She had no patience for lingering. “Be quick about it, lieutenant!”
“The symbols have started glowing, Ma’am,” the young officer finished timidly, as if telling her he’d broken her three-thousand-year-old Roman vase.
“Red alert! Action stations!” Rebecca barked at the tactical. “Set condition one throughout the fleet.”
A siren came through the ship’s speakers, and the bridge lighting dimmed, leaving red LED strips and the information screens to illuminate the bridge. A continuous computer voice echoed after the siren, informing the crew of general quarters call.
“Admiral, the gate’s now active,” Francis announced. His voice was formal, hinting nothing about their exchange a minute ago.
A whirlpool darker than the dark itself formed in the middle of the alien construction. The symbols around the artificial ring, each the size of a battleship, radiated a pale, white light, then one by one, shone bright ruby red, as if someone was entering a code. The sequence lasted a minute that seemed longer than eternity to Rebecca.
“Admiral, fighter wings and defense drones are deployed,” Lieutenant Jong said.
Rebecca leaned on the console, watching the small green dots of the fighters scatter around the main formation like flies over picnic leftovers, creating their own defensive web around the capital ships. “May the God have mercy on our souls.”
A sudden flash of light made her—and the rest of the crew—cover their eyes. When she was able to open them, sheer terror froze her where she stood.
What seemed like a huge ship, at least ten times bigger than the Deviator, came out of the hole. It was completely unnatural—a macabre spider would be Rebecca’s best description if asked. Several legs branched from the fuselage, giving the thing an insect-like appearance. The details were obscured; most of the ship was colored black, blending into the dark background of space. Hundreds of craft in all sizes followed the mother ship out of the black hole.
Rebecca slowly turned to Francis. He gave a sorrowful smile, as if to say, now I understand.
Rebecca’s nod was weaker than she hoped for. Do not worry. Because I need your strength to pull this off. “Mr. Jong, open a channel and broadcast in all frequencies.” Focus.
“Channel open, ma’am,” the lieutenant replied.
Rebecca licked her lips, then cleared her throat. “Unknown vessels, you are now in Samara’s Star, Consortium space. Identify yourselves.”
There was no response.
“Unknown vessels, this is your final warning.” She repeated, though everyone on the bridge knew it was mere protocol, the brief calm before the storm. “You are trespassing and we are authorized to use lethal force if you do not comply.”
Rebecca thought if someone dropped something now, it would hang in mid-air, waiting for their response. Everyone held their breath, staring at the massive alien armada.
A sudden, loud crackling, deafening even, filled the speakers. Several officers were covering their ears. Rebecca reached to the console to cut the signal but the noise stopped as fast as it had come.
WE. ARE. COMING. HOME.
It was a dark, guttural voice, echoing through the ship. Rebecca didn’t know if the ship’s speakers or her own head had amplified the sound but it felt like the owner of the voice was inside her mind. Voices, she corrected herself; there are several voices in that message.
WE. ARE. COMING. HOME.
Enough! Rebecca didn’t stop herself this time and cut the communications, snapping everyone out of their trance.
“Mr. Jong, send a subspace message to Consortium Command.” She waited until her lieutenant secured a line. “We have engaged the enemy and are outnumbered, suggest a secondary block in sector thirty-five between here and Sol. End message.”
Lieutenant Jong looked at his admiral as if she had confirmed their death.
I cannot let them dwell in panic. “Lieutenant, send that message already! I have a battle to win.” The bellowed order made the young officer jump back to the task at hand. Rebecca stormed the bridge, yelling new orders each second, organizing maneuvers and passing tactics to the other ships, running her officers up and down.
In a matter of minutes, all hell broke loose.
***
“Kyushu reports power loss to their main deflector.”
“Pull them back to the secondary group, tell them to form a barrage for the first and third!” Rebecca shouted, holding on to a rail and trying to stand still. The super-dreadnought was taking a beating from the enemy behemoth’s fusillade. “Switch power to forward banks!” She jumped left to avoid a falling lamp as another salvo hit the ship. “Atkins, I asked you to shift shields to forward yesterday!”
