Revalation2
Chapter 2 - Slaughter
"What?! Bring up a visual! Open all hailing frequencies! Find out who they are and why they're attacking us!" Dren twirled around and ran over to his com officer, who was tapping away at her keyboard with maddening speed.
"I don't know who they are, but their ships aren't like anything I've ever seen!" She typed in a command and scanned the ships, then ran a search through the Hiigaran warship database. "They don't match any ship we've ever encountered, sir, and deep penetration scans seem to not be able to penetrate the ships, I think they have some sort of absorbant armor that, deflects or eats our radio scans! I can't tell what they are!"
"Well, find out what they are packing so we know what we're dealing wit- !"
An explosion rocked the ship as a flash of bright white light surrounded the Frigate.
"They've opened fire! Scrambling the fighters and going to offensive tactics, Sir!"
"Engineering, what's the damage?" He shouted over the cries of pain from the flash overloading the crew's eyes, blinding them momentarily, but not causing permanent damage.
"Whatever that was, it only clipped us, Sir, but we have serious damage spreading across the side of the Frigate! That thing impacted the side and spread some sort of corrosive across the hull, but it seems to have stopped, now!"
"Did we get a hull breach?"
"No, it just ate away at the armo-"
"Wait a minute, did you say CORROSIVE!?!?"
"Yessir, of some sort. . ."
At that point, something sped past the topside of the Frigate, leaving a contrail of purple-ish tint. Dren turned and looked out of the window. What he saw terrified him. Spindly, oddly disfigured purple fighter-sized ships were flying circles around his fighters. Every 2 or so seconds, one would let off a thin, bright beam of energy that lasted only a millisecond, but caused one of their fighters to explode in a burst of flames.
"What. . . Are they?" He wondered aloud. Someone yelled and snapped him back to reality.
"Captian! We have dozens of Frigate-class ships incoming! They seem to be firing missles of a ridiculously high speed!" Dren traced one of the missles flight with his eyes as hit flew and suddenly connected perfectly with a Torpedo Frigate. There was a small burst of energy, and a gray spot appeared where the missle had connected with the Frigate, and it grew quickly. Suddenly, he realized that this was the very same corrosive that they had been hit with.
"Sajuuk have mercy. . ." He gasped as the corrosive ate through the top of the Frigate, breaching the hull. Dozens of specks of what he knew to be the bodies of his Kiith-brothers and sisters flew out of the hole, and the ship gave a horrible groan, then depressurized and imploded in a ball of flame.
"Captain, we're being slaughtered!" Someone yelled. As if in a dream, not fully believing what had just happened, he gave an order.
"Tell all remaining fighters to dock with the Frigates and set hyperspace coordinates for the nearest hyperspace gate. Get me the telemetry of the battle as soon as you can." After the war on the Vaygr, all frigates had been outfitted with two ports for fighters or gunships to dock on so they could be ferried through hyperspace. He was expecting the fighters to dock for safety.
"Sir, there aren't any fighters left!" An officer responded as another flash exploded around them. Dren suddenly came back to reality.
"Well, what are you waiting for?! Get us out of here now!"
"Yessir!"
The unearthly blue field opened up around their ship, and closed in over them. The vortex of hyperspace surrounded them, and they gained speed, rumbling uncontrollably. As they broke the speed of light and they successfully compressed themselves into a molecular strain traveling through space, the rumbling stopped. He floated over to his chair and slumped into it, rubbing his forehead, sighing heavily. "Tactical, what are our losses?"
"All fighters and gunships lost, three Flak Frigates and two Torpedo Frigates gone, but we didn't lose any Ion Cannons, somehow."
