“You all know it!?” The Pro-Tass asked as they came out into the open courtyard that the Excalibur had landed before. The sky overhead was filled with traceries of laserfire and falling spore-bombs. They looked like huge eggs, trailing tentacles that twitched and wriggled behind them as they plunged downwards. The automated defenses targeted them first. Hails of flechettes and bursts of lasers and plasma projectiles slammed into them, and for now, none of them had reached the ground.
“Yeah!” Sarah shouted over the din, her hands clapped half over her ears as a red flare bloomed overhead – one of the bigger bioships, ripping apart as a trio of STS missiles plunged into its belly and ripped it from stem to stern. Floating overhead, in what passed for Wolf-359 B’s atmosphere, a million tons of organs and muscle tissue were beginning to deorbit. She continued to shout: “We invented the HPS Drive in the 22 nd century to colonize other solar systems!”
“But why!?” The Pro-Tass asked. “Your world cannot possibly have been exhausted after only such a short time span.”
“Uhhhhhhhhhh!” Sarah said. “We...made stuff.”
“Mostly video game consoles and cars!” Hailee said, her voice coming through the translation orb – which made Sarah seriously start to reconsider the abilities of a beta-level intelligence.
“You what ?” the Pro-Tass asked.
“Discuss economics later!” Tex shouted. “Ship now!”
The Exaclibur welcomed them onboard with a faint chime and Sarah immediately started to give orders. The Spitters and the Bombardiers she had packed onboard began to surge off, as did the blobbies. She figured that the bladelings, though, might come in handy in case any of the Claw attackers tried to board. Once the ship was lightened, she sprang into the command throne and thrust her finger at Tex. “Punch it, Texas!” She said – excitement buzzing through her as the Excalibur’s engines roared to life and they flew upwards in a haze of AA fire. Missiles streaked past them and the white-hot flare of half a dozen nuclear weapons detonating above them made Sarah wince.
Belisarius, who had taken one of the consoles that Hailee had extruded for the rest of the crew, punched a few more buttons. “Focusing my nuclear capacities above us to punch us a hole.”
“Goodie, we’re flying through nuclear explosions!” Hailee said.
“Do we have FTL capacity?” Sarah asked.
“I fabricated the part the instant you started riding my dick,” Belisarius said. “It should have been delivered.”
“You what on what?” Tasha, who was clinging to the back of her chair.
“Nice,” Synth leaned forward for a fist bump.
“Install it, you two!” Sarah said, bumping her fist against Synth. Synth and Tasha hurried away, Aiden jogging after them – clearly planning to help as best as he could. Kellen and Sexy Napoleon had both taken consoles as well. Sexy was grinning, her fingers spreading across the chart as she tapped on a screen – and as Sarah watched, the forward screen switched to show a view of the ship, as if she was standing on the very base and could look down the two kilometer long sweep of the immense, sword shaped craft. The forward torpedo bays opened and Sexy Napoleon began to sing.
“Ah, the 1812 Overture!” Hailee said.
The music began to blare from the PA – loud and percussive and timed with the shuddering that rocked through the ship as the nuclear torpedoes launched upwards, arced outwards, then bifurcated from six rockets to two hundred and sixteen micro-warheads, each one stuffed with a miniaturized fusion bomb. The sky turned white and Napoleon cackled. “Boom boom boom boom!”
“You are absolutely insane,” Kellen whispered. “Gravitic shields to max!”
The front of the Excalibur flared with the gravitational flux of the hardened shields, and wriggling projectiles – each fired by a bioship – began to hammer into the shields. They stopped short, squashing and splattering into bloody glop that was whisked away from the ship by its movement through the upper atmosphere. Like a breaching whale from the old vids, the Excalibur bust from the clouds of nuclear fire and the hail of biological weaponry into a sky rich with writhing, squid-like ships. Most of them were quite a bit smaller than the Excalibur and moved with darting, erratic patterns.
Sarah stood, then held out her hand.
“Fire!”
“Aye aye, Commander!” Sexy Napoleon plunged her fingers down, like a pianist.
Bulky, rectangular turrets emerged from the ship, transforming the flush, sleek hull into a jagged cityscape.
“I thought you said we had one antiproton beam,” Sarah whispered.
“You were pointing at one button at the time,” Tex said, dryly.
