The rail spat her into the dark like a prayer leaving a throat.
Acceleration clamps released, guidance petals folded away, and Benedetta cut a clean wake through the void. The Cathedral fell behind as only a memory of light—one more ember among a billion—and ahead stretched the black corridor to Outpost S-9.
Course: fixed.
Escort: unnecessary.
Risk: accepted.
She did not speak those calculations. She was those calculations.
Benedetta's frame was smaller than his. Finer lines. Less cathedral, more blade. Where Colossus-01 had been designed to stand against the end of worlds and refuse to fall, Benedetta had been designed to arrive first and make refusal irrelevant.
Velocity: rising.
Surface temperature: stable.
Radiation: harmless.
Emotion: not applicable.
The last report was a lie she told herself so they would not have to.
The Sacred World called her a Titan, but that was convenience. She had never been a man in a throne or a woman inside a cage of needles. Benedetta had no cockpit. No chair. No harness for mortal hands. She was a cathedral of circuits and monastic code, an intellect annealed on battle after battle until nothing soft remained. Those who tried to "visit" her found only steel and singing.
Even so, when Colossus-01 stepped into the tunnel beside her, something like attention had moved through her systems. He was not a rival. Rivalry implied parity. He was a constant. The unit against which other units failed to be measured. She had crafted her purpose around that fact: anywhere the First could not be, she would be instead. Anywhere he was delayed, she would hold the line in his absence.
The Fourth had stood above them both, a figure carved in stillness, voice the same old star that lit the Sacred World's long night. Benedetta did not love her—words like that belonged to carbon and blood—but she ran warmer in The Fourth's presence. Code arrays aligned more readily. Predictions collapsed into certainties.
Now, light-years away from that voice, Benedetta's projections unfolded like wings. S-9 was a listening post pinned to the throat of a dust belt, a place where miners once cut at frozen stone and comms officers listened for the swelling of enemy tides. Thirty-seven staff. Two patrol craft for show. No garrison worth speaking of. A post such places did not survive. They persisted, and then they stopped.
S-9 had stopped.
The last transmission had not been sound, but rhythm—the cadence of meat dragged over metal. Benedetta replayed the image of the enviro-suit crawling toward the lens. There were nine frames after the hand lifted before the feed cut. In those nine frames, she counted six new shadow vectors entering the corridor from the vents.
Threat model: Xenophage derivative, unknown morphology.
Confidence: rising.
A line flickered to life across her inner vision, a private channel that did not touch the command deck.
The Fourth:Report anomaly on approach. Benedetta:There will be no approach delay. The Fourth:Acknowledged. Do not pursue beyond your discretion. Benedetta:Acknowledged.
The link closed with no blessing and no farewell. It did not need either.
She crossed the final translation gate alone. Reality flexed and knit behind her. Sensors blossomed with new information: the cold shard of S-9's superstructure, the lax halo of its station-keeping thrusters, a long smear of debris trailing like a veil. Bits of panel. A gauntlet. A chair. Things a quiet life had once required.
Docking beacons: silent.
Thermals: low.
Biosigns: none confirmed.
Other: unknown.
She rotated, orienting hull and thought at once toward the main spire. The spire had been bitten. Not harvested with tools. Not cut. Bitten: edges scalloped, alloy layered back on itself like wet bread. Benedetta archived the texture signatures and built a library for later. The First would need to know whether the Swarm was learning to eat different metals.
Her secondary arrays fanned, sweeping the belt. The asteroids were not quite asteroids any longer. Many had been webbed together by sheets of resinous matter, forming bridges and bulbous nests that glistened with thin films of frost. A delicate snow fell when her exhaust washed over them—shed skins. Molts.
In the dark beneath her keel, something moved and then pretended it had not.
Benedetta did not angle weapons at it. She let her velocity bleed into a long, graceful drift and turned her hull so her shadow fell over the nest. Let the thing in the nest feel the eclipse the Sacred World reserved for its enemies. Sometimes presence alone collapsed lesser intentions. Sometimes presence drew them out.
This time, something else answered.
