Family from Beyond the Stars, Ch. 17 & 18 (Patreon)

CH. 17How Far we have Come

Space.  It was like a solid black wall of night, of infinite meaning, of endless size and scope.  Stars twinkled like distant bright dots, their barely visible afterimage dimmed by the vast length of space between the viewer and their true radiance.  What worlds lurked out there, amongst those faraway galaxies and solar systems?  What new phenomenon or unworldly elements existed, kept from the scope of Humans by that vast breadth of time and distance?  What kinds of people dwelt there, looking up into that same black sky and wondering that very same question?

Kenny had always wanted to be an astronaut, ever since he was a child.  He had grown bitter and cynical of the world he inhabited from a young age, seeing it as always ready to shun and push away those who were not the societally defined version of beautiful, or acceptable, or interesting.  People were cruel and impassive, claiming to be better but rarely showing proof of it all.  But the stars.  They were like dreams, barely realized and often overlooked.  They held all potential within them.  Earth could not be, could never have been, the only planet in all that vastness to support life.  He wanted to go there, to see what had never been seen, to meet faces wholly unlike his own, to explore the cosmos in its infinity.

Maybe it would heal the damage done to him by a world that had never opened itself to him.  Maybe, out there, he would find a place to belong.  Such had been his dream, his hidden desire above all else other than to be loved and accepted.  Reality had forced him to accept less grand or illustrious truths.  Few friends, fewer lovers.  Kenny Sissom had seemingly been doomed to a mundane life of solitude and rejection and loss; his only relationship with the stars relegated to gazing at them from afar.

That had all changed the day one of those very stars had seemingly fallen from the sky.  How different would things be if he had run away?  He did not want to even imagine it.  He was home.  He had found a family, albeit an unorthodox one.  A perfect family by every definition.

Reclining back into Nova's arms, Kenny looked away from the window they both had been facing to watch as the cubs stretched and maneuvered their furry bodies experimentally in their brand-new livesuit attires. The color-shifting material conformed to their Alien bodies, showing the contours of muscles and shifting limbs.  Access panels opened on Phoebe's back as she extended her tentacles experimentally.  Joey and Chandler lashed their tails, which like their sister’s stuck out of the backs of their suits.  Each of them seemed endlessly fascinated in twisting and flexing to test the range of flexibility the suits still afforded them.

Above him, Nova chuffed.  He glanced up to see what she was working on.  It was a similar device as to the one she had attached to him before on the ice planet, using spare parts of her adaptive tech.  Her tentacles easily fiddled and adjusted things on it in endlessly intricate and complicated ways, attaching or removing parts with tiny sure movements.  What had started off as a rough cube was rapidly forming into a small, sloped-edged device.  She turned it over and over as she did, gaze inscrutable.  The light of her stripes cast glittering illumination across the polished piece of material, as well as the walls and floor around her.  Her eyes were intensely focused on her work.

More than the stars, than swirling galaxies, than any other thing in the universe, Nova was beautiful.

Her gaze shifted.  Glancing down, the Tigerine Alien mother caught him staring up at her.  Her face softened from its previous intensity.  He flushed and shyly looked away, feeling guilty for disturbing her in whatever she had been doing to occupy herself.  The time they had together, like this, felt like it was drawing to an end.  After today, everything would be different.

Soft warmth pressed against him from the side as Nova's lower pair of arms hugged him against her more.  A second later his face was being lovingly nuzzled and then enveloped in a lick.  The rasp of her warm tongue on his cheek and temple was as pleasant as ever.  He wished that this feeling never had to end.

Unbidden, memories of their time together leaped to the forefront of his mind.  He saw his coming to the ship, meeting Nova, falling in love with her.  The fear, the uncertainty, the hesitancy, and quiet longing, were things he had long ago normalized when interacting with others.  The transition from those emotions into the joy of her accepting him had been like a wave of warm seawater washing away the frost of a winter morning, setting a burning ember of hope to smoldering within his heart.  The heat only continued to bloom as he became her friend, and then hotter still when she took him to be her new Mate.  They had been through so much together.

Another lick alerted Kenny that he had been sinking into those memories.  He was aware that his cheeks were slightly damp and not from her tongue.  He looked up at Nova's concerned, understanding expression once, wiped at his eyes with a hand, and then buried his face in her thick fur.  Her purr started up immediately and her arms tightened a bit more.

'I am here,' he heard her whisper into his mind.  'Nova has you, my Kenny.  Do not be afraid to cry, for these are lovely thoughts.'

He grimaced into the thick fur that covered her body, trying to bite back the waves of emotion that kept battering at his self-control and restraint.  They were not just joy or nostalgia now.  He never wanted this hug to end.  The moment it did might very well be the last.  They were not going to run anymore.  But he was still so scared.  His resolve was not shaken but it was a tenuous, trembling thing; his courage right then warred against a lifetime of running and avoiding conflict.  But he knew he couldn’t run anymore.  He had steeled his heart, fully prepared, he hoped, for anything that might happen.  It was a lie he had to believe in with all his heart.

