by Shane Black
Buckmaster had seen enough. Fortunately he had planned ahead and was already latching down the last few fasteners on his powerarmor. He lowered the polarizing blast shield across his faceplate and hefted the TK40 he kept hidden for special occasions.
After emerging from the life support chamber, he stalked across the deck, making his way past the fires and wreckage to a point where he could bring his weapon to bear on the enemy landing zone at the aft end of his flight deck.
The intruders either couldn’t see him or weren’t expecting to be attacked from such short range, which gave the Master Chief one good wide-open shot at their ship. He charged up a massive unstable energy bolt and launched it at the attacking ship. An instant before impact, he detonated it with a plasma lance from the same weapon. Enemy attackers were engulfed in the orange-white fireball and were thrown in all directions. The resulting concussive explosion left a fifteen-foot wide scorch mark on the deck and blew the assault ship off its landing gear. The vessel drifted through the air screen and emerged from Flight One into open space. A moment later it was speared by an energy bolt from one of Argent’s port point defense batteries and exploded into hundreds of burning fragments.
The shockwave from the assault ship explosion vaporized what was left of the boarding party.
Fifty-Five
Jason Hunter rarely allowed himself to grieve. Despite the ever-present possibility he would not survive his next mission, he always managed to approach combat with more than a little swagger. Many of his comrades believed it was one of the reasons he was such a dangerous opponent.
But now, cradling the almost lifeless body of one of the bridge crew, he was confronted with grief he could not avoid. She was so young. Even though half her face was covered in streaming blood, Jason could still imagine her smile and how pretty it would be if she were anywhere else but here.
A rage caught fire inside him and rapidly grew out of control. The heat that rushed to his face instantly overwhelmed the eye-watering smoke and out-of-control fires around him. The undefeated spirit of battleship camaraderie took over. After gently handing the wounded tactical specialist over to a medic, Fleet Captain Jason Hunter regained his feet. He ignored the pain from his broken wrist and took his place in the bridge command chair.
“Helm, hard over. Give me a zero zero bearing on the largest enemy target.”
“Aye, sir, helm answering maneuvering thrusters to starboard bearing relative one six zero true”
The enormous flagship pivoted in space, bringing her heaviest weapons to bear on what by now was an oncoming wave of enemy spacecraft.
“CIC, report!”
“We have identified sixteen ships, sir. The battle group is anchored by the Fast Carrier Agamemnon. She has a double wing of Yellowjackets ready to launch. Sixty in all, sir. Other vessels in the formation are screening and escort ships. The heaviest is the light cruiser Pollux!”
“Tactical, give me sequence arming on all capital weapons forward. Set warheads to proximity trigger, maximum yields. Signal ready in thirty seconds. Mark!”
“Affirmative, Captain. Weapons will be armed at the mark. Standing by!”
“Engineering! Yili?!”
“Standing by, sir!”
“Set reactors four and five to maximum throughput. You are authorized to disengage safety systems and stand by to jettison the assemblies. Divert all power to main batteries. Signal indicator delta. Acknowledge!”
“Affirmative, sir. Reactors four and five at one hundred seven percent and climbing. Main power to weapons!”
A terrifying impact shook the bridge. The lights flickered and the navicomp assembly crashed to the deck like an avalanche of steel and composite. Another fire burst from behind the library computer and was instantly attacked by the suppression system.
Jason Hunter had just a twinge before he ordered his vessel to fire her most devastating weapons at friendly ships, but then he reminded himself they threw the first punch. He remembered his father’s words, a Irishman sure enough liable to either be starting drunken fistfights or writing poems about them. “Start whatever you like, lad. Just don’t be too surprised if I aim to finish it.”
“Lock all targeting on the Agamemnon! SRS active! All scanners forward for waveform override!”
