Interlude-Collapse

(Starspeak)

Jordan felt Caleb suddenly vanish from her mind.

Even more bizarre was the fact that Coalescence remained between her and Madeline.

The two of them were stunned, both reaching for the smattering of eyes they had overseeing the battlefield. Each drone was the size of a songbird with weight to match. Even a dozen of them put together didn't tax their mass limit at all. Each one had a camera, psionically sharing images of the battle from above.

With Madeline forced away, those drones had been their insurance, literally a way to at least watch Caleb's back while he stalled the Black Knight.

So how had HUNGRY snuck up on him?

Between Madeline's mass and Jordan's range, they could still exert Adeptry on the battlefield.

Hungry held Caleb by his suspenders, eyeing the Black Knight warily. It seemed like they might exchange words, but just like before, the Black Knight opened fire. HUNGRY dragged both themselves and Caleb back from the edge of the rooftop, vanishing into the building.

The Black Knight fired a volley of missiles into the building before weighing whether or not to chase the other robot.

Several Vorak inside the police station took up more weapons and fired at the Black Knight with all the same ineffectualness as before. The Black Knight turned to return fire, but Madeline and Jordan materialized a crude barrier to block its gun.

On the side of the barrier closer to the police station, they materialized colored letters spelling out 'Stop shooting. Just run.'

"What's going on?" Johnny asked.

Wearing a set of Madeline's flight rotors, Jordan was carrying him toward the battlefield arm-in-arm. She'd gone still, and Johnny would have had to be an idiot not to notice.

"Caleb just got taken off the board," Jordan said. "HUNGRY just showed itself again."

Madeline was handling an identical situation with Ben and Aarti. The two of them had withdrawn from combat duty more than a year ago. Aarti didn't like violence, and Ben had wanted to focus more on developing the Flotilla's technology.

But both of them still kept up with combat training, just in case a situation just like this arose: where everyone was needed.

"Did either of you look at the subterranean mapping for the colony?" Madeline asked.

Ben and Aarti both shook their heads.

"Why?"

"HUNGRY snuck up on Caleb, even with eyes in the sky watching all around him. If it snuck up through one of the buildings underground, it might try to take Caleb away the same way."

"…If that happens, do we go after Caleb and HUNGRY or the Black Knight?" Ben asked.

Every fiber in Madeline's body yearned to say 'Caleb', but it was Jordan speaking through her mouth when she replied.

"The Black Knight. The last thing Caleb did before he lost consciousness was keeping Coalescence going between me and Jordan…"

The nature of Coalescence was countless connections and bridges between minds. It seemed…once those connections were built, they didn't strictly need the superconnector present. Still, without Caleb to actively maintain and optimize the connections, they wouldn't last long.

"Take these," Madeline instructed.

Jordan took hold of the bridges and connections, foisting them first toward Johnny, then Madeline. Madeline in turn took a bundle of links and offered them to Aarti and Ben.

Jordan felt her connection with Madeline thinning, spread out to include more.

The two of them felt themselves lose access to each other's Adeptry, which posed something of a problem given that Jordan was currently a quarter mile above the ground held up by nothing but Madeline-made wings.

Madeline beamed Jordan a copy of the psionics that she piloted the wings with.

Jordan. Johnny. Madeline. Aarti. Ben. Donnie and Nora were reconverging on the Black Knight too. They all arrived concurrently.

The Black Knight had wandered a short distance from the police station, and it was waiting, surveying each direction while it did so.

<Jordan,> Serral rang. <Caleb wanted us checking ships that were turned away for lack of clearances? One of them is on the move now. Inbound back toward the colony.>

<ETA?> Madeline asked.

<Five minutes. Max.>

<…It's waiting for exfil,> Nora recognized.

<It already got its target?> Donnie asked. <When? Did we miss it?>

The questions were pointless to ponder now.

Thinning their Coalescence out between the five of them left them unable to share Adeptry. But more cerebral skills would still be shareable for at least a few minutes, and even the pale remnants of Coalescence informed them of each others' senses, positions, and even intentions.

It was well worth losing the shared Adeptry for everyone present to benefit from the tactical coordination.

<I'm going after Caleb,> Nora started.

It was probably for the best. Jordan and the Puppies had fought together for years, but Nora was the odd one out amongst them. And her tricks were probably the best suited for trying to tangle with HUNGRY alone.

