ShipCore - Book 2: Chapter 70: And All the King’s Men (5)

Book 2: Chapter 70: And All the King’s Men (5)

USD: During Battle over Dedia Prime

Location: Nu Crateris, Dedia IV Orbit, SRS Tears of Fire

Elis had remained quiet and clamped in her seat during the entire engagement. Eyes closed, she hummed to herself as lines of fire were punched through the ship and parts of it were turned into debris.

A railgun round had punched through from the floor and through the ceiling, passing through without stopping and filling the space with a thin cloud of heated plasma. Her suit whined a warning at the temperature of the material, but she mostly ignored it.

Standard operating procedure was to remain in place and wait until you were needed. She might have offered to assist Alex, but she was not proficient at ship operations and now was not the time to learn how to fly a starship. She was getting pretty good at running comms as a liaison to people, but there was no need for her to coordinate two NAIs and their drone units.

So she waited until there was something for her to do while doing her best to ignore the creeping thoughts of how terrible a space battle could be. Having the room ventilated while she was sitting in it was new to her, but she put it out of mind. Her armor was more than capable of protecting her from the dispersed plasma occasionally seeping into the room.

Despite the bumps and a few jerks, she almost nodded off to take a nap, eventually. When a telltale sound of bumps echoed through her suit’s vibration sensors, her eyes opened. That was a sound one never forgot.

Releasing her suit clamp from the main engineering console’s seat, she stood and took in the tactical map that the ship’s sensors fed to her. Red dots were slowly moving inward and as she rotated the view with an eye flick, she realized there were a lot of them. What the fuck.

“Elis!”

“I see them. I’m sending Booper to CIC. I’ll hold engineering.”

“Alright, stay safe.”

Elis grunted a noncommittal reply as she looked down at her forearm display and punched a few digital keys to send the command that would send the combat bot from the cargo hold to Alex.

[Notice: Sentri turrets have been activated and deployed. 11 large form combat drones remain operational, 242 mini drones have been tasked with ship defense. All other drones are in use.]

“Noted. Please take care of assigning them to wherever they are needed.”

[Affirmative: Mini support drones are en route to support your section.]

“Thanks.”

Elis wasn’t going to sit around in engineering, though. Eying the hole punched through the ceiling and floor, she confirmed it was too small for anyone to fit through when a little drone flittered through it, passing by quickly.

Ah, the boarders were going to have such fun with that; she thought.

Moving to an access way to a hatch on the inner hull, she pulled up telemetry on a group that was trying to force a nearby airlock on the inner hull. Why they didn’t just find a way through a hole, she didn’t know. She didn’t really care.

Reaching the top of a ladder, she popped the hatch open as it accepted her wireless security ID and she popped her rifle up out of the hole. The new rifles that Nameless had fabricated were quite nice, in her opinion. A remote camera display inside her suit helmet gave her a perfect view down the barrel sights. A team of five.

Despite the awkward position, a burst of fire sent two Corpos floating off into the outer hull space while the others searched for cover. There were all kinds of debris and junk floating around in the strange micro-gravity area between the ship’s two hulls created by the A-Grav and inertial dampening fields.

Nameless chose that moment to yaw hard, and the men got launched into the open. Elis picked them off, but one activated his suit’s flight capabilities and darted out of sight.

Suddenly a red flashing warning flared on Elis’s screen and she shoved herself down the ladder, a sudden explosion above her spewing shrapnel that pelted her suit ineffectively.

Someone had fired a rocket at her. Shit. They had brought heavy weapons, which was a bad sign.

She landed in the corridor and slapped a wall control and the access corridor’s internal doors slammed shut to prevent anything else from coming down at her. Checking her tac-map, she noticed that several hostile units were already inside moving through the cargo bay in the center of the ship.

[Notice: Multiple damage points in ship cargo bay are allowing access to hostile units. Sentri deployment in the space has been disabled by hostile fire.]

“Yeah, that big ass room is a trouble magnet, isn’t it?”

She ran down the corridor. She did not want them in the ship’s main central corridor.

“Elis, they are all over the ship! Combat drones are going crazy in here.”

