Nemesis

by Christian Kallias

  “Watch, and on my mark, fire a pair of missiles and quantum torpedos from each of your fighters.”

  “I’d rather you clue us into what you have in mind.”

  Defensive fire from the destroyer increased as they drew nearer to the enemy ships and so did the enemy impact ratio. The StarFuries’ shields were getting heavily pounded.

  “No time,” said Chris dismissively. “Just get ready.”

  Trust him, said Argos in Chase’s mind. He’s no longer the kid that needs saving that you remember.

  While nothing would make Chase prouder than this fact, he didn’t enjoy being left in the dark when strategy was involved. But he decided to let it play out, and, as requested, he armed all his weapons.

  Three of Chris’ StarFuries blinked out of existence and almost instantaneously three major explosions lit up the shields on the enemy destroyer, draining most of them in one go.

  “Fire now!” ordered Chris. “Before their shields recharge.”

  Chase sent his squadron payloads as did Argos. Streaks of missiles and quantum torpedoes filled the space between them and the enemy. Chase wasn’t as much surprised by his son’s choice of strategy as he was mystified. While Chase had used the tactic in the past to great effect, Chase preferred sacrificing fighters only when needed. This felt like wasting resources way too early in the fight.

  But Chase decided to not voice his concern.

  The missiles that were faster than their bigger torpedo counterpart hit the tango’s shield first and almost all were in sync. The resulting onslaught of explosions on the enemies’ starboard shields drained them enough to pave the way for the torpedoes to finish the job and blow the target to pieces.

  “Good job, Chris,” cheered Argos.

  “Thanks, Uncle.”

  Chase wanted to echo Argos’ congratulatory attitude, but he just couldn’t.

  “I like the way you think, Chris,” said Chase. “However—”

  “Here we go. Never satisfied.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, Son. We’ve splashed one, and that’s a good thing but at a heavy cost. We’ve spent half our ordnance and sacrificed three fighters. We may need them later during the fight, especially if the enemy brings in reinforcements.”

  “Yeah, yeah. It’s fine when the mighty Dragonheart does it, but gods forbid you don’t see the tactical advantage of finding a surefire way to quickly take care of a destroyer, which is what you’ve asked us to do by the way. Typical.”

  His words resonated in Chase’s mind. Was his son correct? Was Chase still trying to win the next engagement with as little loss as possible? Early in the Fury War, Chase probably would have used a similar tactic, even though the Alliance didn’t have that many resources. So, was it fair to blame his son for trying to make sure they got rid of as many enemies as fast as they could?

  “Forget I said anything,” he conceded.

  “It’s forgotten already, we have more ships to destroy,” said Chris sharply. “If you don’t like my tactics, fine. I can live with that as long as my results speak for themselves.”

  Like father, like son, said Argos to his brother.

  Daniel was sitting in the captain’s chair on board the Iron Fire.

  “Bring us about, and watch our distance. I don’t want us in the crosshairs of the four different destroyers’ firing range at once.”

  “Aye, Captain,” said Commander Aniotis.

  “I should go and transform. Your friends will need my help,” said Ka’Rij.

  “Seems a little too hot outside for that at the moment. If you’re as vulnerable as you say you are while transforming, you should wait.”

  “If I wait too long, we may lose this engagement. I’ll take the risk.”

  “Clearly, you don’t know Chase besides whatever prophecy you think he belongs to.”

  “The prophecy is not a matter of think, with all due respect, Captain. I know it to be true.”

  “Yeah, alright. Allow me to be both skeptical and suspicious on this one. The last time someone spoke about his destiny, it didn’t end very well for him.”

  “I understand and respect that,” said Ka’Rij, pausing for a moment. “This is what I propose: I’ll stay in your shadow and use your shields for protection during my transformation.”

  “I don’t see how that will work. In your dragon form, you’re larger than the Iron Fire.”

  “And I can start flying before I reach full size; it will work, trust me.”