"Kharak have mercy on us. . . Their weapons, so powerful. . . How is it possible?" He sat up straight in his chair as a beep announced the complete upload of the telemetry. The hover keyboard floated up, and the LEDs activated the screen. He started the recording. It showed the squadron traveling through space, and suddenly off in a N-W-N direction from them, a portal of some sort opened up and then closed again. Nothing had seemed to come out of it, but. . . There! A cloaked ship about the size of a carrier materialized. "Cloaked, I see, but why didn't we detect them before they fired on us?" The carrier class ship had a central streamlined, disfigured body with an openning on the underside. From it came several corvette-class ships, that turned towards them and came at them. Two spindly arms held two crooked tubes of some sort under the main portion, and were slighty spread away from it. They was an opening at the end of it, and it began to glow purple from deep within. Then, a pod shot from the tube at an insane rate of speed. Dren turned on slo-motion tracking, and saw the pod fly at his Frigate, clipping the side, spreading the corrosive. As it sped past, it split open, and out came one of the spindly fighters that had annhilated their own. Several Frigate-class ships materialized around the carrier as it fired more and more pods, at least four a second, for about thirty seconds. The Frigates were dark and looked inactive, but then flickered to life without warning, activating fusion drives and firing missles at the squad. The Torpedo Frigate he had watched die was hit with a missle, and he looked away as the corpses were sucked out into space and the ship imploded. At that point, the Flak and Torpedo Frigates had caught on, activating mass drivers, firing at the fighters. A cloud of flak exploded around a group of them, and a dark cloud surrounded them. He smiled triumphantly as the flak dissapated, but then his jaw dropped as the fighters flew out of the cloud, totally unharmed. "Not even a scratch. . ." By now the remaining fighters under his control had been vaporized, and the frigates had stopped firing, all turning, and the hyperspace gates opened in front of them. They closed over them, and the recording ended. He closed his mouth and shook slightly from fear. They hadn't even suffered a single loss, while his squad had been nearly devastated.
"We will exit hyperspace in three minutes, Captain," one of his officers reported, causing him to jump. "Shall I transfer the telemetry to the research department?"
"Yes, please do. Find a countermeasure of any sort, find a weakness, do anything we possibly can. And the instant we exit hyperspace, alert Hiigaran command of this new threat."
"Yes Sir, right away, Sir," She responded, and she walked back over to the computer modules. He stood up, too, and hovered over to the computers. He floated up to his weapons officer, who was busy scanning the corrosive that had been spread along the side of their ship and that had been the death of the Torpedo Frigate, and quite possibly some of the other Frigates as well; The telemetry data was not perfect, and it only detailed what had happened from a 3rd person view from his Frigate, and the field of vision was surprisingly narrow. He looked over the shoulder of his weapons officer, he had just finished an intial scan of the pods that the carrier-ship had been firing, they too had corrosive properties, as the right side armor of his ship had found out.
"Well, Sir, this corrosive doesn't seem to be a gas, or a liquid, or a solid. In fact, I have no idea what exactly it is. Whatever it is, the pods are coated with it and the missiles have some sort of warhead containing it, and when they touch a metal surface, such as the hulls of our ships, it spreads rapidly and with disturbing ease. It's like nothing I can describe that well, we've never encountered such an effective weapon. Not to mention, of course, we haven't got a single defense against it, except for not coming in contact with the pods and not allowing the missiles to impact, which, in the case of a Frigate, is quite out of the question."
"Would point-defense of some sort be able to shoot them down?"
"It's possible, but that would require major upgrades to every capital ship in the fleet from Frigate-class and up, and even if a good point-defense turret was created without too many problems represented by such a small size, the missles are traveling at an incredible speed, at a guess, I'd say about 3 times as fast as our fighters. We'd have to somehow upgrade to even faster tracking turrets in order to come anywhere near shooting at them accurately."
"Well, notify weapon research of this idea, nonetheless."
"Aye, captain." Dren hovered over to the tactical command station. The commanding officer stood up immediately and walked over to him.
