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Edge Of Karrax System

Phoenix Hawk – Cockpit

The Phoenix Hawk dropped out of Hyperspace and immediately went dark, all external emissions from the vessel either disabled or masked. The new additions to the crew were already proving they knew more about the ship than the Captain and First Officer did. The ship moved silently through the void, beginning preparations for a hunt that, with one wrong move, would cause the predator to become the prey.

“The ship is in silent running mode, Captain. Heat levels are minimal. We are ready to launch the probes on your orders.” Serena said, standing at the starboard side control panel. She was operating the stealth systems and would be the one to switch everything to Battle Mode and operate all the weapons, except the MAG, if the Javarians discovered them. No, when they discovered them. There was no way the Bugs wouldn’t find them once the Lightdrive was activated.

“I have nothing on the passive sensors, Captain. We appear safe to launch the probes.” Niki said from the port side controls. She was monitoring the sensors and would be searching for Ash and any other survivors from the miners and mercenaries within the system.

“EWAR Suite is on standby, Captain,” Morgan said. She was behind Niki on the back wall of the cockpit, ready to operate everything else that Niki usually did, allowing her to focus on the search. No one knew if the electronic warfare capabilities of the Phoenix Hawk would even work on the Bioships, but she would try. 

They had considered putting her in one of the pirate corvettes, but after Chris looked them over, she declared them unsuitable without a major overhaul. Tanya’s fighter had limited hyperdrive capabilities, so she was waiting on her ship and was ready to launch if needed. Greg was on standby in his Corvette. Even though it had sustained some damage during its first battle in this system, it was still capable of escaping on its own as well.

“Engineering ready, Captain,” Chris said, seated behind Serena. She would be cycling power to whatever systems the ship needed at the time, increasing overall efficiency and maximizing the ship’s offensive and defensive capabilities.

“Very good. Launch the probes.” John said, and increased output to the thrusters slightly, sending the ship parallel to the system’s star. When the probes went to lightspeed, the bugs might be able to detect their signature and come here to investigate. He didn’t want to be anywhere near here if they did. 

Yesterday, it was a painfully fast race to get off the station and make it to Karrax. Now, they had to move painfully slowly, otherwise they would be swarmed by enemies. Enemies that John had yet to face. He had talked with Greg and reviewed his Corvette’s battle data, but it was all theoretical to John until he met them in battle. 

The hatches on top of the Phoenix Hawk opened up, and the probes were ejected. After five long minutes of slowly burning away from them, they all activated and headed off to different areas of the system to begin their mapping. They would employ active sensors, then transmitting their data to the ship, which should allow the Phoenix Hawk to remain hidden until they had acquired their target.

More time passed, and the tension in the cockpit rose with each passing minute. Then Niki started to receive telemetry from the probes. “Data coming in, Sir. Putting it up on your port display.” 

John glanced over to his side monitor, a curse escaping his lips.

It was red. A lot of red. 

“We are seeing close to 100 000 contacts, Captain, and the number is still rising,” Niki added, her fingers flicking through the data as fast as she could manage. “I… I don’t see any friendly IFF readings yet.”

“Keep at it,” John said, drumming his fingers on his armrest. He opened a communications Channel to Greg’s ship. 

“What can I do for you, Hoss?” 

“How long would it take for your ship to make it back to Parrax?” John asked.

“She is a bit slow; it would be about fourteen hours, give or take five minutes.” He replied. 

John wanted to send Katrina an accurate count of the enemy’s numbers, but unless they stayed in the system for five hours, the Phoenix Hawk could return to Parrax before Greg’s ship could. They had no other way of sending long-range communications; only space stations and planets had the space for the Hyperpulse communications arrays that could send information to the next system in less than an hour. The First Ring of the Parrax 3 station was built around one such array. 

He was really starting to learn a lot of things about this world. He had no clue how they worked, but he knew they existed. When he thought about it, it wasn’t that much different than when he was back on Earth. Who really knew how microwaves worked, or how your cell phone did everything it did? Not him, that was for sure.

