A Sword Into Darkness

by Mays, Thomas A.

shift and jostle, whirl about

  back where we started

  are secrets revealed

 

  Stasis vanished abruptly once more, and every remaining crewmember of the Sword of Liberty comically whirled their arms about as they adjusted to their new locations. Where before they had been armed and arrayed in defensive positions throughout the remains of the ship, now they were all back in the wardroom, in a circle, surrounding the broken pieces of their small arm weapons.

  Nathan looked at his crew, silently checking their names off an internal truncated list, ensuring they were all there. His eyes lingered on Kris, across from him in the circle, until she locked gazes with him and he could see and feel that she was all right. He looked at the pile of guns and then turned to Dave Edwards. “They took the low-hanging fruit. Did they wreck all our preps though?”

  Edwards shrugged, then pushed off from the bodies next to him and flew over to the ops console there in the wardroom. “Dunno, Boss. Let me check.”

  Before he could query the system though, the entire hull jerked and flexed violently, scattering people and gun parts through the air. The debris filled the weightless room, sowing even more confusion and pain as the pieces collided and rebounded painfully off both person and bulkhead without discrimination.

  Kris grinned even as she rubbed a fresh bruise upon her forehead. “Well, at least we woke up during another round of action rather than coming in after humanity was toast.”

  LT Simmons steadied himself and responded, “Yeah, but that action seemed a little close and a little too strong. I’m glad our people are still giving the Patrons some effective resistance, but I’m less keen to wind up toast myself.”

  Nathan grinned. “Mike, we’ve been on borrowed time for who knows how long. All I want is a chance to get out of here. Whether we make or not is in the hands of whatever higher power’s been watching over us up until now.”

  Kris drifted near and she and Nathan snagged one another out of the air and held on tight and close. “Never knew you were quite so religious, Captain-my-love.”

  “Hey, there are no atheists in foxholes. Or in this case, probably none captured by implacable aliens and thrown into stasis at will.”

  Kris frowned. “Stick with the foxhole analogy. It’s pithier.”

  Edwards turned away from the console and gestured to gain all their attention. “Well, whether angels or the incompetence of our captors is responsible, our preps are still good. They satisfied themselves with wrecking our obvious weapons. Auxiliary capacitors are still charged, maneuvering jets are still good, and the shuttle shows five by five. Plus, get this: I’m picking up encrypted comm chatter. I can’t decipher it without a key, but it means it’s not just missiles or mines out there. There are people.”

  Nathan nodded. “That tears it. We make our attempt now. Everybody, we’re abandoning our defensive stations and leaving. These aliens thought they’d taken away all our weapons, removed every means we had of opposing them. But they didn’t count on our ingenuity, our resolve,” he looked over at Kris lovingly and continued, “or our sheer stupidity. Let’s do something stupid and suicidal and show our Patrons what it means to underestimate Earth.”

  As the last half of the first wave’s warheads committed themselves, and as the second wave of missiles launched from the rapidly maneuvering Earth fleet, the invading Patrons finally reacted. And this reaction was the last thing anyone had expected.

  For the first time in over 80 years, the drive star’s radiance shut off. The blue-white beam—which had propelled the Patrons all the way from Delta Pavonis to Sol system, and which had in turn ushered on the technological leaps enabling mankind to meet them on something approaching an equal footing—vanished.

  Aboard the Trenton, Rear Admiral Henson would have bolted upright if his restraints had allowed it. His feelings wavered between hope and dread, and he held his breath to see if this meant the end of the battle, or just that it was only now about to truly be joined.

  His answer came—again—in an unexpected fashion. Below the battered Control Ship, the tortured lines of color constraining the drive star flexed and writhed. Their confining limbs now curled and looped, gathering the brilliant fusion plasma of the drive star into waves and arcs, not to direct an enhanced photon beam for thrust, but to propel the plasma itself outward.

  Sheets of plasma jetted off the drive star to arc over the Control Ship and the museum vessels, coordinated prominences and mass ejections who’s electrically charged sprays of matter attenuated warhead beams, burned missile bodies, and engulfed both laser and railgun fire. Where the vessels of the Patron fleet had been exposed to space and both direct and indirect assault, they were now shielded by atomic flame.