"Well, after taking a quick look at the telemetry of the battle, I think it's safe to say that statistically, we probably shouldn't be alive after that encounter. If we had entered hyperspace about 5 seconds later, those corrosive missles would have ripped us apart." Contrary to popular belief (and it was often the downfall of a rookie captian), ships are still vulnerable while entering and exiting hyperspace, as the battle at balcora gate in the HomeWorld (the second war) war had proved. "And it's a good thing we left when we did, as I have no idea what would happen if we breached the hull during a hyperspace leap, but I really don't think I want to know. I've got my best people working on those fighters, but they're having difficulty. For some reason, they seem to have an absorbant armor plating, and we cant successfully scan them. The only thing we know, at this point, is what they look like."
"What about their engines? Are they conventional drives, or something else? They seemed ridiculously powerful to me."
"They were, and as far as I can tell from the videos, they weren't conventional plasma torch/fusion drives." Before he could ask, she continued. "And I know this because their projected output was much higher than ours, and it didn't leave the same energy and particle signature that a plasma drive does. As a matter of fact, it didn't match any sort of engine that we have, conventional, high-speed, or even experimental."
"Well, in that case, what sort of engines were they?"
"They seem to give off a mixture of charged hydrogen and oxygen molecules. I don't fully understand how they work, but they are quite powerful, producing a mixture of the two, and the reaction they create is a highly unstable creation, but a powerful propellant. If we could destroy one of them and get a good look at it's engine, I think we might be able to reverse-engineer a hybrid of our own."
"That would be incredibly useful, espescially if-" The Nav officer suddenly shouted for him.
"Captain, you're gonna want to come look at this. . ." Dren walked over and looked over her shoulder at the screen, which had the hyperspace monitor active at the moment. "I'm getting some anomalies in the particle waveform surrounding the ship, but I don't know how to describe it. It's almost as if foreign bits that are also in hyperspace are approaching us, but what could they be? Debris from space can't enter hyperspace on it's own, can it? But that would mean that it'd have to be another ship of some sort, but that would mean that. . ." A huge explosion rocked the bridge, and another quickly followed from somewhere near the ship's left. "We've been hit! The ship is being thrown off course! Quantum waveform collapsing, prepare for emergency hyperspace exit!" The ship began to tumble, and far in front of them, they saw an opening in the ifinite light-blue field, the exit to realspace. "Everybody hang on- !" The ship continue to roll onto its side as it shot toward the exit, pulling massive Gs. It breached the gate, and in realspace, the gate opened, slid along the length of the Frigate, bit by bit, then closed, as it merged back into space, it instantly regained its former speed, speeding along as other Frigates started opening their own gates, and shooting out along side themselves. Dren and his crew were reeling form the extreme gravitational forces, but he somehow managed to shout out an order.
"How farther to the hyperspace gate!?" Someone managed to give a response.
"We're nearly there, just about 500 metres more!"
"Get us stabilized and get into that gate, NOW!!!"
"But, Sir, what about the others?" At this point, the portals of the unknowns had opened, and the carrier and multiple Frigates were exiting and preparing to fire.
"Get them in the gate, too! Kharak knows I'll not leave behind my brothers!" Suddenly, the carrier launched a single, new sort of Frigate. It was sleek, slightly crooked, with a diamond-back design, and colored a deep purple with multiple lights flashing across its surface, but a large port of some sort at the front and posistioned to the left. "Oh, no. . ." A ball of yellow-white energy formed at the tip of the Frigate, growing steadily, then dissapeared as a beam took its place, and fired at them, making contact with the engine, then split off several smaller beams, connecting with various parts of the other Frigates, and a ball of energy formed at those spots. "Great Sajuuk have mercy. . ." The spheres exploded. By some great stroke of luck, only their engine ignited, propelling them forward at an insane speed, while every other Frigate detonated. Through the screams of terror, Dren opened his eyes and watched as they flung into the hyperspace gate, entered hyperspace, and the scene before him dissapeared. They were safe, for now, and were heading home. He passed out.