A soft growl disturbed his downward spiral of doubt.  He suddenly felt the weight of the world drop away slightly.  Nova had scooped him up more into her double pair of arms, chuffing and lay her head directly atop of his, easily curling his little body into her much larger one.  He smelled her summer scent rich in his nostrils now, face all but wedged into her collarbone.  Hot breath brushed his thick, curly hair.

"Kenny..." she breathed out.  Her voice, her real voice, was scratchy and rough through her vocal emitters, but she had grown much clearer in speaking out loud.  Nothing could be more beautiful in his mind than that sound.  "You amaze me, my little Mate."

He blinked his eyes open and lifted his head.  His augmented eyes gazed almost directly into Nova's face as she continued to hold him up against her.  "I...amaze you?" he asked.

She blinked.  "Humans.  You feel emotions, as powerfully as we do.  But you are not controlled by them.  Even so, they are nevertheless just as strong.  That makes you the strongest, the bravest, the most fascinating being in all creation to me."

Heat burned in his eyes and he sniffed.  "I'm...really not all that," he objected.

Her arms tightened around him more.  Nova's face did not grow stern or harder, nor did her voice, but he could feel the intensity behind her glowing eyes as they bored into his.  "You are afraid, but you stand resolute against that fear, even as it threatens to freeze you stiff.  You are not strong, fast, nor possess powerful weapons, or even have gone to war before.  This is no place for you, on the eve of battle against the most terrifying creature I've ever known."

Kenny looked away, having told himself all of this before.  It was the truth, but hearing it spoken aloud by another didn’t make it hurt any less.

"But still, you stay," she continued firmly, again drawing his gaze back to hers.  "Your own world, it had no place for you either.  So you made one yourself.  You would not settle to just lay down and die, even as meek and sickly as you were when I found you and the cubs.  You made yourself belong.  You made yourself a home."  She laid a paw against her chest.  "With me."  She nodded past him at the cubs.  "With us."

Tears dotted his eyes and hers as well.  He sniffed again and she blinked several times, long and slow.  "You're...all I've ever wanted," he breathed.  "A family..."

"And we will always be a family," she growled.  "He cannot take it away.  I will not let him.  Never again."

Kenny leaned his head wordlessly forward.  So did Nova.  Their brows met and he felt the tingling rush of their minds melding wordlessly.  He felt everything she did, heard her thoughts as his own.  They were as music to him now.

'I love you.'  He wasn't sure which of them had said it.  Perhaps it didn't matter.  Never before had he been so close to someone else.

They leaned back from one another at last.  At his nod, Nova let Kenny slide back down along her body and eyed the device in her tentacles' grasp.  She grunted and made one last adjustment.  As Kenny's feet once again touched the floor, she held it out and down to him.

"Use it only as a last resort," she instructed him as he took it from her.

The device was roughly a foot long and rectangular with sloping, slightly curved edges that conformed to his palm easily.  Brightly lit displays flashed in his inner HUD right behind his cornea as his suit adapted and assimilated the new piece of tech into it.  He nodded and stowed it against his thigh where it seamlessly adhered to the texture of his outfit.

Something brushed him from behind and he turned.  Phoebe, Joey, and Chandler faced him.  Their eyes were soft and warm upon him.  He couldn't help but notice how much they had all grown, their shoulders now easily reaching the center of his chest even with them remaining hunched over on their six limbs.

Phoebe went first.  She held out a device she had previously shown to him before.  'I fixed it,' she hummed.  Her mental voice was stronger than it had been, or perhaps Kenny could just understand her and her brothers better now.  'It shouldn't jam anymore.'  Her usually stoic expression was disturbed by her hidden emotions and he saw her jaw tremble slightly.

Kenny took the piece of tech and wordlessly attached it to his wrist.  Again, he felt the HUD flare to life as the gadget made itself a part of his suit as a whole, now forming an octangular shape on his wrist and forearm.  Afterward, he reached down and hugged her hard around the neck.  It was getting harder to get his arms around her fully now.  Her purring started up at once and she wormed her thick head against him, returning the embrace before she disengaged and stepped back.

Joey came up next.  He just gave his Daddy a deep nod and a big cheesy smile that looked only slightly forced.  'Why you look so serious?' he chided Kenny in his rolling baritone.  'It's just a game.  For keeps.'  Then he winked one big, bright eye.  Kenny gave him a mock scowl and bustled the big male cub into a similar hug as he had given Phoebe.  Joey returned it, quivering slightly against Kenny and letting his Daddy know how much he needed this.

Last, but not least, Chandler walked straight up and thudded his head against Kenny's chest.  He scratched behind his third child's ears, making him croon softly.  Their eyes met again as Chandler leaned back.  'Whatever happens,' he growled, the lighter cadence to his voice, usually lilted for humor, was, for once, fully serious.  'We are a family.'

"We always will be," Kenny vowed.  He scratched Chandler once more under the chin.  He expected the cub to wriggle and writhe in delight.  He didn't.  Before Kenny's eyes, Chandler slowly, carefully rose up to his hind paws, pulling his head back and up out of Kenny's reach.  He stared up at Chandler in amazement.  Behind him, Phoebe and Joey did the same.

