[AgentZero]

The War to End All Worlds




“Shield failure! Port side, section sixteen!”
Admiral John Kellet, commander of the 23rd Terran Fleet, snapped his eyes to one of the readouts on his right side. It showed a simplified diagram of his superdreadnought with concentric lines around it, each one indicating a shield layer. At the moment, five of the eight lines were black, indicating a collapsed layer, and the outermost remaining line was a deep shade of orange, indicating that it, too, was near collapse. Along a significant stretch of the port side, all the layers were glowing various degrees of orange, and at the focal point of this stretch, where they’d just been rammed, there was a large gap. The force of the impact had torn through the superdreadnought’s shields and blown a sizeable hole in the side of the ship, penetrating through to her secondary armour. On the diagram, well inside this gap in the shields, a crude icon resembling two missiles, one above the other, indicated the location of one of the warship’s twenty-four armouries. The last of the ramming ships had been destroyed, and it would take several direct missile strikes to penetrate the ship’s thick armour, but if that happened…

On the display, the outermost shield layer suddenly disappeared, but the other layers strengthened and the gap closed as an engineer redirected the shield energies. Kellet’s attention turned to the tactical plot in front of him. It showed a three dimensional representation of the space around his ship, with different icons representing different classes of ships, green for friendly, red for hostile. At the moment there was a lot of red. It formed a rough half-ellipse that was steadily closing on his small wedge of green. Yellow icons symbolizing missiles zipped steadily back and forth between the two fleets. Almost all those headed towards Kellet’s fleet disappeared before getting too close to a green icon, the missiles falling victim to his superior point-defence. The same was not true of the enemy fleet. At this range, the human ship possessed a marked advantage over their enemy. More than half of their missiles were scoring hits, and every so often one of the red icons winked out. But the 23rd Fleet simply didn’t have the firepower to destroy the enemy ships fast enough, and Kellet knew that once they entered energy weapons range, the encounter would degrade into a merciless battle of attrition, one he couldn’t hope to win.

As he watched, a series of yellow icons intersected with his green, and moments later his communications officer piped up.

“Sir, the Ajax and the Valliant are reporting heavy damage,” she said, managing to sound calm despite the fact that she was young, despite this being her first time in combat, and despite being obviously terrified.

Kellet nodded curtly towards her. The Ajax and Valliant were two heavy cruisers assigned to screen Kellet’s Ardent. As if to reinforce the young lieutenant’s words, the ship shuddered violently as a series of missiles slammed into her.

“Lieutenant Murphy,” he said, addressing the com officer. “Signal the fleet to begin charging hyperdrives. Have the Ajax and Valliant pull back and tell the rest of Alpha group to form on our flank. We’re going to buy the fleet a little time.”

“Aye, sir,” Murphy replied, then turned to her station to carry out her orders. As she did so, the green icons on Kellet’s display began to fall away from the icons representing the Ardent and the rest of Alpha Group: the Renown, Trafalgar, Cerberus, Defiant, Dauntless, and the Raptor. The first two were massive battleships, the latter four, slightly smaller battlecruisers, though all were dwarfed by the size of the Ardent. Kellet had little doubt the rest of his fleet would escape. Terran ships were significantly faster than their opponents’ and would have little trouble pulling out of missile range before jumping to hyperspace. However, taking seven ships against close to twenty times that number presented much lower odds of survival, even if one of the seven happened to be a state-of-the-art superdreadnought.

Captain Aolo, commander of the Ardent itself stood off to Kellet’s left and slightly ahead. He now turned to his commanding officer and close friend.

“What’s the plan, sir?” Aolo murmured quietly.

“Half that fleet is remotely controlled,” Kellet replied just as quietly. “We’re going to drop under the plane of engagement, swoop up and hit the control ship with everything we’ve got, then jump out in the ensuing chaos.”

