by Dan Worth
‘Shaper ships emerging from hyperspace!’ cried Singh. ‘Twenty new contacts emerging either side of the Renegade vessels!’
‘Nemesis ships, this is Chen. Fire on the enemy fleet!’
‘Belay that order!’ cried Haldane suddenly, and in shock Chen turned to him and found a gun thrust in her face. ‘Admiral, Michelle, I can’t let you do this!’ he cried, a wild look on his normally composed features.
‘John, no. Oh god no...’ she said slowly with the horror of realisation. ‘How did they get to you? How long have you been one of them?’
His hands were shaking. The pistol in his hand wavered. It was a Navy issue rail pistol. Chen could see down the barrel, could see the way the light gleamed off the rifling grooves.
‘Admiral Chen,’ he said slowly and deliberately. ‘I am relieving you of command. Order the fleet to stand down.’
‘You’ll never make it off this ship alive,’ she shot back. ‘You can kill me, but you can’t take on the whole ship, you vile creature.’
‘I’m not one of them!’ he retorted. ‘Don’t you get it? I work for Morgan. He posted me here to keep an eye on you and Haines.’
‘I see,’ she could see the enemy fleet now, out of the corner of her eye. Bright points against the blackness. Her HUD was highlighting them. It was showing her something else too. The comm. channel to the Nemesis class ships was still open. Haldane, in his haste, had left it open. They were hearing all of this.
‘Morgan is no traitor and he’s no slave either!’ said Haldane in desperation, pleading with her. ‘He saw the hard truth: that the only way that humanity can survive is to ally ourselves with the Shapers.’
‘What about all those men and women enslaved by the Shapers?’
‘Morgan’s talked them out of taking all of us. He’s made a deal. No more taking of worlds, no enslavement of all humanity. All we have to do is lay down our arms and make peace with the Shapers and become their allies.’
The Shining Glory swooped in low across the surface of the alien ring. Eonara had found exactly what she was looking for. The ring was a ramshackle construction in her estimation. A thrown together, hurried thing. The great power couplings that drank in siphoned energy from the black hole’s event horizon were horribly exposed. It was a careless design flaw, an imperfection. How ironic, thought Eonara, as she opened fire with everything that the Shining Glory could give her. There was a titanic explosion.
Energy began to build around the nose of the Shaper dreadnought. Tens of kilometres of arcing energies looped and whipped as they were gathered and focused by machineries unknown. Keros hung before the vessel, beautiful, vulnerable. The energy readings from the enemy ship were off the scale.
The armoured plates around the nose of the vessel began to part like the complicated jaws of some terrible creature revealing the gaping barrel of the dreadnought’s primary weapon, now primed and aimed at the billions of helpless Arkari on the world before it.
It prepared to fire.
At the heart of the galaxy, a new supernova erupted. The detonation of the Shaper wormhole device created a shockwave equivalent in power to the core collapse of a star. The Shining Glory rode the shockwave, its sub-light drive straining at full to escape the rapidly expanding shell of energy. Her aft shields were gone. Her hull began to buckle and melt under the intense heat.
Eonara struggled to keep the ship on course as it shook violently. There was too much local space-time distortion to jump. The destruction of the wormhole generator had briefly spun off a number of short lived singularities that had devoured enemy ships and ripped apart the fabric of reality.
She ran the hyperspace calculations until her AI core could take no more.
She took a lucky guess, and jumped.
The Shining Glory vanished into the darkness.
Beklide saw the wormhole begin to shrink even as the Sword of Reckoning alerted her to the fact. The Shaper dreadnought was still partially within the wormhole, the perimeter of which was now narrower that its vast hull. As the wormhole collapsed it sliced the vessel cleanly in two, leaving each half in different parts of the galaxy. Bisected, the Shaper dreadnought was doomed.
As Beklide watched, the pent up energies within the dreadnought’s main gun broke free in all directions in a massive shockwave as the containment fields holding them in place collapsed instantly. Two hundred kilometres of the bow section vanished instantly inside a great sphere of brilliant matter-energy conversion. The energy blast ballooned outwards, collapsing the remainder of the Sword of Reckoning’s shields and searing its hull with intense heat and lit up the skies of Keros with a blinding white light.