Jordan tossed Nora the pearl that linked to the one in Caleb's head.

<Use that to track him.>

A tangle of black tendrils burst outward on Nora's back, and immediately started carrying her into the smoldering remains of the building HUNGRY had ambushed Caleb from.

<My ride's here in a few minutes,> the Black Knight drawled. <You thrift-shop rejects really want to do this?>

Johnny answered it by erupting an amphitheater, instantly cornering the machine.

Madeline charged in swinging with her gauntlets. The Black Knight didn't hesitate to try reducing her to a smear on the pavement. Its shots went wide though. Aarti created a dark red plume of plasma that crashed into its gun arm, but Madeline was quicker to move than expected too.

Her gauntlets looked like they should weigh a ton, and it was easy to underestimate how quickly she could move wearing them, especially in low gravity. She knocked it deeper inside Johnny's amphitheater, pressing to keep it trapped.

<Clear the line!> Ben called.

Before Madeline could duck back, the Black Knight fired another burst. Madeline guarded herself with her gauntlets, but she was still blown backward from the impact alone.

Same result.

Ben aimed a specialized cryonic rifle into the amphitheater. A narrow spray of pale blue fluid washed over the robot, burying it in an ever-expanding glacier.

The Black Knight was stuck between mountains of ice and iron, with enemies on all sides ready to unleash their very best hell…and it barely even slowed down.

·····

Nora was having trouble.

She didn't understand the psionic bauble Jordan had given her to track Caleb. By itself, it didn't indicate a location at all. She had to stimulate it with a psionic signal first, only then could she detect an identical signal coming from nearby.

The building was an empty shell—some kind of museum or gallery—and Caleb's signal was coming from below. Navigating to the bottom floor took too long, and Nora was beginning to doubt she'd find out how HUNGRY had come up through the building…

Until she found the gaping hole blown out of one of the basement walls.

On the other side was a tram line running under the colony.

Gotcha.

Nora sped down the tunnel. It was pitch black. The emergency lights didn't seem to be activated in these tunnels. Was that from the power outage? Or were these just defunct?

Chasing the signal was tough. The tram lines didn't intersect often, and none of them ran exactly in the direction of the signal, so she had to gamble which route would take her closer to Caleb. Choosing wrong meant backtracking a huge distance.

She needed to hedge her bets.

<Serral? Hello?> she tried the Flotilla bands.

<Nora. We're receiving you.>

<Do we have a map of the underground colony tram?>

<…No,> Serral said. <We could track one down, but it might take a while.>

<Maximum priority,> Nora told him. <HUNGRY grabbed Caleb, and its fleeing through the tunnels. I think Caleb is sedated. He's not giving off any psionics on his own.>

Serral didn't respond immediately.

Nora could imagine the emotions going through the Casti though. He had never asked to be so involved with humans. But he'd surely had dozens of opportunities to pass off the role to someone else. Instead, he'd doubled down each time, helping them more and more, even to the detriment of his military career.

He felt a sense of responsibility. Nora did too.

When Serral replied, the undercurrent to his words was icy and dark.

<…Get him back.>

Nora surged forward. There were no guarantees, and Caleb's signal wasn't getting any closer. She was far behind HUNGRY, but the longer the chase went, the more it became a question of plain speed. Once Nora reached the first spot she'd detected the feedback from Caleb, it was just a matter of following the same path HUNGRY did, and going faster.

Or, at least, it should have been.

Nora burst into a larger tunnel that was pitch black. It was one long straightaway to HUNGRY and Caleb's current position. Even in total darkness, she didn't hesitate to charge full-speed down the straight tunnel. It made Nora pay close attention, even in the dark.

For a moment, a few flashes of light twinkled at the far end of the tunnel.

Then a crackling sound roared down the tunnel, impacts on the gravel floor spitting debris.

Gunshots!

In the enclosed tunnel, even small caliber rounds sounded like booming thunder.

How had HUNGRY been able to know when Nora had entered line of sight though? They were almost a quarter-mile down the tunnel…

Infrared might do it.

This darkness was working against her. Distance was the only thing working for her. HUNGRY would have to be aiming the bullets slightly parabolically. Precise aim was impossible. So…this was a deterrent. Something to keep her at bay while HUNGRY continued down the tunnel.

