Chapter 2: Kicking the Nest

Vos came to in his seat, shaking off a headache. He opened his eyes to see a bright cloud of colorful gas spreading around the ship, creating a miniature nebula in front of the bridge windows. It was the residue of the interstellar medium that had been captured inside the superlight manifold prior to the jump, having had its properties altered by its interactions with extra-dimensional space. It was as beautiful as it was mysterious.

He brought up a few external camera views as the rest of the bridge crew were coming around, checking in on the battlegroup. The other three carriers were righting themselves, their flight computers bringing them back into formation, jets of blue flame erupting from the thrusters along their grey hulls. He never got used to their size. They looked like a pod of mechanical whales, the light of an alien star reflecting off their armor plating. Scratch that – two stars. Xi Pegasi was a binary system.

Support ships swarmed them, similarly drifting back into a tight formation. The Doloto-class torpedo frigates were already preparing to unleash their payloads, the square hatches that ran along their hulls between their chisel-shaped prows and their elevated bridge windows starting to flip open.

Slightly behind and above the Rorke was the UNN Mars, a veritable behemoth of a vessel. Battleships were 350 meters long, heavily armored, and equipped with the most powerful ship-mounted weapons humanity had ever created. The craft was shaped like a long spear tip, its massive engine cones situated at the rear, its raised bridge placed just ahead of them for optimal visibility. Its hull was sleek, streamlined, its black coating and harsh angles designed to make it as stealthy as a ship of that size could reasonably be. As well as a staggering 24 torpedo tubes, 24 missile bays, and 20 railguns, it was the only class of ship that could house a super-railgun. These were magnetic accelerators of immense proportions, as large as some of the smaller vessels in the fleet at 55 meters. There were two such turrets mounted on the port and starboard sides of the flat hull, their design hearkening back to the warship turrets of old.

Even those weren’t the most destructive weapons in its arsenal, however. The battleship was split down the middle, creating an opening that ran down more than half its length. It was lined with magnetic rails, and at its mouth was a rotating cylinder, a mechanism that worked like a giant revolver to load projectiles the length of a semi-trailer into the 200-meter barrel. That weapon could eradicate a hive ship in a single shot and even render a planet uninhabitable with sustained fire. That might be Kerguela’s fate if they failed in their mission.

The three Valbaran carriers were off to the starboard, their long, thin profiles bristling with weaponry. There were two fleet carriers, most of their segments made up of blocky hangar modules, their fighters clinging to them like limpets. The solitary troop transport would be hanging back with the UNN assault carriers, where it would be protected by a screen of CIWS boats during the battle.

Five and seven-module support ships surrounded them, their camouflaged hulls bathed in pale light. Their torpedo frigates filled a similar role to their UNN counterparts, two of their five segments equipped with torpedo turrets that were presently rising up from their protective compartments. The weapons were more primitive than their Navy equivalents, little more than long tubes mounted atop a flexible arm, but they would get the job done. Inside those launchers were torpedoes supplied by the UNN, after all. The Vengeance was at the center of their flotilla, its own torpedo turrets slowly rotating towards their targets.

There was one more ship in their ragtag fleet, a blend of organic and mechanical parts, like an armor-plated shrimp with its legs tucked beneath its belly. It was floating off the port side, keeping its distance conspicuously, almost as though afraid to approach. The prominent UNN coloration and markings did little to disguise the Constancy’s origins.

Kerguela was hard to make out at this range, its parent gas giant occupying the entire field of view, streaks of vibrant blue and purple clouds swirling around its equator. How breathtaking it must have been to see it from the ground.

Millions of kilometers away, forming a ring around the planet, the rest of the fleet was making the same preparations. There was no way to contact them directly anymore, as even a tight-beam laser would take too long to bridge the vast distances between them, so he would have to trust that they were all following the plan to the letter.

The crew were all awake and alert now, the other ships reporting their status.

“C-charging the superlight drive for a second jump,” the helmsman announced, still a little groggy from the first one. The process could take weeks when a full charge was expended, but at such short range, only a few minutes would be necessary.

