53. Can't Stop This Thing We Started
Another Arc-en-ciel exploded mid-charge, whiting out the screen, and Fleet Admiral Lindy Harlaown muttered a quick prayer for the departed. Dark shapes appeared in the afterglow; another group of enemy warships burning towards them at combat speed.
"Do we have a lock on the largest ship in that formation?" she asked.
Her weapons officer nodded. "Aye, ma'am."
"Good. Fleet Admiral Harlaown to Task Force Dolga, Second Command is counterattacking. Tenth Heavy, Eighteenth Assault, clear us a path."
Two squadrons of capital ships raced ahead of the Dolga, lighting up the Chaos ships' shields with a volley of magical firepower. The enemy responded in kind, their formation loosening as they moved to engage their tormentors.
Lindy smiled a disconcertingly mild smile. "I believe that's our route up ahead. Helm, take us in."
The heavy cruiser accelerated towards a gap between three frigates, its wards glowing as it entered their line of fire.
"We're taking hits, ma'am," Weapons noted unnecessarily.
"So I see. Well, I suppose I couldn't put off trying this thing out forever. Enhanced Magical Interface System, open."
The Magical Interface System was a powerful weapon, but not without its drawbacks. A mage who used it would have their power magnified enormously, but it supplied nothing itself, meaning that its effects depended entirely on the mage operating it, and the imperfections of the interface between a human Linker Core and such a massive Device severely limited its operating time. The Bureau had come some way in making it more efficient, but, to analogise, there was a reason why people had stopped using levers and hand-pulleys and started using electric winches.
The Dolga's prototype EMIS was the metaphorical electric winch. It backed up the user with two specialised magical reactors, tremendously boosting their abilities without them having to exert the slightest bit of effort, and letting the system operate almost indefinitely. In the hands of a raw recruit, it was deadly. In the hands of an experienced S-rank mage like Lindy, it was terrifying.
Or, at least, that was the sales pitch. They still needed to find out whether it would actually work.
Lindy rested her hands on the control crystals, feeling the power held within rush through her body. "Dolga, Mirage Defenser."
A blue mist encased the heavy cruiser, coiling and writhing like a living creature. The dark lance beams and disintegrator bolts simply bent around it, either flying past harmlessly or turning back to strike the ships that had fired them. One frigate's shield collapsed, its own weapons slicing glowing rents across its hull.
Well, that's promising. Lindy drew on more of her own power, the four opal bindis on her forehead glowing as a series of transparent turquoise ovals like the wings of a butterfly emerged from her back.
"Dolga, Sunlight Wing."
Vastly larger versions of the butterfly-wings flapped outwards from the heavy cruiser's sides and it surged forwards, arrowing in on the battleship at the heart of the enemy group.
The fleet admiral breathed in, focusing on her target and letting her consciousness expand through every room, every corridor, and every pipeline in its structure. "Dolga, Summer Rain."
Thousands of glowing turquoise butterflies appeared throughout the titanic ship, gently flapping their wings as they hovered next to (or, in some cases, inside) power conduits, antimatter regulators, damage-control systems, and ammunition stores. Then Lindy lifted a hand from its crystal and clicked her fingers, and each and every one of them exploded.
The blasts were not terribly large or terribly powerful. Most of them, in fact, would barely serve to knock someone down. Even an expert mage with the might of the EMIS at her disposal was not without her limitations, and Lindy liked to economise anyway. They were, however, very, very carefully placed.
The battleship shuddered, its windows aglow for an instant with the light of distant flames. Then it ripped itself apart.
Note to self: Enhanced Magical Interface System appears to be functioning quite well.
"Hey, what're they up to?" Sensors asked.
"I beg your pardon, lieutenant?"
"The Chaos ships, ma'am. Look – they're acting weird."
He was right. The enemy formation had been loose before, but in a purposeful, organised way. Now, it was falling apart. Some of the ships were maintaining a semblance of fighting order, but others were veering off into parts unknown, charging suicidally into the Bureau fleet, or even opening fire on their own allies. One of the larger battlecruisers had actually shut down, floating unhurriedly through the void with its lights off, its weapons silent (in another example of the Warp getting things wrong, they had been making a faint noise), and its engines dead as three TSAB ships pounded into it at once.
"And all this started when we destroyed their battleship?" Lindy asked.
"Seems that way, ma'am."
"Interesting. Brief anyone you can, please – I'd like to know if this was a one-off, or part of a pattern."
