Space Battleship Agamemnon
Author's note
This story came about in an odd way. My role-playing group was playing a superheroes game, using the Mutants and Masterminds Second Edition (still with bits of First Edition) rules. In those rules, they allow all sorts of super-powers, available on a point-buy system. Among the things you can buy is a headquarters (think the Bat Cave or the Fortress of Solitude), or various vehicles including battleships. And you can build your HQ in a vehicle, including a battleship. And headquarters' can have any super-powers anyone else can. In fact they get them more cheaply than characters do.
I have always thought battleships were cool.
And for some reason the look of HMS Agamemnon appealed to me.
I like the Yamato too, and the Iowa class, and the Bismark etc. But those are all popular and frequently used. I like to be different.
So I built a headquarters in the HMS Agamemnon.
It's not the newest, nor the toughest etc. But lacking any other battleships to compete with, and given several super powers, it does quite nicely.
We had fun with it in our games (it is completely legal under the Mutants and Masterminds rules, including the Power Corrupts expansions).
But then I wanted to write a story including it as well.
The story of its construction is not very interesting, so we start with it fully functional - more or less.
The battleship is the same as we played (this one is a little weaker, actually). The owner and setting are different. The captain and crew do not have super-powers, instead depending on the abilities of the ship. They go looking for adventure, something like in Star Trek: going from place to place, sometimes facing challenges for the ship, and more often, challenges for the crew. Or at least that's what I intended - the first place they visit ended up having so many problems we could face though...
The first place they arrive is the Worm setting (a dark nihilistic super-powers story, with which you need not be familiar, since I have tried to include enough description).
Here you go.
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Author's Note 2
I usually prefer to finish a story before I even begin posting it. Among other things, that's so I know I can go back and edit things for consistency if needed.
But in this case, I'm not sure how much time I have, so I wanted to post what I already have done, for whatever it is worth.
I will keep working towards its conclusion, but, after I get what I have already written posted, new chapters may take a month or more each, if things go well.
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Chapter 1
The Simurgh opened its eyes and came online.
It had been quiescent in orbit above Earth-Bet for a while, but a potential threat had brought it online again.
A ship was approaching it - coming directly at it.
It - the Simurgh usually thought of itself as 'it' even though its shape partially resembled that of a human female - quickly analyzed the situation.
It was very good at rapid analysis.
The approaching ship was of a type the humans built to float upon their oceans and do battle with each-other there.
This was interesting, because it was in orbit above Earth, not floating on an ocean.
Further, this type of ship was old - very old.
The Simurgh's hyper-fast processors went to work on its huge database of all known information and came up with the answer in a microsecond.
The markings and appearance of the approaching ship were an 82.3 percent match to the battleship HMS Agamemnon, launched in 1906 and scrapped in 1927.
There were differences, but it was the same ship.
This space-going Agamemnon still had four 12 inch cannons in two twin turrets, and eight 9.2 inch cannons in four twin turrets.
But the two midships turrets had each been made a bit taller, and had their single 9.2 inch cannon replaced by a quad-mounted weapon system...yes, those were rail-guns
And the twenty-four 3 inch cannons, placed around all sides of the box-like superstructure, had been replaced with an even mix of lasers and charged particle-beams, in 'ball-turrets' similar to how machine-guns are often mounted in tank hulls.
The ad-hoc arrangement of lighter guns, including machine-guns and '3-pounders', often emplaced by sailors on pintel mounts on the deck or atop the 6 main turrets, had been replaced by - it took the Simurgh just a moment to come up with the answer - a unique amalgam of a quad-mounted Bofors 40mm gun and the American Close-In Weapon System (CIWS) called the Phalanx.
The ship's smokestacks were gone - replaced by a hangar for 2 helicopters, a 6-cell Vertical-Launch Rocket System (VLRS), and 3 small but potent turrets containing positron beam weapons.
There were 4 pop-out laser turrets on the bottom of the ship, along with 6 more VLRS hatches.
And the ship's boats - often up to a dozen of various sizes - had mostly been replaced by something that resembled, in both form and function, shuttle-craft from the Star Trek TV series.
