Unfaltering

[Melanie Tyler]

Decommissioning Duty

Heat pulsed through the forward compartment of the Furious as her weapons systems hummed to life, palpable even through the half metre of armour plating separating the gunnery crew from their weapons. Inside the cramped confines of the forward battery an engineer hovered over the closest control console, pouring over the data with such intensity that he might have fallen in.
“Fifteen…Eighteen…Twenty. Core draw is steady at nineteen per cent.”
Beyond the metallic shell of the Liberty Battle-cruiser, waves of energy surged from her forward weapon mounts, successive pulses delivering enough energy to tear a warship’s shields apart. Impacts rippled across the hulk that served as the warship’s target, bolts blossoming into expanding flashes of light as pulse cannon bursts impacted with the crippled dreadnaught’s shields. Furious had been selected to sink the old Warlord-Class Battleship, a battered remnant of the Nomad war that had been pressed into service against Rheinland when war broke out.

Her age had shown in combat, dated drive systems leaving the battleship to the mercy of faster modern warships. Melanie Tyler knew from the briefing that the ship had been damaged beyond repair by Rheinland forces, chased down by hostile cruisers. She had pulled up the logs on the journey out and was amazed the old Hayward had managed to hold together, much less limp home. The ship had lost its primary propulsion system to a barrage of missiles, along with most of her engineers, staggering back to Houston on emergency power. Within a few hours the staff on Norfolk had declared the battered warship beyond even their ability to fix, and the engineers had begun stripping it for parts almost before the last crew member disembarked. Those few components beyond their ability to remove, either by damage or design, had simply been left on-board when the shell was towed back to Virginia for ‘decommissioning’. Tyler shook her head marginally as Furious’ scanners picked up the spot-failures riddling the hulk’s shields. No-one liked scuttling a warship, even one as damaged as the Hayward. It felt like she was betraying the crew who had fought and died to get that ship home. Battleships should die on the field, facing the enemy, not towed and tethered in the far corner of some far-off star system, waiting for a friendly ship to finish them off.

“Hayward’s shields are down. Requesting permission to fire lancers, Ma’am.” Lieutenant Tobias Petrie, the ship’s gunnery chief had made a point of personally handling fire controls for the scuttling. Like Tyler, Petrie had been assigned to the Air Force Carrier Ravenswood until politics had forced the Air Force to retire a great number of its personnel. Just as it had been in Leeds, the Lieutenant’s voice was clipped, the consummate professional, his words betraying none of his feelings at being assigned to break apart a friendly ship.

“Fire away Lieutenant. Two lancers. Target the drive core.” Petrie didn't need her telling him to fire his weapons, but he took the comment with a knowing nod that seemed universal to senior enlisted sailors, commissioned or not.

Petrie barked orders to the sailors manning the gunnery station, and a pair of missiles accelerated toward the hulk, metal shells keeping the colossal warheads in check until the moment of impact. Timers implanted in the weapons would prevent the missiles from detonating until they had driven a fair distance into the hulk’s hull, hopefully taking out the old ship’s MOX drives. Hurried as the salvaging had been, the ship’s reactor had been left online, partially to power her engines and partially because no-one wanted to go anywhere near such a catastrophically damaged system. Tyler hoped that the missiles would be enough to set off a core overload, vaporising the hulk. It wasn’t the honourable death in battle the ship deserved, but it was a hell of an improvement on being left to radiation and target practice. Even as the missiles left their tubes, Tyler felt her battle-cruiser shudder as thrusters kicked the big warship around, turning her stern to face the doomed Hayward. Inertial dampeners groaned as Furious accelerated away from the missiles; pushing herself out to the computer-calculated limits of the battleship’s core detonation. Tyler’s lips moved in silent prayer for the warship as she watched the Hayward fade to a simple highlighted dot on her displays. Looking around the fire control deck, she wasn’t the only one wishing the battleship well on its final journey.

The paired lancers collided with the hulk that had been the Liberty Dreadnaught Hayward in a flash of light and force; tearing strips of metal from the steel skeleton in a terrifying display of force. Hull plating that had stood firm against nomad assaults crumpled as the missiles pummelled their way through, burrowing towards the drive core. Corridors skewed from enemy bombardment gave way before the barrage, sections of the ship’s mess visible for a brief moment before Hayward blossomed into a starburst of radiation and plating, vanishing from Tyler’s sensors as the blast caught up to the drifting components. Consumed in a flurry of detonations, the decades-old battleship simply ceased to exist.

Systems aboard the Furious chimed instants after, algorithms scanning for any remaining fragments and concluding that they posed no threat to the warship’s shield banks. Any larger chunks would be vaporised by automated systems if they drifted into range, but Commander Melanie Tyler had no intention of being there by the time they arrived. Somewhere on the fire control deck, a Sailor moved to congratulate his Chief, finally breaking the silence. With a parting salute from Lieutenant Petrie, Tyler excused herself and began the long climb to the bridge, feeling oddly empty.

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This character is retired.