[SFAP] Chapter 3:4

 This is the fourth section of the third chapter of Sonnets from a Proton. The novel starts here.
The next section is here.

“So would you call that a success then?” asked Gwen
“A harsh lesson I thought.”
“But one in which we could find ourselves.”
“This is part of your training isn’t it”
“Always, look you were always going to lose here, you said as much, to be fair you survived which was the important bit.”
“A wounded animal cornered, trapped and frightened, what else was it going to do?”
“You did the job you’ve always been trained to do in a new scenario, you gave the enemy a chance to surrender or face destruction. You did a great job”
“But we still killed it.”
“How long did it take you to suspect it was a single creature and not a vessel?”
“When it had no docking ports and didn’t react to the marines I should have guessed.”
“You were stuck on protecting Earth, and forgot there was more to space than planets.”
“I’ve got to say the whole singularity to attack the moon puzzled me though”
“Oh that, I liked that bit, quite ingenious.”
“What was that then just a distraction?”
“Nope, a postulation on a way to slow a ship down. The space creature was effectively collecting up it’s body’s waste and then hurling it at high velocity to aid itself slowing down. It compacted it as tight as it could and ejected it at a good fraction of the speed of light to transfer as much momentum as it could to its waste.”
“But why destroy a good chunk of the moon?”
“You house train pets to defecate in uninhabited bits of the garden, so I guess it thought the moon was uninhabited. It was doing something no different. As for destroying the orbital structures I guess it wasn’t used to things being in orbit of planets.”
“I can see what you’re building here. I’m not ready.”
“No, but soon.”