Into the Fire Pt.III

There was something disturbingly peaceful about charging headfirst into the jaws of death. All the world around her was chaos, putrid winds battered her ship like colossal giants who were offended by their presence. Huge arcs of lighting randomly struck the at the ship’s bow and conning tower and the lights would brighten temporarily as the ship redistributed the power. It was the same eerie feeling Astarte felt whenever she stared into fire, it sent a chill up her spine and excited something deep within her. Sometimes the clouds were so thick they couldn’t see the bow, and then without warning the ship would break though and enter a vast pocket of unobstructed air.

At first it seemed like a small bubble of open air, then something within her mind clicked and she realize that they were floating through a space that could easily swallow the entirety of the Earth’s moon. It made her realize more than ever before how small she was in comparison to the vastness of the universe, she was just a mote in an infinite uncaring void, and there was something comforting about being nothing and no one. All her rage, all her scars, all her misery was nothing when compared to that. All the wrongs that had been wrought upon her were meaningless, and her vendettas were equally meaningless. There were no cosmic scales keeping track of right and wrong, no higher power holding her up to the light of impossible virtue, comparing her every fault to some perceived perfection.

She had heard that people often had revelations like this when they went on space walks, or stared at the world they had known from high above. But she had never really gotten that until today, until today the infinite blackness of space didn’t phase her, if anything the darkness felt close and comforting. But now, flying through the most dangerous place she had ever been and she began to understand why Moloch and the other devils might grow fond of Hell and all its miseries.

And then; without warning reality came back to her, and the great sense of enlightenment vanished like rain into the desert sands. She knew that she could try for the rest of her life and would never recapture that feeling, never put it adequately into words, or fully explain it to another living being. She scowled and turned to whatever had disturbed her “Can you repeat that?” she asked Karega who had apparently spoken.

He smiled nervously “Out of all the times to go space cadet on me, and you choose now?”

“I was staring into the void, now was that all you have to say?”

He regarded her curiously but pressed on “I said that since we’re not dead yet, we might as well assume that we’ll make it out of here alive and should probably pick a point to leave this death trap.”

“How long can we safely stay down here?” she asked, the further they could travel the greater the odds of their escape grew, assuming that the Kruhur hadn’t been stupid enough to follow them.

“Between one second and the end of time.” One navigator called back sarcastically; she fixed her eyes on him until he turned away in shame. She understood that they were in a very stressful situation, but that was no excuse for lip on the bridge.

An Ursiloid bridge officer cleared his throat, John was initially apart of the Virtues and had been raised on the same base as Alice and the twins, but transferred to the bridge after it became apparent that he wasn’t suited for combat despite his Grizzly bear ancestry and imposing frame. “Were pushing the upper limits of what the reactors can give us and what the stabilizers can do to keep us afloat, sooner or later one of those is going to overheat and give out.”

Astarte furrowed her brows “Which one will give out first?”

John looked back to the monitor “Core temperatures are climbing slowly, but I’d say it will be the stabilizers, they weren’t built for this kind of environment.”

She rubbed her chin as another bolt of super charged lightning hit the bow, the lights flared a bit and an idea came to her. “What happens to all that energy after the ship disperses it?” she asked.

Karega shrugged “Nothing, we disperse the power across all systems and carry on.” He then turned to her with mounting suspicion “Your not thinking-”

“- I am. We had to dump a lot of charge from the back up super capacitors right? What if we started channeling the occasional flashes into those and then drew on them to power the engines, that would give the reactors time to cool down a bit?”

“That might work, I would have to check with Heizer, but those things are designed to take any extra power generated from the reactors, so it should be fine. But that doesn’t fix the strain on the stabilizers.” He said while rubbing his chin in thought.

“We can take some of the pressure off by tilting the ship back and put more of the burden on our Ion engines. We won’t travel forward as fast, but we’ll be able to stay down here long enough to make up for the loss in speed.”

He frowned and turned to Kat, “Will that work?”