"I'll see what I can do, ma'am," the communications officer replied, "but we might have a problem. Our comms are having trouble reaching the rest of the fleet, and their maximum range is shrinking fast. The people we can talk to can relay it, sure, but it'll take a little longer."
"Slow is better than never, Simca. Go ahead."
A new set of symbols flashed across the tactical display – the enemy had broken through their lines to the south. They had engaged their allies. Lindy hoped their alien friends would be able to fend for themselves, because as the sensors cleared, showing another three groups bearing down on her, she knew that they would have to.
The Spiral Driver control chair (version 2.0) was a skeletal, mildly uncomfortable affair that reached over its occupant like the legs of a spider. In addition to the usual paraphernalia of a captain's post, it incorporated seatbelts, padded safety bars, and two spiral-shaped gauges in the right-hand arm rest. One indicated how much power the ship was drawing from the hundreds of bodged-together alien weapons bolted onto it. The other showed the level of system instability you were currently experiencing – in layman's terms, how likely your ship was to turn into something horrible, eat you alive, and then kill everyone else within the next couple of thousand kilometres.
To say that Captain Jean-Luc Picard disliked it was to miss a perfectly good opportunity to use the word 'loathed'. The fact that it closely resembled Borg technology (especially when one took into account all the green glowy bits) didn't help either.
At the moment, the warning gauge was empty save for a sullen flicker of purple at the bottom, but the power gauge was half-full of green light. This was because Picard was currently fending off a broadside from an enemy ship five times the size of the Enterprise-E with nothing but the power of his mind.
Therein, of course, lay the most annoying aspect of Spiral Driver technology – it worked. It worked well.
During the Year of Chaos, the Federation had finally gone on the offensive against the Stiletto, luring it into a trap above the skies of Aldebaran where three whole fleets lay in ambush. Starfleet had fielded a hundred and fifty ships, three times as many as they had sent against the Borg at the disastrous battle of Wolf 359, and all of them had been armed to the teeth with their nation's latest and deadliest weapons. Captain Rong-Arya and her crew had destroyed them all except for the third fleet's flagship, which had been returned to them with its crew turned into living furniture and the admiral commanding it crucified across the outer hull.
In the last ten minutes, Picard and the other five captains of his squadron had destroyed three Chaos warships, all of which were bigger, tougher, and decades more advanced than the Stiletto, whilst taking only two losses in return.
The battle was nightmarish, brutal. Here, a swarm of daemons was peeling away a cruiser's hull to get at the soft, tasty people inside. There, a heavy escort partially transformed by its Spiral Drivers had grabbed an enemy ship with a long, many-jointed arm that had once been a warp nacelle, hitting it again and again with two other, less recognisable limbs. The two ships they had lost had died in rapid succession – some nameless something had boarded the USS Hudson, consuming it from the inside out in lurid pink fire, which had distracted Captain Grigorovich of the USS New Hope sufficiently for a Chaos frigate to get past his Spiral Driver barrier and slice his ship in half lengthwise. Between them, the two ships had carried well over a thousand crewmembers. None of them had escaped.
Despite this, though, despite the carnage and madness, they were holding. They were facing the enemy that had effortlessly ravaged their galaxy, now returned a thousand times stronger, and they were meeting it head-on.
The alien sensations from the control chair changed in pitch and timbre, the power gauge bulging outwards as the Enterprise's barrier absorbed the energy of the incoming shots. Picard knew what that feeling meant. He shoved the handgrips forward, shaping the wall of energy into a titanic, drill-like lance, and loosed it at the enemy cruiser.
The Chaos ship's shields shattered, chunks of metal flaking away from its hull and fires burning within the gouges scraped across its surface, but it held. Clearly, more measures would be necessary.
"Mr. Daniels, fire phasers."
The tactical officer blinked. "Sir, we had our phasers replaced with those time-traveller plasma cannons, remember? Everyone in the fleet did."
"I am aware of that, lieutenant. Now, if you would kindly permit an old man his eccentricities, fire phasers."
"… Of course, sir. Firing phasers, aye."
The Enterprise's plasma cannons fired, raking across the cruiser's hull. The bolts were a singularly disappointing (if unsurprising) shade of green.
Picard tapped his com-badge. "How are we doing, Mr. La Forge?"
"Pretty OK, sir," the chief of engineering's voice replied. "One bit of concern, though – the Spiral Drivers. If I may say so, sir, you're running them at kind of a low output."
