Memoirs of Kitty Siam Ch. 49

A hush fell over the group as they just stood and looked at me standing next to them as if I was doing something that was supposed to be impossible for someone in my condition. The medical staff did their best to try to usher me back to bed. I was standing on wobbly legs but to them I was standing firm. I was not going to let them see any weakness in me as it was well past time for the Colonel and I to be on our way. They argued their medical points and I argued mine that we were on an urgent mission and had no more time to stay here.

Colonel Connor joined in the conversation at that point and took up my side. One of the physicians inquired about the nature of our mission and cited doctor/patient confidentiality but this went beyond what we could tell him. After debating the issue for some time the lead physician relented and informed me that I could leave sickbay but I would be doing so against sound medical advice.

My physiology was of such that they had never seen before, so they agreed to let me leave if I answered a few simple questions. The obvious question was my name, which I told them. I suspected that they needed that for their official reports. My species was the next obvious question. When I mentioned that I was Annunaki one of the lower level techs in the room over heard my reply and snickered as he muttered, "Yeah right, and I am the Roman Centurion Biggus Dickus." I used the technician's utterance as my excuse to end the questioning by stating that I refused to be mocked by a commoner. As I used my wardrobe device to change into my flight suit and headed for the door I heard the Colonel chastise the offending tech with, "That is no way to talk to an Annunaki Princess." They probably thought that we were a couple if intergalactic nut jobs after we left the sickbay.

Unofficially we had an escort to the hangar bay. When I say "unofficially" I mean that we had a small following of randy males following my every move from behind as I strutted my way to our ship in my tight white form fitting Annunaki flight suit. As we entered the hangar bay Megyn commented that if we had a bigger ship we could have shanghaied our followers as new crewmembers.

I sent a wireless command to the Koloth to unlock its self and to raise the canopy of the cockpit as we entered the hangar bay. Megyn made her way up the crew ladder and slipped into her seat while I made a quick walk around inspection before doing the same. Once my preflight check was completed I put power to the ship then brought the engines online. I was amazed at how quiet this ship was with the engines running. I had to look down at my instruments to confirm that the engines were actually powered up. The engines were so quiet that the technicians in the hangar bay that were gawking at us had not realized that we were powered up until the station's controller gave us permission to taxi into launch position. Once they seen the ship lift up and stow the landing struts they all made a quick dash to get out of our way.

Once we launched I manually set our destination and engaged the FTL drive. I could have done it on autopilot the way that Megyn had done after Kitty had passed on but I needed to get some practice with this ship since for all intents and purposes I was its pilot. I know from her memories that Kitty had extensive flight training, and I did as well so it was not hard to access her memories and adjust my skills to this craft once I understood how everything worked. My surprise came when I accessed the schematics for our weapons systems. My eyes could not believe what I was seeing and this started a long conversation with Megyn that lasted for several hours.

I was hesitant to open a dialog with the Colonel since the Resurrection Protocol over wrote her Kitty's thoughts and personality with mine. I was afraid that she would sense a difference, but after our conversation began I lost all hesitation and threw myself fully into our dialog. I had never seen weapons like the plasma canons, or the missiles that we were carrying. From searching Kitty's memories I knew that these weapons were of Annunaki origin but they were not from my period in Annunaki history. These were about 40,000 year or more from my future.

We were six hours into the last leg of our journey when our conversation of scanners, sensors, canons, rockets, and such was interrupted by Megyn's announcement that her sensors were detecting a large fleet of ships along our flight path. We both agreed that we should check this fleet out. While we were still well out of range of their sensors I dropped us out of FTL and engaged our cloak. Even at sub light speeds the Koloth was faster than anything else in this part of the galaxy so we had no trouble catching up to the hulking vessels on our tactical screens.

As we closed in on the back of the fleet we took up a position at their rear and high above. I put us in a position that put our ship between the Zetas fleet and the nearest star which would add a bit of stellar interference to their scanners should they focus them in our direction. Though there was little chance of that since our cloak and shields were of the temporal variety, there was no way they were going to locate us even if they knew we were in the area.

The fleet was split into two parts and the first part of the fleet was entering a jump point. The ships entering the vortex were of the carrier, battleship, and destroyer classes. The ships left behind were the large hulking planet killers. Just as Kitty did, I knew their battle plans well. The carrier group would launch first and clear out the defenses around the target world. Yet we knew that they were not ready to make the final jump to their target. Their jump engines would force them to make one more jump to get to the Central Command facility. The reason they were jumping in designated groups was because they were now in enemy territory, and that a jump point would only stay open for twenty-nine minutes before it would expire and close naturally. This was not enough time to get the whole fleet through at the same time so the carriers would go first, secure the next jump point and then the rest of the fleet would follow.

