Chronicles of the Aeons War, page 71
part #3 of The Omniverse Series
Under the precisely-timed and strained commands of each ship’s commander in each combat instance, the El-Ahur Starfleet moved to engage the Zohor. The Node had already summoned reinforcements, and a million more Zohor from across the sector were already appearing, cluttering the sky. The fleets fought, new El-Ahur combat instances appearing every few seconds as more and more Zohor filled the sky.
The ships of CI-1 had reached their damage tolerance limits and began jumping out. They had by then already returned to the battle as CI-2 through CI-55; a matter of minutes into the battle passed again before they had to jump back to Bloom’s Point. Then they had to wait in isolation while the ships of their Starfleet were rebuilt.
The El-Ahur spent these Respite interludes between Combat Instances at rest and at play; though their respective ships were all shown to have survived the battle at the Zohor Command Relay Node, no one could know for sure if they themselves would. Already there were fatalities reported on all ships; everyone knew someone killed in action during one of the combat instances so far. New crew were trained and drilled repeatedly before they ever set foot aboard a new ship, and every one of them knew they were replacing someone’s dead comrade.
Meanwhile the survivors were left to mourn, nurse their wounds and prepare to return to combat with someone new, someone inexperienced standing where someone else should have been while they assisted as their ships were repaired and resupplied for the next Combat Instance jump. They were briefed and trained on what was to come during the next set of manoeuvres they would live through. As always the nights before returning to combat were spent in a celebration that neared Bacchanal. For many of the El-Ahur were desperate to live as much as possible before facing death once again. And in far too many cases, that next Combat Instance was their last.
♦♦♦
When the day came to return to combat in their next instance, the crews of the ships of the fleet assembled at dawn, ready to go back into the Black, back into the war and chaos ahead of them. They had spent weeks and sometimes months preparing for the upcoming seven minutes of their lives. Their duty in battle was to execute their orders and their assignments with precision and perfection. For the battle had to be carefully orchestrated in order to be won. It was a complex set of movements, all done with careful, accurate timing. The whole depended on the individual, and the individual on the whole to survive.
At one point CI-23 of the Scimitar deflected heavy fire directed against the CI-17 of the Caliburn; later, relative to CI-32 of the ‘Burn, they saved CI-5 of the Scimitar from a Zohor missile attack.
One instance of the Tanaka Alina was blasted into a burning, tumbling spin from the theatre of war, vanishing in a burst of light. One point twenty-one seconds later the next instance of the Tanaka returned, taking deadly vengeance on the very Zohor who had struck it previously.
Somewhere between her seventieth and one hundredth instance (After a time it simply became a nuisance to keep track) Marley spared the time to focus her gaze on the Zohor command node. Still there was no sign of the Queen. The Zohor were turning to attack it as well as them and they now found themselves defending against both the Node and the Zohor onslaught
♦♦♦
The minute the Queen’s party breached the hull and boarded the Zohor command relay node they came under attack. But as abruptly as it began it was over, the machines and defensive weapons and systems falling dead with a wave of Allison’s hand. They traveled quickly, moving deeper into the command node. Sweepers came after them and ahead; what the Queen didn’t destroy with a thought her HAM-Unit Macronaut escort cleared away – or held off long enough for Her to notice the annoyance. They continued inward, the Shekhina now simply blowing holes through bulkheads as they progressed toward their goal.
“What are You doing?” the Grandmaster demanded from his Macronaut, as they fought off another onslaught of the node’s defences.
“I’ve been spreading My consciousness throughout the node since before we arrived,” She said, “It’s like groping around in the dark; there’s no intelligence, no awareness here but our own. But there is information. I’ve found their communications systems. There’s hundreds of them across the node, and I’m heading for the nearest one.”
“Yeah? What’s the bad news?” the Grandmaster asked, his familiarity with the Shekhina still shocking to many of the El-Ahur in their unit.
“It’s three hundred meters long and guarded by several thousand sweepers.”
The pause in combat was over. The node’s defensive systems had engineered another attack.
“INCOMING!” Grigori shouted, before a hail of missiles rained down on their position. The Zohor weapons exploded harmlessly against an invisible barrier put there by the Shekhina. Of Course, She had already known the attack was coming, already prepared the shield, all without a second’s thought. The HAM units followed in Her wake as she continued ever inward.
“Why not just beam us there? You can appear anywhere You want with a thought!” Grigori protested as a series of heavily upgraded Sweepers burst from the walls to attack them.
“It’s not beaming, it’s shifting,” The Queen replied angrily, “And we will be shifting there as soon as I’ve got a better feel for the layout of the place! I’ll survive if we come out inside a three-meter thick iridium bulkhead. You and your people will not; you’ll be turned into an organic molecular paste fused into the iridium.”
“Then by all means, feel away, My Queen.” Grigori said
“As you say, Grigori Myrym.” The Queen smirked.
