Synthesis - James Swallow [87]
But they were not fast enough. Null fragments coiled through the dark, serpentine forms becoming ridged blades to chop through nacelles and fuselages, others distending to shapes that resembled bolas, spinning and shredding wherever their razored tips touched metal.
Two Sentry ships, one a saucer-shaped construct, another a spindly thing resembling a solar-sail racer, died within seconds of each other, as lashes of matter threw the first into the second with a violent blast that claimed both craft.
The display canted as the Titan veered through the expanding corona of the explosion, dodging dead wreckage from the refinery on the way. At her station, Lavena unconsciously leaned into the turns, as if the motion of her body would somehow translate directly to the moves of her ship.
The engagement zone was a mess of debris, and for a moment, Melora wondered why the Null was so careless about its attacks. In battle, most enemies would strike a blow and then ensure that they had obliterated their enemy, but the Null’s blunt, brute-force assaults left scrap and wreckage instead of the clouds of plasma or free atoms that were all that remained after an antimatter explosion or disruptor strike.
Then she saw the slow drifts of metal and tripolymer and the cilia that reached out from the main bulk of the Null form to touch them, altering the very nature of each tiny piece of shattered craft before drawing it in. Rager was right; it was consuming what it killed, infecting it, adding its mass to its own.
“Sentry vessel, port high,” called Rager. “It’s being swarmed.”
It was Cyan-Gray’s shipframe. A horde of spinning dashes of Null matter whirled around the craft, nipping at the hull and shearing off great scabs of armor. Antiproton beams sparked in response, but it wasn’t enough.
“Ranul, target the… enemy and open fire,” ordered Riker.
“Engaging,” said the Trill.
A fan of sunfire jetted from the Titan’s emitter bands along the upper surface of the saucer, and it washed through the cloud of Null fragments. Puffs of energetic discharge flashed, and on her scanners, Melora noted the sudden sparkle of particle decay as the pieces were not simply destroyed but dissipated, vanishing as if they had never existed.
“The fragments discorporated,” said the avatar, processing the same information. “They have fallen below a critical level of spatiotemporal mass and been drawn back into subspace.”
“That works for the little ones,” said Vale. “It’s their big brother I’m more worried about.”
The main mass of the Null was rotating, flails of energetic material unwinding, questing after the ships that dared to attack it.
Briefly freed of its enemies, Cyan-Gray’s shipframe powered away on a surge of impulse thrust, leaving the Titan a clear line of sight toward the flanks of the main mass. Keru didn’t wait for Riker’s orders and released a salvo of phaser shots and photon torpedoes into the Null. Blooms of black, glassy rubble burst from it where each shot hit, but the seething surface roiled and churned, knitting itself closed over every gaping scar.
Melora’s scans told the story, the sensors picking up the echoes of torn particles as they spilled into the vacuum like blood from a wound. The protomatter metastructure of the Null seemed to exist as much in subspace as it did in this reality. She listened as the avatar explained as much to the bridge crew before interrupting. “Unless we can weaken its ability to exist in both phase states, we won’t be able to contain it.”
“And it will keep expanding,” said Troi. “Consuming all of the wreckage around it, perhaps even the ice world as well.”
“There’s an option,” said Keru. “But I need the authorization of three command-staff officers to deploy