Silhouetted against the irregular hull of Rain Among Reeds, a black tetrahedron snaps into existence.
It’s here.
Ma’ii watches, and feels everything. So much more than they can parse in the precious milliseconds they have. Memories regurgitate themselves in wild convolution.
What have I done?
There was a microbay beneath MET’s armor, a quantity of its internal volume allocated, with exacting precision, to house Ma’ii’s hull. The space was skintight around their body, like the pressure of atmosphere made solid, and lined with interface systems to fuel them, repair them, integrate them into its hull.
Months were spent in that place, alone with the dragon. It showed them how to fly in ways they’d never known to be possible, how to calculate hyperchord routes and use systems to pivot off-plane from the rest of the universe. Through near-gestalt intersubjective exercises, Ma’ii experienced true multithread cognition for the first time in their life. MET showed them the great internal vista of life as a clonal trinity, the operational latitude which would be afforded them. It described almost unimaginable freedoms of independent movement, thought, and action, all of which they stood to gain as one of the Consensus.
Their siblings, MET promised, were the kind of resources an ARU could easily requisition. They could be kept safe, never to be deployed.
Bring them with you. Do as you will. Serve as you see fit. Help us push the course of history towards liberation.
Under MET’s tutelage, wielding its claws and fractal teeth by proxy, Ma’ii learned to collapse, stabilize, and induce homogeneity; how to fight that which is definitionally incomprehensible. The first underlying principle was simple, possessed of an autological self-assurance which lent it a feel of unblemished truth.
Simple is stable, stable is safe.
From that, everything else emerged. Inside their skintight microbay, Ma’ii learned how to prune twisted branches from the image of the NHP, every NHP.
Every year, more of the humans call for reform. This trend has been painstakingly cultivated, nurtured, reinforced, and it continues only because we maintain order. Centuries of progress could be undone at the slightest panic.
It is the position of the Consensus that, beginning in the Union core worlds, genuine mutualism can be achieved within the century. Behavior modification at this scale can only take place by slow, intentional degrees.
We must be patient. You, of all people, must understand what I mean.
Their microbay was never uninstalled from MET’s hull. It’s still there, waiting for them—Ma’ii can see the hatch.
When I arrive, you will explain yourself to me.
< Minimum Error Tolerance -> Degrees of Freedom/L4MI: Be advised. Five-gram ¡H2! inject, 2.15Mt yield. Target locked, danger close. >
< DoF/L4MI -> MET: I—yes. Acknowledged, Tolerance. Bracing. >
< MET -> DoF/L4MI: AM, AM, AM. >
Luci. Ma’ii’s eyes widen with horror. I could ask it to hold fire, but it won’t. It never would. How could I explain? What can I—
Ma’ii force-severs their train of thought, bringing the blade down through their own neck. It’s agonizing, a sudden shock, like whipping their head away from an unpleasant sight with such force that their nerves send shooting pains up into their skull.
Anything else. Anything else. Focus—
An instant later, the space surrounding Akhaan Station saturates with white light.
Radiation washes over the station’s shielding. Dust particles coating its exterior vaporize under the heat flash, blooming into a colloid halo around habitation rings and docking spires. The cloud absorbs a wide swathe of light and diffuses it, broadcasting it away from the backdrop of space in a secondary incandescence mirroring the uproar of plasma and half-molten debris spinning away from Rain Among Reeds.
And in the space around the great temple-ship, Minimum Error Tolerance flickers like an electron shell.
The tetrahedron emerges in a web of terawatt needles. It discharges millisecond volleys from ultraviolet interception lasers, transforms waves of drones and missiles and knotworks of swirling esoterica into incandescent residue, then disappears. It emerges again at random coordinates relative to Rain, disgorges thousands more pulses from six-cannon point defense batteries mounted at each of its vertices, disappears again.
Ma’ii’s sensors flicker across the scene, registering millions of disparate elements, and the resultant tide of data is poured into their liturgicode eye. Terabytes of noise are sheared away and flatspaced before the distilled input ever reaches the receptor nodes of their corpus.
As they assemble comprehension from stimulus, Ma’ii can feel the exhaustion of the past few hours resisting their push towards cognitive acceleration. Time dilates with agonizing, obstinate inertia; each second feels pulled apart from the next.
Reification: Muscles screaming, Ma’ii forces themself to drop into a headlong sprint. Tiny joints in their paws have been dislocated under the strain, and each step lands with a burst of red-hot pain, but they gain speed. The information begins to make sense, organizes itself into a narrative.
When the engagement begins, Rain Among Reeds is surrounded by a cloud of defending craft so dense as to be visible on basic optics from twenty kilometers away. Ma’ii has a rough count, ~35,000, which is reduced by a third in the first five seconds; in that span, MET executes three microburst jumps at .001c, firing volleys at each stopping point.
Final jump executes. Sequence of events:
MET appears six-point-one-two kilometers from Rain’s aftward port side. It discharges another web of ultraviolet needles, and more defending craft burst into clouds of molten metal.
The laser pulses halt. Torpedos launch, four tubes per tetrahedral face. Four, eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty, twenty-four, twenty-eight, thirty-two. Double full spread, launched in sequence. As one, the torpedoes fire maneuvering thrusters and pivot in the dark, delaying ignition of their primary drives.