They were all so tall...7 feet at least.  Finally standing as bipeds, he saw their forms were at last beginning to show distinct differences.  Chandler was long-limbed, gangly, and spindly but built like steel wire, his tufted ears and mohawk making him the tallest of the three.  Joey was a block of fur, solid and massive, broadest across the shoulder of his siblings but also the shortest by half a head.  Phoebe's feminine curves were starting to show; she would probably look just like her mother when she reached adulthood, and she also had inherited Nova's heavy muscular build as well.

Kenny looked up at his children and beamed.  Tears glistened in his eyes.  "You've...all grown so much," he whispered just loud enough for them to hear.  "I remember when all three of you could nearly fit in my lap."

They blinked in unison down at him.  Behind him, Kenny heard Nova stir.  He made room for her to stand up to her full height, turning and looking back at her.  Nova reached up and touched the display at her throat, cycling her paw pad against it in a clockwise fashion.  The two-piece, bikini-like livesuit pieces she wore began to expand until they covered her whole body from neck to paws, just like the cubs' did.  She nodded down at him once, then turned.

Kenny and the cubs watched as Nova strode to the armory and opened it up.  On went her armored suit, fully repaired and outfitted.  He recognized the streams of code flash on the display monitors, as well as the various, collapsed armaments that she strapped to herself alongside the massive plates of armor.  Before their very eyes, Nova transformed back into the armored warrior they had all first met.

Leaving her helmet off for now, the Mother alien turned back to look down at her family once she was fully suited up.  Warmth shone in her bright eyes.  Wordlessly, she kneeled down as they all walked forward.  Multitudes of arms wrapped around one another, hers circling them all as they shared that one last big hug.

When they broke apart all their eyes were set, their jawlines grim, and their shoulders stiff.  Up they marched from the hangar bay.  For the first time in his life, Kenny wished he could zoom out and take a slow-motion camera shot of them all just then, as a family.  He walked in the front, cubs stalking upright behind him and Nova at the rear, towering over them all.  Their eyes glowed like cold-fire, determination hardened into a solid bar of steel.

At the end of the short hall, Kenny paused and let the cubs climb up the hall to the cockpit before him, waiting to feel Nova's teeth catch the back of his livesuit's collar before she lifted him up and climbed after their cubs.  Once at the top, Nova placed Kenny gently back down and then led the way into the cockpit, where she strapped herself into the main seat.  The rest of them did the same but with safety harnesses attached to the wall.  All of their eyes flashed white as scanners, sensors, and displays flared to life all around them.  As a family, they looked out across the blackness of space outside their vessel.

Before them lay the intimidating maw of the black hole, yawning wide and devouring all before it like the maw of Charybdis in the Odyssey.  It swirled ominously like that same all-devouring mouth of a cosmic whirlpool from the Greek epic.  They were far enough away that the gravitational pull of the well did not affect them.  Even so, a thrill of fear passed through Kenny's stomach to look into the blank dark of nothingness.  Nova gave one of the steering handles a twist, turned the ship in a slow 180 degrees until they faced away from the black hole.

This was it.

He and Nova shared one final nod.  She reached up, paw trembling only slightly, and turned off the stealth drive.  Their ship's glittering hull flashed into being, drifting there silent and still in the vastness of the void around them.  Lights hummed into being all along the engines and sides as all systems roared to life, quadrupling the energy output that sensors would be able to pick up upon if they had the right logistics to do so.  It was an open invitation.

Come and get us.

No more running.  They stood their ground.  The hunt, the chase, was over.  All they could do now was wait.

It did not take long.

CH. 18This is Our Home

The opening to slipspace flared to life silently up ahead of the Family’s warship.  Billowing storm clouds rolled out from that tear in reality.  Flashes of lightning, too static and monotonous to be natural, lit those billowing shrouds before they parted.  Piercing those clouds came the pointed, sword-like prow of the dreadnought.  Its dark hull flared to life, reflecting the lights of the distant stars all across its colossal size.  Systems restored themselves from mandatory shut down to avoid overload from exposure to the energies of slipspace.

Alone in the command deck, Lord Darken gazed out across the stretch of open space in front of him.  His quarry hovered there, tiny and unmoving.  There they were...  Sensors and scanners whirled to life all around him, locking onto the ship he had been chasing for so long.  He identified several life signs aboard.  His errant daughter, her cubs, and...something else.  He dismissed it.  Whatever else was on that ship did not matter other than his prize.

Darken knew how this game would play out, as it had without exception every time he closed with his quarry.  He waited for them to flee.  And waited some more.  His eyes narrowed as the ship continued to just hover there, all engines activated and open.  Why weren't they running?  She had always run.  She was scared to face him, knowing what fate awaited her.  Familial warmth and paternal bonds were weaknesses.  Darken had none of those anymore.  He was his species' perfect soldier, the perfect warrior, the perfect tyrant.