Aolo grinned wolfishly. Dropping under the plane of engagement was a little-used tactic amongst almost all space-faring races, a holdover from naval times which none seemed to be able to entirely shake. Even the design of warships seemed to reflect this, with the dorsal side of a ship mounting heavier and more numerous weapons than the ventral, so much so that displaying a ship’s ventral side to an enemy was a universally acknowledged signal of surrender. Early exposure to space combat had taught Terran shipbuilders the value of a well-armed ventral face, and thus Terran ships were unique in the known galaxy in possessing equally armed and armoured ventral and dorsal surfaces. This enemy, however, had yet to learn those lessons. While well shielded, their ventral face’s tended to be poorly armed and pitiably armoured.

Aolo turned away and began barking out the orders that would put Kellet’s plan into action. When he was finished, he turned back to the admiral with raised eyebrows, silently asking if Kellet and any further orders.

“Divert power from the secondary drive system, missile tubes and launch bays and pour it into the guns and shields,” Kellet said loudly enough for the whole bridge to hear. “And disengage the RoFL on all guns.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Kellet saw a couple engineers grimace. RoFL, or Rate-of-Fire-limitators were built into all energy weapons to limit the speed at which they could fire to allow the weapon systems time to cool down. In theory this would allow the weapons to fire indefinitely without overheating. If the RoFL were to be turned off, however, the guns would fire as fast as energy could be pumped into them. If forced to fire at this rate for too long, vital systems in the guns would fuse and fail, rendering them inoperable until extensively repaired or replaced. But Kellet knew they were going to need all the firepower they could get in order to take out the heavily defended control ship, and get out of the encounter alive.

“Control ship locked on,” reported the senior gunnery officer. “Approach vector optimal.”

“Twenty seconds to weapons range,” called out the helmsman. “Ten…five…in range!”

“Fire!” Aolo barked instantly.

On Kellet’s display, nothing changed. The display did not register energy weapon fire. The bridge, however, thrummed and shuddered as the superdreadnought unleashed incomprehensible amounts of energy. Her primary weapons concentrated on the control ship, while her secondary weapons tore into the ships around it. Some of the Ardent’s secondary guns were larger than the ships targeted by them, and these ships exploded brilliantly when hit, trailing fire and debris as inertia carried the wreck forward. Blots of energy flickered back and forth, but faded nearly to insignificance compared to the intensity of the Terran ships’ new beam cannons. The space around the two fleets was a dazzling spectacle of crisscrossing lights, streams of interceptor fire, bright beams of energy and stunning explosions.

But Kellet saw none of this, only the sterile view of his display that showed his whole task force blinking as they took fire, and red dots vanishing from view, only to be replaced by new ones.

“Sir!” This time Lieutenant Murphy didn’t sound calm. “The Raptor’s reporting a total shield failure!”

Kellet flicked a switch on his command chair, opening a direct link between him and the Raptor’s captain. Through the captain’s mike, Kellet could hear yelling, the hiss of fire extinguishers and the crackle of overloading circuits as the unshielded vessel continued to take fire.

“Captain Milligan!” Kellet shouted into his own mike. “Drop back to our port quarter! We’ll cover you while you-”

His earpiece erupted with incoherent noise then abruptly went quiet and Kellet saw the Raptor’s icon flicker off the display.

“Received Code Omega from ITS Raptor,” Murphy said quietly.

Kellet cursed silently. Simon Milligan had been a friend since the Academy, and the Raptor’s first officer had been Marie Kellet, a distant cousin.

“The fleet has entered hyperspace,” Murphy reported from somewhere in the foggy distance.

“All ships, concentrate all weapons onto primary target,” Aolo said through gritted teeth. Kellet was surprised he managed that much. Aolo and Marie Kellet and been engaged for three months. They’d planned to get married in another few months when they were both scheduled for leave. The admiral rose and squeezed Aolo’s shoulder firmly. The captain turned and looked back at him with an expression of the purest agony.

“You’re relieved, John,” Kellet said quietly.
The Ardent’s commander nodded shakily and all but collapsed into his command chair, and sat there, staring blankly at an unpowered monitor.

