Lucky Ace of Spades

"It just takes one."

The filigree fighters roared through the silence of space, a thousand kilometres distant from each other. Close formation, in astronomical terms. Tightening his grip on the throttle, Jimothe pushed forward—9 gees, 11 gees, 14 gees, 15 gees—his fighter, the Ace of Spades, growled in eager delight to finally accelerate to combat speeds. The Ace was performing well today. Its fluid-filled life support capsule pressurised to keep the blood in his body from pooling. The pain was intense, but bearable.

"One fighter craft." Jimothe recalled the flight leader's words. This was what they had built towards—their one chance to strike a meaningful blow against a foe that seemed to know everything, to be everywhere, long before the high command even knew what they were planning.

"A single seeker ray to the node is all it will take."

The node—the one weak point that humanity had found. It had taken centuries' worth of manual human brain power to identify and confirm, but it was the one shining break for freedom. They dare not trust such analysis to computers. No data system seemed immune to their enemy, the Occulus.

The Occulus were so named because they appeared to be a genuine panopticon artificial swarm intelligence. Their nanosensors seemed to blanket space with EM fields, if not physically. No networked computer system was immune. Even the flight control systems of the filigree fighters were necessarily analogue—built around crude circuits of valves and relays with minimum complexity, which could be inspected visually.

The filigree fighters: humanity's one and only weapon that was immune from the Occulus' pervasive intelligence. Each filigree fighter was one-of-a-kind—not just in airframe configuration but down to the very microstructure of its fuselage. The tapering aerospace craft tended to be roughly shaped like a flattened wedge or a long, slender gothic spire, but there the commonality ended. Each was built around mind-bending metamaterial nanostructures that evolved from randomly generated entropic seed crystals. The spacecraft literally grew as single-piece three-dimensional molecular composites from the atomic level up to visible dendritic lattice lacework of awesome complexity: the "filigree" that gave them their name.

The Occulus' weakness, it was reasoned, lay not in their ability to sense their targets—there was nowhere in the galaxy unobservable to them—but rather in their ability to identify meaningful form out of a cosmic background of noise. Their automated sensor processing algorithms thrived on structure amidst chaos. To the Occulus, the absence of a signal was just as noticeable as a signal itself. The only way to go unseen was to embrace randomness and chance.

Thus, the filigree fighters were the ultimate stealth spacecraft: fully entropic inside and out, with no hot spots, no cold spots, no EM resonance, no telltale magnetism. And each one was necessarily unique. To see a similar random pattern twice was to be identifiable.

Like Jimothe, the filigree fighter pilots had spent years learning to understand their individual spacecraft. While the principles of spaceflight and orbital combat were entirely uniform, the complexities of handling a truly singleton combat vessel meant that the learning curve was steep and lethal.

"The greatest pilots are not the ones who learn their fighter," the training squadron leader had lectured. "No—the greatest pilots feel their fighter. They become one from the beginning and listen to what it is saying. You cannot ever fight the fighter, or it will kill you."
"But how can we feel it if it can kill before we even have a chance?" Jimothe had retorted, exasperated by the generalities of endless flight training that never approached a real cockpit. The flight instructor's face was deadpan. "Get lucky," he stated, without any hint of mirth.