The Void always reminded Castantius of an ocean. Not the warm shallow seas of his childhood home on Sanctuary, but something far colder, deeper, and darker. The star lanes were currents of warm water threading their way across that ocean, and he and every other ship in the galaxy were swimmers winding their way along those currents. Castantius was a good swimmer, always had been. Navigating star lanes had come easily to him, startlingly so. He was perhaps the most powerful Vacare in the Concordat, or so they told him. He tried not to think about it. Powerful Vacare tended to get arrogant, over-confident, and careless. Castantius had no intention of allowing such folly to claim him. Careless ships got killed.

Still, that knowledge occasionally tugged at the edge of his mind. They said powerful Vacare could dive into the ocean, completely submerge themselves in the Void and step across the stars in an instant. Could Castantius do that? Could he resurface if he did? What would he find down there?

He shook off the curiosity and returned his thoughts to navigation, effortless though it may be. The tendency for a mind to wander remained in him even now. It remained in all Concorded he’d ever met, though they did it more efficiently than baseline humans. Concorded did everything more efficiently. Their brains simply functioned faster as a result of their implants. This speed was limited by the ability of their brains to disperse heat, another thing the implants helped with, but Castantius’ brain was surrounded by liquid coolant all the time, granting him even greater speed over his more organic brethren. He could navigate the Void, monitor his sensors, regulate his powerplants, and let his mind wander all at the same time without any apparent loss in efficiency. He hoped to further enhance his capabilities someday soon; Sendema had told him she was working on designs for neurally integrated secondary processors…

As if on queue, a voice transmitted itself into his speech centers through his cortical network implant: [i]“What are you thinking about?”[/i]
A thought fired off into the ship, tracing the transmission back to its source in an instant and displaying a holographic avatar of Castantius beside the person who had sent it. Of course it was Ademnon, and of course he was on the observation deck, staring into the flickering play of light and darkness as Castantius bobbed along the surface of the Void.

The avatar shrugged. “Just your rival, and some promises she made me,” he replied absently. Predictably, Ademnon scowled, and Castantius smirked as his avatar spoke again. “That easy to irritate you these days I see.”
“I suppose it is,” Ademnon said out loud, a peculiarity of his. “She is indeed irritating. Generations of secrecy have served us well. Why she’s pushing for open conflict, I just don’t understand.”
“Secrecy can only last so long. Conflict is inevitable, and with the Imperium in chaos, now’s the best opportunity we’re likely to get.”
Ademnon rolled his eyes. “The best opportunity to get ourselves and a lot of innocents killed, in my opinion. You don’t really agree with her do you?”
“No, not fully, or I’d flush you out an airlock this instant”
Ademnon chuckled audibly, then fell silent for a while. “How far out are we?” he asked at last. Another peculiarity of Ademnon’s; if he’d been tapped into Castantius’s datanet, he would’ve known they were a scant few minutes from the void-limit of Concord Dawn’s star. Instead, he insisted on this ponderous back and forth verbal dialogue. Castantius would never know why.
“We’re close, less than 3 minutes to the limit,” he replied dutifully. Ademnon may have had his peculiarities, but Castantius still held a great deal of respect for the old war horse who had effectively founded their civilization.

Castantius abruptly burst through the star’s void-limit, entering the island of safety that every star projected around it. Practiced as he was with the transition, Castantius flawlessly engaged his real-space engines at the perfect time, gently easing himself out of the void. The ocean metaphor struck him again; he made the transit like the neo-otters of Sanctuary, completely at home in either environment as well as the boundary between them. Less skilled ships made the transit like hexawalruses, smashing onto the beach then laboriously hauling themselves up onto dry land. Castantius’ avatar smiled at the thought.

