Utopia War

Chapter 15 - The Battle of Proxima (ii)

Some of the remaining ships took TheBestAtJumping up on her offer and began to scatter off into the 5th and 6th dimensions. A few of them got caught by straggler genius missiles but most made it safely away.

The bulk of the ships TheBestAtJumping contacted, however, assumed a formation behind the dolphin exactly as she had transmitted to them.

The battle raged on all around them, still entirely one-sided. As more consensus ships were destroyed more enemy ships were cobbled together from the wreckage. The consensus was starting to lose it's numerical advantage.

Reinforcement ships were spilling out of the ring, as many who chose not to fight changed their minds once they got a real look at the destruction being brought to bare against Proxima. While helpful, they weren't arriving nearly fast enough to replace the ships being destroyed.

TheBestAtJumping's formation wove its way through the chaos of ships, dodging both the enemy constructs and the wildly flying friendly ships.

<Set you EMFM fields to maximum power, minimum spread, random configuration. Aim that at anything without a consensus identity signature,> TheBestAtJumping told it's charges, as it demonstrated the technique by using it to sear one of the spherical enemy attack craft in two.

<That's crazy!> replied the co-pilot of one of the ships <What if there are friendly ships without signatures?>

<Then then picked a bad day to be eccentric,> snapped TheBestAtJumping <Don't attack anything you think is friendly but we don't have time to get picky. At least if we kill the wrong person their mind-states can still be retrieved.>

TheBestAtJumping tore through another enemy construct, and a few of the other ships in her formation were starting to do likewise. They continued to fly towards the center of the chaotic mass of fighting, towards where TheBestAtJumping hoped they'd find the tiny silver tube that started this whole mess.

Wizard Inculpable.2.2.9 and Rover, piloting the Friend-Ship between them, had commandeered their own fleet. They fought their way down to the ring and began displacing civilians into their pressurized sections. Even starting now it was unlikely they would be able to evacuate any significant percentage of the population, but they had to start somewhere.

Other ships from the defensive conspiracy had corralled their own fleets and were attempted to hold back the enemy.

All around the consensus ships, a haphazard assortment of gems and rounded geometric shapes, were turning to dust. The genius missiles had exhausted themselves but the white enemy spheres now outnumbered the defenders.

Wizard reached out and displaced another dozen people onto the Friend-Ship. They were already straining capacity but now they were exceeding safety parameters. It truely pained Wizard to exceed the safety parameters. Realizing there was nothing else they could do the ship began to pull away from the ring.

The white spheres had already penetrated that far, and without realizing it Wizard had presented the Friend-Ship as a tempting target. Three separate spheres fired in near unison, blowing the Friend-Ship to pieces.

Leaderless, the rescue ships the Friend-Ship had been leading began to scatter.

TheBestAtJumping's group had been whittled down by enemy fire, but they had flown deep into the mass of enemy ships, where the dolphin was certain she'd find her quarry. Finally, her short-range sensors were able to spot the tiny tube in the chaos of the battle.

<There it is,> TheBestAtJumping signaled, including coordinates.

She reached out with her EMFM field but it passed through the U.F.O. as though it weren't there. TheBestAtJumping could feel the sickly sinking sensation of her sensors picking up a powerful alien field being emitted.

<Scatter and regroup!> she signaled, just before a barrage of enemy fire tore through her defense fields and scored a direct hit to her computronium core. TheBestAtJumping was instantly lobotomized.

"No, no, no," Mac managed to get out, attempting to take control of the ship, before the chain reaction that had already begun tore what remained of the dolphin starship.

The white spheres overwhelmed the defenders completely, and swarmed over Proxima ring. They began attacking the weak points on the ring, where the various plates were connected together.

These plates were constructed from scrinth, a material with the same tensile strength as the bonds between atoms. The first series of energy attacks were unable to affect them.

The U.F.O. redirected it's course and headed towards the ring. Firing an exotic beam of alien composition it tore one of the scrinth supports into it's component quarks.

The ring around the sun began to unravel, and the spin the produced the centrifugal gravity ceased. All the citizens still on Proxima Ring began to fly off into space.

<Evacuate! All ships evacuate!> Proxima screamed in everyone's minds <Save as many people as you can and get away!>

The spheres began blasting away at the surface of the ring, just as the tube disintegrated another of the ring's supports.

More and more of the minds that constituted Proxima were dying, and her intellect was dissolving away with each death. Those who remained were half mad with fear. Consequently, Proxima was becoming hysterical.

<We're all going to die!> she was screaming in the mind of every living being within range of her telepathic voice, which was measured in light years <It's the end times! The doom of humanity! Out! Out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Signifying nothing. Nothing. We are nothing. Things fall apart! The center cannot hold!>

The few survivors continued to hear this diatribe until they had pulled completely away from Proxima Ring.

Author's note: I'd love to hear what people think of this chapter. If you're interested in leaving a comment this would be an excellent time to do so. At this point I raise my eyebrows several times in rapid succession to denote that we have an understanding.