When I regained consciousness I was over Kel’s shoulders as he sprinted down the corridor, effortlessly, next to Caleb and Chyrkrady. I attempted to move but Kel instructed me to hold on, insisting it was faster this way.
We came to the end of the corridor and into the central Under-Hub, the heart of the station. I heard Chyrkrady gasp as we all saw it: a full third of the Hub sheared away, where there should be a billion tons of station, only empty space.
The Containment-Fields had booted up, so at least we weren’t venting atmosphere through that massive hole.
Kel set me down and ran over to assist those who had just experienced their own unplanned spacewalk. The last of the tethered rescuers were returning, often unconscious along with their saved cargo.
By now most were in EV suits, either attempting to revive those recently retrieved, or headed into the abyss to save whom they could.
Kel had almost crossed the threshold when Chyrkrady stopped him. “Thirkle! I need you here right now. We need to figure out what is going on! We need to reach The Admiral!”
I saw Kel turn to Chyrkrady, for a moment I thought he would strike him. But then he turned in a circle, hands pressed against the fur on his head.
I recalled at that moment that Humans were known to be a very emotional creature. Prone to irrationality. In a situation like this, Kel’s reaction was to save as many as he could, despite the fact that he, with his particular knowledge and experience, was clearly of greater importance than any individual he might save here. Had Chyrkrady not been there to remind him of that obvious fact, I don’t know if we’d ever have seen him again.
“Thirkle, I know how this feels, but we have to find The Admiral. We are of greater use elsewhere” Chyrkrady said, laying his foreleg along the shoulders of the now-squatting Kel. This gesture seemed to placate him, as the bared teeth and clenched fists relented to a marginally less frightening demeanor.
“Admiral Preyl, do you copy?” Chyrkrady said into his comms. “Admiral Preyl, the station has sustained massive structural damage, requesting status update. Repeat, requesting status upda—“
“—ezvous at Bay 13. I repeat, rendezvous at Bay 13.” The Admiral’s voice fizzled through. “Station is under assault from Hegemony Armada.”
“Those fucking Lizards!” Kel screamed over the commotion.
“Come,” Chyrkrady said to us. “we must join the Admiral—“ he looked Kel directly in eyes. “—then we will give those fucking Lizards what’s coming to them, I swear it.”
Once again this seemed sufficient to calm Kel, and we hustled through the chaotic mess of wounded and panicked. I wondered what was happening in the civilian districts above us—of any remained that is. I had few connections on the station. My only acquaintances were here in my immediate company. But there were countless families and networks aboard The Hands, thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—had just lost all dear to them.
It was just as we entered the corridor that we felt it. The unmistakable push from the wash of a Gravity Torsion Beam, the one that had just ripped though the main hub, and then we felt the next, and the next.
Thrown to the floor by gravitic aftershocks, Kel once again had me up on his shoulders as we ran. I saw him shoot Chyrkrady an alarmed look, Chyrkrady’s silent response a face screaming ‘I don’t know’.
Words were unnecessary, I knew what they were thinking, I was thinking it too.
The Torsion Beam.
Beams, plural.
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How?
How had The Hegemony managed to hit the Station with three in such rapid succession, not to mention the countless others that we must’ve felt earlier?
The tech had been around of ages of course, but it had never been easy. Warping the very fabric of cosmos and then storing that writhing knot of spacetime until you decided in which undesirable direction to send its unstoppable fury, required truly astronomical amounts of power.
So much so, that in the entirety of The Collective’s recorded history, such a Beam had only been utilized on 36 distinct occasions.
It was a precision weapon. For high value targets too heavily shielded to yield to anything less.
Glassing the entire continent of an unruly world. A full session of parliament in one of The Collective’s subterranean bunkers. The stabilizing core of one of The Hegemony’s Jump-Gates. Things like that.
Not for multiple strikes against a single station like The Hands.
