The Expanding Universe

by Craig Martelle

  A massive explosion, stripping away most of the remaining shields, rocked the Ouranos-vouno. There was no way to divert from the gate and allow the shields time to recover, especially not with the extra momentum that the explosion had given the vast ship.

  The last order he managed to get out was "Engines to half power, Shields to maximum." He saw his orders implemented just before the Ouranos-vouno hit the gate and entered the Astral plane.

  Chapter 6

  Ki'antha came back to conscious reality before the alarm started blaring in her fighter. After turning off the autopilot, she checked the controls and systems. The lithe craft responded normally, and all the systems showed green. All the larger ships in the fleet transmitted automatic responses to her status query, indicating that none of their crews were active yet. That meant she was restricted to what was identified by the short-range sensors on her craft. First, she reviewed the last sensor dump from Ouranos-vouno before she'd hit the gate.

  There were three separate enemy fleets, each about two-thirds the size of the remaining Alliance force. Her mind whirled, search for a strategy, in an unaccustomed fashion, as she reviewed the data. With a sudden flash of insight, she could see multiple possibilities. The most probably seemed to that in which the enemy assault transports and landers dropped on the nearest planet in such a fashion as to deny the colony fleet that planet. This outcome would also likely result in the failure of the settlement plan.

  A hostile Cyborg presence in this galaxy, before the Alliance managed to establish itself on any planets, meant that any colonies they set up risked being overrun. The Alliance strategic plan had not taken into account a scenario where the Cyborgs would send a landing force into block colonization. There were few marines and no active army soldiers in the fleet, only naval personnel. The only way they could neutralize the Krahkhan vessels if they landed was to use kinetic strikes from orbit - and the fleet had no mass drivers. No siege component had been considered necessary for the fleet.

  The assault landers were another matter. Faster than the transports, they were designed to make sure their troops made it to the ground. While the Krahkhan vessels transformed upon landing into hardened firebases, the Nemjen class was designed solely to get troops onto the planet safely. Nearly impossible to successfully attack in space due to their heavy armor and shields, they carried no weapons beyond the embarked troops. They were far more useful for reinforcing blockaded or besieged planets than for assaulting a contested one or repelling invasion forces.

  The second possibility was less probable, less bright in her mind. The Cyborg assault ships would be destroyed, but their forces would still manage to prevent colonization by engaging in suicide runs against the Alliance colony fleet. The Cyborg battleships would target the Ouranos-vouno while the smaller enemy vessels attacked the less defended colony ships.

  Ki'antha had to wonder if this was what her mother experienced when she looked at a dataset. It seemed likely. Although she never understood At'kena's explanations for how her ability worked before, everything seemed to click into place now.

  The alarm sounded, and she felt the secondary effects of that aural stimulation. Her heart was pounding in surprise at the loud, harsh sound. Switching it off, she swung the fighter out of the formation it had kept with the Valkyr carrier to indicate she was active. She received a transmission burst with the attack plan. Two of the three flights were to break formation and attack the Krahkhan Assault transport, and the last wing was to engage the enemy fleet vessels. Engagement order would start with the corvettes, moving up to battlecruisers, in order of size. The surviving fighters would focus their attacks on the battleships.

  There was no way the Alliance flights could successfully take out the enemy assault transports and all the Cyborg naval combat ships. They would just have to do the best that they could.

  Ki'antha glanced at the fighter chrono - ten minutes had passed since the clock had started after the jump back from the Astral plane. One of the strange things about that place was no chronometer, no matter how well shielded, functioned there. Time passed during transit, but there was no way to tell how long. Two different people could experience completely different perceptions of how long they have been in the astral during the same trip, even if they entered and exited at identical points.

  Her comm opened on a single point-to-point channel with the leader of the Norskrinjar flight, a Valkyr called Helfrika, "Plan accepted. All flights, flight leaders confirm attack plan. Move and engage targets as they emerge. Norskrinjar and Graki fighters target assault transports. Keltoi flight to start on the combat vessels in designated order." Ki'antha knew that the message would repeat for any pilot who hadn't yet regained their full wits. Only when they broke away from autopilot control would the looped recording cease.

