Storming Heaven

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.”

“Understood,” the Admiral said. “Good shooting.”

“Sir,” Gary said, suddenly. “The remaining Killer starships are turning to engage the fleet!”

“That’s the second time they’ve responded to us here,” Andrew said. Twenty-two Killer starships bearing down on him, each one keen to rescue their friend and exterminate the human scum… he’d never felt happier. They were hurting the Killers in a ship-to-ship action. “Fleet orders; attack wings are to form up and engage each of the Killer craft. Don’t give them time to adapt and react to the new reality; just hurt them, whatever it takes.”

“Aye, sir,” Gary said. “Recommend that we continue attack pattern beta-seven.”

“Make it so,” Andrew said. “Engage!”

“They’re hurting the bastards,” Chris said, in delight. “Your weapons worked!”

“They weren’t just my weapons,” Paula pointed out, although she was somehow tempted to claim all the credit, at least in front of Chris. “They’re also not inflicting enough damage.”

It was true. The implosion bolts caused localised explosions on — no, within — the Killer hull material, blowing it into atoms and leaving the hull exposed. It should have been a decisive weapon, but the Killers were compensating for the effects somehow, rendering it harder to hurt them. Their weapons, on the other hand, were lethal; what they hit, they killed.

She pulled up the sensor readings and studied the energy fluxes covering the battle, trying to determine exactly what was happening. It wasn’t easy to distinguish any particular weapon from another — the Killer weapons emitting vast amounts of radiation when they were fired and more when they hit something — but the implosion bolts had their own signature. It was easier to separate those out from the remainder of the firepower emission signatures, but there were no answers, until she picked up a tiny wave of gravity fluctuation from one of the wounded behemoths.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she said, shaking her head in awe. “They’re smothering the blasts and compressing them into tiny quantum black holes.”

Chris stared at her, bemused. “So?”

“Do you have any idea,” Paula asked, “how much power it would take to do something like that? How much capability to control one of the fundamental forces of the universe to do that without blowing up the entire ship?”

“I see,” Chris said. “They don’t fight fair, do they?”

“No,” Paula agreed. She frowned, studying the readings from her sensor drones. Now she knew what she was looking for, it was easy to pick out the other fluctuations and see how the Killers were channelling the implacable fury of antimatter detonations into their portable black holes. The human weapons were simply feeding the Killer power source. In the long run, it might destabilise the black holes, unless the Killers could somehow dampen the effect down — which was theoretically possible — but it wouldn’t happen quickly enough to be immediately useful. “I wonder… inform the fleet to engage with energy torpedoes and particle beams, rather than antimatter weapons. They have to have a lower limit to how much they can absorb.”

She scowled as Chris headed off to inform the fleet. It should be possible, she decided, to actually duplicate the Killer defence tactic and use it as a weapon, but it would take some time to figure out how to turn it into a practical weapon that could actually be deployed. The Killers themselves hadn’t bothered to deploy such a weapon, which suggested that it wasn’t possible for them, or that they simply hadn’t seen the need to build it. Either one was possible.

“They’re trying to henpeck them to death,” she muttered, as another flare of light marked the death of a human starship. The Defence Force starships were pressing insanely close to the Killer ships, attempting to fire directly into the rents and gashes in their hull, but that made it easier for the Killers to target and destroy them. Several Defence Force starships were attempting to destroy entire hull sections so they could shelter from the Killer weapons and fire directly into the hull without having to evade, but as the Killer fleet fell into formation, it became increasingly difficult to avoid their fire. The only saving grace was that the Killers seemed reluctant to risk hitting each other now that their armour had been compromised.

“Their weapons would probably mess the interiors of their own ships up good,” Chris agreed, when she mentioned that out loud. “Or would their black holes merely absorb all the power?”

Paula shrugged as another Killer starship staggered under a wave of implosion bolts. Somehow, they were using their entire hull surface as a weapon; they lacked weapon blisters or missile tubes. Damaging entire kilometres of the hull didn’t seem to prevent them from returning fire, although it seemed to limit their field of fire slightly. If the entire hull material could be removed… but it couldn’t be destroyed quickly; the implosion bolts only took out a few meters of hull material, at most. The Killer starships were still deadly dangerous.