“Admiral, the power levels—”
“No excuses Lieutenant. Just do it!” Her eyes caught Francis’. “How is the wing?”
Francis shook his head. Most of the first and fourth squadrons were gone. Rebecca had already lost five dreadnoughts and the first group she’d positioned at the front of her web was taking quite a punch to their ranks.
The Ankara had been the first to go down when an enemy battleship rammed her belly. The resulting explosion took out at least a dozen enemy craft in the vicinity, but the cost was dear; Cape Town and Sao Paulo were also within the blast radius and the following shockwave fried most of their systems. Rebecca had tried to pull them back to the rear but their fates were sealed the moment Ankara went down.
Sao Paulo hadn’t even completed the turn before a mortar fire hit her hard from the aft, cracking her hull wide open. The ship had broken in half with the power of the blow and now hovered like a dead husk in the distance, occasional outbursts of fire from the engine section. Bodies, among other debris, had been sucked into space and floated around the now-dead Sao Paulo.
Cape Town was more fortunate; Sao Paulo’s fall gave her captain enough time to complete the maneuver and reposition near the second fleet. However, the damage had rendered her main thrusters offline, turning her into a stationary firing platform with minimal movement. Sooner or later, Cape Town would go down as well.
The other two dreadnoughts, Missouri and Cairo, had been victims of direct fire from the enemy mother ship. Her—was it normal to call that thing a her?—main weapon was a calamitous dark-red beam that cut through their hulls like a razor through skin. Rebecca hoped the aliens were not picking up the escape pods. A fate worse than death.
She imagined seeing the Deviator’s massive cannons opening fire on the big enemy ship one more time, feeling the trembling under her feet each time the huge weapons recoiled back into their mounts. As per her tradition, the audio enhancers were turned off on Deviator; something they’d taught her at the academy. Silence helps them focus on the situation at hand. She wondered how the captains of the old days had handled the distraction of cannon sounds and explosions in sea battles.
She reached for the intercom and selected Engineering from the holographic menu.
“Hawkins here,” a raspy voice responded.
“Mr. Hawkins.” Rebecca eyed the tactical screen and the main display in worry. “Now would be a good time to find me a weak spot on that ship.” The enemy mother ship hadn’t even seemed to notice their artillery fire.
“Ma’am, we may have an idea but there’s a catch.”
“Cut to the chase, Commander!”
The man’s voice at the other end hesitated. “That hull’s too strong for our beam weapons and the projectiles are bouncing off its shield.”
“Mr. Hawkins, tell me something I do not know.”
The man yelled something to a technician over the comms about the core temperature then cleared his throat to continue. “Well, the engines are the key. They’re a structural weakness. They’re not behind any hull plating and we can take our chances there with a concentrated attack. That shield has to come down sooner or later, if it’s like anything resembling our understanding of physics.”
“And the catch?” Rebecca asked.
“We’l
l have to disband our net here and reposition behind that ugly thing for a proper firing solution.”
Hawkins was right. Repositioning would be a serious blow—they’d have to lower their guard against the main enemy line to be able to move.
Francis had been listening. “We’ll take a serious blow, Rebecca.”
“Any estimation?”
Francis paused to think, looking at the green dots before them, surrounded by reds all over the map. “Ten. Maybe twelve.”
Too many, Rebecca sighed and felt herself sinking into despair. I cannot yield. “Evacuate the most damaged dreadnoughts, except their core personnel.”
Francis raised his brows questioningly.
“We will use them as a curtain to move the rest into position,” Rebecca explained. “The others will fire on the spot Hawkins marked with everything they got.”
“What if that doesn’t work?”
“I believe we already discussed that part, Francis.”
***
It took them a costly twenty minutes to evacuate all non-essential personnel and recover the shuttles. They had to abandon seven of the battered dreadnoughts, using them as shields against the main battery fire from the enemy flagship. The process was painstakingly slow and Rebecca felt her heart sinking deeper with each casualty report. Keep it together, girl.
