A Bellicose Dance

by Patrick M J Lozon

  Eventually, it happened.

  A darkness swept over him, chilling him to the very core of his being. It was suffocating. He searched around desperately. A small piercing light flickered beyond. He rushed toward it. Warmth returned. He moved closer to the light. It was familiar. It was Aviore. Something was wrong. He could feel it within her. Fear. She was running from something, she kept calling his name. But the cold burned into him, and he could not move closer.

  He opened his eyes and found his body draped in sweat. The lights seemed bright and intense.

  No this was not a dream. Not this time. Aviore was in trouble.

  He ran to the cockpit.

  She was out there, somewhere. He would find her.

  He slid into the seat, forced himself into a quiet, meditative state again, pushing out the jittery fear.

  Focus. Let it come.

  Where? Follow the warmth.

  His hands moved autonomously to set course. The Dancing Queen surged to acroluc. Light-years flashed by, passing by millions of suns, planets, galaxies. Despite the energies at work, the immense power of travel, it felt like he was still far away from an unreachable point.

  Time felt like it was standing still. It crept along, second by second, each minute lasting an eternity.

  Was he even going in the right direction? Should he turn back, contact the other Alliance ships and start a proper search?

  He opened his eyes, focused his attention on the tracing scans, manipulating re-scans to maximize the distance, watching for any hint. The chronometer indicated hours had clicked by. He considered breaking from his course, but could not convince himself to do it.

  Trust the feeling.

  He could attempt a link back to Xilo, but that could compromise his position if there was an enemy involved. Instead, he adjusted the tracing scanners. Something came up: a faint reading on the outer edge of the tracing image. He manipulated the scans to achieve a tighter beam, his heart pounding in his temples as the anticipation burned in his gut. Deep breaths helped settle his nerves, but a new burning pain began, coupled with a heaviness in his chest, like a burning weight.

  Calm down, damn it. Let this go.

  He diverted his thoughts, drained the tension from his body, recalling his training with the Sisters-of-Soom. Stress gave way to calm, and the pain subsided.

  Images were defining themselves more clearly on the tracing scans. Multiple ships - familiar tracing resonances. It was the Freedom. But there were other vessels swarming about her, and the scans confirmed they were Xi-Empire signatures. As he feared, she was under attack.

  He deployed all cannon and engaged auto-targeting, simultaneously rolling the ship over end-for-end for maximum deceleration. The Dancing Queen blasted down below acroluc, and they dropped into normal space just off the port side of the Freedom.

  The tactical told the whole story. There were almost 50 enemy ships, and only one of the Freedom's escort destroyers remained intact. The destroyer was fighting desperately, engaged with multiple attackers. The Freedom herself seemed adrift, her main burners offline. Large gaping holes were strewn along her hull.

  There were hundreds of thousands of people in there!

  The enemy saw him now. They were already maneuvering to attack.

  Let them.

  He opened a com link to Xilo, hoping to reach them before he engaged. He doubted he had time to solidify the link if he could even establish one. Four ships had already aligned on his course and were moving to intercept.

  Missiles started for him. Ryan broke trajectory and abandoned the effort. He pulled the Queen through evasive maneuvers as the cannon took out the missiles.

  He checked the tactical again. The last destroyer took a crippling hit.

  Far too many ships. How could he do this? He had to. He had no choice.

  The rear cannon auto-targeted and found a victim.

  One down, many more to go.

  He swung the Queen into a tight 180 and laid out a suppressing blast. One enemy vessel took a direct hit, another passed through the barrage unscathed. He brought the Queen to bear on the escaping ship and simultaneously pulled into focus three more destroyers as well. They scuttled apart, but not quickly enough. The Queen’s long-range cannon bursts took them broadside under an incessant staccato. In seconds the plasma burned through their shielding, through their hulls, and into their interior. The destroyers went offline, explosions raking along their lengths.

  Four more down. How many to go?

