Chapter 572: Interlude (1/2)
Sleemas had been a ship captain in the early days of the discovery of the Mad Lemurs of Terra, was on record as being one of the first to encounter one face to face. Since then he had seen the Precursor Autonomous War Machines attack Council Space, the Mad Lemurs of Terra defend those worlds, the Unified Council foolishly go to war with the lemurs, the surrender of the Unified Council, and the appearance of the Atrekna.
For a Shavashan, it was an unholy exciting time.
Sleemas did have to admit, he enjoyed some of the technological advancements.
But those same technological advancement are what put him in the situation he was in.
Thanks to Confederate engineering, automatic systems, and technology, Sleemas was able to command a vessel all on his own, with only limited virtual intelligences to assist him. The engines of his ship were powerful and capable of long distance travel, and the weaponry he'd been able to purchase meant his little one-being starflitter was more heavily armed than a Corporate Military Fleet destroyer.
Which is why he had agreed to accompany a luxury transport full of children who wished to visit a largely uninhabited planet for their final year field trip.
Everything had been fine during the jumpspace travel. Lemur beacons made sure that Sleemas could keep track of the luxury vessel even in jumpspace and adjust his speed to make sure that he would come out of jumpspace a little over an hour before the students did.
Something he was glad he had decided upon for the teenage Shavashan's sake.
Not that it helped him.
Within seconds of dropping into the system he was being scanned. In under a minute he was locked up by targeting systems and he saw massive Precursor Autonomous War Machines lighting their drives and orienting on him.
His LVI's have all screeched with joy, their images going from a cool soothing green to a burning hateful amber as they jumped up and down and pointed at the dozen PAWM heading toward him.
Sleemas made his decision in seconds.
There were 1,474 students, 156 teachers, 38 ship's crew, and 12 security personnel still coming.
Sleemas knew what he had to do.
He laid down in his command couch and ordered it to close. The lid slammed down, the cushions inflated to hold him securely, and the plug slammed into the socket at the base of his skull. For a second there was a slight bit of pain, a tingling burning that swept over his body.
He paid it no mind as he suddenly was the ship. He was surrounded by barking howling little creatures, all pointing at the PAWM.
Sleemas ordered the four barrel nCV cannon to go hot, fired up the missile banks, and launched two mass gatherer torpedoes at a nearby gas giant that was only 6 light seconds away. The torpedoes streaked into hyperspace and emerged less than a second later, dropping into the atmosphere and bringing their systems online.
At the two second mark supercooled gasses compressed and cooled to a slurry flooded into his mass tanks. The missile bay covers retracted and the warbois began waking up, screaming in rage as their slumber was disturbed. His EW warfare systems went live and he could feel the spikes and spines raise up on his 'body' as the electronic warfare systems screeched at the PAWM.
They weren't Harvesters, but they were still the size of small cities and nearly a mile thick.
They were running ranging computations on him as he slid forward through the system.
He set the count-down to when the students would arrive and ordered his computers to churn the astrogation data for the student transport to jump back into jumpspace as soon as their core held enough charge. He identified the nearest military base, only eighty light years away and ordered his astrogation systems to focus on that, dropped a stealth beacon with orders not to reveal itself to anything but the student vessel. He launched another stealth torpedo that had orders not to jump to hyperspace and make for the military base until it coasted into the Oort Cloud.
Ten seconds had elapsed.
His drives were still lit as he pushed further into the system. He knew that the PAWM would follow.
He knew they would.
He wanted them too.
He spun up his battlescreen projectors when his EW system's warboi jumped up and down and screeched that the PAWM had a lock on him. He fired off the flares and strobes and static bombs as he slammed the acceleration to max. He could hear the oversized inertial compensator kick in as his speed jumped from 0.002C to 0.45C in less than a second. He knew his drive signature would burn right through the jamming, but Sleemas had only thrown Tier-5 out, saving the others for later.