Their previous duel on the frozen planetoid had only reinforced this fact.  She may have been his pride and joy, once, the best and most talented fighter, pilot, and warrior of their people, born of a line of chieftains, but he had surpassed even his ancestors now.  He had transcended the boundaries of flesh, elevated to a new, superior being, driven by that most implacable will to survive, to conquer, to consume.  Such was his birthright.

All he had to do now was reach them and the hunt would finally be over.  Conquest would once again be firmly his.  He even had a target in mind for when he had rallied and assimilated his remaining people into his army of Dredges; the home planet of the little gnat that had stymied him before on the ice planet.  Long dead he might have been but he would not let that transgression slide.  They would be an easy conquest, a test of his ultimate army.

This would end in only one way should she allow him to get close enough.  The cubs would be his.  It was his destiny to bring the perfection of war to the universe.  So why wasn't she running?

***

"I think he's confused," Kenny observed.  Despite the terror gnawing at his stomach, he actually felt a grim smile crossing his face.  "Do you think we should enlighten him to reality?"

Nova snarled openly and smiled right back at Kenny and her similarly grimacing cubs.  Her paws took firmer holds on the controls of the ship and her eyes flashed, as did her flaming stripes.  The engines roared even more at the simple press of a button.

'No.  More.  Running,' she snarled.

***

The blare of a warning siren made the warlord sit back in his seat in surprise.  Weapons were being armed.  Lord Darken gazed in shock at the tiny vessel, at the readings that he was seeing before him.  He saw the electronic scanners show that they had switched engines to cannons.  Lock-on signs flared to life.  They could not be serious.

A second later, lights flashed from the ends of one of each of the four converted wing-engines, all of them facing squarely forward in line with Darken's ship.  A quartet of homing blasts raced across the distance in a fraction of a second.  They impacted on the sides of the dreadnought before Darken could even blink in surprise.  The explosions they caused were, comparatively, minor, but alarms flared immediately as the damage was logged.  Those shots were fired from some of the most advanced, accurate, and devastatingly powerful armaments his people had ever invented.

The Usurper had been many things, but he had never slacked when working on his inventions of battle.  If only he had been a true warrior, like Darken, like his daughter had been.  A union of their clans would have allowed for total domination of the system.  All could have been different if he had not abandoned the Way.

Despite all of that, the shots had not been in vital places and could be repaired with minimal effort.  It was not even a logical attack, more a statement of intent.

Darken stared openly across at the still unmoving ship.  That they would taunt him thus enraged his acidic blood within his synthetic veins.  If they fled now, those blasts would have been pointless.  Why waste energy if they were just going to run in the end?  It made no sense.

***

"I don't think he's getting the message," Kenny commented.  Nova glanced once at him, smirking.  "Hit him again," the Earthling told her.  She acknowledged with a surge of satisfaction.

***

Again, the cannons flared to life and again a set of explosions flashed across his viewing screen.  Another salvo.  This time they were more clustered rather than randomly spread out, piercing his hull and causing internal havoc.  A hull breach alert in one of the labs blared across his sensors before he swiped it away, allowing the on-board AI to repair and lock down the area.

Darken snarled.  The impudence!  The audacity!  How dare they openly challenge him like this?

His mechanical paws tapped out a rapid series of commands.  The main guns of his ship flared to life, transferring all power to the weapons systems and leaving reserves only for the booster engines in the back.  Always forward.  Always ahead.  That was how his people always won, always conquered whatever they set their minds on.  The engines flared to life at the rear of the nightmare vessel and the twin heavy cannons at the prow rotated into place, locking slowly onto the distant ship containing his daughter and grandchildren.

An ion blast began to prime.  That would fry their systems and disable their engines.  One direct hit and it would all be over.  The cannons glowed dully in angry violet radiance, rings of energy surrounding the muzzles before they resounded with a silent, echoing flare of discharge.  Twin bolts of scarlet-purple energy crackled and buzzed across the space between them as they streaked towards his daughter.

***

Nova saw the blasts coming on her screen easily, the beeping alarm siren growing louder as they blazed ever closer.  At the last second before impact, she casually tapped several controls and drifted idly off to one side in the space of a breath, using her booster engines on the side rather than transforming the main guns back into thrusters.  Barely a second later, the blasts sizzled past them and off into space.  She flipped the engines back onto their locked-on positioning.

"Third time's the charm," crowed Kenny.  "I think he's starting to get the point."  They met one another's eyes.  "Hammer it home for him, my Mate."

Nova snarled in joy to hear Kenny call her that.  The drive cores opened up and she unleashed a furious salvo of cannon fire from all four wing turbines.  Her father's ship was now beginning to drift slowly closer using its rear boosters, but it made no effort or attempt to try and dodge the incoming barrage.  They all hit it directly on the front.  Pieces of machinery were blasted off in chunks to spin away and off, spiraling into the space surrounding it before their inferior mass was caught by the black hole's pull and flashed away into its maw.  None were vital or even dangerous blasts but her intent was clear.

Again the ion cannons blazed to life and again she nimbly swerved them out of the way, allowing the blasts to just barely miss them as a way of further taunting her Sire.  She didn't return fire this time as, barely a second later, another salvo of the disabling beams came.  She switched the guns back to engines fully now, dropping all pretenses.  This was not a game.  Darken knew they were serious.

