There was a pause.

“Fine reasons, all,” Osmium finally declared.

Pamir turned to those standing with him, and using a calm hard voice, he said, “Make ready.”

To Aasleen, he said, “As soon as we acquire our target.”

And then to someone to whom he hadn’t spoken for hours, he said, “It’s time that we inflict some pain—”

“Agreed,” Washen replied.

Then after a pause, she said, “Careful.”

But Pamir had already silenced the extra nexuses, every sense and sensor, capacity and voice now focused squarely on those millions of square kilometers of churning, dangerous life.

THE TARGET WAS born inside a whirlpool that was the color and constancy of beef gravy. Its body was smaller than the other avian, only a kilometer long, deep but narrow like a knife blade—a chassis of diamond upon which was woven a careful assemblage of tough organics and sacks filled with scalding gases, plus tangles of superconducting neurons and dense organs of no discernible purpose. The body rode the whirlpool outward, letting the current accelerate it until the long, long diamond wings rose high, supplying just enough lift to yank it free of the polypond’s great body.

The whirlpool settled, vanished, its energies sequestered into muscles of water and thousand-kilometer proteins.

The newborn drifted in a sloppy circle. Great eyes and little eyes examined its surroundings. The horizon lay in a remote distance. In every direction, clouds were stacked high, each mass forming storms that spat lightning downward while great blue sprites danced their way into the highest reaches of the new atmosphere. A variety of ears heard rumblings and deep churnings, faraway thunder blending into the nearer, more massive sounds. Muscle was building, or it was healing. Dispersed networks of fusion reactors continued to grow and divide. Metals and rare earths were yanked out of the salty hot water, purified and set aside for later. The bird-body could taste the good hearty health of the ocean, and for a very little while, it was free to rejoice at all of this success.

One of the giant rockets stood above the storms: a gray-black cone using hyperfiber and magnetic guts to contain the rising column of light and wild radiations, controlling the flow and tweaking its momentum. The nozzle had a steep tilt, as if it had halfway fallen over, and without any sound, it desperately shoved at the ship, trying to make that massive bulk dance sideways.

A considerable waste of effort, the bird-body might have believed.

The superconducting mind could have thought many things, or nothing, in the time it took a laser bolt to jump from the hidden blister high up on that nozzle, lashing at a point some ten kilometers in its wake. A blue-white bolt, brief and potent, it burrowed its way into the atmosphere, turning gases to a thin screaming plasma that couldn’t help but fling itself out of the way, drilling a deep empty hole as it passed.

The next twenty bolts dove through the gap, boiling the water beneath before cooking a million tons of young muscle.

Still, the bird-body circled, biding its time and hiding its abilities. The attack was expected and insubstantial, the wounds already healing—a little probing assault, most likely.

The next attack was a hundredfold larger.

Riding out of the rocket plume was an assortment of tiny machines, each wearing a jacket of hyperfiber that degraded in predictable, perfect ways. Little engines emerged from the heat-born crevices. Little diamond eyes acquired targets, and swift soulless brains guided the machines’ flight, and when the interceptors rose up out of the sea to meet them, they struggled to avoid the obstacles.

The interceptors were iron darts, blind and numbering in the billions.

Striking nothing, they nonetheless did a thorough job of herding the falling machines into narrower zones.

As the polypond’s enemies slammed into the high reaches of the atmosphere, black heavily insulated organs burst from the water, disgorging rivers of lightning that were around one another, rising like cherry ropes into the ionosphere. None of the attackers were damaged. After all, they had successfully flown through a plume infinitely hotter than this. But each was left tagged and slightly charged, and the next pulse from the mother body—a coherent, irresistible stream of electricity—grabbed hold of the offending weapons, flinging them back up into the plume from which they had fallen.

The Mother Sea growled and groaned, every sound happy.

The bird-body took another hard look at the sky, seeing first what the Sea would notice in another half moment.

The attack had been a diversion. From a second, more distant rocket plume came thousands of bodies, each deeply camouflaged and treacherously sly, all using the glare of one battle to sneak close and drop like rain.

Some of the bodies were little suns, born and dead again with a single blistering light.

Some linked with their neighbors, building much larger suns that managed to dive into the Mother Sea before igniting.

Columns of steam leaped upward, flanking the bird-body and very nearly blinding it. The superheated air shoved it one way, then back again. But with a graceful dance, elegant and smooth, the entity twisted its wings, bringing the best of its good eyes to look at the brightest of the blasts, instinct telling it that that was where other, even worse dangers might hide.

What looked like an eddy of quiet water shot across the Mother Sea.

It was a puddle, a lake. Invisible again, and appearing again. Then as the bird-body stared, it once again vanished.

With myriad voices, the bird-body gave a warning.

Endless other voices rose up out of the Mother Sea. A new opponent had slipped out from the base of the rocket nozzle, using an invisible hatch that had been quickly destroyed. But what resembled water was a fleet of skimmers, shielded and dressed up in some kind of elaborate holo. And as they rushed along, sure to die in a matter of moments, the skimmers dropped tiny phages full of tools, microscopic and voracious—tools that ate and reproduced like cancers, already tainting the Mother Sea with death and their own relentless bodies.

The bird-body dropped its wings.

Scramjets kicked it into a hypersonic path, burning much of its body while carrying it across nearly a thousand kilometers of churning, irradiated water.

Deep organs crawled to the surface of its skin.

With its surviving eyes, the bird-body glanced at the skimmers. Darts and quick tendrils had cut some of them open. Ponds were on board—tiny independent whiffs of conscious shadow spilling across the water, torn apart by the terrific velocities, then killed in a thousand ways by the greatest shadow.

Harum-scarums, it saw.

Choking off its engines, the bird-body fell. What it aimed for was the sick band of contaminated water, injured, and inside the little whirlpools, dead. Where the Sea was slow to respond, the bird-body could be swift. Where size didn’t matter, it could craft, then deliver perfectly tailored plans for new cells that would eat the invaders, swiftly countering one of the inevitable kinds of attacks. The Mother Sea, like all the Seas, was familiar with every species of machine and each of their ugly uses. The bird-body was meant to quicken the Sea’s reactions, keeping these assaults to the level of a nuisance. At least until the enemies saw its importance, and like any multitude of ponds, they would adapt and try new ways to confound the Mother Sea.

Falling like a knife, the bird-body prepared for its demise.

A carefully crafted bolt of light came at it suddenly, passing through it, slivers of blue fire dividing and consuming, then cutting free certain organs and portions of its substantial and swift mind.

In a multitude of ways, it died.