“Get ready to depart. Once Niki has a reasonably accurate count of the number of enemies, you will launch and return to Parrax. Report to Katrina with this information and inform her that we are still searching for Ash. Hopefully, we will beat you back, but just in case we are delayed, they need this information. Understood?”

“Yes, Captain.”

John ended the call. Ending the distraction. He just wanted to be doing something, anything. 

“Any movement from the Javarians yet?”

“Nothing significant, Captain. They are mostly clustered near the star, with only a few smaller groups moving around the middle and outer parts of the system.” Niki replied.

“Keep searching. Once the numbers have plateaued, send the data to Greg. We can at least give Parrax and the empire a heads up.” He said, then went silent again. Interrupting her more would slow down their search.

Where are you, Ash?  

Five Hours Later

Greg had departed shortly after their discussion earlier, his ship winking out of existence as his Hyperdrive activated. After that, it was just a matter of waiting as the probes continued to provide data. The bugs had not moved against the Phoenix Hawk or the probes yet, which was making him more nervous than confident.

Are we actually invisible? Or do they know we are here and just don’t care?

He didn’t know the answer. He didn’t kno-

“Captain! I have three contacts that are not Javarian!” Niki said, breaking the silence in the room. “They are weak, but when I moved the probes around, I got a higher resolution reading.” 

“Great work, Niki! Put them through to my screen.” He said, unable to mask his relief that they had found something. 

He looked over at the screen, the display showing two contacts in the middle belt, nearby each other and another in the outer belt on the far side of the system. They were weak power sources, but they could be powered down ships. He refused to believe they were anything else.

“Unless there are any objections, we are going in at full power. Morgan, be ready to recover whatever is there. Niki, send the probes to the closest contact and recover them when we arrive.” He said, angling the ship towards the closer pair of contacts. When no one offered an objection, he ordered the stealth system to be disengaged and the ship brought to battle mode. He then activated the lightdrive, cannonballing the Phoenix Hawk towards what would be its roughest fight yet.

The first contact turned out to be no more than the wreckage of a mercenary fighter; the hull was mostly intact, but the cockpit was melted where the manablast had broken through its shields. However, the second contact was a shutdown mercenary fighter, with the pilot still alive. When he had brought the Phoenix Hawk alongside the asteroid it was perched on, he could see someone waving to them from inside its cockpit. It wasn’t Ash, but they still needed to be rescued. He had Morgan tow them in, but in the time it took for her to do that, the Javarians had caught up to the ship.

“Incoming from 090, 002. Approximately 100 Bioships.” Niki called out from her station. “Eta, thirty seconds.”

“Get that ship onboard, Morgan!” He said, unable to move the Phoenix Hawk while she was pulling the unpowered fighter into the hangar. They needed to be moving at a similar relative velocity to safely perform the operation, and if he gunned it now, he would either break the tractor lock or tow the ship behind him like a kite on a string. Actually, it would probably slam into the side of the Phoenix Hawk, killing the pilot. 

“Launching torpedoes,” Serena said, which made John pause for a moment, wondering why she was firing those off now. He found out a few moments later when the Bioships dropped out of lightspeed and into an antimatter explosion that literally shredded over thirty of the fragile vessels before they could maneuver out of the way.

The remaining ships started to rain manablast down on the Phoenix Hawk, causing its shielding to flare, blinding John visually for a moment. Serena wasn’t idle and had opened up with the ship’s full array of weaponry, devastating dozens of bioships in a single volley. 

“They are glass cannon’s Captain. They hit hard, but are physically weak. No shielding, minimal armour. It’s almost like hitting a person with anti-ship weapons.” Serena told him earlier when they were reviewing Greg’s data. Seeing it in person, he had to agree. They had destroyed over half the first wave in six seconds. Still, that concentrated attack had done a number on their shields, already dipping below 70%. They couldn’t afford to be in a slugfest with these guys.