"I apologise, Mr. La Forge, but you are aware of the horror stories from the New Republic, yes? I would rather if we did not experience a 'Code Indigo' or whatever those gentlemen from the Bureau are calling it now."
"Yeah, I get that, but we can raise the safe threshold, remember? All we have to do is transfor-"
"I will pretend you did not say that, commander. We have already given enough to this war effort, and I do not think it necessary to sacrifice the last shreds of our dignity in some flashy, ridiculous…"
"Yeah, I see where you're coming from, sir, but, and I really don't mean to preach here, if we're going to have to choose between dignity and staying alive…"
Picard sighed and rested his head in his hand. "Very well. You've made your point. Perhaps some modifications to the warp nacelles?"
"Sure thing, sir. Don't worry, I'm sure I can keep it tasteful. Always wondered what they'd look like in green, and maybe we could have some little drills on the tips…"
"Thank you, commander."
"Right, sir. Sorry, sir. Shutting up now, sir."
The captain returned to gazing balefully at the main screen. Acting as glorified weapons platforms for the Bureau and their allies was one thing, but did they have to rub it in like that? More than ever, he was glad that he'd decided to leak the information about Spiral Driver side-effects to the rest of the Alpha Quadrant forces. Their current situation was humiliating, but it could well have been deadly.
Somewhere in the distance, another Starfleet ship exploded. More deadly, anyway.
The Errant Venture, like most Imperial-II Star Destroyers, had a long and complicated history. It had participated in the Battle of Endor, served in the Imperial remnant fleet led by the former Director of Intelligence Ysanne Isard, been captured by the notorious smuggler Booster Terrik during a joint operation with the New Republic in 7 ABY, and spent the next decade or so as an enormous, heavily-armed mobile black market. It had had many adventures during that time, not least of which was a recent incident involving some politically-unfortunate documents that had led to the New Republic and what was left of the Galactic Empire ceasing hostilities, and the Errant Venture getting a makeover that included a full refit, several extra turbolaser turrets, and lots and lots of red paint.
Then the Time-Space Administration Bureau had shown up, and with them, conclusive proof that there were other universes to explore, talk to, and, most importantly, trade with. Due to the continuing war against the Yuuzhan Vong, the Republic had been forced to rely on volunteers to bulk out its contribution to Operation Guardian (or, at least, that was the excuse Chancellor Fey'lya had given), and Booster and the crew of the Venture had been amongst the first to sign up to seek their fortune.
It was doubtful, in the opinion of General Wedge Antilles, that they had been expecting seeking their fortune to involve quite so much fighting for their lives against the legions of hell. Nevertheless, they seemed to be taking to it rather well.
"Lay down a turbolaser barrage to our port!" Booster yelled, his face turning almost as red as the hull of his ship. "I said port, damn it! Your other port! Kriffing hell, can't a single one of you inbred mynock-suckers shoot straight?"
The Venture's gunners seemed to be doing a perfectly good job from where Wedge was standing, but then again, he wasn't paying their bills. In fact, he wasn't doing much of anything at the moment – the New Republic wasn't stupid enough to let an unruly bunch of semi-criminals represent them on a multiversal level without some supervision, and since he was a senior officer with extensive prior dealings with the Terrik family, that meant that it was his job to stand around and look responsible whilst everyone else had all the fun.
The Chaos raiders had struck the New Republic fleet fifteen minutes ago, punching a hole through their outer lines and wreaking havoc in their vulnerable innards. They had overextended themselves, though, and the position that made it so easy for them to hit the invaders where it hurt also rendered retreat almost impossible. In short, the time was right for a counterattack, and that was precisely what Booster and his flotilla of smugglers were doing.
"We've cleared out that daemon swarm, boss," one of what could tentatively be described as the Venture's 'bridge officers' reported. "Looks like we've got a clear run right up their hellspawned arses."
Booster grunted in satisfaction. "Good. Now let's see if we got value for money for our new toys from those Bureau shysters. Spiral Drivers, engage!"
Wedge glanced out of the bridge's massive transparisteel window, watching long, glowing fins rise out of the broad red triangle that was the Errant Venture's hull. He could see the Chaos ships in the distance – small, malevolent pinpricks on the disconcertingly colourful backdrop of the Warp. Green fire raced along the surface of the ship, forming a solid barrier as the first probing shots from the enemy zipped past.
"Drivers at thirty per cent power and rising," an orange-skinned Twi'lek said. "System is stable."
A narrow black beam smacked into the barrier with no discernible effect.