She wasn't going to get Caleb back by playing it safe.

So, instead of advancing carefully, Nora stepped on the gas harder.

This tunnel was a nightmare for HUNGRY too. No access hatches or maintenance corridors: there was nowhere to evade for the robot either.

Eight black tendrils coiled and snapped outward in series. Nora's feet didn't even touch the ground.

HUNGRY continued to fire regularly down the tunnel, bullets sparking against the walls and occasional strike against the metal rails underfoot. Nora took only minimal steps to protect herself. She could have thickened her tendrils to better absorb the bullets that struck, but it would have slowed how quickly they could move her.

No, she elected to wrap her body in a thin layer of carapace-like armor. Only her head, neck, and upper torso received any real bulletproofing. She didn't want to waste even the seconds it would take to armor the rest of her body more heavily.

As she grew closer, Nora began to see the robot be illuminated by the muzzle flash of its shots: no more parabolic aim.

She had to adopt an evasive pattern as she charged in, tendrils hauling her to the ceiling, off the floors, into walls, constantly changing direction all the while surging closer to the robot. HUNGRY's aim got better too.

Several bullets tore into Nora's tendrils. Each one had probably been salvageable, but it was quicker to just materialize an entirely new tendril instead of carefully repairing the damage.

One bullet caught her forehead though.

It pierced through a tendril, bleeding a ton of speed in the process. But it still crashed into her face like a sledgehammer.

Her body went tumbling, but instead of crashing into the gravel, her tendrils held her aloft. Once upon a time, the tendrils had involved a convoluted system that tried to interpolate signals in her own nervous system to control them. It let them behave fluidly and organically, like controlling her own limb. Using a psionic-hybrid control system had let her automate them though. Her superconstruct could oversee the complex motions of the fleshy tendrils all on its own.

Nora psionically deadened the pain and rematerialized the section of armor that had caught the bullet. She was going to have a nasty bruise tomorrow, but this was nowhere near enough to stop her.

The next bullets found her arm and thigh. They both bit deep into her body, but she patched both wounds in the blink of an eye. She'd need surgery later to get the bullets out, but in the meantime, she wouldn't bleed, and her limbs still moved.

The last hundred feet separating Nora from HUNGRY were the longest and hardest.

Darkness filled the tunnel. The flash of the gunshots was the only way Nora could see the robot. Each burst of light showed a large figure strapped to HUNGRY's back. Some kind of metal frame with a person held in place by thick straps.

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Nora's tendrils could reach a huge distance on their own. Was it worth just trying to grab Caleb from this distance?

It was so hard to see anything.

But her eyes weren't the only options available to her. Nora made a point to push her tactile cascade through every surface her tendrils touched. The floor of the tunnel was two long strips of concrete with rails inlaid, with gravel separating them from each other and the walls. Said walls had been a cylindrical bore with corrugated metal covering the steel supports behind. But after they came far enough down the tunnel, the construction had changed.

No more gravel on the floor, and the tunnel changed shape to a rounded-rectangular bore made of concrete on all four sides. Most importantly? No gravel on the floor.

Nora's cascade slithered forward through the solid material, finding HUNGRY's exact position. She could feel the robot's every footfall through her cascade. Frustratingly though, she couldn't push her cascade up into the robot's body.

Some kind of cascade resistant material?

That was rare.

HUNGRY was taking fewer shots at Nora now, dedicating more focus toward sprinting down the tunnel. Its running form was downright mathematic. Ballpark, it was probably running at close to thirty or forty miles per hour. On foot. With a passenger.

Its footsteps were a perfect rhythm, booming through the tunnel like a titanic heartbeat.

As a piece of engineering, it was a marvel. One-of-a-kind. And yet? As a combatant, it was still only metal. A far cry from the Black Knight. Nora knew, if she got a tendril on it, she could tear it apart at the joints with a bit of elbow grease.

Caleb was the tricky part.

All her focus was on the robot. Every last ounce of her attention was on looking for an opening to safely separate Caleb from the machine's back.

Literal tunnel vision.

Nora didn't notice the rumbling sound in the tunnel until it was practically on top of her. She had eight tendrils constantly reaching for new handholds, almost like she was 'climbing' horizontally through the bore.

