Armageddon's Pall: Spiral War Book 4

by S. F. Edwards

  “Yes. Ship Lord, coordinate all ships. I want that sector covered. Nothing gets through again.”

  UCSB Date 1003.228

  Bridge, GFS Enterprise, Nashig System

  Captain Jaames Kirek had never seen such a battle before. For four days straight, the joint forces fleets had exchanged enough fire with the Gorvians to glass an entire planet. What drove him to distraction is that it shouldn’t have been this way. The reports from the survivors of the GFS Ushakov were that they’d disabled the Planet Slicer by sacrificing their own ship. When the fleets had arrived, they’d found that the monster had already carved itself most of the way through the fractured world of Nash-9. Despite that, the Confederation and Federation fleets had secured the jump points into the system; cutting off Gorvian supply lines.

  That was when the Gorvians had sprung their trap. Three Gorvian strike groups had emerged through each jump point to overwhelm the picket ships. From there, they’d torn into the fleets from their under defended rear. Then more Gorvians had arrived, setting up their own pickets around the jump points.

  Kirek had been there. His command cruiser had led the charge to retake their jump point when the impossible happened; it closed. Not closed so much as shrunk down to the point that not even a missile could get through. The technology that had allowed the Gorvians to stretch open jump points also appeared to allow them to shrink them. Kirek shook with fear at the sight. If they couldn’t find a way to expand the jump points then there was no hope of rescue or escape. And - the Gorvians knew it.

  Now the fleets were playing a dangerous game of hunter and prey, striking out from hiding places in the inner system’s gas giants. They were losing more of those hiding places every hour. Nondescript asteroids would spring to life, bristling with weapons when they’d come upon them. Taking the fight to the Planet Slicer had been no better. Though it had slowed to a relative crawl while carving its way through the shattered world, it still possessed several planets’ worth of weapons. Weapons that the Gorvians seemed determined to drive the fleets straight into.

  Blood-colored smoke filled the bridge as Captain Kirek struggled to maintain control of his ship. It was a losing proposition. The ship rocked under such a forceful impact that it knocked several crew from their stations. His Thal strength kept him within his seat, but he felt even that was beginning to wane. “How baad did thaat hurt us?” he called in his thick Thal accent.

  The flight controller crawled back up to his station. “They’ve hit the flight deck again,” he reported as the gravity began to falter; the graviton spinners were losing power. “Magnetic catapults and arresting fields are out. So are the atmospheric shields.”

  “Daamn,” he hissed, trying to wave some of the smoke out of his face. The acrid stink of burnt electronics burnt with each inhalation. “Maajor. I need aa full daamaage report.”

  The Krad officer clung to the situation board, only just able to hold on; his left arm was in a sling and his tail little more than a stump. “The flight deck is out of commission. Engine three is gone. Engine two is holding on with happy thoughts. Relays are blowing or fusing all across the ship. We either have runaway power surges or complete power loss over most decks. The bow has more holes in it than an asteroid mine and we’re streaming atmosphere like a sieve. We can’t even seal off all the breaches due to power issues.” He rammed his flat ear into his shoulder to keep the earpiece there in place, his scaly skin beginning to flake. “That was main engineering. They can’t maintain the magnetic fields on the plasma conduits or the main reactor much longer. One more good hit and we’ll have a full plasma fountain down there.”

  Kirek slammed his hand down on the comm line to the engineering bay. “Engineering, dump the primaary power. Then give me full power to the secondaaries.” There was little he could do at this point. With just the secondary cores they’d be lucky to keep their shields. There’d be no fighting back. Even then, it would be a choice between shields or the dark matter drive. There was no choice, his stomach twisting with the decision. “Aall haands, this is the Caaptaain. Prepaare to aabaandon ship. Helm, set us on aa raamming vector for the Plaanet Slicer. Then get to your escaape pods.”

  With the lanky form of someone who had lived their whole life in deep space under low gravity, the helmsman turned to the captain; blood soaked bandages covering his face and arm. “But sir. What about you?”

