They Answered The Call

Transiting null space

3.7 light years from Hive ship

The spy drones had caught up to the nullships, and Command Unit 273 analyzed the sensor readings of the unknown ships they forwarded as the two squadrons turned and headed back.

Its neural pathways surged as it ran simulations for the new, unexpected circumstances confronting them. The simulations ended, and it sent new command pulses to the nullships with it.

Defensive pattern Theta-1. The Hive ship must be protected at all costs.

473 seconds later, the nullships flashed out above and below the allied Hive ship at full acceleration, and in five attack groups, each group assigned an area of control as their AIs tagged targets for destruction.

The starfighters disengaged their clamps as soon as they flashed in, and they immediately dispersed in a protective screen around the Hive ship to intercept and destroy incoming missiles.

The five triads surged out, their war beams and secondary weapons systems smashing through the enemy formations that were charging towards the heavily damaged Hive ship.

Within five seconds of their arrival, over a dozen enemy ships were destroyed as war beams and triple bolts slammed into their hulls, the crews not yet aware of the newly arrived stealth nullships as they died with their vessels.

The nullships continued their attack run, surging through the gaps left by now-destroyed ships and engaging targets of opportunity with secondary weapons as they weaved through them.

The enemy formations broke apart and started scattering from the unexpected onslaught of ships they could not track, their targeting computers and sensors failing to confirm the nullships.

The black ships started firing missiles and energy weapons at the stealthy nullships, their energy weapons missing as their targeting computers defaulted to standby mode from lack of verification.

The energy weapons started firing again, continuing to miss as the enemy ships rebooted the targeting computers only to suffer the same standby mode glitch.

Over two hundred missiles had been launched at the nullships and loitered, not able to find targets as their radar systems did not get returns from the null particle-infused hulls.

The warhead computers switched to IR mode, and now the missiles started tracking heat signatures, homing in on the nullship engines that were flaring brightly as they maneuvered.

The nullships detected the infrared targeting and started flooding the battlespace with jamming frequencies as they continued to destroy nearby enemy ships trying to reform and attack.

Command unit 273 had been intercepting and analyzing the enemy signals that were being transmitted to the missiles and decided to activate a new program that was recently installed.

The new program was a hacking toolkit developed by the creators to counteract the deadly Insectoid stealth missiles encountered in the Jellini system, and it wanted to see if it worked.

Command Unit 273 copied and transmitted an imitation signal with a hacking sub-mind embedded within it to the missiles, which accepted the false signals and connected for new orders.

The hacking sub-mind breached the firewall of the warhead computer in 3.4 milliseconds, and it analyzed and identified multiple weaknesses before transmitting itself back on a signal.

Command Unit 273 reabsorbed the sub-mind and sent a command pulse to its subordinate AIs with the sub-mind files and orders for them to hack the missile warhead computers as they saw fit.

2.7 seconds later, over half of the missiles suddenly imploded as they were hacked, the AIs activating the self-destruct protocols of the missiles most likely to be a danger to the nullships.

Another seventy-three hacked missiles received updated instructions and pivoted with their guidance thrusters, seeking out their new targets—the very ships that had just fired them.

The remaining missiles used their thrusters to pivot before burning their engines to arrest their current momentum and come to a halt before slowly accelerating again.

Once they were moving in the right direction at 5,000 kilometers an hour, their engines turned off and they went dark after powering down, waiting for new targeting parameters from the nullship AIs.

Command unit 273 watched dispassionately as the seven hacked missiles it was currently controlling initiated terminal guidance and chased after the ships that fired them.

It blocked all attempts by the enemy ships to regain control of their own missiles with command codes as they repeatedly tried to self-destruct the rapidly approaching missiles.

The hacked missiles had new codes now, and they continued to target the fleeing ships as they dodged the point defense systems with evasive maneuvers.

Three of the missiles were destroyed before reaching their targets, but the other four made it through and slammed into the hulls, destroying or crippling the ships they hit.

Thirty-seven enemy ships were destroyed or rendered combat ineffective by their own missiles, creating a large gap in the enemy lines and opening a possible escape vector for the Hive ship.

The heavy cruisers lingering on the periphery of the battlespace had fired a volley of six hundred missiles from over 120,000 kilometers away when the nullships first appeared.

The large missile wave self-destructed as the enemy realized their weapons were being hacked and turned against them, and their missile ports were sealed by their armored hatches.

The enemy formations were in total disarray as the nullship jamming frequencies flooded the battlespace, denying them the ability to coordinate a coherent counterattack.

Seeing a potential path of escape for the Allied Hive ship that was still fighting, Command Unit 273 sent an encrypted message to AS-213, codenamed Giskard, before sending a command pulse to the other AIs.

Defensive pattern Alpha-3

As one, all the triads flashed into nullspace and remerged three seconds later in a half-sphere formation in front of the Hive ship before matching velocity and maintaining 15,000 kilometers of distance.

All the shield emitter power was diverted to the bow sections, and the nullships projected an overlapping field that covered 63.7% of the hull facing the incoming heavy cruisers.

