Hyperlinks in the text are intended as supplemental material, discussing elements of the science behind the science fiction. They are not intended as required reading for the story. Hyperlinks will be provided at the point in the story where it comes up, but all the links will also be collected at the bottom of the post for easy reading.
Torpedos, plasma spikes, and hunter-killer drones flew back and forth like a rainstorm that poured down on Set III, and the ships forming the canopy answered back. One missile at a time, they took their toll… but all they were doing was charging a price in blood and materiel to advance. They knew it. The Kthid knew it. They were waiting to open up a weak point… a gap in the defenses.
And one missile at a time, they did.
Flaming wrecks fell into the atmosphere of Set III, burning as they broke up or just collapsing as pilots engaged in heroic efforts to bring down a capital ship softly that was never meant to enter an atmosphere. And the Kthid rotating around the planet took advantage… advancing on the gaps they opened, swarming down into the gap. They obviously meant to form an arrow that they could wedge through the weakness, using their superior firepower offered by broadside angles compared to the fronts of human vessels facing them to batter their way through. The Kthid fleet began to group up, pressing forward into the gap, descending down on the vulnerable Set III like a predatory swarm of locusts ready to consume everything in its path.
And as far as the Kthid Harvest Fleet and the HEF both could see, there was no way that humanity could stop them from doing just that.
The mass of Void Tracers swirled around the Lealing commandos, moving like the crescendos of a whirlpool, poking and prodding wherever they thought they could bite. Their speed and ferocity made everything seem like a blur. The invaders of the Death of Hope thought themselves fighting a tornado of slashing claws, chomping fans, and swirling oversized tails. Surrounded within one of the Kthid’s oversized passageways they had been pinned down by this unleashed fury as it whirled around them like a bloody hurricane.
And Ki’an’i was like the tranquil center of this storm.
Amidst the chaos, she moved with the grace and purposefulness of a ballerina, every step nimble, every dodge seemingly part of some well-practiced dance. She was too busy to feel fear, living too much in the moment to think about anything but the next moment… her Templar training had completely taken over. One of the hammerheads lurched at her from out of that swarm, intending to tackle instead of slash, and Ki’an’i avoided this bone-breaking blow by sliding away almost like an old-Earth matador. As it swished back at her, missing by inches, her sword arm sliced down and managed to cleave the monster’s trailing tail. She heard a roar and a squelching sound as blood splattered from the severed appendage.
Cat-like instincts immediately warned her off another charge, even if she wasn’t facing that way. The Void Tracers were pack hunters… taking advantage of the openings created by one of them to make room for another. As such, she swiftly dropped onto both knees, allowing the leaping monster to sail by right above her head. Her sword sliced again, reaping its way through the alien beast’s belly in a great horizontal gash. Blood and intestines fell from that opened orifice. They splattered down right ahead of Ki’an’i, an ugly mess of viscera created amidst this chaotic battle.
“Iiiiahhh!!!” a squeaky woman’s voice screamed. Ki’an’i vision flung in the direction of the screams, but it was already too late. All she managed to see was but the shadow of one of the Lealings dragged away into the swirling swarm at superhuman speeds, vanishing… likely never to reappear. The Void Tracers had claimed another of the marines.
They had used the hallway as a fatal funnel for as long as possible before the tide of alien death had paid the toll of blood to close with them, forcing them to fall further back and back and back again until they were pushed back to one of the strong points. From there, they tried to hold… the Void Tracers swirled around their position in the larger room like a whirlwind, but the Lealings were only a little bit less mobile. Celerity and dexterousness were their advantages, alongside flight… Yet these proficiencies accounted for a lot less than they had against the draconian Kthid. Pinned in place to their defenses, they lacked room to maneuver. Gliding was nearly a deathtrap as the swift leaping Void Tracer could run along the wall and jump to easily bring down an airborne Lealing like a cat pouncing on a bird, and her forces were constantly on the verge of breaking in terror as the unfamiliar pheromones of these living nightmares tried to send them scurrying for a deep, dark hole. Only constant blasts of retaliatory rifle fire and Ki’an’i solid presence prevented the Hammerhead from swarming in like a school of piranhas in a feeding frenzy and ending her unit.
