First Contact

Chapter 570: Interlude

"Bogey Gamma is shifting formation, looks like Goliath-Seven is tumbling," Tactical Four called out.

"Biowarfare System Twelve is breaking up, looks like Leslie Neilson got a piece of its brain," Tactical Nine added.

The massive warship shuddered as it fired it's rotating eight barrel C+ Cannon arrays in carefully staged shots. There was a slight pause between each shot, only a half second, to keep the powerful guns from warping the frame of the warship or damaging the recoil absorption system.

The system was of little note. A failed colony almost wiped out by a Precursor machine but saved at the last minute by an insane murderous lemur packed with high tech cybernetics almost six years prior was its only claim to fame. It was resource rich, however, and that made it valuable to some.

It also sat squarely in the intersection of four Niven Ring passages and six Doom Tube passages.

Which made if valuable to one side.

"Temporal Resonance Cannon shockwave incoming! ALL HANDS, BRACE FOR IMPACT!" the Captain called across the eVR of the super-dreadnought's bridge.

The other side was there to deny it to the other side, nothing more, nothing less.

With the exception of killing as many of the first side as possible.

The shockwave hit the three hundred ships of the smaller fleet, pouring over the vessels with such power that it made the battlescreens flare and sparkle. Several had paint streaks change color, nearly a half dozen shifted position by nearly a dozen miles, and one rippled and was replaced by a nearly identical ship with different hull numbers.

"Soaring Breezes has undergone temporal exchange!" Called out Tactical Five. "Getting sitrep now."

The Captain nodded, staring at her foe.

Nearly three hundred Autonomous War Machines, almost a hundred of the strange crystalline and battlesteel ships preferred by the enemy, and eighteen clusters of bioweapons designed for space combat and who knew what else.

She clacked her beak in irritation as one of the clusters fuzzed, spores ejected from the living creatures masking the cluster.

"Order Task Force Harrington to hit Bio-Seven with their full missile load, they're up to something and I don't want nasty surprises," the Captain ordered, turning and looking at Com-Nine. "I want those Webers to fire full volleys."

The commo-tech nodded, touching his temple and relaying the message.

Space was full of howling missiles, torpedoes stealthily moving in on attack runs, light attack craft engaged in a swirling point blank knife fight, biological weapons, and the bright flashes of weaponry capable of cracking continents detonating.

An Atrekna battlecruiser took a hit amidships and broke up as the vibrational resonance torpedo shattered the majority of crystalline structures aboard the ship. The two dozen Atrekna tried to shift out but less than a third managed to reach another vessel in the scant seconds they had.

"Monitor Sandy Lives firing main guns! Targeting Goliath-Seventeen!" Com-Eleven called out.

Even at a distance of twelve thousand miles the Captain could feel the heavy guns of the monitor firing through the way it made her bone marrow shudder for a long second. On the visual it looked like space around the monitor exploded into spinning floating mirror-like fragments less than a hundred meters from the hull of the massive heavily armored and heavily armed Hamaroosa warship. The effect continued, getting further and further apart with each shattering of realspace.

An Atrekna Goliath took a barrage of superstring compressor cannon hits in the 5500mm range. The shields failed first with a bright flash, then huge divots appeared in the armor as lances of energy a thousand kilometers high erupted from the impact point. There was a bright flash and the Goliath broke apart even as more impacts blew apart the pieces.

The Atrekna onboard found they couldn't reach out, couldn't do anything, as reality itself screamed and warped around them, impossibly filled with raw malevolence, as if reality itself was mocking their deaths.

The missiles fired by thirty-eight Weber class super-dreadnoughts blew free their stealth coverings and looked around, the warbois aboard shrieking and raving, slamming their faces against the trigger covers, pressing bloody eyes to the sensors.

Nine massive spiral shelled organisms were in the middle of a vast array of complex biological creatures, all of them moving forward with rippling flagella lit by graviton energy.

The warbois shrieked with glee at the sight. The pollen, fist sized nodules that emitted random bursts of energy to shield whatever was inside the cloud, did no good with passive optical systems that the warbois crowded into to bash their faces against the lenses and scream at each other.

One set of warbois started licking their chops at what they could sense from the largest of the spiral shelled creatures.

Phasic energy. Loads and loads of phasic energy deep inside the shell, inside the rubbery tissues. Coming from twenty point sources that they could detect.

They screamed with rage, hurtling the missile pods forward, the others following them.

For the bioweapons, dwellerspawn, slavespawn, whatever one wished to designate them, their plan to spawn thousands of close attack organisms while under the cover of the spores came apart in one second as the literal millions of missile pods blew their stealth shields and went to full power on their active sensor.

Missiles were fired from the rotating magazines before the massive heavy missile was fired just prior to the body of the missile launcher getting sucked in and turned into a C+ round.

The bioweapon cloud had tens of thousands of organisms to fight with, the smallest the size of an ocean going cargo vessel.

There were millions of missile pods, which erupted into tens of millions of missiles and millions of light C+ cannon shots.

The Atrekna aboard the other ships gaped in horror as the entire bioweapon cloud vanished in the hellish glare of detonating missiles and impacting C+ shots.

Not a single Atrekna made it out and the area was converted to a slowly expanding cloud of frozen biomechanical tissue.

The captain aboard the massive battleship Klark Saved Us clacked her break grimly as she saw the icons for T-Drives light up on more than a dozen ships.

"Task Force Five Finger Death Pinch firing Tee-munitions," Com-Seven reported.

Scream of Grief, a Hamaroosa super-dreadnought, sparkled as the guns charged and fired. The guns flashed, a ravening cascade of particles suddenly appearing, giggling and capering as they were born into existence, to rush off and join the endless dance of particles.

There was a rippling in space between Bogey-Sigma and Bogey-Gamma as the Atrekna attempted to pull in more slavespawn from one of the Doom Tubes.

"Smash the button!" the Captain snapped.

The temporal munitions and delivery platforms seeded around the system early in the battle dropped their stealth shielding and fired off. Temporal resonance charges, temporal stabilizers, Dimensional Shift Chatterers, 5D Shake and Bakers, even temporal inversion charges all went off from the scattered points in the solar system, completely bathing it in ravening out of control chronotrons that burst into existence with giggling laughter.

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."