by Lee Guo
Earthquakes rumbled through his super-armored bridge. If it felt like this in here, Donovan felt certain plasma and secondary explosions flamed through his ship. The Asterix had already been through six battles—six battles—worn and beaten as any ship could get.
Hold together, baby!.
For what? Donovan didn't know and couldn't think of a clue! Just don't lose antimatter or reactor containment!
Donovan walked back to his captain's chair. Moving away from the helm's console, he became certain he wouldn't be moving the ship any time soon. He needed to forward face his assailants. He staggered and fell, but his pads kept him from injuring himself.
Amidst the yelling and screaming from the bridge officers, and the, "Are we gonna die?" from Carly, Donovan finally reached his captain's chair. He wrote a quick message through the arm pad to the admiral.
He received a reply back, immediately."Stay put," it said.
At the base of the Cylinder
Flag Bridge, Mobile Battle Fortress VSF Epsilon Decimus
Block D-9-D existed as a massive cylinder with the walls coated by asteroids. Prancort's slow moving battle fortress, the Epsilon Decimus, finally arrived in D-9-D by sliding into the hollow open base of the cylinder, on the ‘human’ side.
When it got there, it gained line of sight on all the snake starships within, especially the ones on the ‘snake’ side.
"Fire!" Prancort ordered.
All two thousand fortress-sized x-ray laser mounts fired into the snake's cylinder fleet. The sheer volume of firepower tore into the two dozen snake warships like dolls being shot with live ammo. For the snakes that had turned to shoot Asterix, lack of forward armor protection meant Epsilon Decimus' lasers burned them into a helpless mess of smoldering debris.
Inside the Cylinder
Bridge, Juggernaut VSF Asterix
Donovan saw the battle fortress.
By science, the thing was massive! He’d known how big it was by seeing it on the holomap, but only by having it fight in the same Block, did he realize its true size.
Being eighty kilometers long meant a whollop of surface area for its laser mounts. Equipped with thirty fusion reactors, it was easily the most powerful and most expensive arsenal on the battlefield. Its shield output overwhelmed Asterix by over six times. Any snake grazer beam that connected with it looked like feathers striking an elephant.
Returning back to reality, Donovan gazed at his bridge. People came back to their senses. The world became palpable—again. They thought they were dead, but were instead—saved by a monstrosity.
"Weapons—do we still have weapons?" Donovan asked.
"Uhh—yes, sir. I got about thirty forward laser mounts still reading green," said Carly.
"Can we use them without blowing up the ship?"
"I—I don't know, sir!"
Donovan paused a second to consider the risks. "Fire!"
The Asterix's remaining lasers dove into the unturned snakes below. The snakes below were in dead man's land. If they turned to face Donovan, the fortress would kill them. If they didn't turn, the fortress and the other human starships combined would kill them, except slower. Meanwhile, Donovan's lasers pummeled the snake defenders gradually with each hit.
"Uh, captain…?" Carly called out.
"I see it…"
The snake heavy-cruiser which chased Asterix, already followed him into the hole. It now turned sideways, forward-facing Asterix's right armor, in order to shoot Donovan as soon as its momentum cleared the asteroid.
"Helm! Turn the—”Helm lay on the floor of the ship, unconscious. Donovan got out of his captain's chair and dove towards the helm's console, but it was too late.
The snake heavy-cruiser's point blank grazer fire smashed into Asterix's side armor and the ship's smoldering corridors—whose flames were just being put out—now became filled with plasma, metal-tearing hull fragments, and body parts.
"Reactor two, three, and four are down. We're gonna lose containment! I don't know how much we can take!" DC shouted out.
But then it stopped. Donovan looked to the right and saw a hulking mess that once was a snake heavy cruiser. The mess retched up secondary explosions.
Donovan's captain's chair beeped. Donovan dragged his war weary body away from the helmsman console and pressed his chair's arm pad. He received a message from the admiral. The display read, "Never fail to shoot someone in the back."