  The flares of the drive star swatted the remainder of the first missile wave out of the sky, then broke free to send an intense wave of energy out to scorch both the second wave and the attacking ships. The plasma blasts cooled and dissipated rapidly as they left the confining energies directed by the battered Control Ship, such that they disabled only a tithe of the second wave and had even less effect on the larger, more distant warships. However, the sheets of star matter proved completely effective in shielding the Patron vessels. Worse still, as the level of assault slackened, clouds of nano-assemblers poured out to begin in-battle repairs.

  With a command, Henson adjusted his plan, and all the ships of his fleet broke free of their original objectives to instead converge on the Control Ship. Where a distributed attack no longer worked, concentration and mass of fire might still carry the day.

  The second wave, now given up for lost due to the mutating nature of the battle, was joined by a third missile assault, a continuous stream of missiles aimed past the Control Ship at the surface of the drive star itself, directed at the continually shifting upwellings which gave birth to the plasma sheets. Nuclear blasts pummeled the immense surface of the star, an attempt to use brute force to disrupt the fiery shields. At first, it seemed like trying to extinguish a blow torch as one would a candle, but after many, many poorly placed explosions, the series of relatively small puffs achieved in aggregate what no one individual blast could.

  The shield thinned and faltered, opening clear patches over and around the Control Ship. Into these patches, lasers and railgun fire poured forth from the human warships. Each hit was small and dealt nowhere near the damage even one of the dwindling number of missiles could accomplish, but at the very least it disrupted the nanotech repair effort. At best they achieved a stalemate, but it was a tenuous draw, limited by the relative size of each force’s magazines: missiles and railgun rounds versus the unimaginable mass of a dwarf star. And once their missiles were used up and their magazines had gone dry, the Patrons would pour forth an onslaught of laser and nanobeam fire that would decimate the Earth forces, not to mention the damage the drive star’s propulsion beam could presumably deliver.

  Despite the best that humanity could bring to bear, they were still going to lose.

  “SITREP, people.” Henson’s voice on the net was grim.

  Dan Torrance came back angry. “We’re in position but nothing’s making it past that goddamn plasma shield. Who the fuck uses a solar flare to guard their ships? How is it not burning them up?”

  Lawrence, the British DESRON commander, spoke up. “Our lads have analyzed a cross section of the shield. It’s actually quite distant from the ships themselves. Our entire force could easily fit inside that volume.”

  Henson jumped on that quickly. “This goes back in our favor if we remove the interference of that shield. If we can’t disrupt it, can we at the very least get inside it?”

  Torrance blew a low whistle. “It’s a wall of fusion plasma, Calvin. The only reason it didn’t burn right through our ships when they started throwing solar flares at us was that it dissipates and cools rapidly once it’s away from whatever’s keeping the plasma confined. If we go down there, though, what’s happening to our missiles and railgun roun
ds will happen to us. Up till now we’ve had virtually no casualties.”

  “You think that’s going to stand, Dan? The Deltans haven’t really fired at us yet. The offense has been entirely on our side. As soon as we shoot our last missile, they’re going to drop those shields and skewer us with every last damn megajoule of laser energy they can bring to bear. And we don’t have enough time to retreat, resupply, and re-attack. They’ll be in orbit of the damn planet before we can attack again. No. We have to finish this assault here and now, even if it means ramming the goddamn thing and blowing all our drives. Now then, any bright ideas on how to get past the plasma shield when it’s at its strongest?”

  Krueger, the German DESRON commander, then mentioned reluctantly, “We have an idea, but none of you are going to like it.”

  The ships of the combined fleet ceased firing missiles and shifted positions, drawing closer and closer to one another until Group One and the UK squadron formed one wedge-like phalanx approaching from the south and Group Two and the EU squadron formed another wedge from the north. The Sword class destroyers arrayed themselves in front of and around the two cruisers, with the bulk of each formation opposite the direction of the plasma flow surrounding the Control Ship. The prominences of their drives blazed so closely to one another, that there was a very real danger of fratricide—destroying their fellow ship’s hulls before the Patrons even fired a shot.

