Chapter Three: Voidfall

While I’d never worked a warship before, I’d seen them, many of them. When not out on missions, they’d often patrol the skies above Enfirnia, ranging from tiny fighters to massive hulking dreadnoughts with thousands onboard. Protests were common, refuting the necessity of such a large military when resources were already thin. I’d once stood among them in my youth, but eventually I came to understand. For so many people, it was all they had left. The only cause they could find, the only comradery they could forge. For so many people, this was a lifeline, a mind-altering drug that induced false sensations of ‘mattering’ and ‘purpose’ and ‘importance’. For so many people, this was everything. So the fleet was kept large and the enlistment rate kept larger. That was a good chunk of its purpose. A comforting blanket of bullets and battleships.

'A' purpose, not 'the'.

“Have you ever seen one?” I asked, more timidly than I’d like to admit, “an Arkolt?”

“There’s no such thing,” Dagger said, “as ‘one’ when it comes to Arkolt. There’s only the Arkolt, and the machines under its thrall.”

“But have you ever seen one?”

She nodded grimly, eyes storming.

“We were patrolling the orbit of Vlissik when they took it.”

“Oh,” I remembered the images from only seven years ago. The entire surface of a planet bombarded by layers of anti-matter, domed cities and mining bases obliterated, the once mountainous terrain flattened to a smooth shell of black glass. A billion people, entire species, all murdered in the blink of an eye, the pulse of a neurone, the beating of a heart. Ships stammering away into space while two battle-fleets desperately fended off the superior Arkolt weapons.

A population of one billion, reduced to the five million in orbit. A fleet five million strong, reduced to thousands by the time they reached protected space.

And Dagger had been among them. One of the few.

“I’m sorry,” I said. The programmed phrase of helpless nothingness. The pointless phrase of pity. The filler phrase of simply not knowing what to say.

She breathed deeply. I could see then how she savoured the air, held on to each gasp.

“This has been a long time coming,” she said, “tonight we take back the ash.”

Some of the other soldiers cheered at that, but not happily. They were hungry for it too, for revenge. But not like I could see in Dagger’s eyes.

The other soldiers wanted to fight the enemy.

Dagger wanted the enemy to die.

In that moment I felt it fully, the tidal wave of fear. What had I done? In my bid to finally live, it felt as though I’d sentenced myself to expire alone in the night.

“But how do you fight them?” I asked.

“Don’t get shot,” Konzor said with a smile. Dagger scowled.

“With your guns, actually,” she said, which was only marginally less unhelpful, “anything special like hacking and jamming, that stuff isn’t your concern. Which brings us grunts to the tried-and-true method of shooting the hell out of it until it stops moving, and then a little longer to be sure.”

“What’s ‘hell’?” Konzor frowned.

“Sitting here with you people, that’s what,” Dagger explained, “look, Greenie, the Ultimatum of Infinity is doing most of the work here. If we actually need to do anything, you’ll know it. If they taught you how to point that little gun, that is.”

“I know that much,” I said, trying to stop my teeth from chattering.

Around us, the ship’s speaker system cackled to life.

“Attention everyone: We are now approaching the Vlissik planetary system. Be sure to buckle in tightly and stay alert.”

“And so it begins!” Konzor laughed, “so it begins!”

“Yeah,” Dagger shifted in her seat, “don’t worry Greenie. If we die, you probably won’t even feel it.”

“Ah, leave the kid alone!” Konzor slapped my back, knocking the air from all three of my lungs, “if we die, you’ll absolutely feel it! They say the glory of battle-death warms the blood of any being, even in the empty void of space.”

“Which is where we’ll end up if this all goes south,” Dagger muttered, “now hold on, let me get the live-feed running.”

(In retrospect, there were probably better people to have spent these moments with).

In the narrow space between us, a perfect three-dimensional hologram of the battlefield (Point-Throwheart, as I’d heard some of the higher-ups call it) materialised in mid-air. A few of the others gasped in disbelief at what it showed, but I simply stared, the pit of fear only widening in the cavities of my gut. We’d seen images taken from afar, but witnessing it in person was another thing.

On one side, the Enfirnian fleet, perhaps five-hundred capital ships of about twenty types, arranged to keep the largest ships buried within a sphere of far smaller defenders. Everything was scaled-up of course; in reality the ships were too small and far apart to see. Our nine Terminator-Class super-dreadnoughts appeared almost moon-sized from this perspective, though they couldn’t have been larger than ten kilometres at most. A tiny mote-sized blip of yellow marked the Ultimatum’s position, sitting somewhere in the middle of everything, lost amongst a swarm of identical ships. Insignificant, even at this inflated scale. Hopefully the Arkolt would agree.

