Sons of the Gods

by James Von Ohlen

  He began to breathe faster, involuntarily. He was no child, cowering in fear of the dark, but being lost down here was no trifling matter. A broken ankle from stepping on something he couldn’t see might well be a death sentence. He drew his sword and held it aloft, hoping that the light of the energy crackling on its surface would allow him to find his way out. Somehow the flashing light and dancing shadows only made it worse.

  When he finally resigned himself to stumbling around in the dark looking for a way out, an odd noise sounded behind him. Like someone had struck a tiny bell. He turned to see what it was and a vertical line a few feet taller than a man appeared before him. It widened, exposing him to blinding light.

  His eyes adjusted quickly and he saw that the wall had opened to reveal a small rectangular room with steel walls and floor. The ceiling was a strange white substance he couldn’t identify, but it appeared to be rock. A thin line of witchlight traced the intersection of the walls and ceiling, illuminating the room.

  “What the fuck is this?” He spoke out loud, his voice sounding unnecessarily harsh in the quiet space around him. Modi appeared in the room with a smile.

  “Come with me and find out, Torsten.” He sheathed his sword and stepped into the small room. The wall slid shut behind him with a hiss like an angry cat, but much quieter.

  He started with shock as the room began moving. It felt like he was falling, but his feet remained firmly on the ground as the room moved downwards. He looked to Modi for reassurance and she nodded.

  “We are safe here.” She said.

  The two were silent for several minutes as the room continued to move. Torsten felt something akin to the awkwardness he’d felt around women when he first started to notice them. Similar but different. He avoided looking at Modi.

  Finally the room stopped moving and the wall opened with the same angry-cat hiss. Beyond them lay a wide open darkness. A few small blue and green lights shone in the darkness, but they weren’t strong enough to light the space around them.

  “This way.” Modi said and smiled. For a ghost, she was beautiful when she did that, Torsten thought.

  He stepped forward into the dark chamber and light flared all around him. Polished marble and steel reflected the witchlight coming from all directions, forming objects that he couldn’t identify if his life depended on it. Tables and chairs to be sure, but so much more. Glass. Windows looking into smaller rooms within the large chamber.

  On the far wall Torsten could make out slightly faded writing on the wall. A now familiar phrase in a now familiar script.

  MINISTRY OF DEFENSE

  Beneath the writing stood a collection of large flat panels of glass. They appeared to be windows, but only showed the wall behind them. Beneath the glass panes stood the old man looking expectantly at Torsten and Modi. Vidar, raising his eyebrows questioningly.

  He stepped forward and Modi led Torsten to meet him halfway.

  “It is time.” She spoke to Vidar who nodded in response. She vanished and reappeared standing before Torsten, her face nor more than a few inches away from his own. Tears of happiness welled in her ghostly blue eyes as she did so. As if she were about to cry.

  “It’s time Torsten.” She swallowed once and vanished again. He could feel her presence behind him as she spoke into his hear. Almost a whisper, choked with emotion. “It’s time for you to be free. For all of us to be free.”

  BEHEMOTH. A fitting name for such a marvelous construction. It was the only way to accurately describe the scope of the battleship. From his command throne the Captain of the massive ship was hardwired into all of its control systems. Ports along his spine and in the base of his skull allowed his nervous system and cybernetic implants to communicate with and control the ship as though it were part of his body.

  In his mind’s eye he could see every part of the ship. Could feel it like he could feel his hands. His consciousness soared over all of it. From the towering spires bristling with defensive batteries that covered the hull, jutting out into the darkness of space in all directions, to the roaring inferno of the engines and down to the binary signals carried by the fiber optic cables that served as the extensions of his limbs.

  It was glorious. Beautiful in its own way.

  The ship had been forged in the void. It didn’t need any aerodynamic shape to escape the atmosphere and gravitational pull of some nearby planet where it had been created. Built at the largest foundry in all of known human space, located near the vast reserves of ore found in a nickel and iron based asteroid field and within a day’s travel to a gas giant.