Elis tapped her comm line to Alex open, “No shit, we can’t lose CIC or Engineering or they’ll take over the ship.”

“Uhh… I think the most important room is the ShipCore room for that, but I don’t think they are going to know what to do with it.”

“That means they’ll blow it up.”

“My brain is in there!”

“Just focus on keeping us from being blown up—blown up more.” Elis corrected herself.

The ship was a wreck. Elis wasn’t even sure how the ship was still fighting, but the telltale signs of it still moving and fighting were noticeable as small shifts pulled at her as she entered the cargo bay from a side hatch.

Gunfire lines between two combat drones and a breacher team were simulated on her suit’s HUD, and she moved to flank them without them knowing of her presence. She popped out behind a large empty steel container and opened fire into their rear without giving them any chance to find new cover.

[Notice: A new count of hostile boarders has been calculated. The number of hostile units has been reduced from 63 to 60.]

“We don’t need a running count. How the fuck many pods did they send?”

[Informative: Of 86 pods detected, 73 were destroyed by Grazhdanin PD fire. 11 Pods have successfully locked onto Tears hull.]

Elis grunted. That was not good. She noted on the tac-net that Nameless’s bots were doing much worse than she had expected at fighting the boarders. Two more teams were entering the cargo hold, and she quickly moved to exfiltrate before they surrounded her.

As she reached the corridor, an explosion near her threatened to throw her off her feet, but she caught herself on a bulkhead. She turned and fired back into the room without aiming as she passed through the entryway to the ship’s main corridor.

There were way too many flashing red dots arriving at once, and most of their drones were focused on holding CIC and the ShipCore room. That left her to hold engineering and keep them from taking out the reactor.

Every door on the ship, including nearly two dozen that were evenly spaced on her path to the reactor room, had slammed shut to slow the boarders but they opened automatically as she passed by them.

The ship lurched again. The feeling of something important breaking from the impact made her seriously consider if they were going to make it or not.

Ships weren’t meant to lurch like that.

Entering Engineering, her HUD flashed red and highlighted a small black drone flying through the room. She raised her rifle and opened fire, sparks exploding on the other side of the room as she missed.

A friendly drone appeared out of a hole and shot its miniature dart gun at it and the two flying things spun around each other in a dogfight.

Taking aim carefully, Elis put a single shot through it with the help of the rifle’s targeting suite.

She called Alex, “Be careful. They are deploying scout drones.”

“Yeah! I know! Three of them came in through holes here. I had to zap them.” Alex answered.

More threats highlighted on Elis’ HUD, and she moved to meet them.

USD: During Battle over Dedia Prime

Location: Nu Crateris, Dedia IV Orbit, SMS Grazhdanin

The air remaining on the bridge was sweltering hot and sweat dripped from Lavigne’s forehead. He couldn’t do anything about it because Morrison had handed him a basic facemask of dubious worth that would at least keep oxygen in his lungs for a short time if the compartment was breached.

More breached than it already was.

The massive Grazhdanin was not in good health. Once the Tremissis had begun to return fire with its massive number of railguns, the ship had become a death trap.

The ship was the largest vessel the Solarian Navy possessed, even compared with the service’s inner system warships. Despite the obvious combat disadvantage, the ship could absorb a massive amount of punishment.

And the ship had fought back, harder and better than Lavigne had ever imagined a ship could. The initial surprise volley by the bombardment rails, coupled with a missile volley from the ground, had obviously wounded the Corporate battlecruiser enough to reduce its offensive capabilities considerably.

The outcome had never been in question, though. Both ships’ lighter elements had been stripped and blasted away after several minutes of hail and coherent light cutting into them. The two behemoths then rolled to present fresh armor and surface elements to the fight.

The entire surface of both ships glowed red, with debris and atmosphere leaking out of them slowly. Deep wounds dug deep into the Grazhdanin, though, as heavy railgun shells tunneled through hundreds of compartments without stopping.

The crew was not equipped with pressure suits, and masks were a poor survival tool when exposed to vacuum. The ship’s I-field integrity had continued to fall until it was forced to pick which compartments it continued to protect.

