by Rupert Segar
“Thank you, leaders,” said Bazza. “On my mark, 50 minutes to engagement. Mark.”
“Remember, squadron leaders, we need to keep thinking 3-D,” said Suxie from the planetary defence communications room on the main island of Crete on the planet below.
“Don’t worry; we’re all looking up north and down south as well.”
Bazza Foster clicked off his comms link and allowed his face to drop the forced grin. The defence commander was a worried man. He was grieving the loss of 57 gull wing pilots at the Marylebone portal. The imperial cruisers were more than a match for the tiny craft. He wondered if the guardian vessels would fare any better.
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Recently promoted, Imperial Vice Admiral Tim Bartz swivelled in the captain’s chair on board the newly commissioned Battleship Kraken. He carefully pulled down the cuffs of his tunic to conceal the black and brown, bristly hair on his wrists.
All around Tim, staff officers were orchestrating an elaborate dance among the vessels under his command. Bartz’s half of the invasion fleet had set off first, in the direction away from Fair Isles. The large flotilla had spread out like pellets from the barrel of a shotgun. Then, as they reached a region of flat time space, they all flipped to the Upper Realm.
Normally, vessels point themselves in the direction they want to travel and build up speed before shifting into hyper flight. The fields of flux ions wrapping each vessel held them outside normal space. It was an imbalance in the fields which propelled the ships through the Upper Realm. The discrepancy in flux fields had to be finely tuned. The ions washing around the outside of the hull always sought to even out any imperfection and so dampen the ship’s ability to travel. However, if the fields became too imbalanced, the vessels would be kicked back to normal space and the excess energies in the flux fields would tear it apart.
Having entered the Upper Realm, Bartz’s half of the fleet was pointing the wrong way. Even using AI computers, it was difficult enough to fly faster than light going forwards. To do so backwards was a near impossibility. All the warships had to rotate on their axis before moving off under hyper drive in the direction of Fair Isles. However, even having turned round, the disposition of Bart’s half armada was still incorrect. Before entering the realm, they had been spreading out like lead pellets fired from a shotgun. When they re-emerged into normal space behind Fair Isles, Bartz wanted all his ships to converge on the guardians’ planet. To achieve that end, every ship in the fleet had to swap position between the port and starboard, the north and the south segments of the armada.
Bartz monitored the progress of his staff officers. He was impressed by their efficiency. All communications used flux lanterns and old fashioned semaphore. Laser beams and radio waves would not work in the Upper Realm. Instead ships had to display flux field pictures other vessels could see. As long as they were relatively close by, it was easy to see the images. Bartz’s ships were spread out and messages had to be relayed from one vessel to the next. Co-ordinates were communicated using a form of Morse code.
Tim Bartz pulled at his cuffs again to conceal the stubby hairs. He was continually amazed at how good he felt, both physically and spiritually. His transformation from a loyal imperial officer into a devotee of the Brood King had been painful at first. He still remembered, in a detached and distant way, the searing sting as the tiny spiders scrabbled behind his eyes and up his optical nerves. The recalled how the spiders entering his ears had made him wretch with giddiness. All the pain, however, was as nothing compared to the bliss he felt in the presence of the Brood King. Like all the converts, he had been taken to Orion, the Emperor’s royal flag ship. His moment standing in front of the large spider had been an inspiration. As Tim remembered the occasion, his eyes began to well with tears.
“Sir, we are fifteen minutes from re-entry,” said a navigator from the helm desk.
“Order all ships to prepare to rotate 180 degrees on re-entry,” said Vice Admiral Bartz, blinking back his tears. “Prepare for battle!” We will not fail you, my King.
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About 95 million kilometres from Fair Isles, a region of flat space time rippled. A series of pearl size lights appeared and grew rapidly. Some of the spheres became nearly one kilometre in diameter. As most of the bubbles burst, bolts of plasma arced across the vacuum. Vice Admiral Bartz’s armada had arrived in normal space. Every ship was slowly turning round. They had overshot the Fair Isles on purpose. Now the conservation of momentum propelled all the vessels back towards Fair Isles.
