by Worth, Dan
The demise of two of their number in the space of a few seconds didn’t seem to deter the other enslaved vessels who continued their charge against the Commonwealth battle line.
‘Helm, bring us to a halt,’ ordered Chen. ‘Ensign, order all ships to halt, stand fast and repel the enemy.’
As the Commonwealth fleet halted, the destroyers and frigates came about to present the enemy with the fire from both fore and aft turrets. The renegade fleet, now down to three destroyers, six frigates and a handful of cruisers was bombarded with renewed vigour. Ships died under the weight of fire, eviscerated and blown apart by the barrage of searing beams and anti-ship projectiles, and still they charged onwards, straight towards the Commonwealth fleet, even as they burned and broke apart, their internal atmospheres consumed by raging infernos.
The enemy ships were now only a few kilometres away from Chen’s fleet now and were showing no signs of stopping or retreating. It was a suicidal charge; that much was obvious. Beams spat back defiantly from the battered vessels, washing off the shields of the Commonwealth ships. The Commonwealth fleet answered with the fire from hundreds of turrets. As the ship now leading the fleet, the destroyer Telamon, blew itself apart and the weight of fire shifted to the remaining vessels, Chen’s sense of alarm began to grow. The enemy ships were now dangerously close to her own. Though the enslaved craft were heavily outnumbered, their violent deaths could spell disaster. Quickly, she ordered her fleet to reverse thrust and back away from the onrushing enemy ships as the Commonwealth vessels poured fire onto the enemy vessels.
Another chain of explosions ripped apart three enemy ships, two cruisers and a frigate, the death of the frigate immolating the two smaller craft, and still the enemy advanced.
‘Collision warning!’ cried Singh. ‘The destroyer Vercingetorix is on a direct collision course with ourselves! Other vessels are attempting to ram our escort ships!’
‘This is going to be close,’ said McManus. ‘Gunnery, how long until we can fire our main gun?’
‘Ten seconds.’
‘We may not have that much time, Mr Mitchell.’
‘Helm, bring us about to face the Vercingetorix,’ said Chen. ‘Gunnery, concentrate all fire on that vessel! Fire our main gun as soon as you are able!’
Fire from the Commonwealth ships raked the Vercingetorix, collapsing her shields and gouging lengths from her hull. Still, the destroyer continued to close, fire and debris streaming from her battered flanks. Chen saw the vessel looming ever larger in her vision, guns spitting fire defiantly despite the onslaught being directed against it.
The Churchill shuddered, space between the carrier and the destroyer turned inside out, and the Vercingetorix exploded. The detonation was enormous; a miniature sun unleashed three kilometres from the Churchill’s bows. As the Vercingetorix died, so the other Commonwealth carriers unleashed their spatial distortion cannons also, and the last of the renegade ships were ripped asunder. A storm of plasma and radiation hammered the Commonwealth fleet, collapsing shields and searing their forward hull armour.
Amidst the firestorm and tumbling wreckage, something moved. It was small, sleek and crystalline and had been lurking within the shuttle bay of the Vercingetorix. Virtually untouched by the inferno around it, it began to move towards the Churchill.
By the time Singh saw the fleeting contact in his sensor readouts it was already too late. Chen caught a glimpse of something ice-white and moving at great speed towards them from the wreckage of the destroyer. The carrier’s automated fighter defences spat laser fire at the approaching shape, but were ineffective against its superior armour and were unable to stop it colliding with the carrier’s bows.
Alarms began to sound.
‘What the hell was that?’ exclaimed Chen. ‘Somebody, talk to me!’
‘There’s no damage to the ship,’ said Singh. ‘But something just penetrated the forward hangar deck shields.’
‘A boarding attempt, it has to be,’ said McManus. ‘Permission to head down to the hangar deck.’
‘Granted. Get Commander Blackman and his marines down there and seal off the hangars. We don’t know what might be on board that thing. Whatever they might be, I don’t want them loose and running around my ship. Keep me informed, and post a guard at all entrances to this level.’