"… and no damage to the shields," she continued. "Impressive."
"OK, now let's check out what it can do to our offence," Booster said. "Antilles, your flyboys finished doing their make-up yet?"
Wedge didn't mind the old smuggler's abrasive tone – after the first decade or so, you got used to it. "My 'flyboys' launched ten minutes ago. They've probably saved your life a couple of hundred times by now."
The scar around Booster's clone-grown left eye creased as he grinned. "Only that many? Getting sloppy. Hope they're gonna step up their game soon, because I'm about to send a whole lot more work their way. Dizrok, I want a full spread in front of us. Target that big yellow bastard at oh-one-three. He wanted to scratch our nice new coat of paint, so we'll scratch his."
Star Destroyer turbolaser bolts were green as a matter of default. The Spiral Driver enhancements, however, made them look even greener – and much, much brighter. Wedge was left blinking away afterimages as the light faded.
"Their energy readings took a dip there, boss," a long-necked Ithorian wheezed. "We didn't break their shield, but we certainly dented it."
"Then hit 'em again, damn it!" Booster roared. "Do I have to do all the thinking around here? And for kriff's sake, tell me our main gun's charging. I don't want this to be a repeat of that time with the Vong over Ithor."
"Affirmative, sir," the Twi'lek said. "Ready in three… two… one…"
"Wonderful. Antilles, you're going to want to see this…"
The emerald barrier across the front of the ship parted, a small hole appearing around the tip of the prow. The floor beneath Wedge's feet started to vibrate faintly, a low whine creeping up through the massive Star Destroyer's many decks.
Booster gave a lazy smile. "Fire."
A massive, spiralling beam shot out from the Errant Venture's prow, seeming to twist and writhe almost playfully before it struck one of the larger enemy ships, which abruptly ceased to exist.
The explosion was quite spectacular.
"Booster…" Wedge said slowly, "be honest with me now. Was that a kriffing superlaser?"
"Hah, you kidding? You really think I could worm a bona fide superlaser out of those Nal Hutta jobsworths? Nah – it's a laser, and it's pretty super, but it's not a superlaser, if you follow me. Figured I might as well treat myself after that run-in with those celebrity impersonators we had. Nei, how long until it's ready to fire again?"
"Seven minutes, sir, and that's if we-"
Something exploded off the Venture's starboard bow, causing the Spiral Driver barrier to ripple alarmingly.
"Don't think we have that long," Booster growled. "Ah, well, I was hoping I'd get to try this anyway. Hold on to something solid, people, and have the fighters get out of the way – I'm taking this thing to maximum power."
Wedge didn't need telling twice – he knew what that meant. He strapped himself into the nearest chair and clung to the arm-rests for dear life, staring out of the window as he waited for the insanity to begin. Dark shapes were gathering in the distance as the Chaos group began to react to the Venture's charge, tracing the space between them with a jagged nightmare of glowing black and the occasional bright flash of an antimatter blast. The green fire surrounding the ship flared, shape and colour fading away as the Spiral Drivers roared and the hull screamed in protest.
There was movement outside. With a lurch in his stomach, Wedge realised that the massive delta of the Star Destroyer's body was dipping away from them. In fact, it was no longer accurate to call it a delta – the broad triangle was splitting lengthwise, the two halves crumpling and spreading in an eerily organic manner.
Legs. We have legs now.
The red expanse retreated, mercifully, out of sight, but Wedge could still hear the noises, see the way that the barrier moulded around the ship's new form. The view from the window shifted left, then right, and he gradually noticed that the rest of the ship wasn't moving with them.
Something long and crimson moved in front of them, angled near the middle and tapering to a point at one end. The point opened into five smaller protrusions, one shorter than the others. The Star Destroyer brought its arm to its face, and flexed its fingers experimentally.
"… Huh," Booster said. "Looks like the paint's still intact. Good. You would not believe what I paid for that. Oh, and we weren't all crushed to death. That's good, too, I guess."
As if on cue, an alarm sounded.
"Another torpedo spread coming in, boss!" the Ithorian called. "Our fighter screen's trying its best, but there's too many of them."
The smuggler grinned, and leaned back in his command chair. "Not for long there aren't."
The Venture's arm flicked forward, a shallow cone of green energy spreading out and away from its palm. Torpedo after torpedo struck it, bursting into brilliant white light… and froze, staying in place like a dozen infant suns. The transformed ship's massive fingers closed, pulling the raging antimatter together into a single incandescent sphere.
