“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, thanks for the assist,” Boon said.
“No problem. Be sure to get a panel or something to bash these assholes a new one,” Sara said, wedging a shield behind a loose panel to rip it from the wall.
Boon followed suit, and swung her panel back and forth to practice before looking at the closing horde. “Bring it, losers!” she shouted, lowering her stance.
Sara gave an evil grin, lowering her own stance, and glanced to her shoulder to make sure Alister was ready. The small, black cat gave a nod, then focused on the bots.
They didn’t have long to wait, as the bots were moving at a good speed. Sara had a last second idea, and Alister provided the spellform she requested. With a burst of Aether, she began a morph spell on the hull of the Raven, right above the hole where the airlock had once been, where the armor was still thick with material to work with.
There was a pregnant second in which Sara was not sure the spell would work fast enough. She almost gave up on it, until she felt the material morphing under her Aether’s pressure.
A spike of the hard, armored material shot out from the hull, splitting every ten feet into two spikes, which split again and again. The fractal-like structure grew like a plant on steroids, in fast forward. Within seconds, there were thirty or more spikes spearing through the incoming bots, sending several into evasive maneuvers, but slicing through many of them, thinning the numbers and slowing the rest.
“Great work, Sara. I wish I wou—–Gah!” Boon lurched forward, spinning her back to the incoming enemy to look behind them.
Sara glanced over her shoulder and saw three of the bots she had recently cut down coming after them. One had grabbed hold of Boon. Luckily, her shield was powered, and she hadn’t taken any damage other than the drain on her Aether well.
“They’re repairing themselves,” Boon said with dread, still in the bot’s grasp.
Then the horde hit the deck, sending a shudder through the ship.
“They’re coming around, sir. They will be in range in thirty seconds,” Hon said, his finger poised over the fire control.
“Cora, are you ready for the jump?” Grimms asked, a frown on his face.
“As ready as I can be. I focused the repair bots on the amplifiers for the last two minutes, so there’s a chance we won’t blow everything out in the next jump, but it’s going to be close.”
“Let’s hope our luck changes on this one,” Grimms said with forced joviality, even though he was preparing for the worst.
“Twenty seconds.”
The Vitas ship rolled slowly, its large array of forward guns glinting in the dim light of the sun.
“Hon, be ready,” the commander said, completely focused on the holo table.
“Ten seconds.”
Grimms could see the enemy’s weapons glowing as the ends of the barrels came into view. “Get ready,” he said, leaning in and watching the timer that Mezner had put into the hologram. He saw several of the small orbiting robots shoot in to attach to the Vitas’s hull, and his stomach dropped. “Jump now!”
The enemy ship spun the last few degrees quickly, using the robots’ thrusters as a makeshift maneuvering jet, and let loose with a large number of particle cannons. Luckily, Grimms had seen the move coming, and the Raven was no longer there.
As the beams passed through empty space, the Raven appeared on the opposite side, only five hundred meters from the Vitas’s ship. They were almost inside the orbit of bots patrolling their mother ship.
“Fire!” Grimms shouted, pounding a fist to the table.
The remaining nine gauss cannons fired in rapid succession, each slug following the path of the previous one by a microsecond.
The patrolling bots reacted instantaneously, firing their thrusters to intercept the fire. To Grimms’ disbelief, the first six shots were deflected by bots crashing into them. He also noted that the bots who were attached to the hull were pushing their ship out of the way.
Not fast enough.
However, the kill shot was not going to happen like Hon had planned.
The first of the remaining three slugs hit hard, ripping through the Vitas’s armor, but at a glancing angle that didn’t penetrate deep enough to cause much damage. The second and third slugs, while cutting furrows in the armor as well, did even less damage.
Essentially, they had missed.
“I’m not showing any fluctuations in their power, sir. It doesn’t look like we did anything but superficial damage,” Mezner confirmed, her voice quiet to match the mood on the bridge.
“We will be in range in forty-five seconds, if they continue at the same rate,” Hon reported. “I don’t have enough power for another shot, sir.”
“Cora, can we jump?” Grimms asked, gritting his teeth and trying to think of a strategy. They had jumped in close to make sure their shots hit. It had been a gamble, and it had not paid off.
“I’m sorry, Commander,” Cora said. “Too many of the amplifiers burnt out. It’s going to take several minutes to get the parts replaced. I can fire the Aether cannons, but the servos on the turret are damaged, so we would need to line up perfectly to hit anything, and we still don’t have gravitic drives.”
“Thirty seconds,” Mezner reported.
“What about emergency decompression? We could use the air in the ship to push us out of the way,” Connors suggested.
“The ship is already decompressed so we can take care of the breaches,” Cora reminded him.
“Twenty seconds.”
“Can Captain Sara move us?” Hon asked.
“Not in the next fifteen seconds,” Cora said.
Grimms gritted his teeth, “There has to be something.”
“Commander, I’m getting a warp signature,” Mezner said, swiping the information to the holo table.
“It has to be huge for us to get a reading,” Cora noted.
Grimms was watching the Vitas ship and still trying to figure out what to do, so he missed the first of the Teifen ships jumping in.