‘Aye, Admiral,’ McManus replied and sprang out of his seat.
‘And Commander, make sure you stop by the armoury on your way there. Can’t have you unarmed.’
‘No chance of that,’ McManus responded grimly as he headed for the door. ‘I intend to bag myself some of the bastards.
‘Now then,’ said Chen, in businesslike manner. ‘Time to take down the Shaper ships and help our Nahabe allies. Helm, ahead full. Ensign Andrews, signal all ships to remain in formation and prepare to engage the enemy.’
McManus arrived at the port side entrance to the forward hangar deck clutching a rail rifle and grenades and wearing body armour and a helmet which he had snatched from the armoury on the way there. He found Blackman and four dozen fully armed marines waiting for him and noticed that the doors leading into the deck were sealed.
‘Okay, what are we dealing with?’ said McManus.
‘It’s some sort of shuttle or landing craft,’ Blackman replied. ‘When the enemy destroyer exploded in close proximity to the Churchill it temporarily took down our forward shields and most of the shields inside the launch bay. That’s when that thing made a dash for it. We’ve dropped the blast doors over the end of the launch bay and a second set a third of the way down the main hangar deck, but someone or something was definitely onboard that thing.’
‘Can we get a look?’ asked McManus.
‘Ah, I’m afraid that they took out the cameras. We did get footage of something though, right before we lost visual.’
Blackman held up a small datapad for McManus to see. It showed the carrier’s launch bay, filmed from high up from one of the internal cameras and looking along its length towards the bow. The Shaper craft could be clearly seen, lying half on its side at an angle about a hundred metres away. Something was moving in its shadow. McManus could see figures, mostly human, though some appeared to be from alien species that he couldn’t identify. They moved in a calm, ordered fashion out of the alien craft, like automatons. There was something else in there too. It was difficult to see at first, but it seemed to boil like smoke from the Shaper ship before it started to coalesce.
‘Now what the hell do you think that is, Commander?’ said Blackman.
‘I’m not sure...’ replied McManus, watching as the cloud, clearly mobile and seemingly sentient, floated up in front of the camera. He could clearly see now, that the cloud was composed of millions of swarming motes. There was something there within it, the briefest hint of a face, before the cloud rushed forward as one and smothered the camera, cutting the link.
‘I have a very bad feeling about this,’ said McManus.
‘Sir, we’ve all heard the rumours,’ said one of the marines, who gripped a combat shotgun nervously. ‘About them, about what they look like.’
‘I think you might be right,’ McManus answered. ‘The Admiral needs to see this, and we need to think of a way to get that thing off the ship.’
‘That’s the other thing,’ said Blackman. ‘It’s not just the cameras; we’ve lost control of all systems in the forward launch bay.’
‘Get me engineering!’ ordered McManus. ‘Now!’
As the Commonwealth fleet advanced towards the enemy, Chen watched as the battle between the Shaper and Nahabe ships grew ever more visible through the bridge windows. The brilliant flashes of light and expanding shells of energy had grown from pinpricks of light above the brilliant orb of the planet beneath them until individual ships could be discerned against the blackness of space above and the green and brown continents and brilliant blue seas below. The Nahabe had now lost two ships to enemy fire, and the remaining vessels were being heavily battered by the Shaper craft, though
they returned the favour with every weapon at their disposal. One of the Shaper destroyers had been torn apart by the concentrated fire of the gunspheres, whilst another had been heavily damaged and was fleeing away from Valparaiso.
With the Anzio and its group left to watch over the disabled destroyers, Chen divided the rest of her forces, seeking to attack the Shaper craft from different directions. She would thus attempt to split their fire, reducing their opportunity to flank her forces. Conscious that her remaining weapons against the Shapers were fixed guns mounted on the bellies of the carriers, she couldn’t afford to allow the Shapers to get into a position where they might use their manoeuvrability to their advantage, not to mention concentrate their superior firepower. She ordered the Plataea and the Pericles groups to peel away on her starboard flank, whilst the Leonides and Nelson groups split away to port. The Churchill, Marcus Aurelius and Alamein groups would advance up the centre. Damage sustained throughout the fleet in the battle with the renegade vessels had been very minor and, save for the ships whose cannons had failed, causing them to lose power, all ships were at full operating capacity. There was however the small matter remaining of whatever it was that had entered the Churchill’s launch bay. The comm. chimed.
