Last Flight of the Kithrasain
Last Flight of the Kithrasain
There's just something endemically frustrating about vectored thrust and interstellar combat, thought the commander of the Kithrasain as it rolled through a ponderous two-G downward port turn to avoid the incoming missiles of the enemy corvette. Too slow by far without something tangible to thrust against, such as an atmosphere. Gravitics would be far better suited for their current situation, the newer pulse gravitics even better. Alas the Kith was limited to a centuries old design using inertial compensation as vectoring, which made her painfully sluggish in realspace.
Terrifyingly sluggish in realspace _ combat _.
The only saving grace about the whole situation was their opponent; an ancient medium corvette, which still used chemical thrust vectoring, making her even slower and more ponderous than the Kith, which was barely a third her size. Unfortunately, the Kith's weapon batteries were far from optimal, and her torpedo bays had been knocked offline by the enemy's first salvo, whereas the Thyrrian corvette had more weapons than six ships of the Kith's class. These were mass-driven weapons primarily, with a well known ordinance loadout, so the Kith knew how much the enemy had left to assault them with.
Far more than they really needed to vaporize the Kith several times over.
This realization did not sit well with the commander of the Kith, one Tsoin T'sye, the first vulpine ever to achieve the seat of starship commander. Admittedly the ship he had been given to command was little more than a scow given firepower. Millennia old, outclassed by almost everything in space less than a thousand years old. That the tiny scout ship was still operation was a wonder, operational to the degree that Tsoin and his crew had gotten it was a pure miracle.
That was his way, one of the sterling traits that had raised him into his present command. Striking and unique even among his own species, he had been graced with many talents that hade him stand out in review. His deep blue fur made him stand out in any crowd, often to his detriment. Old school taught that any mutation was anathema, no matter how advantageous the mutation, or how well the recipient of that mutation fit into their society. Tsoin often thought them blind fools, forgetting their own history. It was mutation that separated them from their oppressors seven millennia in the past. Self induced mutations born of a desire to break with the cold conformity of that forgotten and ignored society; humanity.
Indeed, so subjugated was the crucible of their creation that the very location of the world where they had been borne was forgotten, buried deep in the ancient databases on Vinatri Primus.
Tsoin had striven to rise above their hatred and succeeded. It was pure politics that locked him in his current post, but not so cold that he did not have silent supporters out there who did move to see that he got his Captains' Comet, and a ship. A rickety old scow, with one of the weakest crews in the Hyperways. By one means or another, Tsoin rid himself of the malcontents who despaired any authority, the destructive mental misfits who caused the Kith to be such a sorry protector of the Hyperways.
Indeed, her past captain, made his lieutenant, had been party to the predations of piracy along the Magiree pathways. The fellow had been lieutenant for the duration of a single run, whereupon he was turned over, with almost a third of the Kith's old crew. That had proved to be the strata hiding the true gem of the Kith's heart; the remainder of the crew, subjugated by a far more powerful master, now released. After that tumultuous incident, the Kith and her crew, unaugmented, had been sent to the very fringes of the Syr Federation, to watch the darkness for Thyrrian raiders.
Which they had found.
Yet this was not the Kithrasain sent into the shadows to escape the newsfeeds. This ship, with a strong, motivated crew rife with amazing skill, was far stronger, faster, and cleaner than she had been in almost a century. A pride to her crew, her crew a pride to their uncommon commander.
It was here, now, that their skills were put to the ultimate test.
They had detected a large convoy of ships skirting the edge of the contested frontier and slipped in to investigate, emerging on the dark side of a gas giant to scout the strength of the Thyrrian convoy. Much to their surprise they had stumbled across nothing more than a supply convoy. That the convoy had penetrated so far into contested space hinted that a major offensive had already secured the area. Somehow the Thyrrians had slipped through the defense line, or obliterated it so fast no messages made it back to command. As the Kith was turning about to fold back into slipspace, a broadside salvo from a ship hiding down within the planet's atmosphere struck them, making a shambles of their fold matrix and sending them spinning off into space.
