Progeny (The Progenitor Trilogy, Book Three) (2 page)

              ‘Ma’am,’ Blackman replied and then began yelling into his comm. for a medical team.  He turned to Chen, looking apprehensively at the spreading bloodstain on her upper arm.  ‘You okay, Admiral?’

              ‘I’ll live,’ she replied grimly, as the throbbing ache in her arm grew.  ‘Thank you Commander.  We have a battle to win.’ She cast a disgusted look at Haldane’s prostrate form and added.  ‘Now get this piece of shit off my bridge.’

              Reynaud’s mind screamed in agony.  He was being burned alive.  The pain!  He had never felt such torture! He writhed in torment as the radiation washed through him.  The ship convulsed around him like an animal thrown into a scalding lake.  He could feel the pain of the others as their minds were snuffed out, vaporised in an instant as they became pure energy.  He couldn’t control the ship as it writhed. He couldn’t bear the pain.  He couldn’t think. He couldn’t act.  Couldn’t...  He was trapped within this dying thing, imprisoned within this crystalline shell which, even now, shuddered and died.  His violated body, now little more than a machine encased skull and spinal column would be entombed within it, for without the ship’s systems to keep him alive he would surely die.

              As the ship’s skin faded to a deathly black, he lost all contact with the dominating will of the Shaper consciousness, and the realisation of what had happened to him flooded back. His humanity had been stripped from him, his body had been mutilated and destroyed, his mind had been enslaved.  He would never set eyes on the world again, never touch, never feel the warmth or the love of another.  All his dreams and hopes had been snatched from him.  His life, what remained of it, would end here - trapped in this hulk. He tried to cry out in anguish, but his throat was filled with machines and he could not weep for he no longer possessed eyes with which to do so, the sockets having been crammed with invasive tendrils.

              The ship was dead now.  He couldn’t see. He couldn’t hear. He couldn’t taste or smell or speak.  He was truly alone and trapped within this alien tomb.  A god no longer, he waited fearfully for the end to come.

Sitting shakily back in her command chair, Chen assured her shocked bridge crew that she was not seriously harmed, and then she quickly took stock of the situation.  The formation of Shaper vessels had taken the brunt of the bombardment.  Where before there had been a massive arrowhead formation of over thirty alien vessels, there was now nothing except for a rapidly expanding shell of radiation and fragments of spinning debris.  The trailing Shaper ships had suffered heavily also.  Having been fried by the sudden burst of radiation, many were now drifting out of control, dead in space, their blackened hulls contorted as if they were living things that had died in great pain.  The survivors were peeling away. Wounded things, they were attempting to spread out to avoid a second attack. Several disappeared back into hyperspace to lick their wounds. The renegade human ships on the other hand - being further back - had escaped the worst, though the blast had collapsed the shields of the majority of vessels and had overloaded their sensors and targeting systems.  Still, they powered forwards towards the waiting loyalist fleet.  The
Germanicus
and its group led the charge, with the
Nimitz
and
Hector
groups in flanking position and the
Marathon
bringing up the rear.  Chen would meet them head on.  Quickly, she gave out orders.  She had to seize the moment.

‘All ships, this is Admiral Chen,’ she announced. ‘Launch all available bomber wings and as many escort fighters as you can get off the decks.  Tac. missile frigates are to begin bombardment of the advancing ships.  Ships without shields are priority targets.  All friendly ships are to remain in formation and engage the enemy at optimal firing range.’

A steady stream of bombers and fighters began to emerge from the forward launch catapults of the loyalist carriers as the missile frigates opened fire on the leading enemy ships with a barrage of depleted uranium slugs.  The long, kinetic rounds were useless against shielded vessels, but they were devastating when used against exposed hulls.  The leading destroyer of the renegade fleet, the
Nile,
took the worst of the initial volley.  In vain, its defensive turrets attempted to intercept the inbound warheads, destroying a couple, but the remainder slammed home into the vessel’s superstructure, decapitating the ship and annihilating the bridge section at a stroke.  As the vessel lost control and began to roll forward, a second volley struck the forward gun decks, exploding the energy capacitors that fed the forward batteries and breaking the ship in two.

