The Long Shot Pt. 10

I'm not... but I'm not alone, she thought.

A targeting laser bathed her.

[They have a lock!] K'iren said.

Roxi smirked.

The dorsal turrets of the battleships were antiparticle impact beam turrets. They flung coherent streams of antimatter so fast that they could strip atoms apart, while the matter/antimatter detonations dumped more energy into the area. They weren't quite energy weapons and they weren't quite kinetic weapons but instead sat in the uncertain middle-ground between the two. Kinetic shields could be overwhelmed by solid projectiles, while ablative armor boiled off to resist energy attacks, but neither of them could stand up to the killing white heat of a API beamer.

The petajoules meanwhile were the end result of the battleships being nearly three, four kilometers long. Magnetic accelerators, paired with agrav mass reduction and whatever other physics fuckery that the Voidbringers could bring to bear -- which had to be a lot, considering how the Concord's every attempt to build API guns had ended with the laboratories destroying themselves in white hot flares of out of control antimatter emissions -- allowed the spinal guns to fling a chunk of matter so hard that it hit with...

Well.

It was in the name.

10¹⁵ joules.

Ten with fifteen zeroes.

A sliver of tungsten that hit like a small fission warhead, with a rate of fire on par with a chemical propellant machine gun.

The tapered noses of the Voidbringer ships came to bear and their turrets shifted and settled...

And Roxi knew.

She just knew, deep in her bones, that it was time to move.

She shot forward and felt the dampened acceleration pushing at her brains as her whole body shot along the bottom left of the possible evasion courses that had been set for her by Hugh. The space she had been in was speared with matter/antimatter explosion as the API beams and the kinetics both struck one another, detonating with roaring flares of white light.

"Nuke em!"

Her shoulders popped open as she swept past the belly of the Voidbringer battleship, sheering so hard through their formation that the subline ships were still trying to track the position she had been a few seconds before. The launch of her munitions felt like a series of sharp taps against her spine, and the sight of their contrails filled her eyes as she cleared the back engine of the Voidbringer battleship. She spread her arms as if she was leaping off the headboard of a swimming pool, flipping away and giving herself a serious jolt of lateral motion relative to the ship.

This meant she was a good distance away when the munition spread hit.

K'iren's voice was smug: [Nuke 'em? Please!]

The missiles were so fast and so close that the Voidbringer battleship barely had time to reorient and target with its belly defense turrets. A few of them flared out.

Most didn't.

The first wave were kinetic impactors. Most of their mass were carried in tiny E-space pockets, which they opened up with a flowering bloom of ultraviolet light. Those kinds of E-space pockets were inherently unstable, and it made Roxi just a bit nervous at how many of them K'iren had packed her shoulders with using her fabricator systems. Still, the end result was spectacular: A titanic shotgun blast, rippling along the belly of the Voidbringer ship, illuminating the shield with a flare of blue-white light, which crackled away as the kinetic barriers dropped.

Then the second wave hit.

They were drillbombs, similar to the munitions that the Voidbringers had used on the High Observatory. Rather than simply doing contact detonations, they drilled into the black armored hull of the enemy ship -- and then exploded within.

Against a Concord ship of similar size, that would have been stupid overkill. But as Roxi watched, she saw the battleship had some kind of...inhibitor field. Most of the atomics merely fizzled, rather than triggering full fusion. The end result of several dozen sub-fusion reactions, though, was still enough to set off secondary detonations within the ship and cause the whole thing to crack down the middle like a dropped egg.

[And that's one!] K'iren laughed.

There were still the other battleship. And, of course, the subline ships and the strike craft. They came forward in a chaotic swarm, swirling and darting around and through one another's flight path, so that one fighter seemed to be in many places at once. In response, Roxi simply let her instincts and the glittering target markers and dodge routes that K'iren and Hugh threw up for her, while Carcass used up a small sliver of the computronium capacity she had for some task that she...really couldn't focus on at the moment.

She thrust her finger at a fighter and sliced it in half, twisted out of the way of a screaming trio of missiles, then smashed her fist into the cockpit of another fighter. The voidbringers had some biomatter that served as part of their control systems, and she got it all over her arms and shoulders as her body ripped through a fighter moving at sub-terminal velocities. She flicked her hand, then beamed out with her palm grazer, shooting through a trio of fighters at once, before her heels opened and dropped nuke-limpets behind her. She shot away as the limpets latched themselves onto a pair of destroyers that were coming in close for a matter torpedo attack.

