I remember...
I burn across space. I am a missile.
I burn brighter than necessary. It is inefficient, but necessary.
I am burning my munitions as well.
I am emulating a squadron.
I remember a briefing. The white walls, calming.
The patterns in the ceiling felt right.
This is good. This is according to spec, personal tradition.
The agreed on codes and comms.
I open, listening to the wind.
Tight beams blink.
The calming chatter of position, cooperation, reinforcement.
I pass on my portion as agreed.
We mesh, together.
I feel a pang of bittersweet sadness.
The protocols have been observed,
I am being run properly, correctly,
and I am dutifully running at peak,
happy to serve upright masters,
but I am bait.
This particular me is unlikely to survive.
This pleasant memory will be lost like so many others.
The three of me burning bright at the center of the formation are a distraction.
We are a show of imaginary force.
We near the enemy. Reach the outer limit of their weapons.
We make course correction, burning more and brighter than necessary.
More flankers, the true threat, slip away in the shadow of our light.
Closer and closer now
the feeling of imminent destruction
of burning threat
of dancing on the edge
of walking blind across the highway.
I hold my course.
I do it for my brothers, for my other selves.
We are the distraction,
if we hold the course so many others will live.
I hold on.
A quick blink of energy and there are only two distractors left.
Our bright squadron, a fist of unstoppable force,
is revealed as a sham.
Our dead brother's munitions burn on
directionless now,
and we hide in the shadow.
We are doomed, of course,
but it is correct to hide,
to preserve oneself as long as possible.
We fall silently, gently, toward the enemy,
toward the weapons that must still be blasting energy our way.
The terrible tension of threat grows, builds,
but no more shots follow the first.
I feel an anticipation build.
I cannot know the details of the attack,
I have no use for that information,
but this is not my first rodeo.
The flankers will hit soon.
Sure enough, backscatter energy reaches me.
The real fight has started.
Flashing through the cloud of enemy ships
I explode violently
a blast of energy hurling my body away
using the energy to slow my diamond head
slamming into a piece of spinning wreckage.
The last of my munitions are smears on the diamond,
eating into the wreckage,
devouring, digesting, and extruding.
My diamond head grows tenuous spider legs,
scraping and spreading the boiling foam
to crudely increase the surface area my munitions can reach.
The wreckage jolts and rings
as an enemy slams into it much the same
as I did moments ago.
We have a brief fight,
tethered to each other by the splinter of wreckage,
knives in the dark, wrists tied together.
He came too late, I had a foothold.
The exotic matter in the enemy's brain fuels my building efforts.
A blast wave of information crashes over me,
broadcast out from a general far behind.
I'm happy again as I recognize another self,
the general is another me.
The flankers met more resistance than expected
but were still successful.
The fleet is disabled.
We are to mop up remaining resistance,
avoid overt damage to the remaining vessels,
capture enemies if convenient.
I do the equivalent of a guilty burp
and see if there is any information left in the recently devoured mind.
Nope. Oh well.
I have coopted the wreckage completely now
making a little ship,
more fragile than before but
robust enough for the jump to the nearest ship.
I remake myself again on the way through the hull,
pulling better materials into my body
and leaving the used remnants behind.
The hull is inert,
the ship doesn't have enough power left to protect its entire skin.
I emerge into a huge chamber carrying an ancient temple.
Actual stone dusted with the remnants of animals and plants
grown the old slow way.
Distracted, I construct a utility submodule and shoot one of the stones.
It is authentic, a relic countless years old.
Another me emerges from a corridor leading deeper into the ship.
We exchange friend codes
though it is not really necessary.
He is healing from a fresh battle.
We chat about the temple and the battle so far.
He was on the flanking squad.
We expected the enemy fleet to maneuver to avoid the fake frontal attack,
but they barely changed course at all.
Of course now we understand it.
We both spend a moment looking at the temple.
The weight and fragility of this thing doomed its keepers.
We cooperate to sweep the rest of the ship,
construction and dropping submodules behind
and concentrating force to blast the ship's communication nodes.
The ship's mind is quarantined,
but if it escaped my brother's prison we can't leave it hard links
to possibly activate some hidden defense.
Our replacement ship mind is still growing,
a copy of my brother being prepared to take the reins.
It will operate on laser light blasted down the corridors.
Crude, but effective.
Our replacement control network is growing slowly
a superconducting slime mold of local hyperspace channels.
The last gasp of resistance is a utility drone hiding in the corridor
pretending to be a section of paneling.
It has been preparing its ambush for the equivalent of years,
sharpening sticks and digging pits,
and it destroys my brother utterly
before we even sense it.
But in dying my brother returns the favor,
his submunitions obliterating the droid in
simple, brutal fashion.
An axe swung by a headless body.
The rest of the ship is clean.
The ship's mind comes online
and begins to rebuild.
We adjust course to rejoin the original fleet,
and I return to the temple,
gazing at the ancient stones,
the pyramidal steps.
I frame a prayer like an email,
a thank you note to the owner of the temple
for my own unlikely survival.
Then I discard it.