They Answered The Call

Luna felt a great shame at the accusations of her sister, and her desire to unburden herself became overwhelming. Sharing thoughts was not enough. She needed to show her sister the truth.

She felt her sister’s mind entering hers, and she resisted the instinctual impulse to block out the presence. She could feel her entire life being looked at as her sister searched her memories.

The memories of the Hive mother were continually searched, from when she had saved her life in the animal system all the way to when they had communed before the rescue attempt.

She expected anger at the revelation that there were two Hive mothers and that hers became a traitor and joined the animals. Surprisingly, she did not sense any, just confusion and surprise.

Luna felt completely exposed as she bared her thoughts and her spirit; it was hard for her to allow another such access to her essence. She felt violated, but she forced herself to remain open.

She could see as her sister searched the memories of the young queen, closely inspecting them as she saw the queen interacting with Bandit-Friend and playing the animal game.

Then the memories of the Hive mother and Bandit-Friend holding claws and sharing thoughts with each other were accessed, as well as the Hive mother’s interactions with the animal queen.

She could feel the shock and confusion as her sister saw the animals willingly giving one of their worlds to the Hive mother and helping to build the Hive and Luna’s own interactions with them.

Finally, her sister withdrew from her mind and left, not sending any more thoughts to her. She now knew the truth about the two Hive mothers, the animals, and their rescue attempt.

She did not pardon me, Luna thought sadly to herself as she felt her sister leave. I do not blame her, but at least I now die unburdened by deceit and falsehoods. Think well of me, sister, if you can.

Luna returned to herself in the command chamber, feeling both sad and happy at what had happened. At least now the sister knew the truth and would remember Luna for telling it.

She looked at the animal soldier again, grateful for the experiences they had shared as they faced great danger and battled together. She returned her gaze to the viewer, her mind and spirit at peace.

The enemy battleships started making their last minor course corrections as they decelerated, and the machine ships started firing their secondary longer-ranged particle beam weapons.

The distance was far, at least four and a half planetary diameters, and just over half of the machine ship volley hit, the greatly attenuated particle beams only causing minor hull damage.

The machine ships continued firing, their hit rate and weapon damage increasing as the Hive ship and the forty-three enemy battleships continued to close with each other.

The Hive ship entered maximum weapons range, and the weapons started firing as the machine animal and the weapon drones targeted enemy ships with particle beams and a missile volley.

The particle beams hit the heavily armored bows in sustained volleys, trying to drill through the ablative armor plating of the battleships and penetrate to the weaker hull underneath.

The missiles streaked towards the enemy formations as the worker drones guided them towards their assigned targets in the cramped control spaces located behind the warheads.

The battleships were now within their own maximum weapons range, and they fired their polaron-based energy weapons at the Hive ship in a concentrated volley, still not able to target the machine ships.

The machine ship force fields intercepted the volley, flaring brightly as they blocked the beams. The enemy was now in range of the primary war beams, and the machine ships fired in groups of threes.

The enemy fired again, this time in a pulsing pattern, searching for weaknesses or gaps in the unexpected force field protecting the Hive ship. Gaps were found, and they immediately shifted their fire.

The machine ships focused their fire on the enemy ships that were now targeting through the shield gaps, their powerful war beams smashing through the armored bows and tearing open the hulls.

Ten battleships had their bow sections torn wide open, and the machine ships fired their plasma bolts in threes towards them as they shifted their war beam targeting to undamaged enemy ships.

Luna sent thought commands to the weapon drones, ordering them to target the open breaches left by the machine ships before the enemy moved their bows away to protect their exposed interiors.

The plasma bolts converted their warheads before slamming into the hull breaches, now pure balls of destructive plasma that burned hotter than a sun.

The bolts penetrated deep into the interior of the targeted ships, the successive strikes burrowing deeper as they chewed through the interiors one after another before their charges finally dissipated.

Six battleships vanished in nuclear annihilation from core overloads, and two others lost navigational control, colliding with ships besides them as their bows continued to swing around uncontrolled.

Large breaches started forming on the outer hull as the battleships continued targeting gaps they found, and Luna was thankful she had ordered the drones to move to the inner ring tunnels.

If she had not done that, thousands of drones would now be in the process of being ejected through the breaches and suffering terrible deaths as their exoskeletons burst open from the pressure.