They had recovered swiftly enough, with only minor damage, bringing their shields up and charging the weapons batteries. This was a fight to the death, and Tsoin only hoped it was not their own. Skirting into a dense asteroid belt, they attempted to outrun the corvette before reinforcements arrived, but none ever did. The commander of the escort believed the corvette could handle a small scout ship and had led the convoy onward, folding into slipspace at a predetermined fold point. Only the bloodied Kith and her opponent remained in the small planetary system to slaughter one another.
Missiles traced bright pathways through space as they closed on the slowly rolling scout ship. Bright flares pinpointed asteroid interception, or the shot of a sharp-eyed countermeasure gunner. The distortion waves of the Kith's thrusters caused still more to bobble on approach and streak by just beyond her shields. Several managed to score on the tough shields of the scout ship, causing bright grey flares of dissipated energy and a spike in the dynamo readouts as some of it was absorbed.
"Twenty degree starboard ascent," Tsoin growled at the helmsmaster, a young female wolf witnessing her first battle. She seemed oblivious to the death raining about them, performing her commander's orders with the same calm finesse she always worked with, as if this was no more than another drill. The only difference being that she was forced to brace against those same maneuvers, for internal gravity was deactivated to afford the weapons more energy, "Bring port and belly batteries into line. Weapons! What's our status?"
A deep, feline rumbling reached his ears, almost too deep to understand, "Deck and starboard weapons at twenty percent reserves," the elder puma growled, his dark tail switching side to side behind his command module, "Belly and port recharged to seventy-eight percent."
"Torpedos?" Tsoin grabbed the arms of his command seat as one and a half gee's pushed him firmly to one side and back into it.
"Still offline, captain." the feline's broad, bluntly clawed hands rattled across his control display like the fingers of a talented musician across the board of an instrument, "All control links were severed by the opening salvo."
"Any lines of communication open at all?"
"Personal communicators only, captain."
"Is anyone still there to answer?"
"Status displays show all personnel at their stations. Shrf Lan is in command, torpedo bay two."
"The mouse? Khust. Communications! Give me his channel!" The mouse. An angry little mouse, whose skills were hidden so deep within a defense of belligerence Tsoin had almost tossed him off with the old captain. Only the assurances of skill from the mouse's fellow crewmates had swayed Tsoin into deciding to give him a second chance.
"Aye, sir." chirped the squirrel at the communications panel, his tail a twitching blur above the back of his chair as he worked. Smoke curled up from the corner of his control display, the unfortunate main victim of the Thyrrian's opening salvo. All communications, intership, interspatial, and slipspacial , were severed instantly, as if the enemy knew exactly where to aim. Tsoin growled, lips pulling back from clean teeth that gleamed blue-white in the alert lights. It was not like the schematics of the Kith's ship-type were not readily available to every sentient organization that desired them; the ship was over three millennia old after all. "Apologies, sir, personal communications has been scrambled by battle interference."
"Battle interference? Jut-Khust!" Tsoin cursed sharply, baring his teeth, "You go down there then, and tell them that they have autonomous fire control."
"Sir?" it was a startling breech of command and control. Regulations forbade giving autonomous control, because of compounding errors in targeting, especially in a heated battle among many ships.
"Do it! It's just us and them, us or them!" he waved a slender hand at the enemy ship as it turned slowly in space seventy kilometers to starboard, another wave of missiles blossoming from its hull.
"Aye, sir!" the squirrel unbuckled his restraint harness and shot across the floor with the speed and agility of his wild ancestors, seeming to ignore the gravity switches, zipping through the door almost before his last statement reached the fox's sharp ears.
"Navigation, how are you coming with that fold matrix?" he asked with deceptive calm as missiles detonated all around them, "Weapons, target and fire whenever you desire." He waved his hand imploringly at the back of the puma's console.