Command Unit 273 ignored the insistent warnings coming from the AI sub-mind controlling the shield grid as the emitters continued to extend to overlap with the nearby ships.

It had already factored in the field strength loss due to the greatly attenuated shields being extended to create the overlap effect, and it did not have another viable option.

The remaining Hive ship engines and thrusters fired, trying to change the momentum of the massive vessel and steer it into the large gap created by the nullships breaking up the enemy formations.

Command Unit 273 ran trillions of calculations as the Hive ship slowly changed course and monitored the actions of the enemy heavy cruisers still on the pheriphery of the battlespace.

Forty-three of the heavy cruisers had started burning their engines and now were slowly accelerating towards the Hive ship to intercept it as they powered up their energy weapons.

They were coming to close the large gap left by the smaller enemy ships that had broken ranks and executed evasive maneuvers to get away from their own missiles.

The smaller ships were effectively no longer part of the battle as their momentum and emergency maneuvers had taken them away from the battle and out of range of their energy weapons.

They were only now beginning the long process of making the necessary course corrections to return to the battle for the next attack run.

Their previous evasive maneuvers were forcing the enemy ships to make a wide turn so they could maintain some of their current momentum for the next attack run while conserving fuel.

Command Unit 273 detected massive power surges emanating from among the heavy cruisers that had maintained position on the periphery, and it focused its scanners on them.

New constructs were emerging from the ventral sections of sixteen heavy cruisers, rapidly assembling into two distinct vanes almost half the length of the heavy cruisers.

Analyzing the scanning results, Command Unit 273 realized the enemy was preparing to fire their version of railguns and calculated the time to firing as it ran tens of thousands of simulations.

The Hive ship would not be able to evade when the enemy fired their projectiles; the massive vessel did not have enough functioning engines to effect rapid course changes and overcome its mass.

Command Unit 273 could not risk leaving the Hive ship undefended; they would not be able to survive the attack run of the forty-three heavy cruisers still accelerating to intercept them.

The nullships had also depleted their capacitor charges, and they needed to keep their remaining reserve charge for the escape if the Hive ship managed to survive the next few minutes.

Additional scan results came back, and Command Unit 273 scanned the projectiles being loaded at the base of the vanes as the enemy aimed their bows at where the Hive ship would be when they fired.

They were made of a tungsten alloy and forty-five centimeters long with a diameter of half their length, and they had an elongated conical shape. A hit by one would be a catastrophic strike.

After a series of calculations, it concluded that none of their shields would be able to deflect the projectiles, even at full strength.

The kinetic energy imparted by such a strike would overload and burn out the emitters before thousands of fragments from the projectile itself tore apart the ship after the shields failed.

They had no choice but to place themselves in the line of fire and use their ships to intercept and absorb the projectiles meant for the Hive ship to buy them more time to escape.

One of the AIs sent a pulse to Command Unit 273, presenting it with a unique solution. It agreed with the risky proposal 4.2 milliseconds later and sent out command pulses to the starfighters behind them.

Three of the nullships flashed out of the defensive formation, and another two stopped thrusting, slowing down immediately as the eight starfighters surged ahead to rendezvous with them.

The three nullships that had flashed out remerged behind the sixteen heavy cruisers, firing war beams and triple bolts at their aft engines before strafing them with secondary particle turrets as they surged past them.

Two of the targeted heavy cruiser engines were destroyed and started drifting out of formation, their vanes no longer aiming at the Hive ship as they tried to use thrusters to compensate.

The third heavy cruiser was hit by plasma turrets all along a single vane, and it erupted, triggering a cascade failure that destroyed the generators at the base and caused a massive hull breach.

The three nullships flashed out after their attack run and reemerged three seconds later from the z-axis under the formation, bows pointed directly at the ventral hulls above them.

They launched a perpendicular attack run and targeted both vanes as they intersected the formation and tore through them at an 87.4-degree angle.

The war beams destroyed the generators as the nullships passed through, initiating catastrophic feedback loops that caused overloads as the flow of energy reversed back into their cores.

The three ships turned into miniature suns, taking out another two heavy cruisers and heavily damaging several others as the chain reaction spread through the tightly condensed formation.

The nullships used their thrusters to change their vectors as they made a wide turn that would allow them to attack the formation again one last time as they headed back towards the allied Hive ship.

Six of the sixteen cruisers had been destroyed, and another four had their vanes knocked out, the ships suffering from moderate damage as their power levels fluctuated.

The remaining six continued to target the Hive ship, electricity furiously arcing between the vanes as they neared full power and seated the two projectiles in preparation to fire them.

The eight starfighters finished clamping onto the hulls of the two nullships, and they flashed out, emerging two seconds later directly in front of the six heavy cruisers that were preparing to fire their projectiles.

The two nullships surged forward and down relative to the six heavy cruisers, with the starfighters still clamped to their hulls.

There were four starfighters attached to each nullship, and they were positioned in the aft section, their cockpits facing the rear engines with their bomb bay doors open and missile racks deployed.