Instincts warned Ki’an’i of incoming danger. She didn’t hesitate in wondering which of her senses had detected the incoming threat… she simply reacted, just before two Void Tracers threw themselves down from the ceiling, dropping from above with just a hint of glide from their void-borne wings, claws already outstretched for her. The Sethis threw herself headlong into a dodge that became a roll upon impact, just as those two plummeting killers struck the deck with a heavy, bestial thud. She immediately needed to dodge again, sliding out of the way of an opportunistic monster who looked to capitalize on the way she had taken herself out of the defensive group of Lealings. She scrambled further, her gymnastic dodge ending at the point where the grabbed marine had dropped her weapon. She grabbed the rifle, tucking the sword under her arm as she looked up at the metal roof… More Void Tracers were scurrying up there to repeat the maneuver, scampering on all fours across its surface.
“Down the climbers!” she hollered, aimed up, and fired. The first javelin of plasma skewered right through a Void Tracer’s slender purple torso, boiling its way through it in a plume of vapor that rose up to stain the ceiling above it. That monstrous fiend was unbelievably tough… a human would have simply died from the shock if nothing else. It stayed alive and functional enough to bellow a shrill scream of pain even as half of its body was vaporized, its remaining limbs spasming in all directions as he lost his grip on the ceiling and fell.
In the wake of Ki’an’i’s attack, many of the Lealings turned their blasters towards these upwards-mobile Hammerheads. Though still tremendously swift, the need to clutch onto the hull and walk upside down still slowed their blinding advance, and for the Lealings that was enough. Shot after shot was discharged, and scorched and burned Void Tracers fell to the deck, downed like picked-off birds. Their ambush ruined, the remaining climbing monsters stopped and craned their necks around, glaring towards Ki’an’i with eyeless fiendish expressions. It was, for a moment, as if the insentient terrors knew that it was she who had capsized their scheme… although it was probably just them focusing on her because she stood out and lacked wings. Their thoughtless animalistic fury warred with Ki’an’i’s monastic calm.
This zeroed-in outpouring of hatred lasted for but a second before it passed, then all of the remaining beasts flung themselves off the ceiling and swooped down at them the best they could, entering the fray and looking to drag down anyone they could. More than her fair share of them focused on the Sethis templar, and once again she was forced to scramble, leaping and dodging, and even the modicum of order they had imposed on the frantic rear-guard action dissolved into complete chaos.
“EEEIIIIIHHH!!!” someone shouted, the scream piercings through the snarls of the monster and the cries of battle and the snapping hiss of plasma spikes boiling from weapons. It was several seconds, however, before the templar was able to focus even a moment’s attention in the direction of that scream, already fearing what she might find. One of the Lealing marines, Miarai, had been dragged down and cornered, a score of hissing Hammerheads thronging about her slender figure. Several of them bit down into her arms and legs, piercing through… though they did not rip and tear as they could have. They sank their teeth in not to consume and destroy now, but to immobilize. Even though Ki’an’i witnessed the scene for but a split-second there was no ambiguity about what those beasts intended, what they did to the prey they dragged away. Already the closest were clawing at her uniform, claws shredding her armor into rags.
It was not only speed and agility which imperiled the Lealings against this ravenous enemy, but sheer terror. The very pheromones these hunter-killers exuded were absolutely alarming to anyone… and once pinned in close range and caught the sheer paralysis brought on by fright of fright impeded them greatly. Compelled to stay mobile to avoid attacks, Ki’an’i’s eyes were forced to divorce themselves from the scene, despite her burning desire to do something about it. When the Sethis woman finished her latest set of evasion, however, her eyes ended up gazing towards a scene all too familiar… only in a much more advanced stage. Two other Lealing marines had been dragged away from the herd, well down the tunnel, and were already pinned by the Void Tracers too far away from any help… one on her back, the other on her belly. The ovipositors of the predatory monsters were already forced into their captive bodies, skewering into them. Ki’an’i couldn’t tell how they were being raped, or which hole the monsters were violating, but either way, it would result in the same horrific impregnation. During this battlefield rape, the Lealings’ screamed profusely and their lengthy tails slapped and swung around like whipping knives, trying to fend off the hammerheads as they fought to penetrate even deeper.
