//------------------------------// // Chapter 60 // Story: Hegira: Eternal Delta // by Guardian_Gryphon //------------------------------// Earth Calendar: 2117 Equestrian Calendar: 15 AC (After Contact) April 7th, Gregorian Calendar "Can you train optics?" Mr. Utah put the monocular back up to his right eye, and swept the horizon angrily. The chief gunner, strapped into the operator's chair eight feet above, shook his head emphatically, eyes plastered to his own high-mag scope. The man was forced to shout loudly to make himself heard over the lashing force of the wind, and the rain, as the storm broke upon the platform in unending waves of nature's fury. "Negative sir! The squall has reduced visibility to nil. We can't even spot the Agincourt for manual targeting, let alone the auto-recog program. She's low profile, and those are fifteen foot swells under zero-vis clouds with at least an inch an hour of rain coming down. We're lucky to be able to see our own asses through infrared scopes." Mr. Utah glowered, and turned to see that his attaché had arrived with the items he requested. He relieved the confused man of the lightweight armor vest, slipping quickly into the kevlar plates, and cinching them down firmly. He pressed the small tactical wrist computer into place, and fiddled with the straps momentarily to keep it from riding high on his arm. Finally, he accepted the rail-pistol from the man, and checked that the safety was on. Mr. Utah gestured to an officer manning a signal light. "Relay to Retribution; Proceed grid ten-twelve, attack and destroy ALL contacts. No quarter. No prisoners." The officer nodded, and began flashing the ten million lumen signal light in rapid fire Morse code. After a moment of silence, a series of similar flashes emanated from the distant silhouette of the submarine's conning tower. "Retribution responds sir; Grid ten-twelve acknowledged. Kill order on all ships in the AO, acknowledged." Mr. Utah nodded to himself, then cupped his hands and shouted back up at the gun carriage operator. The sound reflected back off the immense curved side of the mobile assault RAC, barely reaching the officer's ears before the wind snatched it away. "Set CIWS to fast-tracking infrared multitasking mode!" The man obediently began tapping at his thick weatherproofed operations panel, but squinted down, and shouted back a curious reply. "Why?! What are we expecting?!" Mr. Utah glowered as he turned sharply on one heel, and began striding back towards the central catwalk. He holstered his pistol, and double checked the ammunition count, before cycling the capacitor to active mode. "Company. See to it that they're escorted from the premises as red confetti. You need to hold out for at least another twenty minutes." The SeaHawk punched through to the surface with a sound akin to a thunderclap. The super cavitation bubble surrounding the aircraft expanded rapidly as it came into contact with the lower density environ of the atmosphere, generating a strong pressure wave for a brief moment. Neyla had practically begun to flick the inlet-open toggle the moment the tip of the jet's nose broke through the waves. By the time the engines had cleared the water fully, the forward intakes were completely open, and operational. The fighter rocked sharply, and the engines coughed loudly as they dipped perilously close to auto-cutoff. To the Gryphons' immense relief, the twin turbines caught once more a half second later, solidifying the switch to external air. Fyrenn twisted the stick hard right, and slammed one paw into the right rudder pedal. The SeaHawk juked down and right, cutting perilously close to a pair of swells and rocking violently in a crosswind. Both Gryphons were forced up against their safety harnesses by G-forces that would have instantly reduced a Human brain to an unrecognizable pulpy mass. The red Gryphon grit his beak, tensed his shoulders, and rammed the throttle home into the afterburn position. The jet rocked like a bucking bronco, and shot away as if it had been expelled from a railgun. Within a matter of seconds, the violent storm winds, and harsh rainfall, were reduced to little more than barely-visible streaks on the cockpit plexiglass. The tossing and bucking settled into a relatively calm, steady vibration. After another moment, the moisture around the SeaHawk deformed sharply into a conical shape. Fyrenn grinned predatorily, and inclined his head briefly towards the central instrument panel. "Mach one. Twenty two feet off sea-level. And boy heck is it raining out there." Neyla raised an eyebrow, and craned her head to the right to watch the waves pass by underneath. She had to concentrate to keep them from being reduced to a blue-gray blur of motion. "So this is what it's like for a Pegasus?" The red Gryphon inclined his head, and his grin widened. "Not quite as fast on Earth, but much faster in Equestria, to hear them tell it. But they couldn't make a snap-turn to save their lives at those velocities. This thing will corner in less than half a mile at this speed. Mind you that would kill any of the pilots who regularly fly this bird... But you and I have a bunch of wonderful