“What do you intend to do with this new intelligence?” Naagrotod asked, if not on the bandwagon at least smart enough not to contradict me.
“What do you think I intend to do?” I asked.
“Yeah that was a stupid question.” Naagrotod said.
The Kievors had to be humbled, for more than a few reasons. Not only that but my own position wouldn’t be worth a plug nickel if I now showed myself to be non-expansionist and peaceful, or in layman's terms, scared! The Alartaw were predators, warriors, and there was nothing they appreciated better than a good fight. If this one proved to be more difficult than usual, then so be it. That was the Alartaw way!
I gave orders, and within the hour (and we were only slowed down that much because Meerla was out shopping for jewelry, spending money from her own not inconsiderable account) we were aboard my Flag Ship, now named Vengeance, and moving back towards Kievor space. It took seventeen porters with grav-sleds to haul her purchases (which she would by no means leave behind) aboard and we were off.
“We’re clear of Hyper Space, Sir.” Captain Puguta said from the wall of my private Bridge. “We’re scanning now but there doesn’t seem to be any sign of the Kievors.”
“What about the rabble Navy?” I asked.
“They’re present and turning to engage, Sir.” Puguta said confidently. He should have been confident. Alartaw ships were coming out of Hyper Space all around us, millions strong in just this one armada. Puguta would be hard pressed to screw this one up.
The walls of my private Bridge were tuned to view the space around my ship, so once again I seemed to be floating in the vacuum of space. I didn’t know if I would ever grow accustomed to it but it gave me a real sense of the situation so I liked it. The enemy wasn’t yet visible to the naked eye but I used the zoom to pick them out. They were a horde, all right, but the Alartaw were still coming, and coming, and coming.
Meerla came into my Bridge holding out a necklace so thickly encrusted with diamonds and precious stones that I couldn’t even see the metal settings under them. “What do you think?” She asked me. She was all Tanya at that moment.
“I think we’re going into battle.” I snapped. “Do you think you could think about something other than your new jewelry at a time like this?”
“Are we in some danger I am unaware of?” She asked, ignoring my tone, looking around at the walls and all our ships surrounding us. There were so many ships now that the blackness of space beyond could no longer be seen at all. Only Alartaw Ships of the Line, all Capital Class (the smaller ships were outside the main Fleet where they could use their greater mobility to better effect), not that any Alartaw ship could be called slow!
“Enemy armada is veering away.” Captain Puguta warned smugly after appearing on my wall. “What are my orders, Sir?”
“Computer.” I said.
“Yes, Emperor?” The seductive female voice asked.
“Run a battle scenario, please.”
“Immediately, Emperor.” Another box appeared on the wall, rather larger this time, showing our force chasing down the fleeing enemy and crushing them without a single loss to our Fleet. It was over in moments.
“What are my orders, Sir?” Puguta asked.
“Meerla?” I said.
“Annihilate them.” She said emotionlessly, her eyes never leaving the sparkle of her new necklace. Had I really needed to ask? I supposed she relieved me the terrible burden of what we were about to do, at least; it wouldn’t be a burden for her. I doubted it would ever cross her mind again. Little more than daily routine. If she had said anything else I would have been more shocked, to be truthful.
I nodded to the Captain and his face disappeared again. Within moments I felt the slight change that signaled we were under way. Not a feeling of inertia so much as a change within my body’s electrical system, from the electrical field the drive generated. Last Chance had a similar system for its environmental controls, but humans had not yet adapted it to our drives. It was the energy required. Humans had yet to learn to control the massive forces necessary.
I settled in to watch the battle on my scanner screen, since it was a much better, computer generated recreation, but as good as the real thing. Meerla just walked out, her attention still on her jewels. She had certainly found her niche; what was New California compared to this!
