Chương 67: Nova Wars - Chapter 56

What were supposed to do? Be sent back to Telkan where the next attempt on our lives would surely succeed? No. We went with the Mad Lemur of Terra, part of Decken's Irregulars. And we fought. Fought to the bitter end. Fought in the ashes. Fought in the emerging green of a new spring. Fought in the jungle of ignorance and barbarism. We raised our voices and shouted "WE WILL NOT SUBMIT!" And emerged both more and less than we had been on that fateful day we went to see the Cathedral.

-Meditations on the Barrier War, Lancer First Class Imna, Free Telkan Press, 25 Post-Terran Emergence Captain N'Skrek doublechecked his tunic before the lift doors opened onto the 'show bridge', which was at the 'rear' and 'top' of the massive siege engine ship. While the primary bridge, the battlebridge, even the aux-con, were all in the middle of the ship and heavily armored, for some reason he felt as if it was only right for him to stand on the "show bridge" for what he was about to command to be done.

As he stepped out the crew on the show bridge did not turn away from their jobs. Contrary to popular media, nobody yelled out 'Captain on the Bridge" or "Attention on deck!" or anything close to that. N'Skrek knew the drill. They had all done a mic-check to ensure they could hear each other over the show-bridge com-channel, then over suit links, then over general coms. Then their consoles had been checked for function and connection. Now, they were all busy.

True, there was a half-dozen consoles open with greenies working on them, green mantids that had been found frozen in cryo-bays in a section of the ship that nobody had found for the thousands of years the ship had been in operation. New corridors, passages, storage spaces, berthing areas, manufacturing facilities, were being found and mapped every day.

N'Skrek cleared his head as he pulled a self-light from where his antenna merged with his skull, putting it between his mandibles and puffing on it to get the self-light to work. LT (Junior Grade) Scarlet Strontium Sunset-6371992, the shipboard master digital systems control digital sentience, appeared in the holotank off to the side as N'Skrek headed to the main holotank.

"Nav-Int has suggested placing message torpedoes, multi-stage ones, to go to the missing systems, then backtrack back into Confederate Space, with recordings of everything that happened here," Sunset stated. N'Skrek nodded.

"Additionally, at Nav-Int's suggestion, the computer systems in the fruit flies, torpedoes, missile pods, all show that they were launched from Weber-VII class missile wagons as part of a Task Force that was over here," Sunset said. She tapped a box in the holotank eight light-hours up and to the 'left' of the rings.

"Just in case the enemy manages to somehow salvage viable non-volatile computer memory and storage."

"Excellent idea," N'Skrek said. He sat down and folded his bladearms in front of him, resting his chin on the armored and spiked 'wrist' joint.

"What are Nav-Int's projection of how the artificial singularity will perform?"

"Anything out to a light week will be pulled back in. Everything out to a light month will be slowed by a large factor. Nav-Int estimates that if the artificial singularity holds up for at least six months anything within two light weeks should be pulled back and into it," Sunset said.

"It should slow the other constructs down far enough that starvation effects should reduce their size considerably." N'Skrek nodded, still staring at the holotank.

"Additionally, it will pull in and destroy any clusters that warp out from the previous waypoints in the re-energizing ladder," Sunset said.

"Any idea what wavelengths they're using to recharge the clusters?" N'Skrek asked. Sunset nodded.

"Yes. They're emulating standard cosmic ray output of a G2V stellar classification mass."

"My compliments to Nav-Int," N'Skrek said. He looked it over.

"Signal DEFCON to stage one. Wake up the fruit flies," he said.

"We will execute the fire plan fifteen minutes after we get green on at least 80% of the elements." Sunset nodded, able to feel the tension ratchet up on the show-bridge. He was clad in a pressurized flight suit that held his body together. His visor was sealed and closed, liquid atmosphere moving through the tube implanted in his chest, so he technically didn't 'breathe'. He knew that his body was unfinished, mostly existing as a life support system for his brain, but he also knew that it didn't matter.

Clone War Lyfe, baby. Rickytofen-773E6A, "Ricky" to his friends, closed his eyes as he went over his most recent memories. Being launched as something called "Sucker Punch", he could remember heading toward the massive interdimensional wormhole that had been disgorging strange, almost 'grown' ships into the system. I wonder if I made a difference in that war so long ago? he thought to himself. If I tagged at least two enemy ships, I made a difference. I wonder if I survived through the wormhole?

