by Tom Holloway
The Cyclone has discovered the enemy and is detailing to me that there is a massive civilization military starship in the Mariana Trench, protected by billions of tons of ocean water and well-armed. It has ambushed us using its attack ships, which I named wasps in a previous battle fought with this same ship, which escaped me then. The wasps are smaller than the Saber, deadly, though, and we are severely outnumbered. They are all around us, coming out of the sea. They are firing at us, and the Saber is defending and firing back, trying to use its speed to escape and the hot tail thrust of thirty thousand degrees to burn anything behind us. We are leaving Earth, blasting straight up. I can see more than four wasps still tracking us, and then they all evaporate into nothing as the Saber leans starboard, the fire stream hitting them. The Cyclone destroys several more of them, instantly vaporizing them, as it is now close enough to accurately target them and fire at them successfully.
Many more suddenly appear out of the sea.
“Damn it!” I am swearing, raging, and ready for them. We come back to Earth accelerating, diving straight for them, hitting them with fusion guns, firing thousands of strikes a second, like strobe lights on steroids. Even more wasps hurl out of the ocean, hard to count. They’re rising up out of the sea, coming from the mother ship. The Saber is vaporizing them with the fusion guns, yet some escape. I need to sweep them again. The Saber climbs again, making a wide bank to portside, ascending at the same time.
The massive full blast from the Saber’s fusion reactors becomes a sweep, like a broom. We are spiraling up, the ship’s sizzling tail burning straight down into the sea, the fire stream 125 miles long, six miles wide, composed of pure nuclear blast, thrusting down into the ocean at fusion temperatures, reaching the bottom, deep down. The mother ship feels the heat and starts to burn, yet not enough; it returns fire with heavy nuclear weapons, hot fusion-burner streams exploding out of the ocean meant to hit us.
The Saber is again quickly accelerating away from Earth, trying to avoid the massive nuclear bursts coming directly from the mother ship, hotter than the sun, aimed at the Saber.
Once again the massive tail thrust of the Saber burns straight down into the sea, thrashing the enormous enemy starship with the blast pressure and tons of scalding water, a fire heating miles and miles of ocean, billions of tons of water converting to scalding steam. Down deep on the bottom, the mother starship tolerates the heat and the radiation. The Saber is now twenty miles above the Earth, out of range of the mother ship’s nuclear weapons; it’s still too deep in the Pacific. Yet the Saber is preparing to return and will join the Cyclone to destroy this alien enemy, this vast battle starship. Now they need a plan.
The Saber’s brainpower has had control of the ship, fighting for survival and demanding the great speed, then all the twisting and turning, plus accelerating at incredible speed and changing altitude. It’s like riding a roller coaster from hell, at times bursting out into space above the Pacific, finding and killing the enemy wasps at every turn, tracking them down, killing them. They are no match for the Saber, much less the Cyclone, also hammering them.
The Saber is currently talking to the Cyclone, which is below us at an altitude of four miles, still twenty miles west of us, circling. The Cyclone says we need to kill the enemy mother ship. I dread this resolution, yet it’s the right response, meaning I have no other choice. I order it; the Saber immediately heads toward California to get out of the way, and I create a firing solution for the Cyclone with an interception point.
Knowing this navigation point, the Cyclone proceeds to set up the bomb run, climbing, blasting straight up into outer space, directly above the enemy starship, forcing it into a defensive mode to deflect the massive heat from the accelerating Cyclone, which is using its huge fusion reactors to thrust the enormous heat down into the depths of the ocean, again vaporizing billions of tons of water. Steam explodes upward at a mile a second, and there’s a tremendous deafening sound of massive pressure, the hot air hitting cooler air and exploding, making thunder a thousand times louder than normal. The Cyclone needs to position itself for the attack, miles up into outer space.
