Syzygy

Leporis Crush

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The ship drove through the rings of a moon, leaving chunks of ice and light scattered behind it. Black oil-sheened plates caught the light and cast eerie rainbows through the ice, but the engines behind it limned the immense ship with ghostly green.

Andra drifted past Cygnus, and placed her hand on the viewscreen.

She seemed terribly small, but impossibly strong.

Her mind, her raging mind, the match to Cyg's own in power and skill, was as clear as cut crystal.

For the first time since her escape, Andra had perfect control over her own abilities.

The bridge was silent as Ursa, backed by the rest of their generals, looked on.

She didn't look when Cygnus joined her, but when he reached for her hand, she tangled their fingers together. Her mind slid against his, sparking like ball lightning.

After weeks of working to get her back, to shore up the control she destroyed to protect herself, they could merge at less than a thought. Cygnus didn't know if it was precognition, or simply a finely-tuned sense of each-other.

He didn't care.

When their minds laced together, her steely control was the shining framework for his overwhelming spread of power.

When the ship came for them, green light bearing down closer and closer, weapons already arming, they were ready.

The cut-crystal of Andra's mind shivered, resonance building through the shining, ice-sharp facets and into the bell of their merged thoughts. The l reverberation of a fingertip over a crystal wineglass echoed over and over between them, building and building from a whine, to a whistle, to a scream.

(Now,) Andra said, flooded with red-black rage and metal-white purpose.

Together they threw their minds open, reaching for the counterpoint they knew would be at the heart of the predator bearing down on them.

With Andra's purpose and Cygnus providing all the power they needed and more, they found the alien mind, buried in a shell of drones.

Before the queen could stop him, Cygnus blasted through the drones who tried to protect her and found the mind within. Andra felt the moment he was in, and followed him in, the scream of their resonance a comet-trail in her glass-facets.

Alone, neither of them could have done it. Trying to build that sort of resonance would have torn a single telepath apart.

But together, the bond of their syzygy blazing between them, they tore into the queen's mine, the strange crystalline being that held every mind of her ship, her hive in check.

When their resonance crashed into the queen, still building until Cygnus thought it would cut them apart, she went silent, her alien hunger suddenly turned to a desperate battle to survive.

Cygnus tore down her shields as fast as she could build them as Andra fed more and more of the resonance, shrieking ice-shards and shattering glass, down the connection.

The queen had time for a single shriek before the resonance hit her crystalline body. Sound, which began as a tremble of one mind on another turned to a shattering cry. Even aboard their own ship, Cygnus could feel the way the reverberation echoed through her body until she couldn't fight them anymore.

Andra, the thrill of satisfaction shining deep orange through her cut-crystal mind, struck one final blow.

The battle, which until the last moment was one of three minds, suddenly wrote itself across the stars.

Once the queen was dead, the ship, which was filled with her workers and drones, could not recover. The resonance shot out along the bond she used to control them and tore apart every mind on the way, a shockwave of destruction.

The weakness of crystal. It could take a blow, but sound, that impossible sonic scream of two telepaths sharing a load that would wreck one alone, was their vulnerability.

Better yet, a single mind aboard a ship was a target that Cyg's mercenaries could fight. He had enough syzygy pairs and trios around to spread them across the whole battlefront. The trick that the aliens, powerful and numerous and heavily armed as they were, could not fight.

The power of humanity, fighting together when the odds were bad, determined not to give in.

Cygnus dragged himself back into his own body, still halfway wrapped in Andra's mind as much as she was in his. When he opened his eyes, not sure when he had closed them in the first place, it was to a riot of green.

The alien ship, which only moments before had seemed so unstoppable, was coming apart at the seams as the workers, devastated by the loss of their queen, died where they stood.

The ship was half-organic itself, according to Andra. The pilots were grown from the egg into the stations they would man until they died and were replaced. without them to hold the ship together, without the engineers who maintained the engines and coaxed their strange technology into producing the power for interstellar travel, the ship was crippled.

After that, it was a simple matter for the human ships, waiting just out of sight, to open fire.

Cygnus turned, his intentions written in gold-edged red. Andra filled their shared mind with champagne ribbons that burst into red stars when he bent to kiss her over the bones of their defeated enemy.

The bridge crew, already cheering at their victory, exploded into cheers that rang hope and victory across the edges of Cyg's mind.

"Together," Andra whispered up to him when they parted, and he looked down into her eyes.

"Together," Cygnus whispered back, and kissed her again just to feel the smile on her lips.

Hand in hand they turned back to the viewscreen, and the armada of alien ships that came to the dying scream of one of their own.