Chain[01].Link[02]÷<α>

“How can you tell?” she asked as she sat up, stretched, and yawned.

{TODO: describe sailing outfit}

“Phage biology is detectable,” he continued in a quiet voice as she began changing (with a gesture for him to turn around), “it takes approximately 145 of your days before they start being able to mimic local biology to a level to avoid our detection. I examined a small fish-like morph roughly the size of a human finger when it entered my Lifshitz field’s range that turned out to have Phage biological markers. I eradicated it.”

She grabbed her duffel she had taken for the trip, and a second bag of some other things she thought might be useful that she had started packing in anger last night—before she remembered the ship could literally make anything she wanted. She took the bags anyway just in case.

She checked the time, 4:27am and motioned for him to be quiet as they snuck downstairs. She left a quick note on the fridge: ‘got hotel, maybe back tomorrow’. It was more petty than she wanted to be, but it was a plausible excuse to disappear for a relatively arbitrary amount of time.

“So what do we need to do?” she asked after they left through the front door.

“Find as much of the Phage as we can and eradicate them.”

“Okay, but how do we do that?” Sanna asked as she zipped up her jacket before setting a brisk walk to the dock.

“We use the Lifshitz field, in close proximity I can destroy the crucial aspects of Phage biology, rendering them as little more than a biochemical slurry.”

“That’s what you used to control the boat and make those holograms right?”

“Yes. However I do not have enough field allocation to focus on eradicating Phage and propelling the boat at the same time. Another reason mundane propulsion is useful.”

“What about those navigation holograms you did?”

“Soft-light constructs, holograms as you call them, are very inexpensive in comparison. I will be able to provide them.”

“Right, so I sail, and you blendanate.”

“Acceptable.”

“I feel like I should be jogging,” Sanna said as the Adrenaline of being woken up in the middle of the night to fight aliens hit her, “how dangerous is this going to be anyway? How likely are we to lose?”

“There is always risk. One of the eight who arrived before me has already been destroyed by the Phage.”

“Fuck, seriously?”

“It happened while you were sleeping, the first Lysi casualty on this planet.”

“How did it happen,” she asked morbidly curious, but also, “so we don’t repeat the mistake,” she added.

“They attempted to chase down a group of phage morphs that had killed their Captain and were ambushed by hunter morphs, which they fought until their destruction.”

That caused a chill to run through Sanna’s body, she spoke out loud to herself, “I just realized how serious this is.”

The avatar beside her didn’t respond.

She continued as her mind started considering how to do this right, “we’re– I’m going to have to begin preparing for what this is going to be like. And that means you need to brief me on what we are facing. But first, to be clear, if I die I want you to find a new captain, don’t get killed trying to get revenge or whatever happened with that other Lysi. Understand?”

It was another one of those common sense ground rules she wished she didn’t have to explain. But, apparently, she did.

“Understood.”

“Good”, Sanna said as she crested the dunes and saw the sailboat, “so what can you tell me about this threat.”

“The phage are an ever changing rapidly adapting bioweapon. I found what appeared to be a small fish, it’s likely it’s some sort of scout, the school of them likely won’t notice one missing, they’ll assume some predator ate it.”

“How is a school of fish, that a bird or whatever can kill, dangerous to us? Especially you?”

“First, to be clear being eaten by a predator is part of the adaption process. It will infect the animal if it can, and kill it if it can’t. Whatever eats enough of the resulting carcass will then suffer a similar fate. If nothing eats it, it will begin to corrupt the decomposers–”

“Fuck that is going to spread fast.”

“It does, though it isn’t always successful, sometimes a bird will just eat one and nothing happens.”

“So how are they dangerous?” Sanna asked as she tossed her bags onto the deck of the ship. As she did, each one was wrapped in a flow of golden motes before a barrier materialized around them, strapping them tight against the core.

“The phage’s morphs have a scale of complexity similar to the rarity scale of Lysi forms. Anything at the bottom of this scale, currently named ‘Natural’, like the small fish form I eradicated, is incidental and not actually dangerous to me directly. The next tier up corresponds to our ‘Common’ tier and shares the same name. That is when they begin to have adaptations which can pose a threat to me.”

“Adaptations like what?” she asked getting into position as the avatar sat beside her.

