Into the Black

(Bridge, BSN Blightcaller, Dimiya System)

Captain Desmond Jones grit his teeth as he watched the plot from his command chair. He was one of Black Star’s Nomads, but he had earned his position as captain of a destroyer in the Black Star Navy the hard way, by proving himself in battle as the fleet grew. He knew, in his head, academically, that this was just a game. But it wasn’t. And it hadn’t been for some time. Not to him, or most Nomads who truly delved into the game world.

“Comms! Get Windrunner’s Bite and Talon of Wrathion to link up with us! Those dreadnoughts are beating the hell out of the Banshee’s Wail. Tell them we’ll cover them for an attack run on Tango 356’s engines. See if a couple Assassin shots up the ass don’t convince them to leave the flagship alone.”

“Windrunner and Talon both agree, Captain. Moving into position. Dragons from Deathguard Squadron are moving to attack Tango 357.”

Jones nodded. “Good. Once our Assassins are in our shadow, I want flank speed towards 356. All power to forward shields and weapons. Make it look like we’re on a suicide run. That will have the gunners focus on us instead of the Assassins.”

“Our shields won’t hold up for too long against that kind of firepower, Captain.”

“They’ll hold up long enough. The Ihm dreadnoughts have less point defense and antiship weapons in the aft quarter, and they haven’t improved their designs any. All the same, gunners, I want you to focus your fire on 356’s weapons.”

“Aye, Captain!”

(Flag Bridge, BSN Ama-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugi, Dimiya System)

“We’ve lost the Kunwu! Bedivere has taken critical damage. They’re dead in space. Gawain is being bracketed by enemy cruisers!”

I snapped my head to the side, finding the person I needed. “Lieutenant, Get Azrael in there to take some of the pressure off Gawain.”

The comm officer nodded. “Aye, Admiral.”

“Simo Hayha reporting damage from enemy bombers. They’re barely holding together. Reliant is moving to assist. Eight enemy destroyers closing on Pandora’s Box. Looks like they want to take the carrier out of the fight.”

I winced. Losing any of my ships hurt, of course, but the carriers were not something I could just throw away lightly. “What do we have in the area?”

“Not much. A couple gunboats, but they’re out of position for an intercept, and they don’t have the shields to stand up to a destroyer for more than a few seconds at close range. Fighters are currently on interception missions, keeping enemy fighters and bombers away from the carrier. Black Dragon squadron is in Pandora’s hangar now, rearming for their next attack run.”

A series of explosions played across the screen. When they cleared, the destroyers were all crippled, or dead. “Report! What happened?”

“Gunboats Hestia, Isis, Night, and Peru no longer responding. Warp flare detected just before the explosions. Replaying sensor data now. It looks as though the gunboats dumped their remaining Starbolts at Tangos 456, 489, 828, and 233, striking the weaker aft warp shielding, before going superluminal themselves, taking out the remaining enemy vessels.”

“Raven, make a note of their names.”

“Done, Admiral.”

I sighed and looked back at the plot. My forces were giving better than they got, but we were still outnumbered three of the Ihm ships to every two of ours. The four groups under my command were down to 50% combat effective. Not all the ships had been destroyed, of course, but we would be a long time healing from this, either way.

But the Ihm were hurting far worse than we were, and that was all that mattered, for the moment.

(Bridge, BSN Breath of Hades, Dimiya System)

Slave-Captain Ahshala Ulaven gripped the arms of her captain’s chair tightly to keep from being thrown to the deck as her cruiser bucked wildly in space. “REPORT!”

“First salvo, primary targets hit. Starbolts did massive damage to the enemy vessels. Unfortunately, the second salvo was ineffective. Somehow, they have adapted their shields! The shields were reduced in strength temporarily, but they held!”

“Damage control reports a hull breach on Deck 3. Main life support is offline. We’re running on backups for right now.”

Ulaven nodded. “All hands make sure they are wearing their environmental gear. We’ll fight the ship in vacuum, if we have to. How many ships are left?”

“We killed 13 of 27 in the initial onslaught. They weren’t expecting Starbolts. But the Gorb point defense shredded Demon squadron’s bombers as they made their attack runs. Demon 2 and Demon 7 are the only survivors. Hammer and Crimson Blade squadrons have lost most of their fighters trying to protect the Demons.”

“Switch weapons. Do whatever you can. We are all that stands between Dimiya and these… things, whatever they are. Last Stand protocols authorized.”

“We are the Gorb. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”

“AND SOMEONE SHUT THOSE BASTARDS UP!”

(Flag Bridge, CNS Wrath of Gadran, Dimiya System)

“FIRE! ALL SHIPS, WEAPONS FREE!”

Admiral Rizzazi yelled as he watched the plot. The X’thari swarm was fighting the newcomers from Jagloth, but that didn’t mean he could just sit back and watch. The Enemy of my Enemy was just another Enemy, but one that was potentially useful.

It was still an enemy, though.

More concerning, the X’thari and the newcomers seemed to be evenly matched. Actually, the odds were weighted slightly to the newcomers. The X’thari had more ships, but it was obvious, by the way the newcomers scythed through them, that the new ships were far more powerful. Their blue-tinged weapons decimated X’thari shields, and ripped their ships apart when they hit.

That was the scary thing. The weapons weren’t lasers, or grasers, or plasma, or grav-lances, or even kinetics. Whatever those things were, they looked like they were just disintegrating pieces of the ships they hit! Scary shit he didn’t want to be on the wrong side of.

