When the Nightwind threatened to reduce Kingsport to ash, we disabled it using a variation on a weapon Matt called a mass driver. In its most devastating form, a mass driver could rain destruction down on a planet using any handy celestial object — like, say, an asteroid.
The Kyros Alliance calls it the Maku Cobano Expanse. I’m calling it a bottomless bucket of ammunition.
The nearest asteroid, a tumbling rock as big as a shopping mall, is hundreds of miles away. There’s a solid chance the Black End will see it coming (how can they not? It’s a gigantic space boulder) and warp out. The best we can do is fire this baby with everything we’ve got and hope for the best.
Commander Do coordinates the operation with ruthless efficiency. The first order of business is capturing the asteroid, which is a feat in and of itself considering its sheer mass. Using our gravity manipulation abilities in perfect concert, the squadron succeeds in bringing the asteroid to a halt, and then we move it into position for the next and most critical step. My unit forms a ring near the asteroid and generates a gravity well to draw it in. It rolls toward us, then passes through our formation and speeds toward the next section of our living cannon, Erisia’s unit. Their gravity well gives it a big boost and relays it to Gaartiin’s unit. His team fine-tunes the aim and gives our impromptu bullet one final burst of acceleration that sends it hurtling toward the Black End ship.
Vanguardians disperse as the asteroid barrels through the sphere of combat, like a school of minnows scattering from a rock splashing into their pond. The ship doesn’t warp out, but it does train its weapons on the asteroid. The energy beams do nothing to slow its advance. A cluster of singularity missiles detonates on its face. The avalanche keeps going.
My mind, unable to reconcile the visual spectacle with the pure silence accompanying it, fills in the blank, and I involuntarily clamp my hands over my ears to protect them from the illusory din of millions of tons of stone crashing into millions of tons of steel. The Black End ship rocks from the impact. The asteroid shatters into to pebbles. Debris sprays across the sphere, turning the Maku Cobano Expanse into a meat grinder. Energy crackles and flickers around the ship like a dying aurora borealis.
Someone fires at the ship. The blast skips off its surface. It doesn’t leave so much as a scorch mark, but it connected. The shield is down.
It’s vulnerable.
The Vanguard opens up, full force. The individual assaults, numerous though they are, fail to make a mark on the ship. Units reform to combine their energies into more powerful attacks. Units return to their squadrons to further turn up the heat. Starburst crosses form to rain down concentrated destruction. Flying hammers swoop in for dive-bombing runs. The skin of the Frankenship finally ruptures with a belch of flames that almost immediately dies out as they hit the vacuum of space, and then a wonderful, glorious sound comes over my comlink: a cheer of triumph. The hope of the entire Vanguard filters through my earpiece as a jubilant roar.
The moment passes too quickly; the force field flares back to life, repelling our next volley. Our squadron skirts the edge of the sphere looking for our next asteroid bomb while the rest of the Vanguard cranks the main assault up to eleven. Squadron commanders coordinate attacks on specific targets, but it’s still a crapshoot whether they’ll accomplish anything. While my familiarity with starships is not what it should be, I know enough to know that sci-fi movies have once again deceived me. Warships protect their vital systems by locating them deep within their bulk, so unless someone manages to punch clean through the Frankenship, there’s no chance of a single well-placed shot completely disabling the engines or taking out the command deck — and even then, I have to wonder if it would have any effect. The thing is five ships linked together, which suggests every vital system is redundant five times over; take out one and four more are ready to pick up the slack.
Of course, it might take all five systems working at full capacity to keep a ship of this size running. That the ship’s shield hasn’t fully come back online yet supports that theory, but the shield is rebuilding itself in bits and pieces. Glowing patches dance over the ship like heat lightning dancing across a thunderhead. If we can tag it with another asteroid before —
“Incoming! Incoming!” someone cries.
That someone is First Rank Mova, the incoming is a tight swarm of scrub fighters like the ones we encountered over Pin Gok City, and the target is my squadron. We scatter as the fighters scream toward us.