“Fire cannons five through eleven!” she barked to the tactical station, her first officer echoing the order. “Signal Lyon, Detroit and Hamburg to form a barrage. And fire every last thing they have!”
The ship shook with another blow, not as fierce as the others, but Rebecca hadn’t become an admiral because of her naiveté. Each hit meant a hull breach somewhere on the eight-thousand-meter super-dreadnought. Or worse, someone dead.
Smaller craft were engaged in in skirmishes here and there, leaving the capital ships alone in their fight. Defense drones worked as intelligent mines, tailing enemy craft and firing until they destroyed their target or were destroyed. Enemy forces still outnumbered Rebecca’s fleet, The First Banner of Consortium by a large margin, but so far they successfully held them at bay. No thanks to that web you formed, Rebecca.
Hawkins’ suggestion might be the key to turn the tide, or at least, not get wiped out for good. She admitted to herself the lieutenant commander’s idea was brilliant. As an unforeseen side effect in their favor—albeit a small one—the enemy fleet’s many capital ships had to match their maneuvers to Rebecca’s fleet to get a clear shot, or they risked friendly fire.
At first, the opposing force hadn’t seemed to care about hitting its own, continuing the scattered turret fire without any need for precision. However, after losing over twenty craft to their own turrets just to take down three, they appeared to reconsider and Rebecca gladly accepted the opening created.
“Admiral, the Honshu is destroyed.”
“Survivors?” There, another city falls.
“None, ma’am. They had a reactor overload.”
Rebecca had seen it happen all too frequently to commanding officers—barring emotion, ignoring the death toll. The hard part always came later, as they learned to live with the horror of knowing their actions had sent thousands to their deaths. She wondered if she would have a chance to feel regret.
“Helm, what is our position?” She didn’t have the time to dwell in misery. That would come later.
“Two minutes, twenty-five seconds and counting,” Lieutenant Wallace, the navigation officer replied from his station. “We will have an opening—”
It was as if lightning struck the bridge, followed by a thunderous sound and a wild explosion that scattered them all. Rebecca found herself face-down on a terminal, seeing everything in black and white accompanied by a terrible ringing in her ears. She tried to stand up but her legs gave out, dropping her near a young female crewmember with a bloodied face, lifeless eyes staring into nothingness. She sent a silent prayer for the woman’s soul and reached for her dog tag—Lieutenant Jr. Grade Jessica Scott-Adams.
“Rest in peace, girl.” Rebecca pushed the image of the girl aside and tried to stand up again. This time, she succeeded. She gestured toward the navigation controls. “Somebody put that fire out! Commander, report!”
“Ma’am, Commander Leclair’s dead,” Lieutenant Jong said with a coarse voice, his eyes watered by the smoke.
Rebecca stared at Jong, her lips twitching. No emotion, only survival. Officer Jong stood before her in patience, in respect. Not now, girl. After a moment’s pause Rebecca gestured Jong to continue his duties. The tactical officer’s battle-worn face was covered in soot and blood, his left eye bloodied, but he saluted like a young cadet on his first day and rushed back to his duties.
You have to hold on for them. “Mr. Matthews!” Rebecca called out to the lieutenant commander attending to an injured airman near the main screen. The injured boy’s arms had been shredded to pieces—no matter how well Matthews stopped the bleeding, the airman would be dead from trauma long before they reached the med bay.
“Yes, Admiral!” Matthews replied, still fumbling with the tourniquet he applied.
“You are field-promoted to First Officer,” Rebecca announced. “Leave whatever you are doing to someone else, I need you here at Tactical.”
The man raised his head and looked baffled.
“Mr. Matthews, that was an order!”
Matthews looked at the blood dripping from his hands and nodded, still looking confused. He signaled an ensign to take over and hurried toward Rebecca, wiping the blood on his uniform. The Admiral’s look was enough to pull him out of his puzzlement.
Matthews gave an official salute. “Reporting as ordered, ma’am!”
“At ease, Mr. Matthews,” Rebecca peered at the current situation in the flickering holographic display, showing mostly static than images. “Someone, fix this map!” she growled over her shoulder, and turned back to Matthews. “Commander, I want a damage report yesterday!”
