Chapter 570: Interlude (2/2)

The whole universe seemed to turn upside down to the Captain as she held onto the bars of her command cradle with both hands, both in eVR and in real life.

All fifteen of the Atrekna ships suddenly heeled over as energy burst through their armor. Five of them exploded into debris, one started burning, and the last turned into a large Charlie the Moomoo blanket that hit the front of the ship behind it, wrapping around the superstructure.

That ship rolled out of formation.

The shimmering area exploded as the temporal shifting collapsed, shredding the creatures halfway between then and now. Backlash hit the Niven Ring two million years prior and the entire thing shattered from the stresses.

”Stellar mass luminosity has increased by two points!” Com-Nineteen called out. ”Astrogation reports appearance of guidance points!”

”STAY ON THEM!” the Captain yelled. She could feel several of her pinfeathers had molted off, but paid it no mind.

The Atrekna quailed back from the massive wave of incoming firepower. Once again the ferals had shown that they had bottomless reserves. The amount of incoming missiles outmassed their entire fleet's mass, their energy output was close to a stellar mass per ship, and still they fought on.

YOU BELONG TO US! the Atrekna screeched out.

THEN HAVE OUR WRATH! the ferals screamed back.

”Task Force Sandy falling back for cooling and reloading,” Com-Seven said.

”Task Force Harrington is rolling pods. Mass tank refill successful,” Com-One called out. ”ETA to firing time estimated sixteen minutes!”

”Tell Admiral Vetrinka Kusak she has ten!” the Captain called out.

”Wave Gamma has broken through the biofleets and is making their attack run on Bogey-Beta!” Com-Nineteen called out.

The Captain leaned forward, watching the holotank, switching several windows to the cockpit cams of the Hamaroosa manning the light attack torchships.

The ships were designed like flying V's, with heavy weapons on the outside of the wings, underslung missile launchers, and the whole thing wrapped around a nCV cannon. Their battlescreens were taking enough point defense hits that they were almost opaque as the Hamaroosa pilots white-knuckled their attack run.

The cannon only held twelve shots, each slug the size of a Lanaktallan, the barrel only a 5th of the size of most light nCV cannons, but it didn't need to be accurate and it carry too heavy of a payload.

The cannons were loaded with armor defeating high explosive phasic enhanced rounds.

The Atrekna started to ignore the little craft sweeping over dozens of the nautilus shelled and crystal festooned craft. Their maser and laser weapons, the twin paser (Protron Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) cannons all raking the armor. Meters of hardened battlesteel exploded, but there was still meters afterwards.

Then the craft all fired their nCV cannons and spun as they arced away from the massive ships.

The nCV rounds, fired point blank, slammed deep into the armor and detonated.

The phasic rounds were tuned to a newer frequency and were called ”Moomoo Tender Suckerpunch Crunch!” in official documents. A vibrational frequency developed on Smokey Cone itself that had finally made it into weapons and the order of battle.

Across all of the ships hit the crystalling structures exploded as the harmonic caused their crystalline structure to violently shatter.

The Atrekna were reeling when the big guns of the feral fleet fired again. More ships reeled out of formation, spilling atmosphere and wreckage. Over a dozen exploded, lost with all hands, and twice that number went dead, just coasting forward, empty of life when the inertial compensators failed and everything alive was smeared to less than a molecule thick.

The stellar mass brightened again, moving from bright crimson red to an angry bloody orange.

”You may not have this system,” the Captain snarled. She leaned forward. ”Everyone thinks they're gangster till Claymore Roomba comes around the corner!”

Her crew all smiled at one another as they heard their Captain's voice and the combat gestalt threw up the little image of the crude robotic floor cleaner with the ancient directional mine taped to it.

The Atrekna formations suddenly began to break up, each of the massive spiral shell appearing craft heading a different direction accompanied by smaller vessels. The massive biofleets changed heading slowly, their biological systems less adept at changing geometry rapidly.

”THERE IT IS! EXECUTE FIREPLAN KLARK!” the Captain yelled over her link. The Communications section ensured her words were heard by every Captain and Admiral in the combined fleet.

The Atrekna desperately fled, trying to get beyond the gravitational and temporal distortions, trying to get free of the phasic munitions blaring out broad bands of static, trying to find somewhere they could ignite their temporal engines and t-shift out of the system.

They had hoped their sudden maneuver would catch the ferals by surprise.

Instead the feral fleet suddenly seemed to find more firepower. To top it off, ships hiding in the Oort Cloud suddenly dropped masking and opened fire from where they had been keeping 'pace' with the Atrekna fleets, their geometry giving them excellent firing angles with short time flight paths.

More and more Atrekna ships exploded with all hands or began to tumble as the systems went down. The small torch ships, which had been trying to widen the distance, suddenly came around in a big swooping arc, reloading their guns from the mass tanks, ignoring the sharp fzzzt across their back teeth and the taste of watermelon cherry on their tongues as the tanks reloaded from the massive mass gatherer ships sunk inside the gas giants.

The little ships came in close, going for the engines, pounding the Atrekna ships, going in on a run that involved criss-crossing over the ship before coming back around in a large loop to get behind the ships again.

The Atrekna were close to panic, nothing was working, nothing was going the way it was supposed to go.

The temporal strings, which they normal adjusted to make sure they had the outcome they wanted, were full of nothing but crushing defeat and doom. The harder they pressed on the threads that had any chance of escape, not even victory, but some escape, the more chronotrons jumped from that thread to absolute crushing defeat for the Atrekna.

It was if some malevolent entity was brutally shoving the Atrekna face first through the timelines and into the worst one possible for the Atrekna.

The harder they fought, the more malevolent glee they could feel in the way the chronotrons popped into existence.

Each ship that exploded the stellar mass brightened.

With the light of the yellow sun bathing her face, the eVR avatar of Captain Cheekeet Longflight watched with narrowed eyes as the Atrekna vessels were destroyed piecemeal, even as her body twisted and shuddered in her command couch, her brain connected to the fleet combat eVR system.

”You shall not have this system,” she said again. ”This time, monsters, we can protect ourselves.”