OIC (41)
MegaZone23
"Carry on my wayward son/There'll be peace when you are
done/Lay your weary head to rest/Don't you cry no more"
--Kansas
q took his place in the captain's chair, moderately
bemused by the whole situation, and leaned back. As soon as
all the craft that were going to leave had left, he gave his
first order:
"Like get us out of here."
All hell broke loose.
The ship shuddered, a deep thundering noise echoing
through her superstructure; the deck heaved a good two feet
under everyone's seats. Screens exploded, instruments went
dead, alarms howled, the lights turned red.
"What the fuck?!" q shouted, roused to raising his voice
at last.
"We've been hit by a phased radiant energy pulse, port
aft quadrant. Major armor damage, minor damage to the
superstructure," reported Logan at Tactical. "Trying to get
a fix on the aggressor now."
"In English?"
"Someone shot us with a big phaser and dented the ass-
end," Logan replied.
"That's like what I thought. Red alert, prep for
combat, all that other shit. Helm, bring us around
to...face...them...oh my like God."
The SDF-17 had swung to face her tormentor, and as the
hostile vessel filled the screen, jaws dropped. There were
gasps. Several of the WDF's recovering Catholics lapsed into
old habits and crossed themselves.
Looming outside the viewscreen, a hundred or so
kilometers distant, was a huge slab of battleship-grey metal,
bristling with gun emplacements and unidentifiable things,
its decks sloping down and narrowing to a point at the prow,
the bridge with its twin shield generators jutting above the
rear of the ship. An Imperial Star Destroyer. No, check
that--Star Destroyers were roughly the same size as the
SDF-17, and they could have cruised in and out of this ship's
hangar bays.
With a blip, Largo's sneering face filled the bridge
viewscreen.
Down in Engineering, ReRob cursed at one of the
subscreens. Why the fuck wasn't this guy dead?
"Greetings, Wedge Rats," Largo said with a smile. "I
suppose you've been wondering why you haven't heard from me
all this time. Well...I decided finally to come and show
you. What do you think of my latest project?"
The screen flipped back to transparency. The enormous
ship loomed before them. "I call it the Executioner."
"We are like seriously fucked," q muttered.
"Operations. Plot fold. Prepare to like retreat."
Phantom at Ops punched a few keys, looked quizzically at
his panel, tried it again, then slammed a fist down on the
panel. "Dammit!"
"Oh, by the way," Largo said, "my agent who was aboard
your vessel earlier was kind enough to disable your fold
drive."
Down in Engineering, ReRob looked at his status panel,
noted nothing wrong, and, snarling, began to trace.
"Goodbye, Rats," Largo said, and disappeared.
The Executioner opened fire.
The Wayward Son began to shiver and buck as her armor
absorbed firepower that could have devastated star systems.
"This is not good," Logan shouted over the din. "We're
not handling this pounding at all. Returning fire with
conventional weaponry is having no effect."
"Like fire the Reflex cannon!" q shouted. "Do
something!!"
Logan overrode the targeting safeguards--at this range
he couldn't miss--dropped the crosshair and fired. The bow
split, the lightshow flared, and the beam leapt forth, just
as always.
And disappeared, three hundred meters from the
Executioner's hull.
"What the fuck?!"
"Ooh," said Largo over the com. "Someone in whatever
parallel dimension my ship's phase shields exit to is in a
very bad mood now."
"Where the hell did he get phase shield technology?"
ReRob growled from inside the fold panel.
The Executioner had no main gun per se; ten or so very
large phaser arrays seemed to take up that function. They
and the huge vessel's subweapons hammered at the SDF-17,
shattering her armor and ripping huge chunks out of her
superstructure.
"Daedalus, Prometheus, this is the captain," q said into
his intercom, shouting over the noise. "Detach and retreat
at maximum warp. Like get out of here, that's an order!"
