Chatper 526 - Resurgence (1/2)

The Overqueen hissed as soon as the ship made its appearance. She recognized it from earlier, from an attack on a planet full of creatures that the universe had provided for her larder and that the ship had denied her. It had dared attack her magnificence, firing a weapon of such power that it had driven a crater nearly a third of the way through her ship and reduced tens of thousands of warriors into a single smear between eight miles of compressed metals. The crater was over a hundred miles wide, a mirror polish of the surface of her mighty vessel.

She sent the commands to break orbit and head toward the ship to engage it. She felt the ship's vibration change as her servitors followed her commands. She ordered the vast armaments of the ship to be manned and prepared.

This time, she would destroy the annoying ship. She would not be denied the creatures of the planet behind her. They would fill her larder.

She wanted them.

That ship would not prevent her from taking the planet, placing a young queen on it, and adding it to her larder and her eventual empire.

**get me loose from this** she ordered the workers, referring to the birthing matrix.

**but oh queen your duty to lay eggs must be** the lead worker started to say.

The Overqueen screeched, reached out with her power, and struck at the lead worker drone. It convulsed and there was an explosion of tissue and ichor as the worker's spinal nerves and brain exploded from its body.

**do it do now do it do it do it I want free** the Overqueen screamed.

The workers moved to disengage her from the massive egg laying tissues as she screeched her anger.

The hated ship was faster than it had a right to be, more manueverable. As her mighty vessel lit off its engines and broke orbit coherent energy lashed at its shields, making them sparkle brightly. She could feel the anxiety of the worker drones as the shielding level dropped, as power had to be diverted to the shielding.

The torpedoes streaked in, the first half dozen wasting themselves against the heavy battlescreens. Four got through, with a brightly colored dual streak right afterwards. The torpedoes went off, the first four creating craters a mile wide and fifty meters deep.

Cosmetic damage at best.

The last two hit, driving deep before detonating. Both exploded inside the armor, buckling it outwards and upwards even as the explosion drove down and to the sides, creating a bubble of ravening energy.

The twelve mile thick band of armor held.

The Overqueen felt pleasure at the fact that the hated ship couldn't do much more than pinch and nibble. It had not fired that weapon of outlandish power.

Perhaps it could not.

The Overqueen could feel the High Speakers ordering the ship away from the planet, to deny the cover of the planet and its two moons to the much smaller ship. The Overqueen agreed, lure the ship out into the vast empty spaces away from the planets, where it could not hide, could not run.

There, her mighty ship would destroy the little vessel.

The annoying ship stayed back, firing torpedoes and missiles, trying to get behind the vast ship. The torpedoes and missiles seemed to be nothing more than an annoyance designed to take down the shields.

It began to annoy her. The servitor engineers would get the shields back up, the hated ship would pound them with missiles and torpedoes, the shields would fail and the servitor engineers would get back to work.

She hummed in pleasure as she saw the hated ship smoothly move away, further away from the planets. She hated that it was faster, more nimble than hers, and that it kept staying out of effective range of her weapons, but it could only go so far before abandoning the system to her.

She wanted the system and the hated ship would not thwart her wants.

The engineers were reporting that whole sections of the nCv cannons and the heavy energy weapons were not responding to controls. The Overqueen snarled and ordered technicians to the hull to repair them. The High Speaker reached out and ordered the engineers to stay on station, that it was less than 1.38% of the nCv Cannons and less than 0.57% of the heavy energy weapons.

Computer systems within the massive hiveship were going haywire. Putting out gibberish, or conflicting orders, or managing to damage other systems and other computers. A handful of computers sent a ribbon of nearly two dozen antimatter thorium salt fusion reactors into full meltdown, filling the interior of the hiveship around them for miles with radioactive gasses and molten endosteel.

The Overqueen ordered the green servitor caste to fix the problem, to stop worrying about the rents in the armor and add more computers to the system to replace the obviously broken ones.

The High Speaker order the computers all turned off and turned back on again, even though that would leave the ship vulnerable for up to five minutes. He wanted each system to go to independent control and the computer network turned into isolated local networks.

The Overqueen screeched at the High Speaker, who withstood the brunt of the psychic assault without flinching. Two, then three, then four of her daughters joined in with the Overqueen, lashing at the High Speaker, until they felt his will crumble, then felt the agony wash over him, then felt the bright snap of his life ending.

They all settled down, preening, the heretic who denied their majesty purged from their midst.

The Overqueen, almost completely detached from the egg laying organs, chided and chivvied her workers to hurry up. She wanted to move down to the ancient command center and watch over the battle personally, since there was nobody she believed to be competent enough to run the battle.