As the nullships angled down and passed under the six ships, the nullships cut their engines, and the eight starfighters fired their last three penetrator missiles.

The warhead AIs guided themselves with their gas thrusters until the nullships got 10,000 meters away before going active and turning their engines on.

Once the nullships reached the minimum safe distance, the twenty-four warhead AIs coordinated their targeting and immediately went into terminal guidance, looping down before shooting straight up towards their targets.

The still-functioning heavy cruisers were targeted by two missiles each, and the rest of the missiles divided the remaining heavy cruisers among themselves, specifically targeting the four heavy cruisers with the disabled rail vanes.

The penetrator missiles targeted the base of each vane, the hardened nose cones smashing right through them before activating their final booster phase and burrowing into the ventral hulls.

The four remaining missile AIs each selected a ship that was already heavily damaged by the nullship attacks and the core breaches, timing their impacts with the other AIs down to the nanosecond.

They easily dodged the pitiful point defense attempts by the barely functional ships as they guided themselves into hull breaches and penetrated deeply into the exposed interiors by several decks.

The two nullships with the clamped-on starfighters used the last of their reserves and flashed out to rendezvous with the Hive ship still slowly accelerating towards the gap.

One of the missile AIs activated its exterior cameras when it detected biologicals in the vicinity after it finished burrowing deeply into the interior of the heavily damaged ship.

The two biologicals had exosuits and clear helmets, and the AI scanned them with its sensor suite, compiling the new intelligence for Command Unit 273 as the biologicals carefully approached it.

The closest visual match it could find in its species database was Deinonychus antirrhopus from Earth, and the AI continued recording and scanning the biologicals as they moved closer to it.

The specimens were 1.6 meters in height, between 95 and 98 kilograms, and they were bipedal with four upper limbs.

One of them reached out with a plasma torch and started cutting into the missile body with it, and the AI intercepted and recorded their comm transmissions for analysis by Command Unit 273.

The AI received the detonate command and sent a final data burst with the intelligence and a compressed backup copy of itself before setting the warhead yield to maximum and detonating.

Command Unit 273 scanned the area where the sixteen heavy cruiser formation was previously located after the brilliant eruptions and radiation dissipated, pleased with the results of the assault.

There was nothing but a rapidly expanding cloud of debris, the largest fragments less than two kilograms in mass as the remains of the sixteen enemy ships joined the interstellar medium.

Turning its attention back to the oncoming enemy ships, Command Unit 273 had the two nullships that returned retake their positions as it condensed the protective screen and prepared for combat.

The starfighters unclamped and headed to the Hive ship to rearm before rejoining the other six starfighters that had come out before and were currently patrolling behind the nullship screen.

The other three nullships, their capacitor reserves depleted, were almost finished making their wide looping turns and would reach them in twenty-three minutes and 13 seconds.

Command Unit 273 sent orders for them to attack the heavy cruiser formations from behind before reconnecting to the hacked missiles that had gone dark and continued to drift.

It updated their targeting parameters and sent them to attack the fifty-one heavy destroyers that would be returning and attacking them. The missiles will disrupt their formations and reduce their numbers.

The forty-three heavy cruisers of the enemy formation were going to intercept them right before they reached the gap in seventeen minutes, and Command Unit 273 ran thousands of simulations.

The smaller enemy ships had completed their turns, and they would reach the battlespace in twenty-seven minutes and thirty-six seconds, four minutes and twelve seconds after the three nullships arrived.

Trillions of calculations and thousands of simulations all end with the same results; the Hive ship had less than a ten percent chance of surviving the coming battle, and the rescue attempt was a failure.

Still, Command Unit 273 had a task to perform, and it would fight until the Hive ship was destroyed. Any nullships not able to flash out will self-destruct, and the rest would retreat if able to.

The creators need to know about this new enemy, and new calculations indicated that the retreating nullships had a 23% percent probability of successfully making it back through the guardian fleets and returning to Republic space.

There was nothing else they could do but fight, and Command Unit 273 continued to run simulations as it prepared for combat against the overwhelming odds facing them. This is what the creators made them for, and they would perform their function until they were destroyed.

It noted with satisfaction as the hacked missiles attacked the heavy destroyer formations and destroyed fourteen ships. Another six were powerless wrecks, and Command Unit 273 scanned the trail of frozen fluids and bodies the ships were leaving behind them as they spun out of control.

The early warning drone flashed in again and sent an encrypted wide beam transmission before flashing back out, and its neural pathways sizzled as it decrypted the transmission from the drone.

There were now two distinct sources of propagation waves coming from two directions, indicating that two large fleets were on the way. The first source was estimated to arrive in twelve minutes, forty-two seconds.

Adding the new information to its calculations and plans, Command Unit 273 started downloading a backup copy of itself and all the current logs into the black box drones, ordering the other AIs to do the same.

The probability of any of them surviving had been recalculated at 2.3%, and it will eject the bridge log drones before imminent destruction and activation of the self-destruct protocols.

At least the creators would know what happened here, and if they deemed it warranted, Command Unit 273 would be installed on another nullship to fulfill its function and fight for them once more.