On the other side sat Vlissik, the blackened husk of the populated planet Dagger had left behind, with a few tiny spots of light where Arkolt bases had been established, built upon the twisted corpses of those they’d slaughtered. It hardly seemed worth fighting for, and normally it wouldn’t be.

But...

But around Vlissik, Arkolt itself dominated its orbit. A ten-thousand-kilometre torus circling the entire planet, the little radius as wide as a small moon in its own right. Two entire asteroid-belt’s worth of metal fused into a single twisted, thinking structure. While races had launched generation ships in the vain hope of reaching the last star, the ancient Arkolt Tyranny sent thousands of planet-sized machine-brains at random to maximise the chances of their own survival. Sadly for everyone else, they’d succeeded.

“Those bastards,” Dagger growled, staring at the black sphere of Vlissik, fists clenching so hard she dented her seat, “goddamn bastards.”

It seemed fruitless to try. Utterly pointless. But so was everything else, I suppose.

The hologram rippled.

“What’s happening?” Konzor frowned.

“Non-scalable spacecraft,” said Dagger, who jabbed impatiently at the controls. Between our fleet and the Arkolt ring, another holographic ship phased into being. Technically another torus, though with a hole so small it ended up looking spherical from most angles. Overall, the ship’s diameter looked easily five times longer than a Terminator Dreadnaught. Its shadow fell upon us all.

“Holy gracious Parent above,” I stared at the colossal sphere-ship as it swivelled in place, “it can’t really be that big.”

“It isn’t,” Dagger explained, “it’s bigger. That’s what I meant by non-scalable. If I scaled it like our ships, it would be too big.” For the briefest moment she allowed the hologram to flash its true size at us, and my brain almost collapsed trying to imagine it. One hundred kilometres, from pole to pole. A veritable dwarf planet in of itself.

“What about the other ships,” I scanned the battlefield for red blips indicative of further enemy forces. Dagger laughed.

“You think they need more?”

“You were right,” I said to Kondor, “we’re going to die.”

“Not yet,” Dagger grit her teeth as the Ultimatum surged forwards into position, so fast my head knocked back against the wall, “we’re not dead yet.”

The Enfirnian Fleet opened fire, countless bullets, railgun-rounds, plasma-bolts, flak-bombs, and laser beams all unloaded at once against the Arkolt titan. Light shone in from the windows, our dim space lit by the glow of bullet-fire and rocket-flame.

It wasn’t enough.

The Sphereship didn’t move, didn’t fire, didn’t die. It simply sat like a moon in space, green shields casually glittering with each insignificant impact.

“They can’t hope to kill it like that, can they?” I asked, watching the sum-total of our fleet’s power dissipate against the titan.

“At best we’ll eventually punch through,” Dagger said, eyes locked intensely on the hologram like a gambler watching a race, “at worst, we’re distracting them. Most of those guns won’t pierce, but some of them will,” she smiled, “it’s like white-blood cells. You have white-blood cells, Greenie?”

“I don’t have blood. My race transports nutrients through undirected Osmotic pathways in our-”

“The cells keep making new antibodies at random, in the hope of finding a molecular structure that kills the illness. Likewise, most of our guns are useless, but many of our missiles have shields. All we have to do is determine which are piercing, and then we have it locked.”

“You can change the shield frequency on missiles?”

“Yep. Easy.”

“Couldn’t their ship do the same?” Konzor scratched his tough head.

“Not without deactivating it first, and if it wants to do that, it’d be my pleasure.”

“What’s it doing?” Muttered a Plalvian on Dagger’s left side, as the Titan started to rotate in space. It didn’t move, or fire anything, it simply spun on the spot, still absorbing their fire.

“Showtime,” Dagger grunted.

The Titan blurred so fast that it’s afterimage created a solid line in space which remained visible for entire seconds. A swarm of Enfirnian missiles and other projectiles surged right past where the Arkolt sphere had been moments ago. Every ship in the fleet scrambled to turn, but it was too late.

A blazing purple sun appeared within the Titan’s hole, extending outwards into a beam of pure energy. Not quite light speed, but faster than any of our spaceship crews or computers could react. It only lasted two seconds, but when the beam vanished, three of our Terminator dreadnoughts were gone, simply gone, along with two-dozen smaller vessels of variable tonnage. The Titan had lined its shot perfectly to deal the maximum possible blow.

