Remember, thou art mortal. Yes, I have been slacking on the stack. I’ve been fighting my demons. No, I won’t elaborate. Anyway, to mark the occasion, here’s a bit from a failed stalled project. Enjoy.
With a piercing, agonized scream, as if the cosmos itself cried out in terror and pain, screams ‘heard’ by every conscious mind within several standard orbital diameters, regardless of their capacity to hear actual physical sounds, the vast, cyclopean, basalt-like bulk of an Ziggurat class War-Temple tore its way into the materium, immediately in the flight-path of the Dragonfly class drop transport Bessain, Pithain, Uthwen and the Aegis-II class armored cruiser Agamemnon and their shared combat space patrol.
Together with the vast enormity of the intruder, pouring forth from the inky tear in space, blackness beyond the void, comes a swarm of flitting, fluttering shapes. Thick, streaming clouds of chitinous hive-things swarmed, a riot in pinks, purples, blues, indigos, ultraviolets, and other, nameless colours, swirling whorls and patterns etched into biomechanical fungoid-flesh and heavy-metallic exoskeleton alike, patterns echoed and fractally reproduced in dervish-like whirling flight patterns, all serving to catch and drag the unlucky observer's unguarded gaze, through angles and geometries both alien and unsane, as if to claw out the soul of a man and spirit it away from his shrieking, tortured and shattered shell.
In Agamemnon's combat direction center men and women are screaming as blood runs from eyes, noses, and ears, even as Captain James Purdham's hand is slamming down on the big, friendly, red button labelled 'Plato-Holtzman Barrier,' smashing the protective plastic cover, headless of torn skin and blood splattering in spherical droplets, suspended momentarily, before falling away to the rear of the compartment as real-space and time and acceleration reasserted themselves.
Unbidden, the ship itself begins a high pitched rattling, a rattling shake that increases in pitch and frequency into a buzzing, as if a thousand-thousand insects have infested her. The buzzing voices rise up in sudden chorus from the very underverse, transmitting to the erring mortal meat-things the will of the gods.
"Desssssspair and Die, morssssssels! Give us your sssssSuffering and your sssssSacrifice!"
"Sparks," grated Captain James, spitting blood and teeth and chunks of tongue from ruined mouth, "Prepare to send, all channels, all frequencies, emergency military power, transit from my station."
"All channels, emergency military power, aye sir, coming online... now sir!"
Captain Sir James Purdham, Order of the Wheel of Stirling, Baron of Dante, wiped his face and straightened his uniform jacket, before straightening his peaked cap, and sat up straighter against the crash harness, before jabbing his finger down on the old fashioned switch, making his head-set live, broadcasting out to the entire system on tachyonic hyperpulse burst.
"All Stations alert, repeat, all stations alert, this is Captain James Purdham of the SHV Agamemnon, I am, on my authority, declaring Case OPERA NIGHT. I Say again, enact Case OPERA NIGHT, authentication code, India-Mike-Seven-Niner-Bravo-One-One-Delta-Niner. To the mushroom infested corpses who dare to order me, a Son of Adam, to die, I tell you Nuts. I say again, Nuts. Ian James ‘Rabid Weasel’ Stirling and John Fitzgerald Stuart ‘Nuke'em-Again’ Shepherd told me to tell you, 'say hello to my little can of sunshine, motherfuckers!'"
James stabbed the 'end' button on his chair's control panel. "Helm! Cut transit thrust, spin ship ninety degrees port! Give me starboard broadside advance!"
"Starboard broadside advance aye aye!"
Manoeuvring jets fired, pivoting the eight hundred and five meter, seven hundred forty-five thousand ton heft of the Agamemnon, slowly, ponderously, but smoothly and even perhaps gracefully, around her center of mass, becoming an advancing wall of metal, a tide of armour plate and guns, dorsal turrets, fore-castle, amidships, and aft-castle each turning to present their trinity of thirty-five centimeter high velocity auto-cannon to the target.
Vibrations in the command deck became a shaking, the shaking became a thousand thousand buzzing flies, the flies a voice that spat its anger the impossible defiance, "Little Adamling, sssso eager for death? ssssStand aside, we come but for the sssSindar among you, you can feed uss another day" the buzzing grew louder, immaterial wings of millions of aetheric flies rubbing against each other in ecstasy and agony.