Then there was a striking difference in the bow of the ship - it had the 4 foot diameter muzzle of a large energy cannon added to it. The cannon must run down the axis of the ship, and need the whole ship steered towards a target to aim the cannon.
The Simurgh had no weapon like it in its database, but, from many small indicators, postulated that it was a disintegration beam.
The Simurgh was very frustrated - if a non-living machine can ever really be said to be frustrated - because its usual sensor suite was highly impaired in its attempts to analyze the oncoming battleship.
Visual sensors were working fine, as were the x-ray and infrared sensors.
But the Simurgh usually relied heavily on the ability to use its extremely-capable telekinetic power as a sort of tactile sensor - a sense of touch - that functioned at long range, over a wide area, and with great precision.
That wasn't working very well at all on this target.
Some readings came in, but they were heavily degraded. The situation was something akin to a human who was normally capable of reading Braille, suddenly being reduced in sensitivity to barely being able to determine they were touching a solid surface at all, but coming far short of knowing, for example, if it was metal or wood, much less the details of many small bumps upon it.
The Simurgh thought she would like to analyze why that was, after destroying the interloper.
Her probability calculators - so super fast and accurate they commonly appeared to humans as if she knew the future - predicted that the Agamemnon was about to attack her.
She attacked first, a mere 3 microseconds after detecting the enemy.
She usually preferred to defeat machines by using telekinesis - TK for short - to disassemble them and then reconstruct them to serve her own purposes.
So she tried that.
And failed.
The fine control needed for such work just wasn't there.
Worse yet, to do such work, she had to use just a small fraction of her telekinetic power on any one target - otherwise she would crush nuts and bolts instead of unscrewing them, for example. But, dialed-back like that, the reduced TK power wasn't getting through to the battleship at all.
They had a field around the ship of a previously unknown type which reduced her telekinetic power, or eliminated it entirely if it was already below a certain threshold.
The Simurgh was great at analyzing things and forming conclusions.
But correct conclusions depended on having correct data.
Since this dampening field was previously unknown, the Simurgh had no data on it.
So she set out to collect some.
She tried her other favorite attack - the one she was perhaps best known for.
But that attempt failed too, as she'd expected it would.
Using telekinesis to micro-manipulate the brains of humans, and thereby alter their minds - drive them crazy as other humans interpreted it - simply required a very light touch and even finer control than disassembling and reassembling machines did.
So the dampening field around the battleship nullified that use of TK entirely.
She needed to eliminate variables.
So she quickly used her telekinesis to grab a bunch of nearby space junk - mostly old satellites, bits of past space stations and similar junk - and simultaneously fling 53 miscellaneous bits of such junk at the approaching ship.
She flung the bits with varying degrees of power, to see how the results varied.
That was a successful test.
The various bits of space junk accelerated exactly as they should have - some faster and some slower, just as she'd intended.
And she learned some things.
The junk she'd thrown flew at constant rates as it should have, both before and after it entered the dampening field.
So the field did not dampen momentum, but did dampen telekinesis.
She also learned that the battleship was very good at shooting things down.
The faster-moving space junk was hit and obliterated by lasers.
Some junk moving a little slower was destroyed by particle beams.
And the rest of the junk was hit, shredded, and knocked aside by 40mm Bofors CIWS fire, which exploded by proximity fuse into shrapnel.
The cloud of shrapnel put a lot more things - small sharp bits of metal mostly - into the vicinity and minutely degraded her ability to sense things via her telekinetic 'touch' sense, because it spread her capabilities over far more targets.
And along with all that, came a volley of shells from the battleship, aimed at the Simurgh.
Historically, most shells from such ships missed.
It was very difficult to hit things when your gun platform - your ship - was moving in 3 dimensions at once due to the motion of the sea.
But there was no such random wave motion here in low earth orbit.
And these shells were obviously - to the Simurgh - fired from gyro-stabilized guns, and aimed according to very accurate sensor data fed into a computer which took even small variables into account.
So all 14 shots - two twelve-inch shells, four 9.2 inch, and 8 rail-gun slugs - hit the Simurgh, even though she was only a human-sized target.
She let them hit.
She could have knocked them aside, stopped them, or crushed them with telekinesis.
But she didn't bother, depending instead on the effective invulnerability granted by her super-dense layering.
