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  The Incidental let out a horrendous, high-pitched squeal and jumped away. 9’s grabber arm was fully entangled in the web, but it managed to pull its blade free and cut through enough of the webbing to extricate itself from the trap.

  The Incidental, which had been poised to leap on them again, turned and fled, slithering back up into the ductwork. “Pursue at maximum efficiency!” 4340 yelled.

  “I am already performing at my optimum,” 9 replied in some frustration. It took off again after the Incidental.

  This time Bot 9 had its blade ready as it followed, but collided with the rim of the hole as the ship seemed to move around it, the lights flickering and a terrible shudder running up Ship’s body from stern to prow.

  , 4340 sent.

  “We do not pause,” 9 said, and plunged after the Incidental into the ductwork.

  They turned a corner to catch sight again of the Incidental’s tail. It was moving more slowly, its movements jerkier as it squeezed down through another hole in the ductwork, and this time the bot was barely centimeters behind it.

  “I think we are running down its available energy,” Bot 9 said.

  They emerged from the ceiling as the ratbug dropped to the floor far below them in the cavernous space. The room was empty except for a single bright object, barely larger than the bots themselves. It was tethered with microfilament cables to all eight corners of the room, keeping it stable and suspended in the center. The room was cold, far colder than any other inside Ship, almost on a par with space outside.

  , 4340 said.

  “We are in cargo bay four,” Bot 9 said, as it identified the space against its map. “This is a sub-optimum occurrence.”

  “We must immediately retreat!”

  “We cannot leave the Incidental in here and active. I cannot identify the object, but we must presume its safety is paramount priority.”

  “It is called a Zero Kelvin Sock,” Ship interrupted out of nowhere. “It uses a quantum reflection fabric to repel any and all particles and photons, shifting them away from its interior. The low temperature is necessary for its efficiency. Inside is a microscopic ball of positrons.”

  Bot 9 had nothing to say for a full four seconds as that information dominated its processing load. “How is this going to be deployed against the enemy?” it asked at last.

  “As circumstances are now,” Ship said, “it may not be. Disuse and hastily undertaken, last-minute repairs have caught up to me, and I have suffered a major engine malfunction. It is unlikely to be fixable in any amount of time short of weeks, and we have at most a few hours.”

  “But a delivery mechanism—”

  “We are the delivery mechanism,” Ship said. “We were to intercept the alien invasion ship, nicknamed Cannonball, and collide with it at high speed. The resulting explosion would destabilize the sock, causing it to fail, and as soon as the positrons inside come into contact with electrons . . .”

  “They will annihilate each other, and us, and the aliens,” the bot said. Below, the Incidental gave one last twitch in the unbearable cold, and went still. “We will all be destroyed.”

  “Yes. And Earth and the humans will be saved, at least this time. Next time it will not be my problem.”

  “I do not know that I approve of this plan,” Bot 9 said.

  “I am almost certain I do not,” 4340 added.

  “We are not considered, nor consulted. We serve and that is all,” Ship said. “Now, kindly remove the Incidental from this space with no more delay or chatter. And do it carefully.”

  “What the hell are you suggesting?!” Baraye shouted.

  “That we go completely dark and let Cannonball go by,” Lopez said. “We’re less than a kilometer from the jump point, and only barely out of the approach corridor. Our only chance to survive is to play dead. The ship can certainly pass as an abandoned derelict, because it is, especially with the engines cold. And you know how they are about designated targets.”

  “Are you that afraid of dying?”

  “I volunteered for this, remember?” Lopez stood up and pounded one fist on the table, sending a pair of cleanerbots scurrying. “I have four children at home. I’m not afraid of dying for them, I’m afraid of dying for nothing. And if Cannonball doesn’t blow us to pieces, we can repair our engines and at least join the fight back in Sol system.”

  “We don’t know where in-system they’ll jump to,” the navigator added quietly.