Yet here we were, in conflict with an upgraded Hegemony, one that apparently thought nothing of casually slinging spears of pure gravity at its opponents. I was a diplomat, not a military tactician, but even I knew that this was a decidedly bad development…
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Sometime later we came to a juncture. After a left at this intersection we need only make our way down the expansive corridor, through the two sets of blast doors, and we’d arrive at our salvation. We rounded that final corner, just as Admiral Preyl and two dozen of her escorts arrived. Ever since leaving the Hub we had been traveling in the opposite direction of all others we came across, and by the time we met up with The Admiral we were the only ones in sight. Our two groups coalesced into one without a word spoken.
“Admiral, bay 13 is just ahead.” one of the escorts said. “I have word from General Halker that Obsidian Squadron is waiting for us there.”
“Excellent Sergeant,” The Admiral said. “any word on the remaining stealth fleet?”
“Yes Admiral, The General reports that they have begun engaging The Hegemony Armada with great success, however, he says that they are simply too few to cause any significant damage at this time. Additionally, both Ruby Squadron and Iron Squadron are KIA. They were in the direct path of the initial Torsion Beam volley.”
“Dammit.” The Admiral sighed. “Tell him we are 5 minutes out.”
“Yes Admiral.”
“And tell him to get as much of that fleet clear of the station as he can. We don’t know how many more Torsion volleys to expect, but if The Heg has even a quarter remaining of what they’ve already shown, then that stealth fleet is the only chance anyone has of getting out of here.”
I’ve always been something of a nervous talker, and, situation such that it was, in that moment I saw fit to provide unsolicited input of my own,
“Admiral, sir.” I said. “We haven’t felt any more gravitic reverb for over 50 MicroCycles, perhaps The Hegemony Armada has exhausted whatever supply they arrived wi—”
I don’t know if fate just has a morbid sense of irony, or if I have the worst timing in the universe, but just then another volley tore apart the corridor in which we had been standing. Fortunately we were now deep in the belly of the station, with many stories of corridor and ductwork and laboratory and barracks above and below us, so the disintegrating walls merely gave way to more corridor, rather than ejecting us into space.
The wash from the Beams threw us against the walls-turned-rubble even as the floor disappeared beneath us. The Beam entered at an angle approximately 70° off of vertical relative to the station’s gravity, so even if the puncture had been a gaping tunnel, there wasn’t any risk of falling down and out into the void.
As it were, the ensuing structural buckling from that angle of fire made thoroughfare impossible for anything other than atmosphere, and with the station’s S-tier rated recycling capabilities, even the air loss from a Cruiser sized hole in the hull wouldn’t’ve outpaced production. And with the automated Containment Field Generators booting up, the whole issue would soon be moot anyway.
The pressing concern, other than the obvious structural damage caused from those violent incisions, was the damage to whatever those Beams had been targeting. Most likely the drive reactors and armaments.
The station was being crippled, hobbled, so that no escape was possible. We needed to get to bay 13, urgently.
It was with this urgency that i picked myself up from the rubble. I had been thrown quite a distance down into the path cut by The Hegemony’s shot. There was an alarm wailing, different than the one from before. Scrambling over the talus I moved toward the light from the corridor above in which I had just been standing with my fellows.
Scrambling over a ledge made of something that looked like it used to be a blast door, I reached up, grabbing a piece of debris to pull myself over, and came face to face with the Sergeant—or rather the left half of his face.
He had been bisected vertically I saw as I recoiled in horror. The debris I had used to hoist myself up was his mangled leg. I wretched as an intense vertigo overcame me. I had never seen death before, not really, not up close. The Sergeant’s remaining eye was cold and lifeless and I sat there staring into it, transfixed.
It was only when that irregular wailing alarm grew suddenly louder that I snapped back to my present situation.
In a flash I was up and scrambling toward the rim of the pit. I remember the thought going through my head that The Sergeant’s death must have been instant, the Beam simply unmaking the entire right half of his body as it passed effortlessly through it, and everything else in its path. I found that even in my shock at having had my first taste of death, I was able to take solace in the fact that it hadn’t been worse.
It was only after I pulled myself over the rim, back into the hallway with everyone else, that I learned that it had been worse.
The irregular wailing that I had believed an alarm was Kel. He was hunched over, cradling a body, a Human body.
Caleb had been in the path of the Torsion Beam.