  By this point, more than three-quarters of the agile fighters had broken the autopilot formation and were shaking down into squadrons on converging designated target attack vectors. With over sixty minutes before they would be facing directed fire, a civilian might have thought there was little need for rapid response. However, the combined effects of the stimulant and a desire to avoid any enemy fire created a feeling of urgency that pushed the pilots into action despite the extra time. Many initiated the corkscrewing maneuvers drilled into them to evade anti-fighter fire from point defense stations.

  Helfrika sent out another message. "Jump-virgins, remember to purge your energy build up. Keltoi flight, suggest diversion to engines, Norskrinjar and Graki flight, over-charge your weapons. The Krahkahn class are highly resistant to standard power fighter fire."

  Out of habit, Ki'antha found herself gulping down the nutrient paste from the tube in her helmet. She realized that it wasn't from hunger, which surprised her somewhat. Usually, whenever she recovered from transit, she was at least a little bit hungry. The thought faded from her mind as she swung the fighter around. She aligned her course to intersect with the Cyborg’s transport elements at an acute azimuth angle while considering the position of its flank and the Alliance force deployment.

  Although their target couldn't have recovered over the time since it had left the Astral, she ordered her companions into a light defensive weave. It would slow them marginally, but if those ships had point defense on automatics, the tactic would significantly reduce casualties. It was with some relief that there was no sign of defensive fire as they approached their attack run.

  Following the instructions from her Valkyr trainer, Ki'antha pushed more energy through the fragile craft's guns as she drew from the planes. It was impossible for her to put energy into converters without pulling at least a little more from the Astral Plane. A wave of exaltation flowed through her as the enemy ship's shields flashed in destruction, failing under her wing’s fire. As the defensive layer finally blinked out of existence, a cold premonition chilled her bones. Instinctively, she corkscrewed away, many of her fighter wing following her without orders. She cursed as the first blast from point defense stations slashed the space behind her. From the weight of the fire, it was not just the limited point defense weapons, but also the main battery. Without her unthinking alteration of their approach, the planned standard attack run against a defenseless enemy would have bracketed and destroyed the fighters of her wing.

  Ki'antha bitterly cursed the lateness of the premonition as she saw a half dozen of her precious comrades disappear into fireballs. She should have expected the enemy to wait for clean sensor hits on the attack craft before firing. A jump capable ship built up a 'fog' on their shields as they traveled through the astral. They needed to be manually cycled - or brought down - to clear the sensor's view through them.

  "All ships, be aware of point defense fire. Response from targets on automatic." She could at least warn the others. Adjusting their strategy would reduce the overall effectiveness of the fighter attacks. Rather than focusing the attacks on the joint locations, they would have to attack as individuals. This would increase the time it took to wear down the en
emy’s passive defenses.

  Performing a sharp turn, Ki'antha fed her frustration and anger through the capacitors. She was shocked at the size of the explosions that tortured the Kharakahn. Within minutes, the massively overcharged fighter cannon fire from her wing was breaking through to the internals of the doomed vessel. Automatics darkened her cockpit as she pulled up from her third run. She could hear whoops of victory over the com-net as the enemy ship broke apart in waves of fiery destruction.

  Something bothered her, though. All the ships were heading into the liquid water zone of the solar system. There were three planets in that area. Predictably, all the ship’s computers had targeted the central one as the most likely to be compatible with life. Ki'antha frowned at her readouts. The enemy assault ships were suddenly pulling away from the colony fleet far faster than they had been. It seemed likely that the destruction of one of their vessels had triggered a contingency program. Running a ship’s engines without manual input was risky. A single bubble in power plant output could shut the whole thing down, killing drive speed. A worse case would result in a catastrophic failure.

