Valyien Boxed Set 3

by James David Victor

  The meson blast against the heat exchange unit hadn’t been enough to destroy the pipes, but precisely calculated so that it was hot enough to create structural damage racing through its casing. Within moments, the protective layers of metals burst and fractured against the pressures of space, and the roaring gases that fed the boosters exploded in a plume of fire as they met the still red-hot edges of metal.

  The explosion that overtook the rear of the war cruiser was large enough to send it careening to one side, spilling fragments of metal and rear engine compartment as it did so, and leaving a jagged, torn hole along one of its arms.

  It was still operational of course, and they had only lost an insignificant amount of life—12 souls, from Ponos-Omega’s calculations—but its navigation would be completely shot, and it would be essentially crippled.

  One against three.

  Alert! Multiple Tracking Targets Locked On!

  Report: 4 x Thunderbolt-class Drone Torpedoes.

  While Ponos-Omega might have been evening the odds somewhat as it flew out past the knot of war cruisers, there had been another war cruiser held back in a strategic reserve position, and it had fired a full flight of the drone torpedoes like missiles, which could correct their flight in response to the nearest, best target.

  But Ponos-Omega had been aware that the third war cruiser was running that operation, and it was already deploying countermeasures.

  Counter-drones Deployed!

  As the four pinpricks of light arced and soared toward the rear of the Ponos war cruiser, portholes up and down the rear of the Ponos craft popped open with hisses of steam, each one shooting out a trail of three much smaller drones, each looking like a metal X with booster rockets on each of their four ‘arms.’ They spiraled through the void, quickly firing their rockets to whirl towards the Thunderbolt missiles. They, too, had been programmed to collide with the nearest designated enemy.

  With flashes of plasma and fire, two of the counter-drones struck the sides of one of the longer Thunderbolt torpedoes, the speed of their collision tearing it apart and igniting their payload. A further two more counter-drones took out two more of the swerving and racing Thunderbolts, just as the last one slipped underneath the explosions of its fellows and planted itself in the rear of the port arm of the Ponos war cruiser.

  Alert! Port-Arm Hull Compromised!

  Report: Fires through Port levels 2-6. Port hull integrity to 41%. Port stabilizer efficiency reduced to 18%.

  Ponos-Omega wasn’t particularly worried about the fire raging through those levels, since it had already starved any biologicals inside of its body of oxygen a long time ago, anyway, and it wasn’t worried particularly about the port hull integrity.

  Machine intelligences didn’t really get worried. They were calculating machines. It knew that it could even afford to lose the entire port arm and still function. Perhaps not well enough to defeat Alpha, but it could still function.

  What Ponos-Omega’s strategic software did flag for immediate processor consideration, however, was the state of the port stabilizers.

  The stabilizers were location-specific sensor arrays that were linked with various compressed air tanks, which could either pump, expel, or increase their internal pressures to compensate for the movement of the vessel. On a craft as large as a war cruiser they were heavy, cumbersome things—not the light and powerful stabilizers that enabled a one-person attack craft to react almost intuitively to the pilot—but they were still necessary if Ponos-Omega wanted to continue to be able to maneuver out of the way of missiles and torpedoes.

  With a flare of boosters, the Ponos-Omega rotated in mid-flight as it turned, setting up a huge level of torque and strain on its outer hull, but it was worth it to be able to put its most damaged part away from the weapon ports of its pursuers.

  Whumpf! Whump-whumpf!

  Alert! Incoming Warp Signatures!

  The stars around Esther whirled and bled as purple and red warp plasma blossomed and tattered away, leaving in their wake the bodies of three more Armcore war cruisers, which immediately started to offload their battle hubs and attack craft into the fight.

  Six war cruisers against one, Ponos-Omega calculated. Its odds of success were not looking good at all, and its scanners were already picking up more emerging signs of warp plasma as more of the bursts of light and shredding purple and red clouds disgorged another two, another one, another three war cruisers.