“Launch the torpedoes,” Vos said, the comms officer relaying his order to the rest of the battlegroup.

From hundreds of hatches and launch tubes, swarms of projectiles rose on chemical plumes, brief spurts of hydrogen flame propelling them from their bays. Some were the size of missiles, others more akin to ICBMs. The Doloto-class frigates and the battleship were able to field 100-ton, 30-meter torpedoes. When they cleared their ships, they pivoted, shooting out quick bursts of gas as they angled themselves towards their target. Their rocket boosters flared as they shot off into the darkness, a field of new stars glowing beyond the viewport before slowly fading from sight.

The seconds dragged by, turning to minutes, Vos feeling the tension buzzing in the air as he waited for confirmation that they were nearing their targets.

“Estimate impact in three minutes,” the weapons officer announced.

“Start the countdown,” Fielding ordered, the familiar red warning lights bathing the bridge as a klaxon rang out. The crew had been ordered to remain ready, so they could afford to shave off a couple of minutes. As the jump neared, the helmsman counted down the seconds, blackness enveloping the crew as they were once again plucked from reality.

Vos opened his eyes, his bleary vision slowly clearing. In front of the bridge windows, though the spreading cloud of technicolor gas, was a sight to behold. They had jumped in close enough to Kerguela that the brilliant orb occupied his entire field of view, the curve of its horizon rising up before him. Sheets of white cloud drifted through its atmosphere, sweeping over the vast forests that blanketed its surface, their foliage the color of autumn. The suns were behind the fleet, the seas and waterways shimmering under their pale light. At the poles were shining auroras – charged particles from the moon’s parent that had been trapped in its powerful magnetosphere – making the Northern Lights look downright dull in comparison. The ice caps were afire with shifting bands of green and blue, and behind those, the gas giant loomed. Its atmosphere was primarily purple, streaks of lighter blue creating swirling bands, pooling into planet-sized storms.

Hanging above the moon’s atmosphere, directly ahead of the ship, was the Bug station. It was a blend of brown and green hues, silver metal jutting from the organic material haphazardly. It almost looked like a fleshy balloon rising from the forests below on a long string.

The bridge windows dimmed automatically to protect the crew from a series of bright flashes, Vos shielding his eyes reflexively. The torpedoes were impacting the station and the surrounding ships, right on target, blossoms of flame erupting. He keyed in a command on his console, the centermost window switching to a telescopic view, showing the carnage in greater detail. There were more ships than he had anticipated, hundreds of them, a whole fleet of Bug craft hovering around the station. Some of them were the housefly-like fighters he was familiar with, while some were torpedo carriers that resembled armored shrimp, their ordnance clutched in their arms. Others were brand new forms that he had never seen before, their purposes indeterminable.

The missiles with explosive warheads were erupting in proximity to their targets, sending out expanding clouds of lethal shrapnel. With no atmosphere to slow their velocity, they tore through everything in their path like giant nail bombs. Vos watched as a formation of three fighters was caught in a blast, their bulbous, insectoid bodies torn apart as the shards of flying metal penetrated them. They were cast adrift by the force of the impacts, their organic hulls ripped open, their bodily fluids freezing into sparkling clouds of crystals in the vacuum. Armor plating was pocked and shredded, their thrusters petering out, one of them erupting into an explosion of green flame as its fuel tanks were breached.

Many of the larger projectiles were MASTs, Multi-stage, Anti-capital Spread Torpedoes. They carried a payload of tungsten penetrators – long, pointed pieces of solid metal that relied solely on kinetic energy to damage their targets. They were unguided, released in a spreading swarm of hundreds that traveled at upwards of eight kilometers per second, like a lethal shotgun blast that was almost impervious to all known means of point defense.