“I am not entirely sure. It is very difficult to transmit information through the accretion tunnel and so specific examples are often not transmitted. Some examples the others here have already faced include biology resistant to the Lifshitz field such that it takes a few seconds to fully eradicate it, a protrusion that has a mono-molecular cutting edge capable of slicing through my hull, and the ability to self-immolate into plasma causing a steam explosion. These are all classified as common phage forms.”

Sanna had been preparing to set sail as he talked, but she wasn’t so sure any more, “those sound very dangerous.”

“They are, and I will do everything I can to protect you.”

“Well, thank you,” she said before returning to the task, “where are we headed?”

“Out into the ocean” he replied as the ship began moving away from the dock, “I am confident they came from that direction.”

“Then lets go,” she said, despite the very vague directions, as she pulled the main sail tight.

Her boat released whatever effect was keeping him still on the water and they whipped forward.

Moments later a bright red blip appeared on the undersea map and then fizzled out into small red bits that then faded.

“That was another one,” he said.

“How far can you reach with that field anyway?”

“About {40 meters}”

“Not sure we can comb a sound, let alone a strait or an ocean, with only 40 meters of range.”

“It gets bigger as we advance in level. For now, if we can find a few more I can build a sonar profile of them.”

“And then what?” she asked thinking aloud as she tacked the boat to stay heading out towards the strait, “What if they hide at the bottom of the ocean? Do we drop depth-charges on them or something?”

“Excellent idea, yes, we do that,” he said, with what she was pretty sure was an excited tone.

She was pretty sure that was an idea she had had that he never would have.

Sanna had a realization, “is this my job then, to give you ideas like this?”

“Yes, exactly,” he said as another red blip appeared at the very bottom of his range and fizzled out again.

“I’m tacking back to the coast,” she narrated before explaining, “they appear to be staying near the ocean floor.”

He didn’t reply.

First one red dot, then another a few seconds later. As they picked up speed down the coast they came faster each fizzling out. Sanna could see the computation allocation and the field allocation pop up every time, roughly 50 and 20 points respectively.

After a dozen her ship spoke, “sonar profile synthesized, new Phage morph cataloged, natural tier, level 2” he said, “pinging.”

And with that the field allocation maxed out, energy dropped by a dozen, nanites by three, and the water vibrated. And then the computation allocation maxed out as regions of the undersea map updated a piece at a time, every couple of seconds a new section would update as he analyzed the returns, with a dozen red dots each. All along the floor of the ocean they appeared, she had been right. The red signals, new and old, began fading into dark red bruises as the information, Sanna assumed, decayed.

“Pinging” he repeated even before all the regions had finished updating, and again she felt the sound vibrate out of the water and the un-updated regions began updating first. It was a few minutes later they found it, a hive of thousands of red dots, almost a kilometer into the strait.

“Tacking to 341,” she called out as she changed the baring to the one indicated.

“I’m making the depth charges now,” was his reply as golden light started constructing a rack for them to drop from and what looked to be six drums, she noticed the nanites ticked down a few at a time, but the matter was dropping quickly. Nearly 6 a charge if she was judging correctly.

Sanna found it funny that this was probably the first time a sailboat had been armed with depth charges.

In a minute he was done, and half a minute later, they were nearly over their target.

“So can you just drop them? Or do I need to slow down?” Sanna asked.

“I’ll time them, just hit the path” he said as a line appeared before her on the HUD encircling the ship.

She smiled as she gently guided the alien sailboat along the path and, with a series of metallic clicks, dropped three of the depth charges in a slightly offset pattern.

“Isn’t three a bit overkill?” she asked as she tacked into the wind to pick up more speed away from the area they’d just bombed.

“Overkill is best with the phage. That’s a piece of advice that was worth the cost of transmission,” he simply replied as they both watched the charges reach their target on the map.

“Pinging” he said just moments before they were set to hit, Sanna assumed to verify the target. The mass of red dots appeared again, and then they exploded on the display, a moment later the surface of the water followed suit, bursting into the air.

Sanna whooped, “those pack a punch,” she said yelling with a smile on her face.

She could get used to this. And they still had three charges left.

“Pinging” he said after a moment once the water stabilized a little, no mass of red dots came back this time, even though there was still a regular layer of them under the water they had eliminated the hive of them.

“I leveled up” he said.

“Right,” Sanna said with a goofy smile on her face, “I forgot that was a thing.”