Author's Preface
Today I saw the most magnificent thing: a furless monkey hitting a plasma-jet engine with a wrench for minutes, and after some time, the engine actually started working again.
— Chief Engineer Cogacstal, after an exchange program aboard a Human battleship
They have legends, fables of a world where their machines are possessed by spirits. After a year on their ships, I am convinced the fables are true. Once, a tech only looked angrily at the fusion core, and it restarted by itself.
— High Maintainer Frulup, on Human engineering
We boarded the vessel. The crew was long dead. A magnificent beast. An old Human battleship. The original kind. With meters of steel as armor.
The captain thought he had found his new flagship. No one would dare to stand in our way; we would be the most feared pirates in the sector.
It killed us, one by one. A hatch beheading our chief engineer. An elevator sucking the air out of its car, suffocating our captain. And dozens more small incidents.
I cried, begged it to let me live. And it did. The ship spoke to me, said I had treated it with the respect it deserved.
— Interview with the last surviving member of the Nicks Nebular Pirates
Never underestimate your enemy. Or they will bring the dildo of consequences unlubed.
This piece of wisdom from his Human training officers during Fruug’s course on Human tactics had been cryptic back then. But it had become one of the maxims Fruug hinged his planning on.
That’s why the Taishon had been on red alert for three days now.
The Batract fleet had proceeded on its way toward Burrow. In Transit.
After stopping for days outside the solar system, they were on the march again.
Burrow’s defense fleets were positioned inside the system’s large asteroid belt, between Burrow, the fourth planet, and Lurkan, the fifth planet of the system.
This was a natural position because behind Lurkan lay another asteroid belt. A natural barrier for any force trying to transit into the inner system.
Or so they thought.
Inside his holographic bridge, he was almost blinded by the outer belt flaring up in white light before the automated sensors dimmed the projections.
Before he could even ask what had happened, the point-defense guns began firing.
Ships materialized inside the inner belt in massive detonations of light and dust. Gravimetric shear waves, strong enough to shake the metal giant Fruug had thought was as stable as a mountain.
“Report!”
He had to tighten his grip to not get thrown out of his chair.
Lieutenant Ling, who had been thrown out of her chair, climbed back into it, checking the sensors. Fruug flinched at the sight and smell of her blood pouring from an ugly gash on her head.
Like many of the crew, the lieutenant had loosened her harness and was out of her spacesuit, as Fruug had allowed atmosphere on the ship even under red alert to keep morale up.
“Ships transiting through the outer belt directly into the inner belt. Automated defenses correctly predicted the Transit points from the bubbles’ magnetic signatures and opened fire.”
Transited through the belt?
That was impossible. The fragments of the outer belt were too large; they would destabilize the Transit bubble and rip the ships apart. This was one of the fundamental laws of FTL that not even the Humans could break.
As the dust and static around the ship cleared, Fruug finally got a visual overview of the situation.
Ships were still transiting in, with devastating effect on the waiting defense fleets.
Fruug’s tail slipped between his legs as he watched a wing of five missile cruisers get ripped apart by the gravitational tides of a Batract ship’s Transit. It was many times larger than any Human ship or any previously known Batract ship.
“Zoom in on that ship, Lieutenant.”
The view changed, and Fruug’s tail tucked in closer. The enemy monster ships were made from their cruisers grown together into a… Fruug didn’t have the word to describe it. Franken tree, yes, that’s what Humans called it.
“Forward this to the CIC. Get search and rescue out there; maybe someone survived. Tactical, get me an overview of how many ships of that class are out there, and—”
The ship shook even harder than before; for a few seconds, the gravity on the bridge reversed. Luckily, now everyone was fully strapped into their seats. One of the five-kilometer-long monsters appeared right in front of the Taishon . The AR overlay read a distance of 800 meters.
The Taishon was lucky she was large enough to withstand the gravitational shear that reduced any matter in front of a Transit channel to subatomic particles.
The Lasgo wasn’t.
The fur on Fruug’s neck rose as he watched half of his screening ship get torn apart into glowing nothingness.
“Tactical!”
“Yes, Sir. Firing.”
