As Implacable Agent of Retribution crossed the moon’s horizon, the telemetry links cut out, re-routing through the vessel’s support platforms so quickly there was no noticeable lag, but the technical efficiency of datalink uploads wasn’t on Nanil’s mind right now. Her eyes widened as she saw the weapon-ship trade fire with the hive. Beams of blinding yellow, lasers of vivid red exposed as they crossed through clouds of vapour, the flashes of electromagnetic intensity from launching mass drivers and more, including weapons that were more like miniaturized core release systems than culverin pounded down on the monstrosity. They didn’t just punch through the armour like Hegemony direct-fire weaponry, but tore at it like a ravenous beast. Craters eighties of meters wide and just as deep were blown into the keel, their edges glowing like a lava flow.
Gobbets of the Meer-Ulson interstellar unit, flash-frozen in space, bled from those gaping wounds along with debris and bodies that were sucked into space by explosive decompression, but the damage seemed so, so insignificant to the monster’s sheer bulk. Then, rising up above the Meer-Ulson monstrosity with the agility of an explorer, Implacable Agent of Retribution was out of sight.
The hive vessel saw them; it had known they were coming. It had tried to stop them. Its missiles were still trying to breach their defences, its falconets still trying to catch them, but none of those would do it. Red One had taken the flames meant for them and her retaliation had destroyed almost half the weapons on the secondary hull facing her squadron.
“Nanil,” Red One called, sounding as close to fear as the young woman had ever heard her, the hive’s prow swinging inexorably towards her, its energy signature spiking beyond orange on Intent’s readouts. The hive vessel was slewing up and to port to face Retribution as the weapon-ship blew past it, both vessels continuing to trade fire. Retribution’s shields flickered like a dying light panel as the hive’s batteries cut through them with nearly every shot it made, but despite the terrible damage they were inflicting, they couldn’t cut as deeply as they could on the Hegemony’s interstellar units. The synth had been right. She could take it. She had taken it, and given Nanil this chance.
Nanil didn’t hesitate. They had their target. “Squadron,” she ordered. “Strike.”
Even preoccupied by Implacable Agent of Retribution, the sleeper hive had attention – and weapons – to spare. The instant Nanil’s squadron appeared, the Meer-Ulson vessel opened fire. Her squadron had tried to screen the shieldless Assured and Disciplined Response, but they had to open their ranks to put all their core release cannon on the target. Hierarch Aesm-Tren had known his unit would never survive, but he would have been dead without the squadron’s support.
“If we’re with you, that’s one more target they’ll have to deal with. We can draw a few hits away from the rest of the squadron,” he’d said, confident and steady in tone as he laid out the circumstances of his death. FAD through and through, Aesm-Tren and Assured and Disciplined Response never wavered, not even when the hive loomed before them.
His vessel flashed into vapour as weapons meant to kill units much larger than a mere border sentinel broke through Response’s ECM. Another beam punched through Condemnation of Acrimony’s forward shields, ripping straight through the vessel from prow to keel. Half its crew died in that instant, but the border sentinel held course. Disallowance of Importunate Methods lost its primary hangar to one strike and its bridge and senior staff to the next, but its synth took command for the vital moments that the sentinel needed.
Aboard Nanil’s own vessel, warnings screamed as Intent’s shields were breached again and its keel was torn open again and her crew died again. Even with the guns Red One had left it, the hive vessel had more than enough firepower to destroy her command in the next few seconds.
She didn’t give it those seconds.
Thoughtful Repudiation of Intent’s reactor dome was already reconfigured for its ‘focused core output release venting sequence’ as power levels, held at the very cusp of criticality, finally peaked over. Its two surviving kin, though battered, torn and themselves near death, did the same. Separated by less than heartbeats, the three vessels fired on the hive. Beams of the brightest hues of red tinged by brilliant white converged upon the Meer-Ulson vessel, tearing through the monstrosity’s tattered shielding.
Eights of centuries ago on Uherta, there had been a cabal of warrior-priests that served a god, so they said, of balance and the natural world. It was protector of both the land and its people, the priests its mortal arm and the enforcers of its alleged edicts. These paladins travelled the length and breadth of nations looking for impurity and corruption and rooting it out. They would protect villages from deadly predators as much as they would citizens from criminals and heretics.
When they found those that they believed could not be redeemed, whether a creature driven to preying upon Calnians or a person who’s sins were deemed particularly egregious, the warrior-priests would mete out justice with their blade, offering a single, final condemnation for their foe: ‘Be not.’