Captain Purdham stabbed the transmit button again, grimacing in annoyance, the corpse-mushrooms wouldn't shut the fuck up and fight, damn their blind eyes. "Is that fear I hear from you? Well, you should be afraid, you rotting mass of worms, you shit-maggots! You ask us to violate guest-right? You rotten corpses are dumber than you look, which is saying something. You say you can kill us? Well do it then! Because if we must choose between Death and Dishonour, what do we choose?"
With a squeal of feedback, Sir James flipped the switch to make every shipboard comm circuit live, "What about it my children? Death or Dishonour?"
"Death! Death! Death! Long Live Death! Viva La Muerta!" came the thundering reply from every corner of the ship. With another jabbing finger Captain Purdham switched the pickup back to his headset alone, "there you have it scum, now fight or fly, I care not which, the choice is yours!" Cutting off the circuit one last time he allowed himself to slump a little, and tried not to think of the butcher's bill to come, even if they lived, some of them. One breath. Two. Three and centered, here and now. Eyes close as memories rise up, unbidden.
'What we do in life echoes in aeternity'. Suddenly the shade of his long-dead first wife, Alice, is speaking to him, standing in their front yard in the green suburbs of Unity-City on Old-Dirty, white picket fenced ranch style with the Puget Sound shining blue-green on the horizon and gulls in the air, Tubal Khan laughing as he rises up behind her, shooting her down in a blast of lasburn from a smoking hand-pulser, while mushroom clouds sprouted like cancer on the horizon. Mushrooms. Fucking fungi. Not today. Eyes snap open, memories and ghosts of the past banished.
"Engines! Dump high-density capacitor reserves into the Holtzman barriers, we're going to need them! Guns! Unseal and load Special Munitions! Dorsal turrets and starboard broadside prepare for volley fire! Port broadsides and Ventral turrets, load and stand by to service targets. Lasers and subcap missile-tubes to full point defense. Capital missiles, prep for fire-plan ‘Deguello’ and stand by. CAG, launch everything you have ready in the tubes and scramble the rest, load them for Special Munitions Attack. Someone cut that damn GQ alarm, we know already, Sparks, queue up Dies Irae if you please, let’s have us some music!"
The command crew of the Aggie chorused their acknowledgments and swung into action, training and hard won battle experience making them calm and efficient even in the face of overwhelming odds. Even as the grand siege plasma-rams of the Mi-Go'eld fungal Ziggurat started to fire, bracketing the Agamemnon with detonating phased toroids of fusion-hot plasma, battering down the Aggie's Holtzman kinetic barriers which started straining and flickering, causing localized overloads and sparks and even free arcs of shorting current to erupt all over the ship, as shrapnel-shards of the fusing metallic hydrogen, contained by cryptic and occult means, leaked through the shuddering and flickering barriers to detonate with explosive effect on the tons of armour cladding the Agamemnon; making the hardest plate known to the Men of Earth run like quicksilver. Captain James closed his eyes again and offered a prayer for his crew, that the Good Lord might take his life for theirs, if he so saw fit. His will be done, always.
'In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spitus Sancti, Amen.'
Eyes opened. "On the command of execution, Guns and Helm will execute fire-plan ‘Rolling Thunder’. Stand by for optimum range. Sound maneuver warning if you please."
Five-point-five centimeter aperture pulse-lasers strobed in their gimbaled ball mounts, a disco against the cloud of ash, dust, and vented gasses generated by space combat. That the haunting multi-spectral light show that so captured the romantic imagination of generations of so many impressionable young men and women, enticing them into joining the Spacy in the first place, was only possible because of the battle-space remains of the victims of dying ships was one of life's dark little ironies.
"Hold."
Missiles flew true, spat from vertical launch tubes amidships by electro-magnetic catapults and puffs of compressed air from hard-point launch rails on Void-Wraths, spearing Gadfly class insect-drones in silent explosions. Void-Wraths burned hard, taking years of life off of ‘X’ trussed space-frames in mere moments of full military power, viciously using their angular thrusters mounted at the ends of each ‘x’-truss, to change firing arcs on a dime, riding the very edge of g-forces, pilot endurance, and heat-sinks, spearing insectoid attackers with actinic fire,taking the fight to the filth, ancient Enemy of Mankind, who had ruled the men who had ruled the corporations who had ruled the congress during the Dark Times, during the hated and despised Earth-Authority.
"Hold."