The traditional challenge from Concord Dawn’s patrols came in, and Castantius passed it along to Captain Leander so that she could reply with her verification codes. It was a potentially awkward bit of protocol, since Castantius himself was actually a Fleet Admiral, vastly outranking Leander. However, like the Imperial Authority whose rank structure Ademnon had brought to the Concordat, a Fleet Admiral had no business in the actual running of a ship. Castantius was technically a guest aboard himself, responsible for coordinating fleet actions. He was capable of assuming direct control of all ship systems at Captain Leander’s request, but during routine operations, his only ship-specific function was Void navigation.

[i]Castantius![/i] Captain Leander’s voice came to his CNI over the network sounding distinctly alarmed. [i]Case DeepMind! Authorization Leander-Sigma-Five-Five-Five![/i]

It had been 1.3 seconds since he’d forwarded the comm challenge to the Captain. It took 0.1 seconds for Castantius to receive the authorization for Case DeepMind, and another 0.1 seconds to bring his realspace engines and inertial sumps to full power. He shot ahead in space under full burn, subjecting his crew to a thoroughly uncomfortable 10 gravities even through the sumps. Even as he moved, Castantius took another fraction of a second to examine the comm message himself. It was not the standard challenge he’d assumed it to be, but a desperate warning from the nearest perimeter station. [b]Unscheduled and irregular FTL signature inbound, EVADE[/b]

Castantius rechecked Captain Leander’s logic. Nothing could have followed him so closely through the void without his knowledge unless it had been fully submerged in the void. Only one ship both knew where Concord Dawn was and could fully descend into the void. Leander had indeed been correct to activate case DeepMind. It was Valda.

Case DeepMind handed full control of a ship to its Mind. It was incredibly useful in individual skirmishes, but humans and therefore Concorded did not have an appropriate herding instinct to make it useful in fleet operations. A ship under Mind control could act faster than it could under crew control, but it could not reliably co-ordinate its purely reflexive actions with other ships. A fleet in case DeepMind was a fleet broken and routed. A ship in case DeepMind, however, was a wild animal with very, very sharp teeth. Nothing short of case DeepMind would give Castantius a chance to survive against Valda.

Then she arrived. She exploded from the Void, transit energy flickering across her blackened hull, arching between bizarre spurs and projections, across holes and damaged sectors. She was half again as large as Castantius, an experimental Concordat Dreadnought gone wrong. Castantius was the most powerful Vacare in the Concordat only because Valda was no longer among their number.

Castantius wasted no time trying to talk to her. He’d tried that before and almost been killed for his trouble. Valda was well and truly insane, only replying to transmissions with tortured screams. His shields had come up in the instant after his engines had activated, and his weapons shortly thereafter. They had locked onto Valda in the exact moment she had begun to emerge from the Void, and she was not quite fully settled into realspace when he opened fire. The range was close. His railguns fired their molten ferrofluids, appearing as brilliant beams of light as they seared into Valda’s hull. Conversely, his true energy weapons, the ion beams, were completely invisible until they impacted. Valda’s shields were up before  Castantius’ missiles reached her, and the damage that had been done to her hull seemed to do little to slow her down. She leaped to full speed, somehow outpacing Castantius despite her size, lashing out with missiles and railguns of her own. She only used the railguns - older models firing solid slugs  - because of how close she was. Valda had been built as a missile-intensive ship, and she’d favoured the long range firepower ever since. The railguns were unchanged since the day she’d launched, as were her missile launchers. The missiles themselves, however, were a new and deadly surprise every time she was seen.

A particularly nasty surprise today, Castantius thought in the instant between when the missiles somehow punched through his shields and when they impacted his hull. There was pain; he felt it as the missiles struck home. There had to be pain in case DeepMind, or his adrenaline flooded brain might well overlook critical damage. Castantius duly noted the damage to his armour and outer hull in the seconds it took for his weapons to cycle. His normal graser point defence clusters would be insufficient today; it was critical Valda’s missiles be shot down before they could bypass his shields. Fortunately, whatever allowed them to do that had taken up space that would have gone to the warhead, reducing the killing power of the nevertheless deadly missiles. Castantius loaded all of his own launchers with counter-missiles, and held his ion beams for point defense. Those beam mounts wouldn’t do anything close in, but if he kept them targeted at Valda’s launchers and broadened their containment fields, they could easily take down a few missiles each at longer ranges. It would affect his offensive power, but Castantius wasn’t looking to kill Valda, just hold her off until help arrived.