“EEEEYYYYHHHH!!!” the sodomized Lealing screamed as that ovipositor sunk in far enough to all but split her hip-bones in twine. “GGUUUUAAAHH!!!” Her fellow marine’s screams were just as horrific and pained, her holes horribly overextended around that thick appendage. Great wads of saliva drooled from the Void Tracer’s hissing mouths as they heard these desperate pain cries, that spittle plummeting downwards and mixing with the Lealings’ blood on the deck. Even as Ki’an’i watched, horrified, she saw the first of several bulges traveling down the base of that ovipositor and down towards the far-too-small Lealing woman… and the templar knew from horrific, traumatic experience exactly what those eggs felt like. Whence this bulge reached the outlines of the Lealing’s ruined pussy the girl’s shrieks intensified even further… but those screams were nothing compared to what would come if they were allowed to hatch and the young to feast on the provided nourishment of their unwilling host.
The second Lealing was desperately scratching at the ground, reaching for her torn-away firearm, clawing at the deck just inches from its handle as she was helplessly doomed… and it stung deep down in Ki’an’i’s heart that she could do nothing at the moment to save them. They had been dragged too far away from the only area they controlled right now, too far away from the swirling swarm of Void Tracers that the Kthid had unleashed into the lower levels to end their small rebellion. Advancing out into that hurricane would mean that she would be overwhelmed in short order, and without her as the iron core of this defense, it might fall apart entirely soon after. Rationality warred with her emotional impulses and, reluctantly, won out. It always did… Ki’an’i was a templar, after all.
Deep down, Ki’an’i feared it might be a moot point. They were being ground away… one by one marines around the edges were falling, cut down, or dragged away, and every ally felled meant one less sword or blaster to fend the living nightmares off. Continuing her blade dance, Ki’an’i fought to stave off the inevitable. More screams came from her accompanying Lealings as one by one they fell, either killed or snatched away by those fiendish parasites, doomed to be pulled away into a safe distance from the battle so that the frenzied beasts could perform their murderous copulation.
The Void Tracers knew that they were breaking.
Ki’an’i somersaulted into the air, dodging the blow of a Void Tracer who attempted to tackle low. She decapitated another one who attacked high in mid-motion, and her feet touched back down on the ground as if she was weightless, the massive carcass of that killed beast landing with a big chaotic tumble… only to be followed by a Lealing scream from behind her. Not just anyone’s scream, however…
The Sethis templar fought back the spike of panic that threatened her trace, the kernel of fear that wanted to grow into a tempest. That had been Tikaani! Somehow, the purple-hued demon’s tail had managed to encircle one of the brave bat-girl’s legs. With the Lealing thus lassoed, all he needed to do was leap from the battlefield and pull her away with him. The Hammerhead powered forward, dragging the struggling alien along with him like a kite until her wings gave out and she fell, landing roughly for someone who weighed so little.
The templar’s heart nearly stopped. That young Lealing who had cared for her, who had risked herself for her, was in grave danger! Immediately the monster whirled on the prey he had pulled out of the battle, turning to face her. His frothy snarl widened to expose rows of knife-like teeth underneath a featureless violet “face.” Tikanni fought on, trying to bring her rifle up to shoot him, but this close technology was unreliable… it shorted out with an electronic whine even as the Void Tracer leaped forward, tackling her so hard that the useless rifle was flung from her hands and pinning the willowy Lealing against the hard steel floor.
“Tikaani!” Ki’an’i shouted despite herself, feeling her battle trance falter. Even a heart of stone was still a heart. Even the strongest mind could feel fear. Some things, no matter how dire the circumstance, could not be borne calmly.
Knocked nearly senseless by the tackle, a glassy-eyed Lealing craned her head up. With the Void Tracer posted above her on all four feet, the ovipositor jutted towards her visage. Knowing that the moment of breeding was near, the Void Tracer’s perilous weapon jutted fully from the monster’s body at full hardness. Resembling something between a cock and a stinger, the stabbing dick cocked toward Tikanni’s groggy face like a sharpened sword about to stab. It looked like the thing intended on skewering that toughened member right through her skull!