Every turret flared with blue-white light, lancing outwards and sweeping through space. Bioship after bioship combusted, ripping apart as trumpets blared from the PA. It was like a fireworks display crossed with the greatest rock concert that Sarah had ever seen and Sexy was cackling her head off, her hat cocked madly by her flailing as she plunged fingers down, alternating weapon fire, choosing targets with eye motions and spoken commands. “That one! That one! That one! That one!”
Tex, his hands on the controls, shoved the Excalibur forward – rising out of orbit, out of the massed pack of the fleet that thronged around them.
“Uh, guys!” Tasha’s voice came over the PA. “It’s gonna take us a bit to get the drive in!”
A flight of sleek, fast fighters swept overhead. They rained plasma projectiles onto the shields, which flared and strobed – but several of the projectiles got through, impacting into the armor of the Excalibur . The bright blue explosions hurt Sarah’s eyes and Hailee’s voice, cheerful as ever, said: “Hull at ninety eight percent! Shields at twenty five percent.”
“Right,” Sarah whispered. “Right right, right, uh, uh, uh, Hailee...shut the shields off and shunt as much power into the shield capacitors. I have an idea.”
The entire bridge crew gaped at her.
“Do it!” Sarah barked, her mind whirling. The idea had formed – and she realized it was the only hope they had. The bioships were beginning to move around, to come at them from each flank. They were drawing closer and closer – and the saw that the antiproton beams were slowing in their fire, Sexy biting her lip as she limited her rate. Sarah could see the red indicators on the firing console, showing where the turrets were beginning to overheat or run low on power. Sarah nodded to herself – her jaw tightening as Kellen shrugged.
“Adjusting shields,” he said.
“Full speed ahead. Where too, Commander?” Tex asked.
“Wolf-359,” Sarah said.
“...we’re in Wol-” Tex started.
“The frigging sun!” Sarah shouted, sitting back on the throne.
The Excalibur leaped forward, Sexy fingering a few buttons with a grin. Kill-Drones leaped from the sides of the ship, detaching their mass and jetting towards incoming bioships. They detonated themselves, like intelligent shotgun shells, and the shrapnel gutted ship after ship after ship. But there were so many. The entire, swarming fleet, flew forward – and they began to fire their projectiles. Wriggling, acid filled animals, gestated within the guts of the bioships, they slammed into the hull, piercing the armor plating with narwhal-like horns, then injected the gushing acid. Self defense and repair systems began to mobilize, directed by Hailee, and the bladelings began to scramble – not inside of the ship, but outside of it. Their claws clung to the hull and they began to spring out, to intercept the incoming projectiles with their own bodies.
Sarah smacked herself for being a fool.
She sent the order.
And the entire flank of the Claw armada was smashed into, almost at once, by her own fleet. Wingers, their wings glowing with gravitational energies, their mouths spitting out their own anti-ship formatted weaponry, started to swarm the bioships. For a few moments, a wild confusion filled space, the targeting indicators on her internal HUD writhing and whirling with green dots as her wingers and the ships and fighters of the Claw dueled with one anoth
er. But in the end, the Claw’s sheer numbers and their larger ships began to tell.
It still gave them just enough time.
The primary star of Wolf-359 swelled before them – impressing upon Sarah that just because a star was the smallest it could be before it ceased being counted as a stellar object, that didn’t mean it was actually small . The hull began to groan and pop and she saw several of her bladelings tumbling away, their bodies blackening. “Radiation flux beginning to approach critical levels,” Hailee said. “The crew now has mild cancer. Do you want to turn on shields?”
“I can cure cancer! Closer! Tex, start accelerating slower , let them get closer!”
“Closer?” Tex asked.
“I’m more worried about the cancer!” Kellen muttered.
The sun swelled. Larger and larger. The bioships showed no sign of fear – their hulls glistened hideously in the brilliant, ruby red light. It was like being chased by an armada of the damned. She swore she could see them opening fanged maws, their writhing tentacles flexing and flaring as they drew closer and closer and closer. Sarah’s heart hammered.
“The radiation flux has surpassed lethal limits,” Hailee sang out. “The crew’s organs will begin to liquefy in fifteen minutes. Oh, and the diarrhea will start way before that.”
