War Stories of a Supervillain, Chapter 3

Chapter 3 – Infiltration

Science types will tell you that, no matter how powerful your nukes might be, they really aren’t all that effective in the cold void of space. The blast waves associated with them really don’t carry that well without an atmosphere for them to push around. Even the intense radiation isn’t going to have much effect, assuming that whatever is out there has even the most basic energy shields or enough armor to soak it up. And any armor designed to stand up to the rigors of space travel and space combat is going to shrug off most, if not all, of what a nuke can do.

It is a fact, however, that very few species think to armor and defend the insides of their ships as well as they do the outsides. Fewer species also have vacuum inside their hulls, and almost none are fans of high concentrations of radiation. This means that, if you can manage it, setting off a nuke inside a ship’s hull is going to be FAR more effective than setting it off on the outside.

While I got the nukes ready to go (a relatively simple process, when I was following the instructions my sister gave me), Web Mistress was doing what she did best: gathering information. The Squadron Supreme, before they were bombarded halfway to oblivion, had set up and plugged in devices to try and read the alien computers on board the massive ship. In the chaos of the aftermath, they had neglected to remove the devices that had survived the bombardment, and Web Mistress was able to use them to piggyback into the alien databases.

I’d only armed the second warhead by the time she figured out everything she needed to begin planning my infiltration. The hardest part, according to her, was working out the translation from English to ‘Kratuan’, which is supposedly what these creatures called themselves. While she began plugging through blueprints, I started reading the information she sorted out as a cultural brief on the aliens.

The bug-like aliens were known as the Kratuans, and they were, apparently, some kind of hive-like species, with several body types based on their roles in the hive. They were mostly a hive-mind species, with an overarching consciousness controlling them. Most were little better than clever animals without a will controlling them. However, some members of the hive were intelligent enough to act as synapse nodes, in effect, for the hive mind, controlling portions of the swarm, and capable of independent action.

There were two key takeaways from that brief synopsis of the Kratuans as a race was that if you took out enough of their leaders, then the remainder would become feral beasts, with nothing more than basic pack tactics to fall back on, but if you left them alone for too long, they would breed like mad, and soon be a problem far too large for you to possibly deal with. So, while attacking the Kratuan hiveship in the Amazon was a suicidal move that got half the Squadron Supreme killed when the aliens responded with orbital bombardment, it was the right move, in that it eliminated the hive before it could truly start producing new warriors.

Looking past the species data, I saw two points that were immediately interesting to me. First, there was mention that, up until recently, our system had been under the protection of another group, known as the Asguard. Couldn’t find any hard details, but it seemed that they had been called away temporarily, and that our galactic neighbors, who weren’t entirely pleased with the Asguard keeping them from expanding in our direction, decided this was a chance to snap us up while they weren’t looking.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the second piece of info I saw was that the Kratuans were actually only one part of an interstellar group known as the Rithenal Empire. And the invasion wasn’t just the Kratuans going rogue, but something signed off by the Empire itself. That did not fill me with warm fuzzies, as you can imagine. Fighting an interstellar empire when you’re a species that hasn’t set up permanent residence anywhere off their home planet before is a rather daunting task.

But a wise man once said that the only way to eat an elephant was a single bite at a time, so I wasn’t going to just give up and give in. That wasn’t anywhere in my DNA. It did, however, mean that I needed to reconsider how to work things so that we could both take on the Kratuans and kick them off earth, and keep the Empire from joining in on their side, bringing too much weight to bear, and crushing the human race under the weight of numbers and orbital bombardment.

The first step would be to strip away the Kratuan command structure, forcing the junior leaders to take on more responsibility. My goal was to provoke a fear response from them. I figured they wanted the biosphere of the planet intact, for some reason, which meant that they wouldn’t engage in wide-scale planetary bombardment. So, when Bad Things™ started happening to them in Earth orbit, I hoped to provoke them to back off. Without the threat of orbital bombardment, resistance on the ground would actually have a chance.

Web Mistress had trouble getting into their networks. The databases on the destroyed hive ship were easy, they were actual computers. The hive ships themselves, however, were a mixture of technological and organic, it seemed, and that caused problems for her. Her powers were only partially effective against technorganic computers, so her normal role of overwatch would be useless. Still, she had managed to get blueprints for the hive ship, and got the navigation logs from the ship, giving us a map of the Rithenal Empire. A bonus was the fact that all members of the Empire were required to have ships and weapons that could be used by most imperial races on their ships, for emergency situations. That meant there were shuttles and weapons on that ship that didn’t require specialized bug biology to make use of. Most importantly, however, was her identifying the Kratuan flagship.