  The raw materials were all there. Ores for the metal. Gas for fuel and breathable atmosphere once it was cleaned up. Ice for water. There was even enough fissile and fusible materials in the asteroids to fuel the ships reactors for the first few decades of service.

  Born in the void. Living in the void. It reflected in the ships initial design and in the countless additions that had taken place over the passing decades, approaching one century.

  Retrofitted many times with additional power plants and batteries. Hangars had been added in several places to add an escort of interceptors and craft capable of shuttling men back and forth from the gravity wells and atmospheres of planets.

  Hundreds of spires had been erected over the hull as well. Each served a very specific purpose. A few served as sensor arrays. Most served as housing for weaponry. Only one served as the separate quarters for the ships compliment of Special Forces operators. Its location may have seemed to put them at unnecessary risk, but it allowed them to come and go as they pleased.

  The Behemoth was old enough that some of the newer enlisted men and conscripts that toiled within it referred to the battleship as a relic. A thing of days gone by. They did it to joke around. To be smart asses with their friends among the low ranks. But they were right in one regard. It was a relic of the old days of craftsmanship.

  Everything about the ship was wrought with incredible care and attention to detail. From the invisible seams that joined the vast plates of steel and ceramic together to the one section of the keel that had been mined on a planet.

  It was traditional at one point in the past for all ships in service of The United Nations of Humanity to bear a single piece of steel mined and forged on the capital planet of Nova Terra. That tradition, along with the quality of work had been in decline over the past few decades. As the civil war ground on with no end in sight. Draining resources. Killing skilled craftsmen and diluting the work of those that survived with an ocean of ineptitude.

  They simply did not build anything like this anymore. They were incapable of such feats of engineering.

  From his command throne, the captain watched with pleasure bordering on the sexual as his ship, the extension of his body and manifestation of his true self, fought its way across the vast empty spaces between the planets. Time after time.

  Many had faced the Behemoth. Too many to count, in fact. Their numbers had not mattered against its overwhelming might. Entire fleets had been obliterated by its batteries of void cannons. Planetary bombardments with its mass drivers had crushed entire armies and turned entire cities into smoldering craters. Carpet bombing with neutron bombs and biological weapons tailored to the intended victim group’s DNA had eliminated the entire population of seditionist planets that had refused to be brought back into the fold of The United Nations.

  Fleet actions. The sensations the captain felt flowing through his mind and body upon an unending ocean of sensory feedback from every last gun and hardwired crewman on the ship where the stuff of dreams made flesh. Surrounded by friend and foe alike, the Behemoth had cut a bloody swathe through the rebel fleets.

  They sought freedom, they claimed, but they found only death.

  A lucky few could claim to have escaped the battleship’s guns. Scouts mostly. Keeping a very respectable distance. They could be detected easily enough and if caught unawares a storm of long range missiles and concentrated laser fire would end their
existence.

  Distant winks of light was all that marked their deaths. He lived to see such things. Another foe destroyed. As much as he enjoyed swatting down the flies at such incredible distances, it couldn’t compare with what he felt in the thick of the largest battles.

  The Behemoth would take countless hits, filling him with pain and later sadness at the damage done. But it would always give better than it got. Once, the captain of the battleship had powered down most of his systems, feigning the mortal wounding of the ship to lure his enemies closer. To bring them into range of his most powerful guns. Most engagements fought in the void were at great distances. Thousands of kilometers was considered point blank. Tens of thousands was close range. A hundred thousand was more normal. Beyond that, long range.

  His enemies had bought his ruse, surging forward to what they thought was a sure kill. What they thought was the destruction of a hated enemy. Surrounded by swarming enemies, scant hundreds of meters away, the Behemoth had roared back to life and in seconds the majority of a traitor fleet had been reduced to ash.