“I have her onboard, Captain. You are free to maneuver.” Morgan called out. He had already slammed the throttle forward by the time she said the word free, moving the ship out of the way of the next volley of manablasts.

“Incoming contacts. 050, 004. Another hundred of them, Captain.” Niki called out again, announcing the arrival of bug reinforcements. “ETA 1 minute!”

“Yeah, I don’t plan on being here.” He said, then rotated the ship on its axis, pointing its bow towards the bioships in pursuit. “Firing MAG Scattershot.”

The shotgun round was devastating to the bugs. With nothing to slow the ball bearings down, they cut through the jellyfish-like ships like they were butter, destroying most of their pursuers who were lined up behind them. Serena finished the remaining ones off with some accurate plasma fire, leaving them clear to move to the final target. 

John punched the throttles, kicking the ship back into lightspeed. He was praying to Tim, to Mags, to all the Gods of DEN that the last contact was the Tengu. It had to be!

C’mon, Ash, hold on! We are coming!

Fifteen Minutes Later 

“Captain, Pebbles is clear,” Morgan called out once Tanya’s fighter cleared the Hangar. 

“Very good,” John replied, slamming the ship sideways hard enough that he could feel it in his spine. The constant changes in direction he was being forced to do were starting to wear down even his more improved body. He couldn’t do anything about that, though; it was either move or die. “Serena, keep scattering shots around to maintain their focus on us. We need to give her time!”

They managed to get close to the final signal; however, it was buried in a dense cluster of asteroids that John couldn’t maneuver the Phoenix Hawk between. Spending over five minutes trying to find a route he could safely enter the cluster ended up costing the crew of the Phoenix Hawk their initiative, and he had to turn and engage the pursuing Bioships. The horde had finally registered them and was beginning to come at them in force.

Tanya came across his comms then, saying to launch her fighter. It had a ventral-mounted magnetic tow hook that was designed to pull small ships, salvage, escape pods and a variety of other things. She couldn’t maneuver with it, but she could go into the cluster and extract whatever it was, pulling it far enough into open space that the Phoenix Hawk could recover it. 

He wasn’t crazy about the plan, but they were out of time, so he ordered her to launch. Now, they needed to provide enough of a distraction to keep the bugs focused on the Phoenix Hawk and not try to go after her.

The problem was that the bugs had such numbers that it was becoming harder and harder to avoid the rain of manablasts that continued to shower the space around his ship. The Javarian ships were so numerous that they were beginning to blot out the sun.

He started to chuckle, then sent the ship in yet another direction. 

“It was said that the Persian archers were so numerous that their arrows would block out the sun. Firing Scattershot!”

“Captain?” Niki asked, sounding concerned that John may have snapped.

“Dienekes, however, undaunted by this prospect, remarked with a laugh.” He continued, cycling his last round of Scattershot into the MAG. Afterwards, he would only have five of the solid slugs left. He then banked the ship again, sending it drifting directly through a line of Bioships, their softer surfaces exploding when the massive Phoenix Hawk collided with them.

Just like the Zombies in High School of the Dead being crushed under that truck. I guess I did manage to get some bug guts on the ship.

“Captain! Are you okay?” Serena asked him.

“Keep firing! Now, where was I? Dienekes said with a laugh. Good, then we will fight in the shade.” He finished the quote, hoping he didn’t misremember it. Not that it mattered. “It is a quote from a battle that occurred a long, long time ago. I will tell you the story sometime, once we rescue Ash and get out of here.” 

The MAG cycled again, and he punched the throttle, putting some distance from the encircling horde. He then juked the ship to port, narrowly avoiding being melted by another wave of manablasts. The antimissile system was useless against the globs of corrosive mana. 

If I only had a nuclear missile or a larger antimatter weapon. Those torpedoes are not massive area-of-effect weapons. We are running out of those, too. Soon, it will just be the plasma phased array emitters remaining. They still have-

He paused, remembering something else from his past.

