ΔV Pt. 14

Even warmed, breath fogged from Lucas' lips as he stood near the center of the ring of mages. Helen stood beside him, her body armor gleaming with magical runes. She had a pistol in her hand and was checking it over with a frown. Lucas' teeth chattered and he tried to work out why the room was so fucking cold, his mind grabbing onto the physics question rather than thinking about the moment that was rushing towards them at hundreds of kilometers per second per second. The broad sweep of the thin fabric that fanned overhead, the fact the floor was uninsulated Ceres surface -- which would effectively act as a massive heat sink. Maybe both, combined to keep the dome as cold as it was, even with heaters.

Fireheart stood a few paces ahead of them, swinging her sword left and right, frowning slightly as her sword flared with golden light every other thrust. She looked determined. Grim.

Lucas took hold of Helen's hands. He squeezed them and looked into her eyes. "Helen, I-"

Helen leaned in close and kissed him. Gently. Then she drew back. "If we never see each other again, either because one of us is dead, or because this crazy-ass situation ends with us on the other sides of the solar system...it's been fun, Lucas."

"Yeah," Lucas said.

He wanted to say more. He wanted to talk about how it was more than just fun -- it had been amazing. The whole way. That things had been special. It might have just been camaraderie set aflame, it might have been something more. But whatever it was, he treasured it. But before he could say a single word, the chanting began -- and one of the eleven magicians stepped up to him. It was Isabella. She placed her palm on his chest and Lucas felt his body trembling ever so slightly. Power was flowing through him. Out of him. A connection existed between himself and Stark -- a connection that was deep and abiding.

And unlike the rest of the people in the room around him, he was going to be staying behind.

The power crackled. Surged. Swelled. Isabella's chanting grew higher and fiercer, weaving in with the other elves as the other volunteers -- including Vidya and Mohammad and the rest of the science staff, people who wouldn't be active during the battle -- as a connection between Stark and the spell grew thicker and heavier.

It had been explained to Lucas that teleportation was normally quite easy within a certain range. Too close, it got difficult. Too far, it got difficult. But here, now, there was a mixture of distance and speed involved. No magician had ever cast a teleport while traveling at such speeds, and they did not want to take a risk while teleporting an entire battalion of Chinese, American, Indian and Russian marines, with a company of elven warriors.

The spell grew heavier.

And then the tugging feeling at Lucas chest drove him to his knees. Or it would have, if he had been under the gravitational pull of Earth, and not in the strange, half-present gravity of the enchanted dwarf planet. He sagged, his vision growing vauge and dark. Through the shrouded darkness, he could see most of the room was empty. He felt the hands of an unfamiliar mage taking hold -- Isabella was one of those who had gone, to provide magical support. The older mages, the less adept combat mages, had stayed behind.

One of them helped him hastily out of the dome. He closed his eyes, and knew that he was falling towards a deep, deep sleep.

Against all hope, Lucas hoped...prayed...

Prayed that he would waken from it.

***

The Battle of Ceres took three minutes and, other than One Day War, was the most destructive fleet action in human history. It did win the records for the swiftest, though. Once Ceres had reached moment of closest approach, the United Fleet triggered hundreds of explosive charges and ceased accelerating. Their noses were facing towards the Earth as they drifted away from Ceres, and they did so in a staggered pattern.

A cold blooded calculus had placed the most expendable ships at the outskirts of Ceres and had launched them first -- so that flowering outwards, beyond the rim of the protective shield of the dwarf planet, the laser frigates had emerged. Laser weapons rewarded close in, long term combat, the kind of slow, stately attacks and parries that had come from more restricted acceleration budgets. In the lightning fast, whipping pass of the Battle of Ceres, lasers would have minimal use, minimal effectiveness.

Save as a collection of large, obvious targets. And in the time scale, with the optics available, there was no time to do more than a quick silhouette check. Afterwards, the gun-cameras of the surviving ships had captured solitary moments of fleeting beauty and majesty. All the pageantry of warfare on the ground -- of armies on the march, of tank fleets darting across the Russian steppe, unfolded there, in lightning fast movements and blurring flickers of half remembered imagery.

The flower bust of the laser frigates, their hulls lit by the reflected luminescence of Stark, their silvery bodies shining as their laser turrets began to glow invisibly with coherent light. Their engines were silent and still, so they seemed to sweep through space with even more grace, cutting arcs that were all the more elegant for their changelessness.

And then they began to come to pieces.

Given time to make the decision, the orbital fleet -- arrayed in as close to a tethered formation as was possible -- would have not fired at the laser frigates. But there had been only mere moments to make silhouette identifications, identifications that merely placed them as frigates. They could have been armed with railguns, they could have been armed with nukes, they could have even been inflated decoys, built and fashioned on the shadow of Ceres. They could have been anything -- and so the orbital fleet had opened fire with a withering spray of railgun slugs.