  Kirek was an honorable Thal. He despised liars and hated lying to his crew even more. “I’ll find us aa juicy taarget then join you. Now go!”

  Their faces told the story. They knew that he was ready to die with his ship. Half of them stayed, at first. A hyperplaser blast tore past the viewports near enough to melt and blacken the outer layers of the transparasteel casements.

  Clutching at his blood soaked arm, the helmsman programmed in the course. He steered the ship towards the only part of the Planet Slicer visible to them. The crew needed no more encouragement and ran for the doors as the gravity faltered around them, the ship shuddering as more blasts wracked its hull.

  Kirek jumped onto the helm, dividing his attention between his course and the escape pod indicators as they blinked out in rapid succession. It didn’t take long for all but the last pod at the back of the bridge tower to rocket away. An ancient song of the Thal independence war came to mind as he drove the ship on; screens flickering out all around him. “Haalf aan orbit, aand haalf aan orbit still, the world of deaath aawaaited.”

  Missiles pounded his hull. The ship’s point defenses, still working on automatic, were unable to catch them all. He clung to his seat and spotted what might have been a giant dome in the distance. “Flew on did the sixty. Flew on to their destiny. Forwaard flew the freedom fleet! Onto the world of deaath. Flew on did the sixty!”

  “Have I ever told yee, ya have a horrid singing voice?” a woman asked over the bridge loudspeaker. Her heavy Scandinavian accent proved an almost welcome addition. “Ya didn’t think I’d let yee try and slay Beowulf by yer lonesome, did yee?”

  “No, thaat I didn’t. You should haave escaaped though you old crone.” In truth, he knew the old engineer would never leave the ship. It was as much a part of her as she was a part of it.

  “I thought we might bring the Gorvians a wee present. My baby has a power core about to burst,” she explained over the crackling comms.

  “You never could follow orders.”

  “Promise you won’t hold it against me?”

  “Just sing with me; until the end.”

  “It’s been an honor captain. Forward flew the freedom fleet!”

  “Never waas a Thaal dismayed.”

  “For not a one of them knew.”

  “Thaat the slaaves haad blundered, and their enemy aawaaited.”

  “But flew on they did, for reason was not theirs to question.”

  “Now it waas time to do or die, so onto the world of death flew on did the sixty.”

  Kirek made the final course correction and funneled all remaining power into the engines. The ship surged ahead, the chief engineer pouring every last erg of energy into them that the cores could manage. Even the Gorvian defenders couldn’t stop its death dive. I join you now Freedom Fleet!

  Bridge, UCSBS Nosh’Tak

  “Admiral! The GFS Enterprise, it just dove into the Planet Slicer!” the tactical officer called from his station and highlighted the growing mushroom cloud on his display. The crash site lit up the main tactical hologram. It wasn’t far from the edge of the crater that the GFS Ushakov had blasted out of the Planet Slicer.

  “Her crew?” Admiral Quin Tosh asked, her voice so devoid of emotion that she felt she might as well have been ordering her lunch.

  “Showing numerous escape pods, ma’am.”

  Quin Tosh caught the hint of a smile form on the man as the scar the ship had carved revealed itself. But it faded almost as fast, the realization of how little the damage had really meant to that monstrous ship sinking in. His hands scrambled across his console a moment late
r. With a light in his eyes that she hadn’t seen since before Tib’Trim, he turned to her. “Ma’am, the Enterprise, I don’t know how it did it. It must have taken out a major control node…”

  “What did it do?” she implored.

  “The deflectors over a one point two million square kilometra area near where it crashed are out. It’s this area, forward of the Ushakov breach.” The highlighted area appeared. While still small in comparison to the whole of the Planet Slicer, it left a huge area exposed and unprotected by any ships.

  “I want as many destroyer squadrons as we can spare to move in and engage that area. I want saturation strikes. Take out as many of the defense towers and anything vital-looking they can hit. Then instruct bombers to move in. If they can get under the towers’ effective arcs we might get some actual luck on our side. And get some SAR teams out there to haul in those pods. Those are our allies,”

  “For now,” someone muttered but she didn’t press the point.

