Warlord's Invasion (Starfight Book 1) (25 page)

The two combatants smashed into each other. They slashed their swords in varying degrees, trying to cut the opponent's sword at the right angle. The blades clashed and electricity sparkled. Then, when the two disengaged, they tilted their swords towards each other. It was like a medieval combat scene, as the two parried each other's thrust. 

This all happened so fast—so fast that before Huang could even retrieve his own sword, the battle in front of him was decided.

The unarmored Cat had pierced its opponent’s armor easily with its mono-blade, right through the armored marine's abdomen. The marine screamed in pain, before the Cat sliced its sword upwards from where it had entered, literally carving its opponent in two.

Then, the Cat glared at Captain Huang.

Huang could have sworn it was grinning in the darkness as seen through his helmet's night sensors. The Cats could see in the dark without visual apparatus, Huang concluded.

The Cat launched at Huang, who’d already leveled out his sword high above his head in attack position. This is it, thought Huang, glaring at his enemy through his helmet's sensors. This is how my life will be decided!

His next thoughts happened as if in slow motion. Huang knew he wasn’t a skilled fencer. He’d never passed the class at marine academy. He only knew one thing, which was speed. He knew his rifle was useless — the moment he had it angled on the enemy, the Cat would cut his rifle into pieces or himself. His only recourse was to attack with his blade — now.

Huang thrust at his enemy, who easily countered his attack by parrying his blade in a direction that neutralized it as a dangerous element — meanwhile his enemy stabbed its blade into Huang's left arm.

Huang cried out in pain, and the Cat grinned as it pulled out its blade in a way that cut through Huang's bone and literally left his arm hanging in its socket through the connected muscle. The very act gave Huang time to pull his own blade back into attack position using his right arm.

He's toying with me.

His armor was useless. It hindered him. Huang wished he could take it off, but he bit down on his pain and slashed against with his blade. The alien parried the slash easily, and countered with his own. Huang pulled his head back as the alien's blade cut into his helmet and narrowly missed his face by a centimeter. Huang's in-head's display suddenly spasmed as power loss and electricity ran throughout its internal readouts. Huang cried as the free energy burned his face.

Although his in-HUD no longer worked, Huang could see through the hole the Cat's blade had made into his helmet. Along with the sparks from his damaged helmet, he used that hole, despite the fact that every cell in his face hurt.

Huang slashed, again. Miss. He slashed again like a wounded and scared animal. Miss.

A spasm of pain suddenly appeared in his back. It was as if a lightning rod had been shoved into his back muscles.

Huang knew what it was, and he knew if he moved, it would make the wound from the sword that had been thrust into his back worse.

He also knew what was coming. All the Cat had to do now was pull the monomolecular sword up or down through Huang's body and he'd literally be sawed in half.

“Do it! Do it, you sadistic bastard!” Huang yelled, the very act making the wound more painful.

Yet, the slice never came.

The sword was gently pulled out. Huang could feel it as it slid out of his back muscles, as it cut through every tissue in the opening like knife through butter.

He tried turning around, but his legs, his abs, and his mind gave out.

“Why?” Huang whispered, before he passed out from the pain.

Battlespace
…

Ga warships zoomed towards the single most protected part of the human fleet — the two remaining MABs. The surrounding human warships waited for them, setting a trap, because their commander, Rear Admiral Kleingelt had opted to spread out her defensive sphere, instead of creating a denser ball of human warships to protect her trophies. Doing so, she allowed for more angles of attack as the enemy intermixed with her lines.

Although this strategy allowed for a greater chance for Ga warships to gain weapons range on her MABs, she suffered less losses to her dreadnoughts and battlecruisers, and damaged more of the enemy's light attack ships. It was impossible, the human commander knew, to be able to protect her MABs against this many enemy ships. Instead, she let them die, while pretending to protect them.

Within minutes, hundreds of warships, both feline and human, exploded in an ever increasing fury in the most deadly stage of the battle, as ships slashed at each other with h-beams and were pummeled by h-waves on a scale unseen before.

Weight by weight, the humans still traded off far more tonnage to sink Ga ships, but the severity of the trade became more even.

Eventually, however, the Ga ships penetrated into the human fleet's innermost defensive sphere. While being shot from all sides, some of them gained weapons range on the two MABs, and they fired.

Flagship,
Beginner’s Luck

Flag Bridge…

“I can't do anything about it, Admira —”

Vier watched as
alien h-waves slammed into the MAB's aft section, eradicating two hundred thousand tons of hull and blinking away one hundred human personnel. Energy conduits split open, pouring dangerous starship plasma in every direction. Entire systems that weren't erased by the wave altogether went offline, including the ship's warp suspenders. The assault boat and its alien captive now were fading away from the universe.

Vier wished she had a way to save the three hundred marines and the two hundred remaining MAB crews, but unless they could turn on the trophy's h-space suspenders, the men were dead. Another human warship could connect its warp bubble with the one that is fading, therefore giving a place for the marines and their cutters to escape, but that warship would be an immobile duck in water and could be easily targeted by h-waves.

No, the marines were dead as long as enemy ships were nearby. She wasn't going to suicide another warship.

She gazed at the holomap. Now, there was only one marine transport left.

