Re: The Demise
'Nother update!
-----CHAPTER TWO: IN OVER HER HEAD-----
This was getting dangerous. She knew they were getting closer to finding her; the ships were redeployed daily, a net of fighter-killer warships closing in around her. Her escape routes were being cut off one by one; they already had the larger part of the asteroid fields and storms staked out with heavy anti-fighter warships. The only feasible escape route left was a route she dreaded; through a nearby warp point. It was a long-distance jumproute; they would have plenty of time to kill her. The worst part was that she couldn’t even remember what the reason was for the post-humans’ recruitment of her in the first place. The last act of the post-human she had killed was to implant a small part of its subconscious in Tamarillho’s memory. The memories she had acquired from the post-human had faded away slowly, until only vague images and abstract ideas remained. Still, she was certain the others would kill her; for one thing she did remember, was the fact that the post-human she killed was a figure of what one might call authority, and she was fairly certain they wouldn’t take kindly to people who had assassinated their leaders.
That considered, she realized she had no choice; the frigates were getting ever closer, and she wasn’t one hundred percent sure the post-humans would kill her, something she could be certain of with the Commonwealth War Fleet. So she made her decision: she pointed the fighter towards the warp point and kicked in the engine overcharger modules. Immediately, three nearby frigates diverted from their patrols and came in to intercept her at full speed. They couldn’t hope to catch up with her, but there were other ships underway that would at least be able to get off a few aimed shots at her. She would have to evade them, possibly even attack them. She still had a single seismic charge and six cluster torpedoes left, so she was still able to inflict damage, albeit not that much.
*****
Commodore Erit Ghettex was anxious. His rank and prestige were on the line. If he botched this, he was certain he’d be demoted – CC may not have explicitly said it, but the looks on their faces in the single second before the transmission ended said more than their voices had during the two-hour meeting. He was mulling over this all when his comms officer called out to him.
“Sir!”
“What?”
“System-wide transmission! She’s sighted!” At this Ghettex sat bolt upright and started giving orders frantically.
“Intercept, now! Activate target-trackers! Stand by weapons! Stand by troops! Prepare fighter bay, mobilize the pilots, inform all ships we’re coming in! Have them guide her towards us!”
“She’s headed towards the Kukulcan warp point!”
“Overload engines. Push them as far as they’ll go! I want every ounce of thrust available!”
“We won’t make it in time!”
“Overload engines, now! Stand by mass drivers, EMP burst rounds!”
The engineers and weapons officer blinked. “Yes sir!”
*****
Tamarillho narrowly avoided an energy pulse as she pushed her engines beyond the limit. She dived in between the two frigates, intending to duck under them and make a run for the warp point, but they anticipated it and cut off her way with a thick blanket of pulseflak fire, forcing her to wheel the fighter around in one of the deliciously tight turns which had moved her to love this fighter. She bolted back, heading straight for a small group of ships which were moving in to assist the first two. She cut back her engines, and just as she was on the verge of coming into the ships’ weapons range, she pushed her throttle to full again and shot past their noses. They frantically fired their broadside pulseflak batteries, whose shots were easy enough to evade. They whizzed past her soundlessly, impacting into the thick energy-shielding of the other ships. She blasted past them, a few rear ship pulseflak guns still frantically trying to hit her. She flew in a straight line for quite some distance, before coming about in a wide arc. The ships were still guarding the warp point, but then she spotted another one, not too far away, guarded by just a single ship, with no other ships in the vicinity. Even this ship was pulled away, but was quickly replaced with another. A Light Attack Cruiser. The flagships of small fleets and patrol groups. Trouble. Then her comms unit came alive. A clear voice sounded through the small cockpit.
“Attention Captain FC Tamarillho. This is Darkstar, flagship of the First Fighter Interference Fleet.” A fancy name for a posse of whatever fighter-killer ships happened to be within six systems’ distance of her. “We are sending in a fighter squadron. Power down your engines and prepare to be taken aboard.” A pause. Her reply came a few seconds later.
“Go to hell.”
“This is a one-time offer, Captain FC. Power down your engines and you will not be harmed.”
“Only shipped off to a lab to serve as guinea pig, probably to die in the process of some experiment.”
“We assure you that is not our intent, Captain FC, please.....”
“Oh just can it! I know what you’re after, and you’re not going to get it! Over my dead body!!!”