It was the first time the Taishon had fired her main guns in anger. It was also the first time anyone had fired three Welsh Princesses at the same time, practically in the face of an enemy warship.
One second, Fruug fought the urge to vomit at the sight of the yellow veins pulsating on the ship up close; the next, its whole front popped like a pimple on a teenage Shraphen’s snout.
The yellow, slimy spray and debris hid the rest of the ship, and the bridge crew began to cheer before one of the surviving googly eyes showed them the reality. The shot had only destroyed the front of the ship. Most of the monster was still active, firing meter-thick plasma lances at the surviving defenders.
“Void Leader Fruug, Russo here. That thing in front of us is decimating our fleet. Get rid of it.”
Russo’s call only made Fruug angrier.
First, that thing had killed his comrades; then it didn’t even have the decency to die. And what was the admiral thinking, that they were playing catch-your-tail here on the bridge?
“Working on it, Admiral.”
Through the open line to the CIC, he heard the fleet sensor officer’s voice: “Several hundred new Transit events.”
By the Great Hunter, don’t let them be such monsters.
Russo had closed the line without any further remark.
Two guns were reloaded; the last would take another second.
The rounds were changed from FTL-capable Welsh Princesses to osmium-shell protomatter charges.
Good choice.
“Staggered fire until we rip its ass out. Navigation, bring us in.”
Labrex turned, his ears flat.
“Sir?”
Baring his teeth at the ship outside his hull, Fruug only growled.
“If you want to kill a monster, sometimes you have to cut your way to its heart.”
The first osmium round detonated inside the Batract ship’s open wound. Protomatter dissolved thousands of cubic meters into nothingness, and the Taishon slowly began to enter the monster.
The googly-eye overview showed the first hundreds of meters dying off. Plasma and particle turrets stopped firing, and the defense fleet could slowly begin to reorganize.
Not your job, Fruug. Staging the defense is Russo’s job; you just kill what’s in front of you.
“Tactical, change PDG to wet thermite.”
Wet, or oxygenated, thermite rounds were the ASN’s answer to biological ships. Burning at ridiculous temperatures, the fire split the hydrogen and oxygen from the biomatter tissue, feeding itself.
Even without the acknowledgment from the tactical station, the impact was easy to spot. The Taishon now cut like a flaming sword through the Batract superbattleship.
“Sir, we’ve gathered some data about the ship. It seems to be a Batract adaptation to Human technologies and tactics.”
Void Hunter Krunix’s tail between his legs told Fruug everything he needed to know: the secondary sensor officer was scared of what he had found.
“Explain. In two sentences.”
“The superships are built from thousands of smaller ones, and the front is almost all spongy biomatter. Our main guns’ kinetic impact is massively reduced. Like trying to nail down water.”
“That was three, but thank you, Void Hunter.”
The Batract did learn. They were slow to adapt, almost sluggish in battle, and relied heavily on auxiliary forces and their own mass. But they learned. And they had the numbers to make every change count.
The Taishon ’s shields were holding, massive as they were. A fusion reactor as powerful as the Argos ’ main reactor powered the magnetic bubble that protected the ship from polarized laser fire and plasma charges.
But watching the strength drop, slowly, was still concerning.
“Engineering, why are we losing shields?”
The Human lieutenant at the station, already in a full combat spacesuit, shrugged with the cartoonishly exasperated movements Belt-born Humans used.
“The Batract have severely upgraded their plasma charges; they’re eating through the field’s charge. We can adapt, but to do so we need to reduce the plasma charge inside the shields.”
Nuk shields held a dense plasma between two magnetic layers, reducing the effectiveness of incoming laser fire.
The Batract seemed to have dropped lasers from their offensive weapons completely for the moment.
“Make it so.”
Without his XO on the bridge, he had to focus on multiple things at once. The Taishon was the first ship with a secondary bridge, located away from the traditional command center, to ensure command if the main bridge was taken out.
The holographic bridge was a nice touch, and it gave him an exceptional overview of the battle, but there was too much going on for one person to process everything. A glance at the tactical overview showed Fruug where the plasma fire was coming from.
The several hundred signatures he had heard the fleet sensor officer report were the typical Batract corvettes.
The tactical overview also showed that command had chosen a name for the monster ships: Leviathan.
