“No shit, Sherlock,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Captain, the Killers are here,” Gary reported, as alarms echoed through the starship. “I’m picking up at least twenty-seven wormholes opening within the Shiva System… ah, where the Shiva System was.”
“Red alert,” Andrew ordered, sitting up in his command chair. Part of him had never really believed that the insane scheme would actually work; the remainder had known that if it had worked, they would still be going up against the most powerful force in existence. “All hands to battle stations. Stand by to jump.”
“Anderson Drive online and ready to move us,” David said, from his position. “How many ships did they send to dispute possession of the black hole with us?”
“I got at least twenty-seven wormholes, but there’s so much distortion in the surrounding region of space that there might be more; we can’t separate them out at this distance,” Gary said. “I can’t even give you a reliable upper number.”
“Open a channel to the fleet,” Andrew ordered. “All ships; this is Captain Ramage. Follow us in on my mark and focus on the enemy starships; if the weapons work, hit them as hard as possible. If not, try and pin them down long enough to evacuate the system and pull out. Good luck.”
He closed the channel and looked over at David. “Jump us in,” he ordered. “Take us into the fire.”
A moment later, the starship rocked violently. “Localised disruption of space-time,” David reported, instantly. “It’s comparable to what the Observer encountered before it was destroyed. The presence of so many Killer starships is screwing up the Anderson Drive. It won’t be reliable here.”
“On screen,” Andrew ordered, shortly. They’d planned on the assumption that the Killers would deny them the use of the Anderson Drive, although it looked more as if it was an unexpected by-product of their own drive system, rather than a deliberate attempt to prevent escape. “Gary; numbers update? How many enemy ships are we facing?”
There was a long pause. “I am reading thirty-three Killer starships, all Iceberg-class,” Gary said, finally. The screen showed their locations; the massive starships were thundering towards the observation starship, ignoring the newcomers. Seven hundred and twenty human starships had entered the battle zone, Andrew knew, and the Killers were ignoring them. They might not have realised that there was a genuine threat. “They’re quartering the zone.”
“Noted,” Andrew said. He stared at the Killer starships, hating them with every fibre of his being. These weren’t civilians, or innocents caught in the line of fire, but monsters directly responsible for exterminating entire races. “Designate one of the Killer starships as our target.”
“Designated,” Gary said. One of the rearward Killer starship icons began to flash red, marking it as the fleet’s first target. “I have channelled the targeting data to the remainder of the fleet.”
“Bring the implosion bolts online,” Andrew ordered. “Load torpedo bays; charged weapons.”
“Weapons online, sir,” Gary said. “We’re ready on your command.”
Andrew took a breath. “Take us in,” he ordered. “Fire as soon as you enter weapons range.”
The massive Killer starship expanded rapidly as the drive cut in and the Lightning, followed by the remaining fleet, raced towards it. Its size was daunting, seemingly impossible; the Killers had built a ship without any sense of design, or at least a sense of design that humans might have appreciated. It was a monstrously ugly iceberg hanging in space, alien as hell; it should have been beyond imagination. Lighting and her sisters were just gnats compared to its immensity, yet even gnats could kill — Andrew preferred to think of them as poisonous spiders. One spider might be killed, or hundreds, but the concentrated spider venom would kill their target.
Or maybe not, he thought, ruefully. Humans could engineer counters or immunities to any kind of poison. Maybe they’re just sure that we can hardly inflict serious damage on them…
“Sir, I’m picking up power spikes,” Gary snapped. “They’re charging weapons!”
“Evasive action,” Andrew snapped. A moment later, a flash of white light narrowly missed the Lightning as it closed into weapons range. “Helm; start random evasive manoeuvres, keep them guessing.”
“Aye, sir,” David said. His voice tightened as he corkscrewed the starship in towards its target. “I guess we really did rattle their cage, sir.”
“Apparently,” Andrew said. Oddly, he found being fired upon almost reassuring. The Killers were worried about them. “Lock weapons on target and fire!”
The light dimmed as a stream of implosion bolts raced towards their targets. Andrew found himself praying in the last few seconds before they hit, praying desperately that they would inflict some damage, even if it were comparatively minor. Tiny explosions blossomed up on the Killer hull… and the entire starship twitched like a goosed human. The hull material was broken and torn.
“We hurt them,” Gary exclaimed, as if he were unable to believe his eyes. “We actually damaged the bastard!”
Andrew knew that sound didn’t travel through space, but he would have sworn that he heard the cheers echoing through the entire fleet. “Continue firing,” he snapped, angrily, as the remaining fleet opened fire. “Hit the bastard and keep firing until its blown away!”
The starship fired another round of implosion bolts into the Killer starship. It seemed to stagger under their fire, and then returned fire itself from the undamaged sections of the hull. The researchers studying the captured starship had theorised that the Killers used their hull material, which was already a powerful superconductor, to channel their weapons as they opened fire. Andrew smiled as they saw confirmation of the theory; the Killer wasn’t returning fire from the damaged sections of the hull. It they wiped out all the hull material, he concluded, the starship would be effectively helpless…
Or they could fire right into the gaps in the hull. “Take us in,” he ordered. “Load antimatter torpedoes and fire them into the broken sections of the hull!”
“Aye, sir,” Gary said, as the starship came around for another attack run. “Weapons locked on target…”
“Fire at will,” Andrew said. Another streak of white light narrowly missed them. Two other human starships weren’t so lucky and disintegrated in flares of white light, obliterated down to their component atoms. The fight might have become more even, but now it was just a battering match to discover which side could wipe out the other first. “Result?”
“I’m not sure,” Gary said, slowly. “We hit the bastard; I saw the missiles go inside the hull, but they didn’t detonate. They should have blown the starship apart when they detonated inside the ship…”
Andrew scowled. The implosion bolts might have been slicing into the hull material, but they weren’t inflicting more than tiny amounts of damage… on a starship over twenty kilometres long. He’d hoped that the antimatter torpedoes would have proven a shortcut to destroying the ship, but instead… they hadn’t detonated. Or, if they had detonated, somehow the blast had been dampened instead of ripping the starship apart. How the hell had they done that?
“Keep firing,” he ordered, slowly. If they had to rip the ship apart piece by piece, he’d do it. He keyed the link to the Admiral, who was watching through the MassMind. “Get on to the researchers and get them to figure out what happened to our antimatter devices.”