Chapter 2 - Slaughter
"What?! Bring up a visual! Open all hailing frequencies! Find out who they are and why they're attacking us!" Dren twirled around and ran over to his com officer, who was tapping away at her keyboard with maddening speed.
"I don't know who they are, but their ships aren't like anything I've ever seen!" She typed in a command and scanned the ships, then ran a search through the Hiigaran warship database. "They don't match any ship we've ever encountered, sir, and deep penetration scans seem to not be able to penetrate the ships, I think they have some sort of absorbant armor that, deflects or eats our radio scans! I can't tell what they are!"
"Well, find out what they are packing so we know what we're dealing wit- !"
An explosion rocked the ship as a flash of bright white light surrounded the Frigate.
"They've opened fire! Scrambling the fighters and going to offensive tactics, Sir!"
"Engineering, what's the damage?" He shouted over the cries of pain from the flash overloading the crew's eyes, blinding them momentarily, but not causing permanent damage.
"Whatever that was, it only clipped us, Sir, but we have serious damage spreading across the side of the Frigate! That thing impacted the side and spread some sort of corrosive across the hull, but it seems to have stopped, now!"
"Did we get a hull breach?"
"No, it just ate away at the armo-"
"Wait a minute, did you say CORROSIVE!?!?"
"Yessir, of some sort. . ."
At that point, something sped past the topside of the Frigate, leaving a contrail of purple-ish tint. Dren turned and looked out of the window. What he saw terrified him. Spindly, oddly disfigured purple fighter-sized ships were flying circles around his fighters. Every 2 or so seconds, one would let off a thin, bright beam of energy that lasted only a millisecond, but caused one of their fighters to explode in a burst of flames.
"What. . . Are they?" He wondered aloud. Someone yelled and snapped him back to reality.
"Captian! We have dozens of Frigate-class ships incoming! They seem to be firing missles of a ridiculously high speed!" Dren traced one of the missles flight with his eyes as hit flew and suddenly connected perfectly with a Torpedo Frigate. There was a small burst of energy, and a gray spot appeared where the missle had connected with the Frigate, and it grew quickly. Suddenly, he realized that this was the very same corrosive that they had been hit with.
"Sajuuk have mercy. . ." He gasped as the corrosive ate through the top of the Frigate, breaching the hull. Dozens of specks of what he knew to be the bodies of his Kiith-brothers and sisters flew out of the hole, and the ship gave a horrible groan, then depressurized and imploded in a ball of flame.
"Captain, we're being slaughtered!" Someone yelled. As if in a dream, not fully believing what had just happened, he gave an order.
"Tell all remaining fighters to dock with the Frigates and set hyperspace coordinates for the nearest hyperspace gate. Get me the telemetry of the battle as soon as you can." After the war on the Vaygr, all frigates had been outfitted with two ports for fighters or gunships to dock on so they could be ferried through hyperspace. He was expecting the fighters to dock for safety.
"Sir, there aren't any fighters left!" An officer responded as another flash exploded around them. Dren suddenly came back to reality.
"Well, what are you waiting for?! Get us out of here now!"
"Yessir!"
The unearthly blue field opened up around their ship, and closed in over them. The vortex of hyperspace surrounded them, and they gained speed, rumbling uncontrollably. As they broke the speed of light and they successfully compressed themselves into a molecular strain traveling through space, the rumbling stopped. He floated over to his chair and slumped into it, rubbing his forehead, sighing heavily. "Tactical, what are our losses?"
"All fighters and gunships lost, three Flak Frigates and two Torpedo Frigates gone, but we didn't lose any Ion Cannons, somehow."