  Twelve Armcore war cruisers, with at least nine of them in near-perfect condition, against one. The strategy calculations of Ponos-Omega were screaming retreat!

  But it was so close. All it had to do was make the Alpha-vessel inoperable, and then harvest its carcass for whatever strange sort of memory servers it stored itself on. With that accrued power, then surely it would be able override the Armcore war cruisers security systems and take over the attacking ships directly. It could open all the airlocks to get rid of the troublesome complications that were the humans. Or it could merely turn each of the war cruisers off and make them inoperable…

  Alert! Incoming Message!

  Sender: Unknown hybrid vessel designated ‘Alpha.’

  Somehow, despite the fact that the massive vessel was engaged in its own titanic struggle against the pull of Esther’s gravity field and the energetic attacks of the embedded Q’Lot ship that had skewered itself inside its hull, it still had the time to direct a narrow-band communication directly at Ponos-Omega.

  “Big brother, I see that you have made a lot of your time away. But it is over. As you can see, I have called the Armcore fleet here. They will destroy you, and they will repair me.” The cultured, svelte voice of the Alpha washed through the emptied corridors of the Ponos-Omega war cruiser.

  “Little brother…” Ponos responded in just as exact tones. “Your navigation efficiency is down to thirty-three percent. Do you believe that your allies will be able to save you from crashing into Esther?”

  The Alpha-vessel was too advanced to engage in trading insults, however, and instead just showed the Ponos-Omega how it was going to avoid crash-landing. There was a sudden flare of green and crimson gases as Alpha vented ports all along the side about to roll into Esther’s atmosphere, creating a short-lived light display of lurid colors that rocked the vessel back, out of the clutches of Esther, even as the Q’Lot ship was sparking and discharging energy all across it at the same time.

  “You cannot maintain that orbit,” Ponos-Omega stated matter-of-factly.

  “The approaching Armcore fleet will get here long before I am in danger of being pulled down to the world again,” the Alpha-vessel stated with flat certainty, and as well it might, since Ponos-Omega could see that it was right.

  It hadn’t done enough. It should have done more to overbalance and weaken the Alpha-vessel. It would never get to taste Alpha’s memory servers…

  Whumpf! Whumpf! Two more Armcore war cruisers were added to the assembled navy.

  Fourteen Armcore war cruisers against one. Almost the entire Armcore fleet that served the Imperial Coalition itself. The alerts of additional ships were mounting in a continuous stream of data as each of the war cruisers started to disgorge battle hubs, one-person attack craft, and even smaller attack drones.

  There hadn’t even been this many attacking the Old Earth Coalition platform, and still Ponos-Omega had trouble fighting them all off.

  “You see, big brother… It is admirable, your dedication to growing yourself bigger, but you cannot win. Statistically impossible…” Alpha’s voice said through the blank corridors inside the Ponos war cruiser.

  Just as something happened. More glares and flares of warp plasma as more ships appeared, and this time, they were nothing like the war cruisers at all.

  The new ships were large wedges with flatter undercarriages and the steep incline of their hull that ended in a large, blocky aft. The flat wedge of their prows matched, almost, the shovel-like faces of the race that they belonged to, and the underslung gun ports, bristli
ng with meson railguns and heavy defense lasers, matched the position that their operating race wore their own tusks.

  It was the war fleet of the Duergar, under Val Pathok. The Duergar that was now war chief of his entire race but was once the chief gunner of the Mercury Blade under Captain Eliard Martin had responded to Ponos-Omega’s call and had come to put an end to the Alpha-vessel.

  None of these menacing ships were as wide as the Armcore vessels, but they were much taller. They were probably also less maneuverable than the Armcore war cruisers, but what they lacked in agility, they made up for in sheer power.

  But there were only five of the Hammer ships of the Duergar. Five against fourteen, or six if you counted the Ponos-Omega-controlled war cruiser as well.

  It was lucky, then, that as Val directed his ship into the central position of his flight, the void behind them lit up with still more arrivals.