Three of her outer layers - each as thin as a coat of paint - got blasted off, but that just gave her more data about the attacks.
Losing a few outer layers - out of 200 total, each twice as dense as the last - did not impair her in the least.
But gaining data was always good.
To gain more data, she tried using telekinesis to accelerate some space junk that was already within the enemy ship's dampening field.
At low levels of power, that didn't work.
She tried various amounts of power, to calibrate what it took and learn just how much the drain affected things.
The battleship was still coming - now at an angle so it could fire all the weapons along one long side - and it was firing as it came.
The Simurgh got hit by a full broadside and lost a 4th layer.
She ignored that while she experimented.
It took the next two broadsides to blast her 5th layer off.
They had fired missiles too, as well as torpedoes which were almost undetectable except to her telekinetic sense of touch, but the Simurgh could not be certain what they contained at first, so simply crushed those. Then she analyzed the data she got by watching their destruction, decided she needed more data, and kept crushing them. They had a variety of different warheads, some of which could pose potential problems for her.
Then she tired of that game and just blasted the battleship - which was still approaching and shooting her with everything they had, as if that could make any difference.
She blasted it with her full telekinetic power.
That should have torn the ship in half.
Instead it just put a dent about the size of a minivan in the superstructure.
That was interesting, so she planned to continue beating on it that way.
But even more interesting was the force-field that came up around the battleship after it took damage.
She was analyzing that through various telekinetic attacks when her opponents tried something new.
She detected subtle changes in the muzzles of the laser weapons. These indicated wider, weaker beams would be coming, and she determined that they intended to blind her.
So she dodged.
She was not faster than the laser light - rather she was faster than somebody's trigger finger.
She could see the weapons aiming at her, so she moved out of the way before they fired.
She dodged the positron beams the same way. She did so because there was a potential that the shockwave produced by that type of explosion could stun her briefly.
Those beams were only throwing out a tiny amount of positrons, but the matter-antimatter explosions resulting when they annihilated electrons effectively had an infinite propagation rate, especially through super-dense material such as herself.
The propagation rate of an explosion through an explosive material determines whether it is a high explosive, or a low explosive.
Low explosives have low propagation rates, and are useful for moving materials, such as in mining, since the materials can effectively be said to be 'surfing the blast wave'.
High explosives have a blast wave moving so quickly they shatter things more than they move them.
Many high explosives had propagation rates of 7,000+ meters per second.
Octanitrocubane had propagation rates of 10,100 meters per second.
Antimatter had propagation rates so fast it could not be measured.
So even a tiny amount of antimatter, making an explosion about as big as an artillery shell would have, made, at the same time, a shockwave moving absurdly fast in the target. The strength of that shockwave wasn't the problem. The speed was. It could jar her processors and cause them to skip a beat. Computers did not handle such things well, even alien crystalline computers - In fact, they may be more vulnerable since crystals don't take shock well. She would recover from such a hit, but would 'skip a beat', and effectively be stunned for a short time.
So she didn't let the positron beams hit her. Some she dodged, moving towards the battleship while she did so, to see if it intimidated them. And some she intercepted by shoving her enemy's own missiles and torpedoes in front of them.
The resulting explosions put a lot more shrapnel in the near vicinity, making detection more difficult, but still gave her data to analyze.
Her enemy apparently noticed that the shrapnel clouds gave her trouble, and started firing canister rounds from their 9.2 and 12 inch guns.
These 'beehive' rounds each launched thousands of small balls in a wide area.
Amid all the balls, missile fragments, shrapnel, and thousands of pounds of former layers of herself, which was now effectively just sand, the Simurgh also detected one new type of 12 inch shell fired at her.
She had not seen this type before either, but it was similar to other rounds that had contained chemical loads.
She calculated that it had only a one in a million chance of traveling safely through all the shrapnel etc and hitting her, so she dismissed it.
She went back to learning the details of the ship, by hitting it with full-force TK blasts. After the force-field went up, these were only putting basketball-sized dents in the ship. But it still gave her data.
The Simurgh had mere nanoseconds to register that she had been hit by the special 12 inch shell, which released a particular kind of radiation, before the computer that was her mind, crashed, and she ceased entirely to function while it worked on restarting.