"Aye, captain, two salvos already away." the puma reported. Tsoin looked to the main status display as one, then a second flurry of bright stars of matrixed energy grew on the forward weapons panes and lept at the corvette. Between them missiles flared and died, but the energy continued straight on their course, vaporizing missile and asteroid alike. The Kith was lucky and unlucky at the same time due to their weaponry. Her opponent was using primarily mass-driven weaponry, which would affect their maneuverability each time they fired. The Kith used energy weapons, a modern addition, but to do so drew prodigious amounts of energy from the dynamos deep within her core.
"Vuhn, commannah!" swore the navigation officer, bent over her panel as if begging it to produce the delicate and complicated matrix of energies required to fold into slipspace, "Wi'd all o' dis akshun duh energies kollapz b'fore duh web get a chan t' fom!"
"Keep trying." Tsoin sighed as he leaned back in his seat and watched their salvos flare into extinction on the opponent's shields, "Weapons?"
"No penetration sir." reported the puma, "Enemy shields at forty percent. She's rolling to port to give us those shields to chew on."
"Tactical? What's her status?"
The tall, slender marten straightened from his examination of the battle chart, adopting a rigid pose of attention before speaking in a cultured voice, "The Thyrrian vessel has expended three percent of known ordinance load out. Sensors indicate her core is at one hundred seven percent of capacity. She's not burning energy weapons, Sir." Tsoin nodded, turning his attention away from the aristocratic marten, who would continue to hold his rigid pose control until told to relax, though he did turn his attention back to his display. Tsoin was trying to loosen the fellow's iron rigid formality, by whatever means necessary.
Energy pounded the shields of the corvette as she rolled, bearing her weakened shields away and exposing fresh ones, as well as fresh ordinance bays, which immediately spat out their load. Tsoin lost count of the fresh flurry of incoming missiles, staring in horror as their approach contrails entirely blotted out the ship. The corvette was not pulling her punches any more.
"Thirty degrees ascent!" he howled as the asteroids between them and their enemy began vanishing in bright globes of destruction. He quailed at the slow turning of the Kith, the swarming field of missiles dropping below the main status display as if in slow motion. He felt the three gee's of force pushing him back and down into his seat, squeezing the breath from his lungs, but the maneuver did not seem to register in the space beyond. The ship shuddered repeatedly as missiles hammered her.
"Status!" he yelped in a strained voice as he held the arms of his seat in a death grip. Immediately the marten piped up, his normally solid voice shrill as he howled over the drumming roar that echoed through the ship and the strain of battling g-forces.
"Shields holding, no penetration! Sixty percent of salvo evaded or countered."
"Return fire, by the stars!"
"On the waaay!" roared the weapons master, "Torpedoes away!" Tsoin pulled his gaze up to the tracking status to see the corvette lining up to pursue again, turning ponderously under the bright columns of light erupting from her thrusters. Six blinding white contrails streaked away from the Kith as all three torpedo bays fired at once, the torpedoes drawing slowly together as they neared the enemy. Tsoin identified the closing as a tandem targeting program, which might actually penetrate the fresh shields of the corvette's near side.
He howled in dismay, echoed by the rest of the bridge crew, when the torpedoes streaked right past the corvette, missing by a wide margin. The energies of the Kith's starboard batteries hammered at the corvette's shields, but had little effect.
"Zero degree ascent." he ordered as the corvette began turning into their path, "Ten degrees to port. Weapons, how are..." the statement died in his throat as the corvette lurched, its stern rising as she performed a slow end over end, spraying fiery debris into space behind her. She was standing on her nose in relation to the Kith when she finally came apart, bright fiery light racing along widening breaches in her hull seconds before a bright globe of annihilation ripped her to pieces. There were no escape pods in evidence.
"Penetration, sir." reported the weapons master with a startled whisper into the silence that settled through the bridge, "On her weak side. Impact by all torpedoes." They had looped around, targeted on a weakened portion of the corvette. Tsoin had never before seen that done, indeed, he had never before seen torpedoes steer to such a degree until that victorious moment.
