"Wing Four Frenetic," the Captain says, "you are sky free."
The nest of pirates which the company has been contracted to root out is cleverer than average, hard to find. They evidently change locations frequently; the company's pilots have been kicking over the traces of temporary camps, stripped clean and pulse-bombed to destroy forensic traces, for months.
Heard, Captain, chirps back from Nene's insystem, and Hren displays the flight deck overlook on one of the bridge datawalls; the half-dozen-strong wing of mechs, already dizzingly compressed in scale by the cavern of the ship's launch bays, lift through its wide shutters and, in a fresh perspective shift, further shrink in comparison to the great black outside.
The larger rocky bodies of this empty system hold traces of ancient excavation, investigations undertaken before any Apparat historical records of the place; earthworks unburying structures even-then older still. It's all been catalogued, nothing of any interest outside the simple fact of it remaining; but careful extrapolation from the pirates' targets, and the routes they must by necessity travel to whoever refuels and resupplies them, suggests that the system might be a conveniently unwatched place for them to keep a staging post.
Searching barren space rocks for illicit facilities is tedious, fastidious work. Hours-long shifts of confirming that there really is nothing, up close, where there appeared to be the ambiguous possibility of something from ships'-sensors distance.
"Deepnavigator," the Captain says. "They're set for another four-hour circuit, before we reposition the ship; you can be dismissed from the bridge until then, if you'd rather. I wouldn't have the company accountant leave for dissatisfaction with her wifely attention."
"I think she'll endure four hours, Captain," Hren says, in the dutiful way of someone whose superior has made the same attempted joke many times. "...She does need the occasional nap."
It's two hours later that they stumble on something, and the first warning anyone gets is a brilliant, silent, high-yield detonation in vacuum. External comms choke on the noise of a hot surge of hard radiation. The bridge crew and shipself scramble, startled, to squint sensors into the sudden brightness and call out to the mech wing amidst the rocks.
The first chirp to resolve above the noise hits, sublined with data snapshots and panic: FISSILES INCOMING, DEEP DEEP DEEP — Hren, wired into the helm, and the shipself itself grab for the drive together. The glare of the first detonation is a trap in itself, the dark flecks of atomic weapons diving for the ship invisible against it. The ship is huge, old, powerful; but atomic strikes of unknowable yield against its hull cannot be borne. Its vast structure sings with terrible resonances as its engines drag it desperately deepward, faster and harder than any reasonable deepnavigation, pain spiking Hren's head as she frantically attempts to finesse the local gravity gradients and keep them oriented to knowable landmarks.
She, and the ship, feel the wash of warheads — dragged along in the ship's sudden departure from the shallow, littering their deepwake — bursting in the sticky strangeness, muffled almost to harmlessness, except for the churn they make; the added difficulty in retracing their course to the shallow.
Even with the shipself's swift imposition of insystemic sensory baffling, the abrupt transition is painfully disorienting for most of the crew. Hren, fighting both the ship's physicality in a much-faster-than-intended deepnavigation and the muddied rush of deep itself, is dimly aware of her body slipping bonelessly from the navigator's chair; arrested suddenly by the tautness of the cables tethering her head to her bridge station.
Her attention flutters terrifyingly, as if she is falling asleep despite fighting it; the stressed hull's electronic screams rise around her like walls of fog. Mere seconds have elapsed.
The thought prowls, tigerish, from the back of her mind: that Nene Red Bat's wing of mech pilots has been left behind them, abandoned in a hot and hostile zone of nuclear fire. That she ran, and left them there. That Two Marks will—
— she loses her grip on consciousness midway through fumbling some frantic chirp to check on her wife.