  Daniel thought about it and knew that if Chase had agreed to help Ka’Rij it was so he would in turn help cure Sarah. He wouldn’t be able to do that if he died in this engagement. The strategy was too risky, and the stakes were too high.

  “Be that as it may, please hang on a minute.”

  Daniel opened a channel to engineering. “Yanis, can you guys extend the shield far enough so that our guest can stay protected inside it while he transforms into his full dragon form?”

  “Technically we can create a larger bubble, but the dragon is massive, so that will significantly diminish their strength. How long will they have to be extended to repel enemy fire?”

  Daniel looked at Ka’Rij, his eyes doing a good job at relaying the question.

  “Forty seconds, give or take,” said Ka’Rij. “I can usually do it under thirty but that’s when I don’t have to be aware of my surroundings like impacting either the ship or the shields,.”

  “Forty, forty-five seconds, if you can swing it,” answered Daniel, not willing to gamble with Ka’Rij’s life and any misplaced optimism on the Dragonman’s part.”

  “We’ll make it work, but by the time he’s transformed, they’ll probably have drained completely.”

  Daniel hated the prospect of entering the battle in these conditions, but it didn’t look like they had much of a choice. Fortunately, the enemy’s laser turret tech was way weaker than theirs, so the Iron Fire’s thick quadrinium-reinforced armor plating should be able to take some sizable hits before they got into too much trouble.

  “Roger that, get ready to expend the shields,” said Daniel before turning to the commander. “Change of plans, Commander, let’s head to six by twelve by three. We need to stay at the very edge of the firing zone. Once Ka’Rij teleports out of here, start firing every torpedo tube toward the nearest enemy, let’s give them something else to shoot at other than us, at least for a minute.”

  “Understood. Firing now.”

  “I said once he’s teleported!”

  The commander pointed to where Daniel thought Ka’Rij was and saw that he had vanished.

  “I guess the countdown starts now, then. A little heads up would have been nice. Yanis, I sure hope you already started expanding the shields.”

  “Yep, Cap, they’re already expanding.”

  “At least there’s that,” said Daniel as his gaze traveled over the dozens of white streaks from the advancing torpedoes as they filled the main viewport.

  I sure hope we won’t need this ordnance later.

  “What’s our ETA?” asked Altair from the captain’s chair of the Hercules.

  “We’re forty minutes out,” answered his navigation officer. “Asgardian hyperspace boosting optimizations are at sixty percent. The highest we’ve pushed them so far.”

  The Hercules was the most advanced ship of the Earth Alliance fleet. While it lacked a true Asgardian hyperspace engine, due to the rarity of pentalium to power these engines, Thor and his people had worked in concert with Spiros on optimizing the new hyperspace engines’ designs .

  The Hercules was a ship built for war, even though it had been commissioned in a time of peace. The idea behind the ship was that it needed to keep the peace and be an even bigger deterrent than a small fleet of Warheart class destroyers.

  During the Fury War, the Alliance had been caught with their pants down too many times in terms of firepower, with always bigger and stronger ships making their engagement a matter of life and death. So, when the time came to create a new class
of ship, Altair ordered the construction of the Armageddon-class dreadnoughts. The Hercules was the first, and there were another three in service: the Nemesis, the Pegasus, and the Medusa. Spiros, the engineer who had supervised their creation, referred to them as flying fortresses.

  The other dreadnoughts were patrolling the Alliance’s biggest entry point for invasion, so Altair decided not to bring them on this mission but requested that they get ready to jump on his command. Part of him also wanted to see its firepower on its own. He hoped he wouldn’t regret the decision but trusted that his ship could take care of the threat.

  Altair had been surprised receiving the distress call in the middle of the night, even more so seeing Tar’Lock’s signature attached to it. Even though he wasn’t technically a member of the Earth Alliance anymore, Altair was not the kind of man who forgot who his friends were. He also knew that if Ryonna had been there, she’d be on board the ship with him right now.

