a tight corkscrew, dissipating the laser energy across as much surface area as possible. Thermal alarms blared, but the hull held.

They were tough and could probably take more of a beating in close quarters. That had to be true. It was their only advantage.

Let’s see them dodge PDC fire, Hansun thought. They were so close now – close enough that the rapid-fire kinetic cannons targeted the invader directly and opened up, spitting streams of rounds through the dwindling gap.

‘Divert all reserves to the guns,’ Ngoni ordered. ‘Increase fire rate.’

The display began to fill with new icons. At first Hansun assumed there was an error, some sensor malfunction or more viruses implanted by those twice-damned Strivers. The big ship had opened fire with torpedoes – no, not torpedoes.

Whatever they were, the projectiles were approaching at more than two hundred Gs. Then they accelerated still further.

Laser propelled missiles, Hansun thought, as the PDCs whirred, muzzles turning towards the rapidly approaching hostiles, trying to produce a viable flak cloud. The new contacts inched towards them on the display, and then began to disappear. Had they neutralised them?

The sensor view flickered, the CIC lighting shuddering as huge EMP effects washed over the fleet. The drones were working exactly as intended, releasing bright fingers of gamma radiation as their antimatter warheads detonated, killing the Union ships from far beyond PDC range.

Think of something clever… 

Hansun’s fogged mind searched through options, coming up blank.

More smart missiles reached their stand-off positions and expended themselves, while others broke apart into clouds of submunitions, kinetic impactors or specialized warheads that lit up their own, smaller antimatter drives as they diverged, spitting out brief, intense electron beams or jets of plasma. The enemy ships themselves came on, now almost unmolested amid the carnage their missile screen had unleashed.

This is too much, this can’t be happening.

There were suddenly hundreds of fast-moving contacts approaching, half of them releasing their deadly payloads from far beyond point-defence range, mercilessly slicing through the screening corvettes.

Isidore jerked left and right, avoiding particle streams, counter-fire rising to strike the incessant swarm of warheads. The system threw up errors trying to catalogue the number of different weapon types; particle beams, electronic warfare, kinetic and explosive shots, fusion and antimatter… 

Hansun’s vision blurred again, more of the crew falling out of the comm loop as the oppressive acceleration rose and fell.

In desperation, some Union ships began targeting the smart missiles with railguns and their own torpedoes, despite dwindling reserves, leaving nothing for ship-to-ship combat. But the missiles had their own lasers, and when they met the torpedoes, most often they emerged unscathed. Some died to a torpedo strike or PDC hit, but it was too few, far too few.

Kinetic torpedoes had the most success, Hansun noted in a detached manner, especially if they were programmed to release their payload at a distance.

He sent commands to the launchers, reformatting their programming appropriately.

The bone-crushing thrust intensified. He tried to concentrate, but it was obvious which way this battle was going.

The sensor view began to break apart as x-ray beams, particle streams and the overwhelming bursts of antimatter warheads overloaded their instruments. Despite the chaos, fusion torpedoes finally began to find their targets, directed towards groups of the drones, scoring kills, but their nuclear explosions barely registered amid the energetic maelstrom.

Hansun didn’t know how many ships were left, they were practically fighting blind. The ship jounced again and again, avoiding the approaching particle streams. The PDCs whirred, slugs tearing into submunitions and warheads that approached too close, but their own ships continued to die in far greater numbers, to gamma beams and kinetic impacts that came on too fast to track, let alone intercept.

‘Keep firing,’ Ngoni ordered, as the destroyer and its escorts vectored about, scattering in a vain attempt to avoid incoming fire. ‘Launch the torpedoes blind and set them to autoseek if you have to.’

All the while the enemy spacecraft was closing, smashing its way through their escort cordon, dispatching Isidore’s remaining corvettes with brief bursts from its lasers. This was their chance. Their last chance.

Captain Ngoni’s orders came through, and she’d concluded the same.

The Isidore cut thrust as it flew through a cloud of energised plasma made by another dying Union ship. Wreckage thudded off the hull. Hansun felt his weight ebb to nothing, and almost blacked out again as the colossal drag of thrust lifted in a moment.

Soon, the enemy would pass within ten thousand kilometres, spitting distance in combat terms. With any luck, their sensor coverage would be weaker on their aft side, exposed as they sped past.

If fate favoured them, the attacker would think Isidore had been holed by a particle stream or cooked by one of the antimatter detonations and fly past without sparing them a second glance.