With the
Nile
out of action, the missile frigates switched targets to another destroyer shielding the
Germanicus
- the
Crecy.
Meanwhile, the loyalist bomber and fighter squadrons had begun their attack run, the tiny craft initiating a looping course that would enable them to dive onto their targets whilst keeping out of the line of fire between the capital ships.  They now climbed above the two fleets as depleted uranium rounds from the missile frigates under Chen’s command sped below them and pummelled the enemy ships.

The renegade fleet was within a hundred kilometres now and the
Nimitz
and
Hector
groups were breaking away and attempting to flank her ships.  Chen checked her tactical display and noted that the Shaper ships were beginning to rally and regroup.  She ordered the Nemesis class ships that had launched the opening AM barrage and which were now out of ammunition to withdraw from the field before they were attacked in return.  She didn’t have a lot of time.

The
Crecy
was going down under the barrage from Chen’s missile frigates. Her bow section and forward gun decks had been smashed and her superstructure had taken a terrible pounding. She began to slew to one side as another volley of kinetic rounds struck her and began to break her apart.  Admiral Cox’s ship, the
Germanicus
, was now exposed.

‘Gunnery control,’ Chen ordered. ‘Target the
Germanicus
and fire the Arkari cannon on my command.  Helm, adjust our aim.’

‘Sir,’ replied Goldstein and the ship swung fractionally. Chen’s HUD showed that her vessel was now tracking the advancing enemy carrier.  Wait till you get a load of this, you bastard, Chen thought to herself and then barked: ‘Fire!’

The Arkari spatial distortion cannon that had replaced the
Churchill’s
main gun spat a stream of hyper-dimensional death at the advancing enemy carrier.  It struck the
Germanicus’s
bows dead centre and collapsed them like wet paper, instantly blunting and shattering the wedge shaped nose of the craft.  The impact travelled on through the vessel’s internal hangar bays, twisting the internal structure of the ship, breaking apart ammunition magazines and fuel supplies and crushing the fully fuelled and armed craft waiting on her bow catapults.  A vast ripple travelled along the length of the two kilometre long warship in an instant, ripping off armoured hull plates, shattering view ports and tearing open the hull in a hundred different places.

The creature on the bridge of the
Germanicus
that had once been Admiral Cox roared in surprise and alarm.  It felt the deck beneath it buck violently from the impact, felt the disorientating backwash from the weapon and then the awful shudder as the ship began to come apart beneath its feet.  Through the bridge windows it saw the skin of the warship rip open along its length like a great blade had been thrust into the
Germanicus’
guts to eviscerate her.  A dozen alarms began to sound as the impact reached the bridge and instantly shattered the broad windows that Cox had been staring out of.  A howling wind dragged him out of his command chair.  His arms flailed, his hands seeking purchase on anything as the others on the bridge around him were similarly sucked towards the waiting vacuum in a howl of venting atmosphere.

As his feet flew through the shattered window into freezing darkness, Cox’s right hand caught the broken edge of the armoured pane.  For a second he held on, before the emergency shutters detected the sudden decompression and slammed down upon his hand, severing it above the wrist.

Cox howled as he tumbled free of the ship, trailing a stream of blood from his shattered arm.  He screamed Chen’s name in rage, but no sound came from his mouth in the vacuum.  The creature inside him immediately attempted to filter out all neural messages from the pain receptors across his body as the sudden exposure to cold, hard vacuum began to wreak havoc with the body of the fragile human being it had chosen to inhabit, but the Shaper creature was overloaded with sensory data - sensations that it found new and fascinating.  It knew now what it felt like to die, how it felt to feel the life being ripped from a fragile, biological body.  Now it knew true pain.  Pain like it had never known.  Cox’s blood began to boil in his veins. His lungs burst. His bowels evacuated.  The Shaper creature inside him was transfixed by this new experience for a moment.