  The moment that gave him the most pleasure, which stayed in his mind the clearest, like the last embrace of a long lost lover, was the destruction of the enemy flagship.

  The captain of the rival vessel had been foolish enough to move to boarding range, hoping to take what he could from the battleship before destroying it. The broadside that had taken the fool’s ship became the stuff of legend.

  One second, a massive streamlined vessel, downright futuristic in its design compared to the spiny cigar shaped Behemoth, was there preparing to board. The next it was slag, cooling rapidly in the cold of space and its crew of tens of thousands were dead.

  But such incredible triumphs apparently weren’t enough to end the war. As many ships as the Behemoth destroyed, as many battles as it won, it could not end the war on its own. For every victory won by the UN, the traitors won one of their own.

  For decades the war raged back and forth throughout almost all of known human occupied space. A few backwaters, devoid of any strategic value and unallied with either side in clear violation of UN protocol, managed to escape having bombs raining down on their cities. But they were few indeed.

  With us or against us.

  That had become the doctrine of both sides. There were no neutrals in their eyes. Only targets that would be dealt with, that would be punished for their cowardice, once the war had been won.

  Such a colossal conflict could only be sustained for so long, though. Men and materiel began to run thin and on both sides the voices of treason had begun to call for a ceasefire if not an outright end to the war. Military coups within what were already military dictatorships disguised as democracies took place and the war continued, though at a smaller scale as both sides scrambled to be the first to fully recover.

  Through it all, the Behemoth remained in constant service. Enemy fleets, armies, cities and civilians weren’t just going to destroy themselves. Direct military action or economic terrorism. The ship’s captain didn’t care. As long as he felt the action through every fiber of his being.

  But his ship was not unaffected by the grind of the long war. Sections of the ship became badly damaged and in need of repair. When none was available, the sections were sealed off and their resources diverted away elsewhere. Such had become far too often an occurrence for him. Each time a new section was sealed he felt as though a piece of his own body had been lost.

  Crewmen died as well. There were never enough to go around. Their flesh was so weak. Weapons that the Behemoth shrugged off with no real damage still managed to kill them. A lucky blast with a gamma-ray weapon had eliminated most of the command crew. The captain found it a minor inconvenience, but the effectiveness of his battleship suffered.

  Shorthanded, he had ordered his remaining detachment of marines to begin conscripting civilians from nearby populated planets to serve as chain gangs, repairing and manning the ship. Slavery by another name, as it were.

  Those lucky enough to avoid the chain gangs tasked with repairs, which routinely suffered casualties upwards of 90%, had their humanity stripped from them as they were permanently hardwired into systems that needed minor supervision. The captain was all powerful on the Behemoth, but he couldn’t be expected to man every single gun and torpedo tube himself.

  So, damaged and undermanned, the Behemoth had been called to battle. In space around some distant backwater with a small population by UN standards. When most planets worth mentioning held populations in the billions, this one had a scant few hundred million.

  Cowards, the lot of them, he thought and the Behemoth groaned, seeming to agree with him. Colonized by relatively peaceful peoples from various Old Earth stocks some hundreds of years ago. It had escaped notice by the UN and the treasonous Coalition until some scientific discovery taking place there or some other nonsense had convinced the higher ups that the planet needed to be brought into the fold. That it was critically vital to the war effort that the planet, Veldt, a laughable name worthy of derision in his estimation, be brought under the control of the United Nations.

  And so a fleet was massed.

  Small by the standards of the early days of the war. But far more powerful than any that had been fielded in recent years. Sensory input from the Behemoth stretched to infinity as the ship reported being pulled in all directions at once. A moment of euphoric disorientation and the entire fleet arrived in an entirely new system, mere weeks after their departure. Hundreds of light years covered in less than a month, with the Captain’s perception showing only the passing of a few distorted minutes. The very same ability that had brought the stars and their new planets within the grasp of mankind.