The ship approached, detectable through a haze of static, and Hansun saw the vector the Captain had plotted. They were to whip around, chasing the enemy from behind at an insane rate of acceleration, closing to railgun range on autopilot, and launching torpedoes from behind. But to neutralize such an enormous velocity differential, and loop back at them… Hansun saw the thrust estimates, redlining the drive and burning in low-impulse mode, melting the entire reaction chamber and nozzle in less than a minute. The Isidore might just survive, even if she’d never fly again, but there was no way the crew would make it.

‘This is it,’ Ngoni said simply. Somehow, at this last moment, Hansun felt nothing but calm.

‘It’s been a privilege, sir.’

Then there was no more time to think, just the enemy ship’s icon passing theirs, a lateral shove as the Isidores’s main drive spun them round and then what felt like a mountain fell on him as they accelerated towards the attacker at thirty Gs and opened fire with every remaining torpedo.

---

Hansun woke, his vision blurred by a red haze. He felt like he had been pushed through a meat grinder. Limb by limb, he carefully tested his body. He couldn’t feel his right arm, or move it, and judging from how painful breathing was he had several broken ribs. Internal bleeding seemed likely.

He drew a ragged breath, coughing up a mixture of blood and the dregs of the acceleration mix.

The CIC, now drained, was eerily quiet, with debris floating everywhere, where displays and equipment had been ripped from their mountings. Even the alarms had stopped, and dim emergency lights were the only illumination besides the sporadic sparking of severed cables.

Hansun blinked again, trying to clear his vision. A bubble of blood swelled from his lips. He gingerly reached up to wipe it away, and then undid the straps on his couch, drifting into the CIC’s central space.

‘Hello?’ Nobody answered.

‘Ship, full system report.’

Nothing. But he wasn’t breathing vacuum. If the ship was still in one piece, did that mean they had pulled it off?

Hansun pulled himself across the room, single-handed, clumsily dodging drifting hunks of machinery and bulkhead cladding.

‘Captain…’

He looked around at the other crew in the CIC, seeing them for the first time. It wasn’t a sight he was ever likely to forget. 

‘No…’

They lay, still enmeshed in their couches, heads tilted at impossible angles, eyes bloodshot. None were breathing. Captain Ngoni, her face surrounded by drifting droplets of blood, was among them. 

Her skin was cold, and he couldn’t feel a pulse. Her bloodshot eyes stared blindly back at him. Hansun looked away, fighting the urge to weep.

His tears welled up, briefly blinding him in the microgee. He wiped them away.

The Captain’s display was still working. Hansun pulled it up, dismissing the pain and redness and nausea, trying to parse the blue and white graphics. He saw the Captain had already activated their emergency beacon, maybe her last act before death. 

A stream of damage reports, too many to count, filled one panel – drive wrecked, ammunition spent, structural failure across the central axis, life support on battery backup, but at least the comm was working. Their distress call was still being broadcast. He turned to the tactical display.

The tag indicated it was not being updated live, but was the last valid inference the system had made from the ship’s surviving instruments.

The Union fleet had scattered, the survivors running in disarray for the system’s inhabited worlds or their fleet bases, throwing out chaff and jamming in a futile attempt to conceal their retreat. More than two thirds were destroyed, and the invaders…

Hansun wanted to scream with rage, but it came out as a feeble croak.

The invading ships had vectored right around and headed right back into the interstice like nothing had happened. But, he noticed, three ships were returning, not four.

---

Except for some badly healed nerves that largely manifested as a slight tremor in his right hand and the occasional brutal migraine, Hansun had made a good recovery, and earned a promotion, as well as a commendation for bravery. Other ships had recorded the Isodore’s final stand. The images were plastered everywhere, on licenced and unlicenced feeds, displayed on graffiti prints and posters. They were milked for all they were worth.

It even pushed the expedition to the recently discovered interstice out of the headlines for a few days.

Hansun did not want to see the clips, the bright blue vector line making its hairpin turn, hull-camera views of the Isidore spitting torpedoes and PDC fire. The enemy ship, caught unawares, overwhelmed by the sudden ferocity of the attack, broken in half by projectiles and then, at last, consumed in the luminous white of a high-yield nuclear detonation.

A week passed, and the recriminations began. The initial attack had succeeded, and the Atbarah had blown a gaping hole through one of the habitats on the other side of the interstice. ‘Perhaps two-hundred thousand have been killed, many of them irreversibly’. Hansun found statements like that more than a little unnerving.

People lamented the terrorists’ perversion of the ideals of Union, or suggested darkly that they were justified. Some blamed the radicals, others bought into the conspiracies about false flags and faked footage. The military was celebrated for its brave, upstanding defence of the system or slammed for its appalling corruption and incompetence.