She was almost free when the entire ship shook, heaving 'forward' to the Overqueen's senses. She was slammed against the wall, hard enough that she actually felt the bright flash and agony of pain. There was a deep THRUUUUUM, the air appeared to shattered into shards of broken mirror for an instant. The sparkling reflective shards danced in midair for a split second, twirling and rolling, sparkles shooting off of them. The Overqueen saw herself reflected in those shards from a thousand different angles.

The moment snapped and she was thrown forward. She bounced forward off the wall, falling to the floor of her chamber. Her vast bulk crushed dozens of precious eggs, and for a moment she lost control of the psychic hive mind. She looked up, dazed, as she instinctively reached out and slammed the hivemind back down.

Three of her daughters were dead. One had broken off at the waist, between her thorax and abdomen, and her bladearms scrabbled against the floor, having torn apart the eggs around her. Another had been cleaning her antenna and somehow her head and one bladearm were on the floor in front of the queen.

Another had been violently yanked away from the wall, and the resin used to affix her to the wall had held. The back of her abdomen had been peeled away, still attached to the wall, and her internal organs had been pulled out of her by the weight of the egg laying organs.

Two were passed out from the pain, the other seven were all screaming in pain.

The Overqueen lifted herself up, ignoring the agony in her guts from being yanked off the egg organs.

The hated ship had gotten behind them, firing that horrible weapon. The weapon had hit in the middle of the hundreds of miles of engines. The ravening energy had destroyed a full quarter of her engines and driven deep into the hull.

The engine housings were armored around the engines, there was no armor between the engine thruster and the depths of the ship.

The impact had driven a divot, shaped like a rippled cone, five hundred miles into the hull of the ship and left a massive gaping wound nearly a thousand miles wide where dozens of engine thrusters had been.

Not only were the thrusters gone, the engine mechanisms, the power plants, everything involved in them, had been turned into nothing more than supercompacted matter that made up the edges of the massive rippled cone.

Around her, her majestic ship groaned and shuddered.

She could see through the half-panicked eyes of her servitors, who were still reeling from the physical shock of the weapon impact and the near-loss of the hivemind creating a psychic shock.

The shockwave from the cannon was driving deeper, buckling armor, causing it to tear away in some places. Pieces exploded off her ship around the conical impact, the point driven deep into the ship. She saw, crazily, a battery of nCv cannons two hundred miles long, of thousands of guns, tear free and spin off into space, still attached to the fifteen mile thickness of armor.

Her ship lurched and shuddered, beginning to tumble forward.

Screaming in rage, she clamped down on several High Speakers, demanding they gain control of the servitors, demanding the servitors repair the damage, mitigate it, erase it as if that hated ship had never touched her own.

The return fire of her own ship wasted itself, missing the ship, even though its shields flared and it bled energy off of the two engines held away from the main body of the ship.

The distance between the two ships was still measured in light minutes.

Her ship relied on the thickness of the barrages, the ability to fill space with sheer firepower, rather than the obvious pinpoint fireplan of the hated ship. Her guns could fill a thousand cubic miles of firepower, making it impossible to dodge. Its guns could apparently lash out and wipe away miles of weapons and deeply gouge the armor.

She blinked as the ship fired long pulsing beams at her own ship. The beams were orange with a white core, with green, blue, and red energy swirling around the beams. She could tell that the ship was 2.4 light minutes away.

The beam hit less than fifty seconds after it was fired, streaking so quickly that for a moment it looked like the beam stretched across nearly a light minute.

At first she started to sneer as it tore a fissure two miles deep in the armor of the mighty hiveship, not even penetrating its formidable armor.

Then it hit a bank of nCv cannons, shattering miles of the cannons into scrap that lifted up from the hull then began to fall back onto the hull, pulled downward by the gravity created by the ship's sheer mass.

She shrieked even as she was escorted toward the massive chamber that would whisk her along maglev lines to the armored control center, where she could exert direct control on the battle.

The hivemind was flooded with casualty reports, death reports, damage control orders, damage reports, and orders being thrown every which way. She snarled at the sheer chaos of it, hobbling to the 'elevator' with a dozen royal workers and fifty royal guards in attendence.

Behind her, the servitors worked hard to remove the Queens from their birthing organs, to get them down from the wall, so they too could be whisked away to an even safer area.

The Overqueen heard the desperation in several hundred green engineer servitor's primitive minds as they fought to shut down a reactor toward the rear of the ship. She instantly knew that the reactor provided eight percent of the thrust the hiveship still had.

She countermanded their shutdown order and ordered them to repair it while it was still online.