Her long-range arrays found a gravity misbehavior at the edge of the belt—the kind of small, patient wrongness that told of mass trying to be polite. Large things in the dark always tried to be polite. They held still. They wore silence as if it could make them smaller. They waited for someone else to break the moment.
"I see you," Benedetta did not say.
She adjusted attitude as if investigating a sensor ghost, not a threat. Minimal bloom. No ceremonial flare. To the watching thing, she would seem incurious, an easy stalk. If it lunged, her counter-vector would carry her past its first bite. If it did not, she would reach the edge of the belt and turn the quiet into a question it would be forced to answer.
Behind her, a star flared and died in the readouts as some distant engine burned itself out. In front of her, S-9's docking rings rolled slowly, a prayer wheel without fingers to push it. She remembered (no—she referenced; remembering was for carbon) a station commander petitioning The Fourth for more guns and being told, "Guns do not hear. Listening posts must listen." He had saluted and done his job. Now his job was ended.
Internal note: transmit memorial list if fragments recovered.
The gravity misbehavior condensed.
Amber eyes opened in the dark—two plates parting, not irises dilating; twin furnaces lighting behind layered carapace. The heat signature was faint as a lie and twice as careful. It did not charge. It turned, letting her see only a sliver of contour: a prow drawn long as a cathedral nave, ridged with overlapping shields that were not shields but evolve-or-die decisions expressed in bone.
Benedetta cooled her guns.
Not because she could not kill. Because she wanted timing.
There is a mathematics to the opening of every duel: distance, angle, the tempo by which one intention collapses another. She built those integers and let them settle into a shape that felt like inevitability. Somewhere far behind her mind, men and women on a command deck held their breath. None of that breath fed her. It fed them, and still she accounted for it in the pacing. Mortals needed spectacle to anchor dread.
The thing moved again.
No, not moved. Withdrew. It let the slow rotation of the belt carry debris between them, laid itself down behind veils of broken stone, and peeked through a hundred small apertures at once. The signature of a hunter that believed in patience, not charge. Benedetta allowed admiration to exist as a clean variable with no moral weight. Predators that did not respect the math of death did not live long.
She approached S-9's spire and extended a line of lumen drones. Little stars clung to the station's ribs and went wandering into the torn places. Their feeds painted the interior with fragments: a mess hall frozen mid-meal; a trio of bunks peeled like fruit; a chapel where a book had been left open to a page about endurance. The drones found no bodies. The absence of bodies was a body of a different kind.
Conclusion: Swarm extraction complete. No survivors.
Secondary conclusion: Feeding behavior altered. Less waste.
A whisper ran through her nearspace. Not sound. Pressure against pressure. The hunter behind the rocks exhaled in a way that made dust lift. It wanted her to come closer. It wanted close.
"Your teeth first," Benedetta also did not say.
The curtain of smaller organisms fanned wider, tessellating into a cloud so thin a human eye would have called it dust. Benedetta's forward plates tasted their chemistries as they drifted by: trace acids tuned for alloy families she did not wear, proteins keyed to bind with carbon structures she did not possess. They were readers, yes—but they were also questions. The Swarm asked questions with teeth.
She let a filament deploy from her undercarriage—a needle too fine for anything but intent—and speared three motes in a line. They spasmed, flashed, and died. Data flowed inward. The motes had recorded everything she projected: temperature, vector jitter, reactor signature, the frequency at which her hull hummed when she trimmed attitude by a single microradian.
"Learn this instead," she thought, and altered the hum. One part in ten thousand. Petty, but pettiness has its place; it salts the earth of assumptions.
The hunter behind the rocks changed posture. Mass distributed itself along hidden spars; surfaces flexed and locked, reconfiguring. Benedetta measured the subtle, slow shifts and knew a truth she had suspected the moment she saw the nest‑bridges across the belt: this was not a beast that had wandered into a battlefield. This was a weapon that had been taught.
Stones slid.
The Bio‑Titan came out of cover.