Donovan laughed, and his bridge crewmembers, uncertain at first, joined in. Standing up and grinning, Donovan stated, "Devil's Luck."
—then, the snake exploded.
Inside the Cylinder
Battlespace
At first, Gro-Banok's entire outer hull seemed to bubble, then it cracked. An antimatter containment failure split apart Gro-Banok into many fragments. The tremendous explosion, besides killing eight thousand insectoids, severed the spinal nerve cord that held the insectoid ship together. Fragments of the forward section split from the aft, expanding away from the middle at collision velocities.
The expanding fifty million-ton fireball seemed awe inspiring, until collision alert alarms rang out in the bridge of the Asterix. A gigantic two million-ton hull fragment headed straight for Asterix's epicenter. It slammed into Asterix like a throwing knife. The cut crashed into Asterix's starboard hull, breaking through dozens of decks. Explosions broke floors and corridor walls, burning anyone even near the rushing fireballs.
The knife did not stop there. It inserted itself into Asterix's nerve center, the bridge. The bridge of a Viron battleship was extremely well-armored. So much so, it completely stopped the knife. But at deadly costs. The people in it, however, were as fragile as homo-sapiens could be. Any sudden change in gravities could crunch body parts, and despite the padding on the crew's uniforms, nothing could prevent the right wall of the bridge from splitting in half, and blowing dangerous metal fragments in every direction.
Just as the antimatter explosion severed the snake starship's spine, a metal splinter zoomed across the bridge and severed Captain Drake Donovan's spine. The upper part of the captain flew diagonally. The lower part of the captain smashed into the ground and skidded on the floor to his left.
"Medic!" yelled the survivors, amidst the chaos and the burning retching flames.
CHAPTER SEVEN
At the base of the Cylinder
Flag Bridge, Mobile Battle Fortress VSF Epsilon Decimus
Inside the gigantic cylinder, snake battleships became wretched hulks for every minute that went by. While his eight-ship flanker flotilla at the top failed to reach its destination, except the juggernaut Asterix, which lay crippled—a smaller detachment of flankers traveled through the cylinder's bottom and managed to reach flanking position…unimpeded. This, combined with the awesome power of the battle fortress Epsilon Decimus, created a pincer movement, or a semi-perfect ‘bear's claw’.
The snakes inside the cylinder faced annihilation.
Another snake heavy-cruiser on the snake's wall exploded in a tantalizing fury of fire and hull fragments. Prancort watched as his powerful fortress-sized lasers pummeled a snake's forward armor as if it partially didn't exist.
I can't believe I almost retreated…Prancort watched the exploding battlefield. What will the snake admiral do now? Somewhere, far away in the distance, a snake commander must be thinking of a new plan. Maybe he’d been too surprised by the sudden turn-around to consider it.
Prancort knew one thing, however. If that snake admiral didn't withdraw all his forces from the cylinder, and soon, he would lose everything in Block D-9-D. Well, not everything. There was still snake forces sporadically spread out outside the cylinder.
There it is! A retreat!
Inside the cylinder, the snake battle wall suddenly began turning. Every snake ship began twisting towards a crack or exit.
"Captain, fire on all the turned starships!" Prancort ordered.
"With pleasure," said voice from below.
More snakes exploded or bec
ame crippled, at an increasing rate. If the fortress's guns could do this much damage against snake frontal armor, shooting side armor was like shooting an egg. Every half a minute, a snake exploded.
When the last snake left the cylinder, Prancort counted the charred snake hulls inside. It was a graveyard. Twenty-three snakes were dead, at a loss of twelve human ships. Five snakes escaped. The gain-to-loss ratio wasn't that great. Certainly, the destruction of the eight-ship flotilla hiked up the losses. He wondered if flanking with those ships was even worth it. By flanking, he exposed those eight ships to much greater risks. They did fail, but how could he have known there was a hidden K-ship planted right in front of their reentry point? Could he have accomplished much less losses by keeping them where they were?