Several of the MASTs had targeted the station itself, bright points of light flashing as they pocked its armored hull. Though they carried no explosive payload, they conferred enough energy that anything they came into contact with was usually vaporized, turned to boiling gas. The ships that were in the path of these hypervelocity clouds stood no chance of getting clear, the projectiles passing through them as though they weren’t even there. The smaller fighters were obliterated, smashed like bugs on a windshield. The larger, two-hundred-meter frigates tried to fight back, the plasma turrets mounted on their carapaces attempting to shoot down the incoming threats in glowing streams, but it was of little use. One of them caught a tungsten rod midship, a flash of light blinding the camera for a moment, clearing to show two ruined halves spinning away from one another. A blend of organic guts and mechanical parts spewed out into space, Vos making out glimpses of a metallic, skeletal frame inside the wounds.

The same was happening all across the mile-wide face of the station, dozens of ships turned to burning, bleeding husks. The projectiles buried themselves deep into the structure’s surface, digging craters in its hull, doing untold damage through a combination of kinetic energy and spalling. Like an anti-tank round, they would be weaponizing the very armor that protected the station, shattering its thick layers of metal and chitin into yet more projectiles that would tear through its innards.

It was hard to gauge what kind of damage had been done to the station. It was at least two kilometers across and very well-armored. Without knowing the configuration and density of its interior, it was impossible to say what it was going to take to disable it.

The station was still operational, the magnetic rails of what looked like huge plasma turrets turning towards the fleet. They were spaced at seemingly random intervals all over the hull, mounted on flexible gimbals. They flashed bright green, sending bolts of superheated gas shooting towards the incoming ships, but the battlegroup was still far enough away that they could be easily avoided with a little course correction.

The crew were all awake now, the helmsman already burning at Fielding’s command.

“Standard evasive maneuvers,” the captain ordered. “Start moving us closer so we can engage with railguns. Comms officer, tell Lieutenant Baker to prep his squadrons for launch but to wait until we’re in optimal range before scrambling fighters. I want our CIWS screen protecting the carriers.”

“Aye aye,” he replied.

“The assault carriers need to move into formation behind us,” Vos added. “There are more enemy ships than we anticipated. They might get cut off if they try to hang back. We’ll pool our resources, make sure all of the CIWS guns on all of the ships are protecting the fleet. Tell them to prep their countermeasures and burn to us. Standard combat formation.”

Vos watched the nearby ships on his holographic display, a three-dimensional representation of the vessels in their immediate sphere of space, each one tagged with an IFF beacon. The gunboats were forming a wedge at the front of the fleet with the battleship at their head, while the CIWS frigates were spreading out to create a protective bubble around the other ships, the rest of the craft pulling into the defensive perimeter. The four carriers formed a vertical diamond shape, the assault carriers clustering up behind them, the trailing Jarilan ship joining them. Even though the formation was relatively tight by Naval standards, being close in open space still meant being kilometers apart.

The torpedo frigates at the rear were firing off another salvo, the missiles leaving chemical trails as they arced up and over the fleet, heading towards the station in the distance.

Vos opened up a line to the Vengeance, the Ensi’s grizzled visage greeting him.

“Ensi,” he began. “Pull your carriers behind our point defense screen and have your CIWS frigates join the formation. We’re going to need to stay under cover as we move in. Once we’re inside the effective range of those plasma turrets, we’ll break. It’ll make us harder to track.”

“Understood,” she replied, leaning away for a moment to relay the orders to her crew. “The ships under my command will break formation at two-thousand kilometers and pursue targets. Our cruisers are eager to wet their claws.”

He watched on the display as the Ensi’s ships pulled into the sphere to their starboard, still firing off periodic torpedo strikes that raced out ahead of them. All of the ships matched velocity, a ball of death hurtling towards the station, flashes of torpedo strikes preceding them.

“Sensors are picking up movement on the hull of the enemy structure,” one of the officers called out, Vos and Fielding turning their attention to the center bridge window. It zoomed in to show the station’s pocked surface, leaking gas and fluid crystallizing as they vented into space from the numerous wounds that had been inflicted upon it. From the rows of orifices that ringed its bulbous midsection, fighters were crawling their way out, using their six legs to walk along its uneven surface. They resembled bulbous flies, their hulls covered in overlapping plates of armored chitin, their colorful carapaces patterned with dark stripes. At the prow, they had an insect-like head, covered in protruding antennae and dozens of black, shiny eyes. Those were, in fact, organic cameras and sensors that fed data to the pilot inside. As much as they looked like animals, they were machines, albeit with organic components that blurred the lines.