A-Field areas separated across the ship as systems failed, creating pockets of micro-gravity between bubbles of survivable space. Lavigne stared at the ship’s engineering display and knew their time was almost up.

“Signal abandon ship.”

An ensign looked who had been shouting into a ship comm froze and looked up at him, “Sir?”

Everyone on the bridge paused what they were doing to look at him.

Lavigne repeated himself, “Signal abandon ship. Set Contingency Condition across the ship. Set the reactors for… forty minutes.”

The last was a very long time, and he fully expected the ship to not last that long, but he didn’t want the self-destruct to blow them to bits while sailors were still trying to escape.

The few young officers gave directives and orders as the ship’s status lights went from flashing red to flashing black. As the order went out, sailors stopped what they were doing, whether it was directing damage control or manning the guns to rush to the nearest escape pods.

There were plenty to spare all over the ship.

As the new bridge crew finished their tasks, they hurried out of the room as well. Lavigne pulled up the Captain’s console and set all remaining weapon systems to continue to fire on the Tremissis as long as they could, as few as they were.

As he scanned the tactical map, he noted that the lone corvette defending the planet was still alive somehow. It and a Corpo cruiser were on matching courses in an orbit that would take them into the planet’s atmosphere.

The smaller ship had fought and killed at least a dozen other Corpo light warships; how he had no idea, but he saluted the ship’s captain for however they had managed it. Its luck had run out, however, as the heavier Corpo cruiser continued to pound it to ruin, although the little ship was still firing back.

The ship shook heavily, almost throwing Lavigne off his feet. A flashing warning on a screen showed that the Grazhdanin’s main drive reactor had just gone critical and detonated.

Morrison tugged on his shoulder. “Sir, it’s time to get the hell out of here.”

Lavigne nodded and started to follow, but stopped. He turned and pressed a few keys on the tactical screen. The ship only had twelve lasers left, but he re-targeted them on the Corpo cruiser. The weapons would probably slag themselves without an operator to manage them, but they were much less likely to do anything measurable against the Tremissis.

But maybe it would make a difference for the little ship that was still fighting.

The Grazhdanin’s fight was over.

|SHIP CONTIGENCY CONDITION |

|THIS IS NOT A DRILL|

|ALL HANDS ABANDON SHIP|

USD: During combat above Dedia IV

Location: Nu Crateris, PF-131, CBC CSS Tremissis

Heeler held the impaled corpse of a power armored marine in front of him, bullets plinking off the makeshift shield as he moved toward the group guarding the last bulkhead to the ship’s CIC.

All across the ship, men and Rexxors fought, but the sailors had not been prepared for the absolute carnage. It had been punctuated by occasional stabs from the wounded Grazhdanin, and the absolute chaos wracking the ship had devolved its combat capabilities to a fraction of what the ship should have been capable of.

His hunters moved in from the intersection behind him and bullets bounced off their metal armor. Their back mounted gatling guns opened fire as a heavy exchange of bullets was had. Heeler had not modified the weapons for ship combat safety and the armor-piercing rounds punched through the metal walls and ricocheted with wild abandon through the area with lethal results.

A round somehow flung itself back at Heeler, smashing into his carapace. The ricochet left a small crack in his shell, and nanites flowed across to repair the damage as he continued forward.

The last remaining guards outside the sealed citadel perished, and he discarded his now ruined shield to slide a clitter across the metal door.

He did not need explosives or a laser torch to cut through. Instead, a wave of nanites shed themselves from him and rolled up his clitter like a wave of water to spread out on the metal frame. For a moment, nothing happened.

A dozen nestlings fell in behind him along with his two hunters, clawing at each other and growling with fury and hunger.

Quietly, the door disintegrated, and Heeler enjoyed the shocked looks of the room’s inhabitants. His hounds flooded into the room in a frenzy, but Heeler moved with more purpose towards the ship’s Captain. The terrified man raised a pistol and fired with no effect.

As he severed the man’s head, he realized his mistake. The Captain was not the prize. On a raised platform behind the control center, a man in an even more ornate uniform was shouting and directing men to fight back.

Heeler growled and moved forward.