High energy photons flayed at the crystalline armor covering the Sword. The armor performed as designed, channeling the heat and energy outward from the point of incidence, spreading it over a wider area in an attempt to let it dissipate harmlessly into space, but the power poured in much too fast. Plates swelled and buckled, and finally melted through as the beams continued to fire on the same section of armor.
Alarms sprang up on Nathan’s screen as the hull was breached. A wisp of gas erupted from the mostly evacuated space below the breach. Then a crew icon went red—Emil Harmon, the weapons tech monitoring the dorsal radar array, fell off the grid. Nathan winced. He keyed an urgent command to the Helm, but before he could pass along the order, Weston responded.
The Sword of Liberty began to spin along her long axis, denying the enemy weapons a single point on which to concentrate their fury. The still-firing beams went from burning holes through the armor to tracing glowing circles and arcs of semi-melted armor all around the mission hull. Hull plates swelled, but now stayed intact, dissipating the energy through the surrounding plates as originally intended. And all the while, the railgun continued to fire.
The spin—coupled with the high acceleration, and a renewed, if lesser, jerking from evasive maneuvers—threatened to overcome even Nathan’s anti-nausea doping. He spared a glance at the crew status, and saw that several people showed amber, unconscious or otherwise unresponsive as they all tried to endure Weston’s efforts to keep them alive. Nathan’s lips were peeled back in an acceleration induced rictus, but he felt his attempt to smile as he saw that Kris’s icon was still a strong, vibrant green.
Back on the tactical view, the four missiles launched at the Cathedral reached terminal and separated into 24 maneuvering warheads. The lasers inundating the Sword were joined by additional beams seeking out these smaller targets, but before they could take any of them out, small explosions peppered the hull of the alien ship. Railgun rounds rained down upon the Cathedral, unseen and unopposed as they lacked the brilliance of the destroyer’s or the missiles’ active drives, and since the Deltans did not seem to use any form of radar.
It would take more rounds than the Sword of Liberty could carry to destroy the Cathedral with the small projectiles, but the ploy worked. The much-deadlier warheads closed a great deal further than previous salvoes had, and they began to lase at their optimal range.
Flaring out in white light, the fusion blasts cast tightly collimated beams of energy into the Cathedral. Slag and incandescent gas boiled away from the ship’s hull. It was a more rugged construction than the Junkyard, but it was by no means rugged enough. Lasers abandoned the destroyer and again shifted their focus onto the encroaching warheads, but they were now too close and too numerous to take out completely.
A pair of warheads came near enough to switch modes. Fusion fire blossomed close aboard and engulfed whole sections of the Cathedral, blasting arches flat and setting its stones ablaze. More importantly, its lasers abruptly stopped as something critical within broke. The ship appeared defenseless, and Nathan cheered inside his head.
Before the last few warheads could administer the coup de gras, though, the Cathedral suddenly swung out of position. The warheads flew harmlessly through the space she had just occupied, their explosions wasted upon an empty void. Nathan jerked in shock and expanded his tactical view.
The Control Ship swept up over the drive’s horizon, pulling the Cathedral and the Polyp around it until they were arrayed to its north and south rather than along the equatorial plane. The Cathedral was burned and pummeled, and the Polyp was little better, its organic curves and intricate, tattooed designs marred by x-ray laser gouges and blackened sections of hull. The Control Ship’s overlapping, lobster-like metallic plates were also gouged and burned, but to a lesser degree. She looked battle hardened rather than battle bled.
Nathan tapped in an order and the Sword broke northward and made for a higher orbit, seeking salvation through distance and greater maneuvering room. The Control Ship would have none of that, however. A dozen lasers blazed from its hull, each striking the destroyer and burning glowing paths along her hull. Now, not only the forward mission hull was at risk, but the radiators and the propulsion module were attacked as well.