With the speed she needed to chase down HUNGRY no more than two of them were actually anchored at any one time. They were pulling her up and down, side to side, but always forward.

The timing was pure chance. She put a tendril down, anchoring it to a semi-random point on the tunnel's floor—and a ten-ton freight cart came from behind, slamming into the fleshy arm, pulping it instantly.

Nora fell a few feet, caught by other tendrils adjusting their own reach.

A faint light in the end of the tunnel illuminated HUNGRY as it leapt upward, landing on the rumbling freight cart, riding it down the tunnel.

That faint light revealed another freight cart coming from the opposite direction. It barreled down the tunnel, but before it reached Nora's position, HUNGRY aimed a small remote toward it, and clicked a button.

Nora had to make a split-second decision.

Barrel forward into what was extremely likely to be an explosive-rigged cart, meant to collapse the tunnel and prevent pursuit? Or grind to a halt and attempt to protect herself from the cave-in seconds away?

Go!

Her heart and soul screamed at her to charge forward, try to get on the other side of the explosion before it brought down the tunnel! Rescue Caleb!

But her brain stopped her dead in her tracks, training and long-term conditioning forcing her to make the disciplined decision, even as she screamed at herself to help her friend.

The cart detonated in two stages. a small blast upended the cart, tipping it so it fell lengthwise across the tunnel, and a second larger explosion that tore heaps and boulders out of the concrete ceiling, raining rubble down and filling the dark tunnel with dust.

In the aftermath, she'd find out that the cart was basically carrying mortars. The first blast was for firing the charges into the ceiling, derailing the cart in the process. The second blast…

Nora was plunged into darkness first by the tendrils she wrapped around her body, then deeper when what little light in the tunnel winked out.

Back on Earth, just a few weeks before she was abducted, Nora had been through an earthquake while visiting family out in the middle of nowhere. Her uncle's house had practically collapsed on them. The feeling of the very ground beneath your feet shuddering drove fear into a primal place in her brain.

For too many seconds, she couldn't do anything but curl up in her tendrils and pray that she wasn't crushed.

ꞏꞏꞏꞏꞏ

The Black Knight just wouldn't go down.

Johnny and Ben had formed a crude palisade of iron and ice around the machine.

Aarti was holding her quick plasma bursts in reserve to throw off the Black Knight's attempts to counterattack.

Donnie and Madeline were the only ones actually daring to engage it in close range. Donnie was keeping more distance, only darting in when the Black Knight didn't have the room to shoot him. Madeline was staying up close and personal.

More than a few times, it had tried to force her back by just launching a missile right at their feet, but Johnny was watching for those and creating heavy iron barriers in the split second before detonation.

Meanwhile Jordan was prepping their big move.

<[Fuck!] How many missiles can this thing shoot!>

Donnie jumped onto the Black Knight's back once again. He didn't try to stab it or jam a grenade into its joints—satisfying as that might have been. Instead, he focused on cascading its armor and materializing obstructions over its undamaged cameras. Caleb had found a dozen of them across its torso. Vez and he had taken out three. The six of them now had managed to wreck another two.

One of Madeline's blows had cracked the housing on one—after about the fiftieth impact—and Ben had gotten a corrosive inside the eye. The other one had been Donnie's. Whether a design flaw or knocked loose by previous fighting, his cascade had found a gap in the Adeptry-protection the Black Knight had on its body and armor. Donnie had materialized some thermite in the gap and slagged enough to confirm damage.

From there, they were focusing on covering the cameras instead of destroying them.

Paint on the cameras had achieved no effect, so the machine likely saw with more than just the visible spectrum of light. Or, if they were more unfortunate, the Black Knight had some kind of active scanning system in its eyes that didn't rely on any conventional light.

Just like how exotic matter could produce exotic fields, it was possible to produce exotic light too—though it was prohibitively complex and expensive. It was usually reserved for lab experiments.

But whether or not the Black Knight had those esoteric active scanning methods, one thing remained true. Little by little, the machine's blind spots were growing.

They had a chance.

It would hinge on whether or not they could deal some real damage beyond just blinding a few of its eyes.

Its armor was so durable that it was withstanding consecutive explosions without so much as a sign of bending. What damage Caleb and the improvised kaleidoscope sword had inflicted on its hips had been repaired just like the severed arm.

But the sword, with its spatial warping properties had damaged it.

