"Kayuli, have they seen us?!" Anzyl called out from his command chair, his voice cutting through the tense silence of the bridge.
Kayuli shrugged from his Science station.
"Impossible to say, sir. They do not appear to be targeting us directly, but I would be highly surprised if they haven't. However, my long-range scans show no overt signs of hostile intent, beyond their erratic movement."
"Let's hope this swarm is part of the 'Nice and Friendly' hive that we negotiated peace with in the Hur'q War," Eroga spoke up from the Operations console at the side of the bridge, her hand hovering over the controls. "And not the 'mad and feral' hive." Her tone was grim, echoing a sentiment that every veteran of the Hur'q conflict understood.
Anzyl nodded, his fingers resting on his lips. He knew the history all too well. "Agreed. The Hur'q Great Hive mind reclaimed their sanity, which ended the war, but they also warned us that several hives were still out there—lost and maddened. They gave the Alliance standing orders to put them out of their misery if we come across a mad hive."
"Uh… Sir!" Lusaalli shouted from the helm, her pink skin paling slightly as she pointed at the viewscreen. "The swarm is moving… towards us."
Kayuli's voice rose in pitch. "Confirmed, sir! The swarm is moving directly towards us! I think we can safely assume they have seen us, sir!"
On the screen, the chaotic cloud of tan and brown insectoids began to coalesce, the individual fighters spiraling and forming a tight, menacing spear as it began to spin and spiral towards the Nexus.
"I think that answers your question, Eroga," Anzyl said, a cold resolve settling over him. He adjusted his uniform on his Captain's chair, the familiar weight of command a small comfort. "RED ALERT!" Anzyl shouted, his voice a commanding roar. "All hands to battle stations!"
The ship's lights dimmed and the flashing red light pulsed as the blaring alarms began to sound, the metallic clanging of bulkheads sealing adding to the cacophony.
—
Outside, the spinning Cyclonic Shielding of the Nexus began to pulse and rotate rapidly, like a spinning basketball of energy around the vessel. This was not a standard shield grid, but a next-generation system that created a rotating, kinetic energy field, designed to deflect impacts with overwhelming force.
Just as the swarm's smaller fighters, tiny, almost missile-sized vessels, swarmed the Nexus, the field met them head-on. These Chidyat Swarmers had a single, terrifying tactic: assault and overwhelm a single point on their target's shields and hull until the ship buckled and was penetrated for internal assault, or the fighters detonated their cores, causing the assured destruction of the target.
—
"Chidyat Swarmers incoming!" Keten cried out from the Engineering console on the bridge. "Cyclonic Shielding is doing its thing! Smacking them away before they can latch on!"
Anzyl smiled wryly as his ship's unique shielding thwarted the main threat of the Hur'q assault strategy. "Excellent. Tactical," he looked up to Veirik behind him, "Scrub those bugs off the shields, will you?"
Veirik grinned and nodded, his fingers flying across the console with a practiced, predatory ease. This was a puzzle he understood, and the grim calculus of battle was a language he was fluent in.
—
Outside, the smaller, probe-like fighters sped towards the oscillating shields, prepared to latch on, only to impact the spinning waves of energy and get knocked away like a box fan swatting away a fly. With a hum of energy, the eight rainbow beams of the Octo-Omnidirectional beam array began blasting the Swarmers, picking them off eight by eight. Each one exploded like a torpedo, causing an explosion reaction that cascaded through the other Swarmers, a devastating domino effect of fire and shrapnel.
—
The bridge shook and rocked violently as the small Swarmers exploded one after another.
"Gah, I hate those things!" Anzyl grimaced, holding onto his chair for support as the vessel groaned under the repeated impacts. "Forget this, I'm buckling up." He reached up and strapped himself with a safety belt into his Captain's chair, a Nexus innovation that was not standard Starfleet issue. "Damage report?!" he yelled out, now safely strapped in.
He watched the explosions on the viewscreen, a pyrotechnic display of destruction, as the other seated crewmates buckled up as well.