“Commander, I think they’re on to us,” I say.
“Vanguard, clear the sphere!” Commander Do says, broadcasting her order to everyone. “Direct engagement is not working. Employ mass driver formations! Use the asteroids against the ship!”
The other squadrons begin their strategic withdrawal, intending to fall back into the Expanse and start throwing rocks on an epic scale, but the Black End is going to make us work for it. Scrub fighters pour out by the hundreds, by the thousands from ports all over the Frankenship and gather into squadrons of their own to counter our teams. Every time one of our squadrons tries to form a mass driver, one of theirs moves in to break up the party. Slipping into full-on stealth mode doesn’t help; the fighters zero right in. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that they have Vanguard-detecting sensors to go along with their anti-Vanguard weaponry.
This is bad. They have countermeasures for everything we can throw at them, figuratively and literally. We weren’t prepared for that — or for the fact they aren’t fighting like a ragtag bunch of untrained insurgents who respond out of panic; they have a clear strategy. They keep us occupied and prevent us from sending another rockslide their way, which buys them time to reestablish their force field — and once that’s back up, we might not be able to punch through it again. If we can’t get back inside their defenses before —
Inside their defenses.
If my friendship with Matt Steiger has taught me anything, it’s that sometimes the best ideas are so far outside the box they seem totally crazy to those outside said box. When I pitch my plan to Commander Do, the first words out of her mouth are, predictably, “That’s madness.”
She doesn’t reject the idea, though.
The squadron begins its run. We spread out to avoid creating a single dense, easily hit target, but it’s an unnecessary effort; Frankenship’s guns have fallen silent. That can’t be good.
It’s not. As we close in, the energy shield blinks in and out of existence, fighting to reassert itself.
Commander Do orders us to pull up. She’s aborting.
“Sergeant Hauser!” she roars. “I said pull up!”
“Sorry, boss, but this might be our only chance,” I say.
“Right with you, Fargirl,” Erisia says.
“Get ready to burst on my mark,” I say because I am apparently determined to make this as insane as humanly possible.
“Sergeant,” First Rank It-Bar Morre whimpers.
“Keep it together, Morre,” I say. “If you can pull off the double helix, you can do this.”
The shield pulses erratically, neither entirely there nor entirely gone — and then, for one precious moment so brief it can’t be measured, it vanishes.
I give the order.
Those of us who burst without hesitation, without fear, make it through before the shield comes back up. A few veer off at the last possible instant and rejoin the rest of the squadron in the sphere. The rest impact the force field like bugs smashing headlong into a windshield and disappear with flashbulb pops of light. If there is a mercy here, it’s that they die so quickly they don’t have time to scream.
As we skim low over the surface of the Frankenship, a metallic skin as smooth as glass in some spots and riddled with crude repair scars in others, I glance back to take a quick head count. Thirteen of us made it through, including Erisia, Grun, Mells, and Johr, and it looks like we’re not going to get any backup on this mission. Above us, the energy field solidifies and settles to a glow so dim it borders on invisible.
>
“We’re trapped in here,” Johr says.
“You think we’re trapped in here with the Black End? Ha!” Grun says. “The Black End are trapped in here with us.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” Johr says, “cockeyed optimism.”
“I’ll take it,” I say. “All right, Vanguard. Time to cause trouble.”
TWENTY-FOUR
We blast our way in through an access hatch and drop into an airlock. We shift into stealth mode before slipping into the corridor beyond, a high, wide space you could literally drive a truck through. It’s empty, but that probably won’t last long.
“Now what?” Johr asks. “You did have a plan, didn’t you?”
“Enough of one,” I say.
“Oh, that’s encouraging.”
“Tosser, you’re the warship geek. Where are we?”
“Outer hull of a Promanian Terminus,” Tosser says. “It’s nothing but access corridors leading to weapons banks, airlocks, so on. The level immediately below is a secondary hull. Below that is when we start seeing crew quarters, armories, non-critical storage...”