I started a discussion with Megyn about us attacking the planet killers in an effort to delay them and perhaps recall the carriers. She agreed that perhaps if some of the larger ships, or the command vessel were damaged that they might put off their jump for a day or two and give us some additional time to evacuate Central Command or bolster their defenses. At first the Colonel was hesitant but after I convinced her that we could out fly their close in defense systems she relented and agreed to let me take a few shots at their ships.

As I plotted my attack run I deployed our canons and opened the missile bay. Megyn expressed concern about using the missiles after the warning that Kitty had given her, but I urged her to relax and promised that I will not be targeting any of the ships with the missiles. Somehow I knew that she was as eager as I was to engage the enemy, but she was against using a weapon of mass destruction like the Mentok missile, which was banned by the treaties that her planet and her alliance had signed. If she only knew the history of Maew and the reason for my execution she would have hit me in the back of the head with the fire extinguisher that was mounted to the bulkhead behind me.

I put the ship into a dive and as we were closing the distance between the enemy fleet and us I disengaged the cloak and activated the shields. I targeted what Megyn had identified as the command ship and fired the plasma cannons. The twin columns of plasma struck the command ship just forward of its engines and as we moved along the ships hull, the plasma cut two deep trenches the length of the ship. The engine room erupted in flame as bulkhead blew out. The plasma trenches cut through the engineering and command decks, and as we veered away we could see the flaming command vessel behind us as a series of explosions were exposing the inner decks to the vacuum of space.

As I focused on attacking the command ship I did not notice that the lead ship had opened a jump point out in front of the fleet. Seizing on the opportunity I rolled our ship to the starboard and looped in behind the fleet. As the command ship continued to disintegrate the other ships began to spread out while others made their way to the open jump point. I knew I would not get so lucky with the rest of the fleet since they now had gone to battle stations, raised their shields and had lowed their emergency bulkheads and blast shields into place.

I continued to fire the plasma canons at the ships as we move through the formation, raking as many ships as we could with canon fire. Some of our bolts penetrated and some glanced off the shields of their ships that had been angled properly for deflection. I knew now that I would have to make a concentrated attack on any single ship that I wanted to destroy or disable, but that was not my plan. While I raked the enemy with plasma bolts Megyn was keeping watch on the ships moving toward the jump point. As she called out their speed and distance from the jump point I adjusted our speed to over take them in an effort to get us within missile range of the lead ship.

The Colonel once again expressed her concern about launching our missiles so close to a target vessel but at this point I was focused on the task at hand, not her warnings. I released control of the plasma canons to Megyn and she took up where I left off. She continued to fire at the ships as we passed by and this diverted her attention from what I was about to do. I was almost in firing range and had a target solution on the lead vessel when I heard Megyn once again cautioning me about using the missiles. I found myself wondering how a woman could rise to the rank of Colonel in the Earth Force Marine Corps and be so whiny about my choice of weapons and tactics.

As we moved closer to the opening of the jump point I did the calculations in my head rather than take the time to key them in to the ship's computer. I did not have time to double-check my math and just went with the numbers that I decided were right. I programmed each warhead to activate six nano seconds after each other.

When I heard the tone that indicated that we had a firing solution on the detonation point I had selected Megyn shouted, "MAEW, NO!" but I did not care about her objections. I had made my calculations based on the data in Kitty's memories and I knew my plan would work. Confident in my math and my plan I launched the missiles while the Colonel was admonishing me and talking about war crimes tribunals for the both of us.

The three missiles were ejected one by one out from the belly of the Koloth, the engines ignited and streaked toward an area deep inside the jump point that I had aimed for. As they began to converge I took control of the weapons away from Megyn and stowed them safely inside the fuselage and wings of our ship and put us into a hard bank to port. I cautioned Megyn to hold on tight but she did not answer me. I knew that she was pissed that I had disregarded her dire warnings of legal consequences and fired the missiles anyway.

The three missiles entered the event horizon and passed just above the lead ship and as the vessel neared the mid point of the event horizon the first of the missiles explode forming a miniature black hole. The second missile exploded followed by the third. The first black hole swallowed the second, which caused it to double in size. The expanding black hole swallowed the third, which once again caused the artificially created singularity to increase exponentially in size and strength. The singularity was now large enough to start feeding off the energy produced by the jump point. The more energy it consumed, the larger it grew until it was large enough to start pulling at the lead ship. There was no time for the planet killer to react and even if it could, it was not maneuverable enough to even attempt to escape the rapidly expanding black hole within the jump point.