The machine animal turned and signed to her quickly before turning back and continuing to fire the weapons. Luna accessed the small viewer on the panel next to her to verify what it had just told her.

The smaller enemy cruisers had finally reached the area again, and the Hive ship was now in danger of being attacked by them from all sides. They were going to be surrounded and destroyed soon.

The three machine ships that had stopped the deadly mass driver attacks from the battleships had accelerated at incredible speeds to get back, and now they fired their bow engines to decelerate.

The deceleration they were undergoing would have killed any organics, and their momentum slowed tremendously as they fell in behind the battleship formation and targeted their aft engines.

The machine ships coordinated their attacks, the bow and aft sections of selected ships being targeted by concentrated volleys from the screening force and the pursuing machine ships.

The targeted ships could not withstand the onslaught and fell out of formation, slowly tumbling out of control as the atmosphere was vented out of the obliterated bow and aft sections.

The machine animal rotated the Hive ship, bringing functional weapons to bear in preparation for the imminent attack on their flanks by the thirty-one enemy cruisers almost in range.

Many of them had been damaged by their own missiles that the machine ships had sent against them, and there were now twenty fewer enemy cruisers attacking them now.

The missiles the Hive ship had fired now reached the battleship formations, and Luna watched with pride as the worker drones controlling them initiated evasive maneuvers to avoid point defense fire.

Forty-six missiles had been fired, and twenty-one made it through, the controlling drones refusing to lose their target locks despite the deadly anti-missile defenses and jamming attempts.

Luna sent thoughts to them, thanking them for fighting for the Hive mother and their sisters. She felt their minds change; the feelings of fear and anxiety were now replaced with peaceful contentment.

The drones, happy for the recognition she had gifted them, activated their final booster phases and penetrated the outer hulls with their hardened tips before triggering the detonation sequence.

The powerful warheads caused massive hull breaches wherever the drones had targeted, and in spite of the sadness she felt for their sacrifices, she relished the destruction they had caused.

She had only sent a small volley, unwilling to throw away worker drone lives until she could confirm that the missiles would be able to make it through the defenses and damage the enemy battleships.

She sent thought commands to the hundreds of drones that had been waiting in their missiles, and the small, armored hatches of the missile tubes slid aside to allow them to exit the ship.

All around the Hive ship, missiles came blasting out of dozens of tubes, and the controlling drones immediately started maneuvering and tracking the targets Luna had assigned to them.

Five volleys had been rapidly fired, and now there were four hundred and sixty-three missiles blasting their engines as they surged towards their targets and initiated evasive maneuvers.

The twenty-three battleships that still had functional bow engines and thrusters had been using them to decelerate, and now they were thrusting in reverse as they built up momentum.

They matched the velocity between the Hive ship and their formation, and now they were drifting backwards as they maintained the optimal combat range for their firing weapons.

The rest of the heavily damaged battleships surged past and continued behind them, their bow and aft engine thruster systems destroyed and rendered combat ineffective for the time being.

The machine ships continued firing on the battleships in front while the missiles divided themselves between the battleships and the smaller cruisers attacking on the flanks.

Luna tried to keep track of everything that was going on, but she could barely keep up with the chaos going on all around them as the Hive ship started targeting the cruisers with particle beams.

Over a hundred new null space flashes appeared five planetary diameters in distance all around them, and more enemy ships emerged with their black angular hulls.

Whatever little hope Luna still had vanished as seventeen battleships and thirty-four cruisers from among the new arrivals started swinging their bows towards the Hive ship and accelerating.

Half of the machine ship shields had failed, and the remaining ones were flaring bright red as the battleships focused on the still shielded areas with their beams and secondary weapons.

The enemy battleships were now 1.5 planetary diameters distant, and the machine ships were mercilessly targeting them as the enemy polaron beams continued to fire wide and miss them.

New constructs emerged from the hulls of the battleships, and they fired rapidly, shooting hundreds of small spherical metal balls out of multiple barrels from both the bow and aft sections.

They fired towards the unshielded machine ships in front of them and the three machine ships still attacking them from behind, hundreds of metal spheres vanishing in the space around the targeted ships.

The metal spheres were fired so fast, Luna was not able to track them with her eyes. All she could see was the devastating results as three of the machine ship hulls were suddenly filled with hundreds of small breaches.