“Same armament as what we’re used to,” Fielding commented. “Twin-linked plasma repeaters mounted beneath the, uh ... head, and a payload of short-range missiles. I guess there’s no point fixing what isn’t broken.”

The fighters pushed off, then their thrusters kicked in, jets of green flame shooting out behind them as they rose into space. Vos kept waiting for the flow of craft to stop, but they just kept coming. Hundreds of them formed long tendrils as they poured out of their hangars, swarming like angry bees. Their formations were so tight that they blotted out the light from the planet behind them, moving as one organism, reaching out towards the incoming ships.

“Okay, that is a lot of interceptors,” Fielding said as he sat up straighter in his chair.

“They’re going to overwhelm our CIWS screen at this rate,” Vos muttered, swiping at one of his displays to measure the distance between the two formations.

“Radar is showing ... near fifteen-hundred contacts,” one of the officers said. He turned to glance back at his captain, a worried frown on his face. “And those are just the fighters. We have a hundred larger craft moving in.”

“Show me,” Fielding said, the view switching again. Some of the craft that had been clinging to the skeletal frames that protruded from the station were unhooking their crab-like legs from the structures, the flexible thrusters that ran along their hulls emitting bursts of flame as they turned about. They were loosing their own torpedoes now, long, off-green tubes with guidance systems made up of organic eyes and feelers. The vessels released them from the spindly limbs beneath their segmented bodies, the missiles shooting out on plumes of methane fire. Warning signs began to appear on Vos’s display, little red triangles tracking the incoming projectiles. It seemed as though the Bugs could give as good as they got.

As the cloud of torpedoes raced towards the formation, the fleet’s innumerable CIWS guns came to life, their rotary barrels spinning in anticipation as their radar systems picked out targets. Rows of hatches along the hulls of the frigates flipped open, exposing their launch tubes, ejecting interceptor missiles into space. They pivoted on their axis, their thrusters shooting out puffs of propellant gas as they reoriented themselves, hanging there for a few brief moments while their lenses focused on their targets. Almost in tandem, hundreds of flashes of blue flame lit up the night, the projectiles burning ahead of the fleet.

After a delay of a minute or two, the two swarms of missiles met, a sparkling wall of explosions filling the viewport. It was kilometers across, flashes of orange, green, and blue flame illuminating the scene like a fireworks display. In an instant, the number of red triangles on Vos’s display halved, but there were still plenty of projectiles heading their way. As they neared, the point-defense guns on the frigates at the head of the pack began to track, swiveling to face the incoming threats. Every ship in the fleet was equipped with the close-in weapons systems, but the dedicated CIWS frigates had twenty apiece. They unloaded streams of twenty-millimeter HE rounds, painting glowing trails of tracers that stood out starkly against the inky backdrop of space, weaving them back and forth as they saturated the path of the torpedoes with fire. They looked like bright sparks, arcing through the night, terminating in glittering flashes as the rounds exploded at their apex. As more of the fleet came into range, more streams of tracer fire joined them, until the glowing points of light seemed to outnumber the stars.

Emerald-tinted explosions followed as they shot down more of the torpedoes, magnetically-contained plasma warheads and methane fuel igniting into mesmerizing billows of flame. More interceptor missiles joined them, streaking away on chemical plumes, shooting off in every direction. The systems were mostly automated, breaks in the trails indicating where the cannons had stopped firing momentarily to avoid hitting their allies, shooting around the other ships in the formation with computer precision.

The Valbaran frigates were joining the party now, their tracer fire and missile countermeasures indistinguishable from those of the UNN ships, as their weapons were based on the same designs. The aliens had brought a weapon of their own making to the table, however. Vos watched as brilliant beams of green light lanced out from smaller turrets that were mounted on some of the ships, their mirror-like lenses focusing beams of light into deadly weapons. They were solid-state lasers of Valbaran manufacture, a technology that humanity had abandoned in favor of railguns and plasma weapons, but which the reptiles had continued to refine. They held on the Bug torpedoes with unwavering precision, heating their components until they either lost control or exploded.