high-G, multi-stage-pressure adaptations to our blood vessels, and organs." Fyrenn glanced down at his panel once more, and pushed the stick slightly to the right. "Best guess from the torpedoes; Agincourt will be about twenty seconds in this direction. We'll know sooner than that though. Mach two point three... Coming off afterburn now." As the Gryphon pulled the throttle back to the one hundred percent mark, Neyla opened her beak to ask after the meaning of his ominous statement. She was immediately interrupted by a piercing warning tone, and a bevy of red lights on her display. Her eyes narrowed, and she grunted. "We've been acquired. Four high velocity anti-aircraft missiles. Closing at-speed." Fyrenn nodded, and glanced up at the Gryphoness in his rearview mirror. "We've got two chaff ropes. Arm the first and dump it as soon as I break hard left. We'll go into a tight spin, and when we come out of it we're gonna be right on top of them. I'll tap the airbrakes for the absolute smallest fraction of time possible, and our wings will be level. That means you've got about a two-tenths-of-a-second window to light these suckers up. Ready?" Neyla nodded sharply, placing her right claw on her own control stick, and her left over the chaff-release lever. The warning tone in the pair's headsets intensified to almost unbearable levels. At the last possible moment, Fyrenn wrenched the stick as far left as it would go, simultaneously depressing the left rudder pedal slightly to impart yaw forces. The SeaHawk groaned almost imperceptibly as the airframe was taxed to a point approaching its do-not-exceed limit. Neyla glanced towards the relative 'up' direction, and saw two warheads streak past mere inches away from the canopy, framed sharply in relief against the backdrop of the sea. The weapons were so close, the Gryphoness could count the rivets, and pick out microscopic manufacturing imperfections in the nose-cones. As the SeaHawk came level once more, and began to twist into another roll, Neyla released the chaff rope. The length of det-cord flew out of a rear stealth-fared housing, and immediately split into a series of angel-wing patterned charges. Each charge lit off with a magnesium strip, immediately drawing the heat-seeking warheads as they pulled into a tight tracking turn. Both warheads exploded two seconds later as their shock-triggered detonator tips slammed into what remained of the heavy det-cord. The SeaHawk once again pulled into level flight for the briefest of moments. Neyla watched in fascination, slowing her temporal perceptions to a crawl as the Agincourt came into view, filling the front of the canopy. Fyrenn pulled back on the stick slightly, aiming to pass above the ship's bridge with mere inches to spare between the lower inlet housing of the jet, and the armored plating of the ship. Neyla glowered, her sneer a mix of anger, and satisfaction, as she pulled the trigger. Both home-brewed 'dazzle canisters' fell off the wing hardpoints, and tumbled forward, propelled by momentum, and jetwash. The fighter whipped over the top of the Agincourt, and pulled away into a wide right turn under the impetus of Fyrenn's expert guidance. The canisters exploded a half-second later as their timers expired. The grim darkness of the storm abruptly transformed into a light brighter than pure daylight as hundreds of cluster charges broke free, and erupted, spewing their white phosphorous payload across a two square mile area of sky. The dazzlingly burning substance was mixed with two dozen small EMP charges per canister, and a quarter ton of assorted metallic shavings. Fyrenn grinned as he applied afterburners once more, and brought the jet into a climb towards the nearest cloud. "Right outta the park. Home run!" Minos was lucky enough to be staring into a LADAR scope when the canisters detonated. As a result, his eyes were spared. Nearly half the bridge crew had been looking directly through, or towards the front window bank, however. Those who hadn't been blinded by the phosphorous daisy chains were mangled as the plexiglass panels crumpled from the jet's supersonic shockwave. The craft had passed within inches of the ship, bringing the worst of its backwash to bear with horrifically lethal force. Anyone standing within ten feet of the forward windows had died instantly, their heads obliterated by plexiglass shards moving at nearly Mach one. Everyone who had been spared that fate had either lost the entire front half of their face, or had been permanently retinally seared from seeing the phosphorous chains head-on. Under normal circumstances the bridge's windows would have tinted fast enough to reduce the effects to temporary blindness at worst. Instead, the bridge of the Agincourt had been completely devastated by the attack. Rain and wind poured in through the rupture in the front of the compartment, adding to the screams of the living, the cacophony of system-critical alarms, and the ringing in everyone's ears. Minos kept his eyes firmly shut, until he felt a hand on his shoulder. A moment later, an object was pressed into his right hand. Awkwardly, and carefully, he maneuvered his face from the static-laden