Gerad ignored Gaz’s crowing in regards to his handmade technical abomination, but he did keep a sensor lock on the plasma spewing monstrosity; mostly so he’d have
some warning for when it inevitably exploded. Every time Gaz pulled the trigger, the sensors in Gerad’s armour went wild with massive power spikes, alerts for potential containment failures and other things generally associated with a powerful energy source on the cusp of a total systems failure and overload.
Following the fungai’s lead, to a point, he advanced towards the onrushing Hive, transferring his VLA to his secondary arms so that he could make use of his forearm mounted barrier as well. Beams of coherent light and packets of super-heated plasma burned through carapaces and reduced flesh to ash, while the hammer shattered limbs, mandibles and anything else that got close enough. With Gaz thoroughly distracted and the two humans doing their best, an odd Swarmer or two got through, so to counter, Gerad activated the close combat protocol for his cutter/welder; running a similar semi-autonomous program to his PRP, the tool lashed out at attacking hostiles with a fusion torch ‘blade’, savaging anything it hit.
Moments later Sven joined the fray with the
Crimson Fang’s weapons, reducing the remaining Hive to so much smouldering meat, and doing a fair job of running both the hanger and every
other remaining small craft as well. While Silas and Sven got the loot loaded, Gerad made a check of the proximity sensors that were a part of his device; seeing that they were clear, he made his way forward to the cockpit.
“Oi clanker!” He called out to Sven.
“C’n ye keep us de scan shadow of dis tub? Closer those merc haulers stick to it de better…” He added with a slightly sinister tone.
“Tha’ said…we gotta be ‘bout five thousan’ kays out, less we get it too.”---
Sven did his best, but the
Fang wasn’t intended for totally covert work. Still they managed to make it half way back to the
End before the furthest out merc ship spotted them. Fortunately
Legion’s End had been moving towards them to rendezvous under its own ‘aftermarket’ stealth systems, so when it lit off its ECM suite, the merc cruiser was caught off guard. With a poor firing solution, it fired a few long shots at the freighter as it swooped in and snagged the
Fang in a rather rough ‘snatch-and-run’ pick up, but none came too close.
Gerad ignored all of this; all his attention was on the readout showing their distance from the
Balrog. When he realized they weren't
quite going to make the minimum safe distance if he waited, he triggered the device and muttered a quiet prayer to the Ancestors.
When a starship jumps to hyperspace, the hyperdrive creates a ‘bubble’ around the ship that causes it to move out of phase with
n-space, allowing it to appear to move faster than light without upsetting what humans call ‘Einsteinian Relativity’. Because creating said bubble is massively power intensive to do in one go, it is instead created by a series of linked generator nodes around the ship’s hull, their smaller bubbles merging together to encompass the ship, this helps ease strain on the ships power systems during the initial jump. If one of those nodes were to fail, that section of the ship would end up out of phase with the rest of it with catastrophic results; needless to say there are
many safety features built onto any FTL capable vessel to prevent such things happening.
Gerad’s ‘hyperdrive’ had no such nodes, nor did it even know it
should have them; as far as it was concerned, everything was just fine. When the QEC got the command, the computer executed its only directive which was to spin up the drive and jump into hyperspace. The capacitors dumped their loads, the generator hummed and a hyperspace bubble slightly larger than the Armoury where it was sitting enveloped the area. As soon as it reached 100% strength the whole section disappeared into hyperspace, and then promptly fell out again. Maintaining a hyperspace bubble of any size is expensive and usually once a ship has jumped it maintains its bubble by tapping into the energy created at the interface between the bubble and
h-space itself, allowing for an essentially free ride.
This was another thing the device lacked. As soon as
it jumped, it cut itself off from its only power source, which caused the bubble to collapse, and the Armoury to revert to
n-space. Any time there is a translation between one or the other there is a substantial ‘flare’ of energy, larger when dropping into
n-space, which is spectacular but harmless when just in the void. This however
wasn’t so harmless.
Raw energy ripped the bulkheads and decking apart at the most basic level, the sub-atomic reactions further fuelling the destruction. The
Balrog’s battered and abused power systems overloaded, and the safeties failed, allowing a massive pulse to dump itself into the already compromised reactor, which promptly exploded with the fury of a small star. The time between Gerad sending the command and the ruined cruiser disappearing into an expanding ball of super-heated gas was less than 1/10th of a second.
The closest mercenary vessel died in almost the same instant as the near-light speed shock front of energy slammed into it with a destructive force that no battle screen could have turned aside. The cruiser’s own reactor breach simply added to the holocaust as the surrounding asteroids shattered under the impact.
The second ship was far enough away to avoid getting hit with the initial blast or the death throes of its sister, but all that meant was that her crew
knew they were going to die. Massive chunks of rock were blasted outwards, and while the helmsman did his best to try and get clear, there just was not enough time. A rock roughly half a kilometer in diameter struck the bow, sheering off a sizable chunk, while smaller ones wreaked havoc elsewhere. The second ship’s reactor safeties
did react in time to prevent any breach, but all that it accomplished was to leave the vessel crippled without anything more than basic life support as the debris reduced it to an air bleeding hulk.
The third ship which had moved in pursuit of the
Crimson Fang was lucky enough to avoid destruction at the hands of Gerad’s hyperspace ‘bomb’, but it didn’t get away unscathed. The mercenary captain, thinking they were only pursuing a small dropship, had failed to bring up any more protection than the basic particle shields. He’d been in the process of calling for battle screens as the
Legion’s End made its presence known, but he never got the chance. While the plasma ‘shock front’ created by the death of the first two ships died out relatively quickly, the super dense wave of neutrinos generated by the explosions kept going. While neutrinos generally don’t interact very much with stuff in relativistic space, on such a small scale, the wave was so dense it caused an intensely strong gravitational ‘ripple’ as it hit the ship. While extremely unpleasant for the crew it was survivable, though it did cause failures all across the ship, leaving it dead in space.
This was nearly the fate of the
Legion’s End as well, but it jumped into hyper the
instant the dropship was inside it ‘bubble’. The neutrinos still managed to touch the ship though, causing and instability that dropped the ship
back into
n-space just outside the system’s ecliptic, now well beyond the effect area.
”Bit tight, but no’ bad…”The total elapsed time from start to finish was less than five standard minutes.
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