  Within a few weeks more they would be within range of exerting their control over the lone planet. There were a few skirmishes along the way with a small defensive force. The captain of the Behemoth, designated flagship of this campaign, felt a strange kinship with the small spheres that moved erratically and attacked with bizarre weapons.

  They seemed to be unmanned. At least no human body should have been able to withstand the forces caused by such sudden changes in acceleration and direction. Their power far exceeded their size, and they forced the fleet to take notice of this new threat, but ultimately the numbers were stacked too far against them. The sheer weight of the UN fleet would grind whatever resistance it met into dust.

  Confident in their inevitable triumph, the UN fleet bore down on their target. When it seemed a done deal, tragedy struck on the distant horizon. A week or so out from the planet, long range sensors picked up a fleet equidistant and on the other side of the target. The Coalition had arrived, likely with the same intent as the UN. To force this lone planet into the fold.

  Messages and calls for reinforcement were immediately sent by both sides. The captain reveled in the anticipation of battle. Once more he would rend the flesh of the enemy vessels, feeding on their deaths like some bizarre vampire of the void.

  The battle had been joined with fanatic devotion on both sides. The largest battle of the war in decades began with volleys of long range missiles and lasers. He watched with glee as the distant twinkling lights of his weapons finding their marks danced across his eyes. Defensive batteries struck down all incoming threats. The Behemoth was invincible once more.

  Where strides the Behemoth, men die. A corruption of some long ago recorded classical music, but fitting nonetheless the captain thought.

  Reinforcements had arrived as quickly as possible on both sides and the battle grew. A vast cloud of debris, an artificial asteroid field, formed around the planet making it dangerous for larger ships to approach too closely. Planetary defenses struck out at the rival combatants as well. Opportunistically choosing targets.

  Beams of light shot up from the surface of the planet, peppering already damaged ships with whatever the weapon was. None survived. It was some giant laser perhaps, though its electromagnetic signature was a mystery to the Behemoth’s scanners.
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br />   Somehow the defenders below managed to send boarding parties into orbit as well. No one had been able to identify where exactly they were coming from, but small groups of men and women in armor that defied description and with handheld weapons far more powerful than any fielded by the marines and spec ops soldiers that guarded the ships of the UN and the Coalition against hostile elements had at their disposal.

  Their attacks were swift and brutal, and often they were over before anyone outside of the target was aware that anything was wrong. These boarding parties managed to seize control of several ships in the battle, turning their guns on unsuspecting allies. The hostile elements were undoubtedly destroyed when the vessels they took were reduced to slag. There was some concern over their abilities, wreaking havoc in general, but not making enough of a difference to change their eventual fate. Submission or death. It was inevitable.

  A few times it was suspected that they had remotely seized control of ships in the UN and Coalition fleets, but there was no proof. Only a few suspicious accounts of ship’s captains going mad in battle and self-destructing their ships for no apparent reason or laying waste to their allies as well as their enemies. Forensic studies of the ships AI control systems showed tracks of something, but the UN and Coalition machine seers, specialists in the forensics of advanced computation units, were unable to tell exactly what.

  On several occasions the captain of the Behemoth felt… something as well. As if an unwelcome presence was in his mind, sifting through it. Looking for some way in. To gain access and cross the wrong wires. To seize control of the Behemoth. But he wouldn’t allow it. Iron willed, he fought them off without knowing exactly what he was doing. This was his ship. His battle and war to win. He would be damned if he would let anyone stop him.

  With a smile he received his orders from the fleet admiral to begin bombarding targets planetside. Mass drivers dropped huge chunks of metal, massive bullets forged in space borne foundries, onto suspect installations on the planet’s surface. Missiles sought out targets below. Neutron bombs reduced populations in areas likely to resist a landing. Once softened from above, his own marines descended on the targets to put an end to the troublesome attacks. Mechanized divisions descended to put an end to the bothersome events from below.