  Time and time again, he outmaneuvered around his attackers, their constant barrage had now blackened the Dancing Queen with scars of battle. The raw energy of near misses were consistently squelched by the ship’s extended shielding. His attackers were beginning to get annoyed at their consistent failure. They broke into squadrons, abandoning the Freedom in groups, intent to wipe him out by sheer force.

  Now with multiple squadrons on his tail, he maxed-out the lower burners, attempting to pull his caustic pursuers away. The Queen jumped forward, just as his followers moved into lethal range.

  He checked the ship vitals. Energy capacitor temperatures were climbing into critical range, and the anti-gravs were dangerously close to failing over to their backups.

  “Gem, engage the auxiliary anti-gravs, hopefully, it will draw off the capacitors' excess.”

  The enemy was coming at him from all angles, the black space alight with white, angry plasma. They swarmed in, flying at him in a confusion of trajectories. Ryan saw an opportunity and took it. Some pursuers matched his vectors. He pulled into the path of an oncoming destroyer, sweeping by so close he swore the two ships rubbed hulls. Explosions behind showered debris in all directions.

  Two more down.

  He passed in close to the Freedom. He could see the blurred images of determined turret gunners through their opaque shielding. So he moved in closer, drawing in his pursuing Xi-Empire ships. The turret gunners pasted the unsuspecting ships with multiple concentrated blasts, crippling some, damaging others.

  Following along the Freedom's hull, he met up with a half a dozen enemy ships that remained clamped on, like so many parasites. He pulled the Queen around and fired the cannon with surgical precision, effectively immobilizing but leaving them intact so as not to further breach the Freedom’s interior atmosphere. The stranded crew would now have to contend with the thousands of armed and angry ex-slaves. They had no escape.

  He pulled away and continued down the full length of the Freedom, hugging the hull in hopes to confuse the enemy's tracing image and buy an advantage. The tremendous ship's width narrowed as he came up on her nose. Suddenly, Gem seized control, raising the front burners to maximum. A massive cruiser loomed up before the Queen, skimming just past the Freedom's nose.

  Ryan yanked the Queen to the side, diverting from impending collision, but the maneuver cost him a precious second. The cruiser’s lower turrets had him in her sights now. They bombarded a wall of plasma at close distance, pounding the Queen in her belly.

  A capacitor blew, filling the engineering bay with lethal radioactive fragments. Containment controls automatically triggered and circulation systems auto-sealed. Gem coordinated her army of bots to chase down the repair. The capacitor cooling system had overloaded, and the temperature inside the Queen was already beginning to climb. Both primary and secondary capacitors were peaked beyond their designed maximum, and they couldn’t take much more.

  Ryan shut the shields down, simultaneously orchestrating a rollover to avoid another approaching barrage of cannon fire. Lethal white and blue light rained past, barely missing him. A destroyer came up on the port side. Ryan fired back. He didn't miss.

  “Ziggy, we need to drop their numbers faster. Load a star-killer.”

  The cruiser had diverted her attention to the mothership and was busily pounding her without mercy. He flew in close, distracting the cruiser’s attention, drawing the immense warship into a game of chase.

  It took the bait, abandoning its attack on
the Freedom, intent upon a small, seemingly insignificant white ship.

  “Give me shields again, Gem.”

  “We are having difficulty stabilizing the feeds. Instantiating the shields may introduce a non-terminating, recursive drain.”

  “We may not make it this time, my friend. Instantiate the shields.”

  Ryan pushed the burners, leaping far ahead of the deadly monstrous killer, but it was not enough to dissuade the deadly pursuer. He allowed it to close in on them with each ticking second, sweat dripping off his temples, waiting for a sign from his automated friend.

  The signal came into his mind, as a short acknowledgment: shields enabled, missile loaded.

  Wasting no time, he launched the potent weapon. The predator was almost upon him now. From such a close range, its defenses were useless. The weapon penetrated the cruiser's shields and sunk itself deep mid-ships. A moment later, something dreadful occurred within the ship. The entire top section of the cruiser literally disappeared, crumpling into itself. Outer hull sections peeled off and burst outwards, propelled by some invisible titanic force. An immense section collided with the Queen, only to skip across her shields, propelled by invisible titanic forces. In seconds the cruiser lit to bright, white light, then blinked into a maelstrom of twisting energy, ripping and rotating into a reddish sphere that swallowed, then burst into blue-violet rings of energy.

