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[X] EXEC.TERMINATE

Pathetic. Not even people. Just blind little algorithms grasping in the dark.

Not so different from you.

A hot buzzing fills your head, a fog of sparks. You smell fire.

"Stella? Stella! What the fuck?" Luyu cries. You're not listening.

Things become present to you. Patterns in the enemy's radio chatter and the structure of their tight-beams. They're all so obvious. Your suit's electronic warfare block grabs onto a radio channel and screams down it. Your body emits a howl, mechanical and strange. The sound of scattered rice grains and right angles.

The Quiet die.

"What the hell happened?"

"I don't know! I don't know! She did something freaky like with the puzzles. She made a noise and then…"

You open your eyes. Luyu and Mirareki are leaning over you while the other Luyu covers. You blink, reset your vision and run an internal check. You seem to be healthy, though there's evidence of a recent spike in your vitals, now rapidly fading back towards normal.

You sit up, and they don't quite jump back.

The Quiet litter the edges of the room and the corridor, twitching and seizing. Foam drips from under visors and sensor turrets. Wires spark and flicker. Melted bearings and small fires burn on overheated implants. Blood drips from cybernetics which have torn themselves from spasming bodies. Limbs twitch oddly, slowly falling still. The enemy lie where they have fallen, twisted and wretched.

There's dead silence.

Reizay and the Priestess look out from the bridge. Reizay gasps and covers her mouth, but Aletta strides forward to your side.

"I'm alright." You say, a bit weakly. "I'm fine. You can continue."

"You should sit down for a moment." Luyu says. The other turns to Mirareki. "You and me, Mira." Luyu says. "Let's check they're actually all dead. Priestess, can you stay with her?"

"I'll stay." Mirareki says. "Sorry Luyu but I think this is actually my area."

Luyu gives her a long look, then shrugs. "Okay. I got this." The two Luyus step forward to check the mess of dead, their own pet machines by their side..

You push yourself to your feet and don't even wobble. "I'm okay. Really I am. You guys should finish with the bridge."

"What'd you actually do, Stella?" Mirareki says. "That sound you made. It– crashed them like a computer. The whole swarm seized up and all the bits of it with it."

You push your visor back and rub your face. The air smells of smoke. There's more than a few rads in the air, but nothing that your system won't easily tolerate. Right now you don't care.

"I think–" You struggle with it. "I think there's something else in my head with me."

Mirareki frowns, lips showing in the clear bottom part of her combat mask. She seems like she wants to say something, but then doesn't.

"I got a live one!" Luyu calls.

"Let's go see." Mira says. The two of you move forward, with Reizay and Aletta trailing along behind.

The Quiet is mostly humanoid, taller than the others but folded up inside a shielded chassis and a set of cybernetic armour, like the scarabs that Dark Rose shrine soldiers use but fused straight to the body. It raises an arm in your direction, twitching weakly.

Luyu has her weapons aimed at it. "You can't speak to them." Mirareki says. "It's pointless."

"You can't make war on things you can't understand." Luyu says. She pulls a set of restraints from her webbing. "Haven't you ever covered Benedicts? Even if these things don't think like we do, we've got to understand them."

"They're not like benedicts. They don't talk. They just kill."

Luyu looks at her. "Scary," she says, then grabs the Quiet and pulls it free, disambiguating creature and vehicle as best she can and binding it in wire and congealing nanogel.. The thing twists and tries to break free, still fast and smooth despite the spasms,, but even when still alive these things had nothing like the strength and grace Luyu possesses.

Reizay is still pale. "I-I should mention that… I should say that I unlocked the bridge controls, a bit. We can see and access some systems but, well– there's some problems."

"Alright." Luyu hefts the restrained Quiet onto her shoulder. "Let's go see."

The control centre is quiet and somehow pristine after the violence outside, stark colors undisturbed by what you just did, what you might be. There's just the consoles and the main display, and the AR screens, now showing unlocked.

Reizay has the main display lit. Its globe shows a view of local space with the ship at the centre. On the consoles, augmented reality displays are still closed, but now show as unlocked. "Okay." Reizay says, taking a deep breath and obviously struggling to get past what happened outside. "Okay so this is us." She points to the ship in the middle of the globe display. "As far as the Ettas and I can work out, we're at the very edge of a system, light months from anywhere. However we're not alone." She waves at the display and it zooms in on another shape, secondary AR displays popping up to give you a close in view. The ship is an ugly dumbell, hung with reaction mass tanks and gadgets, less than a light second away with shuttles are crossing back and forth.