She dodged the next one, and the next one.  The ship spun and danced at her clever working of the controls, evading blast after blast as the enemy slowly, steadily came closer and closer.  She jerked the controls to the side and drifted right in-between two intersecting beams, barely skimming underneath them both and then righting herself again.  She could all but feel the sizzling energy coming through the ship as one errant electrical arc of the Ion blast tickled one of the engines, making her fur stand on edge.

He wouldn't be able to hit her with those big, clumsy blasts.  His dreadnought was built as a personalized armada all in one, meant to take on fleets and planets alike.  A lone fighter was like a fly, albeit with a potentially dangerous sting, to him, annoying and nearly impossible to swat with such large, inaccurate attacks.

She came to rest again as Darken seemed to realize this.  The ion emissions of the heavy, dual cannons located on the bottom of the hulking spacecraft powered down.  As she suspected, her father was not playing any games either.  All along the sides of the huge ship, glowing portholes opened.  Then, like a cloud of insects, dark, glittering shapes, tiny and barely recognizable against the backdrop of space, flashed up and out of those openings.  Tiny trails of light marked each and every one of them, emitting from the back of whatever they were.

On instinct, she zoomed her cameras out and forward, locking onto one of the shapes as it wheeled and spun away from its mothership before coming to a rest.  She saw an emaciated, skeletal figure of flapping silent fur, blank, empty eye sockets, and twisted black metal framing.  A pair of boosters extended from the back like the wings of a fly.  She knew what those flocks of things were then.

Dredges.  Thousands of them.  Millions more lurked inside that nightmare vessel.  One for each member of her people that had had their life force ripped out of their bodies, zombified, and turned into unliving weapons.  Automatons.  Slaves, mindless to all but the commands broadcasted to them through cybernetics that had replaced living, thinking brains.

They continued to stream up and out of the gigantic warship, flowing together into buzzing, flashing swarms.  Face upon familiar face flashed across her display, silent howling, cackling, snarling skulls and black, empty eyes.  There was no life at all to any of them save for the technology powering their twisted corpses; all they heard was the command of their tormentor, their abuser, their commander.

Nova's paws shook on the controls.  There were so many of them.  Even she could not fight a literal army by herself.  There was nowhere left to run, nowhere to hide.  She had committed everything to this battle.  The swarms of Dredges slowly surged across the vast distance, approaching in their untold numbers toward her and her family.  Dread slowly became a paralyzing cold as indecision raged within her.

Then warmth came.  She felt Kenny reach out through the link, sharing his conviction, his confidence in her blazing through her frozen limbs, freeing them of the shackles of uncertainty and doubt.  Their hearts beat as one, shared purpose keeping them strong.  She closed her eyes as her raging emotions calmed, allowing her to think once more.

She scanned through her mental library and found the song she needed.  From the first time she had heard it, she knew that this was the hymn of battle she would one day march to, should she ever have the courage to do so.  She connected her mind to her cubs, to Kenny, to her ship, and blazed the music through every speaker of it.

This was her family.  This was her home.

Haunting bells and pounding notes blazed through Nova's skull as she opened her eyes.  The swarms had drawn closer, the glittering black horde stretching out everywhere the eye could look.  Weapons glittered upon their twisted limbs in the darkness of the void: blades, guns, hooks, spines, and barbs bristled from every single one of the horrible monsters.  They converged upon Nova and her ship like a rushing tide.  They hurried to surround her and then began to close in.  Closer.  Closer…

Nova snarled and opened her mouth to voice the words in her heart and mind.  Simultaneously the engines roared to life once more, transforming and transferring all power, as her father's ship had, into arming the cannons for her last stand.   The final church bell rang as her paws gripped her controls tight.

She opened fire.  To the pounding beat of the song, she fired.  Each cannon blazed and exploded perfectly in time, alternating shots rather than just opening up all barrels at once and thus depleting her ammo and energy too quickly.  She used staggered shots, aiming for the greatest concentrations of the Dredges everywhere she could see them.

The cannon shots impacted their targets in giant conflagrations of light and flame, piercing through the masses and dealing death by the hundreds.  Every so often she would make a double-shot to disperse or break up a larger grouping of them, but she always returned to her rhythm.  Her people knew music without ever hearing it, but none had ever fought to it before.

The Dredges, even as lifeless and fearless as they were, were forced to skirt up, around, and all over to avoid being blasted to base particles by the hailstorm of cannon fire and exploding shells that she directed, unerringly, into their masses.  They streamed around and on all sides as she continued her onslaught, decimating the ones who could not move fast enough as they had no room to maneuver now.  Their charge's momentum had been broken to pieces and they had to fall back and regroup.

Nova did not give them that chance. Over and over she alternated her shots, firing from every direction as rapid-fire information was fed to her at all times.  She had never before concentrated so intensely and the strain of it had her teeth set into a savagely tight line.  Even so, she did not let up.