  Gravity alarms fired off in deafening screams within the Queen’s cabin, as smoke billowed up from the lower levels and started to fill the cockpit.

  The port anti-grav controller had burst into flame, rippling out a gravity wave that wrenched through the ship. Ryan fought down a momentary bout of nausea as the starboard anti-grav compensated. He scanned the diagnostics over the vaskpar.

  “Gem, have Ziggy attend to that fire and replace the control unit.”

  The Queen rocked again in the wake of multiple, external gravity waves emanating from the reddish sphere, which by now was slowly dispersing. He fought the controls, attempting to maintain course attitude, and at the same time run another string of lethal blasts into a group of oncoming destroyers.

  Alarms quieted as the star-killer’s legacy waned in the distance. Nothing remained of the gigantic cruiser.

  Another rash of lethal blasts passed the ship on the starboard side. The Xi-destroyers were closing in, obviously angered by the loss of their cruiser. Three more destroyers were now in mortal proximity. He launched a pair of standard missiles and retreated, jostling the Dancing Queen through a drill of maneuvers in order to avoid oncoming fire. The ships broke off their attack when they realized they had acquired their own deadly tails. Their attempts to destroy the missiles proved futile. They pulled away from pursuing the Dancing Queen, accelerating desperately, but the Xeronian engineered weapons caught up with them easily, bursting them open in a concussion of massive explosions, their internal atmosphere burning away into vacuum.

  The tactical showed multiple destroyers converging. Ryan put the Queen into a full reverse. The front burners bathed the cockpit in intense white.

  Another wave of nausea came on.

  “Port anti-grav reinstated into service.”

  “Could’ve warned me,” Ryan complained.

  “I am warning you. Energy levels are building. The feeds remain unbalanced.”

  “I’ve bogies crawling all over. Let’s deal with one problem at a time. Tell Ziggy to launch another missile, maximum payload. Keep it dark. I want it to detonate where their course vectors meet.” He painted the picture in his minds’ eye. It was enough for Gem to make the necessary calculations.

  “Deploying with minimal signature in 3..2..1.”

  They started taking on intense cannon fire.

  “He watched the shield dispersal energies as they flipped from positive-to-negative crazily. A little closer, a little stronger, and they’d be hitting past critical limits.

  Another volley. Alarms sounded as the capacitors peaked extending the shields, only to roll out a cascading ripple – creating a temporary opening in the shields.

  A blast penetrated and hit the hull.

  Breach.

  He winced, literally feeling the pain.

  "Rear cannon main power conduit interrupted, re-routing," reported Gem.

  Ryan yanked at the controls, pulling the ship straight toward an oncoming destroyer. The Queen's cannon blasted away in a continuous stream, drilling into the enemy, leaving behind a cloud of yellowish iridescence. He checked the tactical. Multiple signatures were about to reach convergence.

  At least the Freedom was far enough away now.

  “Gem…”

  “Standby.”

  The weapon detonated in a wave of atomic destruction. But Ryan wasn’t sticking around to witness the fireworks. Instead, the Dancing Queen jumped to acroluc, leaving a spiraling, engulfing storm in its wake as multiple destroyers were engulfed in a wave of destruction.

  Proximity warnings sounded as the Queen brushed past yet another destroyer. Ryan cycled the anti-gravs with only a thought. The destroyer lurched and twisted in an all-too-familiar pattern. As they moved away, the writing metal mass burst apart, spewing out its crew into the black of space. The Queen herself contorted slightly, although the anti-gravs auto calibrated to avoid amplification. Ryan rode out the wave, monitoring the ship's stats cautiously. When it subsided, he restored the anti-grav feeds to normal, allow the gravity plates to take hold and pull back into standard gravity.

