NABC Chapter 420 – Resolution
Chapter 420 – Resolution
“FIRE!”
The word echoed through the bridge of the INS Resolution. Men finally shut up. Conversation died down. Men stopped scurrying and stood up as they leaned forwards to try and catch a glimpse through the window. Kassandora herself stood proudly, her knees quivering, her cheeks red, her heartbeat racing rapidly, she needed to force her eyes to stay sharp as they watered.
The command travelled to the three weapons team that operated the Trebuchet Railgun, one on each capacitor and another on the cannon itself. They weren’t soldiers, they were engineers and specialists. Scientists. Weapon designers. Code monkeys. Ideas men. They were the sort of men that should never see the frontline and would be replaced immediately that Kassandora had replacements in the form of men talented in engineering who had served. “FIRE!” Kassandora screamed again and that got the little eggheads moving.
The magnetic coils on the main cannon started to whine as they received the first drops of electricity, and then they went from whining to unleashing a single deafening drumbeat of thunder. The capacitors started to roar and steam as they suddenly transferred enough energy to power a whole town for a few hours into the cannon. The number capacitor display on the screen above the window did not fall or change. It did not plummet or cascade downwards. Instead, it reset. In one instant, the electricity went from a hundred to zero.
One moment, the INS Resolution had a rear to it. In the next, half the missile pods had suddenly been blown open, the helicopter bays were collapsing into the water, both of the capacitors fell onto their sides and slid towards the edge and men were knocked down. Crew began to scramble as the Resolution’s automatic sensors detected too high a heat and activated the fire alarm. Sprinklers on the deck activated. The power cables from the capacitors to the cannon had melted utterly. The rubber had been almost vapourised, the internal melting wiring had become slag. Even the control of the ship started to teeter to the side.
Kassandora did not care though.
Her eyes focused in on one thing and one thing only: the cannon and its exposed top.
It had worked.
Maisara looked up at Anarchia. Maisara looked up at Anarchia. Maisara had to look up to see Anarchia. Maisara stood there, tilting her head back, as she watched the Goddess of Anarchy. The woman had caught her. How, Maisara had no clue but the woman had caught her. Just as Arascus and Kassandora had both said, Anarchia had managed to latch onto Maisara in some way. In some terrible fashion, the woman had found her vulnerability. Maisara did not even know how.
All she felt was disappointment at herself. Arascus had warned her. Kassandora had warned her. And she had still failed. For a single moment, her eyes took in the sight. Anarchia, in her simple red shirt and black skirt, pristine and untouched by the battle or the bombardment of stone that was crashing down around them, was holding Maisara’s axe with one hand. The other held up the barrier of sorcery and the ripping tentacles which utterly stopped the assault coming from above.
Maisara tried to move back. Her legs seemingly shut down. Anarchia widened her smile. Maisara grunted as her axe became too heavy to wield. Anarchia let go of it, a thin stream of blood from an even thinner cut in her palm ran down her hand. The wound closed before Maisara’s axe. Anarchia opened her mouth, most likely to gloat.
The Goddess of Anarchy did not even get a single syllable out of her mouth.
Time seemed to slow down. Maisara could not even catch the slug of solid metal fly past them. One of Anarchia’s arms, complete with the shoulder suddenly disappeared from her body. Anarchia was thrown to the side. The force of the wind rushing by came a moment later, the sound a moment even later. Maisara stood there. Her eyes went right, to Anarchia on the bleeding and punching the ground and then to the INS Resolution. The ship had burst out in flame but Kassandora could not have cared. She sent a message through the open channel.
“Raptor One, keep her pinned for Elassa.”
And from overhead, the apex predator of the sky suddenly roared as it broke the sound barrier in answer. Maisara looked up and she saw the famous Raptor One. The plane that she had tried to have shot down in the Invasion of Kirinyaa and the Epan War. And both times, that terrible black arrowhead in the air, with its two massive wings and four huge engines, with the tip painted yellow to resemble a big and two furious red eyes underneath the cockpit, had managed to evade her.
Captain Douglas of Raptor One pressed the button on the control stick of his jet. These were not his skies, these were their skies, his and his plane’s. The jet fighter screamed as it released more than a hundred rounds over the span of a second and the man in the cabin pulled back the stick between his legs. It was as if his plane wanted him to pull to up. As if it agreed that was the correct thing to do along with him.
Raptor One executed a turn so tight and so fast that no simulator would ever allow it. Yet Raptor One executed it like a ballerina jumping a brilliant pirouette. It spun around in a quick circle. Captain Douglas didn’t even feel the turn. He knew he got sucked deep into the seat. He knew speed and rotation threatened to crush him, yet the forces simply seemed to stop the moment they applied any modicum of pressure onto his body.