“Tikanni!” Ki’an’i shouted again, panic gripping her chest.
Tikanni wasn’t even aware of her impending death, her mind was too scrambled. Her rolling pupils finally refocused, fixing on that readied ovipositor’s killing tip. Even from as far a distance as they stood, Ki’an’i could see the young Lealing’s pupils dilate in overwhelming terror. The Void Tracer cocked its hips backward, reading the strike.
Ki’an’i felt cold… and the feeling sank in that she was about to die. They were all falling… she had held out as long as she could. Superhumanly long. For an hour she had fought a fierce retreat like a bastion against a flood… but this was the breach in the seawall. She couldn’t allow this to happen… Even if it killed her. Every rational intuition within her warned her that she had to hold back, had to keep herself alive a moment longer… yet in the turmoil of watching Tikanni’s life imperiled her training no longer ruled her. Ki’an’i could not let the girl die when she had the power to prevent it.
The Sethis woman charged forward. She was too surrounded for her own rifle to be reliable… she needed to get a clear shot. Even as it reared back, Ki’an’i dodged around one of the Hammerheads and flung her sword like it was a hammer being tossed. That sharp-tipped weapon spun through the air, flying past hordes of surrounding Void Tracers, narrowly dodging many of those encircling demons. The Void Tracer’s cocked ovipositor stabbed toward Tikaani just before her sword sank deep into its neck. A torrent of blood accompanied horrifying screams from the beast as it flailed completely out of control, falling backward onto its back and tail as it kicked defensively at nothing. It barely avoided eviscerating Tikaani by sheer accident.
Ki’an’i gasped with relief, wide-eyed at seeing her friend saved… at least for a few heartbeats longer. Maybe she could make it back into the air. Maybe she and some of the other Lealings would be able to retreat. Not the templar, though… she couldn’t fly like they could.
Hissing, the surrounding Void Tracers began to converge on the suddenly unarmed woman, moving in for the kill.
She had assured her own doom.
Hopefully enough of the others had been shepherded into the Lealing’s ship. Hopefully, her heroics against the Void Tracers had meant something.
She heard the shrill screams. Their disoriented circling stopped and all Hammerheads readied to pounce. Ki’an’i closed her eyes. In the pulsing vein of an instance, she had forsaken her Templar code to save Tikanni’s life for but a second. It was the first breach of her training… and would likely be the final one. Soon, it would no longer matter.
“Fire!” a distant voice yelled. Then the world lit up in flames as an enfilade of plasma fire poured across the mass of Void Tracers from their flank.
Ki’an’i threw herself to the ground… there was no time for anything else as superheated death swallowed the world whole. The Void Tracers were not as lucky. Those monsters had already paid a bloody toll in bodies to close into the range that such weapons would stop being reliable… now they were confronted with another wave of disciplined rifle work chewing through their horde, mowing them down from the side, and their reaction was not to drop down… instead, they bolted. And the templar lifted her head enough to see a wave of alien soldiers she had never seen before marching in ranks with humans… dozens of humans. Escaped slaves, they had to be! The newcomers walked steadily forward down a side passage, firing as they went. The strange assortment of never-before-seen aliens kept walking towards the Lealing marines, keeping up a constant stream of fire… closing ranks almost like ancient musketeers as they fired scorching volleys into the mass of monstrous predators, too thick to miss, and screams of frenzy turned into high pitched wails of pain as the violent Hammerheads were gunned down by the score.
There was no organization. Some of them rushed toward the assembled aliens. Others ran away. And in the confusion, she heard that voice again. “Wait… wait… and fire!”
The second barrage struck like a hammer and killed even more Hammerheads than the first. It was like shooting fish in a barrel all over again… the Void Tracers had to funnel into a hallway to reach them, and it made them impossible to miss as they got caught on one another. A third volley, and even the most stubborn and enraged Void Tracers understood that they would never make it to the oncoming alien shooting squad. Instead of continuing their suicidal change, they scattered a fled, leaving dying fellows and fallen enemies behind as they retreated along floor, walls, and ceiling.