“Chris, do we have any fuel or anything in engineering we could use to make a large explosion? Ejecting an engine and detonating it, maybe?” He asked, grasping at movie magic from Earth.

“Ahh… not really. The fuel is actually inert when it isn’t superheated within the magnetic confinement. If we ejected an engine, well, you would be down an engine, and it would burn a bit… did you have another idea or something?” She replied, squashing his idea.

Damn it, Gene, your science fiction doesn’t stand up in a science fiction world.

He chuckled again. Maybe he was starting to lose it a little bit.

“No, not really. I was just hoping we could engineer something to take out a large chunk of this swarm. We are running low on options.” He replied, narrowly avoiding the next volley by turning the ship ninety degrees and hammering the throttle again. He wanted to bunch as many of them together as he could to maximize his last scattershot round.

He danced his ship around the battlefield, pushing the Phoenix Hawk to the very limits of its capabilities. Warning lights began to appear as he was constantly exceeding the G-Forces a ship of its size should have been able to withstand without being ripped apart. Chris kept calling out warnings as well, unable to feed any more power into the ship’s hull integrity stabilizer, warning that it was overheating and about to fail.

“Much more of this, Captain, and it will melt. If that happens, we will barely be able to move in a straight line without falling apart!” She warned him.

“A little more. She can handle it.” He said, knowing full well that it couldn’t. This wasn’t a movie. Making one last spin on the ship’s axis, he set the ship to half-throttle, then lined up his shot. The Javarian Bioships, once nearly encircling him in a sphere, were lined up before him. It wasn’t a perfect straight line, but the sphere had become a tighter blob, one with nearly a thousand ships within it.

“Fire everything!” He ordered, punching the ship back to full speed and releasing his Hail Mary, the final scattershot round.

Hundreds of the jellyfish-like ships became riddled with holes, the Phoenix Hawk far enough away to allow the ferrous balls to spread out. Beams of plasma followed close behind them, followed up by the last four torpedoes, devastating the bugs. 

Though the ship did not come out unscathed, as it collided with dozens of manablasts on its reckless charge, causing its shields to flare yet again, the overtaxed system is now down to twelve percent. Some of the globs made it through the shields and coated parts of the Phoenix Hawks armour. It held together, though, and the ship blasted through to the centre of the horde, Serena activating the anti-missile system manually and peppering anything she could see through the chaos. 

The Phoenix Hawk started to shudder violently, the physical bodies of the bioship debris were crashing against the hull, and the inertia dampeners were unable to compensate for the erratic impacts. If John hadn’t been strapped into his chair, he would have been flung against a bulkhead. As it was, he would need to heal himself if he intended to walk anywhere anytime soon. 

God damn it, my back hasn’t been on fire like this forever!

“By the Crystal! How are we still alive?” Serena asked once they shot out the other side. They didn’t destroy them all, but they had managed to corral enough of this wave of Bioships together to turn most of them into a pink and purple mist. 

“Fucking brute force and ignorance, my dear. That and sheer dumb luck.” John replied through gritted teeth, pushing the ship back up to its proverbial redline. He wasn’t planning on maneuvering this time, just putting as much distance as possible from the remaining ships as they tried to regroup.

He needed to buy more time for his defensive systems to cool down.

He needed to buy Tanya more time to pull Ash out of the asteroid cluster.

He needed to buy time, but right now, no one was selling any.

“Captain, the mothership. It is on the move.” Niki said, fear entering her voice for the first time since he rescued her.

Unbidden and unwelcome, Alec’s words slammed into his mind just then. “Sometimes you will be fighting those wars, sometimes others will. In the end, war is the one constant across the omni-verse. Death is inevitable.”

Fuck, Fuck, Fuck.

War is the one constant across the omni-verse. Death is inevitable.

Fuck, Fuck, FUCK!

“Contact Tanya. Tell her… tell her we are aborting the mission.” He said, his hands holding his control yokes in a white-knuckle grip.

Death is inevitable.

FUCK!

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