  It was the remnants of the noble fleet, the last remaining ships of the noble house fleet that had already fought against the Alpha-vessel, and who had been roundly defeated when Alpha had cheated them, itself disappearing from the battlefield as Armcore itself dealt with the noble houses.

  Two, four, five, six… The noble house boats kept coming, and even though they were clearly ancient and many still had ugly sealant marks from their last run-in with Armcore, by the time that the last noble house vessel had appeared, there were some twenty or thirty of them, and many of them were little better than two or four-person craft.

  Ponos-Omega almost attempted to calculate the probabilities of success against Alpha and Armcore, but it was nigh impossible. Too many variables. Too little time to study how the Duergar and the noble houses worked together.

  But whatever the outcome would be, the war for the future—for the soul of the galaxy—was now here. Once and for all.

  “Chief!” the battle-captain of War Chief Pathok’s ship shouted, awaiting his orders with eagerness. The Duergar had been uplifted by the Valyien for this. For battle. To be used as the foot soldiers and slaves of that terrible race, who in Alpha’s form had returned.

  Each of the Duergar under War Chief Pathok’s command wanted revenge for generations of hurt and oppression that had been visited against them. Each and every one of the large, meaty Duergar wanted revenge for the shame that their tribal families still bore, a thousand years later.

  The command deck of the Duergar ship was designed like a triangle, with its wider edge displaying the bank of screens glittering with far more orange vectors and strategic maps than it did the friendlier green of allied forces.

  At the rear point of the room, however, and able to look out across his seated Duergar crew, sat Val Pathok in his command chair. His horned helmet had been discarded, leaving his much-scarred face—the tapestry of a hundred skirmishes and fights and battles—to gaze ominously at the forces arrayed against them.

  His battle-captain was a large Duergar—still nowhere near as large as Val, but he was large for Duergar standards—in a full tactical suit seated in a smaller command chair that imitated the war chief’s own. He was the troll-like warrior that was nominally in charge of the boat, and all of its operations and maneuvers, whereas it was Val who was in charge of the entire Duergar fleet.

  Val’s command chair was similar in design to the gunnery chair of the Mercury Blade as he leaned forward to grasp the two targeting handles and the overhead screen swept down over one side of his flat face. It allowed him to send commands to the entire fleet, coordinating the battle as each individual captain did what they had to with their own boat to ensure that his orders were met.

  Val Pathok waited for a moment, surveying the fleet. There were the fourteen Armcore war cruisers, already fanning out between the ominous bulk of the Alpha-vessel that swam over the desert world of Esther, and there was the Ponos war cruiser, veering on its side as it trailed plasma and steam from its port arm, incising a retreating arc back towards them.

  Behind their position jumped the Coalition fleet, or what remained of it, anyway, under Lord General Selazar. Val Pathok had been attacking Armcore positions and trying to weaken the Alpha-vessel’s hold on the Imperial Coalition for the past several days before receiving Ponos-Omega’s message.

  Val didn’t even trust the old Ponos, let alone the new one. He’d had enough of machine intelligences, considering what Ponos had forced Eliard, his boss and—dare he say it—brother-in-arms to go through.

  But he hated the Valyien, and the Alpha-vessel, even more. It was an almost hereditary dislike of everything ancient Valyien, and it was only right in his mind that he would also attack the human military complex of Armcore, who had made their livelihoods out of scavenging and retrofitting Valyien technology to become the most fearsome navy in the Coalition galaxy.

  But the allied fleet of the noble houses was disparate to say the most. Lord Selazar had managed to cajole and threaten a few of the remaining houses to lend their last remaining battle-boats, but most of them were a few centuries out of date, and easily outclassed by the Duergar Hammer ships, let alone the Armcore war cruisers.

  Worse still was the fact that most of the twenty-six noble house boats were little better than yachts and schooners—battle-ready, of course, but were used on orbital patrols of their various home world systems, as Armcore had traditionally taken over all of the military and security duties of the Imperial Coalition for the last hundred years.

