Date Point: 16y10m1d AV
HMS Violent, Armstrong Station rally point, Cimbrean-5, the Far Reaches
Admiral Sir William Caruthers
“Caledonia reports the HEAT are aboard, sir.”
Caruthers acknowledged the update with a nod. Things were moving quickly, but not quickly enough by half for his tastes. The Hunters had hit the convoy on a relatively remote stretch of the spacelane, and although one of the Gaoian-made interceptor drones was en route, it wasn’t due to arrive for another four minutes.
Every passing minute was lives lost. They may, indeed, already be too late to save anyone. But Caruthers would be damned before he’d let the Hunters get away unpunished.
“Sir, update from Clan One-Fang’s third claw. They were on training maneuvers with the Domain’s first fleet, and Grand Admiral Ak’kk’brr is requesting to join us.”
Caruthers nodded again. “He’s welcome with our compliments. Assign his force a place in the rear. If all he does is watch and learn, that will be perfect. The Gaoians go in the van, alongside the Great Father.”
“Aye aye.”
Two minutes.
Myrmidon sent over an updated disposition for him to confirm. It wasn’t much different to the standard Allied setup: Gaoians up front where their speed and firepower could be used to lock horns with the enemy, the Royal Navy’s V-type destroyers in the main part of the force providing electronic warfare, intelligence and long-range fire support, Caledonia and the three San Diego cruisers held behind that ready to spring forward as needed….
And now, in the back behind them, quite a sizeable force of varied Domain ships, including a War Platform that would easily be the biggest and slowest thing on the field. He pulled a small face to him as he reviewed the Fleet Intelligence Center’s… reserved opinion on the war platform’s tactical utility and capabilities, then shrugged and confirmed the disposition. Frankly, if the Hunters ever got a shot at it then things would already have gone catastrophically wrong, so that ship’s shortcomings were a moot point.
One minute. His board was completely green, every ship in the fleet had signalled they were ready. All he could do was drum his fingers and–
The drone’s jump beacon connected. An instant later, more than a dozen ships had all blinked halfway across the galaxy, and a moment after that there were megalight drones howling out of their launch tubes.
Some were inbound toward the stricken convoy to neutralize the gravity spike. Others were headed outward, to establish rally points and lines of retreat. On their heels, flights of voidrippers, firebirds and bulldogs swept in to provide the first clear and up-to-date impression of their quarry.
The Hunters didn’t run this time, and as the data came back from his scout planes, Caruthers could see why. There was a broodship out there for every ship in his fleet, including the Domain ones.
As the overlapping fields from the drones cleared a path for them to warp in under the gravity spikes, the Destroying Fury pounced. Daar’s flagship was exactly like the man himself in that regard: huge, deadly, fast, and eager to lead from the front.
The fact that she was basically a mobile Farthrow generator had a lot to do with that. She bowled into the heart of the freighter convoy, locked down a volume nearly an AU across, and smashed a dozen swarmships out of the sky with her weaponized forcefields.
But the Hunters were here to fight, this time. Long-range sensors pinged several alerts at Caruthers as spacetime some distance away outside the Fury’s bubble fizzed like a soda, and disgorged… well, swarmships. Very, very aptly named swarmships.
They must have been desperate for all the components and little essentials on that convoy, because for the first time since the Hellring went down—before that, even. For the first time since the Battle of Gao, the Hunters actually stood up and boxed.
The Fury was immediately besieged. She coiled her shields inwards, reserving their power and heat load for pure defense, not able to reach out and swat the gnats that bothered her. Caruthers ordered the USS San Diego, and her sister ships Robert A. Heinlein and Gene Roddenberry forward, and they flash-warped directly to the Destroying Fury’s side.
With Daar’s flagship cocooned in their combined energies, not even the nuke the Hunters hit it with could get through, but that wouldn’t last. Even Gaoian-made heat sinks had their limits.
For the first time in a long while, Caruthers felt his knuckles going white.
This one was going to be bad.
Technical Sergeant Adam “Warhorse” Arés
Sealed and suited, ready to go… standing and waiting. Then sitting, to conserve energy. Nobody wanted to hit their Juice—or worse, IV—before the fight had even begun.
Adam got exactly as much information as he needed: that much, no more. Which in this case translated to the words “STAND BY” in his HUD as the HEAT waited for a target.
It was quiet in the deployment bay. The loudest noise by far was the hiss of his own breathing apparatus, little puffs of pressurized air running behind and below his ears and into his mask. The gurgle of the water systems as he took a small sip. Sporadic, terse words on the ‘net, none of them intended for him.
He could hear the battle faintly, through the heavy sound each of Cally’s guns made when they fired. Like a team of men beating on sheet metal with sledgehammers, a few rooms over. Subtle shifts, jolts and sways in the gravity as they accelerated and it took the grav plating a fraction of a second to catch up.
He was used to that. Endless training had made him almost numb to gravitic shenanigans. His body just dealt with them. What he wasn’t used to was waiting.
