Oddly, it was Osmium who finally admitted, “This is lovely, this mess.”

Conrad agreed grudgingly. With his giant eye pressed against his faceplate, the Remora said, “Gorgeous.”

Pamir shook his head, checking instruments and a series of nexuses. Various simulations had predicted the same failure point, shields and weapons finally saturated by the deluge. That point had been reached thirty-three minutes ago, yet every system seemed to absorb the withering abuse without complaint. Engineers were liars, he reminded himself. They always, always, built better than they ever admitted to outsiders.

In another ten minutes, Conrad wondered aloud, “What if our defenses manage to hold?”

The deluge would continue, yes. But it would remain sterile, the buds’ life boiled out of each of them. Water would collect on the hull, dirtied with roasted proteins and the molten slag left by dead machines and breached biovaults; but so long as the lasers could fire up out of the deepening soup, whether for another day or two, or for twenty—

“No,” Osmium muttered.

Within Pamir, a critical nexus began to shout at him.

“South,” Osmium said, hearing the same warning. “A breach—”

Above the horizon came a string of rapid silent flashes, a secondary bank of lasers and railguns punishing a swarm of watery bodies. But there were too many falling in too small of a volume, and the next flash marked the first of a hundred impacts on a point not far removed from the ship’s prow.

“Go,” ordered Pamir.

The skimmer instantly accelerated, letting the narrow black rail yank it toward Port Alpha. One breach meant another, then dozens more, and all at once the ship’s leading face was being peppered with impacts. The next wave of polyponds was already arriving, and sensing victory, its leaders ignited their fat engines, accelerating toward key stations and laser beds and mirror fields. As big as asteroids but moving only a little slower than the ship, they didn’t utterly obliterate themselves on impact. There were no plasma fountains or molten craters of hyperfiber. The temperatures were scorching, proteins cooked and every large structure destroyed, but the bulk of their water remained behind as a coherent steam swirling above a slick gray landscape that was just beginning to glisten, to shine.

To the skimmer’s left, there was an enormous flash.

There was no sound, and both the hull and smart rail deadened the vibrations. But Pamir heard a thousand curses as he linked to the bridge.

Washen’s voice was loudest.

“—you hear me?” she asked.

He said, “No.”

“Forget Alpha,” she advised. “You won’t make it.”

He had already discounted most of his escape routes. The shields were failing in quick succession. The lasers would fire for another hour or ninety minutes, unless they were struck hard by a fifty-kilometer-wide puddle. Thinking aloud, he asked, “Why did I come up here?”

“I already asked you that,” Washen replied.

To Osmium, he said, “Here,” and pointed at a projected map. “This radio field’s got an access tunnel.”

The harum-scarum took the helm. With a lurch, the skimmer left the rail, rising for a moment, then plunging onto the hull, its speed falling off, nothing powering it but its own panicked engine.

They were still in the open, not a feature visible for a hundred kilometers in any direction. Above them, the last of the main shields were failing, and the newest wave of polyponds appeared now as granules of red light strewn across the blackness. Countless bodies formed a strange enormous rain that plunged toward a world that had never felt water, never even imagined the possibility. Sometimes two or more buds would bump and merge, the impact producing a clear infrared signature as their sky skins shattered and the warm interiors bled into the surrounding space. Then as they dropped farther, more slammed together, accomplishing the kind of carnage against one another that the ship couldn’t manage anymore.

Without the braking shove of engines, polyponds fell at better than fifty thousand kilometers an hour. The ship’s mass did the work, and the kinetic energy made the rest inevitable. Skins ruptured. Water boiled. But as the elaborate simulations had predicted, each polypond heart contained a biovault just durable enough to survive—a multitude of organic armors dissolving, but the neurological center left only battered and numbed.

They splashed down in clusters, the first wave creating a sudden hot atmosphere that resembled evening clouds, crimson and gold, standing off in the remote distance.

Pamir counted three clouds.

Minutes later, twelve.

Osmium laughed in his fashion, asking, “Why did we come here?”

“To stand witness,” Conrad replied.

Each man quietly laughed at himself.

A fresh assault of polyponds appeared in the sky. The first few accelerated toward the surviving lasers. Most fired their rockets in tandem, effectively cutting their velocity in half, and then half of that.

“We are close,” Osmium offered.

Pamir felt relief followed by a nagging sense that he shouldn’t feel that way. They weren’t in genuine danger. Not like walking on the hull of a streakship is dangerous, no. The skimmer was clinging to places where the polyponds weren’t falling. And if that changed, they could slide right or left, avoiding any hard blows. And even if the great sacks of water swept over them, the skimmer was adapted to withstand, at least for a little while, the most brutal conditions.

Hopefully.

They had come here to stand witness. But more to the point, they came because sitting at the last Master Captain’s dinner, Pamir had professed, “We can’t just hide away under the hull.” Because it would matter to an assortment of species, not to mention a fair number of angry humans, he argued, “Someone has to go above and throw some curses at these shits.”

He did his cursing now, in a string of rich languages.

Osmium joined in, then Conrad, and while they were accusing the polyponds of every sort of unnatural mating and scatological crime, their skimmer passed into a large field of radio dishes—giant bowls of upturned webs balancing like the most talented of gymnasts upon the very tall, very narrow diamond pedestals.

Through the webbing, they could still see the deluge. A handful of polyponds were diving into the nearest plume of superheated steam, their skins peeled away in an instant, their bodies heated before the final impact. According to simulations, after another six waves the atmosphere would be deep enough and high enough to act like a meaningful brake, and from then on, each of the falling polyponds would splash into the atmosphere first, then into the new sea, never touching the hull lying beneath.

“A kilometer ahead,” Osmium promised.

Their skimmer slowed with a bone-rattling jolt, its course shifting right and back again, dancing around one of the tall pedestals.

Pamir stared at the carnage overhead, then gradually noticed the dish itself. Almost a kilometer across, its body was finer than a spiderweb and strong as any gemstone. And it was moving. Even as they streaked beneath it, heading for its pedestal and a narrow passageway leading down, he watched the dish respond to something of interest, something it could hear coming from a point very near the horizon.

Before he could ask, Washen called him.

“Busy?” she joked.

Every dish in the field was being realigned. He saw that with one nexus, and with another, he told Washen, “Rather.”

“It’ll wait,” she mentioned.

Overhead, a scant ten thousand kilometers away, an ocean’s worth of water was falling toward Pamir’s head. One last time, he cursed the polyponds. Then the skimmer came to a final stop, and throwing on a helmet, he followed Conrad and Osmium out into the vacuum, walking to a doorway that abruptly pulled open for them.