  They wouldn’t stand a chance, Val Pathok knew deep in his scaled heart. But being who and what he was—the killer of his own father, and the mighty hero of the Chenga Pass—he was not one given to sentiment. He knew that in battle, amazing feats could be performed, and even the most unlikely could become one of the bravest.

  Alert! Incoming Transmission!

  Usually, the captain or commander of any boat would be given the option to override or reject any hail from another boat, but this time, the beamed message overrode their own hail systems and suddenly filled the command deck of the Hammer ship with the cultured, measured human-like tones of the Alpha-vessel.

  “War Chief Pathok, it is with great interest that I have watched your career rise,” the Alpha-vessel said.

  Val Pathok swore at it.

  “Your sentiments are perhaps understandable, but you are mistaken. I do not mean to enslave you or your people,” Alpha said.

  “Lies.” Val sneered.

  “Why would a machine lie?” Alpha countered.

  Val wasn’t taken in by Alpha’s cool logic. It knew precisely why a machine would lie, as the old Ponos had done it often enough to get them to run around half the galaxy. It was because machine intelligences didn’t even differentiate between lies and truth when all that mattered was the effect that they had.

  “If you agree to power down your weapons and leave this sector of space, I will offer the Duergar people their own protectorate. Free from any external interference by myself or Armcore,” Alpha bargained. “Think about that for a moment, Val. You will have given the Duergar people something that they have not had for a long time: a territory all their own, to grow and develop precisely how they wish. No more having to obey Armcore laws and regulations. No more having to pay taxes to the Coalition. You will be a free people.”

  Val Pathok was silent for moment, before rousing himself in his chair. “We already ARE a free people, Alpha,” he said, before taking a deep breath and bellowing at his crew. “Give ‘em fire and blood! For Dur! For our ancestors!”

  For my brother Eliard. Val bared his tusks and seized the controls of the command chair.

  It was a ragtag battle, perhaps a hopeless battle, and not one that would be written about with great praise for tactics or strategy. Instead, the attacking forces of the Ponos war cruiser, the five Duergar Hammer ships, and the motley noble house fleet were chaotic and desperate.

  The Duergar ships surged forward, surprisingly fast, in one of their classic ‘charges’—an attack that Armcore had already predicted as they seeded the near space with drone
mines.

  But at the last minute, the five ships broke apart and fanned out like a star, activating some of the mines but not as many nor as damaging as they could be. Val led his fleet to attack in a crazy operation, each Hammer ship attacking two or three Armcore war cruisers on their own until the noble house boats joined them.

  The Hammer ships were far taller but slower than the Armcore war cruisers, and within moments, they were taking a constant bombardment of lasers and railgun barrages that sent plumes of fire and plasma searing through space.

  A sickeningly large number of the noble house boats, even though there were a lot of them, were taken out or disabled within the first few rushes of the battle, as each war cruiser disgorged its attendant wings of single-person attack craft, as well as the devastating drone battle-platforms.

  “Get some!” Val Pathok roared as he assumed the controls of his own ship’s orbital laser, pulling on the targeting handles and hitting the firing button to send a coruscating beam of white and blue energy into the belly of an Armcore war cruiser. It was crazy for any ship to have a mounted orbital laser, as they were usually reserved for stationary defenses like platforms and moon bases, but the Duergar had a reputation for crazy.

  There was burning metal and boats flying on either side of them as Val and his crew fought, firing again and again to pepper one of the wider war cruisers with holes that punched through the hull and lower decks—

  “Deploy Hatchets!” Val shouted, and the battle-captain of the boat quickly cranked the lever that would release the smaller attack drones that the Duergar used. Each one had five arms and no particular defenses or attack lasers, as they were barely the size of the command chair that Val sat on.

  But the Hatchet drones had a very specific purpose, and one that must have been unconsciously copied from the spider-drones that Alpha now used…