“Can we access the ship’s systems from here?”
Tosser thinks for a moment. “This way.”
He leads us to a gunnery pod, a chamber housing the guts of an automated energy cannon. I order Grun to seal the door, Smiv to keep watch, and Mova to hack into the ship’s systems.
“On it,” Mova says. She sits at a terminal with no clear purpose and fires up some kind of virtual keyboard, a holographic panel that makes no sense to me. Mova’s fingers flit over the glowing display with speed and grace and confidence. “What am I doing, sergeant?”
“Shutting down every critical system you can — shields, weapons, engines, environment...”
“Oh, is that all?”
“Watch it, first rank. I only have room in this unit for one smart-ass.”
“Sorry, sergeant, but there’s no way I can shut down an entire system. Even if I could break through the encryption and safeguards, the Black End has networked the ships together in a way I’ve never seen before. They’ve all been cross-wired to act as backups for the backups for the backups.”
“I thought that might be the case. Looks like we might have to do this the old-fashioned way.”
“Which is?” Johr says.
“Find something important like an engine room and blast the crap out of it.”
“I approve of this idea,” Grun says.
“It’d be a suicide run,” Erisia says. “It’s not as though we have the option of destroying an engine from a safe distance.”
“One problem at a time, Erisia,” I say. “We need to get to the engine room first, and I’m betting there’s a lot of ship between here and there.”
“Several miles of ship,” Tosser says. “We might be better off heading for one of the slaved ships.”
“Or not,” Mova says. “The readings suggest the engines in the slaved ships aren’t online, not entirely. They’re behaving more like substations than — oh. Oh no.”
“What? What is it?” I say.
“Massive power spike originating in the main engine room of the Terminus.” Mova pokes at the display. “The warp drive’s firing up!”
“It’s what? Stop it!” Johr says.
“I can’t!” Mova squeals, but she tries anyway. Her fingers fly over the holo-panel faster than I can follow.
“Talk to me, Mova, what’s going on?” I say.
She slams her fists on the console and spits a curse that doesn’t translate to English. “We’ve warped. I’m sorry, sergeant, I couldn’t —”
“It’s okay. It was a shot in the dark anyway.”
Erisia asks the question on everyone’s mind. “So where did we end up?”
Mova pokes and taps and types. “I don’t understand,” she mumbles.
“What? Where are we?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mova —”
“I don’t know! I don’t — we’re literally in the middle of nowhere, all right? I don’t know where —”
I grab her by the back of the neck and squeeze, which is the best way to calm an Aamoritine in the middle of a panic attack. Muscles as tight as steel cables melt under my fingers, and Mova releases a shuddering sigh.
“Nice and slow, first rank,” I say. “Tell me what you know.”
She nods. “The nav system is telling me we’re in uncharted space,” she says, her voice level. “There are no navigation buoys within range and it doesn’t recognize any of the star formations.”
“The ship jumped blind?” Erisia says. “That makes no sense.”
No, it doesn’t, on any level. Starships can’t navigate like Vanguardians, though not for lack of effort. For decades, the Alliance’s finest scientific minds have attempted to replicate our warping abilities, but for whatever reason, the astrarma simply don’t function when they’re not linked to a living being. That gives us a unique advantage over starships: we can warp into a totally uncharted part of the galaxy and find our way back to known Alliance space by feeling our way there (hippie-dippy woo-woo, remember?). The map of the known universe is embedded in the astrarma so we don’t need to rely on deep space navigational markers or visual cues like planets and star formations to orient ourselves. A ship, however, needs to know where it is before it can determine where it’s going. If it doesn’t know where it is? It could spend the rest of eternity warping around the universe and never find its way back to Alliance space.
“Erisia,” I say, beckoning hyer to join me for a semi-private conference. “You’re right; a blind jump makes no sense. The Black End put a lot of time and effort into building this monster. Warping into uncharted space takes it completely off the board.”
“Then why do it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we hurt them worse than we thought and they needed to fall back.”