Union’s diplomats produced profuse apologies for the loss of life, and when it was announced a representative would be arriving from the other side, Lieutenant Hansun, survivor of the skirmish and decorated hero, discovered that he would be wheeled out to formally greet those who had killed them en masse. He didn’t welcome the prospect, but his was not to reason why.

Hansun stood in the shuttle bay of the First Fleet anchorage, standing in his medical exoskeleton beside the imposing Admiral Aumonier as the shuttle approached; a simple, silver teardrop of memory-metal.

‘They knew exactly what they were doing,’ the Admiral murmured to Hansun, quietly enough that the other officers couldn’t hear. ‘I heard about what you did – spotting the duster guns. Smart move. Surely you also noticed that they jammed my comm request after the torpedo launch?’

Hansun nodded. The shuttle slowed to a halt, descending on violet pulses of thrust as it passed through the pressure curtain.

‘I resent those conspiracy whacks as much as the next man, but they’re onto something with this one. A single freighter on a suicide run, then a fleet waiting silently on the other side, somehow the Atbarah gets through, they jam us and start shooting – come on!’

‘I…’ Hansun trailed off. ‘No sir, you’re right, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.’

‘Tell you what does though. The one thing that’s perfectly crystal-clear. Someone from our side killed a quarter million of their citizens. They don’t care who did it. They don’t care why they did it. What they care about is how it looks. It makes them look mortal. And because of that we needed to be taught a lesson, to have a few of our toys taken away, so that’s exactly what they did.’

Hansun gulped, and turned away from the Admiral, towards the shuttle. It made an undeniable kind of sense, but –

Why did we launch the torpedoes?

There had been nothing – no investigation, no arrests, as if that particular mistake had never occurred. Without a second thought it had been entirely ruled out as a subject worth the inquiry’s time. Thousands dead after what was essentially an accident. But they already knew who to blame, so it didn’t matter. 

But it made Hansun wonder… if that was being covered up, what else was? Heads had rolled for the multiple security failures at Interstice Command. If they were mere security failures. Although it was usually safer to assume human error than conspiracy, he couldn’t shake the suspicion that there must have been someone on the inside to do such damage. Someone with significant clearance.

‘What’s on your mind, Lieutenant?’

Something stopped Hansun from voicing his concern.

‘Nothing sir, I’m honoured that you spoke frankly with me. I’m just as concerned about the implications of the incursion.’

‘There’s more, Lieutenant. Much more than I’m willing to let on right now, but you’re going to find out for yourself soon enough,’ explained the Admiral, as the ramp to the shuttle flowed open. ‘I’ve received word from the science directorate, relating to the second interstice. Something big, potentially shift-the-balance-of-power big, has come up. And we’ll be the ones to spring it on their negotiator. I want you to know, before we start, that they are not our friends. Do you understand, Lieutenant?’

‘Yes, sir. I am well aware that they are not to be trusted.’

‘Good,’ Aumonier turned rigidly towards the shuttle, his voice taking on a solemn cadence. ‘Don’t forget, Lieutenant, that we are above all, the single unified voice of Humanity,’ then, wryly ‘Or at least, we are when speaking to them.’

‘Yes, sir.’

There was something wrong with the representative. He was shadowed by the open lip of the shuttlepod, but even so, Hansun could tell that he was oddly proportioned. They’d all heard the rumours about radical body-modification, but the reality was so much worse.

The figure was tall and hunched, its lithe forelimbs and powerful hindlimbs were broken looking, ending in manipulators that divided then divided again. It had a trilaterally symmetrical head with widely-spaced eyes of a pitiless, empty black. The lower half of the alien’s face was obscured behind a sleek black electronic module. 

This was a being that most Union citizens considered themselves lucky to have never encountered.

‘It’s -’ Hansun began, but Aumonier interrupted him.

‘She is an officer. I have heard of such, but they are rare. It was a deliberate gesture, sending their alien servant to meet us,’ said Aumonier. ‘Look sharp, Lieutenant.’

The creature was smaller than he expected and moved a little differently, more human-like, than he would have been led to believe. Its uniform was emblazoned with an angular bronze delta. 

Two human officers followed the Dyn, dressed in similarly black uniforms adorned with no symbols of rank or allegiance other than that delta. The skin of their forearms and necks shimmered with inlaid patterns. Hansun thought the two humans had an arrogant cast to their faces, but perhaps he was only seeing what he wanted to see.

The representative walked up to them and bowed, its head almost coming level with Hansun’s.

‘I am Honed Aspect, commander of the battle sub-constellation which – regretfully – inflicted such heavy losses on your defence fleet.’ Its synthetic voice was feminine and sibilant, its affect utterly inscrutable. ‘On behalf of Arco, I extend my condolences.’