‘Admiral, this is McManus. We’ve got a bit of problem down here. The ship’s definitely been boarded. I’m sending you the footage now.’
The images obtained by the Marines appeared in her HUD. There was no mistaking the streamlined, crystalline form of a Shaper craft, nor the enslaved beings that issued forth from it. Then Chen saw the indistinct cloud emerge from the vessel and coalesce in the air and she went cold with the realisation of what it was. She’d read reports on what the enemy, what the Shapers themselves, were supposed to look like. She realised that she was looking at one, and that it was on board her ship.
‘Commander,’ she said a little shakily. ‘Get every available marine down there right now. It’s one of them. We have a Shaper aboard the Churchill.’
‘Thought so. Jesus,’ McManus answered. ‘It gets worse. We think that the Shaper is intent on taking over the ship, now that it has internal access to our systems. We’ve already lost control of systems in the launch bay. We think that it’s trying to escape and enter the rest of the ship. We’ve already lost the internal cameras as well as the launch bay shielding systems and catapults.’
‘We’re not seeing anything offline.’
‘They aren’t offline, we just don’t control them anymore. The outermost fields have been reactivated to stop us venting them into space and we can’t throw that ship off the bows with the magnetic catapults either as something is shorting them out. I’ve got engineers coming down here, but it looks like we’re locked out of the systems. I’ve already alerted engineering and they’ve physically isolated this section from the rest of the ship by dropping the pressure doors leading out of the forward hangar deck. There aren’t any control systems accessible from the launch bay itself that connect to the rest of the ship, except for the cameras which Chief Kleiner assures me aren’t linked to anything critical, it’s just dumb systems connected to power relays in there that they’ve managed to control, but if that thing gets loose, who knows what it might do...’
‘I get the picture,’ Chen replied. ‘We’ve had intel. reports in the past that the Shapers are able to subvert computerised systems if they can gain physical access. The sheer simplicity of the systems inside the launch bay may have saved us. Defend the hangar bay at all cost, Commander. We can’t afford to let that thing get any further.’
‘Roger that. Any hints on how we kill it?’
‘You’re guess is as good as mine, I’m afraid,’ Chen replied, grimly. ‘We’ve never had to fight one directly. At a guess, I’d imagine that projectile weapons might not be much use against the swarm.’
‘Something energy based would be better, aye,’ agreed McManus, in a tone that suggested he was mulling over his options. ‘Will keep you posted, Admiral.’
‘See that you do, Commander. Chen out,’ she replied.
The Shapers themselves were still beings about which little was known. Few had seen them and lived to tell anyone about their experiences. Captain Caleb Isaacs was one of the few that had. Most reports were sketchy at best - often incomplete descriptions of half seen things or the ravings of men driven mad by what they had witnessed. Now one such creature was lurking down in the launch bay of her ship. It made her shudder to think about it. No-one really knew the abilities of the Shapers themselves, much less what they were capable of in direct combat. On top of that, she had a battle to win. The Shaper fleet was coming into range now, the destroyer craft coming about to guard the vast command ship that was beginning to turn towards them, even as the Nahabe craft poured fire onto it.
They must have seen what happened to the other ships, thought Chen. They know what we can do. We won’t get a second chance at this.
With that, she gave orders to her ships and prepared to engage the enemy.