  He had left a holo-message for Ryonna before leaving Earth orbit but never got an answer.

  Tar’Lock’s message was as succinct as it was terrifying.

  Spectres back—under attack by spider ship—help!

  Since the Fury War, nothing had frozen Altair’s blood faster than reading that note. He hoped with all his heart Tar’Lock was mistaken about the Spectre part. That would be terrible news for every living being across the entire Alliance and beyond.

  It was not an easy decision leaving the other ships at their current posts, but Altair’s thinking was that if the Spectres were indeed back and tried to take out a major stronghold of the Alliance, such as Earth, Droxia, New Olympus, or Asgard, that would be bad, very bad. So having them scattered around these locations unless ordered differently was the most prudent course of action for now.

  Altair hoped the Hercules would make it in time to help Tar’Lock and that the ship’s exceptional firepower would suffice to repel whatever was waiting for them at the coordinates Tar’Lock provided.

  “Boost Asgardian hyperspace optimizations to seventy-five percent,” Altair said out of the blue.

  “We’ve never tested this level of optimization, and the exotic particle created into our hyperspace engine could rise exponentially if we do so. We risk damaging them.”

  “I’m well aware of that, but we need to get there faster. Carry out my orders.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  “And what do you propose we do, exactly?” asked Nyx. “It’s only the two of us on this ship, there’s no way we’re taking it over and doing an inter-dimensional jump on our own.”

  “We have to figure out a way to make this happen, except we’ll make sure the ship doesn’t survive the trip. Once on the other side, we need to destroy the ship. ”

  Nyx’s eyes remained steady and unblinking. “You think? You don’t even have a fucking body, how do you intend to make these modifications?”

  “I’ll just borrow one.”

  “As long as it’s not mine.”

  “I know.”

  “Good luck with that then. Your ability in this matter deems approximate at best.”

  “That’s because I had to grab people in the middle of their work or while they were trying to kill us. If I invade a sleeping body, I know I can suppress their consciousness in the blink of an eye.”

  “Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say we do that. Then what, I’m supposed to take down an entire ship on my own? There are hundreds of warriors on board, and according to you, also a Spectre on the bridge.”

  “Yeah, that’s the tricky part, you’ll need to kill that Spectre. I just hope for all our sakes that he’s not as powerful as Asrak’Vor.”

  “Is that the one you told me the Furies took out, almost losing their lives in the process? The multiple Furies, and they almost lost.”

  “Among them were three Ultra Furies.”

  Nyx’s face dropped. “Ultra Furies don’t exist, they’re a myth told to children. Seriously, why am I even listening to this? I have half a mind to let you deal with this on your own, jump on an escape pod, and try my luck at surviving alone.”

  Ares knew he had to find a way to convince Nyx to help him on the mission, without her there was no plan.

  “If you do that, you’ll stay stuck here forever. And. . .there’s something else. Something I don’t think you will like.”

  “Oh. My. Gods! What the hell are you talking about, Olympian? What else is there?”

  Ares lowered his head and pointed to the chambers lined up against the wall. “You may want to look at the pods. But be prepared for a shock.”

  Nyx turned and gazed at the pods. What was inside them? A thick layer of ice was rendering their windows opaque. Nyx could distinguish a humanoid silhouette inside, but that’s as much info as the visual inspection provided.

  She stepped in front of one, surprised by her heart pounding at an increasingly rapid pace. It felt as if the organ wanted to escape her chest.

  She wiped some of the frozen condensation from the surface of the glass. The coldness stung her palm. Then her entire expression dropped.

  “This can’t be,” she said. “It just can’t.”

  “ETA to the gate?” asked Talon.

  “Two minutes.”

  “Are we going to make it in time?”

  The ship rocked and trembled, sending Talon crashing from his chair.

  “I’ll take that as a no,” he said through pursed lips. “Plan B, then?”

  “That doesn’t seem like a way to optimize our chances of survival.”