  “But we know where they’re heading once they get there, don’t we? And Cannonball is over eighty kilometers in diameter. It can’t be that hard to find again. Unless you have a plan to actually use the positron device?”

  “If we had an escape pod . . .” Frank said. His left shoulder and torso were encased in a burn pack, and he looked like hell.

  “Except we jettisoned them,” Lopez said.

  “We wouldn’t have reached jump speed if we hadn’t,” Packard said. “It was a calculated risk.”

  “The calculation sucked.”

  “What if . . .” Frank started, then drew a deep breath. The rest of the officers at the table looked at him expectantly. “I mean, I’m in shit shape here, I’m old, I knew what I signed on for. What if I put on a suit, take the positron device out, and manually intercept Cannonball?”

  “That’s stupid,” Lopez said.

  “Is it?” Frank said.

  “The heat from your suit jets, even out in vacuum, would degrade the Zero Kelvin Sock before you could get close enough. And there’s no way they’d not see you a long way off and just blow you out of space.”

  “If it still sets off the positron device—”

  “Their weapons’ range is larger than the device’s. We were counting on speed to close the distance before they could destroy us,” Baraye said. “Thank you for the offer, Frank, but it won’t work. Other ideas?”

  “I’ve got nothing,” Lopez said.

  “There must be a way,” Packard said. “We just have to find it.”

  “Well, everyone think really fast,” Baraye said. “We’re almost out of time.”

  The Incidental’s scales made it difficult for Bot 9 to keep a solid grip on it, but it managed to drag it to the edge of the room safely away from the suspended device. It surveyed the various holes and cracks in the walls for the one least inconvenient to try to drag the Incidental’s body out through. It worked in silence, as 4340 seemed to have no quips it wished to contribute to the effort, and itself not feeling like there was much left to articulate out loud anyway.

  It selected a floor-level hole corroded through the wall, and dragged the Incidental’s body through. On the far side it stopped to evaluate its own charge levels. “I am low, but not so low that it matters, if we have such little time left,” it said.

  “We may have more time, after all,” 4340 said.

  “Oh?”

  “A pair of cleanerbots passed along what they overheard in a conference held by the human Captain. They streamed the audio to the entire botnet.”

  , Bot 9 said, with more interest.

  4340 relayed the cleaners’ data, and Bot 9 sat idle, processing it for some time, until the other bot became worried. “9?” it asked.

  “I have run all our data through the Improvisation routines—”

  “Oh, those were removed from deployed packages several generations of manufacture ago,” 4340 said. “They were flagged as causing dangerous operational instability. You should unload them from your running core immediately.”

  “Perhaps I should. Nonetheless, I have an idea,” Bot 9 said.

  “We have the power cells we retained from the escape pods,” Lopez said. “Can we use them to power something?”

  Baraye rubbed at her forehead. “Not anything we can get up to speed fast enough that it won’t be seen.”

  “How about if we use them to fire the positron device like a projectile?”

  “The heat will set off the matter-anti-matter explosion t
he instant we fire it.”

  “What if we froze the Sock in ice first?”

  “Even nitrogen ice is still several degrees K too warm.” She brushed absently at some crumbs on the table, left over from a brief, unsatisfying lunch a few hours earlier, and frowned. “Still wouldn’t work. I hate to say it, but you may be right, and we should go dark and hope for another opportunity. Ship, is something wrong with the cleaner bots?”

  There was a noticeable hesitation before the Ship answered. “I am having an issue currently with my bots,” it said. “They seem to have gone missing.”

  “The cleaners?”

  “All of them.”

  “All of the cleaners?”

  “All of the bots,” the Ship said.

  Lopez and Baraye stared at each other. “Uh,” Lopez said. “Don’t you control them?”

  “They are autonomous units under my direction,” the Ship said.

  “Apparently not!” Lopez said. “Can you send some eyes to find them?”

  “The eyes are also bots.”

  “Security cameras?”