Each Alartaw ship was no more than a blip on my screen but yet there were so many blips that it seemed like a solid sphere of light (we were attacking in a spherical formation). The enemy force, a tiny group, comparatively, was running for their lives before us, no question in their minds the inevitable outcome of this encounter, but we were instantly catching up to them. The Kievors may have shared out their weapons technology, but they had not shared out their drive technology. I supposed that was their way of making the lizards stand and fight. The Kievor’s treachery knew no bounds.
As we inexorably closed the gap between us, many of the alien craft began veering off in tangents, in attempts to escape on their own, but there was to be no escape today and we bore down on the cowards sooner as their changes in vector slowed their overall progress. These blips vanished before their comrades, as they came within our range.
As we neared the mass of enemy ships, accelerating at a pace that must have horrified them, they realized their predicament, that there would be no escape, that they could not attain jump velocity soon enough, and they turned as one to fight.
I waited in breathless fascination as we ran upon the enemy and began firing in earnest. The same power source that fed the immense drives of these ships now showing itself in the weapons we used as we obliterated them. They literally had no chance at all. We were annihilating them rapidly.
When I again felt a change in the electrical field around me I didn’t give it a seconds thought, but then I noticed a strange pattern forming on my scanner screen that shouldn’t have been there, couldn’t be there. A huge swirl began to form within the midst of the remaining enemy ships. It grew instantaneously.
The swirl intensified so rapidly my scan couldn’t track its progress, so that it appeared to be stuttering in its expansion. The blips of the enemy armada all vanished impossibly in one blink of my scanner, one moment there, the next gone, and yet the vortex grew, and this had only entailed maybe two or three seconds. It was happening incredibly quickly and with a sickening dawn of realization I understood intrinsically what it was!
“Reverse!” I screamed, leaping to my feet in terror. Anyone who ever went to space heard the horror stories of what being trapped in a black hole would mean, stuck for eternity in the funnel of the black hole as time was warped, the Universe aging and dying while you yet traveled towards your doom, and traveled, and traveled, forever!
Vengeance heard and responded. It took a mili-second to comply, and then the floor moved beneath me, back the way we had come, but I didn’t. I smashed into the console in front of me, clipping me at thigh level, flipping me head over heels through the air, then I smashed into the wall face first, crushing my nose and breaking several ribs, I was sure.
An agonized scream was howling through the ship, overriding any Alartaw yells for help, or anything the computer might have been trying to tell me. A kind of primordial, raw noise you might expect to hear in the midst of a tornado or cyclone, louder than any noise I had ever heard, louder than anything imaginable. It wasn’t animal, it wasn’t a machine, it was the raw gravitational energy of the black hole sucking at us, tearing at our own immense gravitational field as we fought to free ourselves from its terrifying grip, raw primordial force fighting raw primordial force! The noise was so pervasive I could hear it inside myself, the battle waged at the atomic level. If I survived this I never wanted to hear it again. It was the worst situation I had ever experienced, it was Hell knocking on my front door, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it because I was glued to the wall of my Bridge by so much inertia that I could barely draw a breath.
I watched helplessl
y as thousands, maybe millions of my ships ripped past me and spiraled down into the swirling maw below me. Every ship which had been ahead of Vengeance was already gone, spinning or tumbling powerlessly down into the phenomenon. Some few which had been at Vengeance's depth within the formation were struggling, alongside us, to fight the pull, and as I watched, glued helplessly to the wall, a ship from further back, which had belatedly realized its peril, crashed into one of those hanging near us and they both went spinning down into the maw of the black hole, and to their eventual deaths. Most of those behind Vengeance had acted in time, using our example, so all was not lost, if I could free myself.
Unfortunately my wall was giving me a perfect view of the black hole swirling below us. It was like I was on a glass shelf looking down on the scene, a glass shelf I was stuck to like a bug in a web. I wished fervently then that my wall screens hadn’t been active, or that I had landed facing rearward, but I hadn’t, and I had the best view in the house. Or the worst, depending on your point of view.
