The Hierarchy of Now and Forever Ch. 01

The UNN Calypso floated in space before three Zemturga Warspheres.

"Captain?" Albert asked, glancing over his shoulder.

There had been some grumbling when John had asked for them to re-take the test. Instructor Q3 had arched a single carapace clad eyebrow, twitched two antennas, and then had nodded his head. He hadn't asked for why, and hadn't asked any clarifying questions. He had simply let them go into the pods and cycle it up. The rest of the crew had glanced worriedly at John. John had played it close to his vest. And now, as he saw the three bulbous warcraft of the galaxy's most dangerous species, he nodded.

"Lt. Moore, get us the hell out of here. We're falling back to Wolf-359. Bring us to Tier 4 for maximum speed."

"Aye sir!" Lt. Moore said.

The Calypso swung her nose around - the SOF engines at the front buzzing, crackling and punching a hole between realspace and the lower reaches of the SOF. As they dropped in, the warspheres started to open fire with their kinetics. The Calypso dropped to the second tier, then to the third. But as they were about to reach the fourth, where faster than light travel became not just possible but dangerously possible, alerts wailed and Shey exclaimed.

"Sir! Mass mines! Deep buried mass mines!"

"Surface, now!" John shouted.

The Calypso hurriedly swept up through tier 3 moments before the mass mines detonated, releasing their stored matter into huge, spreading clouds that, in the SOF, would become deadly disruptions to any ship's integrity. As they shot towards tier 2, the scanners and screens showed that a deadly, ravening swarm of Dagger interceptors was already there and waiting - and more than that, so were two more Warspheres. They had come out of the SOF, and Lt. Moore, forgetting his role, threw up his hands.

"Oh it's a fucking failure test, I fucking knew-"

"Lt. Xao," John said, firmly. "Tell the fighters to activate their realspace engines...but do not launch them."

"...sir?" Eugene asked.

"Lt. Moore. Bring us to heading John-1, I've programmed it into the flight computers," John said, his grin fierce, then tapped his coms. "Chief?"

"Uh, yeah? What?" Chief Katria Kyleen sounded faintly shocked. And a little harried. "What?" She asked, again.

"I've sent a plan to your comp pad, enact it. No questions." John turned off the com before the cadet who was acting as the chief engineer could ask anything. Shey was shooting John a look. John was pretty sure the proctors were too. But he saw that Eugene was grinning - and had turned to his console and began to speak.

The Calypso emerged from tier 2 with her fighters prepared. The Calypso was a light cruiser. She had umbilical that held her fighters in a circular pattern around the tapered spine of her hull. Each fighter was designed to detatch and relatch to those hooks - they actually could get 'snagged' by them if they flew close enough. The ship simply didn't have enough space for a carrier deck. It mean that all their realspace engines pointed along the angle of acceleration - and when they emerged into realspace, the fusion drive of the Calypso kicked on at the same moment her fighter escort's fusion jets did as well. The entire ship shot forward along a trajectory that carried it away from the warspheres, away from their fighters.

The warspheres did spend a short time collecting their fighters. In that time, enough distance was gleaned that when they began to fire railgun slugs at the Calypso, the shots took enough time for the aft shields to be brought up, brought down, cycled, and brought up again. In short, the Calypso was immune to their fire as they raced away. The warspheres, too, couldn't chase them faster than light: They were stuck thanks to the mass mines that had chased the Calypso up in the first place. All five warspheres burned hard, jetting after them as they streaked through the system.

"We're out of remass, sir," Eugene said. "Our fighters are useless now."

"Get the crew out of them and jettison the fighters," John said, firmly.

Eugene sighed. "Delta's gonna kill you."

"I know," John said, casually. He watched the screens.

What would have normally been a grueling several day chase at 1.5Gs compressed, thanks to the simulacrum pod's abilities to detect when a stalemate would hold. The battlecomputer had done the math, it knew that the warspheres would catch up to them...but it wasn't before they had cleared days of travel. And so, the Calypso and the warspheres chased one another, but the Calypso's crew got to skip past the days of waiting and reach the climax.

