Mother of Stars

Like a Virus - Connor

I could not believe what I'd just heard. Never had I thought something like this could become a reality. I wished Neila had refrained from telling us that, the same way Neval had hidden his findings from us before our first battle.

"How much time do we have?" Kyrom asked, somehow no more alarmed than he'd been already.

"I don't know!" Neila replied. "Hours? Minutes? I don't have enough data."

The fighters outside the ship began to spin down from the rotational frenzy that they had engaged in during the trip. My interface signaled several objects approaching from above, each zooming toward us at nearly the speed of light. Another viewing window brought them directly into view.

The fighters were converging on our ship from many different angles. They were sharp, diamond-shaped objects, made of the same white substance as the Defect's fighters. Except that the fighters kept growing larger as they approached. Just when I thought there was no way to avoid them, they halted just short of obliterating our ship.

My interface was finally able to provide some analysis on the objects. Each one measured over five kilometers in length. I jolted around in the tight space in my fighter, forgetting that there was nowhere to run. How did the Defect plan to defend against ships that were each several times larger than each of our own?

The tips of each of the massive weapons glowed with energy as bright as the starlight emanating from within Mother. The intensity increased for several seconds before I started hyperventilating. "What are we doing!? It's going to destroy us! Get out of the way!"

"No," Neila said. "I see what it's going to do now."

Bright halos formed around each of the weapons as they released their energy at us. I squealed out loud and squeezed my eyes shut. The windows remained visible since they were part of my interface, so I was forced to watch what happened next.

The beams of light shot toward us, each hundreds of feet thick. Just before they drove themselves through our ship, the fighters spun back up to maximum speed. The beams of light began to split from their converging trajectory. Each one bent in a wide arc around the ship, encasing it momentarily in a cage of energy, but not touching it. They closed back together at some point behind the ship, and ripped harmlessly through nothingness.

My jaw dropped. "What just happened?"

"The Defect just created a buffer around our ship," Neila reported after some thought. "It's like a giant shield made out of the fabric of spacetime."

"How is that possible?"

"That's not relevant right now!"

I thought for a moment. She did use the same word to describe what the Defect described earlier. "Okay, does this mean we're caught in Mother's shield?"

"Yes, it even planned for this to happen."

The Mother's defenses ceased their continuous beam-firing as they began to float away. The Defect's voice sounded in my head as all the fighters inside the hangar lifted away from the floor. "The Mother has stricken. Now, we go."

Red lights blared within the hangar as the bay doors rushed open. My fighter roared as the air decompressed into the vacuum outside the ship. The force of the rush dragged the array of fighters out with the escaping air.

I shut my eyes again just before we entered the field of fighters spinning around the ship. With each passing moment, I became more convinced that my fighter was going to get shredded into pieces. It didn't happen.