“Primary target is losing shield cohesion!” announced the tactical officer.

“All available power to the weapons,” Kellet ordered. The lights on the bridge dimmed slightly as every spare bit of energy was poured out through the weapons arrays.

“Primary target dee-stroyed,” the tactical officer said with evident satisfaction.

“Nice work, Guns,” said Kellet. “Now. Launch six Nova bombs, and helm, get us the hell out of Dodge.” The two officers chorused their ‘Aye, sir’s and six slow moving yellow spheres slid out of the Ardent’s icon as it turned away chaotic mess that was the enemy fleet. Nova bombs were extraordinarily powerful ground attack weapons, one or two being all it took to annihilate all life from a planet. As space-borne weapons they were virtually useless, their slow speed, large size and lack of any real manoeuvrability making them easy pickings for point-defence systems. But with the enemy fleet in total disarray it was unlikely they even noticed the bombs’ launch.

“Jumping to hyperspace now,” the navigator informed them.

The hull lurched strangely, seeming to jerk up, down, left, right, back and forth all at the same time. The red dots disappeared from the plot, leaving only six green icons as the fleet entered hyperspace. Kellet turned his head to the ship’s status monitors and winced. Only one shield layer still remained, glowing a deep red that signified it would be unable to stop most weapons. There were yellow, orange and red splashes all over the ship, indicating damage to the armour, and on a different screen, the damage to the ship’s internal systems. Half the ship’s guns were damaged beyond use, and a third of the rest were critically overheated. Main engines only had half power, and the hyperdrive was operating at a quarter of maximum. Kellet dropped into his seat and reviewed the latest damage and casualty reports from Alpha Group as a whole. Significant damage to all ships; ninety-two dead; four hundred-eight wounded. And then there was the Raptor. A state-of-the-art battlecruiser and three thousand men and women, gone.

“Admiral?”

Kellet looked up to see one of the engineers standing a couple meters away.

“Sir,” the engineer--Marcus Ramsey, according to his name badge—said. “We’ve detected a fluctuation in the hyperspace field. We think it’s related to the damage the drives took. It’s not serious, but-” The engineer hesitated. He was visibly upset and having difficulty controlling himself. The cause of his anguish scrolled by Kellet’s screen just as he was about to ask the engineer. Kajata Ramsey: Navigator, ITS Raptor. Marcus Ramsey’s little sister.

“Marcus,” Kellet said softly, breaking one of the cardinal rules of military etiquette and causing the engineer to look up quickly.

“We all lost someone close on the Raptor,” Kellet continued in the same soft tone. And we will grieve, and we will have vengeance, but not now. Not today. Understand?”

Ramsey nodded. “Yes, sir. Thank you sir,” he said, though his voice still trembled slightly. “The drive filed fluctuation isn’t serious yet, sir. But in about an hour, it’s going to yank us out of hyperspace. Hard.”

“How hard?” asked Kellet.

“The battleships and us should be able to take, but the BCs will be torn to pieces.”

“What would happen if we took our hyperdrive modulator offline?”

Ramsey shook his head. “The instability is now part of our drive field. The only way to correct it would be for us to drop back into normal space and make repairs before continuing on.”

Kellet exhaled heavily, staring at the tactical plot in front of him. Their covert mission had taken them deep inside enemy territory, and even at full hyperdrive speed, it would still take three days to get clear. He keyed in a few commands, and the plot zoomed in on a single system: Odin’s Star. The system where, in one hour, Alpha Group would be wrenched from hyperspace and three battlecruisers would be destroyed, and nine thousand men and women would lose their lives. It was also a heavily populated enemy system and bound to b e crawling with hostile warships. Scrolling back out, he stared at the icons representing the eight star systems they would pass through before reaching Odin’s Star.

“The BC engineers are upgrading the inertial compensators and altering the modulation of the shields as we speak,” Ramsey continued. “So, in theory, when we-”

“Will it work?”