The propulsion module, built of the same materials as the mission hull, fared as well as it had under the onslaught from the Cathedral. The radiator spine, however, was unarmored and relatively fragile by necessity. Radiator plates shattered and slagged, spinning away from the rapidly maneuvering ship. Torrents of coolant evaporated from broken lines and heat loads rose threateningly on all the ship’s systems.
The radiator had always been their Achilles Heel. Vital to the thermodynamic heat engines throughout the ship, it was their chief vulnerability, and they could not fight or survive without it.
Nathan winced at the options available to him. They were much closer to the Control Ship than he ever intended. He could either turn the Sword completely away from the their enemy, and hope they could gain sufficient maneuvering distance before the drive was irreparably damaged—or he could point directly at their enemy and close to knife-fighting range. Either way, he had to interpose the armored portions of the hull between the incoming fire and the radiator, or they were doomed.
Nathan tapped his order in and groaned as the ship swung around. The nose of the destroyer pointed straight at the incoming fire. All four thrust pylons lit up with nearly random jets of light as the ship leapt back and forth along a suicidal closing vector, dodging away from the enemy lasers as much as possible, even as their range fell away to make the beams steadily more effective.
At his order, missiles shot outward from the port and starboard cells, one after another. The railgun fired continuously, targeting each individual laser battery aboard the Control Ship. The Sword of Liberty’s laser batteries fired as well, still too far out to cause any damage, but hopefully enough to blind any targeting sensors coming after them.
Damaged beyond capacity, the radiators were no longer able to discard the ever rising heat produced by all the systems running on the ship. Coolant diverted instead to internal heat sinks, blocks of ice nearby every major system on the ship. The blocks absorbed the waste heat, melting, and then boiling away to relieve the crippling temps each system produced. Steam erupted from vents all around the Sword of Liberty.
Seen from the distant re-trans pod, the destroyer was a valkyrie afire, a shooting star pouring the most devastating forces the Earth could muster at an enemy that still remained unexplained, mysterious. It was awesome to behold.
And ultimately futile.
Responding to the 32 missiles and then 192 warheads released from the Sword, the Control Ship shifted its depressingly effective laser fire away from the destroyer to the individually targeted weapons. Too many flared out into the flames of failure, rather than the brilliant flashes of lasing fusion. Too few closed enough to do real damage with their beams. And the destroyer was still not spared. Now the Control Ship’s silvery beam reached out.
The beam of particles struck the spinning, maneuvering destroyer on the dorsal surface first, and then inscribed a tight spiral around the mission hull. Unlike the lasers, though, the damage here was not lessened by the spin. Wherever the strange beam struck, the hull wavered, becoming indistinct and collapsing into dust. If anything, their defensive spin spread the damage around more than if they had remained steady.
Nathan cursed to himself, even as he praised the increasingly accurate fire from the railgun and the lasers. The warheads were mostly expended now, and though the damage they had dealt was impressive, it did not seem to be having nearly enough effect on the Control Ship. The better aimed railgun and laser fire, on the other hand, at least made a few “mission kills”—several laser emplacements aboard the alien ship had gone dark. But soon, those that remained would again turn on the Sword.
That assumed they would still be a viable target, though. Whatever the silvery beam did, it appeared frighteni
ng in its effectiveness. Silvery dust streamed away from the hull as plates were eaten away. And the damage lingered, growing outward from the stricken areas of the hull even after the beam had passed by. If the rate his hull was eaten continued, it would be through the armor plates and into the pressure hull within a couple of minutes.
A text popped up in his vision. It was from Kris. “NANOTECH. PARTICLE BEAM IS ASSEMBLOR CARRIER. HAVE IDEA. DROP TO LOW ACCEL. MUST EXIT POD TO TRY.” Nathan was confused, barely registering what she was trying to say, but he did as she asked, texting the order to Weston at the Helm.
The ship went into near freefall, still aimed at the Control Ship and still firing away. Recognizing the threat, as well as their greater vulnerability while no longer maneuvering, Simmons had his watchstanders concentrate on the source of the silvery beam. While waiting for the shots to reach their target, Nathan focused on Kris’s icon. It and that of her Electrical Officer had gone red as soon as they left their pods, and he felt helpless and adrift as he waited for her to come back online.
