It was immediately clear that the missile penetrating the Dragon had never been intended to explode. In fact, she didn't know what the hell it was; it resembled no projectile she'd ever seen. It sat on the floor in the middle of the deck where it had come to a rest. It resembled an atmospheric drone: in shape it was an elongated triangle, a spike about a metre long. It had clearly propagated some kind of energy hull of its own to allow it to embed itself so deeply into the Dragon's structure. So far as she could tell, it was completely undamaged.
Mainly it looked weird; it was clearly doing something to the ship. Emanating from it was a branching mess of twisting lines that looked like wires or ganglions – or even the rambling shoots of some plant, creeping over the hard surfaces of the deck. They were trying to find their way into the ship's workings, attempting to hook up to its interfaces, maybe. She picked up a clear electromagnetic whisper off them; the device was mechanical, not organic. It also didn't appear to contain any defensive weaponry at all.
She stepped backwards as the tip of one shoot crept towards her, its head writhing in a small circle as if it were sniffing her out.
“Ondo,” she said. “You really need to see this.”
4. Contamination
“You found the missile? It's unexploded?”
She sent Ondo imagery of what she was seeing. “It looks like an infiltration bug to me. We really need to get the hell out of this region of space now; it's either trying to take over the ship, or it's busily harvesting all the data it can find to send to Concordance.”
She pulled in telemetry from the three nanosensors ringing the ship. Still no sign of any pursuit; the only object of any size nearby was Surtr's vessel. They had to assume it was only a matter of time before the enemy showed up. She sent a series of instructions to the nanosensors, instructing them to remove this muster point from their itinerary, and to pass the command up and down the chain. She needed the devices where they were for the moment, but once they left, they wouldn't be coming back.
She could hear the worry in Ondo's voice as he replied over the comms link. “I'm coming in. Can you disable the device?”
She pulled out the blaster she carried in the thigh-holster of her EVA suit. Took aim at the probe, fired. The object burst into an electrical explosion of fusing metal. The blaze of light rapidly extinguished in the zero-oxygen environment, leaving behind a mangled and blackened husk that gave off no energy signatures.
“Yes,” she said. “I think I can manage that.”
“Be careful; it's probably rigged to explode if it's attacked.”
Right. Okay. “Don't worry,” she said, trying to sound as if she was considering his words. “I won't take any risks.”
The device might be dead, but the tendrils coming off it were a different matter. They continued to writhe across the surfaces of the cartography deck, clearly capable of acting independently. She watched as one severed section wormed its way into an air vent and disappeared from view. No telling how many other chunks of tendril had crept into the Dragon's infrastructure. They had to assume the entire ship was contaminated.
She spent the next thirty seconds happily engaged in firing at the pieces of the device that she could see, reducing each to a blackened fuse. Firing a weapon inside a starship was, naturally, extremely hazardous, basically a taboo, but the fact that she wasn't on a pressurised deck made it less risky, and her augmentations gave her the ability to focus her beam-weapon fire with surgical precision. She made very sure not to hit the Dragon and cause it more damage than it had already received.
Ondo spoke to her again as she reduced the last, snaking tendril to smoke and carbon. “I'm outside your door. Surtr tells me it has sealed the breach and that repressurisation of your deck is now possible.”
The Aetheral had remained in space while it worked. She instructed the deck's control systems to raise the air pressure as a test. The seal held, the released oxygen and nitrogen atoms merrily bouncing around rather than escaping into the void. She was impressed: normally, structural repairs on the scale they'd needed took several hours, even with the Dragon's innate self-healing abilities.
“Come on in,” she said to Ondo. “There's no immediate threat. I'll repressurise fully once the door you're behind is sealed again.”
“Understood.”
Once he was inside, she upped the air concentration towards breathable levels, but kept her suit on and sealed for the moment. No point taking risks. Ondo, his suit restricting his movement, turned slowly on the spot to take in all the details. When he'd finished surveying the devastation, he spoke to her brain-to-brain.
“You decided to destroy the device, then?”
“I had to limit the damage it was doing to the ship. Parts of it escaped into the superstructure, and it looked like the fragments were capable of acting independently. Have you seen anything like it before?”
“I don't believe I have, no. We need to get the surviving pieces out before we bring everything back online. I do not want to traverse metaspace with some unknown technology interfering with nav. In any case, jumping requires the relevant datastores to be available, and if we can access them, the bugs might be able to as well.”
“And I do not want to sit here waiting for Concordance to track us down,” she said. “We need to get the bare bones back online and get away. I'd rather take our chances with whatever this device is doing than wait to be attacked. I trust the Dragon to stop the incursion taking the ship over, if that's what it's attempting to do.”
Ondo looked sceptical, no doubt deeply troubled by the thought of exposing the whereabouts of the Refuge
