Chatper 526 - Resurgence (2/2)
Another ship, a heavy destroyer, took another one of those shots. Directed energy from someplace a half mile from the first shot.
Less than a minute later a one-two punch of those hellish shots hit a light battleship and blew its guts out.
Smaller lances of energy struck out, hitting light destroyers. The 66mm hellbore shots gutted the small craft.
The Overqueen glimpsed it, for a second, ordering a destroyer out with scanners on full and directing its eyes toward where the fire was coming from.
It was a massive vehicle. Tracked, heavily armored, bristling with weapons. Mortars and rockets were being fired from it as it moved at nearly a hundred and thirty miles an hour, firing its guns even as its treads ripped up the battlesteel of the hull. It was the size of a superstadium, all oblique angles for maximum fire deflection, gun barrels, and the black gloss of Substance W.
The Overqueen shrieked, demanding something be done about that vehicle, which had obviously been sent by the hated ship.
She turned her attention back to the hated ship, which had begun sending out pulses through subspace, pulses that repeated pattern every ninety seconds.
The Overqueen sneered. There was nothing that could help it. She would close with it and use her vast armaments to crush it like a squirming worm.
It happened while the Overqueen was looking at the hated ship with all of her sensors. The front of the ship seemed to suddenly be wrapped in flames that then sucked onto the hull of the ship and went still, converting to stylized marking. Space shattered into mirror fragments in front of the ship, then a little further away, then even farther, each gap between the moment of mirror fragments getting wider and wider.
Something blew out on the side of the ship, sending armor, debris, and atmosphere swirling into the void.
Then the impact hit.
The roof above her howled in stress. Dust and oxidized metals drifted down while dust and particles rose up, in two seperate bands. She was violently shaken as her world shattered into prisms, crystalline fragments, and shattered pieces of mirror.
It took her a second to realize where the shot had hit.
Directly above her!
It was as if they had somehow realized that she had moved over a thousand miles from the Hive Structure.
But the hated ship was streaming energy, and her ship was still largely intact. It didn't matter that the vehicle on the surface was now engaged with dozens of ships, that its battlescreens were thicker and more heavily layered than even a heavy battleship. It didn't matter that a full third of her engines were out and nearly 22% of her guns on the side facing the hated ship were dead.
It was wounded.
She salivated, flexing her mandibles.
A wounded prey was a dead prey.
She wished she was closer so she could taste the fear and despair in whatever creatures were inside that ship.
It was still responding with torpedoes, missiles, and pulses from that damnable energy weapon that had energy beams somehow spiraling and twisting around the thick core.
The Overqueen decided she hated space combat. The hated ship seemed to be able to lash at her with impunity. Its missiles and torpedoes were moving at .82C up to .998C when they reached her hiveship. The energy weapon somehow moved at least five times the speed of light.
Then to top it off that damnable thing on the hull kept destroying any ship that dared lift off within its line of sight.
And it was so manueverable. The Overqueen felt that a thing that big, that heavy, should not be able to move at those speeds and fire its weapons with screens that thick and heavy.
She had lost 80% of her supporting fleet less than five miles from the hull of the hiveship thanks to the massive guns on that huge vehicle.
She ordered armored vehicles out onto the hull of the hiveship to counter it.
That's when she discovered that the things heavy guns were capable of rapid fire.
Within minutes hundreds of heavy armored vehicles were nothing more than tumbling debris. One several cases the massive tank just crushed the Overqueen's tanks beneath its treads.
She wasn't even sure she had hurt the damn thing.
When she saw an explosion from one of the engines on the hated ship, saw energy and debris expand from a plume of whitish blue energy being ejected from the engine, she gave a triumphant screech.
The hated ship's speed dropped by nearly 27%. It was streaming atmosphere, debris, and energy from a score of wounds.
She expected it to flee, it was still faster than hive ship, and they were now three quarters of the way to the Oort Cloud.
Instead, it kept fighting. Limping, staggering, but still lashing out with the remaining weapons.
Another barrage and for a moment, just a moment, the battlescreens went down.
A handful of x-ray lasers clawed the ship, ripping at the heavy armor, but only shards of armor spun away, no atmosphere.
Snarling, she ordered the engines to maximum power, even beyond the tolerances, with the safety interlocks removed.
She knew how fast the ship could go. She knew the engines would not dare fail on her.
She wanted that ship dead.
It was limping away now, but the Overqueen wasn't about to let it get away.,
From the bottom of the hiveship hundreds, thousands of light aerospace superiority fighters left their hangars. The battlescreens were dropped for a moment to let the clouds of fighters through. They arced up and around the hiveship, lighting their primary drives and lunging toward the hated ship.