The lead ship was quickly ripped to shreds by the expanding gravity well of the black hole. As the commanders of enemy ships saw what was happening they attempted to turn away from the jump point but as the pull of the singularity's gravity was increasing, it was too much for them to escape. We watched as ship after ship was stretched to its limits before breaking apart and being consumed by the jump point that had been transformed into a ship-munching black hole by the Mentok missiles.

Having known what was about to happen I was able to turn the Koloth away from the black hole as it was forming but the bulky planet killers had no chance as the black hole had formed directly in their flight path. Even as we banked and moved away from the event horizon I could feel the pull of its gravity taking hold of our ship as it was attempting to draw us inside along with rest of the Zetas fleet.

As I brought our ship out of its bank and put us on a straight level course away from the black hole I could feel the expanding gravity well pulling on our tiny ship. I dialed the sub light engines up to full power but that was not enough to allow us to break from the gravitic grip upon us. For about ten minutes or so we were making slight headway against the force pulling against us, then suddenly we found ourselves being pulled backwards as the frame of the Koloth began to stretch and distort. I concluded that my calculations were off just a bit and that the singularity formed and grew at a faster rate than I had anticipated.

The next obvious move to attempt to pull us away from the black hole was to engage the FLT drive, and while the Colonel was cussing me out from the back seat I set about calculating our course. As the Megyn continued to rant about weapons of mass destruction and my having killed us both in the process I engaged the FTL drive. The ship shuddered as the wave began to form under us, but being that a black hole's gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape, we could not escape either. As the wave attempted to form beneath us it was pulled apart by the forces of gravity emanating from the event horizon of the singularity.

The Koloth was acting as if it were a bucking bronco as wave after wave was created by the FLT drive only to be smashed by the dense gravity of the black hole. My mind raced through Kitty's memories of the schematics of this ship but there was nothing in her PDA or memory that would help me in creating the FTL wave. As the vibrations from the attempted wave formations grew the ship was in danger of tearing its self apart, it was then that I shut down the FTL drive and we began to freefall backwards toward the center of the singularity. Engaging the sub light drive slowed us down a bit but now the pull was too strong to keep us from being pulled backwards.

As we watched on the monitors, the remaining vessels of the Zetas fleet were consumed. It would be our turn soon enough as I now realized that escape was impossible. As far as I knew, no one of my species had ever been inside a black hole, and our scientists theorized what was inside but no one had ever been able to obtain any data on what was actually at the center. We were about to find out as we were being pulled back at an increasing rate toward the center. I increased power to the shields to protect against the debris that was being pulled in with us. Huge chunks of rock and other space trash was whizzing past our canopy. Even though this looked like the end, I did not want our end to come in a giant fireball after being hit by an asteroid.

The shields held but as we were drawn closer to our doom we were being struck frequently by many different forms of debris, some were twice our size. The shields were holding but they were consuming more power with each hit, which was robbing power from the engines that were no longer slowing our movement. I had all but tuned out Megyn's rants and ramblings coming from the rear of the cockpit but suddenly she began transmitting through my internal wireless system, which got my attention. She was urging me to disengage the shields and activate the cloak.

It was an odd request but after I considered for a few seconds I knew she was right. I had searched Kitty's memories and found the briefing that Sheba had given them both on the capabilities of this ship. The cloak put us out of phase with this universe, so when I did as the Colonel suggested, our movement toward the black hole ceased and the sub light engines were now moving us forward once again.

We were gaining speed and putting more distance between the singularity and us when the black hole collapsed in upon its self and dissipated. I noticed the time on my heads up display and calculated that it had been exactly twenty-nine minutes since our missiles had detonated in the center of the jump point. Since the energy of the jump point created the black hole, the anomaly dissipated at exactly the time that the jump point would have closed. This combined with our cloaking system kept us from being pulled apart and crushed like the fleet of planet killers had been a short while ago.

Now that the threat was gone I circled back toward where the enemy fleet had been just moments ago. There was not much debris left in case the commander of the carrier group decided to come back to see what had happened to his follow on fleet of planet killers. Most of the debris from the ships had been sucked into the singularity. Not having done this before I pictured that the debris had to have gone somewhere after the singularity dissipated. I had to laugh as I mentioned to the Colonel how I would love to see the look on the enemy commander's face when the space junk that was his planet killing fleet came pouring out of the jump point in front of him at the other end. I was surprised when Megyn put aside her anger at what I had done and mentioned that she too would love to have been a fly on the wall to be able to see that as well.