“Contact,” reported the pilot of a scout ship poised a million kilometres away. He relayed the position of the invading fleet. “They’ve dropped out of hyper flight closer than we expected,” he added, transmitting the data instantaneously. “They’ve missed the minefield.”
At his command desk on his flier, Bazza Foster consulted his strategy board. Mines had been laid between 98 and 99 million kilometres out. The Imperial warships seem to have anticipated them and had, somehow, emerged from the Upper Realm closer in. On his screen, the invading fleet was moving straight towards Fair Isles. Bazza smiled grimly.
A second armada emerged diametrically opposite from the first, putting Fair Isles in a vice like grip. It too had appeared closer in than expected. A scout ship was directly in the path of one of the cruisers and was destroyed with the flick of an ion beam.
Bazza Foster looked down at his strategy board and, while feeling grief for the lost pilot, he marvelled once again at the system of instantaneous communication the alien ship had given the guardians. It was just as well the enemy did not have the secret; otherwise they could avoid what was coming next.
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Vice Admiral Bartz’s half of the armada was roughly 80 million kilometres out when the first vessel hit a flux mine. The cruiser’s munitions store exploded, ripping the warship in half. A second vessel, a battleship, was grazed by a mass seeking gravity bomb. The sheers in space time sliced through bulkheads right down the vessel’s starboard side. Venting gasses, the ship tumbled helplessly in space. Two engines exploded and scores of men and women were sucked out into the vacuum. Fifteen more vessels were disabled before Bartz could give the general order to extend defensive fields. Pushing out their force fields made warships vulnerable to attack from missiles and ion beams but allowed them to sweep aside mines, keeping them well away from their bows. That was exactly when the Guardian ships struck.
In the other direction from Fair Isles, 160 million kilometres away, approximately 9 minutes away by laser beam communication, history was repeating itself with the other half of the invading fleet. Within a couple of seconds, three cruisers and two giant Nemesis class battleships were disabled by mines and bombs. However, this half of the armada’s response was quicker. At the first report of a mine, all ships were instructed to extend their defensive screens.
On cue, a fleet of more than one hundred Guardian ships decloaked from their stealth shields, spheres of magnetic force and flux ions that made their mass and radar silhouettes invisible. The guardian ships weaved through the minefield, knowing where the armaments were was clearly an advantage. They tore towards the invading fleet launching antimatter missiles and lashing out with ion beams. Twelve Imperial cruisers and a battleship were hit before the invaders’ defensive screens were pulled back. Two more cruisers were then disabled by mines. The battleships in the armada began to target the guardian vessels.
Looking at his strategy board, Bazza Foster saw his fears had been well founded. Guardian vessels on their own were unable to stand up to the full onslaught of the new imperial battleships. On both sides of the solar system, his fighters were being picked off like plastic ducks at a fun fair. He ordered the guardian ships to cluster together. Three or four vessels flying alongside each other were not as manoeuvrable as a single ship but their defensive shields could be overlapped. Reports coming back from Squadrons A and B indicated the strategy was working. As long as they kept their distance, the clustered ships were shielded from the bat
tleships’ ion beams. However, they were useless, their offensive force was compromised. Bazza ordered a retreat.
The invading fleets on both sides of the solar system moved unopposed towards Fair Isles. Commander Foster knew he had Squadron C in reserve but he was reluctant to order a suicide attack. He sent the remaining guardian ships towards the planet. The enemy were coming and the former explorer ships would be the last line of defence.
“Looks like it’s down to us now,” said Suxie Wong, the veteran Explorer from her defence coordination room on the planet below.
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Vice Admiral Bartz swivelled in his captain’s chair wiggling his toes in delight. The casualty figures scrolling across his command board showed he had lost two Nemesis class battleships, 11 cruisers and a frigate. That’s less than 10 percent of my force, thought Tim Bartz. His armada was now only 5 million kilometres away from Fair Isles. Now there’s nothing between us and the planet.