The Kratuans didn’t have their ships shielded to keep out teleporters. Or, at least, they didn’t have their ships shielded to keep out MY teleporter. That made my next action child’s play, itself. I teleported to a section that the blueprints said was near the ‘Primary Command Nest’. Now, I was naturally suspicious of any intel gathered from an enemy computer unless it had been verified, but that sounded like an important part of the ship.

The Kratuan ship was… well, like being inside some giant creature that was half organic, and half machine. The fleshy walls looked odd against the light fixtures, doors, and computer terminals in the hallway. Creepy as all hell, frankly, and I was all too glad to know that the thing would soon be a rapidly expanding debris field.

Alarms rang out as I appeared in the creepy flesh hallway, no doubt some kind of intruder alert. I turned to mist as I heard the sound of a lot of big creatures hustling towards me. The biotech air circulators were another cringeworthy experience that I am seriously not drunk enough to describe what it felt like going through. Just, no. At any rate, I made it into the Primary Command Nest, and found what the pictures on my HUD identified as one of the highest-ranking Leader types of these bugs.

Eight-legged, with four arms, one pair larger than the other, with both ending in grasping fingers, and possessing an insectile head with obvious mandibles, the creature was, frankly, grotesque in the extreme. It also didn’t appear to realize I was here yet as I quietly made myself solid behind it. I waved a hand to lock the creature in ice. No sense giving the creatures advantages it didn’t already have.

Walking around to the creature’s front, I looked it in its nasty compound eyes, and said, “Welcome to Earth. You’ll be happy to know that your masters will not be able to punish you for your many failures this day.” I heard the sound of reinforcements getting closer, and idly waved a hand at the door, sealing it with a massive slab of ice. A bit of theater, and insurance that we wouldn’t be interrupted. “Now, allow me to tell you what is going to happen. I am not going to kill you. Oh yes, you’re going to die, but not at my hand. I will, however, be cutting off all your limbs and leaving you helpless here. And, while I go down to your shuttle bay and take a ship for myself, you are going to get to watch as a bomb counts down.”

The leader bug was not pleased with me, that much was obvious, without the help of the translators added into my costume and HUD. Well, I wasn’t exactly pleased with their entire species, so we could call that a draw. For a moment, I considered cutting off his arms and legs while it was encased in ice, but that would be a lot more trouble than it was worth.

The fight was quick, brutal, and merciless. Frankly, it was embarrassing how easily I was able to de-limb this leader bug. Of course, the leaders probably weren’t bred for brawn and physical prowess, but intellect. Sure, it had a bit of a size advantage on it, but that meant nothing when I was quicker and more agile, and my blade ignored the thing’s chitinous armor, amputating limbs with a single stroke of the blade. Once the bug lost the legs on one side of its lower body, it was basically helpless, and unable to resist getting the rest of its limbs chopped off.

Once the leader bug was rendered harmless, I pinned it to the wall with some ice, not wanting it to accidentally roll around and lose the view I was about to give it. With a flick of my sword, I took out one of the (fully armed and ready) nukes I had stolen, and placed it on the ground, just out of the leader bug’s reach.

“Your ships have impressive shields and thick hulls, but tell me, do you make sure the insides of your ships are as heavily armored? You probably don’t know what this is just from looking, so I’ll tell you. This is a weapon that uses nuclear fission to create a massive explosion. It can easily take out a city. Or a space ship. And you get a front row seat!”

With that, I set the bomb on a ten-minute timer, and turned to an icy mist once more, before sneaking into the ventilation systems. Ten minutes was not a lot of time, but I didn’t want to give the Kratuans enough time to potentially defuse or destroy the bomb. Still, with no one expecting me to travel this way, I made pretty good time, even though I was going to have to sign up for therapy after going through all these flesh tubes.

Getting to the shuttle bay was easy enough. I managed that in just four minutes. It took me another minute to kill the grub-like Kratuans that were apparently their engineer/pilot types, the ones that dealt with the non-Kratuan tech the Empire forced on them. Fortunately, they were even less impressive in combat than the leader bug. They weren’t even armed! Simple ice spikes took them all out.

Picking a shuttle and prepping it for launch cost me another three minutes. Most of the ‘prep’ actually involved me sticking a transmitter into a connecter slot so that Web Mistress could hack into the thing and run the preflight for me, as well as opening the shuttle bay doors. That left me two minutes for getting the hell out of dodge.

Outrunning the nuclear shockwave, I couldn’t keep from laughing as I sat at the controls of the alien craft. My piloting skills were… amateur, to say the least, but with Web Mistress’s help, I had the controls set out on his HUD, so I knew what to press when in order to get the ship to go where I needed it to, and the proper controls to turn on the cloaking device. As a side note, this made me officially the first human to steal an alien ship in orbit! So anyone who is reading this can address me as Iceblade, Space Pirate!

YO HO!