by Gethsemane
“We can’t destroy them, but we can send them back,” Caliph answered. The Accipiter displays changed abruptly. Max Jordan wasn’t sure what he was looking at. Caliph explained. “You’ll need to pilot a Nemesis carrier vehicle and drop a warhead right into the Gateway. Actually, one might not be enough.” Additional displays activated. “That should do it.”
Max Jordan beamed. “So, I need to fly a Nemesis missile through the flaming debris of a destroyed planet and outmaneuver an army of space demons to detonate an anti-matter hyper-missile to blow up a Gateway into another dimension?” Caliph nodded her virtual head. “Exactly.”
“Well, yippee,” Jordan responded. He saddled up. A neural interface deployed over his eyes.
Caliph continued. “Now, put me in your head. I already have full sympathetic control access to the Nemesis missiles. I learned how when I tried to blow up Meridian. You weren’t around then.”
Max Jordan nodded. “Unh-Huh.
“I’ll try and pull you out before the missiles detonate,” Caliph assured him, as she over-rode the launch controls and prepared to fire the Nemesis.
Zilla – Blade Toto steered his Aves toward Pegasus’s landing bays, surrounded by the space-scorpions that had overtaken him in flight. Demons buzzed passed him like moths around an exterior lumination source.
Maneuvering into the Landing Bay was going to be a challenge. Zilla had lost two maneuvering thrusters and the others were responding unpredictably. Pegasus was retreating away from them at a relatively fast clip. Flight Control had not responded to his requests for landing clearance.
Zilla’s Main Deck was filling with smoke. Alkema and the rest of the crew were wearing air masks as one of the Medical Technicians tried to locate the source of the fire. Something struck the ship’s hull, causing David Alkema’s tactical screen to fry out. “What are they firing at us?” He shouted.
“That’s outside my area of expertise,” Banks informed him.
One of the Medical Technicians came forward. “Sir, Lt. Commander Alkema… the fire suppression systems are off-line and something in the cargo deck is burning. We’re going to lose containment if we stay here.”
“Get up the Flight Deck,” he ordered. He turned to Banks. “You too.”
“What are you going to do?” Hardcandy Banks asked him.
“I’m going to blow the Main Hatch and vent atmo to put the fire out.” Alkema reported.
“You can do that from the Flight Deck,” she said.
“We’re losing systems. I have to be sure.” Alkema tapped his mask. “I’ve got my rebreather on and I’ll be strapped in. Just go… now! I don’t want to blow up inside the landing tunnel.”
“That would be messy,” Hardcandy Banks agreed. She would have given him a kiss for luck, but she couldn’t because of the oxygen mask. She gave him a good hard slap on the rump instead.
When the crew and passengers had cleared the deck, Alkema double checked his straps and tapped the control panel to open the hatch. It was inoperative, as he figured it would be. He opened an access panel next to the hatch and pulled down the manual release.
Next, he felt his way through the smoke to the center of the hatch, pulled open the manual release panel, and jerked hard on the handle inside.
The inner hatch opened up about eight centimeters. The outer hatch was still shut, with an ugly blister of welded alloy in the center of it where one of the alien beams had hit.
Alkema cursed, groped his way back to the weapons locker, and grabbed a heavy assault rifle. He set the weapon to max yield, aimed as best he could through the smoke, and fired off. The rounds weakened the hatch but did not create the opening he needed. The hatch was reinforced and blast-resistant.
He was reconsidering his options when suddenly the entire hatch assembly blew away from the side of the ship. One of the alien creatures had batted against the side of the ship, and the combination of its impact and the weakened state of the hatch had caused it to disintegrate.
David Alkema looked into the horrible shape the thing that was attacking his ship. He felt it in his mind, and it terrified him. He could hear it screaming in his head.
Something long and sharp like a mosquito’s serrated tongue shot out from it and Alkema barely dodged out of it in time. The restraints that kept him from being blown into space now trapped him in front of the opening in the hull the alien beast was clinging to.