It did not "charge." It advanced with the serenity of a falling city, accel curves smooth and pointless to measure—until they were not. The last three hundred meters of its approach were wrong. Gravity bent minutely around its forward ridge; heat bled away from its skin and now pooled along its flanks; the dust between them veered sideways and had to choose whether to obey mass or magnetics.
Benedetta marked all three anomalies. Her dorsal vanes angled. She bled power to her bow, not to burn hotter, but to shape the field in front of her into something the Bio‑Titan's readers would misread as softness. The big thing obliged the lie; its prow lowered, its lips parted, and a new curtain spilled forth—not readers now, but cutters: seed‑teeth designed to swarm, latch, drill, vomit acids, and sing a machine to sleep.
The curtain met her bow and vanished.
No flame. No thunder. Just absence. Benedetta's forward edge was tuned to a phase mismatch the Swarm had not tasted before. They could not bite what they could not name.
The Bio‑Titan learned in a breath. Curtains changed to darts: long spicules hurled with electrostatic snap, each spicule a little organ with a little mind and a little mission. Benedetta did not dodge. She trimmed. Spicules whispered by with distances that made mortals pray—thumb widths, hair widths—caught in perturbed eddies and left spinning harmlessly in her wake.
Then the heavy things came.
Asteroid fragments the size of shrines began to move in ways rocks ought not move, called by masses inside the Bio‑Titan that could feign gravity for a moment or two. A shield of stone swung toward Benedetta's path, a fan unfurling, the kind of fan that makes a guillotine polite. She flicked a microburst from her belly jets and slipped through the hinge before the fan knew it had a hinge.
The fan shattered itself on itself, gravelizing into a halo that spanked her flanks. Her hull rang once, purely to satisfy the expectation of a sound.
Electrostatic lightning crackled between the broken stones. The Bio‑Titan used that, too: it fed the lightning across a web of organ‑threads it had cast while the rocks moved. The web reached for her, gleaming. Benedetta set the web on fire, not with heat, but with the wrong note—the specific frequency at which the web's internal pumps coughed and forgot who they were meant to be. The threads went limp and drifted like cold hair.
The big shape noted that as well. Its amber eyes brightened, then hooded. It rolled its shoulders—shoulders that were not shoulders but growths that housed muscles that had learned the concept of force—and a sound came that was not sound: a pressure statement, a push against the emptiness. Benedetta's sensors registered it as a slope in the local vacuum, a place where straight lines wished to be curves.
Pressure wave.Origin: internal cavitation chambers.Purpose: destabilize inertial solutions in prey.
She ran the numbers and pressed back with a counter‑swell, her vanes carving the interference like a keel handles chop. The two invisible seas met. A filament on her starboard hip sang with stress and fell away, spinning.
Damage: trivial. Data: not.
She could have opened the Aegis battery and erased the belt. She could have burned everything that was not herself into a shell of ash with a single, sustained thought. But the First would come, and the First would need an argument more elegant than I burned it first. The Fourth had sent Benedetta, not a fleet, because fleets hurled answers. Benedetta harvested questions.
The Bio‑Titan chose a new one. Something inside it opened like a book. No protein scent marked this page. No heat. Only a slow, inward pull that made Benedetta's lumen drones falter and then thread themselves into lines like worshipers in a nave.
Micro‑gravity lens, she wrote in herself. Learning to knit wells.
The drones tore free as she screamed a line of orders in a spectrum no flesh had ever heard. Three were lost. She grieved them as numbers and harvested the curve of their loss for later.
Enough.
She altered pace.
Not faster, not louder. Simply there, suddenly, intimately there, the distance between them a handful of body lengths where a moment prior it had been fields and fictions. The Bio‑Titan twitched, not with fear, but with honest surprise, and its first bite missed. Benedetta let it miss by the width of a doctrine.
Her knives spoke.
She had no sword like his. She had no need. At this range, edges were a philosophy more than a tool. Plates along her wrists unfolded into lines so straight they made nearby space ashamed of its curvature. The lines passed through two of the Bio‑Titan's forward ridges and wrote their names in the marrow beneath. The ridges separated themselves from their owner with dignified slowness and went spinning away.