Each frigate was a warship and had been built to withstand all that could be thrown their way -- to the limitations of areospace designers. The primary defense of each ship was a whipple shield: A thin sheeting of light metal with a few inches of vacuum between it and the primary hull. This gave them their tinfoil chrome wrapped appearance. When a railgun slug struck the shield, the sheer speed of the projectile, just as it would have done to a micrometeorite, caused the shield to tear and the projectile to ablate into plasma, which then gusted along the skin of the ship like a flamethrower.

Bad.

Not as bad as a chunk of accelerated metal perforating your crew, but still bad.

But when hundreds of slugs struck a shield, a few were going to strike the laser turrets -- which had to be exposed -- or the radiator fins or the opticals. Each slug was designed to fragment on such light impacts, to tumble and twist and ricochet through the ship. Even without the shields being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of fire, the end result would have been the same. The frigates flew apart with the soundless, almost invisible explosions of suddenly decompressing ships.

Lasers, though, were faster than railguns.

And while none of them managed to destroy the undead ships, they did manage to wound many. Railgun barrels were melted. Armor bubbled. Radiators were sheered off at the narrow points. And valuable intelligence had been grabbed and flung out by the computers on the laser frigates and, in a pre-programmed diaspora, been flung to the railgun targeting systems on the railships that drifted out beyond Ceres within the next thirty seconds. They came out firing, and as they knew where the enemy would be, and the enemy did not quite know where they would be emerging from, the end result was that they had several seconds of lead time.

And in a lighting fast battle like this, that was all the time in the world, as by that moment, several hundred more kilometers had been cleared and the railguns struck before turrets could begin to swivel themselves around. Blessed by elven mages who had worked around the clock for weeks, the hundred thousand slugs, streaming towards their targets, caused undead ships to come to pieces in the same silent way as the laser frigates.

Here, too, there was splendor.

A railgun slug, after all, was not flung into space without fanfare.

Normally, railguns were utilized at vastly longer ranges, where telescopic and radar targeting could not drop every single slug precisely where it was needed. To assist the computers and the crew who were firing the railguns, each slug had a small pyrotechnic cargo, which was ignited at the moment it left the barrel, creating a neon line that traced through space, allowing them to easily track the progress of the slug. Useless, in this battle, for its original tactical purpose. But in the gun camera footage that would be viewed by later historians, it turned the moment where the railgun ships emerged from Ceres into a moment of surreal beauty. Neon green, blazing orange, searing yellow, pure white, lines of them, unbroken to the human eye by the sheer rate of fire, stretched out from each turret and touched into the distant fleet of undead ships. They did not bust apart, but rather, tore into shreds of smoke and ectoplasm that blobbed through Stark orbit.

And, then, the drones and the missiles were thrown into space by the last wave of ships -- their small size and high acceleration meaning that they would, in the end, be the ones to stick around in orbit the longest. The missiles were mostly a kind of spiteful thumbing at the nose of fate. They expended all of their propellant to barely correct their trajectories, to nudge themselves towards the surviving enemy fleet.

They were killed.

The drones didn't need to get so close.

Russian drones fired their explosive shells. American drones fired their railgun slugs, adding even more neon flares. The Indians and the Chinese opened up with their own weapons -- ranging from X-ray lasers to even simple machine guns and flechette canisters.

And then the three minutes were over and the two fleets were flying away from one another. The orbital defensive fleet was a scant twenty ships left, drifting among clouds of shredded ghosts. The united fleet had fared better...in a cruel, cold way. Every single laser frigate had been shredded -- their crews having gone in, knowing how grim their chances were. But, in the end, each frigate had had a crew of five, six people. They were small ships -- and while the discussion had floated around about fully automating them...in the end, they had been made for crews, and the sophisticated components required for automation were effectively out of their reach.

Not enough time.

Not enough stuff.

And so, humans had sat in their chairs and stepped into the fire and operated their ships to the last moment.

The railgun ships had only three major losses -- three ships whose targets had fired back before the railgun slugs had torn them to fragments. But few ships had gotten through unscathed. The same was true of the drone and missile ships, though none of them had been completely lost. One had missile ship had been badly perforated, but not a single railgun had struck a vital component and the crew...the surviving crew worked to bring it under control, to try and stretch out their life support so that they could be rescued.

Assuming, of course, there was a world to come back too.

And as the fleet decelerated and Ceres began its long, stately curve through the SOL system, on its new, ludicrously dangerous orbit, every scientist on Earth got to learn what happened when an orbital body's mass went from nearly nothing to its full amount.

The end result was the most dramatic, catastrophic breakup since the early days of the solar system. Theories, later, suggested that the return of Ceres' mass had been uneven, that some had become more massive -- and thus, slowed down -- while other parts remained nearly massless and remained at their full speed. Friction turned to thermal heat, which turned to light, and the entire rocky dwarf planet came apart in a brilliant star of molten light, the fragments spreading out like a shotgun blast into the depths of space.

In the years that followed, those chunks would be tracked by nervous astronomers, to see if any remained in the cyclical orbit that would bring them back into an intersecting line with Stark.

But that was a problem for them.

For now, the fate of Stark...the fate of both Earths...was resting on the heads of a thousand soldiers and a single dragon, who had appeared in the heart of darkness itself.

TO BE CONTINUED