I wonder if what I did mattered at all? He shrugged, the atrophied muscles off of his neck not really connected to any support structure. It didn't matter. That was the last mission, the last war. This mission. This war. That was what mattered to a Clone War Trooper. His ship was a high tech marvel. Coated with stealth materials, a millipede drive that used tiny rippling 'flows' of grav-energy spikes to travel silently and stealthily to the target.

The ship was basically a cockpit, sensor package, drive, and energy plant wrapped around an artificial singularity C++ mass driver, with four 'wings' of missile pod launchers that launched twelve pods each. Those pods contained twenty-four missiles wrapped in a circle around a C++ cannon. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. He knew that when he fired, the singularity cannon would compress all the mass down and add it to the payload.

The artificial singularity would 'spin up' while the 'round' flickered in and out of hyperspace. He would be crushed down, his mass added to the singularity, his mass the leading tip of the 'lance' that would strike the target. Around him were hundreds of his fellow 'fruit flies', all of them like Ricky. All of them Clone War Troopers. Not the vaguely feline faced 'cat-girls' or 'anime girls' of the Dead Hand Systems. Actual Clone War Lyfe.

His ship was connected to the nearest four via a thin cable of superconductor, to keep all emissions at the bare minimum, so they could all talk to each other. It was largely silent on the Clone Channel. Like Ricky, the others were processing their last memories. There was a beep and he checked it. Request for pre-mission initiation status check. He thumbed the button for green. Ricky knew there was a weird thing with the SUDS and Clone War Lyfe.

For a split second, maybe even as long as a tenth of a second, the SUDS would record the experience of his existence after death. When he was reloaded or when his brain was spun up in the Born Whole system, he would be able to remember that split second. What it was to be pure mathematical packets rather than matter as most people knew it. The red-shift and streaking of the stars. The split second, too small to really understand, filled with sensations that couldn't be explained.

He felt his SUDS spin up and start recording live. The DEFCON strip, using old incandescent bulbs and colored plastic, went from DEFCON TWO to DEFCON ONE. He flipped up the cover on the firing stud and loaded the targeting data. Ricky closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them.

"ENGAGE" lit up. He pressed the button, felt the missile packs unload the missile pods. Then the strange sucking, pulling, stretching feeling as he was converted into the C++ singularity tipped shell. The superluminal communications buoy went live, activating the superluminal sensor network. The majority of the massive siege engine ship shut down, going to emergency zero-point reactors and metal over silicon integrated circuits with firmware level programming.

Only the show-bridge and the deeply buried secondary aux-con stayed powered. Quantum computers shut down, molecular circuitry went dead and were 'pumped' to be in a neutral state. Captain N'Skrek watched the results in the main holotank of the show bridge, slowly breathing through his leg spiracles. Tens of thousands of Fruit Flies launched within 0. 75 seconds of the order. There were between twelve and twenty 'rings' per 'chute' that the Mar-gite clusters were moving through. Eight chutes.

Just over nine thousand Mar-gite clusters waiting to 'refuel' by going through the rings over the course of an hour. Each 'ring' took fifteen to twenty hits by the C++ cannons. Each 'strip' that connected the rings together to form the 'chute' took five to seven, usually two on the terminal attachment end and one in the middle. Additional missiles and singularity tipped C++ rounds streaked out to strike at the Mar-gite constructs.

Even if the singularity held for an entire five seconds, the Tera and Peta size constructs could, theoretically, survive even two to four hits. Unlike other vessels and structures, a damaged Mar-gite Construct, even if ripped into multiple pieces, would just join back together into a smaller construct. For a second, it looked like nothing had happened, even as flashes appeared on the structure of the rings and the 'straps' that held the vast megastructure together.

Then plain physics did its work on the megastructures. Rotation, sheer forces, and structural stresses started ripping the entire structure apart.

"Scanning and Science are getting good readings back from the radiation cascades from the hits," Sunset said. N'Skrek just nodded, staring with his chin on his bladearm wrists. He tilted his head slightly so his captain's hat, festooned with gold braid, tipped down slightly, covering his large compound eyes slightly. He could feel the show-bridge crew's confidence increase at his own blasé attitude.