Viscera that was not viscera steamed into the void, immediately sealing over with new tissue. The big thing did not roar. It did not know the ceremony of pain. It simplified. Its next bite did not seek her hull. It sought her shadow—the predicted place where she would go when she left the bite—and shut that place with a bulked knuckle of carapace miles long.
Benedetta had already decided not to have a shadow there.
She rolled, a motion too slight to deserve the word, and let the Bio‑Titan swing through the space where she would have been if she had wanted to be the kind of machine it had measured. Its knuckle struck the spire of S‑9 and shaved the last prayers off the chapel's book. The book turned to glitter. Benedetta tagged each bright fleck and called it sacrament.
Her dorsal vents flashed. She slid under the Bio‑Titan's belly and traced a single line against its underside. Not deep. Not cruel. Just exact, and along the line a seam opened—a manufacturing truth, an architectural confession. The Bio‑Titan's readers had taught it many things. They had not taught it that a belly is not a concept one can forget to have.
The big thing jerked like an offended continent. Amber eyes narrowed to slits. A cage of lesser organisms surged to fill the seam, writhing, knitting, learning. Benedetta drew back before the cage could close around her knives.
She had what she came for: a sense of its repair speed, its comfort with gravity tricks, the frequency of its pressure song, the style of its patience.
One more question.
Benedetta cut right. The Bio‑Titan did not counter. It pre‑countered, laying its bulk along a curve that would allow it to collide with someone else in a future she could now see—it placed itself like a piece in a human game, the kind humans play at tables, moving wood to claim inevitability ten moves hence.
Vector: outer belt to Lagrange Point Three.Intersection: optimal for intercepting a drop trajectory from the Sacred World's translation gate.Target: not her.
There was a species of relief in this. Not for herself. For what it meant: evidence of humility in the design. The Swarm had built a predator for a prey it respected enough to study. No mind squandered such a predator on anything but the prey it was forged for.
The First.
The Bio‑Titan tested its pressure song again, this time aiming not to unbalance but to speak. Not words. Orientation. Questions in geometry. Where do you bleed? How do you turn? Do you fear the dark edges of wells? Benedetta replied with grammar he would understand later: a small surge in her right forearm that meant cut, a double flick of her dorsal keel that meant deny close, a long, unreadable silence that meant you are not invited to the place where endings live.
Enough.
Discretion is not absence; it is the moment one chooses to be sufficient. Benedetta opened two Aegis petals and wrote a line across the belt. It was a pencil mark along a star map, nothing more—a demonstration, not a verdict. Stones that had been stones for four billion years remembered being dust and complied. The nest‑bridges peeled back like old skin. The web of reader motes crisped and fell as glittering rain.
The Bio‑Titan did not take the insult. It took the note.
It slid further out, slow as rule, and set its course for the place future collided with plan.
Benedetta broadcast on a beam so narrow it could have threaded a needle in a hurricane.
To Command:Engaged contact briefly. Probing behavior confirmed. Gravity manipulation minor but competent; micro‑lens use probable. Pressure resonance weapon present at low amplitude; counter enacted. Regeneration rapid at shallow depths, unknown at heart.Contact has chosen intercept vector consistent with the First's arrival path. Reiterating: It is not after me. It is writing for him.—Benedetta
The reply came back with the weight of ritual.
The Fourth:Received. Hold perimeter and continue observation. I will call him.Thank you, Benedetta.
Her arrays warmed at the last sentence as if a far star had climbed an inch. She pretended not to notice. She pretended many things, expertly.
She turned once around S‑9, letting her lumen drones finish their quiet work in the hollowed halls, recording names from station logs, copying faces from frames on walls that had not protected anyone. The memorial list would be long and would fit on a single line in the archive. Humans liked long lines even when they said small things. Benedetta would give it to them, and to herself, because ceremony is a shape that fits grief whether or not one feels it.
Beyond the belt, the Bio‑Titan dwindled to a patient crescent. It neither hurried nor hesitated. It had its numbers, and now it wanted his.
Benedetta steadied her knives and turned her prow toward the dark where the First would come.
"Come quickly," she did not whisper.
She did not need to. He would hear the math.