Ki’an’i gasped, disbelieving that she had survived.
Dying Void Tracers groaned around her, blood often clogging their throats and making them croak. Maybe a quarter of her squad of Lealing marines remained among the living and free, working to see which of their raped and injured compatriots could be saved. Then, several moments later, the newcomers were on top of them, still shooting at the fleeing horde. Behind them, Ki’an’i noted, walked a group of Faliran, surrounded and escorted by the others. Princess Thia was among them… it was her voice shouting out the commands. And Amara was with them.
Ki’an’i gaped. Amara looked… awful. Her arm was gone beneath the shoulder, and the entire side of her body was covered in crimson-stained bandages. She wasn’t walking on her own power… two other human women held her up, supporting her as they walked. Most of the Faliran around her looked nearly as bad… less injured, but they seemed visibly ill. Of all of them, only Thia seemed to walk strongly and with confidence.
The unarmed Templar gazed towards Tikaani. The dainty girl rose, hosed in slimy ichor, her leathery wings and big ears absolutely sodden in the Void Tracers’ lifeblood. Yet she emerged unhurt. The girl wiped that gunk from her eyes as if it was the most disgusting matter in the entire universe.
“Amara,” Ki’an’i whispered, turning her attention back to her former Captain. “Is she…”
“I’m alright,” the fallen Captain of the Midgar-6 responded back. “I’m alright.”
As the marines recovered, the core of unarmed or barely armed slaves accompanied by this group began filtering through, heading back through the tentatively secure zone and back toward the ship that offered them salvation. Many looked obviously fearful, cowering as if expecting the Void Tracers to return at any time. Ki’an’i couldn’t blame them. “We lost so many…”
“You lost less than the rest of the perimeter,” Thia said, a grim expression on her face. “These bastards… unleashing Shal’ameth aboard their own ship. If your group hadn’t held your side of the perimeter it would have collapsed, and they would have turned the flank.” She frowned, taking in the Lealings as they slowly put themselves back together. “You’ve sacrificed enough… the Lealings have sacrificed enough. Too much. And you are too badly mauled to hold the approach any longer… if the Shal’ameth return, you cannot hold them off. We need to switch assignments.”
Ki’an’i looked in horror at the injured and lost around here. “I need to-”
“She’s right,” Amara groaned, pushing herself further up. “The refugees need someone solid. Someone to hold the entrance to the ship.”
“Amara, you can’t fight…” Ki’an’i insisted. “You can barely stand!”
“I don’t need to,” she said, and while her voice was weak and exhausted it was firm. “All I need to do is talk. I’ll get people organized and send them after you.” She reached down sank her hand half submerged into a puddle of Void Tracer ichor, and emerged with a dropped sword. Her good arm raised it from the ground and she handed it to the disarmed templar. “We’ll be right behind you.”
“Got to move,” Thia said firmly. “The Warrior caste is pushing hard. The Sons of Kan’lun will not be able to hold them for very much longer. We probably have just a few minutes to get everyone on the ship before it’s too late.”
Ki’an’i looked longingly at Amara again, but she knew that the logic was sound. “Stay safe,” she said firmly. “See you soon.” And she gathered up the first group of refugees and the remaining Lealing marines and took off at a jog.
In the darkness of a protected and well-shielded compartment, a series of panels spun rapidly in a magnetic field… building up rotational energy that was being funneled into the spaceship they surrounded. It was like a generator, but a generator unlike any other… it was using a full ion drive to provide steady impulse, absurdly over-rated for any kind of power generation need, and not the more efficient or highest impulse. What it lacked in other metrics, however, it made up in consistency… it could go for days or weeks without varying speed, and when it was providing stability for something this important consistency was key.
The energy was being fed into a small, corvette-sized spaceship, nestled inside of a larger one. The words “Apophis” were painted onto its side. This ship, however, had been heavily modified. There was no need for crew compartments on this ship, no need for life support or weapons. Every bit of available mass went into radiation shielding, designed to prevent the maximum amount of power and heat leak. Nothing could keep a ship stealthy in space, but with a perfectly timed effort, they might be able to keep one from being noticed for a few minutes.