“Yes, ma’am!” Matthews rushed toward the damage control station.
“Mr. Jong, signal everyone to fire the moment they have a bead on the target.”
The lieutenant gave a curt nod.
Matthews rushed back to Rebecca, “Admiral Conway, we lost life support to decks five and six. Damage assessment teams are on site. No critical damage besides the hull breach. Multiple casualties.”
“Go to tactical and start your attack run, Commander.”
The Deviator took her position behind the enemy ship, outmaneuvering the ugly beast with superior speed. The other ships were already in position, firing whatever they had left at the engines of the spider-shaped monstrosity. Rebecca’s flagship volleyed with all the right-side mortars, illuminating the dark of space with fireworks. The enemy was now forced to retreat, taking a serious blow to their back. But the mother ship returned fire at any target she could mark both with her turrets and the primary beam weapon, delivering the real, devastating blow.
“Ma’am, we lost the California.”
Rebecca grunted, watching the dreadnought turn into a blazing ball of fire on the main screen. “Mr. Matthews, launch nukes one and four to the mother ship.”
“But ma’am,” the inexperienced commander argued, “Firing a nuke into the engine core will cause a reaction. We will get caught in the shockwave!”
“Commander, either do as you are ordered or find me someone who can.”
Matthews saluted and ran back to the tactical console to input the command. “It is ready, Admiral,” he said over the console, his voice shaking.
Rebecca raised her head to address the ship directly. “Computer, authorize launch of nukes, bay one and four.”
“Nuclear launch authorization code required.”
“Authorization Conway, Tango, Orion, Five, Seven, One, Orion—” she hesitated on the final code “—Francis.”
“Nuclear launch authorized. Warheads prepped in. Nuclear launch detected,” the computer confirmed Rebecca’s order in its uninterested, dull voice.
>
“Everyone, brace for impact!” Matthews yelled, holding on to a console.
Rebecca watched the nukes disappear toward the huge, black spider, leaving small trails of smoke on the display. At first, nothing happened and she felt the hairs on her neck raise, but then a blinding sun dawned into the bridge. An immense ring of fire spread in every direction, surrounding the orange ball of melting metal that had been the spider ship. No matter how much collateral damage, it was a sight for sore eyes.
The ring reached the Deviator in a few seconds, jolting the ship as it touched the plating. And with that, what little order the bridge had left after the alien attack was gone.
Rebecca felt the weight of a fallen console on her body and smoke burning her lungs. She wanted to cough it all out but it required effort to breathe, let alone cough. The control center was in utter darkness; only the emergency flashlights of running personnel were working, creating a weird lightshow. The bridge sounded much quieter than it should and she was sure it had something to do with her concussion. Please, no more deaths. The fire sprinklers pumped non-flammable foam, covering the bodies, and Rebecca was thankful for it. One of the lights spotted Rebecca and trotted her way.
It was an ensign named Jackson. “Ma’am, are you all right?”
“It looks worse than it feels, ensign,” she said, whooping between every word, “Help me up, will you?”
It took both of their strength to move the console away. Rebecca couldn’t help but scream when Jackson pulled her up.
Matthews was with them in a second. “Ma’am?” he asked, taking Rebecca’s arm.
“Find me a chair,” Rebecca said under her breath, hoping it didn’t sound like begging, “and a med kit.” She grabbed Matthews. “Not you, Commander.”
Matthews nodded and gestured Jackson to fetch one. He seated her in a fallen chair “You are bleeding badly. Seems like something cut through your left side, near the stomach.”
“Commander, I couldn’t care less.” Rebecca grabbed his collar, “Just give me my damn report.” Matthews babbled a few words, and she slapped him. “Get ahold of yourself, First Officer!”
Although humiliating, the slap helped Matthews get back to his senses. “All major systems are down due to the explosion,” he rushed out. “We are trying to establish contact with the rest of the fleet, but it would be great if we could even look out a window.”
Shadows Bear No Names (The Blackened Prophecy Book 1) Page 9