So it was Jordan's job to try putting together an attack that might actually deal a decisive blow.

Problem was, that sword had been made with ten times more energy than the absolute limit of her magnitude. So how could she match it, much less exceed it?

The answer meant weaponizing the one Adept aptitude she had in spades: range.

Her first thought was a kinetic bombardment of some kind. Materializing something a mile above the moon's surface and letting gravity accelerate it without air resistance to slow it down. Except Nai had basically already tried that, compensating for lower speed with higher mass.

It hadn't even left a dent.

So how else could Jordan weaponize pure range?

She didn't have much mass to work with either. So, she couldn't just materialize something at a specific point far off…then maybe the answer was materializing something far off not at a specific point?

An idea began to form in her head.

Her range was basically a massive sphere centered on her. What if she materialized material at every point inside her range? It would have to be so little mass as to be negligible, spread out over such a huge area. But if that matter had the right characteristics…

Not a few minutes earlier, Jordan had been Coalesced with Madeline through Caleb, and she'd experienced it too when Madeline had been struck by the Black Knight's gravity beam.

What was a beam? How could it modify the gravity of other matter it came into contact with? How exactly had that effect been inflicted on Madeline's atoms?

The idea in her head slid into greater clarity.

It was, she realized, a matter of deciding that regular matter didn't do what she needed it to.

It was, she Realized, a matter of figuring out what could.

<Get him to fire another missile,> she called. <Johnny, be ready to block it in case I miss.>

Jordan materialized an invisible cloud almost two miles wide. Her Adeptry rippled out through the entire colony as she created a little more than forty kilograms of a diffuse non-interactive fluid, equally dispersed throughout her entire range. It hung there, doing almost nothing, while she aimed for her moment.

Gravity wasn't a force. It was a bending of spacetime. But even if it wasn't strictly a force, it could certainly act like one in the correct circumstances.

The main thing that limited low mass, low exactness Adepts in terms of raw force was converting the energy efficiently.

Caleb had figured out a great way to do it. Mimicking the electro-repulsive qualities of real nuclei, he could create pressure explosions out of exceedingly little mass. With his low magnitude, he didn't have too much energy to work with, so what energy he did have, he'd found an exceedingly efficient way of turning it into damage.

Now? Jordan could beat it.

It was the exact opposite trick. Not an explosion. An implosion, based on gravity.

Her cloud hung inert until Madeline dodged wide, and the Black Knight saw fit to launch another missile at her. Simply put? It soaked up gravity. The difference was imperceptible, even to anyone moving through the cloud, but her material drank up gravity's 'force' more and more with every second.

The shoulder port slid open, and Jordan eyed her target. She materialized a reactive mote of the same fluid as close to the missile rack as possible.

Energy rippled through the air, pressure rolling inward through the fabric of space itself. Taking all the gravitational 'force' soaked up by her cloud of strange fluid, and collapsing inward on the mote's position.

The delay between creating the mote and the force's arrival was nearly instant. Measured in nanoseconds.

And for a split second, gravity intensified at the mote's position more than a hundredfold.

As she saw the results, Jordan knew she'd have to do some explaining in the imminent future. The black mote inside the machine's missile port hummed, warping light around it while a glowing orange rocket bent at a strange angle, unable to escape the port. It was jammed between the aperture and the mote's gravity.

It was not a black hole. But laymen could very easily have been forgiven for thinking it might have been. The singularity was dark as a night sky, and it very convincingly pulled on everything nearby.

The pull itself only lasted for a heartbeat, but the damage was epic.

The rocket exploded halfway inside the Black Knight's shoulder, and it went stumbling back. A molten hot sphere had been carved next to its head, a clean hole in the armor showing the exposed shoulder joint underneath.

The Black Knight changed tack. A burst of radio noise confirmed that it had suddenly resumed its communication with whoever was in orbit.

<Ground team, incoming!> Fenno warned. <The ship on vector for you just launched fast movers for your position!>

Everyone froze at the announcement.

Someone was firing? From orbit?

That was a huge deal. Especially in this system. The Atho's Rain treaties laid strict prohibitions on orbit-to-surface weaponry. Along with the Reploid responses, it was one of the few interstellar rules that everyone treated as sacrosanct.

Still, Madeline didn't miss the opportunity Jordan made.