She accessed the panel again and slowed down the recording, watching the spheres explode near the machine ships and saturating the immediate area with a cloud of hyper-velocity fragments.

The thousands of fragments tore into the nearby machine ships, severely damaging the top layer of their specially created hulls and exposing the armor underneath.

This is bad. Luna thought to herself as another volley of hundreds of spheres was shot by the enemy towards undamaged machine ships. Their hulls were riddled with tens of thousands of fragments almost immediately.

The machine ship hulls were damaged, and the enemy was now able to target them with their beams. Already, four machine ships had self-destructed as they were torn apart by dozens of beams and the small spheres.

There were now twelve functional enemy battleships remaining, and the thirty-one cruisers added their weapons fire to the onslaught. A terrible solar minute passed, and now ten machine ships were gone.

Only six machine ships were still fighting; the rest had self-destructed or were destroyed by the secondary weapons of their sister machine ships to deny the enemy any wreckage to examine.

The six fought on, jinxing wildly as the few weapons they had continued to strike at the enemy. Luna looked away, not wanting to see the last of them destroyed as they fell to the enemy weapons.

Sudden thoughts came, startling her out of her sadness for the dying machine ships.

Luna was shocked that her sister had sent more thoughts, and she thought of how to reply. She decided not to correct her sister and tell her that the ships were thinking machines, not animals. It served no purpose.

A falsehood of omission was justified and not as wrong as a true falsehood. She felt the grudging respect her sister had for the fighting spirit being displayed by the "animal" ships, and she wanted to reinforce that.

She paused, watching on the viewer as the last machine ship ejected a dozen tiny objects that shimmered before disappearing as the ship reeled under the crossfire of multiple enemy battleships.

A few moments later, the ship fired its last volley of plasma bolts before disappearing in a massive burst of energy as it self-destructed.

A rapidly expanding cloud of microscopic particles and gas were all that remained of the machine intelligence that had been commanding the machine ships.

Command Unit 273. Its name was Command Unit 273. Thank you, machine-friend. I will not forget you and the others.

Luna allowed the profound grief she felt to go with the thoughts she sent to her sister, bracing herself against the sitting bench as the Hive ship shuddered from the enemy attacks.

Her sister didn’t respond right away, and Luna stared at the viewer as the missiles she had fired before boosted towards their targets, dozens of them blinking out from the enemy point defense fire.

The missiles caused the enemy to evade, and the weapons fire hitting the Hive ship lessened in intensity as they tried to get away from the missiles that were not susceptible to their jamming attempts.

Luna saw missile ports sliding open on the enemy ships, and a surge of pride passed through her spirit as she continued to watch her worker drones unerringly track their targets.

Only now were they willing to use missiles. Only after the machine ships died do they dare use them again. She sent angry thoughts to the controlling drones, telling them to target the missile ports.

She relished in the coming destruction as the missiles made course corrections, her drones now targeting the open ports of the enemy as they continued to dodge the enemy defenses.

Only one hundred and twelve missiles had survived, and her drones activated the final boost phase as they maintained their target locks on the open ports loaded with enemy missiles.

One after another, the missiles slammed into their targets, their warheads adding their destruction to the enemy missile warheads still within the hulls.

Dozens of enemy ships disappeared in blinding flashes of lights, their ruptured cores overloading as the chain reaction of the loaded missiles tore open huge gashes along the sides of the targeted ships.

Even the missiles that missed the ports because of evasive maneuvers caused catastrophic damage; the missile impact and detonations were still causing nearby loaded missile ports to explode.

The last remaining eight battleships were destroyed, as were twenty-three cruisers. The surviving cruisers were so heavily damaged that it was shocking they hadn’t suffered core overloads.

Not yet, she thought to herself as she eyed her next victims.

She ordered the drones controlling still-functioning weapons to target the derelict cruisers, seeing that the machine animal was doing the same thing with the weapons directly under its control.

All the ships attacking them had been destroyed, but now the seventeen battleships and over thirty cruisers that had flashed in before were charging right at them, already firing missiles that surged towards them.

She felt thoughts coming from the command drone again, and she wearily accepted them.

Luna was not expecting this, and it was difficult for her to think properly. Her confusion as to what her sister was telling her to do, coupled with her exhaustion, prevented her from thinking quickly.