Chapter 20: Mongoose Meets Snake

My face was a rictus of concentration, and beneath my throne on the bridge an array of Hosts, in their sharp and matching pure white naval uniforms, were sounding off about various bits of information. It was all flying by at incredible speed, and actually taking in all of that information enough to keep a handle on what was going on was straining me to my limits.

Suddenly Owls -- the Host assigned to Sensor monitoring duty -- gasped out, "Spike! Spike! Spike! Dead ahead!" This was accompanied by a critical alert panel showing the energy readout of the Ha'tak vessel that had somehow managed to discover my Heartseed's flightplan which was a course to several goa'uld worlds with buried stargates -- which I was merrily claiming for my empire, though it had taken a bit of ingenuity with the cargo hatch to fit the 7-meter diameter rings -- in order to lay an ambush upon my ship. Even contemporary goa'uld hyperdrive being fast enough to lay out of long range sensor detection long enough to make their interception of my ship inevitable. A fact I was really rather annoyed about.

I didn't wait for Nav to respond, and immediately stretched my sense of self through the hull of the corvette, engaging in a brief biotic charge to port and below. It the Ha'tak's bludgeon-like energy blast was still in the process of forming even as I came out of the brief burst of FTL. Watching that burst forming was painfully slow, and I kept my eyes on it like a hawk in case the blast was directed towards my corvette from the 600 meter by 600 meter by 300 meter Ha'tak. On the order of a thousand of my corvette could have fit inside the single goa'uld mother ship. A single successful shot from their primary plasma cannon would totally envelop my ship.

It was like a tortoise attacking a mosquito.

After what felt like an eternity but was instead an experienced ten seconds, I could see the plasma burst fully formed and barreling through space. The bolt was aimed directly for where the Heartseed used to be. At the same instant the plasma burst passed through the Ha'tak's shields, my twin phase cannon's streams of charged nadions passed through the minute vulnerability in the Ha'tak's defenses, slamming into and overloading the enemy vessel's main plasma cannon. This was the fifth time in this fight I had pulled that off, and I knew that each time, more Jaffa manning the systems were killed in backwash, but the enemy ship carried a crew of more than a thousand. The main gun would be up and operational again within two or three minutes, and most likely less than a full minute would pass before it was able to fire again. I had to make the best of the time available I had.

The death gliders of the mothership had long since stopped coming. I wasn't entirely sure if it was just that the ship carried no more of them, or if it was the commander of the ship seeing how utterly useless the unshielded vessels were against my corvette's CIWS system. This "cat and mouse" game I was playing with the Ha'tak was rather obnoxious; for every successful instance of my overloading the main cannon, I'd tried the trick at least another eight. The pilot even being able to react in time to rotate the shields enough to throw me off was damned impressive considering I was running in battle reflex mode and had a fifteen to one advantage ratio in perceived elapsed time compared to my enemies.

And that wasn't even counting that the Hosts who currently only existed as Pearls -- meaning they were subsapient -- that were manning the various stations of the corvette had even better elapsed to perceived time ratio advantages.

Again I ordered Guns to arrange a maximum yield ripple-fire solution, and my ship juked like a top so that the biotic Skrill Cannons that were rear-facing could depress the almost flat against the ship and fire in millisecond sequence of each other to be followed almost immediately by a simultaneous tripled blast of the forward Skrill Cannons to exactly the same spot on the enemy's shields. This was followed by two bursts of the forward phase cannons; the first would hit simultaneously with the forward biotic Skrill Cannons; the latter would strike immediately afterwards.

This was all followed by yet another shipscale biotic charge which got my corvette within range to strike the same roughly one meter area of the Ha'tak's shields with a shipscale biotic shockwave.

I immediately sent a third and for the moment final biotic FTL charge out again to push my Heartseed out of range of the Ha'tak's secondary cannons, just in time to avoid my ship's barrier being splashed by the second of the five blasts which attempted to strike at my ship. The barrier was reduced by maybe a third just by that strike alone. Even the secondary cannons on a Ha'tak were anti-capital rated, if just barely. The rest of the attacks, having been aimed intentionally in a spread based on where the enemy thought I might dodge to in order to maximize their chances of actually hitting me, failed to guess correctly and thus did no damage.

Unfortunately, for all the efficacy of my corvette's weaponry against less shielded targets, and the concentrated effort of a firing pattern designed maximize for shield penetration, the damage done to the Ha'tak was relatively minor; I'd managed to penetrate the armor with the second phase cannon round and even gotten the shockwave to propagate further, as shown by the slight increase in power fluctuations aboard the Ha'tak, but that was all.