The surprise of her assault did not last long.  Now aware of the destruction she could cause, the swarms armed their own weapons fully.  Rapid bursts of single-shell gunfire rained down around them, most wildly inaccurate but far too many to be able to avoid them all by sheer luck.  All the Dredges had to do was get in close enough to land and they would be able to do much more.  If even one got inside...

Nova, however, did not just sit idle as her targets seemed to wise up to her tactics.  She switched several cannons to thrusters and spun in place, avoiding a shower of projectiles even as she fired her own weapon in a solid, scything line which carved an inferno of destruction amongst the Dredges.  Her warning signals blazed on all sides and she spun their spacecraft in rapid twirls, transforming guns to engines to guns back and forth as she pirouetted in place while also still firing as much as she was able.

With her unable to continue her sustained barrage, her enemies were able to regroup to more strategic and coordinated numbers.  All began to open fire then rather than just scattered groupings.  Nova was forced to abandon firing back entirely, putting all her skill and energy into avoiding and dodging the billions of shells and energy blasts that fell all around them like hail.  She spun the ship into a tailspin, spiraling nearly out of control as she blasted off up and out of the surrounding ring that had formed around her.

Again and again, rapid-fire blasts peppered the armored hull of the warship.  It was impossible to dodge them all.  Alarms blared as they took more and more damage; minor as it was, it was beginning to stack up.  Kenny and cubs howled as she kept going, unable to stop now.  She had to keep flying, to dodge and evade.  There was no time to think or for anything else.

***

Darken watched his daughter's valiant, skilled, and utterly amazing dogfight continue on.  Even surrounded and outnumbered as she was, she did not surrender or give up.  He almost felt a surge of something, old and forgotten, well up inside of him.  Pride?  In someone else?

His daughter had always been the greatest fighter pilot of their people.  Displays like this were still the stuff of legends but she lived up to them, even if she was doomed.  Beset on literally every side, she was starting to take more and more direct fire.  Her dance was drawing to a close.

At this rate, however, his mindless lackeys would destroy her ship and his prize with her.  That was not acceptable.  He booted up the ion cannons again, tracking her ascent up through the eye of the storm that was her position in the middle of the last remaining swarms of the currently deployed Dredges.  He fired, just as she was about to break free.

***

A direct hit rocked the entire ship just as they emerged from the cloud of remaining Dredges.  Nova saw it, too late, out of the corner of one eye.  She tried to dodge, to evade, but there was no time.  A blazing, red and purple bolt slammed into them and sent them spinning off even more uncontrollably away.  Sensors fried and displays went dark.  The ion blast had knocked them briefly out of commission.  Her father had been waiting.

Screaming in panic, rage, and fear, Nova frantically tried to revive the ship.  She half expected the Dredges to latch onto her at once but, looking out the flickering cameras, she saw them floating in their untold but much reduced numbers, similarly disabled by the blast.  Quite a few of them would be terminally fried, since those cannons were meant to disable entire vessels and cities.  A single creature hit by it, unshielded by the hull of a ship, would most likely be devastated as their brain functions fried.  Cybernetically crafted undead soldiers were even more suspectible, sustained solely by technology as they were.

Nova looked over at Kenny and the cubs, all of which looked a little worse for wear from the spinning and direct hit.  Looking up, her Mate blearily nodded, face tinted slightly green from the spinning and numerous impacts that had rocked their ship.  "We're okay," he confirmed, checking all of their life signs.  "But we need to get moving again!"

Nodding desperately, Nova tried to do a manual reset.  It would take time.  Too much time.  She looked outside of the ship to see her father had grown ever closer.  A glowing golden beam of light was just starting to extend from the open hull.  Her heart sank.  It was over.

Then, suddenly, a restarting scanner showed her new readings.  Slipspace ruptures.  Multiples of them!

Directly behind the hulking, dark shape of her father's vessel, a tear in the fabric of space and time opened up.  Hurtling through it came the blue-eyed front of a golden-hulled Voyager ship.  It was out of date and badly needed repairs.  The armor was lacking.  The systems showed that it wasn't running on full power.  But bristling at its sides were brand new, repurposed cannons and other various armaments.

And it wasn't alone.

Four more ruptures opened directly next to the first.  The five Voyager vessels raced through the openings and charged full speed at the rear of the unsuspecting dreadnought.  Light and fire roared enmasse from them all, striking the back sides of the massive ship.  Explosions roared and just as their ship was snagged in the tractor beam, it was let go.  They had been saved!

***

On his own ship, Lord Darken roared in utter fury.  New readings confirmed that multiple slipspace openings had just flared to life directly to his rear.  A moment later, he was almost blasted out of his seat at the recoil of dozens of impact shots to his exposed vessel.  Thrusters and booster engines were destroyed.  Multiple hull breaches were brought to his attention by the automated systems before bulkheads were slammed into place and the damaged parts abandoned.  They didn't matter.

Furious, Darken tore his gaze from his still disabled daughter's ship and slowly turned his attention to those who had dared open fire upon him.  He recognized the design of the Voyagers, outdated transport and exploration vessels that had been retrofitted with ramshackle weaponry.  The psychic signature of barely over 600 furious souls raged against his mind, echoing there like war-cries.