“Maybe. If there are no navigational markers within range to ping off of, the Alliance wouldn’t be able to track its location.”
“The Black End could take its sweet time to make repairs and then jump back when it was ready for round two.”
Erisia frowns. “Except they’re still in the middle of uncharted space with no way back. Maybe we got in a lucky shot and damaged their nav system?”
“You know what? It doesn’t matter. As long as this ship exists, it presents a clear and present danger. We need to take it out of play permanently, no matter what the cost.”
“Yeah,” hye says with a somber nod. “Yeah.”
“Tosser,” I say. “If we destroy the Terminus’s main reactor, what are we looking at for damage potential?”
“That depends,” Tosser says. “If the plasma reactor is fully online and we disable all the safeguards? This ship is gone.”
“Otherwise?”
“If we hit a cold reactor, we get nothing. If the reactor’s hot and the safeguards are active, they’d initiate an emergency purge or eject the entire plasma core into space. Either way, we wouldn’t necessarily cripple the ship. The secondary plasma reactor would kick in as soon as the main engine went offline.”
“Or all the engines in the slaved ships would power up,” Mova says.
The entire point of infiltrating the Frankenship was to tear it apart from the inside, but now that’s looking like an all-or-nothing proposition; if we don’t wipe the Frankenship out of existence, the Black End will hunt us down and wipe us out.
“Mova, is the energy shield still up?” I say.
She checks her display. “No, sergeant, the shield’s down.”
“Good. Smiv, get to the airlock and warp back to the Maku Cobano Expanse. Let the Vanguard know what’s going on. Mova, you’re staying here. I want you to work on disabling the safeguards on all the reactors. Grun, you’re on bodyguard detail. You keep her safe, no matter what.”
“Bodyguard?” Grun whines. “Babysit, you mean.”
“Sergeant, with respect, I’d rather remain here,” Smiv says.
“Perhaps Mova could try to slip an encrypted sub-signal into the ship’s communications network?”
“If we’re not within range of any Alliance navigation markers, we’re not within range of any communications relays. We need a messenger, Smiv, and you’re it. Grun, you’re the toughest man on the team. If anyone can protect Mova, it’s you. And I swear to God,” I say, my voice hardening, “I do not want to hear one more person challenging my authority. You want to take these bastards down and live to talk about it? You do what I say, with no questions and no backtalk. Is that clear?”
“You heard the woman, Smiv,” Johr says. “Move it.”
After Smiv slips out, I lay out the rest of the plan. Now that we’re here, unknown space has become known space; our astrarma have updated their starmaps, which means Smiv can lead the Vanguard back here — assuming the ship doesn’t warp out again. There’s no indication the Black End knows we’re on board, so we have to hold that advantage as long as possible, which means staying in stealth mode as we disperse throughout the Frankenship. I order teams of two to each of the slaved ships to take out their engine rooms, just in case the main assault on the Terminus isn’t a total success. Guess who gets to shoulder that particular responsibility?
I’m not doing it for the glory, mind you. These people followed me into hell without a moment’s hesitation. If they die, they’ll be remembered as dutiful soldiers following their idiot leader on a fool’s errand. It’s not the best legacy, but it’s a lot better than being remembered as the idiot leader who royally botched her fool’s errand and took a dozen of her allies with her.
“I’ve uploaded the ship’s schematics to everyone’s VAs,” Mova says. “You’re ready to go.”
“I want everyone to avoid direct engagement. Firefights draw attention,” I say. “Maintain radio silence until you reach your objectives, then call in and hold position until I give you the go-ahead to blow your reactors. Do whatever you have to do to make it happen.”
I have to force myself to end it there. I want to apologize for what’s about to happen, but I can’t. For their sake, I can’t. I have to let them believe there’s a chance, however remote, that they’ll survive this — but one look in their eyes tells me they know exactly how this is going to play out. They have no hope, false or otherwise, only determination to bring the Black End down, regardless of the cost.
Action Figures - Issue Seven: The Black End War Page 20