"Give that rodent a medal." he breathed, and cheers erupted through the bridge.
"Emergence!" howled the navigator, who was the only one with the instruments capable of detecting objects in slipspace. The bridge silenced as all eyes turned toward the slender feline bent close to the navigation control panel, "Kontakt bearin' fourty d'grees b' ten, twenty laht secons!" All eyes turned toward the main display which clicked onto that region of space. Weapons were targeted. In the distance a sudden flash revealed the emergence of the incoming missile, from the direction of the departed convoy. "Mo' on duh way! Fo kontakts seventy d'grees b' fifteen at a twenty secons! Two kontakts one-ten by seven, fifteen-secons!"
"Targeting pulses, Captain." Reported weapons.
Slipmissiles. Tsoin cursed inwardly. One of the larger of the convoy's support craft had not waited to hear weather their corvette had been victorious or not. It would be minutes yet for communications signals to reach the convoy, and hours for light monitors to detect the outcome of the battle. "Do you have a fold matrix??" Tsoin howled, almost jumping down from his seat before the restraint harness yanked him back down.
"No! Energy fluktuationz r' destbarizing everting!" the navigator yowled, tail tucked between her legs, claws scraping shrilly across the textured steel flooring.
"Helm, slap us around! Get us out of their targeting cone! Weapons, projectile countermeasures only, we have to let up on the energy drain!" Tsoin was hammered against the side of his seat as the Kith executed a ponderous endover snap roll that had her speeding away some hundred degrees reverse of her previous path. A black ripple appeared in space almost directly before the ship's nose, echoed a second later when the missile slipped again, having made its targeting sweep somewhere out at two light seconds. "How many more contacts?"
"Ten! Fo on bearin' two-ten b' one hunerd, two bearin' seventy b' ninety-tree, tree bearing zero b' zero, five secons! Evade, evade!" her voice rose to a shrill yowl as she realized the proximity of the lethal ordinance closing like a globe of death upon the Kith.
Tsoin hung onto the arms of his chair and desperately stared at the displays all around as they flared and darkened, the ship yawing first one way, then rolling suddenly another like a small boat on an angry sea. The wolf at the helm had taken to giggling darkly to herself as she jerked the ship around in maneuvers far more intense than its designers had expected. Torpedoes and mass accelerators spat their loads into the cold void as stars blossomed and died around them. Three missiles in close formation shot past so close they left illumination burns on the external sensors. The Kithrasain shrieked and groaned as her internal structure felt the strain of the maneuvers.
The fur on the back of Tsoin's neck stood on end as he watched the chaos unfolding just beyond the metal and ceramic hull of his ship, conveyed to him through the sensors there. There was no direct view of space from the bridge, only the defensive batteries were afforded that luxury. All of the assorted bridge crew sat in their stations mutely, unable to do anything further to aid the plight of their ship. Only the female wolf manically twisting the ship through complicated maneuver after maneuver to avoid the swirling flock of missiles orbiting the Kith.
One by one the missiles made their targeting passes, missed by a margin measured in meters instead of kilometers, and folded back into slipspace with dark distortion ripples. They knew the chances were high that the missiles would re-emerge at a distance that would allow them to reacquire the Kith and make still more attack runs. It would only be a matter of time before all the missiles either ran out of power, were destroyed by countermeasures, or hit them.
The attentions of the bridge crew turned to the ordinance stats displayed upon the main screen at the head of the bridge, watching as those very countermeasure batteries bled to zero one after another. Unfortunately, their weapons ran out before they were out of targets.
"Energy?" Tsoin asked into the hush, his voice flat.
"Dynamos're at eighty-three percent." Came the response, just as leaden as his own, "Maneuvering thrusters are weighing heavily on what they are pushing out, sir."