From an electromagnetic standpoint, the relatively small carrier’s automatic countermeasures suddenly panicked as they detected the heavy vessel’s targeting systems lighting up their ship like a bank of spotlights from an approaching aircraft. The vessel began to veer off, but there was nowhere to run. It was space combat equivalent of suddenly recognizing a tiger’s eyes in a copse of nearby leaves.
Hunter’s eyes locked on his enemy. “All batteries, commence fire. Fire at will!”
Argent opened up on the attacking task force with a vengeance. Rail casters one and three slammed energy bolts the size of four-story buildings into the Agamemnon’s forward battle screens like shrieking freight trains fired out of mountain sized cannons. The secondary explosions flattened the carrier’s shields like a plywood shack caught by a category five hurricane blast. Caster two impaled her central flight deck and ruptured her drive field. The resulting two-million-degree hypernova blasted the remains of the vessel and all sixty of her fighters in all directions. The fiery shockwave and radiation burst took the fast frigate Palermo with it and threw the Herald into an out-of-control spin like a small child’s toy.
Beam weapons from the late Agamemnon’s escort formation returned fire. While their weapons were effective and relatively powerful for their ship classes, they were scarcely a match for a strike battleship’s shields. Their only advantage was their numbers. They pounded and slashed at the larger ship like young wolves hounding an elk. Their weapons caused bursts of orange-white explosive energy to erupt from Argent’s hull at each impact point, but left only superficial damage. The heavy ship’s magnetically charged and powered armor was two feet thick at the belt and bracers.
Despite the constant pounding, Argent continued to fire back, staggering each of the smaller ships with twenty-megaton blasts from her mighty main batteries. There was no finesse here. This was not a battle of shrewd tacticians. This was a bar fight that had spilled out into an alley and had moved rapidly from fists to broken bottles. Although Argent’s own escorts were in relative disarray, their flagship packed more than enough muscle to make things dangerous for a time.
“Tactical, get me a firing solution on the Pollux!” Hunter shouted. “Stand by capital missiles one through eight! Get me Skywatch on emergency intraship!”
“Affirmative, Captain, switching comm network to channel J-7. Go!”
“Skywatch STC this is the Flag on priority channel. Flight Two and Flight Three, scramble all alert spacecraft. I say again, scramble all alert spacecraft. Engage battle conference and confirm combat readiness to Force Commander on this channel, acknowledge!”
As the responses poured in, Hunter turned to his Signals Officer and was once again struck by the enormity of Zony’s absence. “When Seventh Air-Ground acknowledges after launch, order them to locate and escort the Dunkerque. We can’t afford to lose that ship. After you confirm, locate Commander Doverly and raise the Fury.”
“Sir, the Fury is adrift, bearing one nine mark two zero zero. She is out of position. Sensors indicate almost no energy output!”
“Was she hit? When? The enemy formation just broke range a few seconds ago!”
“Doverly to Bridge.”
“Annora! Find Yili, muster an emergency medical team and a shock platoon and take a Nightwing over to Fury. She’s adrift and has apparently lost power!”
“Acknowledged! Jets request in two minutes!”
The tactical officer’s expression was a mix of frustration and urgency. “We have no detection of weapons fire or impacts, sir. I can’t explain any of this!”
“Signal the task force to form up on us. We’ll coordinate our targets from Skywatch. Tactical, engage battlespace datalink on scrambled frequen
cy and request acknowledgment. Transfer Yellowjacket control to Skywatch and prepare to engage Argent’s targets in squadron order!”
One by one, the other ships in the strike fleet fell into escort perimeter positions around their flagship and engaged their main drives. DSS Argent, two light cruisers and six escorts loomed behind a fast-moving wall of angry little Yellowjacket fighters and three-vessel Tarantula Hawk attack formations as they all bore down on the remaining fourteen ships of the Agamemnon task force.
The first pass was as violent and brutal as two opposing lines of heavy horse clashing at full charge. Ships spun off their axes, missiles detonated, beam weapons tore and slashed, atmosphere and debris trailed.