"Sir, I cannot help but notice that we're going to be flying dangerously close to a sun," Albert said.

"That we are," John said. He tapped on the coms. "Chief Kyleen-"

"Yes, it's done. And I just want to say, for the record? You're out of your fucking tree, Captain. This is going to be a catastrophe!"

"A cat-astrophe?" Delta asked, grinning as she walked in onto the bridge.

"Tell Vee to fu-"

The line to the chief clicked off as the sun of LHS-228 swelled on the screen. The ship's ray deflectors came online - buzzing and whirring as they started to sweep electromagnetic radiation around and away from the ship. But what could protect a ship from energy weapons for a short time could do so very little against the furious blaze of a sun. Alerts started to blip on as ablative armor started to boil away and the Calypso started to tremble slightly as boiling ablative armor shook them like tiny RCS systems.

"We're losing external systems, captain!" Albert said. "We've lost our dorsal PDCs. And our port plasma arcs. And our...ray deflector just burned out."

The room was getting hot. Sweat beaded along John's brow. He leaned forward.

"Lt. Sheyshen, Launch probe 1."

"Probe 1 away!"

The belly of the Calypso puffed as a probe was shot straight down.

"Tier 4, now!" John shouted.

The Calypso punched into the SOF - and dove. Dove. Dove. The warspheres prepared to dive after, to chase at faster than light speeds. But seconds before they did, the probe struck the surface of the sun - boiling away like a puff of smoke in the breeze. And the center of the probe was revealed: A single glittering Hypexian crystal, carefully sheered off the main drive's reserves. Without this chunk, the Calypso now lacked any backup in case the main body of the crystal went dead - a dangerous place for any starship.

The crystal plunged into the star - and like all Hypexian crystal, when charged, it punched a hole into the SOF. A chunk of the sun the size of five Earths suddenly ceased to have the same physics as the realspace around them. Gravity changed. The speed of light changed. The constants of the universe changed. All of it lasted for only as long as it took for the crystal to burn out - a few seconds. In that time, it triggered a shift in the star's gravity...and the star collapsed inwards, compressing its core fiercer and harder than it should have for few billion years.

The solar nova swept outwards at the speed of light.

The warspheres started to turn to the side - as if to flee.

Their ray deflectors flare. Fizzled.

Died.

Then the shockwave hit them and the ships blew apart into dust.

When the pod opened, John grinned up at Instructor Q3, who glowered down at him.

"Well?" he asked.

"You were supposed to learn how to face up to death..." the insectoid leaned forward. "Two weeks of extra duty shifts."

John's grin was large enough to see from space. "Thank you, sir."

***

The quiet conference room in the heart of Zeta Colony was full of cigarette smoke and the hazy light of holo projectors - which displayed the image and psyche data of one Ensign John Tangent, which slowly rotated in the center of the table. Admiral Gains and Sub-Commander X'or'tal both glowered at one another over the table. Dr. D-4211 N9 and Administrator Plip both watched the two military men but heads - and waited.

"He's suicidal," Gains said, flatly.

"He's a genius," X'or'tal said, his frilled ruff lifting up. "Did you even know Hypexian crystals could trigger novas?"

"That's the whole point!" Gains said, standing up. "It was wildly irresponsible. If his ship hadn't survived flying so close to the photosphere, if his crystal had burned out and he needed a spare, if-"

"If, if, if, he took down the biggest battle group we could reasonably throw at him, in a light cruiser," X'or'tal said, his tail lashing. "The kid is going to make admiral someday. His test scores are also through the roof. He's got that friend group thrumming like a clutch born together, he has no xenoantipathy."

"He's also pretty," Dr. N9 said, quietly, her gleaming metal fingers tapping together, her camera lens eyes whirring and clicking.

Everyone looked at the Omnidrone professor.

"I can't believe that matters," Admiral Gains said, quietly.