Surprisingly enough, no one argued. Perry Aldzinjal was
a good soldier; he knew his first duty was to survive, not to
make heroic stands. His men on Prometheus had been trained
the same. The two smaller ships detached and began making
top speed away from the battle; they were ignored. The
Executioner was after only one thing.
One of the Executioner's main batteries struck home near
the engine room, blasting out an enormous section of torn
armor, several important power conduits, and half the master
computer core.
The Wayward Son screamed silently and began to die.
The screens all over the ship blanked; computers shut
down and things went momentarily silent. Then, with a soft
beep, the EVE symbol appeared on every screen aboard, along
with the flashing legend "FINAL PROTECTION MODE". She began
to sing, softly, mournfully, as the ship that was her home
began to die, and she with it.
Explosions wracked the more vulnerable areas, ripping
through fighter bays and Destroid decks with fury and
violence, blowing energy converters and engine subassemblies
to pieces. The few surviving fightercraft scattered.
All remaining personnel, heeding their Final Protection Mode
training, ran for the Wedge. After the programmed ten-minute
delay, the doors slammed down. Explosive bolts banged and
armor plating fell aside like dead skin from a sunburn; the
Wedge catapulted free from its bay, leaving another gaping
wound in the Wayward Son's tortured hide.
The Executioner, and GENOM Corporation, had won.
The SDF-17 was deserted. All over the ship, red alert
lights flashed in empty corridors, where once people had run
and worked and, laughed and loved, hated and feared, lived
and died. Silence, but for Eve's singing and the muffled din
of outside combat, descended like a heavy weight, and already
the air of disuse and desertion spread across the ship.
Except...
Edison Bell emerged from the turbolift four seconds too
late; the Wedge departed and he was left behind on a dying
ship. He knew there were no more functioning escape pods;
all that had not been used were destroyed. The fighter bays
were gone. He had no way out, no escape. He was doomed.
So be it, then. He turned and ran for the bridge.
Largo had won, but that didn't mean he had to get away with
it. Running into the bridge, he took his seat behind the
helm and began entering commands with swift precision.
Master power conduits were damaged or destroyed, but
creative rerouting of several minor conduits through the
Crusher switchyard gave him operational power again, for as
long as the Reflex furnace kept burning.
On the Wedge, the remaining crew of the SDF-17 watched
their dying ship as it heeled to port and foundered in space,
explosion after explosion ripping through its infrastructure
and blowing out through its hull. Largo's Executioner
cruised imperiously past the dying ship, ignoring it utterly,
not even granting a valiant but defeated foe respect in
death.
Their mistake. The thrusters at the rear of the ship
flared. The Pinpoint Barriers glowed into flickering,
hesitant life once more, manifesting across the bow. At
first those on the Wedge mistook the action for the ship's
final death throes, but then the Wayward Son began to move.
To move, to turn, and to, haltingly, gather speed. Until
there was no doubt in anyone's mind what was about to happen.
The bent and battered prow of the Wayward Son touched
the dull, transparent, bluish glow of the Executioner's phase
shields; they reacted with the pinpoint barriers in a
fizzling, sparking light show, melting the ends of the main
gun's focusing arms; the phase shielding rippled back like an
oil slick from a drop of glycerine, avoiding contact, giving
the dying SDF-17 a doorway.
Then the prow rams slammed into Executioner's armored
hull just aft of the bridge, ripping through the plating and
tearing apart huge sections of systems and circuitry.
Behind, the SDF-17's still-mighty thrusters drove her forward
in her death plunge--but they could not maintain forward
velocity through all that. The ship stopped with just the
last rear quarter protruding from the Executioner's flank.
Edison smiled as he watched the GENOM crew attacking the
huge invader futilely. What could they do to a dying ship?
He moved to the Tactical position. As Eve's song continued,
the electric guitar filling his mind, he overrode the
targeting computer, safety systems, power limiters, and
design cutout interlocks--and fired the entire failing Reflex
furnace through the main gun.
The prow cammed apart one final time, and the charging
light show sizzled and tore at the surrounding wreckage,
casting those peculiarly sharp shadows unique to displays of
pure, raw power.