  The two formations each went to maximum group acceleration, nearly crushing their crews within, but gaining the vital speed they needed to make it through the wall of plasma and to their quarry. Missiles, lasers, and railguns all ceased firing, as combined fleet tactics turned toward formation and maneuver. Closer and closer, the brilliant ramparts of dense, ionized matter loomed, while within each ship, every servicemember grew silent with the knowledge that finality was upon them.

  Just before breaching the curving wall of plasma, missile hatches rippled open, disgorging dozens of missiles, but these did not dive for the plasma sources upon the drive star or scream toward any of the Patron vessels. Instead they flew out a short distance and formed a second wedge leading the first defensive layer of destroyers before the plasma sheath blocking them from the Control Ship. As each missile touched the fringes of the prominence, all six warheads aboard them detonated in maximal fusion glory. Nuclear shockwaves and pulses of radiation battered the destroyers which fired them, but—more importantly—also blew back the plasma of the Patron shield for the briefest of moments.

  The destroyers passed through the thinned region of shield plasma, and absorbed or blocked what remained, casting a shadow of safety upon the cruiser at the heart of each of the two wedges. Trenton and Lake Erie followed close behind and breached the Control Ship’s shield in turn, but it was not without cost. A momentary weakening of stellar plasma did not mean that the plasma was not still capable of causing damage, nor that it remained in that weakened state.

  The first destroyer to breach of either group, Sword of Freedom of Group One, proved slightly too far ahead of the missiles’ explosive shock front. Stellar plasma cut deep within her, vaporizing the destroyer from the bow back as momentum fed her into the fire. She simply ceased to be, the flames of her demise still nothing next to the luminous energy of the plasma itself.

  Flanking her and slightly astern, Intractable and Sword of Vengeance hit the pause imposed by the missile shockwave. That pause was still energetic enough to raze both vessels. Armored hull plates blackened and popped, springing free to allow the energized gasses of the plasma shield to stab deep into each ship. Crew died and weapons burned, but the hulks of both ships made it through. The next rank, with four destroyers and Trenton herself, pushed through with survivable damage, but every last radiator on each ships’ amidships spine was blown—still the greatest weakness of the human warships. However, the cruiser design mitigated this obvious flaw, and from her spine Trenton extended a full set of auxiliary radiators from within armored sleeves along her central spine. Heat management would cripple the remaining destroyers, but Trenton would soldier on.

  Group 2 breached the plasma shield with a similar butcher bill, and Admiral Henson had to take a moment to allow the shock to dissipate as he saw all the damage that had been wrought on the fleet. Out of two cruisers and eighteen destroyers, only the two cruisers had made it past the shield relatively mission capable. Of the 17 surviving destroyers, five were all but blackened frames to which a few dismal lifepods clung, ten more were in various states of distress, and two—Sword of Independence and the NAE Paul Teste—appeared virtually undamaged aside from their damaged radiators, but their lack of cooling capability still rendered them almost immobile and with a very brief attack window before their systems overheated.

  It horrified the admiral.

  He could not dwell upon it yet, however, because the now exposed Control Ship—which already looked less distressed under the silver clouds of repairing nanotech—opened fire with multiple lasers and assemblor beams. The battle had only just begun, and though they had wounded the enemy severely and survived his surprising defense, their victory was by no means a foregone conclusion.

  Calvin Henson glared at his tactical screen and snarled, “All vessels, FIRE!”

  “Move faster, damn it!” Nathan yelled. The crew streamed up the corridor before him, just short of panic.

  Their initial attempt to escape the wardroom had been stymied for a time when the violent shaking of the Sword of Liberty and the Control Ship that surrounded it had jammed the doors between them and their destination and made opening them next to impossible. Then the shuddering largely stopped, and they all worked with nervous intensity, worried they had missed their opportunity to join with their compatriots from Earth, worried that now when they had committed themselves and there was no way to hide what they were up to, the stasis would return and all would be lost.

