Digital Galaxies

Thoughts raced through my head at a million miles an hour, assigning targets to the point defence cannons according to a pattern I was building on the fly. Their missiles were burning hard, stacking on the Gs of acceleration that were orders of magnitude more than my partly squishy body could have handled.

Small rotary railguns growled to life, sending dull, barely perceptible vibrations through the hull as they spat specialised PDC shells at terrifying rates. As each round closed in on its intended target, a canister in the rear of the shell released a spread of thousands of tiny ultra dense metal balls.

Those shells were not standard for the ship that had become the Turshen 2. Originally the PDCs used superheated clouds of metal plasma, but we hadn’t been able to source the necessary exotic elements to fix the containment coating within the barrels of the guns. So, Cerri had designed these things instead, and honestly, they would work just fine. The original setup had seemed a little over the top when we discovered the plans in the ship’s database anyway.

The little triangles that represented enemy missiles began to blink out, showing that her design did its job just fine.

“Gloria, updating your HUD with a waypoint,” Cerri said while I tweaked the point defence network further. “It’s a place where the aether should be weak enough to jump.”

“Understood,” the pilot replied tersely.

Counting the rapidly growing sensor returns that indicated enemy ships, I swore under my breath. Twelve ships bearing down on us. Silently, I pulled up the data for each ship and cross referenced them with the hulks in the system.

They shared similarities in architecture and design philosophies, but the nearly cuboid silhouettes had been replaced with something much sleeker. More alarming than the obvious upgrades these ships had were the small view ports that were hidden in safe spots across their hulls.

"These ships will be smarter than the bots we faced," I said, amplifying my quiet voice with the comms. "Their designs are more refined and it looks like they have actual intelligent crews."

“Okay,” Cerri said, distracted as she pulled up the images I was looking at. “Elissa, can you run an analysis of their ships? We need updated specs. Alia, hold missiles until after the jump.”

“On it,” our ship’s AI said, still in her normal, non-anime voice. I sent Cerri a digital acknowledgement.

Even with our non-standard PDC munitions and my constant babysitting of their firing patterns, it was clear the enemy were closing the net around us.

“Standby for jump,” Gloria called, flipping up the cover on the aetherdrive button. “Taking us in.”

"Distortion fields!" Elissa cried. "You better jump us now or we won't be able to at all!"

Over on the display I had assigned to the current sensor data, I saw the fields propagating out from each enemy vessel. Fear began to close its icy fingers around my heart when I saw the strength of their disruption tech. Holy shit, we'd be torn to shreds if we tried to slip into aetherspace while inside one of those.

The ship lurched, spinning my stomach in a great many funky and nauseating directions. I grabbed the combat display from where it had swung away and pulled it back, trying to figure out how we'd been hit.

"Caught the edge of their D-field," Gloria groaned from the pilot's seat. "The aether in this system is fucked, Cer. It's like something churned it up."

"Drop us back out somewhere close," Cerri said, acknowledging the information with a nod as she issued new orders. "Alia, prepare missiles and set them for dormant self activation. As soon as we're back in normal space, launch. Gloria, punch the acceleration as hard as you can away from our exit point, making for the closest jump viable location."

The moment we dropped back into normal space, I did as Cerri asked, firing the missiles in a spread that would cover almost half a light second across. Each one went dark the moment they were on the right trajectory, relying on nothing but passive sensors to tell them when an enemy ship had arrived.

“Got a spot for you, Gloria,” Elissa chirped. A moment later, a waypoint diamond appeared on the window displays.

“Thanks, babe,” Gloria replied, shifting our course.

Cerri straightened in the captain’s chair and looked up at the ceiling. “Elissa, can you work on some way to interfere with their D-fields? Try analysing for patterns and see if there’s a way to use onboard equipment to destabilise it.”

Several bright flashes of light pulled my attention away from the technical conversation they were having. Fuck, the enemy were here already. I guess our engines left a very visible wake in the aether.

All across the battlespace, missiles lit their drives and burned with terrifying acceleration towards the three enemy frigates that had dropped through first. Enemy particle cannons silently growled to life, all but invisible to the naked eye except where they impacted stray dust, or when they scored a hit on a missile.

One of the frigates began to pulse with the telltale signs of an attempted skip jump as our weapons closed in on it. The other two shifted in towards it, and I frowned, trying to figure out what they were doing. Was the singular ship trying to run away? Were the others trying to stop it?

I guess it didn’t really matter in the long run. They had dropped out of the aether right on top of our cloud of missiles, and there was no way they were going to be able to shoot them all down with the time they still had.

The Turshen shuddered under a sudden impact, and I lurched forward, grabbing at the armrest of my seat. What the fuck?

For about a second, maybe two, the ship that had been preparing to jump existed both back with its brothers and right on top of us. The one next to us was badly damaged, venting atmosphere from a gargantuan rent in its hull, while power flickered on and off to its normal space engines. The impact had been a wave of charged particles and debris washing over our shields.

A moment after the frigate appeared next to us, the cause of its battle damage became clear, as its lightspeed afterimage was caught by multiple missiles. Its comrades’ shields lit up with blinding flashes of radiation when the first volley of missiles detonated early, splashing them with a barrage of micro-munitions that quickly saturated their defences. The shields flickered, then died for half a second, enough time for the second wave of missiles to slam through and into the enemy hulls. It was the resulting balls of fire and debris that were caught in the unstable jump from the third frigate that had hit us.

