Tyre gestured, bringing her second sight closer to the blackbody monitor drones that had just appeared and begun firing on some of Marx's subservient drones. The blackbodies were normally almost invisible, but against the sunlit background of the receiver array she could make out several more of them. The three that had opened fire had turned up at just the right place; either the Rix had guessed lucky or had enough of them to cover every approach. She wondered how many of the dark, silent monitors coasted in front of the Rix warship.
She felt the hands of her superior on her shoulders. Kax stood right behind her seat. There were five crew crowded into the tight confines of Data Analysis. In battle configuration, their usually large space had been annexed by the two adjacent gunnery stations. Kax's hands clenched as the Lynx maneuvered, its slow coldjets pushing them with the sway of an oceangoing vessel.
"You thinking what I'm thinking?" Kax asked.
She nodded. "They've configured for heavy defense, sir."
"See if you can get a count. The captain will want to know how many blackbodies are out there before the Lynx gets too much closer."
"Yes, sir, but I'll bet you right now there's at least a hundred."
"A hundred?"
"If you take a--"
Suddenly, a rush of noise exploded through the room. A searing 57 wind struck Tyre, throwing her from her webbing to the floor. Her exposed skin--hands and cheeks--were being scoured. Her mouth and eyes clenched instinctively shut. Her ears popped as the air pressure plummeted.
A burning sound reached her ears through the thin air, and she felt heat on her hands and face.
Ensign Amanda Tyre, like every recruit to the Navy, had gone through dozens of decompression drills. She knew well the expansion of the chest, the screaming pain of ears and eyes. But this was her first time to experience the event in battle.
It felt as if some demon were astride her, crushing the breath from her body. Tyre remembered the symbol on the academy's decompression drill room door: the Asphyx, the spirit that visits the dying to steal their last breath. Through the haze of synesthesia, she had a sudden vision of the Asphyx--the blank eyes, the yawning mouth hungry for her life.
Then she command-gestured, clearing her data mask of all synesthesia, and saw that it was Kax's face before her. He had fallen to the deck next to her. But even in primary vision, his face remained horrifying, burned and bleeding, the flesh peeling from it as if stripped by hungry insects.
"Class," he said, his voice ravaged.
Tyre rolled out from under him. As her hands sought purchase on the tilting deck, she felt the grit of tiny bits of broken glass cutting into her palms. Her pressure uniform was torn and felt invaded with some sharp presence, like the insinuating fingers of fiberglass against the skin.
The other three in the DA room were stunned, their faces and arms cut with thousands of tiny nicks. The phosphorus fire had burned itself out too quickly to hurt them.
Rating Rogers, still in his webbing, coughed as he spoke.
"It's glass. From the optical core next door." He pointed to the access tube, from which coiled a bright, heavy mist, half vapor and half dust. Of course. Data Analysis was adjacent to one of the Lynx's processing towers, a column of dense optical silicon and phosphorus. Tyre hadn't been following the Lynx's defensive status, so she brought up the diagnostic channel in synesthesia. A number of projectiles had plunged through the vessel.
That explained the momentary blaze. The quantum computers of the Lynx used phosphorus atoms suspended in silicon as q-bits. Free, the phosphorus was flammable, even in what little oxygen there'd been for the agonizing seconds of decompression.
Tyre covered her mouth with a loose flap of uniform to ward off the glass vapor hanging in the air, looked again to Kax.
His eyes were clenched shut and bleeding. He'd been the only one in the station without full-strength headsups covering his upper face. And his body had shielded hers from the blast of glass and burning phosphorus.
"Medical, medical," Tyre said, her voice gritty and plaintive from the glass dust she'd inhaled. "We need major medical in DA Station One, deck fourteen."
She heard the background murmur of other stations begging for medical assistance.
Data Master Kax reached out a bloody hand and clenched Tyre's ankle, coughing. She knelt beside him.
"Don't try to talk, sir," she said.
"The blackbodies, Tyre. Keep looking," he managed.
She glanced around at her crewmates, realizing that the Lynx was still in battle. With Kax out, she was in command now. The data from Master Pilot Marx's scout was invaluable, and he was far too busy flying to grasp its tactical implications.
"Rogers, try to help the Data Master," she commanded. "You two: Back to your stations." Still in shock, her crewmates moved numbly to follow her orders. Tyre sank into her webbing, and flipped back to second sight. She gestured with bloody hands, and adopted the scout drone's viewpoint again.
Master Pilot Marx was under fire.
Pilot
Marx discovered that he was still alive.
A small cleaning robot moved beneath his feet, sucking up the thin, acid bile on the floor with a gurgling sound that set his stomach flopping again. His hands were shaking, and his ears rang from some nearby decompression.
The Lynx had been hit all right. But somehow Zai had kept them alive. The strike certainly hadn't numbered five thousand flockers. It had sounded like only ten or so. Marx scanned the icons of internal diagnostics. There were no more than twenty crewmen dead. He turned his eyes from the display before he could recognize any names. Later.
What mattered most was that Marx's control hardware--the trans-light array that connected him with the drone complement--was still functional. He could still see from the scout drone's perspective, if only fuzzily. He checked the clock. Another thirty seconds remained before his foremost drones passed the Rix battlecruiser and became irrelevant to the battle.
There was still a chance.
But the question remained: How to disintegrate the dead sand-caster?
Marx considered his remaining assets. Only four drones were left mside the Rix defenses that could respond to his orders. The scout itself, tumbling with no reaction drive. The two stealth penetrators, smaller than dribble-hoop balls. And the decoy, weaponless. And if any of them switched on active sensors or accelerated noticeably, the Rix monitor drones would shred it within seconds. He could see the sentinels now as the scout neared the hot background of the receiver array: rank after rank of blackbody monitor drones, dark spots against its reflective surface.