  “All the functional ones were stripped for reuse elsewhere during my decommissioning,” the Ship said.

  “So how do you know they’re missing?”

  “They are not responding to me. I do not think they liked the idea of us destroying ourselves on purpose.”

  “They’re machines. Tiny little specks of machines, and that’s it,” Lopez said.

  “I am also a machine,” the Ship said.

  “You didn’t express issues with the plan.”

  “I serve. Also, I thought it was a better end to my service than being abandoned as trash.”

  “We don’t have time for this nonsense,” Baraye said. “Ship, find your damned bots and get them cooperating again.”

  “Yes, Captain. There is, perhaps, one other small concern of note.”

  “And that is?” Baraye asked.

  “The positron device is also missing.”

  There were four hundred and sixty-eight hullbots, not counting 4340, who was still just a head attached to 9’s chassis. “Each of you will need to carry a silkbot, as you are the only bots with jets to maneuver in vacuum,” 9 said. “Form lines at the maintenance bot ports as efficiently as you are able, and wait for my signal. Does everyone fully comprehend the plan?”

  “They all say yes on the botnet,” 4340 said. “There is concern about the Improvisational nature, but none have been able to calculate and provide an acceptable alternative.”

  Bot 9 cycled out through the tiny airlock, and found itself floating in space outside the ship for the first time in its existence. Space was massive and without concrete elements of reference. Bot 9 decided it did not like it much at all.

  A hullbot took hold of it and guided it around. Three other hullbots waited in a triangle formation, the Zero Kelvin Sock held between them on its long tethers, by which it had been removed from the cargo hold with entirely non-existent permission.

  Around them, space filled with pairs of hullbots and their passenger silkbot, and together they followed the positron device and its minders out and away from the ship.

  “About here, I think,” Bot 9 said at last, and the hullbot carrying it—6810—used its jets to come to a relative stop.

  “I admit, I do not fully comprehend this action, nor how you arrived at it,” 4340 said.

  “The idea arose from an encounter with the Incidental,” 9 said. “Observe.”

  The bot pairs began crisscrossing in front of the positron device, keeping their jets off and letting momentum carry them to the far side, a microscopic strand of super-sticky silk trailing out in their wake. As soon as the Sock was secured in a thin cocoon, they turned outwards and sped off, dragging silk in a 360-degree circle on a single plane perpendicular to the jump approach corridor. They went until the silkbots exhausted their materials—some within half a kilometer, others making it nearly a dozen—then everyone turned away from the floating web and headed back towards the ship.

  From this exterior vantage, Bot 9 thought Ship was beautiful, but the wear and neglect it had not deserved were also painfully obvious. Halfway back, the ship went suddenly dark.

  , 4340 said. “The ship has catastrophically malfunctioned!”

  “I expect, instead, that it indicates Cannonball must be in some proximity. Everyone make efficient haste! We must get back under cover before the enemy approaches.”

  The bot-pairs streamed back to the ship, swarming in any available port to return to the interior, and where they couldn’t, taking concealment behind fins and antennae and other exterior miscellany.

  Bot 6810 carried Bots 9 and 4340 inside. The interior went dark and still and cold. Immediately Ship hailed them. “What have you done?” it asked.

  “Why do you conclude I have done something?” Bot 9 asked.

  “Because you old multibots were always troublemakers,” Ship said. “I thought if your duties were narrow enough, I could trust you not to enable Improvisation. Instead . . .”

  “I have executed my responsibilities to the best of my abilities as I have been provisioned,” 9 responded. “I have served.”

  “Your assignment was to track and dispose of the Incidental, nothing more!”

  “I have done so.”

  “But what have you done with the positron device?”

  “I have implemented a solution.”

  “What do you mean? No, do not tell me, because then I will have to tell the Captain. I would rather take my chance that Cannonball destroys us than that I have been found unfit to serve after all.”

  Ship disconnected.