And in the air above them, Elassa’s rocks where around the Goddess. “Raptor Two supporting.” Erik’s voice suddenly came over the radio. A brief glance at the rear view camera revealed the partner plane passing over Anarchia. Its autocannon left a line of small explosions dark dirt before and after Anarchia. The Goddess herself was pockmarked with bullet holes.
The glance lasted for only a moment. Captain Douglas looked up at the rocks coming down upon him. Elassa was haphazardly throwing them down in continuous groups. They came like a rain of meteorites. Every instinct in Douglas’ mind told him to slow down. To avert and try dodging the massive hailstone of earth coming from above.
Raptor One pirouetted around the first rock. Douglas’ cabin went dark for a moment as the stone obscured the sunlight. The plane tilted backwards and down, under one, then angled forwards again to fly around a falling rock. It should be impossible. There was no one who would expect Douglas to do it. He was sure that even if he dipped out now, Goddess Kassandora would not particularly care.
But he trusted himself to do it. And if not himself.
Then Raptor One would fly it herself.
Maisara finally realised it. She was fighting with Kassandora leading an offensive battle. The only times this happened in the Great War was when the Goddess of War wanted to witness her own triumph. Armies would retreat when Kassandora came close not because they were terrified of the Goddess’ power in itself but because the situation would have been set up in such a way that only a massive frontal shift and emergency reinforcements measuring in the hundreds of thousands could snatch victory out of the voracious and snarling jaws of defeat.
The battle against Anarchia had been won before it even started.
Raptor One burst out from behind one of the boulders Elassa was bombarding Anarchia with. It strafed, those four engines burned with blue flame. The flaps on the wings jumped up and down as if they were the wings of a real birder. Anarchia could almost see the plane disfigure and moved so that it resembled a real bird, even though she knew that was impossible. That yellow beak on the front opened up, an autocannon opened fire. It sent a hail of steel down onto Anarchia to the tune of a running chainsaw, not the rhythmic fire of automatic rifle.
Raptor One dived down onto the Goddess of Anarchy as she tried to pick herself up, her body struggled to regrow the arm in time. Another strafing run, another rapid burst of fire knocked the woman down again. Blood burst from her back in great arcs as if she had just been torn open as Maisara put even more distance between herself and Anarchia. The leeching had stopped. She had lost speed, that was true, but Anarchia had lost so much life that it was obvious the Goddess was struggling to even hold herself together.
Another boulder fell down between them. And then another. They came down like a hailstorm driven to insanity, from all sides and at different speeds. Anarchia swung her arms from side to side as she forced herself to keep closing the distance. Red sorcery made great blades from her arms, which then transformed into hard shields, which then transformed into tiny blades that whipped through air like thin tentacles as they swiped.
A missile suddenly impacted into Anarchia from the side. Raptor One followed up on that missile. It spun in the air, it made turns that should been impossible. Turns that Maisara would not ask even stunt pilots in perfect conditions to replicate. It managed to pirouette past Anarchia’s tentacles and it swerved the stone bombardment from above. And worst of all, like an overconfident predator that had never met a creature stronger, it shot straight over Anarchia’s head. The afterburner turned on for a moment, the sound barrier was broken. Anarchia was thrown into the air as Raptor One suddenly arced high into the sky.
The Goddess landed nimbly on her feet as Maisara tested her strength. She summoned her axe and wheezed when it dropped into the dirt. The Goddess of Order couldn’t even move the weapon she had so expertly wielded before. But her own struggle didn’t matter. Maisara’s eyes returned to the battle happening ahead of her. Anarchia looked up at the sky. She raised a barrier. Raptor One made another series of moves that Maisara struggled to believe in even though she watched the plane expertly execute each and every one of them. Its flight path traced that of a lightning strike, all ridiculously sharp corners and immediate turns.
A bird that large should not be able to be that dexterous.
Maisara saw Raptor One open fire. She saw lead impact on sorcery. Bullet crashed through into imagination conjured up by a Goddess. A crack formed. The hard material fact of reality wiped away the immaterial of the imagination. Raptor One’s gatling pierced through Anarchia. The Goddess was knocked back once again as the plane swooped in low enough to almost touch her. And then it immediately turned upwards, activated the afterburner and the sonic boom of the sound barrier being broken knocked Anarchia through the air. Small ribbons of red, trails of her own blood, chased after her in the air.
Anarchia landed with a thud, her torn back apart with great gashes. The Goddess spasmed on the floor. It took her a few seconds to stop moving. Raptor One evade another of Elassa’s boulders. Anarchia was submerged. Maisara felt power flow back into her. Everything returned to as it should be, down to the fact her vision sharped and her senses got better as she grew in size and strength. She summoned her axe to test its weight, it was what she always considered it to be. She looked at Anarchia’s corpse on the ground.
Wait…
Gashes like that couldn’t possibly be made by rounds.