Because of all of this, there are massive lightning strikes and huge storms everywhere, expanding out quickly to a hundred-mile radius and farther, with wind gusts as severe as any hurricane, grotesque in appearance. The millions of tons of scalding steam are moving high up into the atmosphere, covering Earth at a high altitude. The storm’s velocity is more than a thousand miles an hour and high above Earth, over fifty thousand feet, too high to threaten the surface or its inhabitants. However, the entire planet will soon be totally covered by a dark, heavy cloud layer loaded with moisture. It will take a couple of days for it to clear; it will be a rain-filled world for a while, with widespread flooding.
Tonight will be a good news night for the TV networks. All of this action is very much visible for miles. How will the networks explain this, or government officials, or scientists? Of course the distinguished group from the London pub will speculate, my new high-level friends will all wonder.
The Cyclone has disappeared into outer space yet it is still blasting the ocean at depths far down below, vaporizing more of it with its long propulsion tail, now many miles away; as there’s just that much power hitting the surface of the ocean, equal to a many atom bombs, beyond comprehension. However, this will not kill the alien starship down below. It severely feels the heat and the radiation yet suffers no real damage, nor can it fight back at these depths. Yet it cannot risk coming up to the surface to do battle unless it is forced to ascend. The huge starship will die only with a direct hit. It needs to stay underwater, as the massive depth of the ocean protects it.
I know this starship. It belongs to the Seatisveres, a nasty, mostly nomad civilization not acceptable to the Consortium, considered an outlaw civilization and unfortunately they have starship technology. Their original home world is mostly uninhabitable because of their greed, misuse, global neglect, war, extravagant waste, and pollution. They are like locusts, or maybe pirates, destroying whatever they touch. They are my sworn enemy, and we’ve fought before. There are, all together, seven of these city-starships, each a military battleship, traveling as a fleet. These are massive ships with entire cities inside, more military than not. This ship is separated from the pack for some reason. It will be hard to destroy, dangerous, too. It needs to have a direct hit from something big—our negative dark-energy beam would work. One large issue with using this weapon, however, is a big problem, that it might cause more collateral damage than Earth can handle; it might destroy Earth.
All this brutal combat has happened in a few short minutes, and I just now have a chance to look at Anna, as I am suddenly feeling something is wrong. To my total shock, I know there are no brain waves coming from her, then feeling the terror and desperation of knowing she is not alive. I see her sitting next to me slumped over. I realize she is not breathing. What happened? She is dying, only seconds left. There is blood on her mouth and nose, and she is blue all over. I know her drone medical slips are working, though, I can feel them inside her, frantically repairing the damage, trying to get her lungs to breathe.
Oh my God! The gravity pressure, she was hammered by the massive weight caused by the Saber’s surges in altitude.
She has never been in combat; the g-force was incredible. She must not have been able to handle the extreme gravity weight caused by the Saber accelerating, and her heart stopped, permanently damaged.
I have killed her!
I jerk out of my harness although the Saber is still moving fast, preparing to position an ambush on the Seatisveres’ starship. I grab on to Anna’s harness. I am giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, breathing into her lungs, and it is not working. I scream mentally at the slips in her brain, as for both of them to help, one needs to move to her heart and electrically charge it. The other one needs to spark the brain with enough electrical energy to start her lungs, force them to expand, drawing in air. The heart needs t
o start moving blood, as the slip does the job—bam! —the electrical charge hits her heart. It happens. Now she has a pulse; she is coughing and coming alive. Her medical drones, with the help of mine, are quickly repairing her wounds, repairing the heart muscle, stopping the hemorrhages. Her ribs were broken in several places; the lungs were pierced, then much too much bleeding, now all being repaired by the drone slips. She’s breathing and her pulse is better. She will make it.
Thank you, Lord!
She is beat up some; I can see some bruising where the harness fits. She comes to. Her eyes are panicked, then she vomits, and I have some gravity to work with, as we are not in space or free float. I catch it mostly in my hands; use a urine disposal unit to get rid of it. She is coughing. I clean her up as much as possible using some ship’s cleanser and wet air wipes to wash her face and throat. She’s weak.