On the command deck of Battleship Kraken a large vid screen showed a shaky visual image of Fair Isles. It was being piped directly from the navigation telescope. If he squinted hard enough, he thought he could see the guardian space yard in orbit around the planet. It annoyed Bartz the image was grainy and jumped about. A decent computer programme could steady that image and even enhance the detail, he thought, but he knew, according to standing orders, direct sight of the planet was required. Real vision, in real time, for a real victory.
On the vid screen, Fair Isles disappeared from view.
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In a semi darkened room on the planetary surface of Fair Isles, there was a score of young officers and an atmosphere of intense concentration.
“Flux inverters activated,” said one of the cadets in the defence coordination room, formerly the gymnasium of the Guardian Academy on the Island of Crete.
“Look, the sun has disappeared!” said another cadet staring out of the window into a black sky.”
“Where are the stars? There are no stars,” said another worried voice.
“It’s alright, Squashi, no need to be afraid,” said Suxie Wong with a beaming smile as she looked around the room full of anxious students. “If the stars go out, it shows our defence is working.”
Suxie turned to her coordination board and activated a comms link.
“Bazza, the stars have gone out. I do hope you sent out your instructions beforehand.”
Flying an erratic path around the space yard, Commander Bazza Foster, was well aware that the stars had disappeared. He swiped and tapped his strategy board. It was as if the entire cosmos had gone. Anything further than 2 million kilometres away was blank. Bazza switched his board to show mass detections. A tiny portion of the board showed the planet Fair Isles and the space yard. There were a few dots indicating the bigger ships that were part of Squadron C. Beyond these readings, the board was featureless. Bazza smiled, the plan was working.
“Suxie Wong, as ever, you are our saviour,” said Bazza over his comms link.
“Not me, Bazza. Let’s thank Mr Angry and Dylan the Devoted. It takes a certain sort of odd ball genius to think the unthinkable.”
Approximately three million kilometres away from the planet, 18 asteroids hung in space. If you drew lines between them they would form the corners of an astronomically large dodecahedron. This twelve sided shape was centred on Fair Isles. The rocky satellites were kept in position by large gravity engines and they were buttressed with flux projectors. Once activated, the rocks created gigantic fields of inverted flux. The giant bubbles overlapped, completely englobing the planet.
The effect on normal space was the opposite of the fields used for the flux meteoroids. Instead of mass and dimensions being shrunk to a inverted, the inverted flux trapped huge volumes of almost infinite space inside a finite, real space, bubble boundary. At a command signal from Suxie Wong’s desk, the projectors switched on and Fair Isles was isolated from the rest of the cosmos by a barrier of almost infinite distance.
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On Battleship Kraken, the pride of the invading armada, no-one was aware they had crossed the bubble boundary and had entered the inverted flux field. The ship was powering forward, still accelerating, yet it was going nowhere. The vid screen showing the forward view was completely dark. There was no planet, no sun, not a single star.
“Navigator, position?” shouted Bartz.
“Switching to rear view, Sir,” said one of the navigators.
On the screen there was a large circle of grey starlight showing part of the Milky Way and scores of nearby stars. However, the circle was slowly getting smaller.
“Using fleet locators dropped on entry to the system, Sir. We are still 5 million kilometres from the planet.
“What’s our relative speed?”
“Excuse me, sir …”
There was a pause as the navigator tapped his console three or four times.
“Zero, sir. According to the locator buoys we are stationary.”
There was silence on the command deck as they all watched the small circle of stars getting smaller still. Bartz could feel the throbbing of gravity engines under his feet.
“We’re accelerating, how could we be stationary?”
There was no reply. He looked over at the science officers. One young subaltern had the honesty to shrug his shoulders. The circle of stars had dwindled to a point.
“Losing contact with the locator buoy,” said the navigator.
“What happens then?” asked Imperial Vice Admiral Tim Bartz, without getting an answer.