Sexy Napleon looked green. Kellen’s eyes were closed. Sarah’s fingers dug into the armrests of her command throne. Her eyes were not on the hideous, burning sun – the surface looked as if it was covered in boils, the thick clouds of complex chemicals that could form in the nearly subfusion temperatures that swirled across it. A huge archway of roiling plasma flung itself into the air, the size of several planets, arcing before them like a temptingly close archway. It looked almost like they would soar right through it. Sarah ignored it. Her eyes were entirely on the massive blob of red in her minimap. The bioships were arrowing towards her – and the ship’s rear cameras showed their projectiles beginning to zip at the thrusters, burning up before they could touch it.
Sarah licked her lips.
Now .
Sarah stood. “Focus the shields down. Tex! Jump! Now! ”
Tex slapped the plane shift button.
In the guts of the ship, Tasha and Synth sprang away from the hypertropic plane shift drive they had just put together – yelping as the whirring rings began to whisk around, generating the hyperdimensional object that would rip space time a new one. Along the belly of the ship, the gravitational shields created a gravity flux – the same flux they used to rob incoming projectiles of their momentum. But Hailee had understood Sarah’s plan. Understood and prepared for it.
The shield suppressed all gravitational pressures on a chunk of Wolf-359’s surface the size of a small continent. It was a single, massive spray of energy, and it burned out every single emitter on the belly of the ship, melted half the power conduits, and only lasted a fragment of a second. In that needle thin stretch of time, the crushing weight of Wolf-359’s primary ceased to be.
A torrential wave of roiling stellar plasma at nearly three thousand kelvin burst from the star’s surface.
The Claw had basic flight or fight instincts, deeply coded into their bodies. Even those of them that had been twisted by the selective engineering and careful tweaking of the Eye into biological starships. Every single one of them stopped at once, backwinging on gravitational eddies. Black eyes widened in the guts of almost a hundred thousand ships. In a single voice, carried through the radio-frequencies of their stellar language, the entire Claw fleet spoke but three words.
“Oh fuck me!”
The Excalibur folded through space.
And the wave struck.
When the light had faded, there was not a single ship left in the solar system.
Back on Wolf-359 B, a message sent by a prudent Hailee, opened a valve in the guts of the antimatter depot.
Briefly, Wolf-359 was a binary star system.
Very briefly.
EPILOGUE
“You’re looking at this like the glass is half empty , Eyebo!” Spez said as she sprawled on her back in the glistening, glorpy ship that she had named What The Fuck Are You Looking At Bub, I Can Hatefuck You To Death, You Piece of Shit. The command chair was made of solid white bone, and two very confused Bladelings stood to either side of it. They had once had four legs and were not quite used to being two legged, male, and extremely bishonen. Their long, jagged hair hung down their backs, and they wore bright white collars, with the numbers ONE and TWO stenciled on them and leashes that hung down to the slowly heaving floor, snaked over to the throne, and were hooked on Spez’s big toe.
Spez grinned. “You gotta look at it like the glass is half full .”
The forward screen – really a membrane of color shifting skin cells – showed the slowly expanding, cherry red asteroid field that was the Plasma Dynamics research base.
THERE IS NO GLASS, COMMANDER SPEZ
Spez rolled her eyes. “Yer, like, fifteen thousand billion million years old, you’d think you’d have heard of a simile.”
IT IS A METAPHOR.
Spez’s brow furrowed. “Eyebo, are you fuckin tooling me?” She sat up, her feet planting on the squishy floor of her bioship. “Are you making a joke ?”
I ADMIT, I HAVE BEGUN TO APPRECIATE CERTAIN THINGS ABOUT YOUR SPECIES. I ENJOY THE EFFICIENCY BY WHICH YOU ORGANIZE YOURSELVES, EVEN IF THE PLACEMENT OF A HUMAN BEING ON A THE TOP OF A PYRAMID OF OTHER HUMANS IS NOT A GOAL WORTHY OF SUCH A SYSTEM.
Spez shrugged. “I dunno about all that, Eybo. I just wanna get my fucking pound of flesh…” She grinned, slowly, then reached out with one hand. She cupped the large, green balls of one of her modified bladelings, her tongue sliding along her lip. Her hair-spines flexed outwards. “Just imagine...” She crooned. “I can find every...last... prick that fucked me...and I can make em into anything I want. I could find that dickhead teacher of mine. Oh, no, Spezzo, you’re not gonna be able to fly a ship legally. Can you believe it, I sold that fucker drugs for five years and he didn’t even give me a passing grade!”