A lot could happen in a few minutes, they were careful, and bold, and prepared for them.
Around the rotation, additional power was being fed into this ship through lines. 99% of these lines were dead now, inactive and not hot, but that was alright… they had already done their job, months ago. Now all that power was doing was maintaining the power ecosystem aboard the Apophis. The rotational energy of the generator wasn’t going to that… it was going to maintaining the spin going in inside the ship’s reactor. It’s very, very special reactor…
And that spin was accelerating.
Admiral Chanda Sakar seemed to have been further demoted the longer this war went on… downgraded from that of an admiral, to a captain, to a colonel, and now to sword-fencing marine as all available hands had to contribute to holding off the invasion. She had drawn her ceremonial gold-hilted sable and now cut, clove, parried, and lounged with its blade. The killed Kthid savage before her roared in agony as she turned away from the dying alien, no doubt frenzied at having gotten so close to such a prized captive before being taken down by her superb swordsmanship. More of the caiman horrors stormed in behind him, trampling over his bulky corpse with weapons drawn and maws viciously snarling. Chanda made her stance springy for a swift repost, her sword-guard held high.
Unable to down the flagship with pure firepower, the Kthid had elected to destroy it from within with an unrelenting barrage of breaching sleds. It was an effective strategy… their defense of the planet necessarily kept them relatively stationary enough that they were far more vulnerable to the tactic than they had been in the last battle. Boarding sled after boarding sled breached their defenses, and hordes of Void Tracers and squads of the barbaric space dragons fought all over the HEF dreadnaught.
The details of the space battle were no longer foremost on her mind. Not even the entirety of the battle against the borders of her flagship occupied her thoughts. Instead, she had to be focused entirely on the colorfully-scaled enemies in front of her. Her many medals and regalia jingled as she slashed and clove, cutting down invaders alongside fellow warriors. Frankly, it was invigorating. Too much of this battle had felt helpless… fighting against spreadsheets and casualty reports, trying to make any progress against a hopeless situation. This, however, was something she could affect… here, at this moment, the war was no longer abstract to her. She could put her life on the line and protect those depending on her, back to the most primal origins of her profession. All of the plans had been written up… the Captains of her fleet could do what was required of them. She just needed to keep the ship intact long enough for them to do it.
Plasma fire blazed past her from behind, fired by some of the elite marines marshaled around her. The enemy stormed through the wide corridors of the Azteca, and any non-marines scurried in the opposite direction, away from the rampaging horde, trying to find another place to serve their battle stations.
“Admiral! Admiral! The enemy has breached through sector C!” one of her frantic attendants yelled.
Chanda waited until completing a picture-perfect riposte before answering, the Kthid’s jugular opening up in a spectacle of bloodshed. “Strengthen the defenses around the engines. Void sector C in order to create kill zones around its entrances,” she ordered. The attendant didn’t react immediately. Instead, he was baffled by the Admiral’s flippant and casual attitude towards the breach. They were losing and the leader of the entire Flotilla seemed not worried at all. Chanda dodged a decapitating blow, adroitly ducking underneath it before mortally retaliating. “Enforce the order, officer!” she barked.
The officer scurried to obey. Chanda didn’t watch him go, instead paying zealous attention to her fencing like a great painter would painting his virtuoso masterwork. All she needed to do was survive just a few minutes longer. One minute at a time, they could win. Survive enough minutes, and survive the battle. Survive enough battles, and you survived the war.
“As Admiral, shouldn’t you be sticking to a more… dignified position?” Aesha said into her ear as a bellowing, murder-frenzied Kthid casteless stormed right at her, driving right at the admiral. Chanda side-stepped the attack like a skilled bull-fighter, sticking her sharpened sable into his neck as he careened past her as if it was a needle… so slow that the aegis didn’t notice it, and so quick that the Kthid didn’t either until he was already dying.