We didn’t seem to be escaping, either. By looking out the corner of my eye, I could partially see behind me. Most of the Fleet were pulling back to safety, having acted in time or had been far enough back to have time to act, but many ships still struggled in a macabre dance of destruction, stuck in a kind of orbit or stasis of action, neither of the two forces at work having the strength to overwhelm the other. Vengeance appeared to be in the very worst position of any of the ships I could see on my right side, and it looked like we were losing ground in relation to the other struggling ships around us, as well, not that being stuck to the wall within my ship until our fuel ran out, something broke down, or I starved to death was a much more pleasant option. I now noticed a definite distancing of Vengeance and the ships above her and realized I wouldn’t have to worry about being stuck to my wall forever, because we were going in. If I had only been hair faster!
The velocity of our fall began to quicken when we were suddenly grabbed by a number of tractor beams from the ships above. I couldn’t see the tractor beams themselves but I could see the orange glows reflected around the exterior of my ship, the same orange as the tractor beams the Kievors used, and so I recognized what they must be.
Vengeance shuddered within their grasps and then just ripped free, as if she were a thousand pound weight held by silk threads. Our speed now multiplied and as we accelerated the crushing weight pressing me to the wall multiplied with it. I was being crushed as Vengeance continued to attempt to fight and I was being crushed to death on the wall of my Bridge, by the actions of my own ship. I would be dead in only moments. There could be no doubt.
“Hyper Space!” I screamed with the last ounce of oxygen left in my lungs, and though I screamed it as loud as I could I didn’t even begin to hear myself over the howling madness that was raging through my ship and myself. I doubted Vengeance would hear me. It just wasn’t possible.
But Vengeance did hear. Strange lightning raced across my view of the miasma below me, and suddenly we were free falling, whatever velocity we were attaining unnoticeable because we were within the black holes gravitational web, it almost felt normal, but we were falling into its maw unchecked now.
I fell off the wall and onto the floor as Vengeance ceased pulling upwards. The howling immediately ceased and I could think again. Warning lights were flashing but I couldn’t hear any alarms ringing, which seemed strange, until I realized I had lost my ability to hear anything at all below a scream, maybe. The vortex of the black hole swung down from my forward screen to below me where I’d sat up on the floor after being dumped there and I realized Vengeance was leveling herself to prepare for the jump to Hyper Space. The lightning outside Vengeance was now a constant storm of silent sparks and massive bolts of electrical energy, coruscating around Vengeance like God's own aura, and the last thing I remembered, before the crushing pain came again, was the floor moving beneath me again, then I was hurled backwards into the front of my Command Console, as we leapt forward, directly into the maw of the black hole.
CHAPTER 15
I was in a deep black pit, mired in a thick substance that rejected my efforts to move. I could feel myself trying to move but nothing happened, or maybe I moved just the slightest, I couldn’t be sure. I seemed to be stuck in some cloying, thick substance, but if I was I did not know what it was. The world around me was murky and indistinct, seemingly without substance, yet holding me just the same.
I didn’t really want to struggle against the darkness and my cloying surroundings, my mind kept telling me just to relax, not to struggle, but I felt as if there was something I needed to know, something I needed to do, that just couldn’t wait any longer. Then I was assaulted, shaken excruciatingly by the invisible atmosphere and once again, painfully, I rose to consciousness and opened my eyes to find that I was still alive. Once I was fully awake I realized why my mind had so strenuously rejected the light of awareness, because with it came the agony of my damaged body! I hurt everywhere.
The expression on my face must have mirrored the agony I was feeling at being shaken awake by Meerla because when my eyes opened and the pain of consciousness flooded my body, she jumped back from my side as if scalded by a hot iron. Her mouth worked but I don’t think I heard what she said, though I thought it might have looked like sorry!
The lighting in my Bridge room was feeble at best. We were suffering a power shortage of some kind, but with my nonexistent knowledge of the power systems of my own ship, I couldn’t even begin to venture a guess as to what might be wrong. Though it hurt I was able to turn my head and look around. My screens were no longer active, but there was something else different as well, and it took me a moment to figure out what it was, in my befuddled state.