Even Deacon and her techs had run out of things to tinker with, and they’d use every last minor check and tweak they could find if it gave them something to do. Now she was trying and failing to not chew on her fingernails, and it was infecting Adam’s calm as well.
All he could do, though, was sit and wait for that “STAND BY” in his visor to become anything else.
Which was awful, because sitting still in the Mass was still a full-body, active exertion. Just wearing it meant fighting back against its pressure, just sitting down in it and doing nothing more strenuous than breathing drained calories at about the same rate as a steady jog. He’d got to the point where tensing against it was an unconscious act, but now that he was still…
Now that he was still, he was acutely reminded that he was wearing enough armor to classify him as a light vehicle. In motion, it made him powerful, unstoppable. Stopped, though…
Stopped, it just made him ache. Itch. And still the fucking “STAND BY” didn’t change.
He had some solace in that Righteous and ‘Base had it pretty bad too, though their Mass wasn’t as fiercely compressive as his. Hell, Tigger had it even worse these days, being the singular freak of nature that he was. Even with his much more advanced armor, that was…
Well, surprisingly okay. If Adam couldn’t be top dog anymore, then he was proud to be friend and coach to the one and only man alive of any species who could beat him, or even come close. Or…probably ever would, unless either Adam or Righteous somehow pulled off an upset one day. Thank God the big goofy murderbear was one of a kind.
What was he doing right now? Adam…he honestly couldn’t really imagine what it must have been like to be someone like that. One minute Daar was living life like any grunt, and the very next he was a general leading his forces, or an admiral his fleet…or an emperor, his people.
Adam wasn’t nearly intelligent enough to be someone like that. But he was a damn good medic. As good as ‘Base, in his own way. And he had buddies like Butler and sometimes Thurrsto, all right there with him, doing their best to save lives.
And, well. If it came down to up close and personal violence, he could do that, too. In some ways, he could do that better than anyone. He wasn’t called Warhorse for nothing.
Something changed in his HUD: Radiological alert. Somebody was letting off nukes out there. He glanced over at Baseball, who glanced back at him at the same moment, then looked over Adam’s shoulder and lifted his head slightly to say ‘look.’
Adam looked. Powell was on his feet, talking with somebody, a Royal Navy officer. Probably on the command net, too. Hard to see his face, but in Powell’s case reading his mood was all about body language anyway. And he looked about the same as Adam felt.
Eventually he nodded, thanked the Navy guy, and sat back down again. Slumped. Slumped back down again.
And Adam knew that they probably weren’t going anywhere today.
Builder Alpha-of-Alphas
The data flowed freely, and they were delicious.
The convoy had been one thing. A ripe opportunity to replenish needed sundries whose supply had been stretched by the campaign to dissipate the Broods into smaller, more obfuscated strongholds. Losing the Builder Hive had demonstrated the folly of excessive centralization.
Distribution, however, came with its own challenges. The convoy had been a welcome answer to a few of those challenges.
Now, though, it was turning out to be a far juicier quarry than the Builder Alpha-of-Alphas had foreseen.
Since the first clash between Hunters and a Human warship, there had never been a deadly, fierce struggle for supremacy. Both were naturally inclined to raid, to ambush, to hunt. Both were predators by inclination. It was what made the deathworlders so admirable, so inventive, and so challenging.
But when one predator came to steal another’s kill, the resulting fight could very well become what this one had. And now, the Builders were learning much.
The minutiae of what all those gigabytes of sensor telemetry could wait. For now, the Alpha-of-Alphas simply watched, alert for the big things, the moments of genius and inventiveness that it might follow.
It was not disappointed.
Daar, Great Father of the Gao
It was getting fuckin’ hot on the Fury. Not dangerous, but the air was like a really hot summer day, and slowly gettin’ worse. Hot days were for rolling through flowers an’ chasing after kwek (and Females) an’ not for sufferin’ onboard a warship.
At least he had the advantage of active cooling in his Suit. He was sympathetic as fuck ‘fer all the rest o’ the ship who weren’t in environmentally-hardened armor, but at least they had the advantage o’ not thumpin’ around in duraflex scalemail that were even heavier’n he was…
Good thing they weren’t, they were busy tendin’ to the most bestest ship in the allied fleet. He was proud of the Fury. She was taking a beating that nothin’ else in the galaxy ever could (though bein’ honest, even the Fury wouldn’t be in one piece right now if not for the San Diego cruisers), and if the worst he had to complain about after three nukes at short range was that the air was gettin’ warm, he’d take it. But she was also kinda pinned down: she could tank the hits, or she could fight back. Not both. Not to full effect.
So, break the pin.
“Where are those nukes comin’ from? They ain’t jumpin’ in.”
“That big broodship at the back, My Father. They’re firing a lot of them.”
“A lot?”
“The three—” there was a lurch, a flash, and all the monitors went protectively dark for half a second. “—the four that hit us are just the ones that made it past our point defence.”
Daar growled and contacted Caruthers directly.
“We can’t stay here forever,” he said, putting it bluntly. “Can you take out that broodship with the nukes?”