Almost too late, the Shaper creature tried to regain control of Cox’s broken body as it tumbled away from the dying carrier in a cloud of debris and twitching once-human forms.  The
Germanicus
was breaking apart below him as kinetic rounds hammered the dying vessel.  The Shaper creature leapt into action, using the nano-filaments that it had spread throughout Cox’s body to repair the most critical damage: shoring up rupturing organs, sealing punctured arteries and siphoning off pressure.  Below him, great plumes of plasma had begun to vent from the
Germanicus’s
port side as the engines began to disintegrate, the brilliant blue of the eruptions contrasting with the livid orange of the fires that consumed the vessel, fed by the oxygen rich atmosphere within.

All around, the battle raged.  Ships fought and died. Cox looked upwards and saw a great squadron of loyalist torpedo bombers dive onto the renegade fleet, whereupon they unleashed a hail of deadly missiles onto their exposed and unshielded decks.

The Shaper creature cried out to its fellows for rescue.  Through its remaining working eye it could see other struggling figures all around it.  It had stopped the bleeding, for now, but it would repair this vessel in time, even though it could manage perfectly well without all these extraneous organs and tissues.  The others would come for it soon enough.

The two fleets were approaching optimum firing rage.  Ships on both sides began to open up with energy beam weapons, criss-crossing the void between the two fleets with brilliant spears of light.

The
Germanicus
shuddered and exploded.

There was a ragged cheer from the
Churchill’s
bridge crew as the
Germanicus
went down.  Chen felt a grim satisfaction as the carrier blew itself apart, taking Cox with it, she assumed.  The
Germanicus’s
group was been taken apart by the concentrated fire of her entire fleet. The considerable amount of defensive laser fire being thrown up by the unshielded enemy warships had not saved them from the hail of warheads that had rained down on them from her torpedo bomber squadrons nor from the barrage of missiles, particle beam and plasma fire from the massed loyalist warships that finished them off.  A couple of the trailing frigates, the
Boadicea
and the
Demosthenes
had escaped the worst and now attempted to come about and jump away.  The first, the
Boadicea
, was first disabled by a wing of Azrael bombers before a kill-shot from the
Nelson’s
plasma cannon took out the vessel’s power-plant just as she tried to jump.  The resulting hyper-spatial collapse ripped the
Boadicea
apart and temporarily disabled her sister ship’s jump drive long enough for a barrage from the loyalist destroyers to collapse the
Demosthenes’
wavering aft shields before a volley from the missile frigates impacted her engine block and detonated her reactor.

The
Germanicus’
group had been destroyed in short order, but now a vast, spreading cloud of broken ships and scattered debris was drifting towards Chen’s ships. Whilst she had been busy destroying Cox’s command ship and its escorts, the
Nimitz
and
Hector
groups had assumed stand-off attack positions to either side of the loyalist fleet and were beginning to launch fighters and bombers, whilst the
Marathon
group had halted.  Chen had to act quickly lest her ships be surrounded and their early success squandered.  Meanwhile, the surviving half dozen Shaper ships were beginning to form up into a claw-shaped formation centred around one of the surviving larger vessels a thousand kilometres away.  It wasn’t over yet.

Chen’s ships began to fire on the approaching debris, shattering the chunks of dismembered warships into more manageable pieces.  She ordered her formations to spread out to allow the debris cloud to pass between ships, but even so, there were a number of glancing impacts on the hulls of the assembled vessels causing minor damage to external systems and armour plating.

Chen considered her next move.  Cox had split his forces, presumably with the intention of getting her to do the same in response to make it easier for the more powerful Shaper vessels to destroy her fleet.  She wasn’t going to take the bait.  Cox was gone and his forces were scattered.  She would take them apart piecemeal before they could regroup.

‘Ensign Andrews, send a message to all ships,’ she ordered.  ‘Commence attack on the
Hector
and its group.  All bombers are to return to base and re-arm, whilst fighters are to regroup to our rear to cover our advance against bomber strikes from the
Nimitz
.’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘Helm, bring us about to engage the
Hector
, ahead full and take us out of this debris field.  Gunnery control, prepare to fire once we’re in range.’