"Kharak have mercy on us. . . Their weapons, so powerful. . . How is it possible?" He sat up straight in his chair as a beep announced the complete upload of the telemetry. The hover keyboard floated up, and the LEDs activated the screen. He started the recording. It showed the squadron traveling through space, and suddenly off in a N-W-N direction from them, a portal of some sort opened up and then closed again. Nothing had seemed to come out of it, but. . . There! A cloaked ship about the size of a carrier materialized. "Cloaked, I see, but why didn't we detect them before they fired on us?" The carrier class ship had a central streamlined, disfigured body with an openning on the underside. From it came several corvette-class ships, that turned towards them and came at them. Two spindly arms held two crooked tubes of some sort under the main portion, and were slighty spread away from it. They was an opening at the end of it, and it began to glow purple from deep within. Then, a pod shot from the tube at an insane rate of speed. Dren turned on slo-motion tracking, and saw the pod fly at his Frigate, clipping the side, spreading the corrosive. As it sped past, it split open, and out came one of the spindly fighters that had annhilated their own. Several Frigate-class ships materialized around the carrier as it fired more and more pods, at least four a second, for about thirty seconds. The Frigates were dark and looked inactive, but then flickered to life without warning, activating fusion drives and firing missles at the squad. The Torpedo Frigate he had watched die was hit with a missle, and he looked away as the corpses were sucked out into space and the ship imploded. At that point, the Flak and Torpedo Frigates had caught on, activating mass drivers, firing at the fighters. A cloud of flak exploded around a group of them, and a dark cloud surrounded them. He smiled triumphantly as the flak dissapated, but then his jaw dropped as the fighters flew out of the cloud, totally unharmed. "Not even a scratch. . ." By now the remaining fighters under his control had been vaporized, and the frigates had stopped firing, all turning, and the hyperspace gates opened in front of them. They closed over them, and the recording ended. He closed his mouth and shook slightly from fear. They hadn't even suffered a single loss, while his squad had been nearly devastated.
"We will exit hyperspace in three minutes, Captain," one of his officers reported, causing him to jump. "Shall I transfer the telemetry to the research department?"
"Yes, please do. Find a countermeasure of any sort, find a weakness, do anything we possibly can. And the instant we exit hyperspace, alert Hiigaran command of this new threat."
"Yes Sir, right away, Sir," She responded, and she walked back over to the computer modules. He stood up, too, and hovered over to the computers. He floated up to his weapons officer, who was busy scanning the corrosive that had been spread along the side of their ship and that had been the death of the Torpedo Frigate, and quite possibly some of the other Frigates as well; The telemetry data was not perfect, and it only detailed what had happened from a 3rd person view from his Frigate, and the field of vision was surprisingly narrow. He looked over the shoulder of his weapons officer, he had just finished an intial scan of the pods that the carrier-ship had been firing, they too had corrosive properties, as the right side armor of his ship had found out.
"Well, Sir, this corrosive doesn't seem to be a gas, or a liquid, or a solid. In fact, I have no idea what exactly it is. Whatever it is, the pods are coated with it and the missiles have some sort of warhead containing it, and when they touch a metal surface, such as the hulls of our ships, it spreads rapidly and with disturbing ease. It's like nothing I can describe that well, we've never encountered such an effective weapon. Not to mention, of course, we haven't got a single defense against it, except for not coming in contact with the pods and not allowing the missiles to impact, which, in the case of a Frigate, is quite out of the question."
"Would point-defense of some sort be able to shoot them down?"
"It's possible, but that would require major upgrades to every capital ship in the fleet from Frigate-class and up, and even if a good point-defense turret was created without too many problems represented by such a small size, the missles are traveling at an incredible speed, at a guess, I'd say about 3 times as fast as our fighters. We'd have to somehow upgrade to even faster tracking turrets in order to come anywhere near shooting at them accurately."
"Well, notify weapon research of this idea, nonetheless."
"Aye, captain." Dren hovered over to the tactical command station. The commanding officer stood up immediately and walked over to him.