“We landed two good hits on it. It seems to be just as tough as you,” Caruthers replied. “And they’ve copied backlash shielding, too. We lost two firebirds.”
Daar panted frustratedly. The air temperature was creeping up toward blood-warm now, and the update that accompanied Caruthers’ words showed him that it was a testament to the incredible skill of Human pilots that they hadn’t lost more than that. The Firebirds had withdrawn in an orderly manner, pulling back from the most hazardous part of the battlefield to fly close support for the capital ships and keep the swarmships from latching on.
Space all around was a blizzard of swarmships, hard radiation, debris, kinetic ammunition and firepower. The big one at the back of the Hunter formation was well protected behind a wall of its lesser counterparts, each one of which was imitating the San Diego cruisers’ advanced shield projection.
Worse, as well as wrapping up the big one nice and cozy, each one was enfolding a freighter in its grasp.
Dammit. They were going to jump out, and those pilots’ lives would have been spent in vain. Not to mention the lost materiel for the Guvnurag, and the lost civilian lives.
But Daar couldn’t see a way to break the deadlock. His formation might push forward, but that would just give their point defence less time to react to the incoming nukes: they’d just be driven back again, or destroyed. Bringing the Domain ships in would just get a lot of hapless blue amateurs slaughtered, and the V-destroyers were already as well-placed and effective as they were gonna be.
On the plus side, the stalemate went both ways. As far as Daar could tell, it was a battle of heat dispersal, and the Hunters didn’t have enough to win it… but neither did he.
“I have WERBS on standby,” Caruthers ventured. “Though, I would prefer not to use it unless we absolutely must.”
“Agreed. Don’t want ‘em learnin’ that trick anytime soon,” Daar had a feeling that if the Hunters ever figured out WERBS, their first instinct would be to use it to scour planets to the bedrock. He’d seen the estimates on what that weapon could do. Its creators were justifiably terrified of it.
It had saved Gao. He wouldn’t use it for anything less than that.
Daar growled to himself, it seemed like this was gonna be an endurance test, an’ that weren’t a thing he was gonna much enjoy. Attrition was a stupid way ‘ta fight a battle. He just needed some crazy, off-the-wall idea mebbe, something ridiculous like the ass-pulls they always managed in all those stupid Star Trek episodes…
…Well…
…Hmm.
His head cocked slowly onto one side as just such a crazy ass-pull blossomed in his mind. Or mebbe it was dumbassery. Either way, his instincts knew he hadta try it. “Caruthers…if you could pick jus’ one Hunter ship right now…which one would ‘ya pick?”
Caruthers was silent for a few seconds. “…Target designated Foxtrot,” he decided. “It’s on the edge of the formation and radiating more heat than the others. I think we can get a lick in if we hit it hard.”
“Everythin’ we got. Hell, bring the V’zktk in on it too.” Not that he really expected to penetrate its shields, but that wasn’t the point. The point was… something a little different.
“Guur,” he turned to the Fury’s Shipfather. “How aggressively can we dump heat as a beam?”
“We already are,” the Shipfather replied. “It’s called backlash shielding. The Humans at Mrwrki invented it.”
“We tied to a particular wavelength, or…?”
“We usually emit in gamma, but that can be changed. What’s your plan, My Father?”
“Cycle our backlash frequency ‘ta somethin’ their shields’re transparent to. Visible spectrum, mebbe. When we hit Target Foxtrot, poke ‘em with all the heat we can dump. Might just tip ‘em over.”
“Yes, My Father.” Guur took up the task personally.
Daar returned to his spot in the middle of the bridge and was glad indeed for his suit’s cooling. He must be emitting quite a lot of heat himself, now, but at least it let him stand calmly in the middle of the bridge and not pant. Right now, he needed to seem indestructible.
But he was prayin’ like hell that his plan would work.
Admiral Sir William Caruthers
“Do you think we can break it?”
“I think at this point it’s a question of whose ammo reserves run deepest,” Caruthers replied. “Both of us have shield webs fully in place, neither of us can advance on the other… about the only thing we have that they don’t is the Farthrow. Maybe hitting a single target will work, but I doubt it. Not unless we time it down to the millisecond.”
Ak’kk’brr’s flagship—the war platform’s name translated loosely to Strike With Both Hooves—had come forward into the main formation at his invitation, and Caruthers had to admit: there were a lot of big guns on that thing. Right now, he was glad to have them.
“My ships have a firing solution, Admiral,” he reported. “We are ready when you are.”
Caruthers was pleasantly surprised: the ETs hadn’t held them up at all. Apparently the Domain’s first fleet could keep up. That was one good thing to come out of this day, at least.
“Wait for my mark,” he commanded. Timing was crucial. “Tigger, Highcastle. All ships are ready to fire.”
“Sync-lock to Fury’s fire control.”
There was something from the Dominion’s monolithic way of doing battle that was actually useful. Caruthers authorized the brief synchronization of his fleet’s weapons, handed them off to Daar, and stood back to watch.
On the ‘net, he heard only the briefest of pauses. For a second or two, there was pregnant silence. And then…
“Fire.”