“Is this really the time to criticize, Exalted?” she asked, guard retained. Metal clanged as Chanda blocked a downward cleaver swipe, the offending Kthid bleeding from several sword wounds which made him weak enough for Chanda to stymie. “Would you prefer me to surrender my ship!?” she gasped and then pushed away the bind, swiping at the Kthid’s neck before he managed to establish any sort of guard.
“The moment is almost upon us,” Aesha replied, her voice hesitant. “And you know I can’t do it myself. Exalted are cut off from the weapon systems.”
Chanda narrowed her eyes before stepping back, letting another marine fill the gap she vacated. “Is the weapon ready?”
“Affirmative, Admiral,” the Exalted woman said.
“And the enemy armada? Have they amassed together for maximum damage, pushing through like we’ve been waiting for?” she asked, blood dripping from her blade.
“They are… the bridge merely awaits your command. You are aware of the reports from our agents involved in the sabotage?”
For just a moment, the battle around her ceased to exist for Chanda. She closed her eyes and swallowed. She had read those reports. The Kthid armada was not filled entirely with combatants. Despite their hopes, there were tens of thousands of slaves aboard each one of them… cities worth of helpless captives. People with no means of defending themselves, who didn’t ask for this war, who would be collateral damage of any such attack.
But Chanda had her duty.
“Gods forgive me,” she whispered, her first prayer since she was a child. Then she activated her communicator. “Bridge, this is Admiral Sakar. Initiate process 01 in the computer. It will know what to do.” Then her head sank. While studying history as a child, she recalled a man who had done dreadful things. He had done them for a good reason, or so he had believed… but in completing his task, in making a weapon to defend his country, he had unleashed something on the world it was not ready for… something beyond anything it could be ready for. She suddenly felt a dreadful kinship with the man named Oppenheimer. “God forgive us all.”
Out in the vastness of space, a large swath of the Kthid armada had continued their breach… pouring more and more into the widening gap in the HEF fleet’s defensive lines. The more they did, the more damage they caused to Set III and the fleet… but also the most they were forced into close physical proximity for a spaceship. The nearest ships were still miles apart, of course… no one was in danger of colliding. As far as the humans were concerned, however, they might as well have been occupying the same space.
There was a principle in war that had been proven again and again… that in the end, the difference between propulsion technology and weapon technology was more a difference in viewpoint than it was one in technical ability. And never in human history had that been more true than it was with starships.
On the bridge of the Azteca, the crew input the commands into their computers, beginning a pre-planned and mapped course maneuver. The ship’s retro-rockets all fired, slightly adjusting its trajectory. A blast of explosives blew a series of armor plates off of one part of the hull, beneath the ship. Then, for just a moment, all of its engines stopped… the ship’s power being fed to the magnetic accelerators instead, blasting the Apophis free from that concealed tunnel fast enough that equal and opposite reaction actually slowed the vast battleship… and propelled the unmanned corvette like a bullet from a gun. It had no engines active… it couldn’t afford to be seen, not until it was too late, so the acceleration had needed to all be inside the Azteca… thousands of G worth of acceleration, a rate that no human could have survived. They had targeted its course at nothing, and hopefully, that lonesomeness was the best stealth of all… Few ship’s defense systems, if they noticed it at all, would be too concerned about what looked like a ballistic piece or armored plating that was going to miss everything, or some misfired missile not adjusting to change course. It moved through space, silent and dark as the ghost of dead galaxies.
Inside its shielding, however, it was anything but quiet. A series of vibrations so fast that human ears wouldn’t have been able to hear them shook the insides of that vessel, threatening to shake it apart at the very core and rip the ship to pieces. And as it reached nearly the center of the Kthid wedge poised to pour through the HEF fleet, something gave.
The Apophis was built around a Lilis drive. In fact, while it had been in storage aboard the Azteca, the massive flagship had used it as one of their Lilis drives. Warping space and time around a tiny, spinning black hole had been one of mankind’s greatest discoveries, a way to cheat with energy storage and mass. By pumping gamma radiation into a bunch of mirrors capable of reflecting it, inside that spinning space-time, that radiation was forced to accelerate… but a particle already moving the speed of light, like gamma radiation, couldn’t speed up. So instead, it gained in energy… again and again and again, each time it swooped around the artificial black hole. The hyper radiant gamma gained mass as it gained energy, and then HEF would let that radiation escape at the correct times and places, generating the gravity their ships used and enabling transit through a wormhole.