♦♦♦
Multiple instances converged on the Zohor fleets, overwhelming the enemy ships even as more Zohor filled the sky.
“We are now at minus five minutes to Zohor Mass Strike Event One!” Commander Baxter Vincent called from the Tactical Pit. This was their seventy-fifth instance. Commodore Marley Stringfellow turned to the flight deck: “Start countdown to exit jump; all ships of 75-CI synchronize and make ready to jump!”
Zohor Mass Strike Event One was the first of three attempts recorded by the Observation Fleet’s instances to wipe out the El-Ahur Starfleet. This first attempt would be done by sending in an overwhelming fleet of Zohor ships ordered to destroy all Zohor ships currently ringing the node. The Zohor currently in the theatre of war would, when simultaneously detonated, unleash enough destructive force to potentially wipe out all Combat Instances of the El-Ahur Starfleet.
The two hundred and fifty-fifth instance of the El-Ahur attack fleet was the current “senior” instance; as such they had authority to broadcast to all ships. There had been several such messages sent throughout the battle by earlier instances who’d briefly held “senior” status, including CI-77, who’d held it for a record seventeen minutes. Now Marley-255 sent the order for an all-ships broadcast and then made the announcement to all instances of the attack fleet.
“Commodore Marley Stringfellow, Senior Instance Two-Five-Five: All ships synchronize for Mass Strike Event One. Set your escape coordinates and jump in three minutes, seventeen seconds on my Mark...Mark!”
The new Zohor fleet opened fire on the old, even as the El-Ahur instances continued to attack and defend against the still-combatant first wave of the Zohor. As the first wave of Zohor ships were struck by and began to shatter under the sustained attack of their fellows, every instance of every ship in the El-Ahur Starfleet jumped into the Q-field, emerging at their individually designated rendezvous points for repair and refit prior to returning to the fight once more. By Combat Instance Two-Five-Five, the escape manoeuvre was routine; they’d executed it over and over again from Combat Instance Seventy-Five on. The first wave of Zohor ships, as always, exploded uselessly and violently. When the next set of El-Ahur instances began returning to the fight a few moments later it was behind the Zohor’s second wave; instance after instance of El-Ahur ship zeroed in on their enemy and opened fire catching the flying weapons defenceless from behind, effectively wiping them out without sustaining any damage to their own fleet instances. It would be forever recalled as the Miracle Manoeuvre.
But there was little time to celebrate; the victorious instances began taking up defensive positions around the node as the third wave of Zohor ships began to appear in the black around them. Inside the command relay node something exploded; they could see it visibly on any screen focused on the structure they were both defending and preparing to destroy.
“What Hell was that?” a voice echoed from the crew pits.
“Whatever it was,” Commodore Mallory replied, “Let’s hope it was the Queen’s doing.”
There was no more time to think about the node except their mission to defend it. The Zohor were now raining ships down on it and the instances of their fleet.
The number of El-Ahur ships in combat swelled as more instances joined the fight. Jumping from the Q-field back into combat on all sides of the Zohor swarm they opened fire with all weapons. As older instances timed out and jumped back newer instances returned to the fray, already locked onto their targets and firing.
Alarms sounded as the Zohor deployed a swarm of hundreds of thousands of mass drivers around the node. All of them began charging to fire; the El-Ahur had seconds to react, but they’d had years to prepare for this part of the choreography; the Observer Instances had seen it all and thousands of new El-Ahur instances appeared, firing their own hyper-ballistic weapons at the Zohor attackers before vanishing into the Q-field once more. The El-Ahur were practiced veterans of such precision manoeuvres.
But as had been pointed out to Grandmaster Benedict Jack by Heihachi Daniel so long ago...and still so far away to come...sometimes luck events changed the outcome of time-travel combat.
The luck even occurred during Ouroboros Combat Instance Four Hundred and Twenty, when a Zohor spear missile struck the Ouroboros through the starboard ventral section and exploded. Gravity went haywire aboard the ‘Boros and Commodore Marley Stringfellow and several others died. That made Baxter Vincent the next officer in line of the chain of Command. From Tactical Commander to Captain because of a single luck event.
Instance five hundred and sixty of the Ouroboros’ Fleet were the next instance to survive the scrambling effects of the luck event’s chain reaction. They jumped back to Bloom’s point for emergency repairs and updated tactical information: Most of the mass drivers had suffered catastrophic explosion; most, but not all. The shift in reality was rippling back from the observation instances. Only four mass drivers escaped, but four Zohor mass drivers could still deliver plenty of damage. Matters were worse than a mere four mass drivers: nearly a hundred of the Zohor needle ships had managed to escape the chain reaction of explosions that consumed the rest of the swarm. The survivors were already reorienting for a new attack, death-diving into the Command Relay Node.