The cabin had decompressed and his rebreather must have malfunctioned because he was fighting to get air in his lungs. The scene was getting purple and black around the edges of his vision as his brain demanded oxygen his blood could not supply.
He raised the assault rifle again and squeezed off rounds continuously at the alien. He heard a scream inside his hid that felt like a migraine headache. He fired and fired until the insect let go of Zilla.
Then, he passed out, still in his restraints.
Pegasus – Main Bridge – “It’s emerging,” Billy Keane reported breathlessly.
On the screen, they had a view of the thing coming out of the Gateway. Swarms of tentacles surrounded the central body, which seemed to consist entirely of mouths, ten of them, with tongues of fire and lined with rows of fangs. In the very center of the beast was a circle of nine horrible flaming red eyes.
It was terrifying enough, but their immediate problem was the swarm of small, scorpion-like things on their ship’s rear quarter. General Kitaen ordered Tactical Specialist Gage. “Arm Hammerhead missiles. Set for contact detonation and launch.”
“Right, arming Hammerheads. Targeting Demons. Arming warheads.” Gage activated a forward tactical display that depicted missiles in Pegasus’s forward weapons array arming and launching.
“Aves Zilla is in the landing tunnel, 13-Alpha,” McCormick reported. “They’re heavily damaged.”
“Increase velocity to maximum,” Change ordered. “Get us to transition speed.”
“What about Phoenix?” McCormick demanded.
“If they haven’t already been destroyed, there’s nothing we can do for them,” Kitaen answered, sparing Change the need to say it.
The Demons had caught up with Pegasus, and the pathfinder was not doing well, not doing well at all. Almost twenty accipiters had been destroyed in the first few minutes of battle. The anti-proton cannons on the Accipiters barely scratched the Demons. When the Accipiters attacked, the Demon ships turned and slammed into them, instantly annihilating both ships. Pegasus’s ionic cannons were having somewhat more success, but destroying one of the attackers meant keeping it in a steady line of fire for several seconds while the Demon ship jigged and evaded.
One Demon, then another, and another smashed hard against the rear base of the command tower. The bridge juddered from the assault. The Hammerheads were taking their toll on the Demons, but there were so many of them.
The small, scorpion-like ships were pounding against Pegasus’s outer shields. One had even slipped through a weak point an annihilated itself against the Inner Shield at the base of the Secondary Command Tower, causing moderate damage. Specialist Coldbeer had sealed off that section.. Another of the demons skipped across the bow like a stone across a lake, then smashed into a section near the base of the two towers.
Specialist Raider spoke up from Tactical. “Commander, one of the Nemesis carrier vehicles has gone to launch mode.”
“I didn’t order that,” said Change.
“I was about to,” Kitaen pulled up a tactical display nest to his position.
“Whose authorization code was used?” Change demanded.
“No authorization code, the launch sequence was over-written. Missile away,” Raider reported.
“Show me,” Change ordered.
Raider added a new display hologram to the forward bridge, showing a Nemesis carrier vehicle launching from the forward hatcheries, then banking and heading back over the ship before speeding toward the Gateway.
“I’ve found a control linkage between the Nemesis and the Auxiliary Accipi
ter control on Deck 49,” a third tactical specialist, Warfighter Swift, reported. “I can attempt to disable it.”
“Negative,” Kitaen barked, then looked at Change. “I don’t know what that thing is, but we know it’s hostile, and very powerful. It needs killing, and the Nemesis is the most powerful weapon we have.”
Change nodded. “Maintain that link.”
Kitaen added. “Give that warhead carrier vehicle some fighter support.”
“Affirmative…” Gage answered.
“Outer Shield failure imminent over the port wingblade,” Coldbeer reported a second later.
One of the Demon ships broke through the shield and smashed right through to the port wingblade. It self-annihilated on impact, but tore a gaping hole nearly a hundred meters across right through the ship.
Another Demon made an impact in the same zone of the ship, deepening and widening the hole. A third smashed right through to the Graviton engine embedded within. The entire ship lurched hard to port.