It was chaotic, and undeniably beautiful.

“The first wave of torpedoes has been neutralized,” one of the officers announced, Vos allowing himself a moment of relief. All that ordnance, and not one projectile had found its mark. “Enemy ships are launching more, and their fighters are inbound.”

“They’ll get through the cordon,” Fielding said, narrowing his eyes at the looming tendrils of swarming craft. “No chance of stopping them all.”

“New bearing,” Vos said, the comms officer preparing to relay his orders to the rest of the fleet. “We’ll bring the formation about to forty degrees, keep our distance from those station guns until the Mars can get to a safe angle of attack. We need to deal with those fighters before we move any closer.”

“They’ll saturate our CIWS with that many craft,” Fielding added. “That’s probably the idea – overwhelm any incoming ships with sheer numbers and damn the losses. They don’t even know what we are yet, but they’re fighting like they’re on the ropes.”

“They are,” Vos chuckled. “Whether they know it or not. A cornered animal doesn’t have to know the extent of the danger it faces to lash out.”

“More ships incoming,” the radar operator called out. A view of them came up on the feed, the lobster-like craft pushing off from the station like a shoal of ugly fish, escorted by smaller ships that were arranged in a more recognizable tactical formation. A dozen or so of the larger ones were burning hard at the center of the group, the flexible thrusters that ran down their flanks flaring. They had a wider, fatter profile than most of the other ships, and their limbs were clutching something beneath their bellies protectively. Their forelimbs were longer and sturdier, sporting large, serrated claws.

“No idea what those are,” Fielding muttered. “They kind of look like the light carriers encountered during the battle of Valbara. Those things would get close and use their claws to tear open the hulls of enemy ships.”

“They’re transporting something, and they’re on an intercept course,” Vos added. “Could it be that they’ve already calculated our new heading and are moving to cut us off? Fast little critters. Redirect some of the torpedo frigates to fire on them. Whatever they’re doing, it won’t be good for us.”

“And, the fighters?” Fielding asked.

“Scramble your air wings, Captain.”

Baker sat in the pilot’s seat of his Beewolf, feeling himself sinking into the plush padding through his clinging flight suit. The green glow of instrument panels illuminated the cockpit, the HUD on his full-faced visor displaying information readouts. Above his canopy, he could see the ceiling of the launch tube, which terminated in a pressure door a short distance ahead of his fighter’s pointed nose. It was scarcely wider than his craft’s wingspan.

There were forty such tubes on each carrier, which allowed the craft to launch more than half of their fighter complement in a matter of seconds, depending on what type of aircraft were being used. Right now, there were forty fighters aboard, with a little under half of the hangar space reserved for the dropships and CAS that would be used in the ground assault.

Unfortunately, when you were assigned to a launch tube, all you could do was wait around until your orders came through. He was following the battle as best he could, monitoring the comms channels and watching the ship movements on a window in the top right of his field of view.

“Hey, Scorch,” his wingman chattered in his earpiece. He was out of view, stowed away in an adjacent tube. “Are they gonna tell us to launch, or what? Those Bug fighters are getting a little too close for comfort.”

“Can’t be long now, Charlie,” he replied. “Be ready.”

It was customary for fighter pilots to give each other callsigns, usually with some kind of humorous hidden meaning. Baker had earned the name Scorch when he had failed to retract his radiators during reentry while training at the academy, causing them to melt and overheat his engines. It had taken on a new meaning recently, referring to how he had braved reentry during the battle of Valbara to pursue a hive ship that was descending through the planet’s atmosphere. He and his wingman, Jaeger, had managed to bring it down. His exploits had earned him more than a little acclaim in the fleet, propelling him to the rank of wing commander.

“Those fuckers are gonna overwhelm the CIWS screen if we don’t deal with them soon,” he grumbled.