"Well, after taking a quick look at the telemetry of the battle, I think it's safe to say that statistically, we probably shouldn't be alive after that encounter. If we had entered hyperspace about 5 seconds later, those corrosive missles would have ripped us apart." Contrary to popular belief (and it was often the downfall of a rookie captian), ships are still vulnerable while entering and exiting hyperspace, as the battle at balcora gate in the HomeWorld (the second war) war had proved. "And it's a good thing we left when we did, as I have no idea what would happen if we breached the hull during a hyperspace leap, but I really don't think I want to know. I've got my best people working on those fighters, but they're having difficulty. For some reason, they seem to have an absorbant armor plating, and we cant successfully scan them. The only thing we know, at this point, is what they look like."
"What about their engines? Are they conventional drives, or something else? They seemed ridiculously powerful to me."
"They were, and as far as I can tell from the videos, they weren't conventional plasma torch/fusion drives." Before he could ask, she continued. "And I know this because their projected output was much higher than ours, and it didn't leave the same energy and particle signature that a plasma drive does. As a matter of fact, it didn't match any sort of engine that we have, conventional, high-speed, or even experimental."
"Well, in that case, what sort of engines were they?"
"They seem to give off a mixture of charged hydrogen and oxygen molecules. I don't fully understand how they work, but they are quite powerful, producing a mixture of the two, and the reaction they create is a highly unstable creation, but a powerful propellant. If we could destroy one of them and get a good look at it's engine, I think we might be able to reverse-engineer a hybrid of our own."
"That would be incredibly useful, espescially if-" The Nav officer suddenly shouted for him.
"Captain, you're gonna want to come look at this. . ." Dren walked over and looked over her shoulder at the screen, which had the hyperspace monitor active at the moment. "I'm getting some anomalies in the particle waveform surrounding the ship, but I don't know how to describe it. It's almost as if foreign bits that are also in hyperspace are approaching us, but what could they be? Debris from space can't enter hyperspace on it's own, can it? But that would mean that it'd have to be another ship of some sort, but that would mean that. . ." A huge explosion rocked the bridge, and another quickly followed from somewhere near the ship's left. "We've been hit! The ship is being thrown off course! Quantum waveform collapsing, prepare for emergency hyperspace exit!" The ship began to tumble, and far in front of them, they saw an opening in the ifinite light-blue field, the exit to realspace. "Everybody hang on- !" The ship continue to roll onto its side as it shot toward the exit, pulling massive Gs. It breached the gate, and in realspace, the gate opened, slid along the length of the Frigate, bit by bit, then closed, as it merged back into space, it instantly regained its former speed, speeding along as other Frigates started opening their own gates, and shooting out along side themselves. Dren and his crew were reeling form the extreme gravitational forces, but he somehow managed to shout out an order.
"How farther to the hyperspace gate!?" Someone managed to give a response.
"We're nearly there, just about 500 metres more!"
"Get us stabilized and get into that gate, NOW!!!"
"But, Sir, what about the others?" At this point, the portals of the unknowns had opened, and the carrier and multiple Frigates were exiting and preparing to fire.
"Get them in the gate, too! Kharak knows I'll not leave behind my brothers!" Suddenly, the carrier launched a single, new sort of Frigate. It was sleek, slightly crooked, with a diamond-back design, and colored a deep purple with multiple lights flashing across its surface, but a large port of some sort at the front and posistioned to the left. "Oh, no. . ." A ball of yellow-white energy formed at the tip of the Frigate, growing steadily, then dissapeared as a beam took its place, and fired at them, making contact with the engine, then split off several smaller beams, connecting with various parts of the other Frigates, and a ball of energy formed at those spots. "Great Sajuuk have mercy. . ." The spheres exploded. By some great stroke of luck, only their engine ignited, propelling them forward at an insane speed, while every other Frigate detonated. Through the screams of terror, Dren opened his eyes and watched as they flung into the hyperspace gate, entered hyperspace, and the scene before him dissapeared. They were safe, for now, and were heading home. He passed out.