Nova Wars

The Telkan moved quickly, taking off from a ready stance and sprinting down the hallway.

For almost a full second a murky silverish image of the Telkan was still crouched down, ready to take off sprinting, while a murky gray streak connected the Telkan to the image as he sprinted down the corridor. Then the ready-figure didn't take off, it just slid into the streak and merged with the Telkan, who was against the far gym wall.

Admiral (Lower Decks) of the Iron Shelvant closed the video, nodding.

"We have almost two hundred fifty other documented demonstrations," Chief Engineer Algwarth said, putting her hands behind her back and tensing her shoulders to make her muscles stand out. "Different spectrums, some multi-spectrum, different environments, different species."

Shelvant nodded, opening up another video.

This was green mantid, obviously concentrating. Around him floated spectral numbers and mathematical formula.

He closed the video.

"We're not sure what's causing it, but it's definitely related to wherever we are," the Engineer said.

"No clue which Transit Space we're using?" Shelvant asked.

The Engineer shook her head. "Negative."

"Any solid proof for how they're doing it?" Shelvant asked.

Chief Engineer Algwarth shook her head. "Just WAG and the like."

"Hit me with one," Shelvant said.

Algwarth flexed her shoulders again, obviously uncomfortable. "We know Mar-gite can generate a biological counter-grav to get off-planet once they get three hundred or more linked up. We know that they can go superluminal somehow. The current, prevalent theory, is that they layered enough Mar-gite on us to shift us into super-luminal and haul us along."

"That seems fairly self-evident," Shelvant said.

"Which is why I have teams gathering as much data as possible," the Chief Engineer said. She sighed. "Not that it will matter. With them coating the hull so thickly, we can't get a message torpedo off-ship. That's assuming that the torpedo can somehow operate in wherever we are."

Shelvant nodded. "I have a theory on how to get the message torpedoes out," he paused. "It won't be good for us. We'll all regret it and probably die from it, but it should work."

The Chief Engineer was silent. "The Mar-gite have layered nearly six hundred feet deep on us. That's at least three hundred, possibly closer to four hundred layers thick."

Shelvant shook his head. "It won't matter. If this works, it won't matter how many there are."

The Chief Engineer was silent a moment. "Are you going to explain?" she finally asked.

Shelvant told her and her brow ridge raised. "At the least, it will cause massive damage to the ship's hull. That's the best case scenario."

"The largest probability is that we explode," Shelvant said. He sighed and moved around the holotank slowly. "I'm not enamored with suicide, but we're at war. The Mar-gite are obviously flooding into the systems and we walked right into an ambush because we weren't warned."

Algwarth nodded.

"Most of the ranking officers are dead. Most of the Senior NCOs are dead," Shelvant continued. "A lot of the enlisted with highly technical jobs are dead."

"Anyone with supplemental memory and interface controls," Algwarth said. "If I hadn't had mine physically turned off so I could run checks on the thinking wires, I'd be dead too."

Algwarth nodded. "I've been thinking that we're not the only ship that's been taken. Before we got moved, I saw at least two other ships go superluminal and the Mar-gite ejected clusters were heading for at least a dozen other ships."

"They've never shown those tactics before," the Chief Engineer stated. "That spears were new too."

"Saint Newton and Saint Ch'Krawt are the two most deadly sons of bitches in the universe," Shelvant said, chuckling at his own joke. "Any idea what the spears are made of?"

"We took two, center mass. Examination has shown that they're density collapsed calcite. Same things as the Mar-gite arm-hooks and the grinding plates and teeth in their mouths," she shook her head. "We've estimated that the Mar-gite cluster crushed down at least twenty-million Mar-gite per spear. They had at least twenty-thousand Mar-gite riding the spear end. Once they hit, they immediately concentrated on battlescreen emitters, point defense, and counter-missile missile launchers."

"How? They don't even really have brains," Shelvant said.