The Overqueen screeched in victory.
There was no escape.
She would get what she wanted.
She was...
Ships suddenly streaked into view.
Massive, triangular ships, long pointed wedges.
Where the hated ship was around 2 kilometers in length, these ships dwarfed it.
Five of them, surrounding an even bigger ship. Unpainted, unadorned, a flat gray. Long wedges with a superstructure on the aft portion. The biggest one had a notch in the middle, a third of the way down the length. They were surrounded by two dozen smaller versions.
Immediately hundreds, thousands of craft erupted from the triangular ships.
More ships streaked into existence. Over a hundred of them of a dizzying array of designs. They all looked old, battered, almost... well.. scruffy. Many of them were round barrel shaped hulls with superstructures beneath the barrel hull.
As the Overqueen stared, they too launched hundreds, thousands of smaller craft, many of which deployed their 'wings' into a secondary configuration.
Three huge ships appeared above the hated ship. Two of them looked like two disks attached by a column. These released hordes of strange looking ships, flattened ovals that immediately adjusted by stretching the sides of the ovals. The other looked nominally like other ships, but it too released a horde of smaller ships.
Below it, almost fifty ships appeared, again, all of them releasing a swarm of smaller ships.
**GET THEM** the Overqueen screeched.
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Pikark watched as the fighters swooped around the big hiveship.
”We knew they were going to do that sooner or later, Captain,” Worf rumbled.
Pikark watched as they formed into a cloud that rushed directly at him.
”One shot from the Pike Shot would blow them all into atoms and still hit Big Momma,” Pikark said. ”Sulu, get us out of here. We need to repair. Uhuru, let Yar know we have to retreat, she's only got Attila for support.”
”Aye-aye, Captain,” Uhuru said. Her voice was calm, unruffled. Her face was almost bored despite the fact that a cut on her forehead had covered half her brown face with blood. Her faceshield was intact on her armored vac-suit, and that's what actually mattered.
”Setting course, Captain,” Sulu said. He coughed and gripped his chest for a moment. He'd fractured several ribs although the restraints had saved his life.
The bridge had an atmosphere. Smoke and particles and gasses from burnt out computer consoles, charred carpet, and burning insulation.
”I was hoping there was someone close enough to answer our distress signal,” Chekov said. He had had the idea to use a distress beacon torpedo to signal from one of the empty hangar bays after the subspace communication system had blown out.
”Keep it running. It was a good idea and...” Pikark started.
Massive ships appeared.
”Sir, Imperial LARP ships off starboard, they're hailing us,” Uhuru said.
”Put it on screen,” Pikark coughed.
The screen, which had bands of distortion through it and color problems, showed a blue skinned alien.
”Grand Admiral Marvawn, Third Sith Empire,” the figure introduced itself.
”Sir! Defaint ships off port! Their hailing,” Uhuru said.
The figure chuckled. ”I told Queen Armanhammer that I'd get here first.”
Pikark wanted to lean back and sigh as Cylon ships appeared, then nearly a dozen Battlestars and their attendant ships.
”Fall back, Pikark,” Grand Admiral Marvawn suggested.
”We're good. We have boarders on that damn thing and a Bolo making it impossible for them to launch off this side,” Pikark said. He coughed again, ignoring the dull digging pain of a cracked rib.
”Sir, Klingon, Romulan, Glorious Heritage Class heavy cruisers, Narn, Centauri, Minbari, Vorlon ship signatures arriving,” Uhuru stated.
”Captain, it is logical that one person take command to reduce confusion,” the Spock said.
”Uhuru, give me a channel,” Pikark ordered. He smiled. ”She can't get away now.”
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The Overqueen at first had quailed at the sight of reinforcements to the hated ship, then she realized that her ship outmassed all of them by a factor of a thousand. Her shields were thicker than all of theirs, and she had more guns than all of them combined.
She overrode the High Speakers urgent request that the hiveship flee to jumpspace, and ordered her ship in for the attack.
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The team of thirty humans was deep inside the hull, far deeper than they had any right to be. They were all kneeling down in an abandoned maintenance corridor that swirled with smoke and mist. They were all taking long slow breaths, or sipping at their water, or chewing a squirt of nutripaste.
”How close?” Yar asked, kneeling down next to the team leader.
The commando checked his HUD. ”Twelve more miles,” he said, speaking softly.
The entire team had their psychic stealth system cranked to max.
Yar looked down the corridor. ”She's waiting, boys”
Her men all nodded, smiling grimly.
She gave a smile as she stood up.
”We don't want to keep royalty waiting.”