A Sword Into Darkness (40 page)

“Aye aye, sir,” Weston answered.  As he did so, 20 missile icons sprang forth from their ship and disappeared around the drive to the north and the south.

Explosions continued to light up the horizon, each one higher up and closer in, as the warheads maneuvered closer to their objective.  Now that the detonations were well above the blazing horizon, though, Nathan could see that not all of them were the brilliant white eruptions of lasing fusion.  Some of them exploded more dimly and haphazardly, ignited by counterfire from the alien ships.

He frowned.  “Shit.”

Magnified by the
Sword of Liberty
’s sensors, the Cathedral rose into view.  Her gothic arches and ornately carved, stone-like halls were gouged and broken, venting fluids and bright gasses into the vacuum.  It was not demolished as they had hoped, but it had not escaped unscathed either.  As he watched, another set of warheads flashed into fusion brilliance, and their unseen x-ray lasers lanced deeply into the distant alien vessel.

The Cathedral responded in kind, casting out beams of red light made visible from the gasses and vapors pouring from her hull.  Nathan glanced over to see if they intended to take out any warheads, but he lost them as Weston began the maneuvers he had ordered.

Fifteen gravities of acceleration again squeezed him down, but this time they were accompanied by violent jerks from side to side, back and forth.  Anti-nausea meds and stimulants flooded his system, allowing Nathan to push the sheer physical torture to the back of his mind, and to still concentrate on the battle.

His fingers jerked as much as they were able under the crushing thrust, sending coded texts to his crew.  Four more missiles blasted out from the sides of the destroyer.  Nathan did the count in his head.  He only had 32 more, but it had been a worthwhile expense, both to cause the damage they had thus far achieved and to test their effectiveness against the Deltan ships’ defenses.  Should they fail here, that data would be of paramount importance to the ships being built back home.

Determined to give the missiles the best chance he could, but reluctant to expend any more of his dwindling supply, Nathan’s fingers twitched again, sending new commands out.  Simmons and Weston received the order and took action.  The violent jerks the hull underwent smoothed out somewhat and the Cathedral steadied up, directly ahead of them.  The railgun locked on and went into continuous fire, sending shot after shot screaming through the narrowing void.  The damage imparted by their kinetic and chemical energy might be no more than a nuisance to be endured by the immense ship, but he hoped it would be enough of a distraction that the missiles would have a greater effect.

Now aware of the new threat just risen over the drive’s horizon, the Cathedral turned its wounded attention toward the
Sword of Liberty
.  Twin beams of laser light flashed out from the ornate arches of the spherical alien ship.  Slag erupted from the destroyer’s bow, her first wounds in the battle.

High energy photons flayed at the crystalline armor covering the
Sword
.  The armor performed as designed, channeling the heat and energy outward from the point of incidence, spreading it over a wider area in an attempt to let it dissipate harmlessly into space, but the power poured in much too fast.  Plates swelled and buckled, and finally melted through as the beams continued to fire on the same section of armor.

Alarms sprang up on Nathan’s screen as the hull was breached.  A wisp of gas erupted from the mostly evacuated space below the breach.  Then a crew icon went red—Emil Harmon, the weapons tech monitoring the dorsal radar array, fell off the grid.  Nathan winced.  He keyed an urgent command to the Helm, but before he could pass along the order, Weston responded.

The
Sword of Liberty
began to spin along her long axis, denying the enemy weapons a single point on which to concentrate their fury.  The still-firing beams went from burning holes through the armor to tracing glowing circles and arcs of semi-melted armor all around the mission hull.  Hull plates swelled, but now stayed intact, dissipating the energy through the surrounding plates as originally intended.  And all the while, the railgun continued to fire.

The spin—coupled with the high acceleration, and a renewed, if lesser, jerking from evasive maneuvers—threatened to overcome even Nathan’s anti-nausea doping.  He spared a glance at the crew status, and saw that several people showed amber, unconscious or otherwise unresponsive as they all tried to endure Weston’s efforts to keep them alive.  Nathan’s lips were peeled back in an acceleration induced rictus, but he felt his attempt to smile as he saw that Kris’s icon was still a strong, vibrant green.