Algwarth nodded. "True. But we've managed to examine a few we took down that didn't get melted by that damn fog. Their sensory organs are different. It looks like they were specifically 'bred' to consider those primary targets."

"Great," Shelvant tapped the holotank, bringing up the silvery ship as it came in and the image of it attached to the hull with a battlescreen up, taking from the wreckage strewn bay it was outside of. "And these are new."

He tapped another window, showing the strange tentacles creatures that had been killed by the Marines. "And these."

"It's not really that high tech," Algwarth said. "We've taken apart some of the remains. The metal is battlesteel as well as carbon doped endosteel. Circuitry is standard molycircs everyone but the Terrans figured out," she shook her head. "Even the plasma weapons and the vibroblades aren't that unusual."

"How do they compare to Confederate technology?" Shelvant asked.

"Behind even the Lankies before the Big C3. They just went a different direction than everyone else," she said. She tapped another window and the DNA strand showed up. It was a triple-helix. "Lots of genetic engineering. Out of the four types we encountered, three share DNA that's been heavily modified, the other one isn't related to the other three at all but shows signs of heavy alteration."

"So... we don't know anything about them," Shelvant said.

"The three would enjoy ammonia heavy worlds. The odd one out would be just fine on Smokey Cone," Algwarth said. "At least, that's what the dumbwire medical computer claims."

"Where did that system come from? I've never even heard of it?" Shelvant said.

The Chief Engineer shook her head. "Luck. That's where it came from. Turns out that an Omni-Corp wanted to use a ship this one's size to test the dumbwires so they agreed to pay for the construction of this ship. They did their field tests, then sold it back to the Confederacy. During refit it was decided that the dumbwires would be too expensive to remove, so they just left them in, brought the ship up to Space Force standards, did a single trial, then handed it off to us."

Shelvant chuckled. "Well, I'll make sure to include a thank you note to the Omni-Corps in the message torpedoes."

"You're wedded to the plan?" the Chief Engineer asked carefully.

Shelvant nodded. "I am. It might just be a fancy form of suicide, but this is war and it's bigger than us," he rubbed his face. "While it makes for great cinema, being the subject of such a cliche brings me no joy."

The Chief Engineer nodded.

0-0-0-0-0

The Chief Engineer looked over her holotank, staring at the icons. The holotank was inside one of the command and control dropships, a heavily armored beast. Admiral Shelvant stood next to her, staring at the icons.

The NCv cannons were loaded, magazines of fifty. The barrels were not extended past the hull, instead the guns were still retracted. Blast shields had been welded into the channel to prevent any backflow from damaging the guns for as long as possible and armor added to the external surfaces of the barrels. Steam powered launchers were loaded with heavy combat dropships or aerospace fighters capable of short jumpspace hops, strap on battlescreen projectors dotting their surfaces. The lifepods blinked to show they were ready and loaded.

The entire remaining crew was either in lifepods, aboard the aerospace fighters, or in the dropships.

Everything else was being run by dumbwires.

"Go strap in," Shelvant ordered.

The Chief Engineer nodded, moving away.

The 'ACTIVATE' icon blinked slowly.

Once that was hit, the cannons would start firing, rapid firing their entire fifty rounds as fast as possible.

The secondary sprint drive had been replaced by message torpedoes. The drive activation mechanisms replaced with bursting charges that would blow the casing of the NCv round apart and drop the message torpedo into whatever space the ship was being moved through by the Mar-gite.

Shelvant had decided to go for all or nothing.

As a final, parting gift, multiple thermonuclear weapons, antimatter bombs, and other esoteric weapons normally fired by the guns, were all wired to blow.

Shelvant intended on leaving the Mar-gite and their masters with nothing.

He reached out and touched the icon.

The counter began winding down. He saw "HURR DEE HURR" flash next to it and knew that the signal had been passed on. Not just activating the weapons, but activating the timer so that those sailors aboard the lifepods and dropships and aerospace fighters could see it too.