The entire frigate fell silent. Everyone was seemingly contemplating the same thought, that it so easily could have been us. I tried to imagine it myself. A death so fast barely seemed like death at all. Most deaths one could imagine were slow, the bed-ridden weakening of illness or the drawn-out agony of bleeding to death. Even a bullet to the head could be imagined as pain, no matter how sudden. This seemed more like erasure than death. A sudden failure of existence.

“Three entire dreadnoughts,” someone whispered, “must be thousands of people.”

“Actually, no,” Dagger said breezily, “skeleton crews, maybe a few dozen each.”

Konzor frowned.

“We have unmanned ships now? That’s a boon and a half, I tell you!”

“No. But we knew the ship would fire at us from there,” she smiled wryly, “why else would we put three dreadnoughts in a perfect straight line?”

I checked the hologram again, and watched the Titan’s shields shine as hundreds of missiles hit home, each one fired the very moment their sole target had jumped into place, swift to fire without calibration or aiming.

“The Arkolt isn’t stupid,” said Konzo, “my people fought it over countless wars! They must know why we made that formation.”

“Yep. But what else can they do? Leave three of our strongest ships when they have the opportunity to take them right off the board? Even unmanned they’re vicious things. The Arkolt jumped into our trap because it’s all they could do.”

“Insidious!” Konzor declared with a thunderous clap, “sharper than a planet-brain, that's us!”

“We haven’t hit anything yet,” I said, still unshaken from my pessimism as the Titan started to rotate once more. It seemed we’d bought ourselves time to probe its shield, but little more than that.”

“Nah,” Dagger grinned, “knowledge is power. The Arkolt aren’t the only ones that can use it.”

I could see what she meant when the fleet began redirecting their fire, not towards the Titan, but towards the path of its next jump.

“Will the Titan run into our projectiles?” I asked. Dagger snorted.

“That’d be amazing, right? But nah. Those light-speed drives are better than anything we have.”

The Titan blurred again, and for a moment I wondered if it had turned invisible.

“Knowledge is power, eh?” Konzor widened one eye. Dagger exhaled sharply.

The Arkolt Titan hadn’t gone invisible, it simply wasn’t where we’d expected it to be. For the first jump, it’d travelled along the direction of its hole, like a bead down imaginary thread. It had done the same thing this time.

Backwards.

Every missile we’d fired over the last several seconds missed its mark, searing off into space.

“Knowledge is power,” Dagger echoed, and winced.

The Titan fired again.

In that moment I thought that I was dead. That some of the stranger religions had been true after all, and I was staring into the blazing form of a godlike figure.

When my vision returned, everyone else was reeling from the blast, the entire ship rocking as repairs to the thrusters weren’t being made fast enough.

We hadn’t been hit, but the beam had passed beside us for an entire two seconds, bright as a supernova. Any closer and I might’ve been blinded.

“Status,” Dagger was babbling, blinking faster than seemed normal for her species, water rolling down her forehead, “what’s happening, dammit?”

“Two dreadnoughts,” I said, apparently the first to recover, “and lots of smaller ships.”

Dagger swore a veritable rainbow, faster than my earpiece could translate.

“At least we know now,” I tried to comfort her, “at least-”

Konzor whooped as a tiny orange full stop blinked on the Sphereship’s surface. Dagger squinted, face still watery, and laughed.

“Gottem,” she rubbed her hands together, “oh, we have them.”

More orange spots blipped against the Titan, mostly concentrated around the weapon.

“One of our missiles hit home,” grinned Dagger, “the others are shifting-shields to match.”

The fleet surged forwards, suddenly confident as the Arkolt warship started to hurt. A little at first, but as we concentrated fire, tiny pieces of hull started to chip away, small compared to the Titan, but probably bigger than our dreadnoughts. Meanwhile, assorted projectiles still bounced against its shields, keeping them too essential to deactivate, even for a moment.

The Titan started to turn, now pointing its hole directly towards us.

“Are they about to fire on us?” I asked, once again scrambling at the very fabric of mortality with scabby fingers.

“No!” Konzor whooped, “they’re turning to run!”

“You’re both right,” Dagger folded her limbs tightly together, face scrunched up in shocking apprehension, “brace.”

“What?”

“Brace!" She screamed, "Now!”

The Titan blurred directly towards the fleet.