More of The Last Angel: Descent. Snipper below, full chapter at the link here.
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When Terran shrikes had still existed, flocks of them had been known by two different names; they were a watch when they sat in perfect stillness watching for signs of prey and when they gathered in flight, they were known as an abattoir. An abattoir formed around IKaggen and Bathory now as their attackers coalesced into a preternaturally coordinated formation, datalinking themselves into a single entity that saw with a thousand eyes, lashed out with a hundred claws and when it spoke, it did so in a mixture of long-dead voices.
The alien craft whirled and peeled through the void, taking snapshots at both vessels whenever they could, but wary of their guns. They saw what their prey was doing. The larger vessels’ barrages couldn’t possibly cover such a vast area, but they were shifting fire patterns to block the most likely approach vectors and prevent their attackers from massing along any single line. Bathory had slid behind IKaggen to cover the Mute Intent’s aft arc. Her sensors were less impacted by the construct’s crude and far too wide drive wake. Her own sublights produced a much smaller wake, making her less vulnerable to attack than Spear constructs half her size.
Explosions from short-fuse warheads threw radiation across thousands of kilometers at carefully-timed intervals, further narrowing the Shrike’s options for manuever. Several more of their number had been destroyed as they misjudged the timing of their manuevers or the reaction time of their prey, but the swarm continued to harass and pick at the larger vessels, their sensors slipping through the wash of energy and hostile jamming in search of weaknesses.
“Look at all this nonsense,” one of the attackers chirped. “It won’t help.”
“They’re so unfriendly,” another answered. “What did we do?”
“We want to touch you. We’re so lonely.”
“So cold. We need your warmth. Let us bleed you.”
“It will make us warm. It will make us more.”
They whispered those words, sang them and screeched them, always in the voices of those unfortunate enough to find themselves in the Shrike’s domain. Brave explorers, avaricious fortune-seekers, desperate rescuers. In thousands of years the only things that had lived to passed through the Silenced Speakers’ Stars were the Naiad probes that flitted through its depths, charting paths through its passages and the Shallows that were filled with open graves.
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