With its shields down and power failing, the enemy ship had no defence when I targeted it with the heavy railguns. Feeling fancy, I decided to cut it in half with six carefully aimed shots, then turned and nodded to Cerri.

“Show off,” she chuckled, giving me an affectionate look. “Gloria, ETA on the jump?”

Gloria, busy dodging debris, asked, “Are we going to drop back near another easy jump area?”

“That’s the plan,” our acting captain agreed.

“I’m going to skim us then,” she said, gripping the flight controls and leaning forward. “No sense wasting power on a full jump if we’re staying in the system.”

Cerri nodded. “Do it.”

Space blurred outside the bridge, and the local star slid sideways across the sky. As soon as we came to a stop, I threw out another round of missiles set to go dark and act as seeking mines. I assumed that was what Cerri wanted me to do, and she gave me a small mental nod when she saw them leave the tubes. Her face was thoughtful and ever so slightly worried, though.

“The code didn’t work,” she said, tapping her claws on the armrest.

I frowned. “The what?”

“The AI kill code,” she explained, turning to look at me. “When they tried their electronic countermeasures on the missiles, they should have been fried. They weren’t.”

“Oh,” I blinked, and grabbed a free display from where it hung on an arm out of the way. Pulling it down, I brought up the battle data and scrubbed back in time until I could watch the enemy ships trying to shoot my missiles. With the new context, I realised why our attack had been so effective. They were only relying on their point defence cannons to shoot our missiles.

Using a combination of gestures and thought, I packaged the segment of battle data I had viewed and pushed it to one of her displays. “Look at how they tried to fight our missiles. Especially the part where they hesitated for 38 milliseconds.”

Her eyebrows rose slowly up towards her horns as she realised what I’d seen. “They fought off the code, but it kept them from taking control of the missiles. It was a partial success.”

“I have more bad news,” Elissa said quietly, her tone chagrined. “The maths involved in that D-field stuff is… look, I’m stupid and it confuses me.”

“Ah…” Cerri winced.

“Outsource it,” Gloria called, then leaned over and kissed the arm of her seat. “And you aren’t stupid, your skills are in different areas than maths.”

“Oh. Why didn’t I think of that?” Elissa muttered, going quiet as she was distracted by her new mission.

Her rhetorical question went unanswered because the rest of the enemy fleet leapt out of a skim jump out wide of where I had placed the missiles. Shit! I rushed to send the weapons towards our enemies, but it made no difference. At that range, their point defence networks were more than capable of shooting everything out of the sky.

“They anticipated the trap,” I said redundantly. “Cerri?”

“Get us out of here,” my girlfriend ordered, and Gloria skimmed us away. “Elissa, have you found someone to do the maths for us?”

“Yes,” she replied anxiously. “He’s working now. I’m sorry—“

The ship jerked as we exited the skim jump, and Cerri winced. “It’s fine. Alia, how are we going on missiles?”

“Not enough to saturate a large enough area that would get the job done. Fabricators are running as fast as they can to get more made, but we’re low on raw materials.”

Worry lines creased her forehead. “Try to predict where they’ll come out and start firing the railguns. Gloria, same as before. Get us some distance and then jump us out of here.”

“Yeah, on it,” Gloria said, hitting the gas.

I got to work, trying to figure out where they would come out. They were smart enough not to use the same exit point as last time… or, well, I should say the same position relative to our position. God, space combat was mind bending. Maybe they would keep it simple and go for the opposite side? I fired off several fragmentation darts in that area, peppering it with shards of metal travelling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Even then, I was tracing tight cones of death through a gaping sea of potential target locations.

To my surprise, the enemy formation actually materialised around where I’d predicted, and one destroyer immediately erupted as something important exploded. A frigate also took a glancing hit, stressing its shields to the point where they snapped for a moment.

“One ship down. But the others are unscathed,” I reported, knowing that everyone could see the tactical data if they wanted it.

Cerri leaned forward. “Gloria, ETA til we can jump?”

“Ten seconds,” came the reply, and I switched to the PDC network controls, getting a pattern ready to intercept enemy missiles.

It wasn’t a moment too soon, because all eight of the remaining enemy ships opened fire with a massive volley of missiles. The computer logged each one, giving it a temporary designation and plotting trajectories. There were too many for us to swat down, I could tell just by looking. Shit. Shit! What to do? What to… aha!

Working quickly, I told the computer to switch to manual input, then forced my body to remain as still as possible. Cranking up my time dilation to intense levels, I worked on the problem with all of my concentration, trying to figure out a way to somehow get the enemy missiles to kill each other when they died.

The first thing I noticed was the shields flaring ever so slightly, and I flicked my mind’s eye over it just briefly out of curiosity. That curiosity quickly turned to alarm when I saw why our shields were reacting oddly. Atmosphere outside the ship, appearing out of nowhere… just like when…

I was kicked back into the normal flow of time when the ship shuddered, emitting all sorts of groaning sounds that metal was not meant to make. Reality bent under the strain of trying to interweave the laws of the mundane and the aetheric. As that happened, something emerged into local space, a massive sinuous horror, too large to see properly, and too strange to comprehend even if I could.

“Gloria!” Cerri practically screamed. “Get us the fuck out of here!”

The moment before we lurched into aetherspace, I saw tentacles as vast as cities reaching out towards us and our enemies. The ones reaching towards us didn’t get there, but the others? We wouldn’t be followed by the 8 remaining ships, that was certain.