"Prepare for evacuation. Bring up the laser batteries, if you think we can handle the drain." Tsoin tabbed the escape pod release code into his command console, yellow strobe lights flickering to life around the bridge over pod entry points. Perhaps they could actually escape this situation, but if not, he was going to at least give his crew a chance to get away. Anything smaller than a cargo-tug would go unnoticed by the missiles. "I'll take over weapons, Chul. Erri hold the helm. Everyone else to your escape units." The puma nodded slowly and slaved his weapons to the command console. Navigation and ships systems followed as the bridge crew rose as a group. At that single moment Tsoin felt more pride for them than he had at any point previous. Though he allowed the rigid order of his ship to relax somewhat during regular operations, there was always the underlying discipline. It was suddenly displayed among his crew as they rose as a single, fluid unit and made for their escape pods without incident. Only the wild shifting of the deck beneath their paws caused them awkwardness.
"Stars guide your trail, captain." The stoic Marten intoned quietly as he made his way to his escape pod, sketching a brief, jaunty salute before disappearing. Ships' systems showed similar activities elsewhere aboard the ship as nonessential crew evacuated. Only the laser turrets and torpedo bays still showed activity. Tsoin watched the power drain climb as the laser batteries opened fire on the swarm of incoming missiles. The Kith yawed into an amazing five-g turn, pushing Tsoin deep into his command pod, squeezing the breath out of his lungs. His tail gained sudden weight, falling heavily against the back of his console as he braced. Over at the helm the female wolf, Erri, dug one hand into the side of her seat, the other still hammering commands upon her console. He was not sure which would rip them apart first; the missiles, or her maneuvers. He would much rather it was her.
The sudden, ear splitting roar that filled the ship told him the truth of his suppositions. A missile had found its way through her maneuvers and the Kith's lasers, scoring a direct hit. The Kith rolled even harder, throwing Erri bodily from her console to slide across the deck, her claws shrilling upon the metal as she cursed obscenities in her native language. Tsoin slapped the evac release and a series of smaller shudders rolled through the ship, utterly lost under the bone-numbing rumble of the missile explosion. Those evacuation pods that were occupied immediately separated from the doomed scout ship, thrust out into the cold vacuum of space at fourteen gees, before any forces imparted by their maneuvers. With each pod went a situation recording, which would illustrate the last, fateful moments of the valiant Kithrasain.
Tsoin's innards roiled as the gravitational influences imparted by the dynamos fluctuated for a moment, then died. Normally the three gravitational dynamos which powered the ship were harmonized to one another so that their natural forces would not tear the ship asunder. The impact of the missile had blown a gaping hole amidships, gutting her at crew and hydroponics levels. One of the dynamos went hurtling away from the ship, tearing itself to shreds as it broke loose from its resonators. Without the counterbalancing of the third dynamo the other two would quickly overload and go into harmonic breakdown. They would finish the job of the missile, of in a somewhat more protracted manner. Tsoin held onto the edge of his console tightly and checked the ship's systems. He let out a short sigh when he noticed the remaining survivors making for their escape pods and using them. He glanced up toward Erri, clutching the edge of Navigation and watching him with wide amber eyes. Her dark grey fur was damp with sweat, her uniform rumpled, cut at the hip in her slide across the deck.
"It's over." He said as he unclasped his restraint harness, "Go. Stars guide your path, Erri." He stood as best he could and saluted her. He knew that, if she survived, her actions would be honored and praised for years. Even implemented into the training of pilots as well.
If.
Erri returned his salute silently and then gave him a deep bow of respect, which was a high honor in her native culture, before spinning and vanishing into the dark maw of her escape pod. He saw the final flash of her grey-tipped tail as the hatch closed and he made his way up to his.
Thirty light seconds out from their position, a dark ripple rent space and the huge, grey silhouette of a heavy cruiser emerged into realspace. It sat there, motionless, for another forty seconds, then vanished again with another dark slipspace ripple. Almost at the same instant another ripple bloomed much, much closer to the scintillating remains of the Kithrasain, turning slowly in space as escape pods hurtled off into space in all directions. Once a safe distance away, mini-thrusters on the pods kicked in and began directing them toward one another.