"Kolash," Booster said mildly, "who fired that at us?"
The Ithorian's long, thin fingers stroked his custom-made keyboard. "Modified light cruiser, boss. Bearing three-four-seven. You see it?"
"That I do. Hey, buddy, you dropped this…"
The Venture made a sharp gesture, and the antimatter sphere collapsed into an impossibly long lance, reaching across the thousands of kilometres between them to impale the cruiser lengthwise. For a nanosecond, the world hung in a frozen, perfect tableau, and then the Chaos ship disintegrated.
A pair of escorts moved to flank them, criss-crossing space with waves of midnight death. The Venture jinked to one side, throwing Wedge against his seatbelt, and charged forward. Through the window, he saw the leftmost frigate rapidly increase in size, all spikes, gothic arches, and eye-hurting runes, as the Star Destroyer's own guns met its desperate attempts to defend itself in a sea of green-and-black explosions. Its shield went down when they were barely two hundred metres away and then the Venture's head twisted to one side and Wedge had a brief glimpse of a massive red arm coming forward and then there was nothing but technicoloured fire as the transformed ship shoulder-barged through its enemy at eighty kilometres per second.
The Venture flipped tail-over-head, facing the second frigate upside down. It raised its hands, fanning out a broad green drill like an umbrella as its enemy opened fire, the torrent of Warp-infused energy glancing off harmlessly. The drill began to spin, chewing through the fabric of space itself until all that was left was a hole two kilometres wide, which the Star Destroyer promptly stepped through.
Captain Pierre Leclerc did not need any of his crew to alert him when the scarlet colossus rematerialised a scant few hundred metres from his ship. This was because he was his ship. His spirit was bound into its hull – its adamantium armour was its skin, its thousands of lesser daemons and servitors were his neurons, and its sensors were his eyes. All he had to do to notice it was look up… and up… and up.
The enemy ship stood two kilometres tall now, towering over his own frigate. It was loosely humanoid, covered in massive, triangular armour plates and cloaked in green fire. Its squashed-hexagon head looked down at him, its broad, flat face totally featureless. For the first time in his second life, Pierre was frightened.
Like most of Chaos's ascended daemons, Pierre had been long-dead when the gods had conscripted him into their army. He had once been a captain in the service of King Louis, where his ship-of-the-line, the Magnifique, had been quite a thorn in the side of the perfidious British until an incident with a sandbar and a couple too many bottles of Bordeaux had brought both his career and his life to an abrupt and messy end. A fast learner and creative tactician, he had adapted unusually well to his return a couple of centuries later, which might have been due in part to space's dearth of sandbars and his new body's total alcohol immunity.
He was kind to his crew (even if they were a bunch of bloodthirsty monsters spawned from the literal depths of hell), he was popular with the kids at Bloodhaven's communal nursery, and whilst he did like to slope off on weekends and do strange and disturbing things to upstanding (or, occasionally, horizontal) members of the public, he always made sure he had their informed, enthusiastic consent beforehand, and most of them remained pretty enthusiastic afterwards. In short, he didn't really deserve what was about to happen to him.
The Magnifique II's engines howled as Pierre diverted all the power he could to them, desperately trying to put some personal space between him and the giant intruder. The transformed ship, for its part, simply reached out and grabbed it with both hands, its thumbs sinking into the upper hull. Pierre screamed in pain, feeling his skin slowly peel back as the frigate forced itself forward. Something would give soon, he knew, and he and his ship would be free, but it wouldn't happen nearly fast enough. He needed to loosen his enemy's grip.
Every gun on the frigate's starboard side fired at once, lashing into its enemy at point-blank range. The giant hands relaxed for a moment, the pain lessened, and for one brief, glorious instant, Pierre thought he had done it. Then his sensors cleared, showing the transformed ship again. Its armour was chipped, blackened, and scarred, but it was still intact, still glowing with the unholy light of the Spiral.
Pierre Leclerc had just enough time to order a general evacuation before the Errant Venture, the New Republic's only privately-owned Star Destroyer, snapped the Magnifique II in half over its knee.
Wedge turned away from the exploding frigate, and back towards the command chair. "How the hell did you do all that?"
"Antilles," Booster replied, "I have absolutely no idea."
Author's Notes: Been a while since I read the X-Wing books. Not completely sure I got Wedge and booster down, but still good to work with them.
Also, I swear Picard is eventually going to catch a break. At some point. Maybe. Possibly.