I DO NOT CARE
Spez shrugged. “Okaybe, Eybo, let’s move on to stuff you does care about.” She sat up. “We’ve seen what the Failure, Doooooooctor Kappel...” She said the name with as much scorn as possible. “Can do. And, honestly? Kinda lame. She didn’t kill a single one of the fucking badguys! And she got captured, like, twice, as far as I can tell from eating the brains of her critters.” She smacked her lips. “Tasty.”
SHE STILL ESCAPED
Spez looked up at the ceiling. “I mean...if ya can call pulling a plane shift jump within a star’s gravity wello going fifteen thousand Kayy Pee Ess – a blind jump while on fucking fire, dude, that bitch is lost , Eybo. Lost in Space. The worst fucking place to get lost.” She grinned.
HMM...TRUE. AND WE CAN ALWAYS FIND HER ONCE MORE, IF SHE DARES TO ACCESS THE SUBMIND FOR ADVANCED BIOTECH.
“Tha’s the spirit, Eyebo!” Spez sprang to her feet, rubbing her palms together. “Now, to celebrate, let’s say I take a dunk in the fuckpit-”
YOU MUST PREPARE FOR THE ATTACK ON EARTH. ONLY THEN WILL YOU EARN ANOTHER ROUND WITH ME.
“Yer a shitty boss...” Spez muttered. “Expecting me to do work so I get paid. Fuckin’ bullshit.” She tossed her head. “Sides, we’re not going after Earth y-” Her hand went to her throat as a sudden tightening closed around her skin. Her eyes widened and she felt her lungs screaming for oxygen she was pretty sure she didn’t need anymore. Her body felt the need. She had every memory of being choked – by criminal bosses, by her father, by everyone. Her eyes widened and her fingers scrabbled at the air as her knees slammed into the ground.
DO NOT THINK TO DECEIVE ME, INSECT.
Spez tried to choke out a word.
DOCTOR KAPPEL DECEIVED ME. IT WILL BE THE LAST TIME A HUMAN DOES. EVER.
The space around Spez’ vision was beginning to go black. Her two fuckboys looked on, concern in their black on black eyes. She reached out to the
air as the iron bands drew tauter and tauter. Then...release. She gasped in a deep lungful of rich, pungent air and collapsed forward onto her palms, which squished against the bioship’s hull. She hung her head forward, her head spines drawn taut against her scalp, and just breathed. Breathed. Breathed.
YOU WILL GO TO EARTH. YOU WILL TAKE IT FOR PROCESSING.
“No...I won’t,” Spez gasped out – then before the iron bands snapped down, she lifted her hand. “Fuckin’ listen to me, Eyebo!”
She felt the tightness of the Eye’s attention. But she did not feel the strangling again. At least, not yet. She scrambled to her feet, using her own throne for support, and let the words come tumbling out, a mile a minute. The fact that she didn’t need to pause for breathe made her think the Eye was less about strangling and more about mind fucking. Which, considering how often he had put his tentacles down her ears and left her quivering and twitching...made sense.
“Okay, so, you saw what one Excalibur class could do. That’s the flag, but they print them all the same way on Mars, right?” She nodded. “And that one wasn’t even fully loaded for bear – it had one volley of nuke torps. They normally ship with ten . Now, if you come in with your big dick swinging at Earth, every corp is going to scream their heads off and every single fleet humanity’s got out there dicking itself over is gonna come back. I’m talking hundreds of ships, and more being spat out every hour , with fresh AIs to crew them. We. Won’t. Win. Humans are like that.” She grinned. “But what if...we got humans on our side? Humans that hate corps just as much as I do? Humans who we don’t gotta tell that they’ll be mulcho if they work with us?”
GO ON…
“Right...” Spez nodded. “Corps keep this shit secret. But, ey, that’s why crims like me are go good ta have.” She leaned against the throne. Her sharp, sharp teeth glinted in the pale bioluminescence of the bridge. “See, there are other humans out there. With nanofabs and shit.”
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