The thought of having almost lost her horrifies me; no question in my mind, damn…damn…this was a major screw-up by me. I couldn’t lose her this way. I am trying to recover from the shock. She looks at me; the slips are back in telepathic mode, and I am reassuring her, my loving thoughts and tenderness flooding her, soothing her: “I am here, and I will protect you.”
She looks up at me, tries to respond, coughing, then blurts out, “Henry, what happened? What hit us? I don’t remember much after all the explosions. Lord, I feel lousy, sore all over, just awful, feels like someone beat me up. I hurt everywhere. My mouth tastes terrible.”
She looks out at the massive turmoil of the black storms and asks, “Oh my God, did I cause this?”
I smile, so relieved, and respond, “Anna, no, no, you did not cause this. It’s really good you don’t remember much, better not to know. You missed a war with another starship, an old enemy of mine hiding in the Mariana Trench. They ambushed us, with a lot of fireworks and noise. I think it’s almost over. It almost killed you; the gravitational pull stopped your heart and broke some ribs. You came out of it. You will be OK. I am so sorry!”
I remember what’s happening. I stop looking at her and look ahead. “Just look out there. I hope you see our victory coming, although it’s not a great day for me. I never saw it coming, a bad sign. It was a close call and my fault. Never should have happened.” I look at her, feeling awful, disappointed in myself, wanting to make it better. “I am sorry, Anna. This was not the joy ride I planned.”
Anna looks worried. “No, I feel bad but not that bad. Does anyone know about this, like Earth people?”
I answer, “Unfortunately the whole world knows. And it’s not done yet; let’s hope my plan will work. Say a prayer, Anna, for our success.”
The Cyclone is three thousand miles from Earth, far enough away to make the shot. It loops back fast toward Earth, accelerating to forty thousand miles an hour and blasting a bright, spectacular tail of nuclear propulsion fire thrust at least five hundred miles long behind it, back up into outer space. It starts its bomb run to deliver its death black-hole shot, an almost invisible negative-gravity stream of power, pulsating, then creating the severe gravity of a space blackhole that will implode a planet or star. We have chosen this strategy because we have nothing else that will work.
The beam takes massive negative energy from our dark antimatter generators and then creates the tremendous gravity needed. The Cyclone has aimed it at the Seatisveres’ starship deep down in the dark depths at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. When it hits the starship, the suction of the gravity will start to fold it up like a crushed paper plate, destroying it within a couple of minutes. Then it will continue to do much more; it will continue to expand, the massive gravity pulling in more, destroying this part of the world, then pulling all of it inward, us too. The Earth will just disappear; end up the size of a golf ball. We are dead, too. We are too close to escape it, and I can’t reverse it.
If I don’t use it on this ruthless starship, these repulsive, true cannibals, worthy of death, will stay in their ocean parking place, safe from attack, using the Earth as a shield. If they kill us, Earth will be ravaged, then sucked by this parasite. We could run. We could make an escape, come back with a Star Fleet VII, the fleet that’s nearest; however, they would be gone by the time we got back, and Earth would be severely damaged or destroyed and plundered by that time.
The Cyclone triggers the negative energy stream. The plan is only a short burst to scare the enemy starship, then hold off to see if it runs. The first burst is so powerful; I can feel its pull on the Saber, now many miles away. My boss, Gabriel, will know about it, as he always knows when I use this weapon. He will ask me about using it. The entire planet will feel its energy when it starts to hit; then, if it’s continued, the Earth will disappear, pulled into a black nothing.
The Seatisveres’ starship has only two real options: escape from Earth now or be destroyed with it. I think they will think it is better to go by fighting their way out. I also know they are extremely vulnerable as they power out of Earth’s gravity, since they are massive and heavy. The Saber is ready and waiting to spring the ambush, in stealth mode so it can’t be seen, on the coast of California now, as the huge enemy starship takes the first and only real option: to escape. The Saber will run at it and fire when the starship is nineteen thousand feet up, just the right altitude for the Earth’s air to help it burn. The hit will self-combust around the starship, and the oxygen will bring the heat up to three hundred thousand degrees, an incendiary hit. The Saber will use a fusion reactor gun using a sort of nuclear gunpowder. The Saber’s one huge blast must hit perfectly, and it must breach the starship’s powerful security field. We will have only one shot; it has to work, or we face their deadly return fire.