A massive section of one of the rings tore free and scythed through the Peta-Cluster that was charging as well as the four Mega-Clusters and four Tera-Clusters orbiting around it, all them slowly rotating. Chunks, that Captain N'Skrek knew were billions, trillions of Mar-gite, flew off, shedding smaller pieces. The singularity tipped C++ rounds and the singularity missiles hit the constructs less than a second after the ring was hit. Some, the smaller Clusters or Kilo-Clusters, vanished, pulled into itself.

The larger ones tore into two, three, four pieces.

"Wait for it," N'Skrek said softly.

"CONTACT! NEW CONTACTS! ONE, THREE, FIVE, SEVEN! CONFIRMED SEVEN!" someone called out. The new contacts flashed in the holotank, which was driven by micro-vac tubes rather than integrated chipsets.

"Here it comes," N'Skrek said. He heard the whistle over the copper wire shipboard communication system to alert all hands to prepare for what N'Skrek knew was coming next. Sunset curled up in the fetal position, closing her eyes, and seemed to get sucked away into the vanishing point of an invisible horizon. SAFE appeared in red letters in the holotank. The bridge closed their visors on their armored vac-suits and went to passive only, atmosphere maintained by pressure systems rather than electronics.

There was a series of white flashes that permeated the show-bridge. Shadows vanished as everything disappeared in the equivalent of a flashbang the consumed the entire bridge. A few consoles imploded, sparks and arcs of electricity crackled around various metallic surfaces. The speakers gave a howl of static. Then it was over. N'Skrek blinked away the purple spots in his vision.

"Seven flashes, each separated by one tenth of a second," one of the sensor crew called out.

"Confirmation of high bursts of artificially generated phasic energy in pulse," another called out. N'Skrek wished he could smile as he knew what was happening now.

'Submarines' had been positioned around the area, sunk deep into the subspace foam, their torpedo tubes hot and loaded. The 'flash' would knock out their 'periscope' and they'd be surfacing already, their instruments running hot. For long moments the only thing N'Skrek could hear was the hissing in his suit. Then his HUD rebooted, crashed, rebooted again. The fans came on and N'Skrek took a deep breath. His visor cleared and he could see around the show-bridge. The lights flashed three times.

Power came back to the bridge.

"Targets breaking up. Looks like the subs at Box-Tango were only six seconds torpedo time from the contacts," someone said. N'Skrek just nodded.

"Wait for it," he said softly.

"SubTac-Tango diving," N'Skrek heard. He just nodded. Time went by slowly. The huge megaconstructs were breaking apart, the Mar-gite clusters were still shredding.

"Nav-Int has a probable vector for Mar-gite and Unknown Contact approach," someone else called out. N'Skrek just nodded. Time ticked by.

"CONTACT! Near Box-Echo!" was called out.

"SubTac-Echo surfacing!"

"Contact is in the gigatons, unknown ship, no attendants," tactical operations relayed. N'Skrek nodded.

"Shut us down again." Everything went dim, the incandescent bulbs taking a moment to warm up to light the bridge.

"You are about to see why one trick ponies lose to the most adaptable," N'Skrek said softly.

"Echo firing," was said softly but with firm authority.

"Echo is diving." There was another flash. This one made sparks jump off of almost every surface. N'Skrek saw his faceshield go completely white for a split second before it blanked out again. He could see hundreds of dead pixels scattered across the transparent display film. Fans kicked back on, the lights flashed three times. The bridge went live again.

"Target is drifting. Massive damage," someone called out. N'Skrek unfolded his bladearms slightly, tapping the surface of the console in front of him with the needle points.

"Send the nearest boarding parties," he said softly.

"Lets find out who these guys are." Private First Class Jaskel felt the dropship he had been napping inside of go live. He opened one eye, looking around the bay at the rest of the company. Everyone was in their Helreginn Mark VI Type IX Anti-Mar-gite Full Contact Powered Combat Personal Protective Equipment Systems, AKA Hell Suits, everyone tricked out for boarding action. Wonder what we're heading for, he thought to himself. He closed his eyes and went back to sleep. We'll get there when we get there.