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Both Squadron A and Squadron B patrolled outside the reaches of the dodecahedron. They had lost contact with Command Control. In fact, their base, Fair Isles, had completely disappeared. All the crews on board the Guardian ships had been told to expect something out of the ordinary but this eventuality went beyond any of their expectations. To be frank, most of them were unnerved.
Thankfully, they all had a mission to complete, which, at least gave them a purpose. Their pre-recorded instructions from Commander Foster were reassuringly clear. They were to stop the enemy escaping. On no account were they to enter any of the space bubbles marked in red on their navigation boards. However, if any enemy vessel emerged from the bubbles they were to be engaged and destroyed. Thus far, they had little to do. Like Fair Isles, both halves of the invading armada had simply disappeared.
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“Ship to ship communications?” barked Bartz to his Comms Officer.
“I have all flux lanterns lit but there’s no response, sir.”
The command deck was depressingly dark. The giant vid screen which alleged to show both the front and rear views, side by side, was stubbornly black. All the main lights on the deck were off because they were in combat mode. The bridge officers worked by the soft glow of their instrument panels.
“Anyone getting anything?” said Bartz beginning to feel desperate. “Don’t be shy.”
There was an ominous silence from his staff. Bartz thought it was time to be decisive, even if that decision was trivial.
“Cabin lights on!” ordered Bartz, getting out of his comfortable swivel chair and walking across the deck. “Senior officers, to my ready room. Deputies, defences on full alert. Pipe any developments, and I mean anything, through to me.”
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Defence Commander Bazza Foster gazed down at his strategy board then flicked the screen back to his comms link. The face of the veteran Explorer, Suxie Wong, was beaming up at him.
“It looks like it is working, Bazza,” she said.
“The threat of imminent invasion has certainly been lifted, for the moment, but what happens when the inversion field bubbles are turned off?”
“When the bubbles burst we’ll be there and ready and waiting.”
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Vice Admiral Bartz looked around the table; all of the faces looked young and bewildered. He found himself gazing at their wrists, looking for the tell-tale signs of transfiguration, even though he knew none of the
officers on board had been brought over to the Brood King. None would be feeling the pangs of despair and anguish he felt having failed his spider lord. However, none of them would have his determination to succeed.
“Astronavigation, where are we?”
“Sir, I believe we are still where we were when our forward screen went blank, approximately four-and-a-half million kilometres away from the target world, Fair Isles.”
“How certain are you?”
“90 percent. When we were receiving signals from the location buoy, we were stationary. However, we have not had any contacts at all, with anything, for the past 45 minutes.”
“Science,” commanded Bartz.
“Sir, my team have come up with two options: firstly, we have been transported to a region of far off space...”
“But even in deep space we’d see stars,” interrupted the navigator.
“Not if one of those alien portals moved us to a zone outside the volume of inflation that occurred after the Big Bang.”
“How likely is that?” said Bartz.
“Not very, I admit,” said the Head Science Officer, “but my team think it’s a possibility. Our second option is that the space around us has been altered.”
“That is my view also,” said Bonnie Blackheart. She was the battleship’s lead UFOologist. Actually, she was the ship’s only UFOologist. “Having taken into consideration the attack on the quintox flotilla at Cygnus Prime, where a Guardian vessel became a singularity, I think that is exactly what is happening.”
Bartz stared at Blackheart wondering when the Imperial Navy began recruiting cranks. It had started shortly after that tiny alien ship defeated the Royal Fleet. Suddenly anyone with any gimcrack idea about aliens and alien technology was given a promotion.
“Blackheart,” barked Bartz. He paused then asked “What’s your rank, woman?”
“No rank, sir, I am a civilian UFOologist.”
“Well … Miss Blackheart, would you care to expand?”
“Sir, it might be easier if I were to show you,”
Blackheart dabbed at her pad and started a programme. All the vid screens in the ready room began showing an animation. A flat black sheet was covered by a wavy rippled surface.