“No way to know,” she said, looking down at the black hole she’d created. The Shiva Hole — as she had decided to call it — was barely visible now, but there were still some hints of the remaining gases from the star. When the battle was won — if the battle was won — she would have to begin the immensely more dangerous task of tuning the black hole to use it as a communications device. The whole process was rooted completely in theory. She, for the first time in far too long, would be performing genuine original science. “One way or the other, we’ll find out soon.”

“They’re working as a team now, sir,” Gary reported, as the Lightning narrowly avoided certain death by a completely random burst of fire. The Killers had pulled all their starships together and were working to cover each other, an unprecedented display of concern about their human opponents, although they were still winning. The Killer starships had been damaged — all of the starships had lost parts of their hull material — yet they were still dangerous. “We’re just not making enough of an impact.”

Andrew nodded, bitterly. The antimatter weapons, deployed against the interior of the Killer starships, should have ended the fighting in short order. Instead, they seemed to be snuffed out as soon as they were deployed, leaving particle beams and energy torpedoes to wreck havoc on the Killer starships. It just wasn’t good enough. He had the grim certainty that they’d started a battering match that would only end when one side was completely wiped out… and the human race had already lost two hundred and seven starships. Their deaths hadn’t been in vain, but the Killers hadn’t even lost a single ship.

“Lock particle beams on the exposed areas of their hull,” he ordered, shortly. “The attack wing will follow us in and bombard the areas we target.”

“Understood, sir,” Gary said. He sounded tired; for the first time, Andrew understood why the Killers sought such close harmony between their biological bodies and their technology. If they ever got tired, no human had ever seen any evidence of it. “I have weapons locked on target.”

Andrew nodded to David. “Go,” he said. “Take us in.”

The Lightning spun on its axis and dived down towards the immense Killer starship, running through a series of evasive manoeuvres to avoid incoming bursts of fire. The Killers seemed to have problems targeting multiple foes at once, although Andrew had to keep cautioning himself that that might be nothing more than wishful thinking; the sheer volume of firepower they could put out was daunting in its own right. They drew more fire as they zoomed closer, but none of the Killer blasts came close enough to blow the Lightning into dust.

“Weapons locked on target,” Gary said. “We are engaging the enemy.”

Andrew watched as the particle beams dug deep into the Killer starship, vaporising metal and burning through deep into the interior. The strange Killer atmosphere — which they now knew to be representative of a gas giant — was streaming from a dozen holes, yet the damage wasn’t deep enough to be fatal. Gary launched a spread of energy torpedoes into another rent, but half of the spread smashed against an protected section of the hull, and the remainder simply didn’t inflict much damage. Andrew was sure, looking at the power curves as they ran over the Killer starship, that they were hurting the enemy ship, but it showed no inclination to run, or to die.

Gary added a spread of implosion bolts as they roared up and over an undamaged part of the Killer hull. The Killers returned fire with a cold fury that seemed to rend and tear at space itself, but somehow the Lightning escaped destruction. The tiny explosions — tiny, but so devastating n the long run — sparkled on the Killer hull, before they were swept away by particle beams from oncoming human starships. The Lightning climbed away from the Killer starship, firing another spread of energy torpedoes and noisemakers to cover its flight; David avoided the last two bursts of Killer weapons fire with ease. The Killers had other targets to engage.

“Two more starships were destroyed in the run,” Gary said, shortly. Andrew nodded once and pushed his feelings away into the back of his mind. They’d mourn later. If there was a later. It was easy to build hundreds of destroyers, even factoring in the new weapons, but harder to train the crews, even though the Community had had plenty of volunteers after the Killers attacked human settlements… and humanity had proven that they could be beaten. “Another… sir!”

Andrew turned and saw one of the starships. Somehow, it had been hit, but survived. It was falling down towards the Killer starship, using the last vestiges of its drive field to point itself right at the target and ramped up the drive to full power. It flew right into one of the damaged sections of the Killer hull and exploded. A moment later, a series of massive explosions tore the Killer starship apart. There was nothing left of it, but a wavefront of expanding plasma and radiation.

“Sir, the Melbourne and the Payback are launching suicide runs,” Gary reported. Andrew stared in numb disbelief. The starship commanders were ignoring all signals from the command ships, or entities from their friends, but launching themselves against the enemy. The Payback’s Captain, he recalled suddenly, had lost family at Asimov. He had been the first to grasp the possible uses of the new weapons. “They’re throwing themselves right at the Killers!”

Two minutes later, three more Killer starships died.