Torpedos poured from Argent’s fighters one by one as the fleet little craft peeled off from their attack runs. Those ships not staggered by the impacts were pounded and hammered by brawler cannon fire from the gunships. Agamemnon’s escorts launched wave after wave of point defense missiles to try and counter the ferocious furball that they had kicked up. It rapidly became clear the task force was at a considerable disadvantage without its own capital platform or fighters.
“Battlespace datalink established, Captain. The board is green.”
“Signal the fleet to coordinate attack signals and fire at will.” Hunter reclined in his chair, confident the firepower he had just given the order to unleash was likely to clear space of every hostile vessel for a million miles.
“Battlespace synchronized. Zero Juliet Five signals alpha one!”
DSS Jefferson launched first. Hypervelocity shipkillers rotated off her twin launchers on bursts of gravitic energy and ignited plasma.
“Zero Juliet One signals alpha one!”
Spruance opened up with proximity bursts from her main batteries. The forward guns alternated fire, puncturing the oncoming formation with space-shattering fusion-amplified detonations of superheated plasma.
“Zero Juliet Four signals alpha one!”
Revenge joined in, pounding away at the line with row after row of debris scattering explosions.
Then Argent opened up again, firing her main batteries in perfect coordination with the positions of her fighters and gunships. Rail slugs speared enemy engines, caster snapshots sheared vessels into pieces, massive multiple-phase explosions rippled across space, engulfing ship after ship. Eventually the late Agamemnon’s line broke into dodging and rolling evasive maneuvers, explosions pursuing each ship as they peeled away, firing back with ever-weaker barrages of anti ship missiles. Each vessel drew the attention of several fighters and gunships.
The tactical officer grabbed his headphones tighter against his ears. “Threat board signals new contacts! Counting three, four, five heavies. Designate King Two bearing three one five range two million miles and closing! Skywatch STC reports they are approaching our defensive perimeter!”
“Jason, this is Doverly aboard Nightwing One. Request jets.”
“Annora, we’ve got something angry and dangerous stirred up here. Find my sister and get her in this war.”
“Acknowledged, Captain. Nightwing One out.”
Fifty-Six
DSS Dunkerque was literally running for her life. Somehow, Commander DeMay had managed to escape from the formation and maneuver the heavy vessel through a diving hyperbolic course that cleared the oncoming attack formation, and only drew two pursuers. One moment, he was going over checklists. The next, he was in a running gun battle and redlining his engines.
On the one hand, he was furiously angry he wasn’t able to pull more heat away from the fleet. On the other hand, he was more than a little relieved he wasn’t going to have to run to a spot and then fight his way home.
The enemy ships were both fast destroyers armed with enough firepower to cause major problems for the undermanned ship if they got in range. Dunkerque easily outgunned them in a stand-up fight, but that was unfortunately the one thing she wasn’t capable of at the moment.
“Set a course for Barker’s Asteroid! All ahead flank! Continuous acceleration!”
“Sir, that will put us in range of the minefield in less than four minutes!” the pilot shouted.
“Then let’s hope Hunter was right about this ship’s transponders! We’ve got to get that Sentinel into operation as planned!”
“Battlecomp reports enemy contacts are closing. Range now ten thousand miles!” Lieutenant Austin shouted. He was one of DeMay’s hand-picked officers, chosen for his considerable experience as third watch Officer of the Deck aboard Argent.
“Weapons, weapons, there’s got to be a way,” DeMay half-growled, half-shouted as he steadily pounded his fist on the arm of the command chair.
“We don’t have the personnel, sir. We’re doing well to man the helm and engines at this point with only two dozen people!” Austin shouted.
Toby suddenly rose from the command chair. “But we do have the weapons themselves, right? We can arm them manually! Can’t we?”
“Affirmative, skipper, but I’m not sure–”
DeMay punched up the intraship. “Engineering, get me three tactical-trained able crewmen in the center magazine with tac suits and environmental harnesses on the double. Bridge out.”
“What’s your plan, Captain?”