Tsoin noticed none of this as he climbed up the ladder to his launch, the hatch hissing quickly shut behind him. As the metal disk set into place with a heavy thunk the lights in the bridge winked out, blackness filling the displays like a wave moving outward from his command seat.
Tsoin rued the day he had accepted command on the Kithrasain, though it was the only command he was ever likely to get at his age, or because of his species. Vulpins were considered loners; good assassins or reconnaissance soldiers, but never command officers. As well, Tsoin was a mutant even among the Vulpin kind, lacking the black or russet of his kind. His pelt was a striking shade of sky-blue, lacking the dark gloves and tailtip of his cousins. This highly visible aspect of his genesis made him an easy mark for ridicule and disrespect.
Through this he fought to get into the Starcorps, to fight above the low positions his superiors fixed to him because of his visible shortcoming without realizing the merit of the mind under that blue coat. Eventually, on merit alone, he won a coveted position into the officers' citadel by demanding a hearing before the Council of Officers. His marks were equal or superior to those whom were granted commissions, thus it was his right to be awarded the same, no matter if he was different.
From there he spent almost an entire decade at the feet of commanders both noteworthy and idiotic, learning the ways and means of the great ships and lesser. He rose in rank slowly, only when the computers that tracked meritorious conduct demanded that he be granted rank; never by the decree of his peers, who saw him as a distinct oddity among his Vulpin kin and in the officers' ranks.
Those under his command quickly saw past his appearance, realizing him for a commander both empathic to them, and very well versed in the tasks he was served, and through him, they were served. Indeed, most of the Kith's crew, both command and enlisted, followed him to the small, ancient scoutship. A few were 'problem cases'; the Kith seen as a convenient dumping place for them, as well as a way to snub the fox that had risen to such a valued position in the Starcorps.
The mouse, Shrf Lan, was one such. He had come to the Kithrasain as a quietly frustrated ensign whom had caused trouble on the ships he had crewed in the past. They were too restrictive for him or his acute mental focus on his tasks. Tsoin quickly found that, where he was put, he did a masterful job, but always seemed to foster some tiny seed of resentment to his superiors. With some work, making visible merits of the mouse's accomplishments, and respect for his skills, Tsoin won Shrf's respect and amazing loyalty.
Tsoin earnestly hoped that he mouse's genius with the torpedoes would not be forgotten, lost here in the cold vacuum of space with the demise of a small scout ship pushed to the outer fringes by those in high command who feared the ambition of the small ship's captain.
Tsoin struggled his way up to the command seat of his launch and dropped into it heavily, barely managing to slot his tail through the back of the seat before a lurch slammed him down into the resilient g-foam. His ship was not truly an escape module, but a small skiff capable of folding into slipspace. The captain's launch was normally used to shuttle from ship to ship while away from planetary orbit, or convey officers from one command to another. It was equipped as an escape unit as well, with linkage ports on its hull to couple with the docking locks of the smaller personnel modules. After an evacuation the smaller escape pods would come together and link up to share power, communications, life support, and thrust until a search-and-rescue vessel arrived to pick them up. With luck, the captain's launch would be available to link up with them, using its foldspace drive to take them to a safe haven all the sooner.
The fox looked up from pulling on his restraint harness when a flash caught his attention from the forward holographic display. A whispy globe of gasses and fire expanded in the dark void ahead, quickly vanishing in the vacuum of space. The artificially enhanced trace of laser brightness lanced from off-screen, striking an unseen target and another globe silently expanded against the stars. Tsoin barked in shock and dismay as he checked his nearspace scanners and spotted the cruiser sitting motionless in space some five hundred kilometers away from the Kithrasain, its turrets training on the defenseless escape pods and burning them from existence one by one no matter how futilely they evaded.
He slapped the uncouple tab with a fist and the small launch bucked as its physical locks disengaged. The disorienting gravitic chaos and vibrations of the dying Kith vanished immediately as the launch was released from its physical connections. Only magnetic proximity locks held him in place now. He jerked his restraint harness tight, his teeth gleaming in the dim white glare from the displays. The foldspace matrix was in place around his launch, its power in the green. He regretted the fact that the matrix was too small to encompass the dying Kithrasain. With a single poke from one claw-tipped finger, he disengaged the magnetic couplings.