Worse, the newcomers cemented their ‘Enemy’ status by landing infantry on the outer planets. If the reports he was getting could be believed, then it looked like their handheld weapons gave the same blue light, and if one of the beams so much as grazed you, it would start eating away your flesh, slow enough that you could still feel it and scream before you died.

And that wasn’t even counting the ones with the terrible claws, that moved like some pack of ravening beasts. They looked like the other metal skeleton creatures, except for the fact that they wore the skin of their victims as some kind of crazed fetish. Worse, they acted independently, attacking any living creature they came across. According to one planetary guard captain, it looked as though the metal men just aimed the things and let them loose, rather than trying to incorporate them into a proper attack plan.

If he didn’t blast his way through the X’thari, and take out those ships, then there wouldn’t be a population of the outer planets left for him to protect.

(Ehdara City, Ydan, Dimiya System)

“No! Stay back!”

“I don’t want to die!”

“Please, wait! Don’t hurt me!”

“Not the children! Please, just spare the children!”

“MOMMY!”

Across Ydan, the rifts into Hellspace had opened, and demons spilled out. Saying that civilians were not ready for this was an understatement. The demons hunted, raped, pillaged, burned, tortured, and committed obscenities and violations against the people of Ydan that strained belief. The horrors on display would have made even the most hardcore horror enthusiast sick to their stomachs.

Worse, still, the demons were actually competing against each other, trying to find who could conduct the most perfect torture, the most exquisite kill, the supreme violation. Each and every demon on the planet was trying to do their best in the competition. Their Pride demanded it.

We are the Gorb. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

But it was not just the demons descending upon Ydan. The Gorb descended upon the landscape through technological means. At first, the planetary guard’s weapons worked, but then an energy shield went up, adapted to the energy wavelengths that Confederate weapons used. The cybernetic soldiers marched in unison, an unstoppable tide.

Whenever that tide rolled over someone too slow to escape their clutches, they were injected with nanites. Nanites that began spreading through the blood, and converting the victim to Gorb. Linking them to the hive mind.

It was only when the Gorb met the demons of Pride that they were challenged. Apparently, they had no defense against pure, physical, hand-to-hand violence. They could adapt to slugthrowers and to energy weapons, but not to a melee.

The guardsmen didn’t care about the whys of it. They just reported it in, and shifted fire away from the demons practicing their art upon the Gorb, and focused it on those still ‘perfecting’ the people of Ydan. If they got between those two forces, then the best outcome they could hope for was a quick death. Not that either side would give it to them.

“UVUIL-HAI! ROAAAAAR!”

From the rifts came a roar of primal rage, of wrath unchecked and unchained. More demons, different from those of Pride, spilled out into the world. Each of them held cruel weapons wreathed in flame or anointed with the blood of the fallen. And every last one of them thirsted for the slaughter to come.

Bat-like ears, slitted eyes, and sharpened fangs as teeth denoted most of these demons, about the same height as a human. But there were others that stood easily three or four meters tall, and carried weapons that would be legends in their own right, if anyone lived to tell their tales. The forces of Uvuil, the Wrathlord, had arrived.

“NOT ONE STEP BACK! KILL THEM ALL!”

But they were not the only new arrivals. Riding fire and flame, and spreading the message of reevaluating one’s poor life choices to the blessed refrain of BRRRRRRT, the Black Star Marines entered the fray, all four of their main companies deploying together for the first time. And all of them bearing no shortage of weapons that would ruin even a demon’s day.

But it wasn’t enough, and everyone knew it.

(Flag Bridge, BSN Hrunting, Dimiya System)

“SHIELDS ARE DOWN TO 12% AND FALLING! HULL BREACHES ON ALL DECKS! MAIN ENGINES OFFLINE!”

Commodore Dakha turned her head to spit, because she didn’t want the blood to get on her screen. Hrunting had managed to destroy the Ihm flagship, and several other major players, besides, but she hadn’t come out of it unscathed. Even more ships had targeted Hrunting than the Ama-no-Murakumo! The Perfected really wanted her dead, and it showed.

That last attack run had been especially vicious. An explosion on the flag bridge had sent shrapnel flying, impaling her and nailing her to her command chair. It missed her most vital organs, but the medics couldn’t risk moving it, not until they had a working medbay ready to go, but the one working medbay was flooded with casualties already. So, she took stims, and carried on.

“K-keep firing. All weapons, fire as they bear.” She gasped, one lung doing the work of two, with a side helping of pain from the steel shard in her torso. “Have Tracer, Ahri, Lara Croft, and Carmen Sandiego join up, and take on that dreadnought. Signals suggest that’s the new flagship!”

“Enemy cruisers moving into attack positions!”

“S-see if any of our Four Horsemen can intercept!”

The Four Horsemen were what Second Group called their compliment of Shinokage-class cruisers, after some old Earth religious text. The joke was that if all four decided to turn their attention on a single target, the Apocalypse would be the least of their worries. But that didn’t matter right now.

“Death incoming! They’ll do a high-speed pass, to try and get as many of them without compromising defenses elsewhere.”

“Excellent. Tactical, use whatever point defense we have left to try and pave the way for them. The less Death needs to maneuver, the better.”

There was a cry of alarm from the remaining sensor station. “Commodore! We have a massive disturbance in space forming opposite Ydan from the primary Hellspace rift, and getting larger! I have no idea what it is!”

“Damn it all! Why couldn’t they just leave us with one major crisis at a time?” She took another breath. “Undamaged ships, fight your way through! An—”

Another explosion cut off that line of thinking. The communications officer looked pale at what he heard. “Plasma bolt pierced through the shields! Main bridge is open to vacuum. No response from the bridge crew.”

“Acknowledged. Prepare Last Stand protocol.”