The Beast Arises

Targeting solutions crowded the lower right quadrant of Dantalion’s main viewer, coloured box reticules jostling over the vid-feed of the cannibalised Oberon-class battleship. Energy sources. Weapons arrays. Structural weaknesses. Void-suited strategium serfs worked furiously to keep the display updated as the two vessels sailed into weapons range. Lobbed shells blistered Dantalion’s forward shields. Fire broke out between them as the two warships closed and slowly, slowly, began to turn apart. The Oberon-class dropped to port, Dantalion climbed to starboard, both ships manoeuvering to present the massed firepower of their broadsides. Banks of hardlines provided wired communications between Dantalion’s command deck and the thousands of weapons hardpoints, loading bays, and cogitators throughout the two-kilometre-long battle-barge. Breathless operators called in status reports.

‘Prow beamers charged and locked.’

‘Macro-cannons trained to target.’

‘Launch tubes alpha through delta report cyclonic warheads loaded and ready at your mark.’

‘Hold torpedos,’ Shipmaster Marcarian commanded. ‘Macro-weaponry and beamers only until we have the measure of their shields. Steady as she goes.’

‘Fire weapons!’ Zerberyn snarled.

‘Firing, aye.’

White-hot beams of stellar fury drilled from Dantalion’s fusion batteries at near-light speed. The gap between the two ships had narrowed to a few thousand kilometres — an almost terrestrial scale, a space of particle fire and scrambled fighter craft — and the barrage hit almost instantaneously. The first beam strike overloaded the Oberon-class’ jury-rigged void shield array. The second lanced through the outer hull, and set off chain explosions within the superstructure. The fusion beamers fired in sequence. Each blast lasted split seconds before the collider cells had to be removed to be cooled and recharged, but the relative velocities and opposing vectors meant that those snap shots were sufficient to gouge through hundreds of metres of armour cladding.

Spewing drive plasma and the atomised constituents of its outer hull, the Oberon-class sailed under Dantalion

’s belly, the battle-barge yawing over its blistered prow.

‘Ventral batteries report locks.’

‘Fire!’

Sustained firepower chewed up the cannibalised vessel’s dorsal plating. Atmospheric decompression ignited like the pilot light of a super-heavy flamer. Edged with greens, yellows and purples from vaporised hull elements, fire erupted into the void. For all Dantalion’s killing might, however, the honour of the ship-kill and the steel plaque on the wall of her shipmaster’s cell fell to another.

‘Shipmaster Akienas, of the Paragon, hailing,’ Marcarian exclaimed, panting with short bursts of relieved laughter. ‘It’s the fleet.’

The cheers of those on the command deck followed the aegis frigate Paragon as she cut across her parent ship’s nose. Engine stacks on full burn whited out Dantalion

’s viewer and for a moment the escort passed close enough that the electromagnetic distortion generated by the interplay of the two sets of shields whined over every open channel.

Zerberyn did not cheer. He had never doubted, and there was little to celebrate in seeing others catch up to one’s certainty.

The escort sailed under as Dantalion went over. The dying Oberon-class battleship cruised between them, trailing plasma discharge and colour distortions as Paragon opened up. Anti-fighter batteries walked down her centre line at devastatingly close range. They struck something critical, an unsecured mega-weapon or a main plasma chamber of the drive core.

The battleship detonated like an atomic warhead.

Dantalion blazed inside her shields like a model voidship in a lightning cage. Paragon

’s layered shielding failed simultaneously in an explosive moment of brilliance that rivalled the birth of a star. Her starboard side buckled under forced compression. Bent plates spewed atmosphere, and she skewed off wildly on a new trajectory.

Unshielded ork fighter-bombers that had been emptied out of the Oberon-class’ flight decks were simply obliterated. Muzzle-flash explosions dotted the cloud of attack craft that had been racing in behind. The survivors broke off their run under the barrage of Dantalion’s flak guns and scattered, weaving a craze of propellant tails behind them.

‘Track them, shipmaster, see where they go,’ said Zerberyn. ‘Move to cover Paragon and raise Akienas.’

‘Helm, new heading,’ Marcarian relayed. ‘Put us between Paragon and the orks, siphon power to starbord shields, mobilise reserve gunnery teams to dorsal, starboard and ventral flak batteries.’

The command deck, already a hive of purpose, set about the new orders with a well-drilled efficiency.

‘Aye sir, new heading. Plotting turn.’

‘No response from Paragon.’

‘Reading catastrophic damage to her primary transceiver array. Trying to contact her machine-spirit.’