Did the Humans know that Lev’athani was a mystical sea monster in Shraphen mythology?
“Tactical?”
“Launching combat drones.”
Hundreds of drones launched from the ship’s aft launchers, and a small icon blinked: the ship’s fabricators had just started producing more drones.
Only Humans can come up with the idea of adding fabricators to their battleships.
Fruug shook his head.
Something large detonated in front of the ship. The Taishon had slashed her way halfway through the Leviathan and was almost completely engulfed by it, and her constantly firing spinal guns had now hit something vital.
The back of the Leviathan burst as the osmium shells hit metal hull plating for the first time in the engagement, and the slightly glowing yellow veins that surrounded the Taishon died instantly.
“Critical hit, Sir. Googly eyes show the back half is completely destroyed. Batract screening ships are retreating.”
The cheer on the bridge was muffled, as everyone was now back in their suits. Fruug couldn’t help but wag his tail.
One down…
“Good job, Void Leader. New order: kill the rest of them.”
A glance at the tactical overview painted a picture of Fruug’s task: 33 Leviathans had entered the system
Admiral Russo’s voice sounded stressed. Fruug could understand that. He was already almost overwhelmed fighting one Leviathan and its newly arrived screens; what must it be like to lead a system-wide battle?
—————
His head still hurt from the initial gravimetric shear wave. Like so many others, Russo had folded his helmet back after days of waiting, and just as he was about to get something to drink, the wave hit. He was launched across the CIC into a steel beam and almost lost consciousness.
Ever since then, he had had to fight not only a headache but also two medics who wanted to drag him into the medbay.
Still, he had reason to smile. Fruug, the Shraphen maniac, had used the Taishon like a spear and pushed her through the Leviathan. The fact that the Batract battleships were vulnerable from behind was vital information, and it went out on all combat channels.
“Commodore Díaz reports the minefield will be active in three minutes, Sir.”
Russo waved his hand in acknowledgment; he had no time to waste on protocol. The battle had started horribly and was only slowly turning.
“Intelligence, any ideas yet how they fucked us up so badly?”
The Batract had acted unusually aggressively and offensively, and Russo wanted to know how they had managed to transit through the belt.
“Initial suspicions seem to be confirmed, Sir. The Leviathans’ Transit fields were uncharacteristically large, even for ships this big. They acted like a snowplow and cleared a path for the smaller corvettes to transit through the belt.”
“Tell Díaz to mine those areas first.”
Russo made a note to investigate this method of attack. They needed a defense against it, and they needed to learn how to use it themselves.
The plasma-charge impacts had stopped. They were the only weapon the Batract had at this point that could harm the Taishon , and Russo breathed a sigh of relief. Not that he feared the obvious danger to himself and his staff aboard the battleship, but after the horrible losses they had taken in the first seconds of the battle, it was good to see the ship worked better than intended.
“Planetary and orbital guns repositioned, Sir. Ready to fire.”
Finally… Took them long enough.
A glance at the clock proved him wrong; the whole battle had only lasted nine minutes so far.
Felt like days.
His vision blurred a bit as he quickly turned to look at the fleet tactical officer.
“Fire at will. Coordinate with the squadron commanders. We need to close the gap in Section 24.”
There, a Leviathan had reduced the stationed ships from 130 to only 6. Simply by exiting Transit and grinding them to dust with the gravimetric shear.
Of their almost 7,000 ships in the system, the Batract had concentrated 400 in this small sector alone.
“Aye, Sir. Permission to use Nixtred Frames?”
Using them now, while they were disorganized, would lower their effectiveness, but it could give the surviving fleet time to breathe.
Russo watched the status screen for a second. The planetary and orbital guns had just destroyed 250 cruisers in their opening salvo. He shook his head.
“No. Order the fleets to retreat to fallback position one, and focus on maintaining spinal-gun fire ”
Díaz’s mines would be active in less than a minute; then the trap would be closed, and it would be time for cleanup.
“But prepare firing solutions for the belt launchers.”
Falling back would pull the invading force out of the belt. Then the thousands of frame launchers would be behind the Leviathans. The perfect moment to introduce them to his newest weapons.
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