Absolutely—his battle fortress, which equated to a whole fleet of snake ships, would have made a difference even without flanking.
Prancort puzzled over it, and then decided in the future, he could win through overwhelming force without flanking, because of his battle fortress.
His attention returned to the map.
The battle was not over.
He looked outside the cylinder. Skirmishes occurred in the surrounding Blocks all around D-9-D. The human fleet's total death count was 75%, meaning a full three quarters of his pre-battle fleet now lie as sprawling debris or incapacitated. The snakes lost 70%, of which a significant number came from losses in the cylinder.
Prancort had forty ships still operational, a dozen of which were inside the cylinder, including his battle fortress. Should he take them out and engage the enemy fleet? He thought about it. If he didn't, what would he do? He would have to withdraw all his forces into the cylinder, and they'd rack up considerable losses from retreating.
By science, I have the most powerful machine humanity has created to date. I'm going to use it. “Captain, move our battle fortress to the snake's side of the cylinder."
"And do we stop there?"
"No, keep moving until it exits their base."
"Yes, sir!" The captain smiled.
Prancort inputted commands into the fleet computer, and the dozen other ships inside began moving as well.
Inside the Cylinder
Bridge, Juggernaut VSF Asterix
Helmsman Lieutenant First Class Chris Mayson woke up.
What happened? He must have blacked out. How strange. He’d never fallen unconscious before. When he looked at his helm console, he saw nothing. All his instruments were turned off. All the displays were blank. What happened? Had the ship been turned offline?
No. No way. They were in the middle of battle.
Then, he felt the heat. It was hot inside his padded suit, and his entire body sweated. He wanted to take off his helmet, but first, he checked the oxygen inside the bridge. Yes, it was safe.
He took it off. A rush of smoke filled his nostrils. He gazed around and saw flames. To his right, Chris gasped as he stared at the wall. It looked like someone had exploded a bomb on the other side and a gigantic gaping hole filled with sizzling wires and torn metal all darted inward.
What the hell happened here?
"My God—is everyone, ok?" he called out.
"No, Chris," a woman's voice responded.
"Carly, that you?" Chris glanced at the woman.
Carly Kemph, tactical officer, sat exasperated near the weapons console. Her instruments and displays blanked out, too. "What happened to you?" she said.
"I blacked out," said Chris.
"Are you ok?" Carly blinked.
Chris looked at himself. "Not a scratch. Where's the captain?"
Carly pointed at the disfigured body on the floor, surrounded by medics.
"My god—the captain? Did I cause that? This is the first time I ever blacked out. It never happened to me before. I'm really—"
"He's lucky you blacked out. If he’d been sitting, that metal fragment would have sliced his head off. But he was standing. You saved the captain, Chris."
"How do you know? You watched him get hit?"
"Everyone was watching. He was talking about Devil's Luck."
Chris stared at Donovan's, or what was left of his, upper torso. He’d literally been sawed in half. "Can they heal him?"
"Heal him? No," said Carly. "Save him? Maybe. Can't say the same for Commander Rajek…"
"Where…" Chris then saw Paul Rajek's scattered remnants and shuddered. A mesh of blood and flesh smacked onto the wall on the far side. "Holy mother, is that him?"
Carly nodded.
Stunned and confused, he gazed at Carly.
The woman just stared into the fire, not moving, not manning her station.
Well, what was there to man? Then, he looked over at the captain. The guy, if he lived, would never walked on two legs, again. Then, he glanced at what was left of the first officer on the wall.
The two remained silent, except for the moaning in his suit's radio. Was that DC? Or was it Comm?
"So, who's captain, now?"
"You are, Chris."
"Oh—Ah…"
Above the Cylinder
Bridge, Light Cruiser VSF Harrington
Elise was dead, or so she thought.
How the hell could I still be alive? With a snake juggernaut in front of her, and two snake heavies below her?
Yet amazingly, she could still breathe fresh oxygen from her suit.