“We’re going to roll our anti-ship missiles out the back door like depth charges, lieutenant. If we set them for delayed detonation, they’ll act like proximity charges, and if we equip them with magnetic field activators, the enemy ship hulls will draw them in like seagulls to a burger joint. Pilot, give me a range and ETA to the edge of the minefield.”
“Two minutes, twenty seconds present speed.”
“Full power to aft battle screens. Austin, you have the conn. Let’s hope that transponder theory doesn’t turn out to be a wrong guess.”
Commander DeMay ran for the magazine deck.
Fifty-Seven
“What are you?”
The being that towered grotesquely in the cross-corridor fixed a chilling gaze on Colonel Moody. It had already absorbed four maximum-power shots from his blaster and was unaffected. It looked vaguely human if every feature of a normal person was stretched vertically to twice its normal height. It wore featureless black.
It’s mouth opened and a chorus of screeching voices filled the air. Iris-less white eyes stared at nothing. Its unusually large skull was hairless and covered in bruise-like veins.
Moody fired again, and again, but the creature simply turned and floated back up the corridor, ignoring the powerful energy bolts it absorbed without reacting. Shadowy humanoids streamed around it and rushed towards Moody. He cut several down with his blaster pistol before he engaged the rest hand-to-hand. The big marine officer was more than a match for the relatively weak intruders one-on-one, and in the narrow cross-corridor they were only able to get at him one or two at a time.
He clocked the first one with his blaster, ramming into its helmet straight-on. The second swung wide and was rewarded with a swiftly broken elbow. After they slumped to the floor, the ones behind stumbled forward. The colonel was having the best of it until one grabbed him from behind. It jabbed a knife-like device into his neck. There was a moment of disorientation and then...
All Moo could say for sure was he was standing on a precipice that seemed hundreds of miles away from what it overlooked. Before him was a gigantic dull green translucent spherical object suspended inside an even larger chamber. If he didn’t know better, he would have said he was looking down on a planet during re-entry. The sight caused a wave of vertigo to rush over the colonel. The distances he perceived were beyond human comprehension. He had never been inside a structure even a tiny fraction as large as this one. It was cold and damp, and not home to anything even vaguely resembling human beings.
Yet somehow Moody could feel a presence at the center of that sphere. Somehow he knew it was Admiral Hughes. An image formed in his mind. He could see a human face staring into infinity, mouth wide open and thoughts of slaughter and conquest seeping from its
mind. A thousand chittering sounds stormed into Moody’s consciousness, and over them a voice that was becoming less human by the moment.
“Weakness must be consumed. The strong must aspire to greater things. Else all is lost.” They weren’t audible sounds in the strictly human sense. The words felt like an icy cold wind drifting through the colonel’s soul. The sounds conjured images of graveyards and decay.
“Magnificent, isn’t it? What is born from here will soon be warlord of your reality.”
Colonel Atwell approached Lucas’ vantage point. He still wore the same faded and damaged uniform.
“You weren’t making any sense before, and you aren’t making any now, colonel.” Moo replied, still dizzy from the effects of the transition to Ithis space.
“Nonsense. We have been taught our entire lives how sacred life is, yet we never even once consider the sheer power of anti-life.”
“When I get you back home, I’m going to celebrate your court-martial with a nice thick steak, Atwell. You’re a traitor to your own race, and you’re a traitor to Skywatch.”
“Skywatch is a bacterial colony, colonel. I’m talking about galactic civilizations here. You don’t even recognize what you are seeing. This structure alone is so far beyond the pathetic boundaries of human engineering there are perhaps five men alive who could even understand it! If you flew across that expanse at your ship’s best speed, it would take days to reach the other side. Only three men have ever seen an enclosed space this large in all human history. The Ithis are the stronger species. Why can’t you accept that?”
“If they’re so strong, then why do they need a fleet of our ships to do their dirty work? Why steal our technology and attack our people? What could they possibly have to gain?”