Before Stirling and Shepherd and the Black-Fleet Conspiracy. Before the Founding and the Hidden Priests and the Black-Watch. Before Hegemony, before Hegemon and Duke-Prince of Earthmen. But then the drones were among the Wraths, ramming them, grappling with them, cutting with biomechanical arc-mandibles, crunching through cockpits with terrible maws.
"Hold!"
The Zindari dropper was manoeuvring sharply to clear the combat zone, thank God, displaying ludicrous acceleration and to Solarian eyes, a conspicuous consumption of precious delta-vee. But the principles were clearing the battle-space and Guns had solid tone warbling in his ear, and his hand raised in a thumbs up.
"Execute! Roll ship! Fire as she bears, gentlemen!"
...
Lizrael Inglerion, Zindari Apprentice, watched the brave little Solarian ship on the projected screen in front of her, advance suicidally at the rutting Mi-Go’eld Ziggurat, ten, maybe eleven times their own mass and displacement, tiny in the holographic projection of local space as the Drop Transport sped away, and was fascinated. It was madness. It was awful. It was beautiful.
As hosts they would shame themselves unbearably to abandon a guest. This she understood in her gut. It whispered to her heart, it shouted in her blood, it screamed in her bones, and she wished, oh how she wished, as she sat there, wooden, staring, frozen in the dead-header’s jump-seat in the Bessain, Pithain, Uthwen’s cockpit, how she deeply wished she could remember how to cry. Even just one tear.
The great guns of the Agamemnon spoke then in anger, flashing on the screen and leaving a rapidly dispersing fuzzy mist of smoke in the black. Then, curiouser and curiouser, the Agamemnon began to spin, to roll about her long axis before bringing a new line of guns to bear which then flashed, and so on. Meanwhile the Ziggurat's plasma-ram impacts spread themselves out, unable to simply batter the same sector of the Solarian's surprising yet crude and primitive shields over and over again.
"What is that madman doing?" asked the Lead pilot, a grey haired old-salt Imperial Atani whose name Lizrael could not recall in the heat of the moment.
"He's bringing all his guns to bear and spreading the hits he takes across his armor and shields." Lizrael pointed out.
"But that's just prolonging the inevitable!" protested the old man.
"Giving us time to run away!" snapped Lizrael.
Then the first of Agamemnon’s fired shots, tracked in the holo-display as out of scale blinking dots, reached the Ziggurat and Lizrael's eyes widened at the telemetry reading back. These were not solid shots, nor simple high-explosive concussion rounds. Nay, these were mass-implosion detonations, properly shaped-charged protonic, pure-fusion detonations, directed by charge-shaping into spears of high energy plasma and x-rays. And she saw the Captain’s daring plan. These weren't fragile mass-torpedoes, subject to trivial point defense and snub-fighter interception, these were artillery shells, brutish and primitive but decidedly non-trivial to intercept. The enemy could either engage in a gunnery duel with the madman slinging mass-implosion detonations like a laughing mad-bomber or he could move. Captain Purdham won either way. A delicious dilemma, either accept nine shaped charge mass-implosion hits every thirty seconds, on the second or move and therefore be chased off by the low tech primitives. How audacious!
How she yearned to join them.
"Flight Leader Hamal Zylvarstar, get Odew Squadron out there, now!" someone ordered. "And prep Balerion for flight!"
Ridiculous! Who would presume to...
"Prentice Lizrael, confirm that last" came a voice from the speaker.
Something inside Lizrael snapped and she grabbed the mic from its rest on the console with a snarl and quite calmly explained to to the Leader that, "I will be on flight deck in two minutes and if you are still here when I arrive, I will suddenly and very finally find myself with an opening for a new Flight Leader. Am I Understood?"
"On the bounce ma'am! Odew-actual out!"
With a tinkling jangle, her crash harness fell to one side and she stood up and began her march to the flight deck, eyes now blazing yellow-gold with power and no one stood in her path. Until that is, she ran into Da’ath Aretwe.
"Going somewhere my Prentice?"
"To secure our Alliance, Master, by your leave!" She snarled as shouldered past his towering might and main and marched right past him, daring him to physically stop her.
Da’ath Aretwe grinned and mouthed a sub-vocal - 'they grow up so fast!' - and then looked at the other Lords of Zindar in the first-class compartment with a scowl.
"Well, what are you lazy-louts waiting for? A graven invitation? Get after her and back her play!"
Then he turned on his heel and entered the comm shack, bellowing for someone to ‘get me Admiral Karst on the line’ before he lost his patience and ‘had to flay someone’.
...