The Calnian people had long since given up the belief of gods as irrational and pointless superstition, and historical research had shown these so-called paladins as little better than any other band of self-appointed vigilantes who used force and fear to promulgate falsehoods and oppression. When she had been very young, Nanil’s second mother Zyleis had told her tales of them, at least until her dam told Zyleis to stop filling the childrens’ heads with nonsense and corrected the record with the truth about those so-called ‘heroes’.
Nanil had forgotten all about those stories until this moment.
In the moment before everything turned white, Nanil bared her teeth, her tail lashing as she uttered two words, the same invocation that a warrior-priest, standing over the defeated form of a horror from myth, would have uttered in the instant before his blade fell for the final time.
“Be not.”
~
Weapons technology is one of my favourite fields to research. I’ve improved the systems my ship-self first carried in lethality, range and accuracy as well as developing new weapons over more than seventeen hundred years of war. My particle beams can punch through a Chariot’s shields. My energy mounts, ‘lasers’ all despite being varied forms of beams including masers and grasers, can tear anything smaller than a battleship to pieces in seconds. My mass drivers, railguns and coilguns can slam c-fractional sabot rounds into – and through – a target from light-seconds away. If I were in Earth’s orbit, my missiles could strike targets on Venus at its perigee. I am one of the most powerful warships in the galaxy. The Compact, despite being generations behind my own research, remains the most technologically advanced and militarily formidable nation in known space.
The battle here at Meer Colhara has forced me to reconsider a lot of my previously-held beliefs. It has also put an increased emphasis on a question I already had. The Calnians are adamant that they do not build warships. The closest they come are designs like their ‘border sentinels’ and even then, despite their small size, they devote more space than necessary to tertiary functions; Thoughtful Repudiation of Intent has scientific laboratories that a cruiser would envy.
Humanity was like them once. Even at the height of the war they never really called me a dreadnought. I was a ‘deep space fleet engagement vessel’, a term only used to satisfy the conscience of those who believed part of the war was for the soul of their people and not their existence.
As I’ve said, the Calnians remind me a great deal of humanity. They’ve come so far, but they are still so young. They’re also desperate to hold onto the image they’ve crafted of themselves. I wonder, and not for the first time, if the universe will let them keep it. I don’t think so. Humanity couldn’t. If they could, they’d never have needed to create me.
Nanil’s ship and the two survivors of her squadron concentrate their fire on the hive’s central hull. Its shields – what’s left of them – resist less for than three quarters of a second before those beams tear through. The hive vessel’s armour was strong enough to take hits from the explorers’ and surveyors’ conversion cores, but I understand why Iljta and Allis-Ranz were as confident as they were that they could engage it before it caused substantial damage.
The hive ship’s shields are stronger than almost anything I’ve seen before and though both mine and Compact armour is pound-for-pound superior, the thickness of the Meer-Ulson hull means that only titan- or fortress-grade weapons can easily breach it. Not even a Toletta fortress has defences comparable to these.
I can successfully engage entire fleets and achieve victory. Compact Chariots can shatter entire defence grids and single-handedly subjugate entire star systems. This warship, even with its shields down, puts us both to shame... but that instant its shields last against the combined fire of three craft just over seven hundred meters in size is the last instant of life the universe permits it to have.
The beams, brilliant bright ruby-red, strike with perfect precision. The hive ship’s primary core, already critically overcharged to deal with me, is breached.
The energy released in that catastrophic instant blinds my sensors, burning out delicate instrumentation. The radiation pulse that follows on its heels is so intense that it destroys the systems of my remaining hull-mounted missiles and any drones that aren’t outright vapourized. Without conscious input, my auto-repair functions set to work as I take splinters of my attention to direct engineering units to the damaged systems, rolling my ship-self to bring my undamaged facing around. As I do so, I get to see what is left of the enemy.
Nothing. At least, nothing larger than the palm of a human’s hand.
The side of the moon facing the hive ship is pounded by shrapnel accelerated to catastrophic speed, the heat of the hive’s destruction turning lunar sand to glass and making stone formations that have stood untouched for millions of years ooze like melting glaciers.
Anything not shielded dies as the radiation pulse hits. Meer Colhara, already a ruin, is now lethally radioactive. Wrecks within line of sight to the hive are instantly scoured of life, their armour too thin to keep out the worst of it.
From around the moon, Nanil’s three remaining vessels emerge. Beaten, poisoned, hulls torn and systems faltering, they’ve not only survived, but destroyed a foe the equal of entire fleets. I watch them for a moment. They are tiny compared to me, even smaller when compared to a Compact Chariot and yet, just one of these little vessels could kill either of us. It’s... sobering and the question I have becomes more insistent.
What would the Calnians create if they actually built warships?
I think on that, and I feel another flicker of hope for the future and what we might be able to achieve together.