“Get us out of here,” Change repeated.
Atlantic snapped back at her. “The Number Four Graviton Engine is off-line. I’m trying to reconfigure the propulsion field to compensate.”
“Outer Shield failure over the Aft Port Quadrant,” reported Tactical Officer Gage.
Shield failures were also imminent over the rest of the ship.
“Cut power to the Outer Shields, reinforce the Inner Shield over the Command Towers and the Habitation Decks,” General Kitaen ordered.
The Demons surrounded the aft section of Pegasus like a swarm of flies around the tail end of a Borealan Musk Ox. The difference being, the flies of the Borealan plains were merely pesky, and didn’t explode violently upon impact. The Demons did. And they were inflicting massive damage across Pegasus’s entire aft section.
The scorpion-things began to cluster around the huge hole they had blasted in the ship’s port wingblade, ripping into the exposed decks with their horrible, horrible claws, as though knowing instinctively this was the ideal route to the inside of the ship, where thousands of tasty humans huddled and braced against their onslaught.
Deep Space/ Deck 49 – Through the sympathetic neural link, Max Jordan could feel the carrier vehicle beginning to fail all around him. “Maneuvering thrusters are gone. Aft hull is losing structural integrity.”
Caliph whispered: “Just hold it together for 13.7 more seconds.” The Demons had largely ignored him as he had flown out from Pegasus, and he tried to give the swarm a wide berth as he bore on toward the target, an elongated circle in his head’s-up display.
He felt a shockwave and then an impact against the side of his ship. One of the Accipiters escorting him had been destroyed, and a large hunk of its former engine smacked off his hull.
The Nemesis carrier entered the planet’s debris field. Jordan dodged and weaved the ship through the flying rocks. This was worse than any asteroid field simulation he had ever tried. It was thousands of times more dense than a standard asteroid field. The rocks were still in motion from the explosion, their flight paths fully random, and it would take millions of years for them to stabilize.
Suddenly, a chunk of Gethsemane’s crust the size of a mountain range loomed up in front of him. “Whoa!” he shouted out loud, putting his ship into a panicked crash dive as the flying mountain range cleared the top of his ship by less than a hundred meters.
Something that felt like a hard punch to the gut greeted him on the other side. A rock no larger than a wally-ball had smacked the ventral side of the carrier vehicle and knocked out most of the armor plating. Back in the control chamber, the loss in control became a vibration, like driving a speeding road vehicle across a deeply rutted dirt track at high-speed on two flat tires.
The carrier was barely responding to control inputs. “I’m losing it!” Jordan reported.
“You can’t!” Caliph insisted. “We’re not close enough.” She tried to help him stabilize the vehicle. It helped a little.
He checked the head’s up display. He had lost the target. “Dammit!”
“Correcting,” Caliph told him. She instructed him to rotate 47 degrees on his y-axis, 32
on his x-axis. The thrusters responded sluggishly.
The ship was through the worst of the debris field, but now was passing close to the molten surface of the planet formerly known as Gethsemane. It was hot like a small star, and gases were exploding outward from its surface.
“There, I see it,” Max Jordan said. On the control simulator, sweat was pouring down his forehead and into his eyes. His wounded leg throbbed with pain. His throat was parched. Only Caliph’s constant stimulation to his brain kept him from passing out. It took everything he had in him to put his ship on course for that ring.
The thing inside it was nearly through the breach. A hundred tendrils, or more, waved and swatted in the blackness of space.
“Stay away from those things,” Caliph warned him. “The condition of the Carrier Vehicle is too precarious.”
“You should launch another one,” Jordan told her. “I don’t think this one is going to make it.”
But Caliph insisted. “There isn’t enough time. Ialdabaoth has to be destroyed before it can get out of the Gateway, or we cannot stop it.”
“Ialdabaoth?” Max Jordan asked. “How do you know its name?”