He tapped at one of his control panels, running a few system checks as he tightened his harness. Jets of propellant gasses spurted from the thrusters that were spaced out along his fighter’s angular hull, the ailerons on his stubby wings and the rudders on his dual tail fins waving up and down. The Beewolf was deadly both in a vacuum and in atmosphere. The vectoring nozzles on his engines flexed, the hatch that protected his twenty-five-millimeter gatling gun flipping open, the rotary cannon spinning. In compartments beneath the craft’s belly was hidden a payload of missiles, and there was a dorsal railgun mounted on a flexible arm that would rise from the hull behind the cockpit to fire on targets independently, fed by a belt of tungsten slugs the size of beer bottles.

All systems showed green, his heart starting to beat faster as he watched the radar contacts near the fleet. Suddenly, a voice crackled on the priority channel, Captain Fielding coming through in his helmet’s earpiece.

“Lieutenant Baker, your orders are to launch all squadrons and intercept the Betelgeusian fighters. Get out there and show our new friends why the Beewolf has a sixty to one kill ratio.”

“Roger that, Captain,” he replied with a grin. He switched channels, addressing all five squadrons under his command. “Chocks away, boys. Form up on your squadron leaders and engage the enemy at will. Watch out for friendly point-defense. It’s going to be a fucking bar fight out there.”

He flipped switches on his consoles, the engines spooling, his HUD clearing to show targeting information. The cockpit around him faded away, his helmet’s visor patching into the innumerable cameras that were mounted all over his fighter, allowing him to see through its fuselage as though it wasn’t even there. Through his unimpeded view, IFF signals popped up, linked to the wireframe profiles of nearby ships. With another button press, the rectangular pressure door ahead of him snapped open, exposing the tube to the vacuum beyond. His fighter slid along its launch rail on a sled that hooked up to its landing gear, flames filling the tunnel behind him as his engines ignited.

In a second, he was in open space, peering over his shoulder to watch the Rorke diminish to the size of a minnow behind him. To his left and right, his squadron of eight was forming up on him, more of the jet-black craft getting their bearings as they raced away from the ship.

Baker scanned his immediate surroundings, seeing the wedge of gunboats at the head of the fleet, the massive battleship leading the way. The CIWS frigates had spread out into a sphere to protect the formation, and the rest of the vessels were hanging back. The sole Jarilan ship was near the assault carriers, and the long, thin Valbaran ships were off to the starboard side of the bubble. He was amused to see Jaeger’s ship among them, giving him a quick salute, even if his friend couldn’t see it.

He gripped the stick in his hand and rolled the craft ninety degrees, pulling it back as he began to turn. The thrusters along the fighter’s belly burned to create resistance as he maneuvered, simulating a banking motion that would usually be impossible in space, the safety features ensuring that he couldn’t exceed ten Gs. He felt the legs of his suit tighten, gripping his calves to prevent blood from rushing to his feet.

His squadron mirrored his movements, leveling out again as he aimed his nose at the incoming Bugs. He couldn’t even see them yet, they merely showed up as a dense cloud of red triangles, more than he could count. They were forming strange tendrils, almost like bees from a vintage cartoon.

As he turned his head, he saw that the four other squadrons had matched his velocity, jets of blue flame spewing from their twin engines as they raced towards the enemy. The fighters from the Samar, Darwin, and Taipei were bringing up the rear, swelling their number to 120. He had never seen so many in one place before.

He opened a channel to the other wing commanders, giving them a customary greeting.

“Scorch here. You boys ready for a knife fight?”

“Always did prefer the twenty-five-mill over missiles,” one of them replied, their callsign appearing on Baker’s HUD. It was Boomerang, hailing from the Darwin. “Much more personal.”

Next came a female voice, her thick accent letting him know who it was before her tag had even popped up.

“About time. We cannot fight a war from inside a tube.”

Meimei was the wing commander of the Taipei’s fighter squadrons, and while Baker didn’t speak a lick of Mandarin, he had heard rumors that her callsign meant little sister. Knowing how callsigns were usually earned, it probably had a completely opposite meaning.

Last to report in was Sheriff from the Samar, his Midwestern accent flooding the channel. He was all business, as usual.

“We’ll take the starboard flank. Those CIWS frigates are going to be firing when the swarm gets closer, so watch your six.”