Tamarillho turned off her comms unit and headed straight towards the ship, engines at maximum overload, her last seismic charge and clustertorps being prepared for launch. The ship swiveled toward her; not very fast, but she wasn’t that close to it either. When she faced it head-on, she locked the bridge in her target reticule and..... It was still turning. She shot past it, mass-driver EMP burster rounds going off all around her. One caught her at a wingtip, and sent her spinning along the fighter’s spinal axis, but not causing any other damage.
There was the warp point. The blue disc seemed more inviting than ever, now that one of the best fighter killer warships was directly behind her, initiating a chase. The other ships dispersed and headed off back into the systems from whence they had come, which struck Tamarillho as odd. Why leave now when their flagship had her right where they wanted her? In the transpace tunnel, speed meant nothing – she could bring the fighter to a full stop and she would still arrive after the same amount of time. The only things speed were good for in a transpace tunnel, were making sure you were moving when you came out the tunnel, and losing pursuers. But that only worked with pursuers incapable of changing their speed in-flight, comets, missiles and mass-driver bullets being the most well-known examples. Ships could catch up with fighters easily; mass meant nothing, acceleration only a little – and with the Darkstar’s drives, it should have no problem catching up with her once they entered the ‘point’s event horizon. Any way you turned it, she was no match for the warship.
*****
“She’s in!”
“Engines to full! Stand by for maximum acceleration!”
“All mass-driver turrets report EMP bursters loaded and ready!”
“Event horizon in three, two one-”
Everything went black for a fleeting instant. Then, Ghettex found himself standing on a rocky plateau in the midst of a cloud of thick fog.
*****
Tamarillho was frantically trying to evade the EMP bursters that were going off everywhere in the transpace tunnel. She had managed to stay ahead of the Darkstar for about two hours, mainly due to the five clustertorps she’d lobbed at it. Now, however, she was down to her last clustertorp, and she didn’t want to lose it. Nor did she want to use her specially re-wired seismic charge just yet; the risk was too great, and if it did work, she’d be stranded. No, if she was going to use it, it would have to be near the virtual coordinates of the Clappenheim system, which lay right beside the jumproute.
The ship was still closing in on her, though. Its massive drive section could deliver a lot more thrust power than her fighter’s engines, it would take them quite some time but they would overtake her eventually. The worst part was that they were still firing EMP flak rounds at her.
She could narrowly avoid an intense burst of fire, when she suddenly felt her consciousness slowly slipping away. The post-humans were going to get her, and she couldn’t use her seismic charge yet. She was helpless. She veered around an anti-fighter missile, which the Darkstar had now decided to lob at her in great numbers. The weapons-pod-mounted micro-launchers were spitting out veritable swarms of EMP burster missiles, which were much harder to evade than the railgun rounds she’d been forced to contend with earlier. The railgun flak didn’t chase after her at least. She had pushed her throttle to maximum overdrive, and was now faster than the missiles, but their high-powered drives were providing them with enough acceleration to make them capable to catch up with her in a few minutes at best. This really was a bad time for her to lose consciousne-
She wasn’t standing on the plateau this time, instead she floated in the blank blackness the post-humans called the “Plane of Thought”. She could sense other minds around her. She could also sense that these weren’t the post-humans she had been in contact with earlier. These weren’t even post-humans for as far as she knew. She could sense a significant difference between these beings and the post-humans.
“Who are you?” she thought.
“We were humans.” came the reply. It was as if the thought was projected into her mind from an outside source, though it wasn’t forced into her.
“How can you be?”
“The beings you were in contact with claim to be post-humans. They are not. We are.”
“Then what are the others?”
“Post-Scryath.”
“Come again?”
“They described our early history quite accurately, so I won’t recount it. After we had developed interstellar flight, and had established colonies on other worlds in other systems, Humana suddenly came under attack by an unknown force. They had used a stable neutrino singularity, of which we had no knowledge, to enter our system and to attack us in force.”
“Wait- so you knew about warp points, but what are neutrino singularities? Warp points have high neutrino emissions, every spacer knows that.”
“Neutrino singularities are warp points.”
*****
“She’s stopped evading!” the Darkstar’s sensors officer shouted across the bridge. “Sir? Sir!” He had finally noticed his commanding officer, Commodore Ghettex, was unconscious. “Sir! Can you hear me?”
Ghettex lifted his head up with a gasp. “Yes. What’s going on?”
“She’s stopped maneuvering! EMP burster closing in! Impact in four, three, two one.....”
-----END OF CHAPTER TWO-----
__________________
O'Neill: I have something I want to confess you. The name's not Kirk. It's Skywalker. Luke Skywalker.
-Stargate SG1
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Thank you.
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