"I'm the best quasicausal psychodynamic expert that the Alliance has," Dr. N9 said. "The mathematics are extremely clear. The SOF operates better on the young, the attractive, the charismatic. The selection bias has been clear and present in every stellar navy that has ever existed, even the UNN has demonstrated this, and you've only been flying starships for less than a century."

Gains frowned and leaned back in his seat.

"Lets be clear, here," Gains said. "We only have one shot here. One chance. There has been no communication from Earth, from SOL, from any UNN-IAF beacon or repeater, no ship codes, nothing. It's overwhelmingly clear that the Totality has won the war."

Everyone flinched. Everyone looked grim. Everyone didn't want to speak. No one at Zeta Colony let themselves speak those three words, even if everyone had worried, everyone had wondered. Why had they been sent so far, why had they been left out here for so long? Were they all that was left of the Alliance who were still free? How many of their former colleagues and friends been turned into thralls of one make or another? Those worried were there...but Gains had broken the taboo.

Gains continued. "If we choose the wrong commander for this mission, then it will doom not just ourselves, but our children and every other child of every free species out there. It will doom the slaves of the Zemturga to an eternity of servitude. It'll mean this whole damn galaxy will be under their tentacled thumb for the rest of time. That's how important this is." He looked at each of them, frowning.

Sub-Commander X'or'tal hissed, his tail twitching.

Administrator Plip and his three sub-bodies all burbled quietly, thinking.

Dr. N9 nodded. Her smoothly modulated, robotic voice spoke into the silence. "This only reaffirms my decision," she said. "Ensign John Tangent has every factor we need. He's brilliant. He's a good diplomat, and better lover. He's pretty. He's young, but not too young. If...I could choose anyone, without the constraints of physics, then I'd send you, Admiral Gains. You've vastly more experience and training - but we have to operate in the bounds of physical reality. And as it is, if you were to enter the SOF to Tier 3, the effects would be extremely deleterious unless you were a passenger."

Gains looked aside, his hand pressing against the table in the center of the room. The United Nations Navy hadn't had enough time to have the same institutional experience that the Alliance navy had with command officers and exposure to the SOF. He gritted his teeth, then swore. "Damn. I suppose gallivanting around the galaxy really is a job for the young, eh?"

The holos shifted to what they had all been working on for the past twenty years.

Gains watched the image rotate.

He nodded.

"Tell him."

***

John was buttoning up his uniform when the door buzzer to his apartment chimed. He turned, opened the door - and came to attention as he saw Admiral Gains and one of the science staff. Gains was a tall, dark figure with a bald pate and a thick goatee that framed his narrow lips, and he looked down at John with a severe expression. The science staff was...

Well.

She was an Omnidrone - a species that had been built by another species now long extinct due to an ancient plague. They had been instructed to assist and help, and had done so well past the point their creators, their masters, had died. Without anyone to assist, they had been stuck in endless loops of repeating, self replicating programs...but just as in natural evolution, replication errors had led to evolution, evolution had led to sentience, and in the end, the Omnidrones had left their world to find others to assist. They were terrible warriors, but excellent at most other tasks.

And this Omnidrone?

She was about as tall as John was, her heels built with a stiletto point, giving her an elegant posture. Her hips were waspish and chrome, while her bust was large and jutting, barely contained by her pale white lab coat, which had several buttons undone to free her cleavage. Her hair, silver metal, was carved into a shape that accentuated her features, while her large, plush rubber lips were pursed. A pair of corrective lenses perched on her nose, and she held a comp pad in her hand. Her voice was breathy and seductive as she held out her hand. "Good afternoon, Ensign Tangent. I'm Doctor

D-4211 N9. I am told that my name translates into Terran as...Darling."

"Uh, ma'am, er, Doctor," John said, taking the hand, shaking it, before turning to Admiral Gains. "Sir?"

"Come with me, Ensign," Admiral Gains said. "Dr. N9 here will be explaining things."