  A pair of Gorvian fighters appeared as if to punctuate her point, filling one of the view walls. The sight sent her heart racing despite the fact that they were deep within the ship. One of the fighters exploded and its wingman sped away before a Splicer 2000 and a Phantom 4 streak past in pursuit. She watched their drive glows as they chased the larger craft away; their positions told the story. Exhausts and thrusters flared as they jockeyed for position to get a shot on the Gorvian. She shook her head. This wasn’t cooperation; the pair were competing, a clear demonstration of the nature of their alliance.

  The spirit orb acting as her chief advisor hovered nearby and she turned to it for a moment. “Did you have these kinds of problems?”

  The orb twittered back at her; filling her mind with images of integrating the Telshin Army with the Confederation Space Forces after the Nentui Accord four centuries earlier. The integration had gone smoother than most, but that conflict had all been due to a misunderstanding.

  She shook her head, then turned her focus to the navigator. “Tell me that we’ve got something on the jump points!?”

  The navigator stared at a small window on his display for a moment, tapped a key and it exploded to fill the monitor. “Just a moment, ma’am.” He analyzed the readings then turned to the science officer two consoles over to confer. Their body language told the story even before he spoke. “We still have no idea how they’re doing it Admiral. There is no record of any artificial constriction to this degree anywhere. However, the third jump point appears to be large enough to pass a small corvette through. Assuming they can make it past the picket.”

  “We’d waste how many ships on that gambit?” her XO asked. “And even if we get through, who knows what’s waiting on the hyperspace side?”

  Quin Tosh moved to say something before what she’d assumed to be an asteroid in the distance spun about. It was a tactic she’d only seen in sensor logs. The asteroid opened fire on one of the cruisers in her defensive blockade. It annihilated the cruiser before it could bring its guns to bear before three more of her own ships closed in for the kill.

  The battle continued, ships winking out of existence every few moments. She’d never felt so exposed before. The fact that more ships than orbited the home worlds surrounded her didn’t make her feel any more comfortable. Flashes of coherent energy bridged the gaps between ships as the fast-moving blips of fighter drive glows zipped about. One of those fighters, a Splicer 5000 if she made out the running lights correctly, destroyed a Gorvian fighter only to fall prey to a closing gunship a moment later.

  She forced her eyes closed for a moment’s prayer and looked up at the mighty Barker Class carrier escorting them. It was a pale shadow of its former self. The hull hung open at multiple points where Gorvian torpedoes had impacted. Its engines sputtered, forcing the crippled ship ahead in spurts; EVA techs swarmed the hull in a valiant attempt to keep the ship alive.

  The flashing landing beacons of one of the carrier’s extended landing platforms drew her eyes as a disabled Solaar drifted in to land. The pilot fought to maintain control as his craft vented fuel into space, thrusters lighting up space all around. Then it all went to pot.

  The pilot attempted to slow the fighter, the thrust vectoring paddles closing to act as thrust reversers. The reversed plasma flow ignited the cloud of fuel around the fighter. The explosion slammed the fighter down into the landing platform, collapsing its undercarriage, and smashing the right heavy mass-driver cannon into the ventral rocket pack. The force of the twin impacts detonated the rocket engines of the three remaining kinetic kill weapons.

  The resulting explosion punched through the fighter’s wing and fuel cell, detonating it. The burning hulk of the fighter rebounded off the deck and into the alcove beyond before it bounced back and tumbled down the short tunnel to the inner hangar bay. The doors to the bay remained closed, saving the cavernous space, but not the pilot. The vacuum of space quickly extinguished the fires that ate at the mangled interceptor.

  Stealing a look back at the Planet Slicer; the hole in its shields all but beckoned to her. Multiple destroyer squadrons raced towards the breach, pounding the hull beyond. Taking a deep breath, she looked at the tactical hologram they’d assembled of the ship based on their recon data. That hole in the shields uncovered decks wherein the ceilings were triple the normal height, and where they theorized that ship’s bridge to be. The ship’s very existence and the nature of its targets were an affront to all she stood for. No sacrifice would be too much to the existence of that ship and whatever warped minds which had created and commanded it.