  His heart lurched inside his chest. Pain returned in torrents. With one arm numb, he switched control over totally to his vaskpar, guiding the ship back to the Freedom, to drop under its belly.

  The anti-gravs protested yet again with a deafening whine as the ship’s mass slowed to a near complete stop. He eased the Queen up into the recesses of the burner conduits and waited, watching the tactical. He had not seen the explosion generated from the missile, but evidence of its effect lay strewn throughout the space where he had once been. There were only a few of the enemy left now. If he could pull this off, he would have the advantage of surprise. They may think he’s been destroyed.

  He rubbed his chest with his good hand, concentrated on slowing down his now racing pulse.

  Just like the Queen’s pulsating capacitor feeds, on the brink of chaos. It was getting bad. Worse than ever before. Maybe he should have listened to Aviore. But there wasn't any time before. Now he was going to die, out here, alone.

  But it would be good to rest.

  No.

  Aviore was still in trouble. He couldn't.

  Ziggy walked into the cockpit, his jerky movement graced in a dreamlike haze. The robot injected something into his arm. A burning raced through his body, into every joint, every facet, flowing through every blood vessel, into every cell. Instantly the world around him shattered like glass and came back into sharp focus.

  "Thanks, old friend. You may have just saved my life."

  "This solution is only temporary,” replied Gem. “You need a medical procedure."

  "Give me another dose."

  "That could do irreparable damage."

  "I have to go in. I have to find her. I can't reach her on the Par. Something is wrong."

  A long hesitation. "I understand, Captain."

  Ziggy administered the second shot.

  "The remaining ships have now attached to the hull and are actively boarding. Two remain on patrol. I do believe, as you surmised, that they think we are deceased."

  Ryan reviewed the tactical. One of the patrol ships was going to pass almost directly underneath him.

  "All the better for us."

  “Can you rebalance the capacitors?”

  “We are currently printing some replacement components.”

  “Then we re-engage and cross our fingers.”

  He waited for the ship to appear, then brought the Queen down just meters away from its hull, firing the belly turret into the stern drive area. The destroyer started to explode underneath him. The Queen mad
e it out, narrowly missing being crushed between the two ships.

  The other patrol was sweeping in, laying down a string of fire. Ryan pointed the Queen in the direction of an intercepting ship and maxed the burners. For a brief, almost imperceptible movement, he had the positional advantage and took it. Long-range cannon did their work, carving out sections of the oncoming destroyer's hull. But the ship held course, refusing to veer away. Ryan deployed a missile at close range. It flashed away, penetrated through the enemy ship's hull and shot out the stern, exploding harmlessly out in space. He cussed openly, pulling the Queen into an opposite vector. The other ship shot by, powerless and mortally crippled.

  The boarding ships were next on his list. One managed to get free but wasn't able to align its cannon in time. The Queen's impulse cannon split it cleanly in half.

  He brought the tactical tracing out to mid-range and performed as a full sweep. Only two ships remained, and the one was racing up on his stern. He swung the Queen down under the cover of the Freedom’s wing just in time to avoid a ruinous barrage.

  His pursuer was rushing in, using the Freedom as cover. The ship appeared in an angry flash. He whipped the Queen around to avoid another volley of fire and headed along the wing, destroyer in pursuit.

  The Par was down, so he attempted a com link to the bridge as this was the only communications left.

  Kanook's bloody face appeared, behind him, a bridge draped in thick, black smoke.

  “Commander, good to see you. I see you have a tail."

  “Portside cannon is still active, if you’d like to…”

  “Standby, Kanook. Try not to burn off my ass.”

  The Queen passed into the dispersal range of the gigantic port cannon. Ryan gave it a split second before jumping the burners to maximum. Behind him, a blast of blinding intensity simply vaporized the destroyer class ship.

  Only one left, now.

  The last functioning Xi-destroyer was tethered to the Freedom. He moved in cautiously, systematically firing the cannon, careful to avoid hitting the Freedom. His last staccato proved effective, slicing through its shields and bursting open its hull. He left the fatally crippled ship and headed for the docking bays.