  It was then that she saw the shift in the enemy ship positioning. The five remaining Kharakhans were steadily drawing away from each other, separating into a dispersal pattern as they went. Still a day or more out from the planet, it wasn’t a problem yet. The fighters could easily dodge the enemy Nemjen-class ships that moved to interdict fire from the main Alliance fleet. The lighter Cyborg vessels, the fully jump capable destroyers, were now showing signs of movement.

  The Alliance fighters would have to move quickly, and she worried about pilot fatigue if they gained too much separation. Ki'antha would have to send ships back to the Ouranos-vouno and carriers when exhaustion started to take its toll. By the time their force engaged the fourth vessel of the dispersing Cyborg force, she was worried she might not have enough effective fighters to take down the fifth ship’s shields. It was going to be a long day for them all.

  * * *

  Othan groaned as he awoke in his command chair. He'd been traveling aboard warships through astral jumps for decades, and typically he felt fine after transit. However, his ship didn't usually have its shields nearly destroyed before moving through an Astral g

  ate. He glanced at the ship chronometer and looked again more carefully. Thirty-five minutes was a far shorter jump disorientation recovery time than expected. He had been certain that Ouranos-vouno's crew would take far longer to recover the Astral echoes than that. He could see other officers on the command deck begin to move normally, and groans and moans were coming from other duty stations as well. Obviously, whatever had reduced the echoes had affected other people. Many of the officers exhibited similar symptoms to those that he could feel reverberating in his own body. A massive headache and aching joints were the least of those.

  He looked in question at Al'kena, who had been working on a console since before he regained functionality. She caught his glance and answered his unasked question, "With the reduced shielding, the Astral echoes dissipated far faster than expected. Other consequences of the reduced shielding are as yet unknown."

  Nodding to her in appreciation for both the answer and her perception, Othan punched the battle stations alarm. "All parasites launch. Prepare for ramming efforts. Defend colony ships. Ouranos-vouno is now expendable. Protect the colony ships at all costs."

  Ouranos-vouno rocked and jerked. Alarms began to howl, creating an assault on the ears to add to the urgency of action. Looking at the sensor board, he saw red damage alerts covering the entire jump gate room. One of the officers on the deck responded instantly, "Damage control to gate room, corpsmen to the gate room." He hoped desperately that Jove and his companions were okay. Every individual in the fleet owed them a debt that none could repay. Without Jove and his team’s efforts, the fleet transit to another galaxy would have never been attempted. Let alone actually made the trip successfully.

  Quickly reviewing the fresh scans, he could see the fighters were achieving limited success against the damned planetary assault force. The small group of ships that had been sent against the naval forces was achieving a much greater level of success. Evidently, the Cyborgs had heavily refitted the standard Kharakhan's shield systems.

  It would still be up to the main fleet to take care of those two Nemjin landers. Their presence and position would intercept any attempt by the Alliance fleet to assist the He'iols class fighters with long-range missile strikes.

  A plan formed in his head. "Relay orders for the colony ships and their screening forces to make a hyperbolic arc route around the enemy assault force towards the planet. Keep on repeat on each dedicated ship channel until you get a message-received response. Ouranos-vouno is to move against the enemy Nemjin vessels. The rest of the naval fleet is to proceed against Cyborg naval forces as they come online. Fighters are to continue their strikes for as long as possible, then return to motherships."

  * * *

  Ki'antha looked at her much-reduced strike. She was now getting scanner updates from Ouranos-vouno. In the increasing time periods between attacks on the disbursing Kharakhans, she was reviewing the data. There was nothing the wing leader could do to affect the battle taking part outside of her fight. The best thing that she could do was to continue leading the strikes. She knew she was already showing early symptoms of Astral Exposure Toxicity. That meant she'd received a larger dose than expected and was being less successful in purging the excess than she had hoped.