Her feline ears twitched, and she cocked her head to the side, “I think so? Instead of hovering like a harrier we’ll be kept aloft by upward momentum, it’ll be like we’re on a shallow burn to orbit like old ICBM’s. It’ll be hard as hell to manage though.”

Astarte smiled “sounds like we have a plan then, stay vigilant, it will only take one mistake or miscalculation to kill us all. Set a course towards the gas giants equator, that’s where we’ll exit and warp out. Hopefully they won’t have a ship within range to intercept.”

Her orders given everyone busied themselves with the immensely difficult work ahead of them. It had been relatively easy to begin utilizing the random lightning strikes to begin charging the Astaroth’s super capacitors, and Astarte watched with delight as the charge within the ship’s backup batteries sporadically climbed closer and closer to full. She began to wonder if she should make this standard procedure for recharging ships in the field when a rouge wind hit them along the midships and ripped a rail gun right out of its mount. Spare bullets sparkled in the air before they were quickly whisked away by the cyclonic winds, and she ordered to ship to climb a little higher.

Another bout of rouge wind hit the ship from the port side and the ship began to tilt starboard. They had some basic gyroscopic control, but not enough to resist that kind of raw power by force, so she ordered them to turn with the wind to prevent them from tipping over. For the next three hours they were at the mercy of the storm and moved which ever way the fickle winds decided, which meant that instead of traveling closer to the equator they were pushed further towards the planets ‘west’, or what they deemed as the world’s west.

She had been staring off into the void again; this time though she was just spacing out from the constant stress of the last few days, not having some sort of prophetic realization, when something strange happened. The active sensors picked up an object roughly four times the size of the Astaroth, with a high magnetic signature. Implying that what ever it was, it was metallic in nature. And then it disappeared from their sensors.

Suspicion creeped up Astarte’s spine, “Bring us about, and reduce engines to half speed.” She ordered.

Kat and Karega turned to her with puzzled looks, but obeyed her command and brought the ship about and reduced speed. Astarte watched the sensors intensely for several minutes, until the interference cleared again, and they got a second reading, same as the one before but in a totally different location, this time closer to where they had been. “They’re hunting us.” Astarte said grimly.

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“I didn’t think they would be stupid enough to follow us in” Karega mused.

“Not so stupid, lieutenant” said as she examined the sensor screen “They’re a couple kilometers above us, I think they’re just skimming the surface trying to find us.”

A third ping came in, this time almost right on top of them. Dread crawled across her skin “Evasive maneuvers, now!” she roared. Helmsman scrambled to their stations and abruptly made a hard turn, just as beams of pulse fire blasted just off their starboard side. “Engines to full!” she ordered just as a second beam of fire came down just aft of the ship. She felt herself pressed into her chair by the force of the ship’s acceleration, she was occasionally jerked left or right as the bridge crew performed random turns to keep the enemy fire from connecting.

The ship hit a dense patch of cloud and the fire stopped temporarily, but they couldn’t stay in there forever. Missiles strikes would be out of the question, the winds would easily knock them off course. And their cannons couldn’t elevate to a 180-degree angle, that only left one stupid alternative. “The next time they fire roll the ship onto her side and fire all cannons at the source.”

Bridge tech’s glanced at each other nervously, but did what they were told. The next time the enemy cruiser fired on them the ship rolled port until all her cannon were facing right up and fired. The light from the pulse cannons lit up the clouds around them, and they saw the shadowy silhouette of the enemy ship and two more smaller vessels. Their shot connected with of the smaller ships just off the cruisers side, and it burst into flames. Something about the explosion felt off to Astarte, and as the Kruhur destroyer fell into the planets core before them she saw that there wasn’t much left of it.

“There shields are down” Karega said in astonishment, coming to the same conclusion as she had.

“The power draw is probably too high to maintain down here.” Astarte mused out loud.

“How does that help us?” he asked.

“It will make killing them easier, but I don’t think that’s the right way to handle this.”

“What?” he asked in mock surprise “The mad dog of New-Mombasa doesn’t want to kill her enemies at all costs”

She glanced at him sidewise and gave him a cocky smile “Nope, I plan to do something even dumber ”

“How dumb?”