Immediately the launch pitched away from the vibrating scout ship, but there was no drive. Tsoin did not want the cruiser to realize his launch was free, or even there, for that matter. Attitude jets turned him toward the cruiser, his view of the killing slewing off-screen. In the foreground the Kith shuddered, bits of her hull tumbling off into space, trailed by comets of flame. She was not long for this existence.
Nor was he, the fox thought, as his hand came down on the initiate tab on his command module.
Immediately the launch bucked, throwing Tsoin against his restraints with a startled gasp. Fold entry did not buck. The screen went white, then black, and he could barely feel the acceleration bearing him toward the cruiser. He knew he would never notice when his ship emerged from slipspace somewhere deep within the bowels of the cruiser; the destruction would be that immediate.
From their respective viewports, those that had escaped the destruction of their ship watched the slow, methodic destruction of their comrades by the massive cruiser, visible to the naked eye despite its distance from them. The Kithrasain was a slowly tumbling glare of escaping energies, the captain's launch still affixed to the hull above the bridge. Erri turned her escape pod, which was the closest to the doomed ship. She knew that her incident recorders were still active. She wanted everyone to see the final moments of the Kithrasian, and the murderous cruiser beyond her.
Suddenly the Kithrasain lurched, her bow angling away from her stern as a bright globe of destruction bloomed amidships, her dynamos finally giving up their last dregs of contained energy in one final salute to annihilation. In the same instant the dark ripple of a foldspace drive activating washed across the expanding globe of blinding death, distorting its spherical perfection. Erri watched in some confusion as a series of flat, circular distortion ripples spawned in the space between the Kith and the cruiser as if a slipmissile were entering and dropping out of slipspace in a distance of a few kilometers, leaving a wake of foldspace distortions.
The trail of circular distortions intercepted the cruiser less than a second later, and Erri knew that whatever it was had scored a hit, for the shields never flared to reveal interception. The slipspace weapon had been beyond realspace during the instant it took to move within the shield's radius. Nothing immediate seemed to happen; it took a great deal more than one slipmissile to make a cruiser take notice.
But this was more than a mere slipmissile, and the cruiser did take notice soon enough as the deadly lasers ceased their murderous rampage. Two minutes later a few bright puffs spat from the hull as escape pods were jettisoned, but it was apparent that they were too few, too late. The huge ship fell inward upon itself as its containment systems failed. The one shortcoming of gravitic propulsion was the fact that, once unleashed, there was nothing that could stop a cascading failure which drew the ship in on itself until it reached some point of stability or critical mass.
With a ship this big, the effect would be a critical mass point, which it reached some three minutes after the foldspace wake reached it. Several thin, dim spheres of fire blossomed silently from the hull of the doomed cruiser as she collapsed inward. Erri gritted her teeth as she came to realize the extent of the destruction that monster would cause when it finally went.
The cruiser's escape pods vanished in the blinding, blue-white globe that ended her existence in the span of a single breath. A shockwave radiated outward from the cruiser's gravitational axis, which displayed as a slightly off-angled circle to Erri and those nearest her. For three seconds the wolf watched the silent ring radiate outward at fractional C, the bright nimbus of ionized energies growing steadily more intense as the expelled energies closed on her vulnerable, miniscule escape pod. A roar grew slowly, reaching deafening proportions as the shockwave reached Erri's diminutive shelter. She clutched her ears as the pod tumbled in the energies released by the supermassive vessel's demise. For the first time since the enemy scout had ambushed them from the atmosphere of the gas giant almost an hour past, she was afraid for her life.
She did not realize until long after everything had stilled and she regrouped with the survivors of the Kithrasian that the foldspace missile that had saved her and her crewmates had been the captain's launch.
She mourned then. They all mourned.