"Shields holding at 68%!" Keten yelled as he slung his seatbelt across his chest. "Those little buggers pack a punch!"
Eroga grimaced from Operations. "That is how the Hur'q do battle. They overwhelm a single point and either burrow into the hull or explode while still attached. I have seen great warships go down from those tiny insects! They are NOT to be underestimated." Her words carried the weight of Klingon experience and battle history.
—
Outside, the Nexus blasted as many small Swarmers as it could. Its eight energy beams of the rainbow fired off in a disco ball of destruction, a mesmerizing light show against the void of space, as thousands of tiny Chidyat Swarmers spiraled around the vessel, unable to latch or target a single point on the behemoth ship. As one would explode, it would ignite the nearby Swarmers, and if many were too close, a chain reaction would continue from one to the other, causing a volatile eruption outside the Nexus.
—
"Shields at 45%!" Keten yelled, holding onto his console for dear life as the ship shook violently. He could smell ozone and burnt circuits in the air, a sign that the ship was taking a serious pounding.
"Can you use a Wide beam setting, Veirik?!" Anzyl shouted as the bridge rocked and rolled. "And why isn't the Plasmonic Leech absorbing energy for our shields?"
Veirik shook his head, trying to concentrate on the thousands of targets. "No energy type seems to work better than the other… Activating 45-degree wide beam settings. And Captain, there's not enough for the Plasmonic Leech TO absorb!" His face was red and frustrated as his fingers danced on the console. "They explode with the slightest burst of energy, the leech can't create a feedback loop to drain anything!"
—
Outside, the Nexus began sending out fans of energy in the eight colors of the rainbow. Each color a different beam type in a 45-degree fan of energy, to cover as much area around the vessel as possible. The beams lit the Swarmers up in flames, followed by an explosion. As the fans of energy swept through the swarm, explosion after explosion, the fireball of energy swelled and grew, soon encasing the entire swarm around the Nexus in hundreds of smaller explosions.
—
On the ship, the bridge rocked vehemently, as consoles and energy conduits exploded and fires burst out. Anzyl unbuckled his chair and leapt to grab a fire extinguisher, rushing to the aid of a burning crewmate. "Damage Report!"
Keten, bloodied and bruised from the violent shaking, yelled out from his chair. "Shields at 12%! I already diverted power from non-essential and auxiliary systems to shields!"
Anzyl and Eroga helped put out the flames on a burning crewman and a blazing wall, the extinguisher blasting the flames out with a hiss. "Divert power from the engines to shields!" Anzyl cried out, helping the crewmate alongside Eroga. "We're not going anywhere anytime soon! Eroga, get him to Sickbay." he commanded, then returned to his chair and strapped back in. "Divert what power we have, other than life support and weapons, to Shields and Hull Nanites." He looked up at Veirik. "Are there any bigger ships out there we can leech from? Swarmers always have a Hive nearby!"
Kayuli sputtered and flickered, the holographic projectors having a hard time with the destruction on the bridge. "I have one Vedcrid Hive on sensors, Captain!" He yelled from his Science station. "392 kilometers off our port bow! It's surrounded by several other large Vridyat Ravagers. The Plasmonic Leech could easily absorb them." He looked up at the viewscreen with a horrified stare. "But they're in the dead center of the main swarm cloud…"
Veirik looked at the Captain with a stern glare. "The Hur'q will NOT make it easy for us to get to their hive."
Anzyl stared at the swarm on screen, a sea of violent, buzzing death. "I have a feeling the swarm won't leave us alone until either the Hive or the Nexus is gone, and I don't plan on leaving our mission." Anzyl gripped his chair and gulped, the weight of his decision settling on him. "Helm, take us in. Half impulse, nice and slow. Tactical, keep fanning the Swarmers. See if we can make them explode while we're still out of their blast radius."
"Aye aye, sir," Lusaalli and Veirik both nodded, as the Nexus lumbered slowly into the massive Hur'q swarm.