She materialized her sword and went to stab the machine, shoulder down to hip.

But whichever AI built the Black Knight, they just forgot to include the 'quit'.

It leaned with perfect timing, causing the stab to glance off the wrong spot. It aimed its gun at her knowing Johnny would materialize a sheet of iron in the way.

Slamming its body into the iron slab, it toppled Madeline's cover, pinning her underneath.

Aarti tried aiming her plasma at the shoulder wound, but the Black Knight was read to guard with its other arm.

Donnie cried out. <Jordan, hit him again!>

But she couldn't.

She'd buckled to her knees. Vomit welled up in her gut. Blood leaked out of her nose. Maybe ears too. Her head was pounding, threatening to split her skull in two from the inside. Her cloud had been allowed to soak up too much force. The energy moving through it had forcibly destabilized the material. Even suffering the recoil, she'd been lucky that the force hadn't just evaporated into nothing before the material could channel it to the mote.

Somewhere high above the colony, four fast movers veered downward. They punched through the colony canopy like it was paper and hurtled into the ground surrounding the Black Knight.

Their metal casings popped open to reveal white orbs almost a meter in diameter.

"It's been fun, truly," the Black Knight said. "But I'm on the clock with places to be. So, I'll leave you with some playmates."

Each of the white orbs exploded into a wash of white light, and dark figures took shape within the blinding display.

Light seemed to solidify into flesh and bone. And when everyone's eyes had cleared, the Black Knight was surrounded by four hideous monsters. They looked like pale lab-grown nightmares from four different flavors of alien, but each one had long bony limbs with skin stretched taut between all its joints with bulbous bony protrusions jutting from random points along their bodies. Their eyes were utterly lifeless.

From orbit, everyone got a picture of what was happening. The ship in question was on approach to enter the colony through the hole it just punched. In thirty seconds, the Black Knight would be aboard a ship ripping out of the colony.

Jordan swallowed the taste of bile and forced herself to stand. Her head might have been on the verge of exploding, but at least her blood was pumping. She broke into a run.

The monsters were a smoke screen to cover just how far into a corner they'd backed the Black Knight. They'd dealt a serious blow to it. Just not serious enough.

Madeline, memories of being connected to Jordan fresh in her mind, saw what she was aiming for and moved to assist. The Black Knight didn't lose focus even as the disfigured monsters took over the fighting, and it was ready when Jordan and Madeline tried to close the distance again.

It sprayed bullets at them, but the two of them had come too far to be scared of a little buckshot now. Madeline materialized a gauntlet to shield herself, while Jordan materialized a new gravity cloud.

The resultant singularity bent the bullets' trajectories several degrees off her.

Jordan braced to power through the recoil, but smaller and weaker gravitational meddling didn't tax her so much. She managed to create three singularities in sequence, deflecting the Black Knight's gunfire even as it tried to correct its aim for the distortion.

Madeline got behind Jordan, grabbing the other girl in a mechanical gauntlet, and hurling her straight for the robot.

The Black Knight had already seen enough humans climbing on it, and Jordan couldn't land gracefully at all. She contorted her body mid-air to avoid the machine's attempt to catch her, and crashed into the ground next to it. She got one hand on its ankle, and immediately rolled away from its attempt to stomp her into the ground.

<Back!> Jordan called.

Madeline followed her call, scrambling back and letting Johnny shield the both of them with bursts of iron stalagmites.

They weren't going to bring down the Black Knight here. It was just too damn tough, and the only attacks that had worked were improvised tricks with low reliability. The longer this went, the odds one of them would slip up and die skyrocketed.

So, if they were going to lose…Jordan had made sure they would at least get a rematch soon.

Because embedded in the Black Knight's armor, where she'd touched its ankle, was one of Jordan's pearls.

The mechanical menace continued to fire on those of them still wrestling the bio-engineered horrors, holding its ground as a ship's thruster began kicking up dust as it came down.

It didn't touch down though.

A heavy cable fell from the ship, and the Black Knight affixed it to itself without so much as a word.

Ben made a valiant attempt to shoot the cable down. And while his ice-gun's blast was right on target, the sudden drop in temperature didn't brittle the metal enough for their enemy to fall.

The Black Knight's ship accelerated back upward, burning hard to escape the colony and the moon's orbit.

And like that, it was gone.

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