My Bridge room was completely demolished. It was twisted and buckled impossibly, which shouldn’t have been possible, as the entire ship was made of trans-metal and would reform if the forces which operated the system were still functioning. We had obviously suffered what was an almost complete power failure, and if true, and if we were ruptured, we had very little time to live before our atmosphere was completely vacuumed away into space.
I obviously couldn’t hear the whistling that would signify a breach of integrity, because I couldn’t hear anything, but neither did I feel the breeze that would necessarily accompany it. Maybe we weren’t breached, after all, but that seemed impossible, not with this much damage in the very center of the ship!
My blood, the deep, dark Alartaw red, had splattered everywhere around the room, as if I had thrown a bucket of it into a huge fan. I’d bled profusely from my broken nose (shattered would probably be a more fitting description), but also from the back of my head, where now, reaching back, I found a raw patch of missing hair and scalp that was still wet with blood. So I hadn’t been unconscious long enough for clotting. From the way I felt, and the splatterings of my blood around the room, it looked as though I had been tossed around quite a bit after I’d lost consciousness.
I think a tear escaped my eyes as I forced myself to sit up. I definitely had broken ribs, but none had punctured my lungs or ripped into any other internal organs, somehow. I struggled painfully to my feet. I was soaked in drying blood, head to toes. Through the fog of my pain and exhaustion, I still found the energy to marvel at how such superficial wounds could bleed so much. My nose felt flush with my face and Meerla grinned at me as I felt it. She didn’t have even one visible injury. Her grin grew larger when she saw me examining her and she said something, but I still couldn’t hear. Whatever she said, she found amusing. Somehow, I felt, that had I been able to hear her, I wouldn’t have found the same amusement in it as she had. I was glad I hadn’t heard. I didn’t have the energy for a snappy comeback, just at that moment.
I found my de-atomizer where it had fallen from its holster, double checked its charge, still full, and signaled for Meerla to follow me. Immediately we were halted by the exterior door of my suite, which refused to open. Meerla pulled her blaster and ope
ned a hole for us before I could even worry that she might be exposing us to vacuum, but there was atmosphere. I didn’t even hear the explosion of the blaster as it ripped a jagged opening where the door should have been, but I couldn’t worry about it right then, I could get my hearing restored if I survived. If.
I went through the opening she had created and turned towards the Main Bridge, finding two dead crewmen in just that short walk down the one corridor. The Main Bridge was a shambles and as blood soaked as any slaughterhouse. Turning over the corpses strewn about like so much worthless flotsam I found Puguta, dead, and Naagrotod, somehow still alive but unconscious. Naagrotod was the only living Alartaw on the Bridge and he woke quickly under Meerla’s rough shaking; wide, terrified eyes were met by our own impassive gazes. He said something which none of us heard. We ignored him other than signaling him to get to his feet and to follow along.
Down was down, somehow, so we worked our way towards the bottom of Vengeance, finding many more dead along the way but also some who were battered but still alive. Alive and very much pissed off. I wasn’t so much angry at the Kievors as I was with myself; we had been tricked like the fools we were! The blame rested squarely on our own shoulders.
When we worked our way all the way down to the lowest level and out to an exterior wall it was suddenly apparent why we could still breathe. Through huge rents in the ship’s skin we, Meerla and I and a growing group of surviving shipmates, could see green foliage and blue sky. We had crash landed on an oxygen rich planet! At least we weren’t going to die of explosive decompression. Explosive decompression had to be the worst way to go, I thought, and I was glad it wasn’t to be the way we would go. We weren’t out of the fire yet, however.
The dim glow the backup power supply had been giving the lights suddenly went out with a flicker and then nothing. Now the only light was what was coming in through the rip in the hull, and that appeared to be fading as well.
Chronicles of a Space Mercenary Page 26