John walked with them as Dr. N9 swayed her hips from side to side, her skirts swishing around her chrome buttocks. John forced his eyes forward as they moved through the corridors of Zeta Colony. "As you know, John," she said. "Our colony was founded to study the Luciferian ruins. The Lucifer species, named by one of your scientists after their ruins were discovered on Venus, once existed in this region of space ten thousand years ago before they mysteriously went extinct."

John nodded.

"This planet is the only one to have so many intact Luciferian artifacts. But we have spent these past twenty years not merely studying the ruins..." Dr. N9 said, turning to face him as they came to an elevator that John had never used before. "You see, we discovered the purpose of these ruins nineteen years ago. It was one of the first things the colony did discover - but it was agreed that the information must be kept as secret as possible, lest the Totality discover it through esper scrying or infiltration and spying."

John nodded. "What was it, Doctor?"

The elevator whirred down. Down. Down. It was going fast. Then, suddenly, the window that showed nothing but black wall - so smooth and unchanging that it had been impossible to see movement on it - bloomed with a view. They were cruising down an elevator shaft that ran along the wall of a megastructure's interior. Within the structure were two vast shapes. One, John recognized as being none other than the UNN Cataphract - the venerable and well built Khan class escort carrier that had brought the colonists to Zeta Colony. It served a dual role as battleship and carrier, and was able to outfight two warspheres at once, if well handled. The Cataphract was currently a skeletal frame - her hull removed, her components shifted...

Onto...

Onto...

"This planet was built to do one thing," Dr. N9 said, her husky voice commanding. "To build starships. Luciferian starships."

The components of the Cataphract had been placed along the spine and forward jutting hull of a titanic starship - a frame of gleaming black Luciferian metal that looked as if it could be as massive as three warspheres put together. She was essentially two broad, blade shaped wings that reached up towards a spinal column that attached to a bulbous and sophisticated looking engine pod. Admiral Gains pointed, his voice proud. "The Luciferian computers, once we got them working, threw the designs together. The thing's modular, clearly made to incorporate a great many components. The only ones we could find in the library banks of the Luciferian systems were for their engine and command bridge. So, we've been cannibalizing the other parts from the Cataphract."

"Good god," John said. "That'll only fill, I don't know, thirty percent of her capacity."

"Indeed," Gains said. "But it is our hope that as this ship meets Alliance species, their industrial capacity can be put to building components to add to the ship - creating an amalgamation of all our best traits. It'll be a true dreadnought. A weapons platform that could take on an entire Zemturga battle group and destroy it, then retreat to safety before reinforcements arrived. A single ship can travel farther and faster than a fleet - meaning this one ship may be the difference between the war being lost and the war being won."

"That's why you made the academy!" John exclaimed. "To train the young of the colony - to be the crew."

"Indeed," Gain said. "And...to find her captain."

The elevator slowed. Stopped.

John, Admiral Gains and Dr. N9 stepped out of it and stood before the deadly looking ship. Admiral Gains turned to face John once more. "You have been chosen to be the Captain of the UNN Excalibur."

John watched as crew painted the name - in vast letters - on the narrow, birdlike prow of the command bridge. He squared his shoulders. "Thank you, sir." He smiled, slightly. "SOF physics are a bitch, aren't they?"

Gains frowned. "You're not-" He stopped himself.

"Sorry, sir," John said. "But I did read Lectures on Dimensional Fatigue and Command Staff Allocation Regimes."

"You read my essay?" Dr. N9 exclaimed.

"Yes, I just didn't have a face for the name until now," John said, smiling at her. The Omnidrone doctor blushed and put her hand to her cheek, biting her lower lip as she looked at John in a new light, while Admiral Gains sighed.

"You will of course, have a command staff of the highest scored ensigns - but for everyone in secondary command positions, where the effects of Dimensional Fatigue will be far lesser, you will have the best officers we have in the colony and the finest crew we have," Admiral Gains. "Make no mistake. The future of the galaxy rests on your shoulders."

John came to attention.

"I won't let you down, sir," he said.

Admiral Gains looked him over...and nodded.

Behind them, the Excalibur began to shine with her deck lights as the final systems came online.

TO BE CONTINUED