screen of the LADAR scope, into the safety of a tactical helmet. The auto-tinting visor blocked out the majority of the light and heat still emanating from the phosphorous chains, as well as the swirling shards of plexiglass, the wind, and the rain. Minos turned to see the officer who had helped him passing out helmets to any other bridge crew who could still see. A few moments later, the comms officer managed to find the manual override for the frontal blast shields. The immense metal panels mercifully shut out not only the weather, but all light from outside. The damaged holo emitters tucked into the edges of the window frames somehow managed to summon a fritzing, half-coherent tactical display in place of the window's usual vista. Minos grit his teeth, and turned his head away as he noticed the ship's captain, and the admiral, lying in pools of blood and unspeakably mangled tissue. His face contorted for several moments in rage, before his fury finally burst forth on the executive officer. "WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED?! YOU TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED!! I WANT A FULL STATUS REPORT!!" The man tried to open his mouth to respond, but Minos crossed the bridge swiftly, boots crunching against shards of plexiglass. His soaked hair was littered with miniscule pieces of glass dust, and plastered to the sides of his head, giving him a wild, almost insane aspect. He rammed his index finger into the man's chest, keeping his volume so elevated, that it shook the nearest consoles. "THEN I WANT THAT *DAMN* THING BLOWN THE HELL OUT OF THE SKY!!! DO YOU HEAR ME?! KILL THAT RED GRYPHON!" A woman tending to one of the injured peeled off, and slid into the dead LADAR operators seat. After a moment, she shook her head emphatically, and threw up her hands. "Its no use sir! Computerized-optics are permanently fried. LADAR and all autonomous fire control systems are confused by the chaff, Infrared can't get past the phosphorous. We're down to SONAR, and manual visual targeting only. Radio effectiveness has also been severely reduced." The officer who had first rescued Minos shook his head, removing his helmet gingerly and wincing as he took in the damage to the bridge once more. "Multiple decks report severe casualties. At least thirteen are dead counting the fatalities here, and about ten more are permanently blinded. We're down to less than half-crew as of now, and we're technically below minimum operating numbers if you factor in the injured." Minos snapped his head around to pierce the officer with his gaze. His voice dropped to a dangerously low tone, and his eyes narrowed sharply as he ripped off his own helmet. "Injured? No. There are no injured! You put everyone who can move back on a duty post." The LADAR officer shook her head, and sighed. "Sir, we are *mission killed!* We could hardly reliably target a supercarrier if it was forty feet off our bow! The Retribution is now unaccounted for, and at least one Earthgov ship is still out there, waiting for an opportunity! We have to withdraw if we..." Minos snatched the woman by her collar, physically hauling her from her seat in a vicious chokehold. His eyes bugged out of his head as if he were about to burst a blood vessel, and his voice rose to ear-splitting volume once more. "WE ARE NOT MISSION-KILLED! YOU GET EVERYONE WHO CAN MOVE ON A DUTY STATION, AND YOU *SHOOT* THE REST! Throw their BODIES into the ENGINE WAKE, and get back to your own POST! WE ARE FINISHING THIS RIGHT HERE, AND RIGHT FUCKING NOW!" Minos pulled the woman's face close, tightening one hand around her throat until the bones squealed softly in protest. "UNDERSTOOD?!" At last, for a moment, a stark silence fell across the bridge. The woman nodded feebly, and after a few more tense seconds, Minos allowed her to drop to the floor. He swung around to the executive officer, and jabbed an index finger at the man's chest once more. "Put everyone back at battle condition one. *Now.* Get every single weapon on this ship ready, including carbines and small arms. Pull everyone who's range-qualified and get them to the aft water garage in ten minutes." Minos scratched at the back of his head, and began pacing feverishly. "Tie every hertz of processor power we have into the central systems AI. If we can't use the server racks for precise multi-missile targeting, then reallocate them to fill in for missing crew duty stations. Engine subsystems. Course correction and nav. Sensors. Work with me people, use your brains." Minos swung around and jabbed a finger at the young man occupying the helm station. "Come hard left and accelerate to one third." Without waiting for a response he turned to the LADAR officer, his eyes narrowing as she rubbed at her throat. "Flash transmission for the Lancets; Tell them to hunt that fighter down, and blow it away, even if they have to ram the son-of-a-bitch out of the sky, you hear me? Transmit that EXACTLY! And you tell them that if they come back with a zero-kill report, that we'll splash them before they can even request a landing pad!" Minos paused, and rubbed at his face, then furrowed his brow. "And someone get those bodies