Explosions flared upon the Control Ship, blanketing the area where the “assemblor” beam fired from. The beam cut out intermittently and then faded away to nothing, shut off at the source. Nathan almost cheered, but the nano-scale eating machines that Kris believed them to be had already been deposited on the hull and continued their destructive work. Whether the beam kept re-depositing them or not, they would eventually turn the ship into dust if Kris was unable to stop them.
Her voice cut in to the tactical net, causing an intense surge of relief in Nathan. “Okay! Since we’re fresh outta missiles, I decoupled their power cables from the main bus and grounded it to the outer hull. I’m gonna close the breaker and charge the exterior of the ship. Hopefully those suckers are small and fragile enough to kill with a little excessive voltage.”
Nathan shook his head, exasperated. “Stop talking about it and just do it, CHENG!”
“Fine! Just don’t be mad if I pop every other breaker on the ship in the process. Here goes.”
The speakers in his helmet squealed and popped, and his VR display flickered and went black for a moment, but it came back almost immediately. Red status icons blinked for all of the crew and for a number of systems. Railgun and laser fire had stopped. Panicked, Nathan called out, “Kris! XO! COB! Report.”
“Captain, XO, I think we’re okay. It’s just the monitoring systems and weapons that have gone offline. COB, get verbals from every station on the general net, and I’ll work with the department heads on system status and recovery.”
“Roger, XO,” Edwards agreed.
Nathan took a deep breath. “Okay. CHENG, report. Did it work?”
He looked at the hull cameras even as she spoke. The spirals of damage were no longer growing and no more dust streamed away from the ship. Kris spoke up, her voice filled with static. “Yep. I think so. No more critters eating the hull anyway. I’ve got a lot of smoke and electrical damage back here, but we’re still in the fight.”
Nathan took a look at the battlespace, considering that. The Control Ship was gouged and blackened, quiescent for the moment as it apparently contemplated its own damage. Their warheads were all gone, either expended in the attack or blasted by the Deltan defenses. The nanotech beam was also gone, as well as several of its laser emplacements. For the moment, the battle was paused, both ships wounded, warily watching their foe.
“Nope,” he said into the net. “We’re done. There’s no way we can stop them with what we have left, and we’ve given them pause with what we’re able to do. It’s time for retreat. They don’t know that we’re dry at the moment, and I want to get away from here before they can repair their systems enough to try to take us. Everybody back into your pods. Helm, give me flank acceleration for the horizon and let’s see if we can make it home before they do.”
“Roger that, sir,” Weston answered. “Fifteen g’s in ten seconds, everybody!”
“We’re buttoned up down in Engineering,” Kris yelled. “Let ‘er rip.”
Weston fired the thrusters, turning perpendicular to the Control Ship, and the propulsion hull lit up with flank thrust. The drive star began to roll by beneath them, putting distance and the burning horizon between themselves and the Deltans.
But the Control Ship—dormant while they had cruised by at a constant velocity—awoke now to full destructive fury, unwilling to accept a draw.
Six lasers shot out, all aimed for the same point at the weakest area of their hull, along the damaged radiator spine. Radiator panels burned straight through and came apart. Allocarbium bracing, made up of hardened alloys and nearly indestructible carbon nanotubes, vaporized under the thermal onslaught. Gantries, pipes, and shafts parted, and the spine of the ship cracked right down the middle.
Fluids and vapor shot out from the damage and the destroyer snapped in two.
The propulsion hull barreled past the mission hull at flank thrust, sending both halves tumbling away from one another before the drive shut down. Cut off from all power, the mission hull went dark, the data stream it had continually sent toward the re-trans pod now silent. The propulsion hull, never equipped with communication antennas, was robbed of a final voice as well.
The Sword of Liberty was no more.