The information was still flooding in, and she hated it. It wasn't the calm orderly hivemind of normal life, not even the somewhat urgent order of the hivemind of the invasion of those planets. The information came from millions of points, all marked urgent, all involving that hated ship or its actions.

The damnable thing kept trying to get behind her ship again and she had been violently and suddenly made aware that the majestic hiveship could be wounded deeply, that it had a vulnerability. Nearly 12% of the hiveships computer systems were ignoring orders, some of them spouting gibberish, others making threats, and still others acting malevolently.

A Low Speaker was killed when he leaned forward to see what was going on with all the swirling geometric shapes on a display and the display suddenly exploded, tearing his head apart with the shrapnel. A High Warrior was killed when the blast door he was crossing suddenly slammed down, pinning him beneath it. It then slowly pressed down, sometimes easing up on the pressure, and the High Warrior could hear, through his agony, the door somehow laughing at him as he died.

The Overqueen demanded that the computer systems be repaired and fried the minds of a thousand green servitors to encourage the rest to work harder.

She had just been wrapped in a soft cocoon of cloth when a part of the hivemind screamed for her attention. She had barely reached out to take direct control of at least one of the screaming minds, stretching out to calm the others, when it happened.

The reactor detonated.

It blew an upraised mountain through the armor. Nine engines went completely dead and acceleration dropped as the other engines suffered a 9% power loss.

The energy ravened through the massive corridors, through chambers, shattered interior walls, and shredded servitors down to molecules.

Before she could come to grips with the reactor explosion, another hit clanged against the hull. A sextet of torpedoes detonated inside the armor, creating a bubble of energy like a star erupting to life nearly fifteen miles wide.

This time it got through the armor, smashing and destroying.

Snarling, she ordered servitors to the ancillary ships.

She would destroy the hated ship and go back to take the planet she wanted, harvest the beings there to add them to her larder, and feast upon their thoughts and fear.

It was nearly an hour ride to cross the eight hundred miles to her armored control chamber. Several times the lights blinked as impacts hit hard.

Armored shutters closed behind her, massive shock absorbers were rotated into the tram tunnel to block it off, and the tram arrived at the control chamber.

She got out, took two steps, and everything shattered.

Broken pieces of mirror floated through the air, sparkling diamonds, like water drops or pieces of carefully cut crystal, floated through the air. She felt herself lifted up into the air as the entire ship seemed to be violently shoved down. Right before she would have hit the ceiling the pieces of mirror and crystal vanished and she fell nearly eight meters to the floor, landing in heap.

Six of her nine remaining daughter vanished from the hivemind in the bright flash as their psychic energy was released by death.

She struggled to her feet, her brain feeling bruised.

That weapon, that cursed, terrible weapon, had hit the Hive Structure toward the base, at an angle. It had broken it completely free, pounded the base down.

There had been no armor beneath the Hive Structure. There was no need for it. The structure itself was wrapped in twenty miles of armor.

That armor was driven into the spaces of the ship like a steel rod pounded into mud by a sledgehammer.

The Hive Structure shattered, pieces tumbling away to fall toward the hull, pulled by the gravity created by the sheer mass of the massive hiveship. The impact drove almost all the way through the hull, debris blowing out of the huge crater as the backwash shredded half-liquid matter and sucked it back up out of the crater.

Only three of her daughters had survived, all of them on trams to take them to their own control chambers. One was screaming, the tram having jumped the tracks and spun against the wall, shedding debris. She was pinned to the wall, a massive endosteel beam through her thorax.

The Overqueen stumbled over and collapsed in the command couch that had been built without ever expecting her to use it.

The Queen's chamber, the most heavily protected section of the ship, had been destroyed as if it was tissue paper on the hull.

She managed to exert control of the hivemind, which had shattered into a dozen different High Speakers all struggling to maintain control. It calmed, and she extricated herself from the babbling.

The Overqueen's ship was wounded, streaming atmosphere, liquid metal, and debris.

But the ancillary ships were lifting off, the massive bay doors opening.

A heavy cruiser cleared the bay it had been resting in, using antigrav to push itself away from the hiveship.

A blast of hellish energies like the Overqueen had never seen hit the heavy cruiser dead amidships. A single 'slug' of energy that liberated its payload into the battleship like an explosively forged penetrator.

The shot went through the heavy cruiser, which didn't even have its battlescreens up, even as the explosion measured in the tens of megatons gutted the heavy cruiser.

A 200cm hellbore shot leaves little in its path.

The heavy cruiser's back broke and the two pieces snapped apart. The engines, sputtering on anti-grav, caused the rear section to tumble forward. The forward section dropped back into the hull of the hiveship.