Back on the Wedge, q, truss, et al. looked with horror
at the SDF-17's stern protruding from the Executioner.
"What's he going to--" truss began.
"Goodbye," Edison said, and pulled the trigger.
The beam emerged from the other side of the
Executioner's engine room, poorly focused, to burn through
Musashi's upper ionosphere, skip off the denser layers below,
and blow a chunk out of the planet's primary satellite.
The two ships separated, plunging through Musashi's
atmosphere; Executioner with a huge hole blown through her
engines, leaking fuel, poisoning the atmosphere, and SDF-17
with most of her front half disintegrated and the rest,
battered and dying already, smashed by backblast.
The twisted wreckage of the Executioner, her back
broken, slammed to ground directly in the center of Musashi
City, and then her shattered engines went up. A toxic
nuclear-chemical fireball claimed most of Musashi's western
hemisphere and poisoned most of the remaining planet.
SDF-17, WDF Wayward Son, crashed into the desert two
thousand miles distant, landing on her keel and settling,
slowly cooling, into the dust. Her back remained unbroken.
For Edison Bell, everything went white as he felt the
ship shudder in her death throes under him, saw the blue beam
lash out once more to strike Executioner a mortal blow. For
the barest instant he was aware of the hiss of escaping air
and the interesting sensation of his flesh being ripped from
his bones; then there was nothing.
Shortly, the whiteness resolved itself into a room,
about ten feet square, with no entrance or exit. He glanced
down; he was still dressed in the clothes he had met his
death in. He was quite aware that he was dead; he had been
there before. He knew full well what it looked like. And he
knew what came next.
A door opened in the far wall of the room, and a pale
woman in black stepped into the room.
"Hallo, Teleute," said Edison mildly, hands in pockets,
looking entirely unperturbed.
"Bell," said Death. Her mouth quirked in a little grin.
"Finally got yourself killed, eh?"
"That I did, that I did," Bell replied airily. "Damn
shame too...I fear that young fellow Gryphon may never get
out of his jam now, without my help. He was framed, you
know."
"I know," Teleute replied. "I have... an interest in
the Wedge Rats. I've been watching them."
"Oh, that's right, I forgot. The all-seeing Endless."
He sighed, then looked with interest at Death's feet. "Your
shoe's untied."
"Give it a break, Bell. Better things than you have
tried."
"Yes, but none have succeeded." Edison grinned. "You
can't hold me. Some may rush gallantly--or stupidly--into
your open arms, but not Edison Bell! Today is not my day to
die."
"Too late. Come on, I'm a very busy woman--I don't have
time for your shenanigans."
"I'm afraid I'm not budging. I've far too much to do to
die now. Already I may have been delayed too long." His
smile vanished; his steel-grey eyes narrowed. "Don't try to
stop me, Teleute."
"I have to," Death replied. "'S my job."
The door opened again, this time to the left of Bell
(and, consequently, Death's right), and a large man in a grey
cassock entered, bearing a large leather-bound book. "I'm
afraid he's right," the man said. Bell's eyebrow crooked; he
knew the voice, although he had never met this particular
Endless before.
"Oh, Christ, Destiny, what is it?"
Bell's eyes widened. Destiny had left the door open.
This was his big chance...he started edging toward the door.
"Look here," said Destiny, opening his book and
pointing. "He isn't supposed to die today."
"Are you sure this isn't some kind of typo?"
Destiny shoved back his hood to reveal the face of
Vaughn Clark "Reality" Gross--and he looked annoyed. "I
don't make typos."
Bell paused, stunned, at the doorway, at the sight of
Destiny's face, but then remembered all that was at stake and
stepped through.
"Well, look, this is ridiculous. Edison--Edison? Oh
hell--where'd he go?!"
Edison Bell was mildly annoyed to find everything gone
all white again.
He looked at his watch.
It was half-past infinity.
He closed his eyes.