He rushed to his seat, sitting down and buckling in.

The hope was that the cannons and other weapons would clear away the three to four hundred feet of Mar-gite, allowing the nCv rounds, the aerospace strikers, the lifepods, and the dropships to make it out into the superluminal space.

The hope was that the superluminal space would spit everything out into n-space, into realspace.

Five thousand torpedoes. Fifty dropships. Fifty aerospace strikers. Two hundred lifepods.

Admiral Shelvant hoped that at least one would make it.

That the Confederacy would be warned about the new tactics the Mar-gite were using. That the evidence of the Mar-gite's masters would make it. That the warning about The Flash would make it.

Shelvant closed his eyes.

Live or die, it didn't matter to him.

What mattered is how many of his sailors survived.

The counter was blurring.

It reached zero.

The big nCv guns started firing, the first ten round HE with an impact fuze with the standoff distance removed and no booster charge. The huge 55 inch guns blew the Mar-gite clear with the first three hits. The rest of the rounds whipped into the strange fog and vanished with a flash. The rounds containing the message torpedoes followed, vanishing into the fog.

The guns at the front of the launching systems, carefully placed by the surviving engineers, opened up as soon as the launch iris opened. Six seconds and the way was clear. The ships were launched, vanishing into the strange swirling mist.

Shelvant closed his eyes and was startled to realize he was whispering an ancient, almost forgotten prayer to the Digital Omnimessiah, his hands clenched together, the heavy armored gloves lacking tactile feedback.

There was a sudden gut-wrenching twist, a feeling like he was being pulled inside out and in every direction at the same time.

It felt like he threw up inside his skull while his brains leaked out of empty eye sockets and out his nose.

Then there was a wobble that he felt, like everything, the entire universe was made out of jello, just for a second, maybe two, maybe ten heartbeats since his heart was hammering like a jackhammer.

He could smell the ozone and faint stench of scorched hydrocarbons from his suit helmet cleaning the vomit.

He could hear someone screaming. It went on and on and on.

He took a deep whooping breath.

That was the only reason he knew it wasn't him.

He managed to get his eyes open.

The Chief Engineer was staring at him. He looked her up and down.

She was intact and not fused to the deck plating. She didn't look like she'd been turned inside out inside of her suit and her suit looked intact.

Someone was still screaming, the screams getting thinner and weaker.

The lights of the dropship flickered and came on. He could feel machinery spinning up vibrating the seat underneath him. His armored vac-suit went live.

"We made it," the Chief Engineer said.

Shelvant looked around, seeing the Chief Security Officer was strewn across the deck, organs, muscle, bone all strewn together with shards of the armored vac-suit. Steam was rising off the meat and the screams were getting thinner even as the pulsating flesh moved less and less.

"Some of us," Shelvant said. He closed his eyes and opened them. "Let's see what the scanners can see."

0-0-0-0-0

The dropship was unable to find anything near enough to trigger the sensors. It didn't contain a jumpdrive or superluminal beacon. Its atmospheric recycler could keep everyone alive, fifty-three out of the seventy who had launched with it, for an indeterminable amount of time. The nutriforge was live, the rations were good.

The only hope was the message torpedoes that had been put on the weapon mounts of the dropship and fired off as soon as the dropship had ended up in realspace.

The Chief Engineer and her team had foreseen something like that happening.

Which is why the massive dropship, easily able to carry a Treana'ad infantry company, only had seventy crew and passengers.

The cryotubes and their backup zero-point reactors were the 'gone to hell' option.

Shelvant watched as the lights went from amber to a cool blue.

Unlike everyone else, he wouldn't be protected by a cryo-tube and a nifty-thrint field.

Just the field.

He sat down in the command chair and doublechecked everything.

A Confederate transponder would turn off the nifty-thrint field.

He hoped they wouldn't be floating out in the dark for too long.

He reached out and touched the button.

Everything went still.