It seemed many more souls had thought it wise to cross his ire, so close to the fulfillment of his ultimate goal.  He roared and hammered a metal fist onto a display.  His own weapon systems roared to life, no longer ion cannons either.  Full death and mayhem blazed forth with no rhyme or reason as he directed all of his utter divine wrath onto those five insubordinate ships that had dared to come between him and his prize!  He would not be denied now.

If they would not surrender, they would be destroyed.

***

Kenny saw Steel and the others break their formation off as Darken turned to open fire upon them.  Where before had only been the massive dual cannons were now a bristling menagerie of weaponry, the likes of which had his heart suddenly go cold.  Cannons had abruptly erupted everywhere along that sinister shape, almost like the quills of a porcupine, swiveling to track and aim with cold mechanical acuity.

The flock of Voyagers evaded most of the shots but several took glancing hits from the abrupt, volcanic outpouring of destruction that blazed from all sides of the overwhelmingly large ship.  It had guns on literally every side possible, all of them blazing with bursts of light and muted flame.  Their reinforcements were already hard pressed to avoid them but they had done their job as they had promised.

Turning back to look at Nova, he saw her still trying to reroute and repair the warship so they could return to the fray.  She was having very little luck.  Looking to the side, Kenny snapped over at the cubs.  "Joey!  Unstrap yourself and help your mother!" he commanded.  "We need this bird flying NOW!"

Joey grunted and did as he was commanded, dropping down off the wall and racing over on all six limbs to assist his mother, paws already working overtime across the dozens of displays and controls as they tried to get the engines working again.  Nova gave him sparing directions but their son took to his task with a will and a knowledge of machinery seemingly bred into his bones.  Slowly, very slowly, the lights started to flicker back on more consistently.  The ship was waking back up but it was not in good shape.

Then another explosion, larger than any before, tore Kenny's mind away from watching them work, lighting up the dark void of space momentarily like a flash of lightning.  His eyes went wide and he surged against his restraints at what he was seeing.  "NO!"

***

Darken cackled with laughter as he finally caught one of the golden exploration vessels broad-side with a salvo of cannon fire.  The ship erupted in explosions all along its hull, splintering and breaking fully in half a moment or so later.  More fire and muted bursts followed as the doomed vessel began to implode.  The crew tried valiantly to recover but it was all over for them.  Multiple escape pods and minor sections of the ship blazed away from its smoldering corpse, but not all of them would escape detonation.  The engines exploded bare seconds after evacuation began, scattering pieces of the ship in a huge radius which were soon snatched up and swallowed by the black hole's ever-hungry pull.

That had felt good…

Then some small tickling of his trained instincts reminded him of the more pressing issue here.  His singular eye glanced back at where his daughter's ship was.  It was slowly coming back online.

He cursed and spat angrily.  These flies were distracting him.  Still, the armaments they carried would cause far more damage than even he could deal with if he didn't continue to handle them himself.  Only four left, after all.  He punched a number of commands and a brand new wave of Dredges launched from their stasis canisters inside the giant docking bay at the belly of his ship.  He gave explicit cybernetic orders for his troops to board and disable his daughter's ship rather than overtly destroy it.  Once onboard, they were to kill her and recover the children.  No more time would be wasted.

He set his mind back onto dealing with the ailing remnants of his people's ships with grim satisfaction.  The thrill of true battle was an old song that even his bitter, analytical and villainous brain could register a profound satisfaction to feel again.  He almost wished he could crush them with his own four paws rather than so distantly from the command deck.  Oh well.  He had a universe still to conquer and many holdouts of his people to locate and turn to his will once they had surrendered.  All in good time.

***

Nova tore her eyes away from watching the exploding ship.  Hundreds of lives lost.  The survivors were quickly picked up by the other Voyagers but many of them were struck by sadistic errant shells fired from her father’s vessel.  Her people were fighting their hardest but it still wasn’t enough.  They had to return to the battle!

She hammered on the controls as life came sluggishly back to them again.  Reawakening sensors blared in alarm as yet another swarm of Dredges was launching, flying right towards them.  She had to deal with them first before she could help the others fight against her father.

The engine transfer cycle, however, was locked.  She tried to circumnavigate it but she couldn't.  The main drive cores had been overloaded by the ion blast and locked into engine form.  She couldn't transform them from here with enough time, and the engines weren't fully powered back up yet.  As she watched, the Dredges descended closer and closer.  They were still trapped!

Then the front rank all seemed to implode as one in rapid bursts of limbs and pieces flying off in every direction.  Shocked, Nova looked around.  Flying right past them at breakneck speed, she saw one of the Voyagers had broken off from fighting against her father and come to their rescue.

'Figured you could use the aid, my Queen!' howled the static, distant voice of Steel through her sensor.  His ship took a sharp turn and blazed right past the next wave of the undead creatures.  His cannons weren't operating properly, maybe firing once per three emplacements.

Voyagers had never been intended for full combat deployment; their cycling engines were barely keeping up with maneuvering between salvos from both Dredge and Dreadnought.  Even so, that didn't stop the veteran Officer, truly one of the last of the Old Guard.  Before her eyes, the bulkheads on all sides of the ship opened as another wave of zombified soldiers buzzed towards them.