out of here. They're wasting floorspace." The rescue officer crossed his arms, and raised an eyebrow. "What am I supposed to do once I have able bodies in the water garage?" Minos gestured to the ceiling with both hands, as if the answer were incredibly obvious. His tone matched his condescending, disgusted expression. "You get your ass out there in the hydrofoil, and wait for whoever is coming for us! When they get here? You catch them from behind, get onboard, and fill them with demolition charges. Blow their ship sky-high." The officer blanched, and his eyes widened. "In THESE conditions? We'll be lucky to survive that long!" Minos glowered, and raised an eyebrow. "The storm will also provide ample cover. We're blind, but so are they. They'll be so preoccupied with us that you'll be able to get aboard before they even know you exist. Now HAUL! Get the lead out! Chop chop! We're on the *clock!*" "SIR! We just saw a MAJOR event on all passive sensing pallets. It looks like something went up, and went up *big,* topside." The Columbia's captain pushed aside a bundle of hanging wires, and bent low over his LADAR officer's station. The bridge's lighting was unusually dim, given that half of the illuminator strips had been taken out by the fire. The woman paused, and pursed her lips, before glancing up at her XO. "What's the ship's condition? Are we battle ready?" The man snorted, and shook his head slowly, crossing his arms and exhaling slowly. "Not hardly." He paused, and wiped a grime smear off his face, before continuing. As he spoke, he cast his eyes around what was left of the bridge, wincing reflexively as the extent of the damage hit home. "Half the consoles in here don't work. CIC is gone, and most of the personnel down there went with it. Half our powerplant is in SCRAM mode and the other half is barely holding on. We lost the starboard fore torpedo racks, and two of our VLS tubes. Show me one subsystem that works, I'll show you five that were on fire ten minutes ago." The Captain paused, hands welded firmly to her hips, eyes narrowed as her thoughts raced. She inhaled, and tilted her head, brushing a lock of hair out of her eye as she did so. "How are we doing structurally?" The XO waggled his head back and forth, then gestured to one of the few functional upright screens in the compartment. "I have news, and I have bad news. Which would you like first?" "Hydrofoil says they're barely holding on sir. It's been almost five minutes and they've nearly capsized twice." Minos raised an eyebrow, and sighed. He bent over the bridge's central holotank, and peered down at the small flickering triangular icon representing the SWCC boat. "Point the aft deck-gun at them. That should put their risks in perspective." Before anyone could object, or move to carry out the command, the LADAR officer blanched, and swiveled abruptly in her seat as a series of soft insistent alarms issued from her panel. "I have a displacement reading beneath us! Super-capital tonnage!" Minos turned, and drew breath to request more information. Before he could expel the words, the Agincourt rocked violently to the side, momentarily listing almost twenty degrees to starboard as the sea heaved under her port side. The ship slid down the wave for a moment, then rocked back in the opposite direction. A series of insistent alarms once again blared, indicating the foredeck had been momentarily swamped. The helmsman's eyes widened as he peered through his tinted scope, and his skin blanched white as snow. Alarms went wild through the intercom system, and the compartment's lighting plunged into alert status. The young officer winced at the petrifying image in his scope, and pulled back reflexively. "HOLY F---" "FIRE!!!" The weapons officer nodded, and grinned down at his station, cupping his mic close to his lips. "Fire! Fire! All batteries, all tracks!" Lantry grimaced as the deck pitched from a forty five degree upwards angle, down to a more reasonable level, then further into a dip. The ship rocked as if it had been cast into an enormous blender as breaching forces pushed and pulled the hull in multiple contradictory directions simultaneously. The TAO grit his teeth as the load bearing braces groaned yet again, and shook his head. He jerked his thumb at the Agincourt, which lay no more than thirteen meters to the North Carolina's starboard, at a parallel angle. The enemy vessel was still half swamped from the displacement the Battleship had generated upon surfacing. "Somebody is about to have a REALLY bad day." As if to underscore his words, the North Carolina lurched sharply as blowback forces reflected off her target, and pushed her away, deforming some of her more battered armor belts slightly in the process. The roar of the main battery was nearly unbearable in spite of all the noise-damping shield material, mainly as a result of the battleship's unsafe proximity to her target. The windows were mercifully already blast-shielded, but the computer composite holoscreen images told the story of the cacophony outside in high fidelity nonetheless. The images were illuminated as if under stadium lighting, mostly via the still-conflagrated remains