Back on the tactical view, the four missiles launched at the Cathedral reached terminal and separated into 24 maneuvering warheads.  The lasers inundating the
Sword
were joined by additional beams seeking out these smaller targets, but before they could take any of them out, small explosions peppered the hull of the alien ship.  Railgun rounds rained down upon the Cathedral, unseen and unopposed as they lacked the brilliance of the destroyer’s or the missiles’ active drives, and since the Deltans did not seem to use any form of radar.

It would take more rounds than the
Sword of Liberty
could carry to destroy the Cathedral with the small projectiles, but the ploy worked.  The much-deadlier warheads closed a great deal further than previous salvoes had, and they began to lase at their optimal range.

Flaring out in white light, the fusion blasts cast tightly collimated beams of energy into the Cathedral.  Slag and incandescent gas boiled away from the ship’s hull.  It was a more rugged construction than the Junkyard, but it was by no means rugged enough.  Lasers abandoned the destroyer and again shifted their focus onto the encroaching warheads, but they were now too close and too numerous to take out completely.

A pair of warheads came near enough to switch modes.  Fusion fire blossomed close aboard and engulfed whole sections of the Cathedral, blasting arches flat and setting its stones ablaze.  More importantly, its lasers abruptly stopped as something critical within broke.  The ship appeared defenseless, and Nathan cheered inside his head.

Before the last few warheads could administer the coup de gras, though, the Cathedral suddenly swung out of position.  The warheads flew harmlessly through the space she had just occupied, their explosions wasted upon an empty void.  Nathan jerked in shock and expanded his tactical view.

The Control Ship swept up over the drive’s horizon, pulling the Cathedral and the Polyp around it until they were arrayed to its north and south rather than along the equatorial plane.  The Cathedral was burned and pummeled, and the Polyp was little better, its organic curves and intricate, tattooed designs marred by x-ray laser gouges and blackened sections of hull.  The Control Ship’s overlapping, lobster-like metallic plates were also gouged and burned, but to a lesser degree.  She looked battle hardened rather than battle bled.

Nathan tapped in an order and the
Sword
broke northward and made for a higher orbit, seeking salvation through distance and greater maneuvering room.  The Control Ship would have none of that, however.  A dozen lasers blazed from its hull, each striking the destroyer and burning glowing paths along her hull.  Now, not only the forward mission hull was at risk, but the radiators and the propulsion module were attacked as well.

The propulsion module, built of the same materials as the mission hull, fared as well as it had under the onslaught from the Cathedral.  The radiator spine, however, was unarmored and relatively fragile by necessity.  Radiator plates shattered and slagged, spinning away from the rapidly maneuvering ship.  Torrents of coolant evaporated from broken lines and heat loads rose threateningly on all the ship’s systems.

The radiator had always been their Achilles Heel.  Vital to the thermodynamic heat engines throughout the ship, it was their chief vulnerability, and they could not fight or survive without it.

Nathan winced at the options available to him.  They were much closer to the Control Ship than he ever intended.  He could either turn the
Sword
completely away from the their enemy, and hope they could gain sufficient maneuvering distance before the drive was irreparably damaged—or he could point directly at their enemy and close to knife-fighting range.  Either way, he had to interpose the armored portions of the hull between the incoming fire and the radiator, or they were doomed.

Nathan tapped his order in and groaned as the ship swung around.  The nose of the destroyer pointed straight at the incoming fire.  All four thrust pylons lit up with nearly random jets of light as the ship leapt back and forth along a suicidal closing vector, dodging away from the enemy lasers as much as possible, even as their range fell away to make the beams steadily more effective.

At his order, missiles shot outward from the port and starboard cells, one after another.  The railgun fired continuously, targeting each individual laser battery aboard the Control Ship.  The
Sword of Liberty
’s laser batteries fired as well, still too far out to cause any damage, but hopefully enough to blind any targeting sensors coming after them.