  “Order all ships to arm and launch their slipstream torpedoes; full spread, maximum velocity.”

  The tactical officer began to relay her order and stopped; turned towards her. “Ma’am?”

  “We need to make the Gorvians hurt for once. Order all crews whose ships are unable to fight to abandon ship. Set them on collision course with the hole in the Planet Slicer’s shields.”

  “Aye ma’am” the tactical officer replied.

  “Focus as much firepower as we can on the theorized bridge area.”

  “Ma’am, the bridge is still protected. The missile defenses won’t let a gnat through,” her XO reminded her; the spirit orbs buzzing with anticipation as they pulled the plan from her mind.

  “If we overwhelm it something will get through! Saturation strike. Now move us in, and prepare all torpedo ports!”

  “Yes ma’am,” the tactical officer replied with a grin. The Nosh’Tak didn’t lack in torpedo ports, her designers believing that a torpedo battlecruiser was the future of warfare. His hands flew across his console in response as others relayed her orders to the fleet. The eager fire in his eyes had returned, a sight the Admiral had not seen in longer than she cared to remember.

  Quin Tosh couldn’t help but smile at that. She just hoped that her gamble might pay off. No matter what she did, thousands would sacrifice their lives in the assault. If she was wrong, if they couldn’t pull this off, then she just threw four fleets and hundreds of thousands of sentients away. Worse, she would leave the rest of the galaxy open to the Gorvians and their supreme weapon of mass destruction.

  Tactical room, UCSBS Mercy, Nimbus System

  Space warfare had never been the purview of the Telshin. They preferred to face their enemy eye to eye on the field of battle, not at distances measured in fractions of lightspeed. During his time with the Confederation Space Forces however, Tadeh Qudas had learned a few things. He now stood on the small dais within the spherical chamber, the ship’s captain at his side, the last tactical situation they’d received from the Nashig system floating before them.

  Even Tadeh Qudas had to suppress a shiver at the sight of the Planet Slicer and the shattered world of Nash-9. This was no way to wage war - there was no point to it. One fought wars for territory, for control of assets, be they stations, planets, or even jump points. To destroy a whole world, a world on which one could live, was counterintuitive.

  The state of the fl
eets was grim. Too many ships lay adrift, disabled, or destroyed, and there was no escape via the blockade and puckered jump points. The captain’s exoskeleton rattled at the sight, such battle was beyond her scope of experience. “We can't get supplies to our people or get the injured out because of this blockade," she shrieked in her tinny voice, grasping at one of the groups of Gorvian ships blockading the jump point. She released them a moment later, the futility of the gesture sinking in.

  Tadeh Qudas remained stoic. Using his micomm, he highlighted the blockaded jump point closest to the fleet; expanded the view until it filled his vision. “We should do something about that. See these ships. There’s nothing special about them according to these readings. These are the common models we’ve seen before. There’s no new or special equipment mounted on any of them.”

  “So, you think that they’re puckering the jump point from inside hyperspace?”

  “That it is something we have not seen is only logical. Were I in command, I’d hide such an asset as well.”

  “Even with that information what can we hope to accomplish?” she asked and tapped a command into the control board. The hologram shifted to the Nimbus system and their small flotilla; the Mercy, the GFS Freud, a single destroyer and six corvettes, three from each side of the greater conflict. “We don’t exactly have much in the way of firepower, not with the rest of our defenders off chasing that Gorvian recon team across the system for the last two cycles. And contacting the main fleets? We would have to leave the nebula and expose ourselves.”.

  In his many annura in the Space Forces, Tadeh Qudas had worked with most Confederation races; the Shinekian remained the queerest. Despite their fearsome appearance, they were timid to the point of cowardice at times. It took a great deal to convince them to go on the offensive. “Captain, look at their vectors,” Tadeh Qudas explained, changing the hologram back to that of the Nashig System. “Those ships are all facing away from the jump point and most of their weapons are mounted for forward firing arcs. If we can jump in, we’ll catch them with their weakest quarters exposed.”