The holo table exploded in red icons as the leading edge of the Teifen fleet jumped into their ruined system. Teifen destroyers immediately washed the Raven in Aetheric scans, and turned toward the combating ships. They were only a few hundred kilometers out, and the distance was closing quickly.
“The Vitas are using the bots to turn toward the Teifen. They’re ignoring us for now,” Mezner said.
“Let’s hope the Teifen make the same choice,” Grimms said, his mouth a tight line.
30
Four two-meter-tall robots descended on Sara like ravenous dogs. Their claws snatched and tore at her shields, nearly draining her well. She tried to jump back, but was tripped up by a half-repaired foe she had sliced down earlier, and she tumbled to the floor. The four pursuers piled on top of her.
“Sara!” Boon shouted before slicing a robot in half at the waist, and turning to see several more bots pressing in on her.
She focused down on the morph spell, shooting spikes from the walls and floor in a twisted flurry, spearing several enemies and blocking the passage.
Sara screamed in response with rage and frustration as she ripped away a section of the wall and swept it over her body in a violent motion. The hulking section of corridor smashed into the four bots, throwing them clear of her and into the far wall. Sara pressed the torn wreckage harder, now that she was not being drained from the bots’ touch, and smashed the section into their crumpled forms. She gave her makeshift club a twist and was satisfied to see sparks and metal parts explode from behind it.
“How many more are there?” she asked, stumbling to her feet with Boon’s help. Even Alister and Silva looked tired from the prolonged battle.
“It’s hard to tell. They keep repairing themselves,” Boon huffed, taking the lull in the battle to catch her breath.
They watched as the spikes blocking the path were bent or blasted out of the way by the persistent invaders. Through the mass of robotic
bodies, Sara could still see out into open space. The Vitas ship had reappeared, and was quickly assaulted by a barrage from the Raven. Even though she saw three of the gauss rounds hit, she knew that they had not been enough to disable the alien ship. Now it looked like her ship was dead in the water, and the Vitas were coming around for another shot.
“Captain, we have a situation,” Grimms said over her comm.
“Yeah, no shit,” she snapped, sending a freshly torn wall panel into the crowd of bots, slicing several open and shoving them back into their fellows.
“A new situation. The Teifen are arriving. They seem to be stalling the Vitas’s attack on us,” he said.
The corridor suddenly lit up with rifle fire from the far end, cutting down the back ranks of the Vitas bots.
“Baxter?” Sara asked over the open channel.
“Yes, ma’am. We circled around after dropping off the wounded. Looks like there’s a bit of a party going on. Mind if we take this dance?”
The sound of his voice made her want to weep with relief. She and Boon were being slowly run over. They needed the space to fight and not hit their own men, but the Vitas’s ability to absorb large quantities of Aether had hindered their attacks more than she had thought possible.
“You are always welcome to these dances, Baxter. Can you keep them occupied for a second?” she asked, taking a step back to let her well recharge a little.
“Take as long as you need, Captain. We resupplied on the way over, so there are plenty of slugs to go around,” he assured her with a smile.
“Grimms, what are the Teifen doing now?”
“They are burning hard right for us. The Vitas are still unable to maneuver well, but they are swinging around toward the Teifen. I think they are going to engage them, ma’am.”
Sara frowned. They needed to convince the Teifen that the Raven was not their enemy. Maybe even as an ally. “Grimms, I want you to send them all the raw data we have on the Vitas. Our battle footage, their capabilities, everything,” Sara said, taking a chance.
“Ma’am, they’ll see that we are defenseless. Any advantage we have would be spent,” he reasoned.
“We’re already at their mercy. Do it. It’s the only chance we have of maybe making it out of this thing alive. I don’t believe the Teifen are who we think they are.” Sara said, hoping that her hunch about the order of the universe was not wrong.
There was a moment of silence, then Grimms said, “Sent.”
Sara turned to the opening in the Raven‘s hull and, looking past the raging robots, focused on the Vitas ship. She made a fist and pounded it into her open palm. “Come on. Do it,” she said quietly.
A bot lunged for her, still blocked by Boon’s spikes, but it didn’t make it much more than a meter before Boon tore it in half. Sara hardly even noticed as she stared at the Vitas ship.
Then she saw one of the orbiting robots explode as it intercepted a gauss round. Then another, and another. Within the blink of an eye, the void filled with projectiles too fast to see, but their destruction was unmistakable. The defensive bots were doing a good job of intercepting incoming fire, but they were soon overwhelmed, and the Vitas ship began taking direct hits. There must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of slugs fired. Chunks of the enemy ship were torn free, then those chunks were pulverized by follow-up fire. Within seconds, the Vitas ship was nothing more than dust and fist-sized debris.
Every bot on the Raven stood up tall, and the lights that glowed in their internals went out. Several of them tumbled to the ground, or were shot open with continued rifle fire, but it was obvious that the bots had been deactivated.
“Hold,” Baxter shouted over the comm.
The fire ceased, and the corridor went dark.
“Ma’am. The Teifen are hailing us,” Grimms said into her comm.
“I’ll be right there, Grimms,” Sara said, then with a nod to Boon, turned and began running for the bridge.