The remains of the Shaper dreadnought’s fore section was wracked by internal explosions as her fleet continued to pour fire into it before it too blew up in a chain reaction of reactor core breaches.
As the Arkari looked about, all of the wormholes above the planet had closed. Beklide was filled with relief. Somehow, they had done it! She didn’t know how, and right now she didn’t care. Keros had been saved from certain destruction. With vengeance in her heart she ordered the remains of the Arkari fleet to destroy the remaining enemy ships in the system.
‘Make peace, huh?’ said Chen. ‘It’s that simple is it? Give up Earth.’
‘It’s the right choice Admiral, please,’ Haldane pleaded with her. ‘It doesn’t have to end this way.’
Chen saw new contacts appear above the Shaper fleet out of the corner of her HUD monocle. They were falling towards the enemy ships at great speed. The Nemesis crews had done their duty regardless. Chen had managed to play her winning hand after all.
‘Over my dead body!’ she screamed. ‘All ships, fire at will! Security to the bridge!’
‘Don’t move!’ yelled Haldane. ‘Nobody fucking move!’
There was blinding flash from beyond the bridge windows. Chen’s world was suddenly rendered black and white. Then it became white on white. The anti-matter missiles. Their deadly payloads were right on target.
Chen moved.
Two gunshots rang out.
Epilogue
Isaacs and Anna made their way through the battered remains of the bay doors into the main hangar. Dressed in environment suits they found the going tough in the debris strewn chamber. The floor, walls and ceiling had been ripped apart by the Shaper ship. Parts of smashed ships and equipment were piled in tangled drifts across the bay, whilst horribly mutilated bodies, some human, some of races as yet unknown to man, lay in sad, pathetic heaps. Isaacs tried to avoid looking at the faces of the dead as much as possible. It was their expressions of utter horror that upset him the most. The enslaved had all known what was happening to them, right until the end, and had been powerless to stop it.
There was no sign of Anita. She had simply vanished. It was if she had never existed. After a while, Isaacs and Anna came to the conclusion that she must have been killed in those final, suicidal acts of defiance as the enslaved had charged the Order and detonated their explosives.
They held each other amidst the devastation and remembered a bright young girl now lost to them forever.
Eventually, they struggled through the mangled wreckage and reached the doors to the adjoining bay. Anna helped Isaacs to move the piles of debris away from the door controls before they manually cycled the locks and opened them.
Inside, sat the Profit Margin. Untouched and unharmed. Isaacs almost wept with relief.
‘See?’ said Anna. ‘Your baby’s unscathed.’
‘Well at least that’s something,’ Isaacs replied.
‘Yeah. We’re floating dead in the middle of enemy occupied space, the Commonwealth is at war with itself and we just fought off a horde of zombies, but it’s okay because your toy is in one piece,’ said Anna, her voice laden with sarcasm.
‘She’s the best ship that we have left,’ Isaacs replied defensively.
‘She’s about the only ship that we have left,’ said Anna gloomily.
‘We need to ge
t a message to the Navy. We need to tell them that we know how to fight the Shapers. We need to tell them that the Nahabe have found a way to detect the Shapers’ transmissions, that they can detect the enemy and are making ready for war.’
‘Got a plan to tell them that without bringing the entire Shaper fleet down on our heads again?’ said Anna.
‘Maybe I do,’ Isaacs replied. ‘I’ll think of something.’
About the Author
Dan Worth was born in Bradford in the United Kingdom in 1977 and was educated at Hull and Bradford Universities. He has probably worked in every office job known to man at some point and writing kept him sane during his evenings and weekends. He writes for his own enjoyment but even though he now spends his working hours in a job he enjoys he still likes to wander off into his own imaginary worlds during his spare time.
Also by Dan Worth
Exiles, Book One of the Progenitor Trilogy