  In this situation, one of the symptoms of AET was an ally rather than an enemy. She didn't feel tired, there was a feeling of energy that she hadn't experienced before in her life. It kept pushing her onwards, without even considering returning to Ouranos-vouno for rest or treatment.

  It was just as well. The hardened shields of the Kharakhans were proving troublesome, and Ki'antha was concerned about the fact that they were blocking attempts to scan for other modifications that might have been made to the ships. The second ship they'd taken out surprisingly quickly. It had gone up in the same strike that had accounted for the last of its shields. One fighter had reported box launchers showing up on scans just before it had exploded, but that made no sense. The external launchers were one-shot weapons and would have been impossible for a ship to reload this far from any support. Besides, although using a missile to kill a fighter was overkill, surely if the enemy had the weapon, they would have used them on her flights.

  There was an alarm from scanners as two of the battleships in the enemy fleet performed a short-range point-to-point jump. Ki'antha swore across the open channel. There were only a handful of naval ships that had been held close to the colony ships. A small group of cruisers and a pair of battlecruisers. The rest had been focused on the systematic destruction of the Cyborg forces where they were, not where they could appear.

  There was still an hour before her fighter would be in range of the next Kharakhan's point defense. The colony ships scattered. With only two battleships jumping in proximity there was a good chance at least two, if not three, of the colony ships could manage to avoid action against the battleships, especially if the screening force managed to disable the battleships' engines.

  To her surprise, the Cyborgs targeted only one colony ship, the Jehed Traveler. The embattled ship responded by shifting its track further from the remaining critical vessels, effectively sacrificing themselves to enable the survival of the others. While the other races had opted to mix the cargoes of colonists, the Jehed had insisted on 'sole cargo' colony ships, although they had agreed to put some colonists in Ouranos-vouno like everyone else.

  The action was either out of arrogance or foresight. Considering her past experience with the race, Ki'antha had thought originally it was arrogance. With the incredible focus that the Cyborgs were placing on that specific vessel, it now seemed to be foresight. As the battleships closed on the colony ship and began to fire, the targeted ship used one last trick. One that it wasn't supposed to have. It opened a
gate and fled into the Astral plane. The two enemy cruisers closest to it attempted to follow through the gate. Although the Cyborgs must have pushed their drives past sanity, the pursuit was only partially successful. One enemy made it through the gate, but the other disappeared in a flash as the gate slammed closed.

  That was something she'd never heard of happening before. The gates were supposed to stay open if any matter was in transit through them. The possibility of controlling the closing of the gate as a defensive tactic had been tested as a possible weapon to use against pursuing Cyborg forces. During the first six months after the enemy had started following fleets and ships through gates, researchers had tried repeatedly but had never succeeded. Until now.

  She let a silent prayer go out to the Jehed Traveler as her craft closed on the fifth Kharakhan. Two more assault landers left, and the two wings tasked to destroy the enemy attack force would have achieved their goals. The colony ships would be safe to land or travel to nearby systems.

  * * *

  Many of her pilots had been sent back to their carriers, their exhaustion showing in the growing erratic movement of their fighters. The fleet battle was now over. Ouranos-vouno and the Alliance naval forces had defeated the Cyborg fleet but at a terrible cost. Even Ouranos-vouno herself had taken serious damage to her drive systems. The carriers were the only relatively intact ships, having been held back to receive returning Keltoi fighters. Rescue vessels had repeatedly been launched from the command ship and carriers, pulling any remaining crew members from the far more brutally damaged fleet ships.

  The remaining strike force was nearing the planet, tracking their target, the last surviving Cyborg vessel in the system. The world showed on Ki'antha's screens as a beautiful blue-green, with white ice caps on opposite ends. It looked to have a variety of environments rarely seen on life-giving worlds, at least in their home galaxy. She was having trouble with her weapons, and other pilots had reported unexplainable problems with their engines and other systems. Problems that were outside what happened from astral travel or overuse. It was as if the laws of physics that they knew had picked up different characteristics in this galaxy.