Technically, in the overall scheme of things, there was no reason for Vier to pay attention to the MABs and their actual survival. Their trophies were dead no matter what happened, but—the sole remaining MAB
could
escape destruction if it disconnected from its trophy — once it became mobile, it was much more difficult to hit — and that was what interested Vier. Some of the alien captives taken by Captain Huang's marines could be useful. They were the only alien captives humanity had in the entire war, after all.

As for Captain Huang himself, she hadn't heard from him in a while...

She hit a button, interfacing her voice with Huang's chain of command. “Are your men all back into the cutters, Lieutenant?”

“Almost, ma'am,” a voice replied.

“ETA before you and your men are all aboard the main transport?”

“Two, three min—” the line dropped dead. 

She twisted her head and looked at the holo of their bubble. Two, no, three h-waves had slammed into the MAB's bubble. But none of it had hit the MAB itself — Vier thanked god — the h-waves had hit the larger trophy instead. The outer hull of the alien vessel they had been boarding was now severely crippled, but... it didn't matter since she knew it'd be lost anyway. What did matter was that the remaining marines got out. “Lieutenant?”

A new voice came online. “This is second Lieutenant Seetch, sir. Lieutenant Graff is dead. His cutter was in the way of the h-beam.”

“Okay. How many captives do you have?”

“Twenty, maybe twenty five, sir. Many of them wounded.”

“I see,” Vier replied. “Make the quickest way to your transport and disconnect with the alien warship immediately. We need those captives alive.”

“Yes, sir.” The line closed.

Marine Cutter 001, Delta Battalion

Passenger Compartment…

Darkness and pain. That was the only thing Huang knew and seemed to know for as long as he remembered. His face felt like it was on fire. His left arm socket oozed with blood. His back, where the blade had penetrated, felt like a blinding gunshot wound, and he struggled to breathe.

“Hold on, sir. We're almost there. The medical facilities on board the
Nomad
will revive you.”

Huang gasped in pain. Why was he alive at all?

Why didn't the alien finish him?

Huang couldn't understand it, couldn't fathom the Cat letting a foe live. The alien had killed the two marines before him without mercy or hesitation. Why did it decide to let him live?

What did it gain by letting an enemy live in a situation where the enemy couldn't be captured and its knowledge put to use?

Huang flinched. He knew where he was. He was on board a cutter, being taken back to the mother transport – the MAB.

The cutter shook. He didn't know what had caused that. His helmet in-HUD was smashed.

“Almost there, sir,” the trooper beside him said.

Huang gasped, trying to breathe despite every movement of his lungs making his wounds hurt...

Betelgeuse Combined Fleet

Flagship,
Beginner’s Luck

Flag Bridge…

There was no chance. No chance, thought Vier, of the marines' survival. The feline ships were swarming to the center, to make every last effort to make sure the remaining MAB bubble disappeared, and its trophy along with it.

But it was also the opportunity of the century.

Because of instead of fighting her warships, and because the Cats' priority was to get to the center and take out the remaining MAB, they exposed themselves to her weapon fire from all her warships in ways she could never have hoped.

The enemy was dying faster than ever before.

But the holo showed the MAB bubble taking another hit by an h-wave. This one slashed at the marine transport itself, eradicating several docking ports on its starboard hull. Vier felt relieved. The transport survived the wave with its suspenders intact.

Then—another h-wave from another roach slammed into a trio of marine cutters, erasing them from existence.

Seconds later, two more feline ships entered weapons range and fired their primary weapons as well. Waves of destabilization fields slashed at the loan Valkyrie. The roachs' wormhole weapons detonated energy payloads inside that same MAB as well. On her private report screen, she watched as damage indicators lit up. The MAB suffered malfunction after malfunction. Entire systems went into black. The sheer amount of systems on board the ship blinked off like a cascade.

Then, it blew up.

It blew up.

A white hot fusion detonation split the marine transport in half. Two thirds of the MAB's cutter complement — docked with the main vessel — died with it when they were blasted away into plasma by the explosion. The remaining cutters a little further distant limped away after withering the shockwave of both the MAB
and
the trophy, but without a mother transport capable of maintaining a warp bubble,
they were as good as toast
, Vier surmised.

And of course, the warp bubble surrounding the entire system, trophy and all, began fading.

Marine Cutter 001, Delta Battalion

Passenger Compartment…

There was a hushed silence inside the cutter after the massive blast wave had paled, and Huang knew everyone inside was dead.

We're dead
.

Huang never had a religion, but as long as he was lying inside that little shuttle in every manner of hurt possible, he thought that fading out of this universe was an ironic but well-suited way to end the pain—and perhaps he would meet a god when he reached the next universe.

But where
did
souls go when they dematerialized in hyperspace? For that matter, where did souls go after they died?

Huang wasn’t sure. That was the one ultimate mystery humanity had never solved through its eons of civilization. And luckily, he was about to find out — in less than six minutes when the warp bubble faded entirely.

Ka's First Fleet, Main Group

Supreme Battlecruiser Usha'Tera…

Hal-Dorat watched the holomonitor as the battle raged. 

A sense of relief flowed over him, relief that the danger of having war-winning technology stolen, analyzed, and reverse-engineered had disappeared.

It was true — the warship that carried his son's corpse would soon disappear, and his son with it, but he was only slightly grieved. The deed had already been done. His son had done what he needed to do to kill the most of the enemy and protect his ship from being controlled, just as
he
had done what was necessary for his role as fleet commander by destroying the ship that carried his son's corpse.