He didn't have Confed Space Force gear, but his gear far outstripped anything the Unified Council or the PAWM had.
The PAWM pushed their drives, trying to catch up.
System scans were coming back. The stellar mass was red, engorged, huge to Sleemas's vision. The two habitable planets were coming back with confusing readings, as if they were in two places at once. PAWM were lighting off their drives further in system as the early warning system announced Sleemas's little craft.
His combat gestalt, loaded with eVI's, threw an image to him. It was of one of the fierce Terran carnivores standing in the snow. Arrows stuck out of it and it was bleeding from a multitude of wounds. Blood was drooling from its fierce tooth filled maw, its eyes were bloodshot and red. The text was simple.
I can't win but I can still not lose
Sleemas clenched his teeth as purpose filled him.
Thirty second had elapsed.
One of the moons of the closest gas giant was nothing more than a factory producing PAWM units and Sleemas targeted it by eye, using passive reticles, not bothering with his more advanced and esoteric targeting systems.
His thumb flicked up the cover on the top of the grip he held tight in one fist. His brain ordered the breeches loaded and the magazine prepped. He pressed the button, holding it down.
The light nCV cannon thudded, paused, thudded, paused, as he fired four spaced shots, the whole superstructure of his single-being space-flitter shuddered.
Sleemas heeled over, pulling a shallow arc, spilling em chaff and 'smokers' while fluttering the engines to make it seem like his systems were overstressed as he came about on a new heading, pushing himself in-system.
The four shots hit the small moon square, each moving at 0.75C. The moon shuddered and rang like a bell on each shots, ejecta pluming hundreds of miles into space, much of it moving fast enough to achieve escape velocity.
Cracks appeared on the surface as the entire moon warped and shuddered from the impacts. It held together, but everything on the surface was turned to wreckage by the violent earthquakes as the moon spasmed from the high velocity hits.
The PAWM following Sleemas increased their speed, pushing their engines to 120% of maximum safe thrust. Other PAWM lit their engines and began rising out of ammonia seas and methane clouds.
Oh, you all want me bad now, Sleemas thought to himself. He closed both of his eyelids over his eyes and willed himself to relax. Enraged Phillip be with me now, he thought to himself, remembering his meeting with the legendary Terran. Let me show the courage you showed when you came to my aid.
Sixty seconds.
The PAWM were activating and lighting up their drives across the system. Sleemas could feel them through the neural linkage with his ship. Creatures, bioweapons known as Dwellerspawn, were lifting from the gas giants or uncurling from where they had been sleeping in their orbit around the huge red giant.
Sleemas fired stealth torpedoes and ordered his nanoforges to wet-print up more. He wasn't worried about his mass tanks, the stealth platforms sunk into the gas giants were refilling his mass-tanks as fast as he was depleting them.
He drove inward, angling toward other planetoids that his sensors said were uninhabited but full of energy signatures consistent with PAWM construction. He fired his cannon, four shots at a time, and ordered the nanoforge to wetprint the replacement rounds.
His tiny little morale gestalt tossed up a cartoon of a fat yellow lemur with a club yelling ”DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING? I'LL TOUCH ANYTHING I WANT!” and smashing the plants, insects, and small creatures around him.
Sleemas felt his spirits lift slightly at that.
Five minutes.
He was keeping ahead of the PAWM, ahead of the Dwellerspawn, emptying his four-barrel nCV cannon every chance he had, throwing out shoals of jammers, firing off decoys, and piloting wildly.
He was deep into the system, a fifth of the distance from the resonance zone toward the stellar mass. His acceleration was up to 0.79C, the closest nCV barrage had been nearly a million miles off, and none of the light speed weapons had gotten close to him.
Ten minutes.
A third of the way into the system.
It looked like everything in the system was converging on him.
Several ships of unknown configuration were lifting off from one of the inhabited planets that his probes had done high-speed flybys of. They looked like vast spiral shelled sea creatures, with a spongy 'foot' extended out, surrounded by graviton producing glowing flagella.