February 8, 2047; White House Oval Office; Washington DC
Lydia Russ watched the destroyer’s final moments in real time, six months after the fact. No one in the room said a word, every one of them shocked into silence as the transmission from the Sword of Liberty cut away and the retransmission pod unemotionally kept up its broadcast, unaware that it sent forth its masters’ epitaph.
White faced and barely able to breathe, Lydia could not turn aside as the two halves of the destroyer spun uncontrolled around the Control Ship. Constructs emerged from the implacable vessel, each one forming up around the two halves of the Sword of Liberty. Bracketed by these alien devices, the destroyer sections were steadied up and then pulled into the interior of the Control Ship. The warped and damaged plates of the alien vessel, which had slid open to reveal a dark interior volume, slid shut once more, entombing her friends, denying them even the solace of a burial in space.
The re-trans pod dutifully recorded the Deltan formation as it once again began revolving about its drive sphere, but whatever was to be done about the destroyed Junkyard and the heavily damaged other vessels went unanswered. As soon as the Control Ship and the Deltan formation passed within close proximity of the pod, a flash of light lashed out and all transmissions ceased. The stream from half a light-year away fell to static.
Lydia slowly turned away from the wall-mounted screen and glared at Carl Sykes and President Tomlinson. Tomlinson looked as wan and in shock as Lydia had. Sykes seemed perturbed, but not dismayed.
Lydia pointed a finger at the screen. “They’re gone, Carl. We just saw them give up their lives to stop those damned Deltans. They made a sacrifice, assured that it wouldn’t be in vain. But when I go to sleep tonight, and they’re there in my dreams, what the hell do I tell them? Do I lie and say that the information they died to give us will help us alter the defense we’re building, that their example will help all the allied space navies be even more effective when the Deltans finally get here?
“Or do I tell them the truth, that there is no space navy, that the three ships we’ve been building still aren’t finished yet, that all the backdoor politicking and contract disputes haven’t allowed us to lay down any more hulls, that not one piece of the design has yet to be shared with our allies, even though we promised it to them right after the Sword launched? Huh, Carl? Which is it?”
Sykes flashed a brief look of shame, but squelched it in favor of indignation. “Lydia, none of that is my fault. These things take time, and delaying the completion of construction until after first contact was a strategic decision and the right one in my opinion. I’m sorry your team was killed, but this has shown us where the design flaws lie. When we complete the cruiser specs, we can build a trul
y effective warship. Now we don’t have to waste production time on these flawed destroyers.”
“Bullshit!” Lydia screamed. “The destroyer design isn’t fundamentally flawed. They damn near took out the whole Deltan fleet with one ship! If we quit on this design in favor of another version that isn’t even drafted yet, we’re going to be left with nothing. It’s too late for this DC Beltway crap! The Deltans are coming and their intentions are no longer academic. They are the enemy and it’s up to us to build our defense as promised and planned.”
Sykes’ anger appeared in full force. Whatever shame he had felt at seeing the Sword of Liberty destroyed was now buried. “That’s not your decision to make! We may indeed go on with the Sword class destroyers, or we might decide to proceed with the Trenton cruiser. Maybe we’ll do both, with or without releasing the designs to foreign powers, but that’s something that will have to follow the full analysis of this data by my office. And while you may be convinced of the implacable intent of these aliens, I’m not. I don’t fully endorse the way Kelley handled things. I think he was way too hot-headed and trigger happy. He fired the first shot on these Deltans and he was the first one to destroy a ship. For all we know, he took out a ship full of refugees!”
“Damn you, Carl! Open up your eyes. We’ve dragged our feet too long.” Lydia turned to face the President, seated behind her desk. “Madame President, it pains me to have to say this, but if this nation doesn’t do what’s necessary to defend this planet, I’m going to take Windward’s designs and Windward’s technologies to another world power who will listen and do what’s needed, nationalized US property or not. I’m sure I can convince the EU or the Chinese to react.”
Sykes smiled. “That’s it. Go ahead and try, Lydia. It will be my personal pleasure to throw your ass into Leavenworth.”
A Sword Into Darkness Page 29