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[X] Paint the Quiet ship with targeting systems run at STL using the main torch, allowing them to evacuate more easily. Activate internal defences if they don't leave.

"We should run at STL," you suggest. "If we trap the Quiet aboard, they'll probably fight to the death."

"They might do anyway." Mirareki says.

"Bad idea to trap an enemy. Anyone'll fight if you do that." Luyu says.

Reizay doesn't wait for more argument but gets to work igniting the drive. There's a brief moment where it seems like nothing has happened, but then you hear the hum, rising in volume, followed by the distant roar and the tremors. A structure this size can't be moved without side effects. Then the ship groans, a deep building cry that swallows you like water shot through with shoals of staccato pings. Reizay cringes. Gravity briefly increases, then cuts down, as the acceleration builds towards one G.

"I-I'll reduce thrust!" she stammers and shouts over the noise. "Hold on-"

<Not yet!> Luyu puts a hand on her shoulder and switches to transmission. <It's fine. We're right by the spine.>

<The engines probably haven't been run at full power for a long time,> says Aletta. <Nor will they be designed to do it for long. But given the circumstances we can wait for it to tell us if something is wrong.>

<What are the Quiet doing?> asks Mirareki.

Reizay projects the tactical situation.

The Quiet ship is accelerating smoothly outside, burning engines hard to try to keep up with the far more massive torch on the Deep Ship. <Bring up targeting radar and paint them. See what they do.>

The targeting radar pings off. A moment later the Quiet ignite their own targeting radar, pinging you back. Shuttles begin to fall away from the bay. <It looks like they're evacuating.>

<There's movement from the Quiet further inside.>

<Are they moving toward the engines?>

<No. They're approaching one of the Diplomat infestations.> Reizay looks at you. <Should I fire?>

<Don't shoot, but arm the defences and get guard machines around vital systems.> Luyu says. <We already know they're carrying fusion bombs and I don't want any more going off.>

The Quiet are destroying cameras as they move, and Reizay deploys more drones to compensate. They don't seem to be making it a priority. Their priority seems to be speed, running fast towards a sealed storage section of the ship.

<Do we have camera coverage inside?> Mirareki asks. The Quiet breach the sealed section and the log fills with weapon discharge alerts.

<Yes. It's going to be lousy with Diplomat countermeasures though.> Reizay says. <Hang on.> Camera feeds unfurl around you.

The storage area is a charnel house. Despite the tactical brilliance they displayed in the vent fight the Quiet don't seem to have devised a solution to the Diplomat's countermeasures and are compensating with brute force of numbers and shot. The Diplomat, insofar as you can tell what it's doing through the kaleidoscopic noise, itself seems confused, lashing out at the cyborgs clogging the battlefield without any clear plan besides opportunism. They don't seem interested in grabbing them like they did you or Atet, just tearing them apart. The Quiet meantime move in complex formation, expanding through the corridors and holds like a time lapse of a flower, filling each gap torn by the enemy with a fresh backup heedless of cost.

For all their coordination, they're taking casualties constantly. Motiles ambush them again and again, breaking through the walls and yanking Quiet back into their holes or erupting in great bull rushes. The Quiet blow them away with coordinated fire, but each attack costs them. Eventually they break into a hold where an immotile lies, and begin to set about it with great industrial blades, cutting its geometries away to bind it onto a tracked pallet and then rushing back the other way. Ruined bodies litter the deck behind them as the remaining invaders withdraw. Reizay triggers a set of secondary doors to seal the section as the Quiet rush away towards a shuttle bay. The others are in full retreat, launching as fast as their shuttles as they can load them.

The capture team arrives at one of the last shuttles out. It drops away and begins to burn frantically to get clear of the torch. The Quiet ship peels away to match velocity, opening distance as quickly as is compatible with collecting its creatures.

<They're gone. Is FTL active?> Luyu asks. Reizay scrambles through other menus until she finds something that looks like the controls for a translation engine (you're almost, but not quite, used to recognising things you've never seen) and lets the others crowd around to see.

<I think we're good,> says Luyu.

<Where are we headed?> asks Atet.

<Let's just start by getting away from that Crown of Thorns. Then we'll figure out the rest from there.>

At Mirareki's prompting, Reizay actuates the controls again, and the screens that had shown the retreating Quiet ship give way to the grey banded infinity of Translation Space, between the darkness bands of the 'sky' and 'sea' far above and far below. The torch shuts off and the vessel ceases to shudder as it makes the transition to FTL flight. There's another minute adjustment of gravity.

Reizay slumps back in the chair. Luyu puts a hand on her shoulder. "Good work. Put us on the defences safe list." She says, then smiles. "Shall we go make sure none of our colourful friends has wandered where it shouldn't?"


The Quiet that Luyu captured is the only one left onboard, she put it in a secure storage room near the bridge, still covered in a signal blocker. "Sorry my dude." She tells it as she moves to fit a more accommodating set of nanotech restraints. "Your friends left you behind." It watches her without emotion, eyes tracking, cold and dead, like a sharks, poised to attack if Luyu gives it even the slightest opening. She doesn't.

Mirareki watches from the door while you sit further outside. The store room door is set seemingly at random into a charming old style viral concrete wall on one side of the street. You've found a mostly undamaged arcade near the command centre, a small cafe and garden and a row of utility rooms and crew quarters. The corridor and cafe has a holographic view of a brilliant cerulean sky and a world that doesn't quite look like anywhere real.

"So we're studying it?" she asks.

"Yeah, and the dead ones." Luyu stretches. "I figure the Medician might want to dissect them. How're the infested zones?"

"Contained." Mirareki says. "The guard machines pushed a few who were out back. I think if the computer hadn't crashed then they wouldn't have got loose. The counter measures are harsh but they don't actually seem that scary in a fight."

"Not unless you're a posthuman." You say. "It was doing something to the one inside me. You wouldn't think something I could survive could do anything to one of those, but I don't really know how they work."

"Nobody does," says Mirareki.

There's a pause after that, and the team gradually reassembles, finding spaces on the cafe's chairs and couches. A silver robot distributes coffee. "So, we need to decide what to do now."

[ ] Option 1: "You said your guest mentioned the Almagest Observatory. That's not so far from here," says Mirareki. "It's a warzone, but that seems like the most direct path to finding out what's going on here."
[ ] Option 2: "I'm not certain about that," says Juketta. "Stella's hitchhiker may have her own agenda, and in any case she seems to have been badly injured in the events. But I've been consulting my memories and discovered something interesting. There's a nearby system with an established alien population who have art and legends describing something quite similar to the Diplomat. We might find out what these things are."
[ ] Option 3: "Why don't we go to ground?" asks Atet. "Hide in some uninhabited systems. There's got to be heat on us right now, from a lot of different sides and it'll give us a chance to clean things up here."
[ [ Option 4: "I think we should head for Haraway. That's the nearest major world with enough military potential to stop that Crown of Thorns, if its still on us." Luyu says, bluntly. "Also, we could get Stella into a medical facility there, and Mirareki can talk to her friends about this." The other her drinks some coffee. "And I can get my full complement of bodies."
[ ] Option 5: "Um, this isn't our ship, right? Should we give it back?" says Reizay. Luyu and Mirareki give her their usual 'what are they teaching kids there?' look, but she has an argument: "The ship's navigation core has several bases for this Nyxian religion marked in it. We could go to one of them and maybe get help. I bet they're not happy with the freaks who kidnapped us doing horrible experiments under their noses!"