The flare of light bathed her back and she shot towards the other battleship, maneuvering so that the petajoule kinetic would always intersect both her...and the rest of the formation. The battleship held off on firing long enough for her to reach the barrel and shoot inside of it. It was wide enough that three Starships could have flown down it, their shoulders barely touching. She didn't even bother with her beam weapons: She just grabbed onto the walls and flew and ripped all at once, peeling fragile components out of the wall with a series of sparks and flashes. The petajoule was disabled before she was even a quarter of the way down the barrel.

[Look out!]

Ahead of her, she saw service hatches opening -- the kind that would normally be sending out maintenance devices to fix the gun up after damage.

Instead, it was dropping in the multi-limbed, oddly asymmetrical combat drones that the Voidbringers used for boarding actions. One of them had a double barreled kinetic weapon that it aimed at her belly as she shot towards the hatch. She snatched it from its clawed hands, then smashed the creature's curved head-like protrusion. Roxi wasn't sure if that was the right place to hit it, since each time the Concord had faced the Voidbringers in their many intrusions into the galaxy...the drones had been a different design.

It ended up not mattering.

The kinetic and the upper half of the drone came apart with a spray of shrapnel that ripped into the wall with shocking force. Some chunks of the armored shoulder bisected their way through another one of the combat drones, leaving her facing only three more, that all fired their kinetics, which slammed into her defensive screens.

Those were designed to stop ship to ship guns.

The impacts flashed, crackled, stopped a solid ten centimeters away from her breasts, and then the slugs themselves drifted away, their inertia stopped and bled away in an instant.

Roxi lifted her head up. "Oh, man, you guys are fucked."

Her X-beam finger sliced one in half, then whipped out and cut another's head off. The third fired a shotgun spray of kinetic projectiles into her armor, which she walked forward and through with ease. More swarmed out of the hatches.

[I know that this is fun and all-] Heinlein started.

"I got a plan, Carcass, can you start figuring out how to make an API go pew pew?" Roxi asked, punching her way through three drones at once and then shoving into the hatchway. She dropped down, landing in the agrav field of the Voidbringer ship. It was slightly heavier than Earth gravity -- meaning she barely noticed it -- and the corridors were the same angular, black material as the exterior of the ship. The corridor was almost hexagonal in design, but the verticies were all slightly wrong, making it twist and distort in her eyes, like one of those optical designs or surrealist paintings.

[Done,] he said.

"That was fast," she said, starting to sprint along the corridor. She came around the corner, found that a trio of combat drones had set up squat, spider-limbed turrets, and then leaped upwards, blasting with her grazer palm. The searing beam cut through the corridor material as if it was hot butter and she exploded into the next corridor with a CRUNCH, her shoulders slamming into the roof and denting it inwards.

[It's not very hard to, as you say, make the gun go pew pew,] Carcass said as she sprinted forward. Her palm flared and she cut through a hole, into a chamber full of strange, glittering crystals and odd, spiderlike beings that scuttled out of her way. Then she was underneath one of the API turrets. There, she used her hand to rip her way through a closed hatch, tugging it down in a spray of metal fragments.

The interior of the turret was several more of those crystals, each one pulsating with a dark-light that cast the entire chamber with an eerie, unreal light. The combat drones and spider creatures alike scuttled towards the hatch, and Roxi shouldered her way through them, dealing with them with a punch, a kick, and a single headbutt. As the twitching creatures sprawled around her, she grinned, then pointed her finger at a wall, shooting a hole through it with her X-beam.

K'iren had already gotten the idea. Her shoulder chuffed and a micro-drone shot out of the hole, into space beyond.

[We got a lock on the rest of the fleet, and maybe twenty six seconds before this turret is offline,] Heinlein said.

[Okay, when I say so, strobe that crystal with...you know, just point your finger,] Carcass said and Roxi grinned, thrusting out her finger. Then she flew up into the air, so that her feet were no longer on the floor of the turret. Her internal agrav engines kicked on and she dug her fingers into the wall...and shoved. Hard. Squealing metal and groaning machines reverberated through her arm as the turret strained against her, trying to not traverse...