Ramsey and Kellet turned to look at Captain Aolo. He’d risen from his chair, and while outwardly composed, Kellet could sense the pain and turmoil writhing within his childhood friend. Ramsey’s shoulders slumped.

“No,” he admitted. “It won’t do a damn thing.”

Kellet nodded slowly, then thumbed a switch on his chair, opening a communications link with another section of the ship. “Have Commander Matthews report to the bridge,” he said quietly. Not quietly enough, he noticed, as several nearby crewmen shifted uncomfortably. A few moments later, the bridge doors ground open and Matthews strolled onto the bridge. Despite their best efforts, the male bridge staff were unable to keep themselves from staring. Commander Sarah Matthews was, by all accounts, stunningly beautiful. Her shimmering black hair reached down to her shoulders, noticeably longer than military regs permitted and her sparkling green eyes focused solely on Kellet as she strode towards the admiral’s chair, her slender body swaying sensuously as she approached. Kellet rose to return her salute, then waited as she snapped an equally crisp salute to Aolo, before nodding upwards at Ramsey. Matthews was a fair bit shorter than the Terran norm for females, though one would be hard pressed to find a man who would complain about it. As she turned back towards Kellet, a slight smile tugged at her lips.

You look like [censored], her voice echoed in his head. Along with being the head of the 23rd Fleet’s Intelligence Division, Matthews was also a high-ranked member of the Psy Corp, meaning she possessed both powerful telepathic and telekinetic abilities. Kellet ran a series of numbers images and memories through his mind, a special code that would unblock the conditioning in Matthews mind for a short while, and allow her to receive his thoughts.

You’ve looked better yourself, he replied, letting his eyes wander over the freshly treated gash in her forehead. How’d you earn that, he inquired. Power overload?

No, she replied. McPherson’s coffee mug.

Kellet chuckled despite himself, drawing curious looks from Aolo and Ramsey, both of whom were completely oblivious to the exchange between the two. Kellet ignored them and had Ramsey explain the hyperdrive situation to Matthews. When he was done, Matthews turned back to Kellet.

“So, exactly what do you want me to do about it?” she asked bluntly. Members of the Psy Corp were not renowned for their subtlety.

“You know enemy space better than anyone,” said Kellet. “We need to find somewhere quiet where we can drop out of hyperspace and make repairs.”

“There,” Matthews replied instantly, pointing to a system on the tactical plot. “The Ootek’rey System. Uninhabited due to the lack of any hospitable worlds. Only two planets orbit it’s star, and both are completely barren, devoid of any resources or even atmosphere. If you want somewhere to hide, there’s your spot.”

“Ramsey?” Kellet inquired, noticing that the engineer was shaking his head.

“Ootek’rey is forty-eight minutes out, sir,” he said. “By then, the field imbalance have gotten to the stage where making transit would be fatal to our BCs.”

“Then they won’t make transit,” said Aolo. “The Ardent, Trafalgar and Renown will jump in-system, make repairs, then catch up with the rest of the fleet at the rendezvous point.”

Ramsey cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Problem is, sir, only the Renown and Ardent have functioning hyperdrive modulators. If we jump out, the BCs will be trapped in hyperspace, and have no way to manoeuvre, let alone jump back into normal space.”

“But the Trafalgar’s drive is working?” asked Aolo.

“Yes, sir. Perfectly,” Ramsey replied.

“Then the Ardent will jump alone,” Kellet informed them. “The rest of Alpha Group will carry on without us.”

“Without our screening ships we will be extremely vulnerable if discovered,” Aolo pointed out.

“Agreed,” nodded Kellet. “But unfortunately, we don’t seem to have much choice.”

Forty-five minutes later, a strange thing began to happen in a lonely patch of space in the Ootek’rey System. The very fabric of space began to twist and contort, pulling and straining, bucking and heaving until suddenly it split wide open and the vast energies of hyperspace spewed outwards for a brief moment, until they were blotted out by the Ardent as she thundered into normal space.