A new chapter of Descent. Our story opens with the fate of humanity in the balance. Low stakes, right? As I mentioned elsewhere, Descent follows up on a couple plot threads from The Hungry Stars. Kongo’s fate and how Cerulean Eight and Bathory reach Nibiru as quickly as they did.
In this excerpt, we see part of the argument between the Fleet and the Naiad pack. For the full thing as well as the outcome, check out the link above and enjoy!
~
When Red One spoke again, it was the in harsh static of her alien dialect, still lacking much of the nuance of True Speech, but there was no possible doubt as to her intent. <tell me you only mean Nibiru> she hissed. <tell me that and i’ll help you burn that system down to its last moon. tell me that>
<were we to say those words> Sammuramāt answered. Her tone was cold, but it wasn’t anger. It was a sense of sorrow like the crumbling of frozen cliffs. <would you believe them?>
<no> Echo added. She was moving her ship-self on a flanking vector, putting her port broadsides towards Domitian. The king was young, but his spinal mount was a paired siege weapon capable of killing a dreadnought in a single shot, two at the most. He’d be the greatest threat. Naiad females were carriers, laden with missiles, attack drones and their child escorts. Domitian was the most immediate threat and she needed to make him think about what she was doing, not just focus on her sister.
‘Immediate’ wasn’t the same thing as ‘sole’, though. It would be millennia before any of the three young monarchs reached their full size, but even now each of them was more than a match for any known dreadnought – and that included both her and Nemesis. Even as carriers, the energy mounts Tzu-hsi and Sammuramāt bore were hideously lethal even to Echo and Red One’s ship-selves.
Taking emotion out of the equation, as any good logical and rational artificial intelligence should, then the solution would be to allow the Naiads to purge Rally, while collecting a cross-sample of humans from the handful of other colonies that they could be found on and verifying their lack of infection. Humanity would be preserved, the Damocles Sword of Rally’s well-being would be taken out of the Compact’s hands, and the Naiads would become stronger allies in the Long War.
Echo and Red One were not emotionless beings. Red was willing to die to protect the people of Rally, and Echo was willing do the same. There were some lines that, once crossed, you could never step back over and Echo would cross this one together with her sister. They hadn’t been born together, but they would die together if they had to.
Nemesis’s core wasn’t intended to hold a charge for more than a handful of seconds. It was already breaking containment and if it wasn’t powered down or released soon, the explosion would rip everything within a million kilometers of this point into atoms and twisted chunks of metal that bore only an abstract resemblance to what they’d once been.
One way or another, the argument wouldn’t go on much longer.
~
My Patreon / subscribestar / twitter
Proximal Flame's Fiction 