I have got a headache, thought Jack, and when another part of himself added but AIs don’t get headaches he realized that the crystal containing his consciousness had not escaped unscathed. This was not entirely surprising. His diagnostic returns took up a substantial proportion of his processing space, and on the whole they indicated the NEJ to be a write-off. The gravtech weapons nacelle had been torn away, and one of the nacelles for conventional weapons inverted inside the ship, and much of what it contained turned inside-out as well. Luckily it contained no CTDs since antimatter would have reacted rather violently with the substance of the NEJ. One conventional weapons nacelle remained undamaged, which was rather surprising considering the state of the rest of the ship, though according to Jack’s current manifest it contained only two CTD imploder missiles and a rack of space mines still locked in the carousel.
The forces exerted on the NEJs hull had twisted it into the shape of a section of metal drill bit. Inside, corridors, cabins and other spaces were distorted or flattened. One reactor had been cracked like a walnut and now leaked radioactives throughout the ship. Much of the intricate machinery inside appeared to have been put through a shredding press.
Um, definitely wouldn’t be any survivors, Jack observed. His other half tended to agree, though not vocally, for it was losing its independence as he gradually programmed in reconnections at the shear interface in his mind’s crystal.
Searching through the diagnostic data for some idea about the state of the U-space engine, Jack finally understood there was no data available. After many hours of easing a small robot through the wreckage to find and repair optic feeds, he finally managed to reconnect to all his pin-cams. The U-space engine was notable by its absence: however, he found the fusion engine, still in one piece, though with all its fuel and power lines sheared away.
I do not hold out much hope for his recovery, Jack commented, now directing all his resources to excavating through shattered and twisted composite structural beams to reach the U-space communicator. Some hours later a crab-shaped robot, no larger than the palm of a man’s hand, eased its way through a crevice and found the remains of the device he sought. A subsequent investigation of nearby stores rendered the first good news: Jack located a U-space beacon capable of sending a distress signal. However, that signal would remain uncoded—just a loud shout for help. Jack rattled metaphorical fingers on a metaphorical desk, and wondered if such a cry might resemble that of a snared rabbit calling for help at the mouth of a fox’s den. Before making the call, he decided it might be a good idea to repair all the control optics leading to that one remaining nacelle, and see what he could do about connecting up the fusion engine again. Almost with a sigh he set the remaining robots and telefactors to work inside his wrecked carcase.
The planetoid mass of enemy ships took on the shape of a galactic lens while those ships departed it, separating from one massive bio-mechanical structure. The Battle Wagon’s, huge acceleration towards this mass demonstrated, more than anything else, that either no humans or other fragile creatures were aboard that vessel, or that its controlling AI deemed them dispensable. Those ships that could keep up with it, covered the attack run, the rest were finding enough problems of their own.
With cold logic, Azroc noted that only half of the Polity dreadnoughts remained viable but, worse than this, the other half had not all been destroyed, for the enemy controlled at least twenty of them. One consequence of this was intermittent communication, as com channels needed to be perpetually switched and re-encoded. Some ships, despite this and despite possessing com systems hardened against Jain-based informational attack, were nevertheless subsumed by such attacks. As he observed, in his mind, the spreading mass of enemy ships, Azroc could not for long remain coldly logical, since still ninety per cent of them had yet to engage. The Polity was losing, and there would be no help while that USER still functioned. And plotting its field strength revealed its position at the remote edge of the system—many days away under conventional drives, even if any of the Polity ships could disengage themselves to head out that way.
The Battle Wagon bore down on the massive concentration of ships. Its shape transformed now from the simply cylindrical as it extruded weapons turrets, coil guns the size of attack ships, and the business ends of beam weapons over which lightning played from various discharges. Around it gathered a swarm of its own semi-AI mines and missiles. Thereafter, what Azroc viewed, necessarily became filtered to cut the glare of explosions and burning vessels.
The giant warcraft punched through enemy ships massed no further apart than a few miles, and from around it spread a wave of inferno fire. Metal vapour boiled through space, and it seemed as if a thunderstorm spread out in vacuum from the massive vessel. Its missiles hunted through this maelstrom, picking targets with care and slamming home. Its mines allowed themselves to be enwrapped in meshes of rod-ships, or alternatively sidled up to the large ball-of-worms vessels, then happily detonated. Such was the scale of the destruction that it even seemed possible the big Polity vessel might win. But the tactical displays did not lie. Though Battle Wagon successfully punched a hole through the mass, it was no larger than the equivalent of a pen pushed through a slice of melon.
As the great ship finally passed through the cloud of enemy ships, and began to go into a curve around the ice giant planet, it seemed from a distance to be leaving a vapour trail behind it. Closer viewing revealed this phenomenon as a mass of pursuing ships. While Azroc watched, an enemy-subsumed Polity dreadnought evaded the few remaining mines and slammed itself into the armoured side of the huge ship. The impact knocked the Battle Wagon sideways, tore away one of its coil-guns, and scattered a line of wreckage through space. On other displays Azroc could see the ship radiating, unable to disperse the heat from the continuous beam strikes made upon it. Three CTDs, or maybe plain nukes, struck it all at once, shattering weapons turrets and spraying debris and boiling fire from glowing craters. All around the Battle Wagon, this intense assault obliterated all those attendant ships that guarded its attack run. Like a wounded buffalo it lumbered on, now swinging round above the ice giant’s rings, adding its own substance to those rings as it shuddered constantly under strike after strike. Ahead of it rod-ships swarmed in the process of forming a wall, holes continuously punched through it by the Wagon’s remaining weapons. But in the end there were too many of them. Soon it lay at the centre of another storm, but rod-ships now reached its surface, melting in, and spreading through its systems.
A comment from the Battle Wagon’s AI came over general com. ‘Mmm, I should have done this earlier.’
The view blanked—no sensors able to handle any longer the sleet of radiation emanating from that direction. Two, three, four seconds… then, finally able to discern something through the sensors of Brutal Blade, Azroc saw the Battle Wagon was gone, a massive cloud of incandescent gas spreading in its place. Even the ring system of the ice-giant planet disrupted, losing its definition and blurring around that orb. Though the destruction of enemy ships was high in number, more than eighty per cent of them still remained. Meanwhile over half of the Polity ships had been destroyed, and Azroc estimated that only an hour of life remained to those surviving.