That help was closing fast. Three corvettes on outer system patrol were rapidly approaching, but Castantius shooed them away with a thought. They would be easy targets for the rogue dreadnought. Better they wait for the cruiser squadron coming in from the mid-system before engaging. Five cruisers would tip the balance definitively, and Castantius was confident Valda would run before they arrived. If not, the battleships being dispatched from the inner system would scare her off, or kill her if she stood and fought. Castantius just had to hold on for a bit.

Valda’s next salvo screamed from her launchers. Ion beams cut swathes through them and counter-missiles launched to meet them, graviton warheads pulling Valda’s missiles towards them before detonating and wiping out more. Grasers fired desperately at the remaining few, until only one missile made it past Castantius’ shields, spending its fury against his armour as he rolled to meet the impact. It meant deviating from his least time course towards help, but if he lost an engine, he’d lose time anyways, and they were pointed directly at Valda.

And then Castantius had an idea. His railguns continued to spend their fury against Valda’s shields, loaded with electrified ordinance in an attempt to disrupt her defences, but with the weight of his fire devoted to point defence, they weren’t likely to get through on their own. Castantius watched the next missile salvo come, doing his best to intercept as much of it as he could, but this time two missiles got through, pounding his armour and melting through his outer hull. With great theatricality, Castantius sputtered his engines before shutting them down, letting Valda race up to meet him. He held his fire for a moment, then resumed it at reduced efficiency. 

Valda piled on even more speed to catch up. Of course she would. As far as her deranged mind could tell, Castantius had no engines, and was back under crew control. That meant severe damage, possibly damage to his brain itself. Valda fed on the psychic emissions of Vacare. That was the theory anyway. In all her attacks that the Concordat had ever heard of, she only took the Vacare of a ship, or the cloned brains that powered their precog engines. What she actually wanted was petrichor, the Concordat knew that much. She was hopelessly addicted. But petrichor was hard to find and heavily guarded, so leading minds of the Concordat theorized she harvested the brains of Vacare, plopped them in jars, and tortured them until they eventually died, feeding on their agony in place of the substance she craved. So she naturally was very concerned that she might have damaged her prize, Castantius’ brain. And that made her careless. And careless ships got killed.

Her mind reached out, sniffing at Castantius’ like a hound on the hunt, but it was sporadic and intermittent, and he found it easy enough to entice her with falsified pain. Were she not a slave to her addiction, her sensors would have told her the damage she’d inflicted was probably not serious enough to cause engine failure. But Valda came on blindly, no longer firing as she slurped up Castantius’ ersatz emotions. Captain Leander queried him, desperate to know what he was doing, but her logical mind figured it out soon enough and she fell silent, tossing out some panicked distress calls to contribute to the illusion.

Valda was right behind him and starting to dispatch drones when Castantius activated his engines at full power. The fury of a star’s fusion reaction, shaped and directed into a flame of incandescent energy, roared from his engines, punching through Valda’s shields and burning away her forward armour. She screamed, in a way, erratic transmissions bursting out of her, but Castantius ignored them. He turned all his fire on her, blasting away, but she had already turned to run at full speed. He gave chase, thinking for one glorious instant that he might be able to finally put her down. But she was too fast, reaching the void-limit and fully diving in an instant later, down into the depths where Castantius could not follow.

He stopped short of the limit, and returned primary control to Captain Leander and her crew, letting his mind relax, allocating drones to repair duties and other basic tasks. Someday, he would catch Valda and put her down. Someday he would lay his sister to rest.