"Damage—damage control," she called.
"DC is gone," said voice on radio. "I'm manning her operations from my station."
"Ripley, how about it? Tell me what's left."
"We lost all three fusion reactors. The engineers shut them down before they melted the coolants. Seventeen out of fifty sections are reporting green-green. The rest are yellow-orange or red-red-black. Most of our top section is full black."
It made sense. The juggernaut had been firing at her top before she turned it to face him. "And our bottom section?"
"Orange to brown."
Amazing. She wished she could get the holomap back online. That would be a heaven's gift. How did she survive two snakes shooting her bottom? "Do you, uh, have map information?"
"Yeah," Commander Ripley replied, "it's all online. We just don't have the main plot."
Elise closed her hands and thanked whatever space deity who’d given her good fortune. An explosion shook the bridge. She could hear a clunk, then a slam. A clang pushed her against her seat straps.
Space deity my ass. Elise sat in the darkness. She studied at her arm pad. It was black. She tried rebooting it, but no luck. Then, she slammed it with her padded gloves. Still, no luck. Unbuckling her safety straps, she stood up and tried to keep her balance amongst the shaking and the clang sound of metal tearing away.
When she got to Ripley's station, she gazed over his display.
"Map plot?" said First Officer Ripley.
"Hell, yes," grumbled Elise. "Can't tell people to shoot—if I can't see."
"Not a lot of that left."
His display changed from DC view to a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional sphere ten thousand kilometers in diameter.
My stars, everything is still here. "Zoom it in, please," Elise requested.
The map went from ten thousand kilometers down to one thousand, then down to five hundred kilometers.
"Change the view. Can we see it from the side?"
"Sure."
Two debris fields hovered beside her, the aftermath of a reactor explosion from both a human destroyer and a heavy-cruiser. Below, two hulking fragments of exploded snakes also littered side by side. Above her, a partially damaged snake juggernaut continued to fire on her forward armor.
Clang. Clang.
Elise couldn't understand it. How did she actually escape her ill fate? Somehow, out of the two snakes under her, one destroyed and another one disappeared. The snake above her looked badly damaged. "Zoom out," Elise ordered.
The map turned one thousand kilometers.
"Zoom out, again. Wait—never
mind." There. Another human heavy had intervened on her behalf. It lay dead after being destroyed by the snake juggernaut, but not before killing off a snake heavy below her.
But what happened to the one that disappeared?
She didn't know, and then realized she may never know if the juggernaut finished her.
Rumble. Rumble.
"Are gravitics online?"
"No, ma'am," said helm.
"Damn…Weapons?"
"Firing, ma'am. Twenty forward laser mounts. “ Shake—Strike that. Eighteen firing."
"I'm not ready to die," Elise voiced aloud. "We got reinforcements, right Ripley? Zoom out." Her eyes glistened. Four human ships headed out of the cylinder towards her. The battle inside must have gone well—or they were retreating.
Doesn't matter, she shook her head. What mattered was that there was help arriving.
The bridge spasmed and for a second it seemed gravity plating deactivated.
Would help get here in time?
Elise realized it didn't matter how far they were, as long as they had line of sight on that snake juggernaut.
Get line of sight people!
Bridge, Light Cruiser VSF Dejax
Icheb von Shuer realized he had better luck than his friend Donovan. That exploding ship fragment looked like it had jammed right into Asterix's bridge, and Icheb wondered if his friend was okay. Every attempt he tried to message Asterix failed. The big juggernaut's comm system obviously went offline. It dropped off the network, too, since its transponder no longer signaled. This only happened when things were very bad. He could see it through the probe network, of course, but it looked it would explode any minute.
There was nothing Icheb could do for Drake Donovan and his crew. But there was something he could do for Elise de Manchu and hers.
But in order to help her, he needed line of sight on that huge fifty kilometer ship which seemed poised and just about to blow her to pieces. True, it was damaged, but still a snake juggernaut. "Helm, could we plot an alternate course?"