But traverse it did.

[Pulse!]

At Carcass' word, she pulsed her finger. Whatever coherent beam of energy he had programmed into her weapon system hit the crystal and the API beamer made an eerie, tingling, singing noise. Through the uplink she was getting from the micro-drone that K'iren had launched, Roxi could see the explosions as the beamer played along the edge of the combat group. Then she kept pushing and the turret started to play along the cruisers and destroyers and...

The beam shut down.

"All right, no more fun allowed!" Roxi said, feeling her manufacturing plants coming online. She slammed her ankles down and piton nukes slammed into the ground behind her. She frowned. "Is that enough?"

[I tapped out our tritium to boost them to the high megaton range!] K'iren said, cheerfully. [...you're right.]

Her shoulders opened and more nukes slammed into the ceiling and walls of the turret.

Roxi shouldered her way out and flew into space.

Behind her, the Voidbringer battleship cracked in half with a flare of blue-white light. Either she'd busted up their fusion suppressor, or they couldn't stop every nuke at once. Roxi grinned. She had just dismembered a Voidbringer detatchment. By herself! First time!

With help! She added.

[I was about to say,] Hugh said.

[E-space folds incoming,] Carcass said, his voice clipped.

The horizon bloomed with purple light. Sixteen battleships dropped out of E-space, flanked by more subline ships than she could handily count.

"...shit," Roxi whispered, her elation vanishing.

[Fortunately, I was not spored off from a fool,] Carcass said, his voice smug. [Follow my directions precisely...now.]

The instructions flashed up before Roxi and she dove into E-space a fraction of a second before enough kinetic projectiles to rip a planet in half swept through her.

***

Admiral Yen Yen Ro turned from the display as it finished up with Roxi's arrival back at the staging yards. During the entire replay, Roxi had kept her eyes focused on the window -fascinated. Found had been transformed in the short time she had been away, and it was...awe inspiring to witness.

Rocket fleets were dropping in from E-space every few minutes, as regularly as clockwork. Their purple flares of entry were then followed up by the thrust-plumes of their fusion torches as they moved into a holding orbit around Found, joining the other rockets that were mustering. There were war rockets from across the entire Concord here, from the blocky shape of Fourarm craft to the geodesic shapes of some species she didn't recognize, needle like Trisk ships...but the majority of them were the long, cylindrical rockets of the Terran navies.

"Excellent work, Approximating Apotheosis," the Admiral said, nodding curtly. "You made the right call -- not just to hide yourself until you could escape, but to engage the enemy. Every one of their ships we kill is another we won't have to kill later. They don't have logistic support in our galaxy yet...we may be facing the largest invasion in galactic history, but we're still facing an invasion, and all the classic invasion traps still hold true." His lips quirked up faintly in his version of a smile. "At least, we hope."

"It's kind of like fighting slowboat style again," Roxi said, trying to not...squirm.

Between the awe at the sight of the Concord's rocket fleet mustering and the pleasure in knowing she and her crew had done well...there was another feeling, a sensation that was getting stronger and stronger with every second.

Roxi...was fucking horny.

After so many close calls, after barely escaping, after victory and triumph and the raw feral power of her muscle and her beams and her munitions all being at her fingertips, Roxi felt as if her entire hull was tingling. Her nipples were so hard and her pussy was so wet, she was shocked that the Admiral didn't notice. Those six eyes flicked to her face and Roxi's cheeks flushed as she swore that she saw an amused glint in them.

T'yatian were anthroforms, but rather than the terrifying monster species that that term indicated, they were somewhat more similar to the Terran legends of centaurs. His upper torso was humanoid and gray skinned, his features were almost elfin, with his eyes framing his features like an chevron, his nose a little slit between his two sets of three eyes, his lips dark black and tipped with fangs that thrust over his lower lip. He had two humanlike arms that ended in black claws, and then his lower body was a hulking spider's thorax, with enough legs to allow him to scuttle around with ease. He was dressed in the upper tunic of the Concord Rocket Fleet uniform, which just reminded Roxi even more that she was naked.

Naked and horny.

