novelraw Chapter 177: Deadlock
Chapter 177: Deadlock
In response to the Captain's command, the decking of the Spear of Fearlessness began to vibrate.
Mydias felt the warship fully awaken; he could practically see the plasma fire roaring from her aft thrusters.
The sickly green glow of hololiths and the blaring red of hazard lumens quickly flooded the entire bridge. Simultaneously, blast shields several meters thick slowly ground shut over the surrounding observation viewports.
Within ten seconds, the Spear of Fearlessness had entered a state of total combat readiness. Signals of battle-readiness from the other cruisers and escort frigates had also begun streaming in.
His gaze then shifted to a newly captured image of the system's edge to identify the spatial rift.
A massive hole had torn open in the fabric of space itself. Wreathed in crawling tendrils of warp-lightning, its center revealed a nauseatingly vibrant vortex that then stretched wide, like a maw preparing to vomit.
A jagged, iron skull pierced through the opening, dragging an equally colossal, jagged hull behind it.
It was a terrifying behemoth, over ten kilometers long, built incredibly thick and armored in dull plating. Its prow was shaped into a sickeningly mocking alien grin, while a massive, sneering yellow moon was painted across its flank.
The Grounded, a Super Space Hulk and the flagship of the pirate Warlord Nazdreg, erupted from the surging sea of the Warp like a bloated, armored piranha!
"This—"Mydias's mind reeled in confusion for several seconds, utterly failing to comprehend this suddenly appearing greenskin void-beast.
Suddenly, the gargantuan monstrosity unleashed a thunderous broadside.
The prow of a Dauntless-class cruiser, positioned barely a dozen kilometers from the Spear of Fearlessness, was instantly bathed in the shockwaves of catastrophic detonations.
Its void shields held for a mere two seconds, the energy bleeding off like oily ropes twisting across its surface, before the ship was obliterated, expanding into a brief, blinding sun of dispersing plasma and debris.
A furious rage seized Mydias on the bridge. He was practically vibrating with anger as he bellowed the order to return fire.
"Fire for effect!"
The human warships began to answer in kind with their own weapons batteries.
The void was instantly saturated with blinding lances of light and the brutal trajectories of torpedoes.
But against the Super Space Hulk, these strikes were akin to mere scratches; they didn't even cause the vessel's shields to ripple.
Meanwhile, the space surrounding the Grounded began to bubble and boil like boiling tar, as one greenskin warship after another translated into realspace.
The very first wave alone numbered well over a hundred vessels. They immediately adopted an aggressive vanguard formation, completely choking the void ahead of the Spear of Fearlessness.
"How could there be... so many!"
Another synchronized volley from the enemy flagship vaporized three more human warships in an instant.
Mydias stared blankly at the icons on the display that had once represented allied vessels. Now, they had been reduced to expanding spheres of superheated gas, hurling blazing debris in all directions.
The shattered corpses of warships dominated the primary augur screens, rendering the hundreds of servitors and crew members temporarily mute with shock.
They had very clearly run headlong into a massive, main-line Ork armada.
The stark horror of the display left Mydias frozen for a split second, his eyes glued to the terrible imagery.
He forcefully shook his head to clear it, just as the cacophony of the bridge crashed over him like a tidal wave.
Officers were screaming over one another, servitors and cogitators were indiscriminately vomiting torrents of data, and the Tech-Priests were already rapidly barking streams of binharic orders to their thralls.
He had to seize control of the situation before it spiraled completely out of hand. But there was still one crucial piece of information missing.
"Who is the enemy?!"
He barked loudly. A Tech-Priest stationed in the crew pits below turned its head slightly, its single, glowing red augmetic eye meeting the Captain's gaze directly.
"Orks."
Having delivered its single-word report, it immediately turned back, issuing a rapid-fire string of commands to the technical servitors scattered across every deck.
For a brief moment, Mydias stood perfectly still, looking like a man who had just taken a bullet straight through the chest but hadn't yet realized he was dead.
Then, he slammed a fist against his own forehead.
"Damn it all!"
The hololith suspended above him rotated, displaying the relative positions of his fleet and the enemy armada. Luminescent runes denoting auspex readings and tactical summaries blossomed and multiplied in dense clusters.
Torrents of data from external arrays overlaid the projection—intra-ship vox-chatter, inter-command links, and detailed crew status reports from every remaining vessel.
Mydias took a deep, steadying breath, feeling a collected, icy calm flood his mind and body.
Years of brutal training and rigid discipline suppressed his base instincts. He knew he was the eye of this storm, the singular anchor-point of will and authority.
"Bring us to the superior attack plane."
As the command left his lips, he felt the warship shudder. The hololith flickered and blurred for a fleeting second.
He forced his eyes back to the rushing torrent of raw tactical data. It had been four minutes since the first allied ship was destroyed.
They had lost half their flotilla—six ships total destroyed, with two more suffering catastrophic damage.
The entire battle-group's aggregate firepower had plummeted to thirty-six percent.
They teetered on the very brink of annihilation.
Even the Spear of Fearlessness
was taking heavy fire. The void shields protecting the forward weapon arrays were collapsing. Power had been diverted from other systems to reinforce them, and the plasma reactors were straining their containment housings to maintain the critical output.Enemy bombers incoming—
Macrobatteries engaging fire—
Lance arrays aligning to optimal firing angles—
Adjust heading by thirty percent—
Correcting trajectory—
He exhaled a long, slow breath, deliberately tuning out the detailed telemetry of the Spear of Fearlessness.
He was the commander of the entire battle-group; whatever catastrophe was occurring on the immediate front line was merely one facet of this engagement.
Mydias focused entirely on the macro-information projected before him. The trajectories and amber engagement markers on the hololith were a tangled, chaotic mess.
But the overall tactical situation was chillingly clear.
The enemy armada was structured as a jagged, driving wedge. A massive screen of heavily armored capital ships enveloped the absolute largest vessels at its core.
It was plowing straight out of the Warp translation point, bearing down directly on the patrol flotilla. It seemed to intend to close to point-blank range and crush this tiny Imperial detachment through sheer mass.
Orks. Their enemies were Orks.
The thought pierced Mydias's gut like a jagged shard of ice, as if the reality of the situation had only just fully registered.
Against such an overwhelmingly disparate force, they possessed absolutely no means of resistance. Even fleeing was virtually impossible; the enemy's staggering firepower could easily tear them to pieces before they could safely translate into the Warp—and the only reason the Orks hadn't done exactly that already likely pointed to a far darker motive.
They likely intended to board and capture the surviving Imperial warships.
The mere thought made Mydias's head spin with vertigo. For a terrifying instant, his consciousness seemed to echo with the agonizing, imagined screams of his warship being invaded and transformed into a living hell.
For a brief moment, he felt the aching frailty of his own power, realizing he was just as old and utterly outmatched as his venerable ship.
"I cannot lose—I cannot fail!"
Mydias's gaze swept over the hololithic tactical display, noting the streaks of bloody crimson weeping through the tangled patches of blue and green.
His long years of service brought a previously drafted contingency plan to the forefront of his mind, instantly adapting it to the desperate realities of the current engagement.
He could see it—a strategy not just to survive the onslaught, but to strike back in kind.
If they were going to bleed, then the greenskins were going to bleed with them!