She now saw that the Condottieri battlecruiser Regina Margherita was only second rate, whereas the frigates were top-of-the-range, nimbler than she’d planned for, and with more powerful shields. As for the smaller craft launched from the carrier, she saw they were a squadron of fighter-dropships, each carrying a squad of mercenaries and bristling with defensive weapons, but also with short-range torpedoes that would be devastating if they hit.
And the carrier…it was dying! As if it were suffering cyber-attack, the power to its systems reducing one by one.
What you don’t understand will surely kill you, Venix was fond of telling her. She believed him. Though when you’re outnumbered and in a fight to the death, sometimes what you did understand would kill you just as dead.
Two seconds to effective weapons range.
She ignored the rest of the battle space for now and peered with all her strength at the carrier, trying to solve its mystery.
And she was right to do so. The carrier’s systems were shutting down, but in a strictly controlled fashion. All electrical power available was being directed to charge a rear-firing particle cannon mounted from bow to stern. Inside the carrier, Blue could make out six Class-A reactors, which would give the particle cannon an estimated rating of…55 TW. Entropy!
The Condottieri plan now made horrifying sense. The enemy couldn’t risk blowing up Midnight Sun, because the Raknar they’d come for would go to hell with the ship. But slicing her into two hemispheres – as that particle cannon would easily achieve – was a chance worth taking. Unless the enemy was very unlucky, the Raknar aboard would sleep blissfully through all the mayhem, completely unharmed.
Blue’s outer hull trembled with fear.
“Change of plan,” she growled, “we’re going after the carrier. Hold onto your lunches, everybody. Major Sun, prep for dropship launch as best you can with these gees. If Midnight Sun is disabled, take the Raknar down to the planet and keep them and the marines safe.”
Had the crew heard her words? Perhaps. But as she strained every sinew of her metal body to veer away from the scattering frigates and pushed toward a close encounter with the carrier, no words were needed.
Her intentions were translated by the total immersion interface into new course plots on the intelligent glassware of her crew. They’d be receiving flashing command icons and spoken instructions. Blue didn’t know the details. She no more considered how she changed course than a human would articulate detailed instructions to her legs when crossing the street.
She was the Midnight Sun.
Her reactors, engine, and weapons were her heart, muscles, and claws, and the crew – well, they were her nerves and autonomic processes, their expertise her learned competences.
Lasers burned her skin.
Her shields absorbed some of the energy, and at this range, beam diffraction prevented the lasers from cutting through her gleaming hull. Nonetheless, with all facing batteries from seven enemy ships burning her, they hurt. She began to feel trapped in a hot web of fire.
And it was getting hotter.
* * * * *
Chapter 46
Beautiful firefly lights flickered into existence as enemy missile tubes unleashed their deadly payloads.
Blue waved them away with lasers, anti-missile missiles, electronic countermeasures and other defenses, much of which would activate at the appropriate time without needing her active attention.
The frigates and the Regina Margherita battlecruiser could wait. She had to get that carrier before it sliced her clean in two. But the burning web of laser fire was too agonizing to ignore. While trying to keep the same bearing, she began spinning her outer hull, and she opened the vulnerable heat radiator ports on her surface to relieve the burning.
The incoming laser fire was so intense that her efforts to dump heat would only delay by scant seconds the moment when the beams would start cutting through her skin. The exercise also robbed her of a little thrust, so she stopped spinning and endured the searing heat.
Regina Margherita was also maneuvering hard – to what end, she couldn’t tell. Over thirty missiles were still screaming toward Midnight Sun, all with warheads too hardened against her scrutiny to identify their type. And if that weren’t enough, the carrier’s immensely powerful particle cannon was almost at full charge.
In the face of overwhelming odds, Blue responded with what she did best: the unexpected. She dropped her shields.
And danced.
Standard warship configurations delivered thrust out of engines mounted on the stern, secondary engines providing roll, pitch, and yaw, but nominal acceleration.
Midnight Sun was a working relic of the wars that had consumed the galaxy in a forgotten epoch, long before the Union. Her configuration was not of this time. The fusion engines were housed at the center of her spherical form, delivering plasma ejecta through switchable exhaust outlets at eight points on her hull. It was very expensive use of real estate. Compared to contemporary ships of similar displacement, she sacrificed most of her secondary armament, but other ships couldn’t do this…
Blue shut off the drive nozzle that was pushing her toward the carrier and redirected plasma to four nozzles along one hemisphere. A wall of plasma blew out into the path of the incoming missiles.
But she didn’t divert the power evenly, thrusting a little more on one side to set up a dizzying spin that wrapped Midnight Sun in a wreath of plasma. She zigzagged through the black like a cosmic worm, laying a trail of bright ejecta. It was so hot that, not only were electrons ripped from nuclear orbits, but the heavy elements with which she deliberately laced her exhaust now sparkled with nuclear fission.
Blue screamed at the agonizing heat and self-flagellation of radiation.
The milliseconds dragged by, but she had to hold on. She had to get to that carrier. She mined distant human memories to distract from the pain.