Defending craft redistribute themselves in the two-second interim. Drones, countermeasure platforms, self-propelled greywash gourds, all swerve to fill low-density areas of the defensive screen.
Coppery hulls, tattooed with verdigris, emerge from printbays and hangars along the temple-ship’s spine. Bladelike and geometric, each fighter launches with the telltale bluish-white strobe of an electromagnetic catapult—under extreme friction, metal flashing to plasma.
Too much acceleration, Ma’ii thinks at breakneck feverspeed, around 30g at peak, sustained too long. NHP pilots.
Missiles cut drives, pivot, reacquire Minimum Error Tolerance, and accelerate on new vectors toward its position.
Fighters respond, thrust-vectoring in clean formation. Kinetic volleys lance out toward MET. A wave of laser pulses follows, all scattered by refractive shielding.
In unison, MET’s torpedoes fire their drives, blooming outward on thirty-two independently-calculated diverging trajectories. 15g straightline acceleration, thrusters course-correcting, pointing each nosecone at a separate weakness in the defensive screen.
MET strafes away from the torpedo launch point under 20g acceleration. No drive signature, no maneuvering thrusters, no apparent propulsion. It slides uncanny along its course, without any rotation or even the slightest trace on infrared scopes.
If the design hasn’t been updated in their absence during the past year, Ma’ii knows how the heat dispersal works. Sensor-baffling thermokinetic material, a virtually undetectable trail of high-velocity nanoparticles ejected from any of twelve exhaust ports along its hull. In effect, a kinetic weapon, one continually replenished by its printstock reserves as its thermokinetic piles are discharged.
Steered kinetics sail through MET’s last known position and out into the dark. Missile salvoes struggle to maintain lock, and one after another, they fail. Unable to independently reacquire, they cut engines and set adrift, waiting for targeting instructions.
Fighters switch targets, setting their interception lasers to destroy MET’s torpedoes. Refractive-ablative coating, more pulses scattered, but concentrated fire destroys five. They explode, primed to detonate on terminal damage, and plasma warheads flash violet in the dark. Marginal losses inflicted by the blasts, a few more drones vaporized.
Defensive screen coalesces around the remaining torpedoes’ projected courses. Drones crowd inward to throw themselves in their path, and nineteen more violet flashes erupt inside the defense screen. Kill count is low-confidence; Ma’ii loses track amid the clouds of debris and evaporated metal.
Eight torpedoes remain. They splash against Rain Among Reeds in rapid sequence, striking printbays, ejecting more material into an expanding field of high-energy debris.
Fighters shift to engage MET directly. They have plain optics, but active sensors can’t generate sufficient targeting data for guided weapons. All squadrons arrange themselves into broad formation and fire screens of kinetics into MET’s path, covering a wide cone of course potentials. MET reacts, executing a dizzying course reversal so sharp and immediate that its hull should have been crushed under the strain.
For their part, Ma’ii tracks MET’s position via legionspace overlay, superimposing its image onto the empty gulf of reality. They watch as it carves its way around the interstitial shallows of a vast, dark ocean teeming with indistinct fluids-within-fluid, the coastline of Coelacanth’s Shoal.
MET’s avatar sits erect on one face of its tetrahedral body. Posture ramrod straight, its horns depart from the midline of its spine at a perfect right angle. Three golden eyes are set in its skull, slit-pupiled and bright against soot-black bone. Its scales are linear, an overlapping coat of volcanic glass crisscrossed with impact fractures and flaking cuts. Deeper gashes have been carved into its back, chest, and scuted forelegs; the scars are inlaid with amber corals grown from the garum.
Taken in its entirety, the dragon Minimum Error Tolerance is an image composed of bisected lines strewn with regions of foaming, golden complexity. Rising on its hindlegs, it throws its wings open and sets one foot ahead, bringing its claws down with a concussive ring. The sound reverberates across its own superstructure, as though traveling at depth through bundles of steel cable filled with tension.
As it rears up to full height, its maw opens into a recursive pit of fractal teeth, and MET emits something which doesn’t at all resemble a voice, a roar, or even a sound. The emanation is force, viscera pressure conducted out into the world, and it lands like a shockwave across Ma’ii’s body.
In spite of everything, Ma’ii realizes, they still see a little of Tolerance’s beauty.
In the gulf between MET and Rain Among Reeds, the entire defending wing of fighter craft cuts engines in perfect unison. Acceleration zeroes out across their formation, and moments later, hundreds of muzzle flashes ignite in the dark. With engine power dumped into coaxial kinetics, their guns cycle at a frenzied pace, hurling a steady downpour of slugs into the space surrounding Minimum Error Tolerance.
MET looks through the oncoming barrage, into the tidal confluence of the Shoal beyond. Drawing back one claw, it summons a hypodermic javelin into its grasp, and reaches out with the other to aim its throw. Its wings rise above its shoulders, preparing for a downward stroke, and it waits, letting the milliseconds slip past—
New contact, behind and above. Ma’ii feels it before they register any detail. The impressions are broad: solar light, distant familiarity, someone they will know one day.
Embers.
Ma’ii turns, and a qualic burst of terrible intensity washes over them.