This was a fight of attrition and if I'd had an Eco-Tech rather than a Fahrkan implant granting me my battle reflex mode, the neural burnout would be reducing me to a gibbering wreck with the IQ of a lemur. It was hard to say who was really winning; the Ha'tak's weapons were unusually suited for burning through my ship's biotic barrier, and had done so twice in this fight even with just the secondary cannons, but they had yet to sustain that rate of impact enough to successfully keep the barriers down, let alone actually score damage on the hexagonal Taelon-derived virtual glass which was only the second of three defensive measures. In contrast, the Ha'tak was peppered with multiple small breaches in its armor, as my strategy for damaging it while only permitting mostly superficial damage was accumulating. The only trouble was, that was only the case as long as I could keep on dodging their weapons fire, and while the Heartseed wasn't near to close to her limit on the biotic nodule's static charge buildup, that limit did exist and after that I'd be reduced to not only no longer freely dodging their fire, but also lacking my outermost defense.

I could try to retreat, but that was at best a stalling action as I had no good idea of what the local star systems looked like, and the Ha'tak would certainly overtake my corvette before I could find a decent spot to catch my breath.

That wasn't the same as saying I had no chance of actually winning this fight, however.

In the most confident voice I could muster, I called out to the sensor operator. "Owls. Deploy the quantum beacon and give me a full in-depth scan of all locations that Ha'tak is currently damaged. I want to know if someone's so much as scratched a deck plate. Navs. Coordinate with Owls and give me a precise flight path for the ID drive to put this vessel foreward-facing the deepest penetrating damaged area of that ship. Guns. Forward volley fire, all available weapons, immediate on drop from ID space. Coordinate and execute on my mark."

I paused and drew a breath, the adrenaline having long since given my physical self the shakes. "Mark!"

The activity of the Hosts responsible for the various operational duties of the Corvette all went into a flurry of activity that was far beyond what I could actually track. Even with my battle reflex mode, this was a level of coordination that was simply beyond me. I could only wait as they synchronized their data and compared available methods of complying with my orders. I tried to minimize their workload by relying on my automail connection with the Heartseed, experiencing the ship like it was my body. I dodged and juked as randomly as I could, keeping an eye out for signs of energy spikes from various parts of the Ha'tak as it attempted to use it's own sublight drive in a random and erratic pattern to get close enough to be in effective range of it's secondary cannons. In many cases those cannons fired just to try to keep me active and on my toes; the blasts never coming near my ship. I kept up my withering fire, ducking in and out of range of the biotic Skrill cannons to lob the occasional forward volley timed with a dual blast of the phase cannons. This was no more likely to harm the Ha'tak than they were to harm my corvette, and in so doing I kept up the appearances of the stalemate of our nearly hour-long combat.

And then, to the Ha'tak's crew, my ship vanished from view. By the time their sensor operators realized my corvette had literally flown through the Ha'tak and were now directly inside her shield bubble, it was all over but the rolling of the credits. That didn't stop them from trying to roll their ship to try to prevent me from striking whatever it was I was about to hit, but their timing while at the peak of human ability just wasn't good enough.

The combined simultaneous strike of my three forward Skrill cannons, shipscale biotic shockwave, and fully charged phase cannons ripped through the small area in which the Ha'tak's armor had already been sundered. I immediately followed this up with minimum charge shots from the phase cannons and non-biotic bursts from the Skrill cannons, as my corvette was firing from less than ten meters off of their hull.

The damage was prodigious. The combined energy of my corvette's weaponry was analogous to multiple small nuclear weapons bursting in succession from inside of the ship's armored hull. Within short order, something critical was struck -- by primary or secondary damage, I didn't know. The Ha'tak didn't so much begin to break apart as it simply detonated.

The Taelon-derived interdimensional drive was not capable of initializing again after the scant few seconds since it had last been activated. At least, not without risking damage to components I would not be able to replace, so instead I initialized another biotic FTL charge away from the Ha'tak and allowed my vessel to be buffeted by the blast radius we could not escape while already in a negative mass bubble. While this did thanks to the square cube law significantly minimize the blast impact, the total energy was still enough to completely collapse the ship's barrier, and even burn through most of the forward-facing supposedly indestructible virtual glass layer. If my ship had been designed with Star Trek technology, I'd be perceiving EPS conduit blowouts throughout the ship.

Instead, the combination of the extreme pressure capacity of the biohull material and it's reinforcement via hull polarization merely meant that three quarters of the forward hull armor's one meter of depth -- along with the forward armaments -- were incinerated to the point of cellular death.

The components involved being biotech in their entirety, the Heartseed's bioprinter was already laying down the necessary replacement organs and tissues to be grafted into place to accelerate their regeneration in order for the ship's biobots to haul and adhere them to their destination. My corvette was still flight-capable, so I decided to head for the nearest star system in the meantime, as it would take the better part of a day for the autorepair and regeneration to restore the ship to complete intactness.

I activated my holoavatar and made a display of checking in on Gefion, who despite the ship's more than adequate, and in fact overly redundant, inertial dampening was strapped into an acceleration and decompression couch. The emergency protections -- a breath mask and jelly encapsulation system -- had never even deployed. "Ahh, good. Have a nice nap, Gefion? I trust the excitement didn't trouble you."