of the dazzle canisters. North Carolina's first volley struck home directly in the center of Agincourt's hull. The space between the two ships momentarily vanished in a withering cloud of muzzle gases, and explosive impact blowback. Shards of the enemy ship's hull flew outwards in all directions, to the point that some even buried themselves harmlessly, but tellingly in the outer layers of the Battleship's decking. Parts of Agincourt's hull peeled away like the remains of a candy wrapper caught in a hurricane. Bodies, slivers of structural beams, armor plates, and even pieces of warheads flew away in all directions, tumbling into a disgusting slick of blood, coolant, and propellant on the surface of the sea. The Arsenal ship's deck guns immediately came to bear, peppering the most vulnerable portions of the Battleship's island with a stream of relatively low-impact, but high-volume fire. The ominous roll of thunder mixed with the roar of weapons fire, to the point that any sort of single sound was utterly indistinguishable. For both crews, even those secreted away in the deepest portions of the vessels' engine rooms, the world was nothing but an unceasing merciless roar of weapons fire, impacts, explosions, and container breaches, akin to the arrival of a supertornado. Agincourt's crew rapidly forced the ship's reactor into emergency meltdown mode, willing every last erg of available energy into the vessel's twin magnetohydrodynamic thruster banks. The Arsenal ship took off at a breakneck pace, slicing into the water like an angry shark as she desperately maneuvered to get under North Carolina's guns. Smoke and fire billowed from a thirty foot by fifty foot gash in the side of the ship, and sea water poured in, hampering the Agincourt's theoretical top speed. As North Carolina brought her athwartships thruster banks online, the Arsenal ship began to dispatch her missiles blindly, without clear targeting data, relying on proximity, and each warhead's built-in guidance system, to guarantee hits. The Battleship responded with her own missiles, and within ten seconds, the sky was an opaque writhing mass of contrails. Smoke from fires, engine exhaust, and muzzle dispersion engulfed both ships in an ever-expanding cloud that looked like nothing so much as a sick, plague laden fog. At point blank range, neither ship could hope to shoot down even half the missiles they had fired on each other. The majority of the warheads failed to even find a target, but those that did were rarely intercepted by either vessel's defense guns. That didn't stop either crew from pushing the CIWS systems well beyond their rated limits. Within thirty seconds, the barrels of the weapons had begun to deform. The pandemonium caused by proximity heavy weapons fire, the dazzle canisters, and the ECM blanket resulted in several misfires, causing friendly missiles to strike their own craft after reaching the apex of their arc. Inside a minute, both ships were burning in a minimum of four locations. North Carolina lost her rear aircraft receiving decks instantly to a devastating missile barrage. Agincourt's forward deck gun, and the majority of her bow, disintegrated seconds later, as the Battleship trained all three of her main turrets directly on the fore-deck. The arsenal ship rocked, and listed sharply to port as her hydrodynamic profile was suddenly reduced from a sleek tumblehome arrowhead, to a ragged water-filled series of uneven breached chambers. In turn, Agincourt released another devastating flurry of warheads, followed by her last torpedoes and mines. North Carolina's starboard outrigger finally gave in to the immense pressures that had befallen the ship over the course of the day. In one violent instant, the entire structure sheared off, taking forty crewmembers, two gimbal guns, and several anti-missile emplacements to the seabed with it. The explosion cascaded inwards, rupturing a dozen coolant lines, killing five more, and shutting down all power to the starboard main engine bank. Both ships continued to circle as swiftly as they could in their crippled states, matching the other blow for blow, and desperately seeking a foothold to pull ahead in the battle of pure, unmitigated, vicious attrition. The trooper winced as his hand was nearly smashed between the hull of the hydrofoil, and the side of the ship. Incredibly, he managed to withdraw his armored fist just before the two metal surfaces clashed, forced together by an unusually large swell. Rain pelted the man's helmet and shoulders as he finally achieved purchase on the ladder, and managed to scramble up to the remainder of his squad on the burning wreckage of the fantail. The fifteen boarders surveyed the cratered deck with critical, predatory gazes. The sergeant in charge motioned silently towards the nearest access door to the island structure. As he pressed forward, carbine leveled into the blinding, sheeting rain, his team fanned out around him in perfect synchronization. Their boots clanged softly against the deck plating, sloshing through puddles as they passed over a series of scorched landing indicator stripes, and a designation marking. 'FBB-55: North Carolina.'