But what if they didn’t let any of it escape?
Inside the Apophis, far, far more gamma radiation that was used in a Lilis Hop had been poured into that series of rotating mirrors… far, far more, and then the automated procedures had sealed the openings, forming a perfect, reflective surface that caused the gamma radiation to spin endlessly, bouncing off the mirror walls again and again and again as it dipped in and out of the black hole’s ergosphere and gained in energy… and mass… with each time. Battering against the mirrors… first as weightless, barely noticeable photons, but increasingly as actual particles, with some real weight beneath them. And bit by bit, those impacts began to shake the entire sturdy construction of the ship.
The Lilis Drive was no free ride of energy. What hyper radiant gamma was doing was that stealing a bit of energy out of the artificial black hole by using rotational velocity… consuming the insanely rapid spin of the thing. The black hole began to die as the particles grew in power, its energy being whittled away from outside of its event horizon… an artificial black hole that had taken the HEF months to make, by channeling the energy of millions of orbital solar panels into a single spot for about six months before it had collapsed into its current, spinning form. Enough panels to consume about 1% of the star’s output, over 6 months, had created this black hole… meaning it contained 5.9 x 10 to the 28th joules of energy, ready to be harvested.
No one really knew how much of that was going to be harvested before the system failed… before the physical constraints of the system broke. But given the size of the numbers in question, it really didn’t matter.
At last, the system hit a tipping point… the particles, having gained enough mass, were hitting the mirrors hard enough that each impact threatened to push them out of alignment. Each of trillions of impacts per nanosecond moving the mirrors slightly further out of line. And when the collapse came, it came faster than computers could process. When the first mirror was nudged even a spec out of line, it was enough for any of the radiation that hit it to leak out. The extreme heat and kinetic energy involved sublimating everything nearby instantly into gas, and the other mirrors failed, all in the space of a few nanoseconds. Then, no longer constrained to the ergosphere of that what was left of that black hole, the energy ripped its way in every direction, incredible mass moving at 99.9999999% of the speed of light, in the single largest explosion humanity could even conceive of how to make.
It was like reality itself had been upended. The concentration of energy was enough to momentary warp space-time, and then from a God’s eye view it was like all those great dreadnaughts of war were suddenly toy ships in a bathtub with an angry child. aegis shields glowed for a microscopic instant before dying, utterly overwhelmed, and those ships closest to the detonation were not destroyed so much as they were vaporized. Further away, the aegis of other ships glowed as bright as stars as their solid surface reflected light and energy off of every single part of them… but Newton would have his due anyway. They were kicked by the explosion like a hamster in a clear rolling ball… smashed hard enough that the protected bits within the shields shattered. Still further away, others held, but even their orderly formations were rippled into disorder, their sterns and bows wobbling in different directions and trajectories, their sides arching and bending at unintelligible angles. Some were ripped apart by the strain of the forces action of them. Even among those that were not there was often a perceptible warp to their hulls.
The explosion was simply huge. Even the HEF ships, as far away as they were, had their shields lit up by it. To the Kthid fleet that had been far closer, it had done simply unthinkable damage. It was as if the Kthid armada had been sucked through a supernova, and the expanding sphere of destruction left a vast gaping hole in the line of the enemy armada. The damage was unworldly, unthinkable, completely without comparison. With one shot the HEF fleet had done more damage to the enemy than they had suffered in any recent single war.
This was Maria’s gambit. All the steel and blood and energy that mankind had poured into this defensive fleet had served to force the Kthid to concentrate their own forces… lining them up for the awesome strength of this new application of their drive technology. In the space of a few minutes, nearly a third of the harvest fleet had been destroyed, and another third damaged.
In the wake of the explosion, the guns of the other ships on both sides seemed suddenly silenced. Every ship, every crew, seemed frozen in shock by the impossibility of what had just happened.
And deep within her Matrix, hidden safely aboard the Azteca, Maria smiled and began the next stage of her plan.
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