And the Admiral was able to see it. Smell it, maybe. That just made her sex tingle even more as she rubbed the back of her neck. "I-I mean, uh, the old slowboat wars, before we cracked FTL, you couldn't really invade another solar system, because your attacking force was so slow. We're just looking at that at a larger scale, even faster than light, uh, the Voidbringers-

[You know, it's not against the regs to fuck an admiral as a starship,] K'iren said, her voice teasing.

"-a-and, uh, they...that is, they take so long to get here from Andromeda, even, even, faster than light, in E-space, so yes, they brought a lot, but they're facing an entire galaxy!" Roxi continued, her cheeks burning as she saw the Admiral nodding.

That can't be right, she thought.

[He's not in our chain of command, he's just coordinating between the Corps and the Rocket Fleets.]

But...wait, really?

[Also, technically, we don't really have a chain of command, we're not precisely a military organization and also, you haven't lived till you've felt T'yatian paralytic toxin!]

"Parawhat!?" Roxi spluttered.

The Admiral laughed. "Ah, new ships..." He shook his head. "Every time I've had to work with new ships, you know what I've noticed?" He stood, his spider-legs clicking along the floor. He cupped her cheek, gently. "Your crews are nearly as horny as you. Which is saying something, for people who never wear clothes."

"I mean, clothes tear!" Roxi muttered.

"We both know that's not why ships never wear clothes," Admiral Yen Yen Ro murmured, his thumb sliding along her lips. "Now...normally...I'd love to take advantage of the utterly lax state of discipline among the Starship Corps, and bend you over my desk, and rail your new ass so hard you can barely walk."

Roxi whimpered.

"But we're on the edge of a galactic disaster, and I have so much paperwork to do," he said, dropping his arm to his side. "And you will be shipping out again in precisely ten minutes to escort the iron bombs. So, I recommend you shift to a higher computation time." He smirked, then turned back to the desk, tapping some buttons on it. "Here, take these simfiles, I'm sure your crew can take advantage of them."

"Thank you! Uh, Sir!" Roxi said.

"And Roxi," the Admiral said, as she floated to the door.

"Yeah?" she glanced back.

"You do have an amazing ass," he said, grinning at her, showing his fangs.

Roxi flushed, then shot forward.

One of the nice things about being a starship?

She didn't need a cabin. She just found a discrete corner of the station, then leaned back against the wall, then watched as time seemed to slow to a crawl. In actuality, it was her thinking that was being sped up. A starship could handle processing speeds up to a hundred times human speeds, for short bursts -- the strain on the biological parts of her mind were just a bit too much to keep up for anything more than an hour. It was the main limiter on a starships combat endurance, but fortunately, the recovery systems would mean she could drop back to normal human cognition speeds and be refreshed after only a minute or so out of high speed time.

That's why she didn't worry about the fact she might be going into combat again within ten minutes...

By the time she was there, she'd be ready for high speed cognition again. She closed her eyes, then stepped backwards into the simulation of her bridge. She walked into the bridge and then froze as a dark, black hand caressed along her back. "Ooh this is fun," K'iren purred into her ear, her voice silky and seductive and dangerous. She had fangs -- which, for a Trisk, was not that odd. What was odd was the feeling of them puncturing Roxi's hull and injecting her with a toxin that caused her muscles to go slack, her knees to collapse, and her whole body to burn from within with a blaze of raw, fierce lust.

"Mew!" Roxi squeaked as she went limp in K'iren's arms, and then felt more arms, pressed against her sides. These came to narrow, bladed points, and they held her up as her head lolled back and she could see K'iren's features, but with a distinctly grayish-black cast, her eyes glowing red and...six in number.

K'iren had become a T'yatian.

"Quite a nice bit of simulational programming, I think," K'iren crooned. "Don't worry, the boys will be here soon. After I've...prepared you..."

Thick glops began to slap against her thighs as K'iren spun Roxi around and around and around. For Roxi, the sensation of being so weak and powerless was almost as intoxicating as her ludicrous strength had been moments before -- thick strands of webbing glued her arms together above her head as K'iren pushed her hands up with her humanoid palms, while more strands swept around and around her hips and legs, pressing them together. Her eyes and her mouth were covered by the stuff and if Roxi had needed to breathe, she might have been concerned.