  Tar’Lock put the ship on evasive, avoiding as many plasma bolts as possible from the cloaked spider ship. Fortunately, the enemy ship was engaging from outside its optimum firing range and never scored direct hits.

  “I don’t think we have much of a choice. We must drop our shields to enter the jump gate, thanks to your friendly Earth Alliance regulations, or it will consider us a hostile, and we’ll get blown to bits.”

  “I won’t argue that it was a dick move from the council, but it has slowed down the raiders abilities to perform hit-and-run raids.”

  “Fair enough, and you’re sure you can trick them into going toward the jump gate?”

  “We’re about to find out.”

  Talon noticeably swallowed.

  “On the next impact, I’ll blow up the pyro charges on the hull. The enemy will think they scored damage, which will hopefully buy us a little time.”

  “How much time?”

  “Fifteen, thirty seconds if we’re lucky.”

  “For the record, this is the most daring and batshit crazy plan I’ve ever heard. If it works, my little insectoid friend, I’ll kiss you, but if we get killed. . .”

  “Well, if we get killed, there wouldn’t be much you could do about it, now would there?” asked Tar’Lock pre-emptively.

  “I don’t know, but I’ll kill you again.”

  Tar’Lock chuckled, but when the master lock alarm buzzed, he verified that all the variables of his plan were in place, and there were quite a lot of variables.

  “Here goes nothing. Activating in three. . .two. . .one.”

  The spider ship took a shot at the Bellerophon, and a massive explosion engulfed the ship for a brief moment before it rapidly shot through the flames and headed toward the gate. The spider ship boosted their engines in pursuit, taken by surprise with the impressive acceleration of their target.

  The jump gate started its activation sequence, with bright-orange lights flashing progressively stronger, a visual indication to any approaching craft that a hyperspace window was about to open.

  The spider ship kept firing increasing amounts of the plasma toward the Bellerophon. Because of their increased rate of fire, each projectile was less powerful than the fully charged ones the spider ship was using when in closer range. Multiple explosions and debris flew off the crummy old ship as it kept accelerating.

  The spider ship, realizing they wouldn’t catch the Bellerophon before it entered the gate mic
ro-jumped and then dropped its cloak. It was now right on top of the Bellerophon as the hyperspace window opened. The beat-up ship was a handful of seconds away from entering the hyperspace window.

  A column of translucent light shot toward the Bellerophon as the enemy deployed a tractor beam, but the beam passed through their target, causing the Bellerophon to stutter in and out of existence.

  At the same time, the flames and smoke from the earlier explosion had just dissipated, revealing there was another Bellerophon. The real one.

  On the bridge, Talon stood in full view of the cracked viewport. A smile spread across his face.

  “Fire at will, make that jump gate disappear. Now!”

  Tar’Lock had already started the firing sequence. The Bellerophon diverted every ounce of power from its engines, life support, and self-repairing systems to only one—the weapon’s systems. Last minute optimization had allowed Tar’Lock to boost their efficiency by forty percent and deliver a sustained beam of red laser energy toward the gate.

  The key would be the precise timing of hitting the gate while it was using all its power reserve to form the hyperspace window. The jump gate blinked before it exploded into a pure inferno, trapping the spider ship dead center inside the kill zone.

  “Goodbye, assholes,” said Talon.

  23

  A couple of enemy fighter drones broke away from their formation and were on Chase’s six.

  Chase checked his own drones and only three were still operational. They had done a bang-up job of keeping the smaller fighters out of the way of the Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Squadrons when they made their runs at bigger targets.

  But the enemy seemed to have a near infinite supply of the damn things, and while the kill ratio was four to one in favor of the Earth Alliance forces, they would eventually all be destroyed if the enemy was given enough time.

  Right now, though, Chase and his friends couldn’t worry about that, as their own StarFury drones were doing what they were programmed to do, which was to divert the smaller craft’s attention while the fleet took care of the larger ships.