Gefion just looked at me with a deadpan expression -- which for an Asgard was literally inhumanly good -- and said, "Veljic. Even your combat doctrine is veljic. I am honestly impressed."

I just shrugged my shoulders and smirked. "Hey, look at it this way. You got more data about the biotech systems' performance profiles in combat conditions."

The deadpan unblinking gaze never left my avatar until I finally dismissed it.

A day later and I was sitting in the Heartseed's galley -slash- kitchenette. One of the good things about the protein synthesizer -- the upgraded protein resequencer -- was that it actually took up less total space than the resequencer did. Fewer moving parts and less need for different base materials to be piped in, as more of them could be synthesized on the spot from the same base compounds. So between that and the wider range of possible meals it could produce, eating while aboard the Heartseed was less akin to living as a college student and more like living as a bachelor. No genuine fresh cooked meals, but a wide selection of preprocessed alternatives.

While I was currently utilizing just my implant to command the ship, the galley also had an old-style control throne I could connect to which doubled as an emergency restraint couch. I wasn't currently sitting in it, but could connect to it in less than ten seconds if needed. I was physically accompanied by the only other currently embodied sapient being aboard the vessel, Gefion. She was eating some sort of off-white cream or paste that seemed to be the only thing Asgard actually ate.

I was attempting to make small talk with the overly technically minded ten thousand year old researcher. "So, Gefion. I've been dying to ask. How in your esteemed opinion did my little ship hold up given your understanding of the possible capabilities of the technologies utilized in its construction?"

Gefion blinked at me, and then blinked at the blank wall for a few moments. "After a considered review, it is clear your vessel's design philosophy is in many ways fairly conformative to your 'biobots'. You seem to have placed an excessive emphasis on redundancy and general function with an intention of outperforming more technically sophisticated designs through a reliance on excessive skill. This is exemplified by the obvious intent of the command decisions you made during the combat. Were this ship not operated by artificial intelligences, it would now be a collection of finely dispersed atoms."

I quirked an eyebrow at her while politely slurping down another oversized spoonful of the slightly better than adequate chicken noodle soup. The chunks of chicken were mildly spongy, and the carrot chunks were disturbingly exactly the same size as the chicken, and too soft, but the broth was flavorful and the noodles were thick and chewy, and it all went together to be a decent if plain combination. The yeast-bread rolls added to the fillingness of the meal.

I thought about her words while chewing my latest mouthful to give myself time to consider my response. "So is that a good thing or a bad thing?"

Gefion continued that nearly unnerving stare. "If this had been an Asgard vessel of comparable technological sophistication, we would have evacuated and attempted to continue doing so until locating a defensible position. The sensors on this ship are sufficient to spot a gas giant from within two light years, and with the multiple forms of faster than light transit available, you could have eventually led them to such a body, from within which the barrier and short-burst faster than light transit could have operated indefinitely, and the vessel's stealth systems would have been adequate to throwing off any attempts as preemptively locating it. A prolonged attrition combat would have been without question, but it also would have been without question equally in your favor: even if the enemy received reinforcements, you could have simply narrowed your weapons-fire focus to sustained penetrative fire on already damaged parts of the enemy vessel. While this would have made your attacks somewhat more predictable, it also would have degraded enemy performance far sooner. These actions would have been in agreement with Asgard combat doctrine. Instead you took far riskier actions which depended on the success of a final gamble. May I ask why?"

I chuckled. "I wasn't so much worried about this fight as about the next one."

Gefion tilted her head. "I do not see how that follows."

I pointed my spoon at her to emphasize my words even as I leaned back in the open air behind the bench I was sitting on. "And that right there is why you little guys are losing against the replicators. See, it's not always the best decision to look like the biggest, baddest kid on the block. Sometimes you gotta make it look like the only reason you won is because you cheated. Just like with that Ha'tak. They almost certainly had time to report back on the way the battle was going; it took almost an hour. And right up until we struck one surprise decisive blow by using abilities we never demonstrated, the Ha'tak probably thought it was going to win that fight. A little unusual for such an annoying pest of a ship to hurt their hull armor so much, but up until I finally did strike at the same spot twice they probably thought nothing of it. So here it looks like a complete fluke, rather than your clearly well thought out action. Which means the next time they come at me, it'll be with the same level of force. Only next time, I pull my little trick within minutes, and make it look like something clearly not me but unknown -- maybe an enemy goa'uld -- laid a trap."

Gefion's eyes widened. "How very… deceitful. Impressive."

I merely waved my hand in front of my face mildly dismissively. "I have good advisors and teachers. It's simply to be expected." I paused for a moment before continuing. "Still, you haven't said -- should we head to the abandoned Unas gate, or the steam-era human civilization first? Or should I just cut my losses with five abandoned gates collected and make way to Euronda to see what the Breeders left of the compound that the gate there is buried in?"

Gefion was no help in that decision. No help at all.