“It looks like an Ialdabaoth to me,” Caliph answered. “Now kill it.” Pegasus – Main Bridge – Coldbeer was losing her battle to keep up with the damage reports.
Deck after deck, section after section was decompressing, opening to space as the demonic creatures from another dimension tore Pegasus apart.
The largest holographic display on the bridge was now devoted to a three-dimensional schematic of Pegasus, showing the beating the ship was taking. Each passing second recorded another impact against the rear quarter. Most of the phalanx guns in the aft section had been taken out. Shields were failing.
The UnderDecks were taking the worst of the attack. The Demons had smashed through the outer hull of the UnderDecks on the starboard side. It was an outboard section, unoccupied. But they had penetrated the ship and were tearing it apart from the inside, making their way toward the inhabited decks.
General Kitaen hovered over the Tactical Display. “Deploy emergency bulkheads throughout the Aft quarter, it will slow them down.” He traced with his finger the most direct route from where the Demons were to the nearest inhabited decks, the Aves Hangars.
“Pet some tactical teams on the other side of the bulkheads to lay some traps,” Kitaen said. “If we put explosives behind these bulkheads here, here, here, and here, those bastards will have one Hell of a surprise waiting for them when they bust through.”
“I’ll relay the order to Lieutenant Patton,” Raider said.
“Sir, we have a problem,” Gage called to Kitaen.
He showed the outer tactical display. A group of the demons broke away from the main body and swung around to the front of the ship.
“They’ve figured out that this is the command center,” Kitaen said in a near whisper.
A pair of loud explosions came from the opposite side of the armor shield that protected the Main Bridge. A third explosion knocked a bulge in the hull plating.
“Secure stations. Evacuate Primary Command,” Change ordered.
“Reroute tactical command to Secondary Tactical Command Center,” Kitaen ordered.
“Maintain all previous operational orders until we arrive there.”
“Rerouting operations functions to Tactical Command Center,” Raider reported.
McCormick and the others were already evacuating their stations, scrambling toward the hatch at the back that led to the transport dock.
More explosions, the hull plating groaned and began to snap. Pegasus sounded a warning:
H u l l b r e a c h i m m i n e n t i n P r i m a r y C o m m a n d 1
Gage and Raider remained at their stations and worked furiously to make sure control over helm
and tactical systems wasn’t lost, as scorpions smashed against the armor of the Command Tower, one after another.
“Leave it!” Change ordered. “Come on.”
Locking down their stations, Gage and Raider followed her to the exit hatch and sealed it behind them as the scorpions broke through.
The front of the Main Bridge breached and exploded into space.
Deep Space – The badly damaged Nemesis carrier vehicle commenced an arc around the outside of the Gateway, releasing warheads all along its trajectory until all ten were launched.
The first four were almost immediately destroyed by impact with Demons. But the other six got close.
Caliph had programmed them to detonate sequentially. The first three created a backwash in the energy that was streaming through the open Gateway, disrupting it enough to collapse the field holding it open.
Just as it closed, the remaining three detonated within nanoseconds of each other, destroying the Gateway completely, and sending the terror that had been struggling to emerge back to the Hell dimension from whence it came.
The hundreds of scorpion-demon-space monsters trying to rip into Pegasus found their existence in this reality unsustainable in the absence of their host. In the space of nanoseconds, they turned to quantum ash and blew away on sub-atomic, super-string winds, shrieking in unheard ultraviolet wavelengths as they perished.
Also, the annihilation of energy and anti-matter created an explosive burst of energy on the scale of a small supernova. And since even a small supernova released energy on the scale of billions of nucleonic weapons, further dispersing the debris field that had been the planet Gethsemane.
Several minutes later, the badly battered Pathfinder Ship Pegasus was subjected to one final massive blast wave, then all was quiet again.
Chapter 17
The ship is more how I like it now, dark in places, and filled with strange noises. I was in the commander’s quarters during the attack. The noise disturbed one of my better naps. Then the bulkhead compressed and I was trapped in the Old Man’s sleeping quarters until they brought him back from the planet.