Sleemas changed course, heading downward from the stellar mass and across.
Everything changed course, following him. The creatures and machines were tightening the net, narrowing the geometry, closing the distance.
Fifteen minutes.
He was racing now, shooting for a gap between the Dwellerspawn and the PAWM. Two of the twisted shell craft were orienting on him, great 'wings' of unfolded tissue extended from either side glowing with phasic energy as they absorbed the light of the dying star that should have been a high energy yellow star.
His ship started shuddering as he took near hits and he cranked his battlescreen up to 50%, threw flares and chaff, popped two decoys out to the side, and slammed his acel to max. The engines howled as he went to All Ahead Flank Speed. He could feel himself sweating, panting, inside the command couch's shell.
Twenty minutes.
He did a close flyby on one of the moons, seeing it was nothing more than vast biological factories and spawning pools. He threw decoys out, rotating as he did so, so the 50 gallon barrel sized decoys dropped toward the moon. The reactors were running out of control, the small five kilo antimatter thorium salt reactors getting hotter and hotter, heating up the decoy.
Three minutes after he launched them from the grav drivers they hit and the bright white actinic flash of antimatter explosions was visible behind him as his decoys detonated and blew huge divots out of the moon, atmosphere exploding outward as the three shockwaves roared through the moon.
Vat Grown Luke succor any who were on that doomed place, Sleemas thought as he pulled a high-G turn, practically standing the starflitter on its nose and shooting straight up.
Thirty minutes.
Halfway into the system. 'Above' the stellar mass's orbital ring.
But the noose was tightening as his battlescreen strength rose to 63%.
He was faster than any of them except the spiral shell craft. He was more nimble than any of them.
And he was more heavily armed than he had any right to be.
He knew that he had to break out, but he'd be forced to move within range of their guns.
But Sleemas had decided it was time to play his death song. He knew that the PAWM would dedicate valuable electronic resources, valuable computing power, to decipher the EM emmissions in hope of figuring out the meaning.
”The first time I saw you...” his ship broadcast.
He gunned it, planning on 'scraping' by one of the massive PAWM fleets that had nearly two hundred PAWM machines around a Harvester class machine.
”...was on the screen at Sebastian's house...” rang out.
He ordered the warbois to bake up EW hashes and shake their salted caramel rainbow hash table.
They screeched and jumped up and down with glee.
The huge Harvester class PAWM blinked in electronic surprise when the ship didn't twist away but instead accelerated straight at it. It's shield strength increased and that cannon at the front began spitting shells that tore right through its massive battlescreens to slam deep craters into the PAWM's hull.
”Back then you were so much older than me but now you're a child,” sang out on the speakers and from the radio transmitter.
Forty minutes.
Sleemas 'felt' himself battered around as the twisting plucking feeling of near misses with nCV barrages measuring in the hundreds of shells scraped by him. His piloting eVI helped guide his hand as he twisted and dodged shells that were only a 10th of his size.
The shields on the Harvester dropped completely as one of Sleemas's weapons got a chunk of something good, raising up a lance of energy a hundred miles high and twenty miles thick.
As he whipped across the Harvester, less than a mile from its hull, he threw out decoys, ejected too almost-overloaded thermal cores, and slapped open the cage for the insane warbois.
The electronic entities shrieked with glee as they flung themselves out of the creche and at the massive ship. Thousands, millions, billions of access points glimmered and gleamed and sang to the insane electronic warfare eVI's. They leaped into them, slamming through the six digit forty-five character passwords, collapsing firewalls thinner than a stripper's pasties, and swarmed into the Harvester's systems with all the malevolent glee of rabid children descending on a deer made of candy.
As a parting shot Sleemas flared his engines, throwing tens of miles of energy from the drives as he swept barely a mile above the Harvester before shooting past it.
The lance of energy hit the Harvester's engines, which were shielded from outgoing energy, not incoming.