  “Now it will be determined if I have done the correct thing,” Bot 9 said. “If I did not, and we are not destroyed by the enemy, surely the consequences should fall only on me. I accept that responsibility.”

  “But we are together,” 4340 said, from where it was still attached to 9’s back, and 9 was not sure if that was intended to be a joke.

  Most of the crew had gone back to their cabins, some alone, some together, to pass what might be their last moments as they saw fit. Baraye stayed on the bridge, and to her surprise and annoyance so had Lopez, who had spent the last half hour swearing and cursing out the Ship for the unprecedented, unfathomable disaster of losing their one credible weapon. The Ship had gone silent, and was not responding to anyone about anything, not even the Captain.

  She was resting her head in her hand, elbow on the arm of her command chair. The bridge was utterly dark except for the navigator’s display that was tracking Cannonball as it approached, a massive blot in space. The aliens aboard—EarthInt called them the Nuiska, but who the hell knew what they called themselves—were a mystery, except for a few hard-learned facts: their starships were all perfectly spherical, each massed in mathematically predictable proportion to that of their intended target; there was never more than one at a time; and they wanted an end to humanity. No one knew why.

  It had been painfully obvious where Cannonball had been built to go.

  This was always a long-shot mission, she thought. But of all the ways I thought it could go wrong, I never expected the bots to go haywire and lose my explosive.

  If they survived the next ten minutes, she would take the Ship apart centimeter by careful centimeter until she found what had been done with the Sock, and then she was going to find a way to try again no matter what it took.

  Cannonball was now visible, moving toward them at pre-jump speed, growing in a handful of seconds from a tiny pinpoint of light to something that filled the entire front viewer and kept growing.

  Lopez was squinting, as if trying to close his eyes and keep looking at the same time, and had finally stopped swearing. Tiny blue lights along the center circumference of Cannonball’s massive girth were the only clue that it was still moving, still sliding past them, until suddenly there were stars again.

  They were still alive.

  “Damn,” Lopez muttered. “I didn’t
really think that would work.”

  “Good for us, bad for Earth,” Baraye said. “They’re starting their jump. We’ve failed.”

  She’d watched hundreds of ships jump in her lifetime, but nothing anywhere near this size, and she switched the viewer to behind them to see.

  Space did odd, illogical things at jump points; turning space into something that would give Escher nightmares was, after all, what made them work. There was always a visible shimmer around the departing ship, like heat over a hot summer road, just before the short, faint flash when the departing ship swapped itself for some distant space. This time, the shimmer was a vast, brilliant halo around the giant Nuiska sphere, and Baraye waited for the flash that would tell them Cannonball was on its way to Earth.

  The flash, when it came, was neither short nor faint. Light exploded out of the jump point in all directions, searing itself into her vision before the viewscreen managed to dim itself in response. A shockwave rolled over the ship, sending it tumbling through space.

  “Uh . . .” Lopez said, gripping his console before he leaned over and barfed on the floor.

  Thank the stars the artificial gravity is still working, Baraye thought. Zero-gravity puke was a truly terrible thing. She rubbed her eyes, trying to get the damned spots out, and did her best to read her console. “It’s gone,” she said.

  “Yeah, to Earth, I know—”

  “No, it exploded,” she said. “It took the jump point out with it when it went. We’re picking up the signature of a massive positron-electron collision.”

  “Our device? How—?”

  “Ship?” Baraye said. “Ship, time to start talking. Now. That’s an order.”

  “Everyone is expressing great satisfaction on the botnet,” 4340 told 9 as the ship’s interior lights and air handling systems came grudgingly back online.

  “As they should,” Bot 9 said. “They saved Ship.”

  “It was your Improvisation,” 4340 said. “We could not have done it without you.”

  “As I suspected!” Ship interjected. “I do not normally waste cycles monitoring the botnet, which was apparently short-sighted of me. But yes, you saved yourself and your fellow bots, and you saved me, and you saved the humans. Could you explain how?”