“We’re basically acting like a submarine right now, and how did subs evade their enemies?”

“You can’t be serious?’

“Deadly, they’re likely afraid to dive to deeply into the planet’s atmosphere, and set up a perimeter around where we dived. That means that every ship down here is likely rushing to where the other ships reported spotting us. If we dive down under their sensor range we might be able to escape any new perimeter they set up by back tracking.”

“You want to go deeper into the deadly atmosphere of this world and go back the way we came?”

“Its our only real shot at escaping, besides slowly destroying each and every one of them from below.”

“But Star, we’re barely able to stay in one piece as it is, going any deeper would-be suicide.”

“Not if we bring our shields online for the dive, they’ll be able to keep the crushing force off us for a little bit. We won’t be able to last long, but we might be able to stay down just long enough to get away.”

He rubbed his chin and turned to Kat “is that possible?”

“Just about everything we’ve done so far isn’t possible by normal conventions, why stop now.” She said in total bewildered exasperation.

“That’s the spirit!” Astarte said with a grin as the bridge crew readied the ship to dive even deeper.

Heizer had been under orders to get engines and FTL back online at all costs, but now they had changed their minds and ordered him to bring the ship’s shields back online. They passed the next five minutes in tense combat with the ever growing number of Kruhur above them until Heizer had the shields back online. With one parting shot at a Kruhur cruiser who had been the closest to hitting the Astaroth, they dived deeper into the gas giant. Ready for whatever new dangers it had to throw at them.

~~~*~~~

The Spear of the Divine shook as a rouge shot from the Astaroth glanced off their side. They had a harder time in finding the ship than he had initially thought since they couldn’t go nearly as deep into the planet’s atmosphere than they could. Belogahst was beginning to believe that they had designed their ship to regularly withstand such pressures, though why they would do such a thing made absolutely no sense to him. They had been very lucky to get the barest hint at their preys presence when a stray small metallic object was caught by their scanners, barley large enough to register on their scanners and it had almost been dismissed as a false contact. But a wise order from Belogahst had corrected their mistake and they got a better view of what appeared to be a mangled gun emplacement.

But just finding the elusive ship hadn’t been enough, getting a clear lock on their presence was impossible, and the random shots they had taken into their direction had been fruitless. Only when the other ships of Belogahst’s fleet had arrived to add their own scanners to the search were they able to get some halfway decent shots in. But the added presence of more ships had given Astarte new targets to hit. The destroyers couldn’t bring their shield online while within the gas giant’s atmosphere, unlike the Spear of the Divine and the other cruisers.

Just as a few other cruisers arrived to aid him the Astaroth completely disappeared once more. “Do you think we got them your holiness?” the young command aid asked optimistically.

Belogahst thought for a moment, logic dictated that surely they must have hit it at some point, or maybe one of their engine systems gave out? But this Terran captain was very clever and daring, she might have tried something completely out of the realm of normal possibility. She could have dived even deeper, which would almost certainly rip her ship apart, but just in case it didn’t “reestablish the search perimeter around this focal point, but tighten the extent of our search. We may have hit them, but until we are certain we should assume they chose to dive deeper.”

The aid bowed “Yes your holiness, but it will take some time to get the order out, the signal interference down here is too strong to reach the whole fleet.”

“That is fine” he said benevolently. He turned back to the sensor screen to watch carefully for any stray blips.

~~~*~~~

The heat within the ship had risen dramatically as the cooling systems did their best to transfer the growing reactor temps. Astarte was panting like a dog as the heat dwarfed the high heat of summers in New-Mombasa, she likely would have felt better if she removed a few pieces of her armor. But doing so felt like a sort of concession, like giving up.

The rest of the bridge were also sweating buckets over their control screens, and constantly wiping sweat off the screens. But they continued to preform their jobs with single minded determination, at their depth it would only take one mistake to doom them all. But despite the oppressive heat they weren’t dead yet, which Astarte felt was worth celebrating in itself. But that would likely give off the wrong message to the crew.