Her mother refusing to cry as she waved goodbye to her daughters, Blue unable to watch her out the window from the sub-orbital shuttle that would take them to the training camp, but asking her sister to stream a feed of their mom.
A deeper memory: her father whispering into her ear that she had to cheer the parading soldiers with more gusto, because the secret police would be inside the crowd, watching everybody.
With a last wail of agony that leaked through into ship-wide channels, making all hands flinch with sympathetic agony, she shut down her engines at the closest approach to three of the enemy frigates. Separation was just over a thousand kilometers and closing fast. Not quite optimum weapons range, but close enough.
She checked for pursuing missiles and saw the pain had been worth it. The passage of the enemy missiles through the plasma clouds had completely confused their targeting systems, and they were now speeding uselessly out of the battlespace.
The enemy laser fire had shut off too, but now the nearest frigates reacted, their tracking lasers closing in on her.
Too late, sweetie-pies.
Shutting down her maneuvering engine had freed up power from the two operating reactors, which she now diverted to hull-mounted laser pods.
This close in, she could see inside the frigates, opening a schematic for her perusal.
She wanted to make them hurt. To make them pay for daring to burn her skin.
But she checked herself, channeling her hot rage into cold determination. This was the real reason Gloriana had chosen her. No one else in the galaxy could understand this ancient ship the way she could.
The reason Midnight Sun had survived those ancient wars was because she’d been withdrawn from service due to a critical fault.
The ship was insane.
It was never more than a beat of its engines away from unquenchable bloodlust. It sought danger and risk at every opportunity. It was an untamable wild beast, unpredictable and unrepentant.
Just like Blue.
Human and ship forged a peculiar bond of understanding, an eye between two storms that produced a patch of
clear air where ancient ship and its mortal commander merged into a single rational killing machine.
And that machine waited until its view of the frigates gained enough detail to see not only the location of the enemy’s laser batteries, but the layout of their heat sinks.
Her own lasers were few in number, which was why she relied on careful aiming. She spat laser pulses on ultra-narrow beams to concentrate the energy pressure at their tip. The lasers shot through shields, ablated hull casing, and sliced through coolant pumps, severing the enemy laser batteries from their heat sinks.
Return fire from the frigates’ lasers burned Blue’s skin, already pitted with ugly burns, but the enormous heat generated by their power sources no longer had a safe place to discharge.
AIs in the three nearest frigates shut down the affected lasers. Far too late. Small sections of the frigate hulls nearest these hot points melted until they were too weak to hold in their pressurized contents and burst open.
Blue grinned, her bloodlust on fire. The frigates were venting air, flames, and bodies, but automated systems would shut airtight hatches, and damage control teams would stabilize the stricken vessels.
But Blue wasn’t finished yet. Before she passed beyond this close range, she raked the open wounds of the frigates with broadsides from her point-defense railguns. The tungsten grapeshot sliced through deck panels, avionics, life support, and flesh. The hailstorm passed all the way through the ship before ricocheting off the inside of the far hull for a second round of devastation.
Mind-spearing pain wrenched her away from the pleasure of destruction. It was the carrier; the charge it was carrying held such electrical potential that Blue’s eyes watered.
The carrier needed to turn just a handful of degrees before bringing her deadly beam to slice through Midnight Sun.
“No!” she bellowed and threw everything she had into a lunge from a single plasma plume.
Blue’s metal skeleton groaned in protest, her reinforced frames beginning to buckle. Several crewmembers succumbed too, losing consciousness, the contents of their stomachs, or both. They were still just bare degrees away from that particle cannon’s firing arc.
The last sprint had taken her close to the target. She spun the ship around to present her main armament.
She had just one shot at this, or they were all dead.
All dead…
The human part of her remembered amongst her mortal comrades a freckled face with ginger hair, a saucy wink, and the promise of further adventures. Jamie Sinclair.
She snatched a rapid update of events outside the immediate battlespace. Sinclair was nearing the stargate, but he’d arrived far too soon for the scheduled transition. The Streak turned out to have unexpected claws and fleet heels. The ship they’d bought for the Scorpions was swatting away the pursuing missiles, though many still chased doggedly. Sinclair had a chance. He was still fighting.
And so was she, putting up shields as the carrier’s secondary weapons hit her with lasers and short-range torpedoes.
She shut down her engines temporarily, transferring every last bit of juice into powering the rails of her magnetic accelerator cannons.
Bracing herself for an upping of the pain from the incoming fire that was already unbearable, Blue opened a clear firing aperture in the plane deflector shield and…
Fired!
* * * * *
Chapter 47
On all decks of Midnight Sun, the lights dimmed; the ever-present hum of the air scrubbers died.
Any power Blue decreed was not sacrosanct was being sucked into the capacitors that charged the rails of her four magnetic cannons. Life support was a secondary concern.
