Homestar Saga

Chapter 12: Kamikaze

"Did we fail?" Yvian couldn't feel her body, but she was sure she was clenching. "Did I miss?"

"No," Mims told her. "If you'd missed, we wouldn't be in Klaath space. Get the ship moving and follow me."

"What do you mean?" Yvian set autopilot to follow The Random Encounter at the best speed she could muster. Damaged as the Lady was, it wasn't that fast.

"When you break a portal ring, there's a reaction. Turns the portal from a circle to a sphere. Only lasts a second, but when it's done everything in the area ends up on the other side."

"So now we're in Klaath space." Yvian didn't feel any shift as The Wandering Lady accelerated. She pulled up her ship's status. Inertial Dampeners were still online. She thanked the Bright Lady, then felt foolish for not checking before she accelerated. If the dampeners were offline, she would have just pancaked herself.

"We are. The Queenships aren't. Or at least, the sections that had Klaath Queens in them aren't."

Yvian cursed. "They're in Krog space. We just doomed the sector."

"Not necessarily. Maintain your current course. I've got to go deal with something." Yvian disengaged the autopilot. The Random Encounter changed course, rapidly leaving the range of her sensors. The human continued, "The portal shift cut the Queenships into thirds. The middle thirds are in Krog space, but they'll be defenseless after that kind of damage. I gave Admiral Fightsmart control of our other ships before we hit. The beam frigates should be able to finish the job."

The bulk of the Queenships slowly drifted off of Yvian's screen. She wished she could see what else was going on. She briefly considered having the ship's auto repair systems focus on sensors, but decided the engines were probably more important. After a few seconds of silence she asked, "So, uh... what's happening out there?"

It was Lissa who answered. "Most of the Klaath are ignoring us, but we've got a Corvette and two Klusters' worth of Raiders and Fighters coming at us. Mims is trying to get them to come after us instead of you."

Yvian cursed. The Encounter could probably deal with the Raiders and Fighters, but a Corvette would turn it into debris. The Wandering Lady wouldn't be able to help. Yvian had no shields, ruined armor, and the entire bottom of her ship was a crumpled mess. She doubted she could take on a single Raider by herself.

"You don't have sensors?" Lissa asked.

"They're so messed up I can't make out anything over fifty k." Yvian glared at her console. She knew she was lucky to be alive, but that didn't make flying blind any less annoying.

"Do you have a working console?"

"Yeah." The screen was cracked. "Mostly."

"Patch your wrist console into it. I'll send you our sensor data."

After a little fiddling, Yvian managed to cast her wrist display onto the main console. An overview of the area appeared. A solar system. Yellow star, six planets, two asteroid belts.

"Here's the sector we're in," said Lissa. "The fourth planet's a Klaath colony. Or their homeworld, or something. At least it was. Look." The display zoomed in, focusing in on the planet. A large, pulsing mass, over six thousand kilometers wide, was pressed onto it. Silvery tendrils streamed from it, grasping and wrapping around the planetary body. The image reminded her of an amoeba trying to consume a larger organism.

"What the Crunch is that?" she asked.

"No idea," her sister replied. "We're too far to do a detailed analysis. But the Klaath are scared of it." The image zoomed out. Klaath swarmed in orbit above the planet, firing down into the silvery mass. The mass fired back, violet beams and scarlet bolts of energy streaming into the ships. Whips of silver material stretched into the sky, reaching for the defenders. The Klaath ships numbered in the millions. Yvian suspected they would not be enough.