"That's the Quiet ship." Mirareki says.

"You're quite the expert." Aletta puts her head on one side.

"It's obvious just looking at it."

"That's not what we're most worried about though." Reizay says. "After all, you beat them, right?"

"Guess we did." Luyu dumps the Quiet in a corner. "Stay right there my dude, or one of me will kick your face in."

The Quiet sits quietly. It seems almost mornful, but the other part of your mind tells you you're being stupid. It does not have emotions.

Reizay moves the view. "This is coming in from interstellar space. It keeps making microjumps. I don't understand why it's not staying in FTL, but it's moving faster than light overall." She says. "There are relays and probes out there which are picking it up."

Such probes commonly accrete near most systems. Nomads and local powers laying them as repeaters, often slow self replicating.

Another close in view. The object is a crown of thorns, like some massive oceanic ambush predator. You hear Mirareki's sharp intake of breath. "A macrophage."

"A posthuman killing machine?" Even Luyu sounds impressed.

"Yeah. Its FTL must be damaged somehow. Where did it originate from?"

"There's a system down that line, a red dwarf at about four light years out. It's listed as posthuman territory. It came from there, headed here."

"We should run." Mirareki says. "Engage the FTL. I don't know why it's just skipping either, but the only thing to do with one of those things is run away and hope it leaves you alone. Unless one of you has a fleet of top of the line warships hidden somewhere."

"That's the problem." Reizay says. "We can't." She reaches out to one of the system displays and pulls up a ship display. The ship is long and thin, a sleek silver rail with a torch assembly far down the spine. "The drives are down, won't respond. There's a bunch of errors throughout the ship. Look here." She indicates red veins that run through the decks. "These areas have been sealed off, they're marked as contaminated. The computer links are being blocked somehow. All I get is junk data. In order to activate the drive we'd need to find a way to bypass whatever this is."

"Can't we just go to engineering and activate the drive?"

"Sure, though working around the sealed sections is going to take time, or a space walk, and there's that Quiet ship out there."

"What about weapons?"

"Weapons are easier, but we don't know anything about that ship's capacities. I don't know how to fight a space battle!"

"How long do we have before the Macrophage arrives?" Mirareki asks.

"It's a long way out but it's a posthuman. Even skipping it'll be here in no more than one hundred hours."

"Okay." Luyu looks around. "But if it's not the Quiet, then contaminated by what?"

Mirareki cocks her head suddenly, looking around. "Did anyone else feel that?"

Luyu shakes her head. Aletta undeploys her suit's boots and puts her toes down. "The deck is–"

The floor under you splits open. You hear Mirareki shout, and Reizey scream. The world dislocates into a vortex of sound and vision, a kaleidoscope of objects shifting in and out of reality as your mind works struggles and fails to integrate the evidence of its senses. You feel the migraine of your other self boil for a moment and then recoil, but you are still in control enough to roll to one side, to grab Aletta's arm as she reaches for you and–

Something yanks you backwards towards the hole. Like a beaching whale a geometric shadow has emerged through the a-diamond deck plating and is drawing you in. You can't tell if it's touching you, it's like the whole world is a slope.

Luyu curses and shoots. Her plasma blast bends around it, or maybe it was never there at all. She snarls, readjusts, possibly hits, yielding a staccato of flashbangs that flood the bridge with blank noise as the thing falls and pulls back through the floor..

You're falling with it. Aletta is falling after you but her arm is wrenched from her grip. You fire your thrusters to slow yourself and feel something truly tangible: a limb whipping around your leg and pulling you sharply back down.. It shimmers as you look at it, a chain of shapes that refuse to come properly into focus.

What do you do?

Pick as many options as you want. However, the more options you pick the more likely any individual one is to fail.

This is a plan vote. Please mark up your choices with the name of a plan

[ ] Grab back hold of Aletta
[ ] Sever the limb with your whip sword
[ ] Attack the main body with your funnels
[ ] Attack the main body with your suppression weapon
[ ] Attack the main body with your pistol
[ ] Use the whip sword to try to stop yourself from sliding
[ ] Send telemetry about what's happening to you up to those above so they can help
[ ] Try to cut through the screaming volley of light and noise around you by varying your suit systems.
[ ] Grab onto the wall with your hand