Down in the Churchill’s forward bay, McManus and Blackman decided on their plan of action. In front of them, the massive pressure doors that lead to the forward launch bay stood tightly closed, though every so often, periodic thumps and the sounds of scrabbling could be heard through the thick metal above the background rumble of the ship’s engines operating at full capacity. Behind them, about another two hundred metres distant, another set of doors had been closed across the hangar bay, sealing the rest of that massive space off from any incursion and protecting the carrier’s precious complement of fighters and bombers. Fortunately, there had been no combat craft in this forward section, the area having been cleared to allow ships to be manoeuvred easily into launch positions on the forward catapults. There was, however, an assortment of tractor and loader vehicles and a couple of the Churchill’s shuttles left within the forward bay plus piles of equipment crates that the marines had arranged into makeshift cover. The doors to the rest of ship had been closed, sealing the marines in with whatever was trying to come through the doors in front of them.
‘So, Commander Blackman, what do we have at our disposal? Projectile weapons might not be much use against this thing,’ said McManus.
‘Not a great deal,’ said Blackman. ‘We have laser rifles and pistols, but what we could really do with is something with an area of effect. Plugging away at a swarm with laser rifles might be as futile as trying to attack it with bullets. What we do have, however, is plasma grenades. These little beauties are for clearing out bunkers,’ said Blackman and removed a fist sized egg shaped device from his belt. ‘Concentrated plasma held in a magnetic field. Fries flesh and electronics with equal ease. Don’t know if it’ll kill this thing, but it ought to upset it.’
‘And then, once we’ve really pissed it off?’
‘Hopefully we can get it to relinquish its hold on the launch bay systems and force it back into the launch bay. Then we can throw it and its ship into space off the bow catapults. The magnetic launch system should do the job. I have engineering standing by. As soon as I give the order...’
‘That’s a lot of ifs, Commander. We know next to nothing about these things.’
‘It’s the best idea I’ve had so far,’ Blackman replied grimly.
‘And I have to admit, I can’t think of anything better,’ McManus conceded. ‘Ah, shite. Who wants to live forever? Got any of those things going spare?’
At that moment, they felt the deck vibrate beneath them. A sudden jolt, followed by a series of thuds, then a continuous sideways motion as the ship manoeuvred.
‘Feels like we just entered combat again,’ commented Blackman.
‘Aye, sure enough,’ replied McManus, and then noticed that the doors to the launch bay had opened a crack.
The Shaper destroyers came at the Commonwealth fleet at high speed, like sharks going after the scent of blood. They were manoeuvring hard. It would be a difficult task indeed for the carriers to hit them with their fixed weaponry, as the Shapers were only t
oo aware. The Shapers were vastly outnumbered, but if the humans couldn’t hit back with anything that would count, then they would be unable to stop the shining, crystalline ships from taking their fleet apart. Two were heading for the Plataea and Pericles groups, two more for the Leonides and Nelson groups, whilst the more ponderous super-destroyer was coming about to face the Churchill and Marcus Aurelius. The other remaining destroyer still harried the Nahabe, launching hit and run attacks at the gunspheres as they whittled down the super-destroyer’s shields bit by bit. Chen faced a difficult decision. She replayed the events of the battle so far and took a gamble.
‘Signal to the fleet. Destroyers are to use their spatial distortion cannons.’
‘Admiral, pardon me, but are you sure?’ said Singh.
‘It’s the only hope we have of hitting those Shaper craft,’ Chen replied. ‘Their turreted cannons might not be as powerful as the fixed weapons on the carriers, but they can be aimed more easily.’
‘But the other vessels were disabled by systems malfunctions.’
‘It’s a chance we’ll have to take. If we can’t hit the enemy, we’re just as dead if we don’t try as if we try and suffer the consequences. Andrews, transmit the order! Helm, aim us squarely at that super-destroyer and close the distance as quickly as you can.’
Andrews nodded and did as she was ordered. Chen watched the range counting down on her HUD and gripped the arms of her command chair in anticipation. If she was wrong, the entire operation would fail, thousands would die, trapped in helpless ships. If she was wrong.
‘Communication from Admiral Cartwright,’ said Andrews, as the two fleets closed at speed. ‘He reports that his fleet has engaged the Shaper fleet in the Chittagong system. Several ships have been lost to the enemy, with a number badly damaged, but he is confident of success.’