Damaged beyond capacity, the radiators were no longer able to discard the ever rising heat produced by all the systems running on the ship.  Coolant diverted instead to internal heat sinks, blocks of ice nearby every major system on the ship.  The blocks absorbed the waste heat, melting, and then boiling away to relieve the crippling temps each system produced.  Steam erupted from vents all around the
Sword of Liberty
.

Seen from the distant re-trans pod, the destroyer was a valkyrie afire, a shooting star pouring the most devastating forces the Earth could muster at an enemy that still remained unexplained, mysterious.  It was awesome to behold.

And ultimately futile.

Responding to the 32 missiles and then 192 warheads released from the
Sword
, the Control Ship shifted its depressingly effective laser fire away from the destroyer to the individually targeted weapons.  Too many flared out into the flames of failure, rather than the brilliant flashes of lasing fusion.  Too few closed enough to do real damage with their beams.  And the destroyer was still not spared.  Now the Control Ship’s silvery beam reached out.

The beam of particles struck the spinning, maneuvering destroyer on the dorsal surface first, and then inscribed a tight spiral around the mission hull.  Unlike the lasers, though, the damage here was not lessened by the spin.  Wherever the strange beam struck, the hull wavered, becoming indistinct and collapsing into dust.  If anything, their defensive spin spread the damage around more than if they had remained steady.

Nathan cursed to himself, even as he praised the increasingly accurate fire from the railgun and the lasers.  The warheads were mostly expended now, and though the damage they had dealt was impressive, it did not seem to be having nearly enough effect on the Control Ship.  The better aimed railgun and laser fire, on the other hand, at least made a few “mission kills”—several laser emplacements aboard the alien ship had gone dark.  But soon, those that remained would again turn on the
Sword
.

That assumed they would still be a viable target, though.  Whatever the silvery beam did, it appeared frightening in its effectiveness.  Silvery dust streamed away from the hull as plates were eaten away.  And the damage lingered, growing outward from the stricken areas of the hull even after the beam had passed by.  If the rate his hull was eaten continued, it would be through the armor plates and into the pressure hull within a couple of minutes.

A text popped up in his vision.  It was from Kris.  “NANOTECH.  PARTICLE BEAM IS ASSEMBLOR CARRIER.  HAVE IDEA.  DROP TO LOW ACCEL.  MUST EXIT POD TO TRY.”  Nathan was confused, barely registering what she was trying to say, but he did as she asked, texting the order to Weston at the Helm.

The ship went into near freefall, still aimed at the Control Ship and still firing away.  Recognizing the threat, as well as their greater vulnerability while no longer maneuvering, Simmons had his watchstanders concentrate on the source of the silvery beam.  While waiting for the shots to reach their target, Nathan focused on Kris’s icon.  It and that of her Electrical Officer had gone red as soon as they left their pods, and he felt helpless and adrift as he waited for her to come back online.

Explosions flared upon the Control Ship, blanketing the area where the “assemblor” beam fired from.  The beam cut out intermittently and then faded away to nothing, shut off at the source.  Nathan almost cheered, but the nano-scale eating machines that Kris believed them to be had already been deposited on the hull and continued their destructive work.  Whether the beam kept re-depositing them or not, they would eventually turn the ship into dust if Kris was unable to stop them.

Her voice cut in to the tactical net, causing an intense surge of relief in Nathan.  “Okay!  Since we’re fresh outta missiles, I decoupled their power cables from the main bus and grounded it to the outer hull.  I’m gonna close the breaker and charge the exterior of the ship.  Hopefully those suckers are small and fragile enough to kill with a little excessive voltage.”

Nathan shook his head, exasperated.  “Stop talking about it and just do it, CHENG!”

“Fine!  Just don’t be mad if I pop every other breaker on the ship in the process.  Here goes.”

The speakers in his helmet squealed and popped, and his VR display flickered and went black for a moment, but it came back almost immediately.  Red status icons blinked for all of the crew and for a number of systems.  Railgun and laser fire had stopped.  Panicked, Nathan called out, “Kris!  XO!  COB!  Report.”

“Captain, XO, I think we’re okay.  It’s just the monitoring systems and weapons that have gone offline.  COB, get verbals from every station on the general net, and I’ll work with the department heads on system status and recovery.”