  Nathan and Dave Edwards, channeling the spirit of Christopher Wright proceeded to yell and berate the fragile crew until they began working again, struggling to open each and every pressure door, step by step closer to their objective. Now, as they finally set to work opening the last door, the wide loading doors leading into the hangar, the concussions and shaking of the Control Ship being subject to pitched battle began anew.

  Kris looked to Nathan. “Second wind? Think our side took a little breather and now they’re back to fight?”

  Nathan shrugged. “I have no idea, babe. But if the Navy brought enough firepower to re-engage after being repelled once, then they may well have enough to finally crack this ship down to whatever protected core we’re in. And that’s good and bad for us.”

  “Yeah. Good that maybe we’ll have a clearer path out of the belly of this monster.”

  Edwards chimed in after her. “Yeah, and bad because they ain’t gonna be likely to hold fire if and when we bust out. Hate to go all this way to end up a victim of friendly fire.”

  Nathan looked around them. “I don’t know. I’m not feeling the big hits like the missiles would make. These are taps like kinetic rounds. Maybe the battle isn’t going as well as we could hope after all.”

  Edwards grinned. “Then maybe our boys need a little help. Your girly’s got a prescription for some heavy duty mayhem against these bastards. I say we let it loose and deal with whatever comes.” The Master Chief turned to the techs working on cranking the powerless door open. “Or I would if you idiots could just open a goddamn door!”

  With that, the door sprang open and people began to rush through toward the SSTOS. Edwards pushed off the overhead and pulled himself through the doorway. “It’s about friggin’ time! Well, don’t wait on me, boys and girls, get aboard! Because I promise I will kick your ever-lovin’ asses—legs or no legs—if you let me board that shuttle before you do.”

  The crew flew aboard the shuttle, unencumbered by any luggage or supplies. Kristene and Andrew Weston shoved their way to the front of the boarding throng so they could finish the preps for launching and initiating he
r plan. Edwards went aboard as the last crewman to enter, leaving only Nathan aboard the Sword of Liberty, the captain about to abandon his post.

  Nathan stood half in, half out of the shuttle, braced in the frame and looking back at what he had worked so long to build, at what had sustained them and protected them for so long. The Sword of Liberty was not just a ship. It was a part of him, a part of them all, and the final part that he could touch of Gordon Lee, his last link to the great man and his friend. After this, live or die, the past would be gone, laid to rest. Did they have a future? And if so, what did it hold?

  “Stop the sentimentality and get your overpaid ass on the bus, sir.” Edwards clasped his hand, drawing Nathan in. Nathan nodded and swam into the shuttle, turned and shut the hatch. He checked the seals, glanced around to assure to himself that everyone else had strapped in, Edwards included, and pulled himself to the cockpit.

  Weston had brought the reactor online and the engines were warmed already. Kris had negotiated a link to Liberty’s bridge and monitored the conditions aboard her. Nathan drifted behind her. He felt the vibration of the shuttle through his palms as he held himself in place, followed by a sharp shudder, transmitted through the SSTOS, through the ship, and presumably through the alien vessel. “I’m feeling missile strikes, Kris. It’s time.”

  Her fingers hovered over her screen’s connection with the Liberty. “Nathan, you know this whole scheme is nuts. I got the damn idea from a freakin’ Niven story I read as a kid. We’re probably either going to be blown up, or else it won’t do enough and we’ll still be stuck in the middle of this Patron prison. This is a huge gamble.”

  “Kris, I’m CO, so it’s my gamble and I choose to gamble on you. Do it.”

  Without another word or hesitation, Kris stabbed down on the button, initiating the Sword of Liberty’s final program. All the power cells, batteries, and capacitor banks for the power conditioning system, the empty missile modules, and missing railgun and laser emplacements suddenly reversed their flow of energy and fed electrons back into the destroyer’s grid. This energy circulated about, bypassing shutdown system after shutdown system, seeking a lower potential and somewhere to expend itself. Finally it found an objective and flooded in, energizing the twelve enhanced photon drives of the auxiliary propulsion and maneuvering system.