Dozens of armored figures burst out from the golden ships interior, connected still to the ship by their paws and using boosters to right themselves.  They attached themselves to the hull of their vessel like spiders clinging to walls, hooking their spines to their ships with tether cables before they took over firing directly from their personal weapons.  Her people were not going to give up without a fight!

The oncoming wave was picked apart as they drew closer to Steel and his crew, volleys of projectiles piercing that dark shroud of glittering metal and withered flesh.  Less than half the swarm emerged through the firestorm, descending into their effective combat range.  Arm-mounted blaster fire, hissing rockets, and searing beams of plasma arced between both combatants.  Several Drudges attempted to land but were cut down by the furious defenders as Steel winged up and away from Nova at last, drawing off the majority of their enemy into pursuing them.  Kenny and cubs yelled encouragement after them.

Turning her gaze back onto her family, Nova assessed their grave situation.  Joey yowled in annoyance from where he was, still trying to find a solution and invigorated to get back into the fight.  The stalling engines stymied him at every adept turn and trick he attempted.

Phoebe and Chandler lashed tails and tentacles from pent up excitement and terror-fueled battle rage.  Kenny met her eyes once, his uncertain, scared, determination wavering.  He might have had a beautiful heart, but it was not one trained or capable of handling the real face of battle such as this.  Nova knew what she had to do.  Her big paw fell on her burly son's head.  He looked up at her in confusion, pausing in his efforts.

Her smile was gentle.  She looked across to her other two children who had similarly fallen silent and turned to look at her, then to Kenny.  Her Earthling Mate saw it in her eyes and mind clearly.  His glowing eyes went wide.  "No!" he stated in nearly a shriek.  "You cannot possibly be thinking of going out there!"

Nova blinked once.

"It's suicide!" he yelled at her desperately.

'Kenny...' she sent to his mind, the clearest way for them to converse and to make sure he understood exactly how she felt and what her plan was.  'The engines are overloaded and cannot transform.  We are weaponless as we are.  I have to manually hook up to them from outside to direct their fire.  We will stand no chance otherwise.'

He saw the steely conviction in her gaze.  Even so, he and the cubs blinked back tears.  "But..." he tried to object, even knowing that she was right.  There was no other option right now.

She growled.  'Kenny.  Our people are fighting for their lives against my father.  They are giving everything they have in order to win.  The fire you set inside them must not waver for you are the heart of us all.  Your Light guides me.  This is no time to fear for tomorrow, for all we have is today.  Today, we live.'  She unhooked herself from the cockpit and crossed over to him.  Her huge paw cupped his cheek delicately.  'Today.  We fight.'

Leaning down, Nova pressed her forehead against his.  She let him feel her fear.  She was scared too.  She wanted nothing more than to run.  But he had taught her something.  Even if she was scared, she was still going to fight.  She was outclassed, out-muscled, outgunned, out of depth of what any single warrior could possibly do in this circumstance.  But she was not going to give up.

The music had once again started up in her ears.  She projected its message directly to Kenny.  She meant the words completely and utterly to the very depths of her soul.  Nothing would divide them ever again.  Here, in this music, they were united.

She wanted to be just like her Mate.  She wanted her cubs to see what true bravery was, and who had taught it to her.

Kenny shuddered against her, meeting her eyes as she leaned back from him again.  Her tentacle brushed his throat implant and they fell into the link once again.  In that endless plane of color and sensation, a thousand emotions raged within the core of her Human Mate.

It was as a swirling cyclone of colors with her at the center of them, the very fixation of his being.  She floated toward him, wrapping him in her arms even as he did the same to her, both squeezing each other so hard in an embrace that she could feel him compressing her.

The music of the war-song blazed around them, bolstering their flagging hearts.  He met her eyes, spoke the words within their minds out loud.  "To the ones...who have seen the light..."  He breathed.  The link fell away with a bittersweet blur and she again saw his real eyes, now blazing up at her with furious desperation.  "You come back!" he ordered her.  "You come back to us!"

Nova blinked.  'Always forward.  Always ahead.  That is my promise.  This is our Home.'  Then she turned and raced from the cockpit.  She steeled her mind for what she was about to do, snapping on her helmet and sliding down the hall to reach the hangar.  It was in total disarray, walls dented from pieces of tech and machinery that had been knocked loose during the fight.  Even so, she crossed wordlessly to the bulkhead doors and braced herself once they opened.  A single burst of rushing air later and she was sailing out into space, the doors reclosing behind her.

Her boosters fired rapidly and allowed her to redistribute her forward momentum before she drifted back onto the warship.  All around her were the lights and muffled thumps of the battle.  Dredges hummed everywhere, flashing by overhead in their chittering hordes.

The Voyager ships were giving it everything they possibly could to fight them off while avoiding getting blown to pieces by Lord Darken, who did not hesitate firing through his own minions whenever it suited him.  She began to crawl back along the hull, toward the engine transformation matrix at the rear.  With death all around, she had never felt more alive.