As bad as they had it on the bridge, there were parts of the ship in far worse shape. Alwen had called to inform her that these high temperatures put a lot of her patients at risk, especially the ones with fur. The deck apes had apparently stripped off their robes and were now trying to preform repairs in their underwear. And the engineering division who had it the worst had opened up all the hatches to try and let some of the ambient heat out of the engine bay so that they could continue to do their jobs. Butch had even reported that the water in the kitchen was boiling itself, though Aster thought that one might be an exaggeration.

But despite all that she didn’t dare bring the ship up even a single meter, this kind of gambit would only work once, and she had to be sure that they escaped the Kruhur search patterns.

The good news was that since the shields were up the ship was no longer being tossed about by the winds, or at least not like they were before. Gale force winds still hit the side of the ship like a derailed freight train, but with the shields in place they were no longer in danger of tipping over or losing any more gun emplacements.

They were just passing the ten-minute mark when they heard the best news she had heard all day, warp emitters were back online. Knowing that spending more time down here would have deadly consequences, and also knowing that they either escaped the Kruhur now or never, she ordered the ship to come about and set course for the outer atmosphere. Astarte knew that she wouldn’t feel any difference in pressure, and her ears wouldn’t pop with the rising of the ship, but she felt like ‘something’ about the air had changed. Like a weight had been lifted from her back.

As the ship rose out of the gas giant’s enormous gravitational pull the cooling systems were finally able to catch a break and the ship’s internal temperature dropped rapidly. Little clouds of evaporated sweat rose off of everyone’s body, and Aster knew from Bell’s endless complaining that the scent of it would linger for days since they had nowhere to send to foul smelling air within the ships sealed atmosphere.

It was a great relief when they broke through the last of the clouds off the gas giant and once again entered open space, passive sensors only reported four stray Kruhur ships circling the world at the outer edges of its atmosphere, watching for when the Astaroth made its break for freedom. But they had miscalculated, and were several hundred thousand kilometers away, only barely visible at the edges of their passive sensors. But they would notice them very soon as the Astaroth dumped heat into the surrounding space, there was no way to dump that much heat without alerting someone of their presence.

Sure enough, the four enemy ships noticed them, two dove into the gas giant to alert the rest of the fleet of their presence. The other two turned and warped right on top of the Astaroth. Astarte could have ordered the ship into warp before the enemy had seen them, but as hot as the reactors were it would be too dangerous. And besides, with their shield systems back online there was no way they would every lose to only two Kruhur destroyers. The ship went into condition four and the helmsman and gunnery officers all smiled at the prospect of letting out some of their stress on these poor Kruhur.

The first shots from the Kruhur harmlessly broke against their shields and the ship came about and showed them their port flank, and all the guns that had been aimed that way and were waiting to tear into the enemy. The Astaroth lurched forward and roared into battle once more, the two destroyers split, and Kat maneuvered the ship along one their open flanks. All nine pulse cannons opened fire on the longest side of the nearest ship, each barrel glowing cherry red from the heat of the sustained shot. The ship lasted four seconds against the Astaroth’s full fury before its shields broke and a volley of Bodkin missiles hit along the enemy midship. It burst into a glorious fireball just as the sensors reported many enemy signals rising out of the gas giant.

Knowing that it was only a matter of time before the rest of the enemy fleet escaped the planet’s high gravity well and charged towards them, and also knowing that the main guns weren’t ready to fire again, Astarte said something she had wanted to say for a very long time “Ramming speed!”

Kat cackled with delight as they swung the bow around and pointed it dead onto the destroyer’s flank. Ions went to full and once again everyone was pressed back into their seats, and the poor unsuspecting ship which had only just come about to reengage the Astaroth was hit right at its thinnest point. The shields held for a bit, but the kinetic force behind the Astaroth was far too great for them to withstand. They broke apart like dry reeds and the enemy wake distortion field vanished.

They redirected the ship’s now dented bow, and went to warp just milliseconds before the first Kruhur ships jumped to where they had been.