The War Council met in the Gathering of the Dream as they waited desperately for the time-shift to finish rippling through their Observation Instances fleet. The Observation Instances were the most removed from possible causal backlash. the Combat Instances were in the thick of the event, and suffered the worst when such temporal catastrophes occurred.
They formed a new strategy even as the map and play of the battle was re-formed from the Observation Instance telemetry. The ripple effect was sending a new memory stream through their minds...those who had served as part of the Observation Instance fleets’ minds were scrambled momentarily as new memories formed and absorbed the old. They were disoriented as their minds fought to assimilate new memories that contradicted the old. But it passed. Most of those affected were fortunate enough to only have one set of memories.
The personnel fighting in the Combat Instances weren’t so lucky. Having engaged directly in events as they unfolded previous to the Deviance, having trained for those events multiple times, they were trapped with interwoven memories of success and failure, repeated over and over for every instance experienced by the surviving combatants. Memories and memories of memories overlapped, creating confusion and for some unfortunates, madness.
The next set of Combat Instances returned too late to stop or even minimize the damage done. The Command Relay Node was rubble, broken and adrift. The Zohor fleet were crippled and soon destroyed as instance after angry instance of returning El-Ahur opened fire at their now-listing enemies, destroying the unfeeling, dead machines with an unfettered, impotent rage.
The Ouroboros did not partake, as dearly as Baxter Vincent wanted to. Instead he scoured the wreckage of the Node, looking for signs of life, survivors, of the Queen he had sworn to serve.
“Security Alert!” called Roshenko Aqualina from the Tactical crew pit, “Unidentified object in dorsal section K-23 through K-29; between the inner and outer hulls!”
“Dispatch all available HAM-units from inner and outer access points,” Baxter Vincent said, already calling the tactical data into his vision, “That thing is huge! What the hell is it and how fast can we get it off my ship?”
“There’s no need, Captain Baxter,”
At the sound of Her voice he knew he should have expected it as soon as the Security Alert sounded.
“My Queen,” he said, turning to the Shekhina as She appeared before him on the Ouroboros’ Bridge, “What did you put aboard my ship?”
Beside Her, still in their HAM-units were the Grandmaster and his retinue.
“The key to defeating the Zohor,” She said, “As they used the League of Worlds’ own communication system against them, so too will we now do the same to the Zohor: We’ve recovered a fully functional holographic entanglement transmitter and receiver.”
“All ships stand by to jump back to Bloom’s Point on my command,” Grandmaster Benedict said, his Macronaut reclining and splitting open to release him, “It won’t be long until the Zohor are redeployed from another Command Relay Node.”
And like that, the war against the Zohor turned.
TWENTY-FOUR
BLOOM’S POINT REVISITED
The fleet was channelled to the Point Harbour through a single, massive tunnel; the impression of the huge fleet to the on-station El-Ahur (Including Gesheol El-Ahur permitted by Order of the Queen to serve the City-Station of Bloom’s Point instead of the Mountain-City of Olympus) was intentional and effective: They arrived heroically, dramatically; they arrived as conquerors – both of the Zohor and of El-Ahur society. Their ships filled the Harbour and the Sentinel had to navigate them into flotillas and formations to keep regular traffic moving to and from Bloom’s Point. It was an easy enough navigation algorithm to write and track; the ships were put exactly where they needed to be. The Ouroboros and its opposite number, the unnamed Jibrail attack ship that had bested the Commodore’s Flagship in combat were the first to proceed to the docks. They were moored side by side intentionally; the two Commanders had been rivals in the cosmic arena. Now that the fleets were joined, the Commanders of the respective Flagships were at last to meet.
Commodore Baxter Vincent stood with his command crew at the joint airlock between the two ships. The other ship’s airlock at last unsealed and out came five silver and black-clad, mechanically enhanced El-Ahur from the Jibrail. As always, Baxter found the surgical, biomechanical alterations unsettling; he could get used to seeing the same Jibrail again and again…but every new member of the Queen’s Tribe left him with fresh horrors at the modifications they had allowed to be done to themselves. One had her eyes replaced with black orbs; at first Benedict thought she was wearing some sort of ornamental headdress, until he realized the band above her ears were inserts; ports designed to hook her into the systems of the ship she served.
Apparently how the ports were implanted into the El-Ahur’s heads was determined either by personal taste, style or function. Baxter couldn’t be sure. Each of the five Jibrail who debarked had a different set of what he could only think of (despite his own neural interface) of “plugs” across their heads. Two women and three men, all dressed as uniformly as their individual cybernetic body modifications permitted.
The first woman bowed low and then saluted, her left hand over her heart in the traditional El-Ahur manner.
“Greetings, Commodore. I am Flag Commander Rafouz Ingrid. It is an honour to meet you at last.”
Baxter shrugged, “You’re lucky you shot first, Flag Commander,” he said, shaking her hand, “A half-second later and my Captain would have blown your ship out of the sky.”