The Saber signals that the Seatisveres’ starship is up and out of the water, accelerating quickly, with massive blasting, on its way to outer space. I order the discharge, and it is triggered. It instantly streams out of the Saber like a massive lightning megabolt, visible for thousands of miles, sheer massive heat and energy, enough to power the world. It instantly jolts the Saber into a lower speed like a brake, slowing us down from sixteen thousand miles an hour to six thousand in a second. We are heading straight for the starship, still firing. I’m not sure what will happen, can’t see the starship clearly with all the moisture and debris from the previous detonations and still a long distance from it. I think it’s a hit; we are miles from it but closing in fast.
I look at Anna; she is looking at it, too. She felt the ship jerk with the stream shot, slowing us down, saw the massive hot fusion-bolt stream to its target, all coming from the Saber.
Yes…yes…I can see it. The huge starship has taken the hit, the firestorm making the ship easy to see. It hesitates, rolls over, starts to fall back to Earth, and then explodes into a fiery mess, vaporizing in the extreme heat. It’s colossal; the gigantic fireball explosion shoots miles up into outer space, probably can be seen for thousands of miles, and the wind concussion is considerable as it sends a shock wave out, moving hundreds of miles an hour, fortunately much less when it hits the California coast.
We bank a hard right, turning away from it; the air concussion hits the Saber, causing us to jolt and lose two thousand feet in altitude. The Cyclone is gone now, done its part of the plan, blasting off and covering thousands of miles, now going after any active wasps. It turned off the negative-gravity stream as soon as the big starship started rising from the bottom; otherwise we all would be dead.
It’s been another close call, a terrible victory. There is no pleasure in this success. I know we have not heard the last of the Seatisveres. There are six more of the civilization starships, all battleships, somewhere out there, not far. They usually travel together like a pack of wolves. They will eventually know what happened, and with my current luck they probably will be coming back to Earth for revenge. Maybe they will go on, not bother Earth, and come after me instead. I need one or two fleets to find them and a fleet to protect Earth. This, unfortunately, is one more reason I have to leave; I must go back and apply t
o bring Earth into the Consortium for their protection.
Regrettably, I know all eighteen thousand souls on board have perished. Some of them were normal, not evil. Even if they wasted lives in ill pursuits, not all deserved this fate, and their children on board did not deserve this. I feel their deaths and regret it happened; this feeling is something I live with constantly. It always comes after a battle; can’t avoid it, like some kind of self-punishment. It is a sad day for the Seatisveres and me. At least they died mercifully quick.
Unluckily, the explosion was so large it paused the Earth’s orbit a fraction—not a lot, thankfully. It also shifted the world’s axis a little, which caused a small movement in the Earth’s crust or shifted the top layer a little, causing small earthquakes and tremors over the world. It’s bad, yet it could have been much worse.
At the site of the starship’s destruction, the blast was equal to a 50 megatons atomic bomb exploding at nineteen thousand feet up, where the shock wave dissipated, thrusting up into outer space and no damaging radiation from the blast. It was also too high for any resulting tsunamis, nor did the ocean blast from the Cyclone cause tsunamis.
Yes, thanks to divine providence we are alive, undamaged. So is the world, thanks to the Cyclone, the Saber, and thank you God for saving Anna. I know she now wonders about my real life and me. I feel her doubts, and it brings me much sadness. I rarely bring happiness to the beings I come in contact with—ask the eighteen thousand I just killed.
For the Earth the most significant result of all of this is that over the next few hours, the world becomes dark, almost night, as a heavy cloud cover spreads out over the land and oceans. Heavy rain and some flooding occur everywhere across the world, even rain in the deserts. It comes from vaporizing trillions of tons of water, all of which rises into the upper atmosphere. Nothing like this has happened since the age of the dinosaurs. There were floods then, too.