Enormous capacitors fizzed with potential, then unleashed rapid pulses of alternating polarity through the charge rails that ran through Midnight Sun’s heart. Jacketed by electromagnetism, and spun by the helix pattern of the charge rails, the ‘biter’ rounds of super-dense metals alloyed with exotic matter moved from rest at the breach to leave the muzzle at hypervelocity, spinning at over a thousand RPM. The carrier was only 500 km away. The first round crossed that space in 1.9 seconds.
The biter’s tip was a modified drill bit originally intended for geo-engineers and F11 miners, the vital fuel deposited over billions of years inside the crushing gravity field of a gas giant’s heart. Ironically, the optimal material for F11 mining was found inside the same gas giant cores.
Automated point-defense batteries on the carrier reacted, flinging out clusters of tungsten shrapnel, which etched away at this first biter round. Lasers cut into it too, and the carrier’s powerful shields began to dissipate its kinetic energy.
Slowed, but still delivering enormous momentum, the still spinning drill bit of the biter made contact with the carrier’s hull at the port bow, where heavy sheets of armor were placed to deflect impacts coming head-on.
The extra armor made no difference.
The round tip ripped through the armor, outer hull, and inner hull, slowing as it penetrated each barrier. As it pushed through the pressurized interior of the capital ship, the air and debris compressed before its path heated rapidly, so when it reached the fuel line near the starboard maneuvering thrusters, the fuel exploded. Flames erupted out of the starboard thrust nozzles an instant before the biter round drilled through the starboard hull and slammed into thick armor plate from the inside.
Robbed of linear and angular momentum, the round could no longer drill through the armor. Instead, it punched through with brute momentum alone, blowing a jagged exit to the wound channel it had blasted through the carrier.
By then, the second round was hitting the port beam before cutting through amidships and missing the CIC by just fifteen feet.
The third round hit the containment systems for reactors four and five, ruining them utterly, and sending the fusion reactors into critical overload.
By the time the fourth round struck the engines, the carrier was already in the process of exploding into a fireball bright enough to temporarily blind the sensors of all nearby ships and cause Blue to blink.
She wallowed in the destruction she had wrought.
No enemy could stand against her!
None would dare.
While she ripped the carrier apart, she’d seen inside and recognized the little Veetanho creatures who crewed this insolent vessel.
She knew them of old. They thought they were a warrior people.
But they were nothing.
Mere children!
She’d teach them. And savor every soul as she ripped them from this life and sent them to the Nightmare Hells.
“Krzggh! H’ll. K’zha! K’zha!”
The Zuparti officer was screaming at her in his native tongue. Captain! Goddess! Incoming! Incoming! Blue didn’t need a translator pendant to understand every nuance. She was an ancient warship and understood that particular alien species well.
And why he was so afraid.
She was headed into a missile barrage from Regina Margherita. The Condottieri battlecruiser was flying away on a diverging vector that would take a long while to come about and close on the Midnight Sun, but her missiles had 1000g thrust. They could place themselves wherever they damned well chose.
She’d been sucker-punched.
Despite flinging up a barrier of extreme range point-defense fire, the churning in her gut told her it wouldn’t be enough. Fifty-three missiles were still inbound and closing fast.
She sang a siren song of ancient electronic countermeasures, but only a half dozen of the incoming missiles would listen.
Again, she lashed at them with point-defense railguns, but she’d spat so much tungsten at the wounded frigates that her ammo feed chambers registered empty. Half of the missiles came through unscathed.
Her final defense – with the missiles already close enough for proximity blast damage, she injected a plasma spray from the engine exhaust nozzle facing them – the ultimate flamethrower from hell.
The missiles b
urned, but the explosive shock she expected from their warheads didn’t hit her.
Just eight missiles came on through her plasma clouds.
She took out one more with a laser, but the surviving missiles were too close to bring weapons to bear, and she was out of time.
At the last instant she remembered the tactical plan she’d agreed to with Lieutenant Flkk’Sss and curled herself protectively around the coldness of Reactor Three.
The missiles targeted her exhaust ports. Nimble as they were, the missiles couldn’t fly up her exhaust chutes, but the secondary payloads they now launched did exactly that.
She felt violated. Invaded by parasites crawling inside her, leaching away her life force. Paralyzing her with toxins.
Her fleshly body was unharmed, but Midnight Sun felt herself being ripped apart from the inside. Human and ship screamed into the black.
And kept on screaming.
* * * * *
Chapter 48
When his acceleration cocoon snapped open, Venix shot out to assess the situation, pushing between crew stations in zero-g.
Midnight Sun was coasting out of the battlespace. Sensors were out, CIC was reduced to green emergency lighting, and its crew stations barely functioned, although internal comms were still online. The ship had lost its power hum but was far from silent; the human captain was screaming.
To Venix, humans often sounded strange, and even the words translated through his pendant rarely made sense, but the screams ripped from Captain Blue’s throat were a universal language of pain that made Venix shudder. Her eyes had rolled back into her head, and her snapping jaws were ripping her lips into bloody tatters. She was thrashing so hard it was fortunate she was still inside her lidless cocoon.
“Medic! Sedate the captain. Someone give her something to bite down on.”
The Midnight Sun (The Omega War Book 2) Page 17