31
Sara burst onto the bridge, breathing heavy from her run and previous fight. Alister jumped from her shoulder to the captain’s chair as she passed it, and sat at attention. Nyx, now awake, gave him a nod as he settled in.
“Sit rep?” Sara asked, stepping up to the holo table.
There were several hundred Teifen warships in the system now, including a large, heavily battle-scarred cruiser at the center of the cluster. More and more Teifen ships were arriving by the second.
“They began warping in a few minutes ago, then turned directly for us and the Vitas. It looked like we were going to be targeted as well, until we sent the battle information,” Grimms said with a nod at her decision. “That was the right call, Captain. As soon as they got a picture of what was happening, they focused on the Vitas. Fifty or more ships began chain firing gauss rounds at the enemy until they pulverized them.”
“As soon as the ship was down, the bots quit working,” Sara said. “Boon’s clearing them out now.”
“Cora came out of her maintenance cycle right before the Vitas were able to fire on us. If I had to guess, I would say the core knew we needed her, and released her,” Grimms said, giving her a knowing glance.
“We are still being hailed, ma’am. Should I reject the call?” Mezner asked, her voice tinged with worry.
“Give me a second, ensign,” Sara said, holding a finger up to the nervous woman. “Cora, what kind of time frame are we looking at before we have the amplifiers working?”
“Ten minutes,” she replied. “All three reactors are coming online in the next three minutes. We’ll have weapons and gravitic drives, but no way to shield or jump. I can probably pull off one more jump, but it will completely destroy the progress we’ve made on repairs.”
“What about warp?”
“We can go to warp, but I can’t guarantee the amplifiers will be able to hold the bubble, and if it collapses, we’ll be crushed.”
Sara took a deep breath. They were trapped for at least ten minutes. They might be able to fight in three, but they would need to do so without shields. She looked at the holo table and the ever-growing number of Teifen warships, and knew that fighting would be a death sentence for her and the crew.
“Open the channel, Mezner.”
“Aye, ma’am,” she acknowledged, accepting the hail. “We only have audio; the video system is still down.”
Sara gave the apologetic ensign a nod, then greeted, “This is the Raven, I am Captain Sonders. I apologize for the lack of video, but we are having a few technical problems. To whom am I speaking?” She stood up straight and smoothed the front of her battlesuit, knocking free some debris she had picked up from the fight.
“I would say ‘technical problems’ are an understatement, Captain Sonders,” a deep male voice replied. The words were joking, but his tone was serious, confusing Sara a little, without the visual cues to read. After a moment, he continued, “I am Grand Admiral Bok, of His Majesty’s fleet.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you Grand Admiral, and I thank you for the assistance with the Vitas,” Sara said, hoping her pleasantries would forestall any attacks.
“I see in the report you sent us that you call the enemy by that name——Vitas. What do you know about them?” the admiral said conversationally.
“You have the report,” she told him with a shrug. “That’s about it. We jumped in, and the system was like you see it. We found no life signs system-wide, so we decided to do a tech scan, and that bastard came out of nowhere. You have all the information we have.”
There were a few moments of silence as the admiral looked over the report; or at least, that was what Sara supposed he was doing.
Eventually he continued. “So, why do you call them the Vitas?”
Shit. Double shit. How the hell do I explain that without talking about the pixies?
She panicked, then cocked her head to the side and smiled. “We just picked a name. It was better than calling them ‘That Ship’.”
“Hmm,” the admiral grunted
. His voice was deep and the grunt was gravelly, like he had been smoking cigarettes from the time he’d come out of the womb.
Sara’s comm beeped, and Cora came on the private line. “Sixty seconds ‘til we have reactors. Amplifiers are still eight minutes out.”
“Admiral, what can you tell me about the attack on this system? Obviously you received word when it happened. And the fact that you abandoned your conquest of the Elif tells me that this place is important,” Sara prompted, trying to buy time and hopefully get some information.
“This was an internal matter, and not of concern to you Elif. Count yourselves lucky that we have given back your capital,” he said dismissively.
Sara leaned in to Grimms and whispered with surprise, “He doesn’t know we’re human. We can use this.”
“Be careful, Captain,” he said with a nod.
Sara cleared her throat. “This was the result of the Teifen fighting a two-fronted war. The Galvox ripped through this system and left nothing behind, and now there is a new player who exceeds all your capabilities. We can’t afford to fight one another.”
“Ma’am, we have visuals back online, if you want them,” Mezner reported in her comm.
Sara held up a hand to forestall them. She wanted to wait until the Raven at least had some sort of defensive measures.
The Teifen admiral considered her words.
Just when Sara was about to speak again, her comm beeped, and Cora came on the line again. “Reactors are online, along with gravitic drives.”
As she said it, the ship’s lights came up, and the view screen came to life, showing the Teifen armada spread out in front of them. Sara felt the familiar hum of the reactors coming from the below the deck once again.
“Can you use the gravitic engines to cloak?” she asked quietly.
“I can,” was all Cora said.
Finally. Something going our way.
The admiral started speaking again. “We see that you have power again. I advise you not to power your weapons, or we will be forced to fire upon you.”
Harbinger Page 14
