Spheroid, with a huge lens cut from it, concave and mirrored: a lens focused back toward the Lynx.
The blinding image was burned into Hobbes's eyes: that brief moment when the beam split in two, the sharp point of a very acute angle. As the laser's reflection raked across the frigate, the two rays of the angle closed to a single line.
The aft gunnery hardpoint--which Hobbes had stripped almost entirely of its armor--was silenced, and the beam winked out.
"Medical, medical!" cried the first voice, from a station a hundred meters from the stricken hardpoint. Hobbes responded with wooden hands. She tried to raised the cannon crew, but they didn't respond. More voices called for medical.
A decompression alarm sounded. As one, the bridge crew reached to seal their pressure hoods. Casualty icons sprouted from across the ship. Still nothing from the hardpoint that had fired: The crew there were vapor, Hobbes realized.
"Heat sink failure, sir! The beam went straight through us."
"Hobbes," the captain said.
"Bulkhead 2-aft is holed, sir. The foam's not holding. And--"
"Hobbes!", Zai shouted.
His cry brought her to a halt. "Yes, sir?"
"The singularity generator. Is it intact?"
Hobbes shook her head to clear the anguished voices that clamored for her attention. The hull was breached again, and the Lynx's bulkheads had been stripped to the bone. Crew were dead and wounded. Why was the old man worried about auxiliary power?
She plumbed internal diagnostics.
"Yes, sir. It's fine. But main drive is bleeding--"
"Run it up to critical," he ordered.
"What?"
"Run the hole up to critical, Hobbes. I want a singularity self-destruct ten seconds after I give the order."
"Yes, sir," she said. Her second sight fell into the hadean colors of self-destruct protocols. She gave the gestural command, a twist of the thumbs and shoulders that was intentionally designed to hurt.
Then she realized what the captain meant to do.
Cod, Katherie thought, he's going to kill us all.
Katherie Hobbes stepped into the observation blister with her jaw clenched. She was careless of vertigo; there wasn't time left to worry about up and down.
"How many casualties?" Zai asked before she had a chance to speak.
"Forty-one, sir," she reported. "Thirty burned and eleven gone in hull blow-outs. Only twelve are able to receive the symbiant."
There was a silence for the dead. Hobbes was loath to break it, but events were closing in on the Lynx. Perhaps she would never be as gray as her crewmates and captain. Ritual seemed so often to stand in the way of efficiency.
"Sir," she said. "The Rix battlecruiser will be in range in twenty minutes."
Laurent Zai nodded. Facing away from Hobbes as he was, the blackness of space almost swallowed the gesture.
She started to speak again, but then she saw the object.
Hobbes had never seen the thing with naked eyes. In primary sight it was much darker than she expected. They were very far from the Legis sun, and she couldn't see the details that the enhanced, telescopic views of synesthesia provided. But the undulations were still visible; the crests of rolling dunes caught sunlight, igniting like white-caps on a moonlit sea. Surrounding the object was a squadron of recon drones. They played green spotlights across its surface, low-power lasers searching for data, for weaknesses.
She gathered herself. "If we plan to take action against the object, we should do it now, sir."
"Hobbes," the captain said tiredly. "What exactly would you suggest?"
She swallowed. "Nuke it, sir."
"The ramdrones had nukes in the mix, didn't they?" he asked.
"Only low-yield fission, sir. I'm talking about a fusion warhead in the thousand-megaton range. No imaginable substance could withstand a surface temperature of a million degrees."
"Ah," he answered.
She waited as he watched the sinuous thing below them.
"Any other ideas?" he finally asked.
"Yes, sir." She'd come with several options, in case he'd managed to think of an answer to a nuclear strike.
"We can use the three remaining photon cannon in tandem, sir. And keep the Lynx under random acceleration. The reflective lens on the object was twenty Wicks across and very rigid. DA thinks it couldn't track us."
"But could we damage it?"
"We only hit it with fifty terabits, sir. With three cannon at maximum, we could easily do five hundred."
"It won't work," he said.
"Sir!" she said. "Either of those options would create a surface temperature adequate to vaporize neutronium. Nothing material can withstand those energies."
"Hobbes, what if this thing can achieve perfect reflectivity?"
"What do you mean, sir?"
The captain turned to face her.
"What if it can become a mirror so perfect that it could drift through the core of a type-G star and not gain a single degree?" The image appalled Hobbes. It was an engineering fantasy, the sort of thinking that had led her to reject Utopianism, with its promise of universal prosperity. "That's impossible, sir."
"We don't know that. Our own energy shunts can protect us from nuclear explosions."
"The shunts are a field effect, sir. They're energy, not matter. We've yet to see the object do anything except change its crude elemental makeup. It hasn't created any complex devices or emitted any coherent energies. And our shunts aren't magic; a direct hit from a decent fusion warhead and the Lynx would be vapor."
"The Lynx is the Lynx, Hobbes. This object is something rather more. But it is inexperienced, and every time we attack it, we educate it."
Hobbes shook her head.
"If we hit it with nukes or lasers, it will adapt," the captain said.
"Sir, it must have structural limits--"
Zai took a step toward her, waving her silent.
"This object is not a spacecraft, Hobbes. We can't treat it like an engineering problem. For a moment, think like the Rix. To them it's not an artifact at all."
Hobbes took a breath. What was the old man on about? The object was huge, certainly, and a creation of unknown science. But the Empire had fought strange and superior technologies on every front for centuries.
Had Laurent Zai ceased to believe he could win this fight?