Crush Depth

An Evaded Cadence one-shot

Simon J. Dodd

Helios Gamma. The Cylon War.

Torrents of fire volleyed back and forth between the battlestar Ward and her enemy. The basestar was curving in a tightening arc around the Ward, trapping her between the basestar's guns and Ophion's upper atmosphere. But for an instant, the gods smiled on the beleaguered battlestar. A gunner finally drew blood on what they had been trying to hit all along: What the Colonials thought was a central spindle joining what the Colonials took to be twin hulls. The ventral gun-boss saw her moment and took it. She grabbed control of all eight of her turrets, slaving them to the one that had landed the hit and swinging them to bear as they reloaded.

"Match bearings and shoot!" There was triumph in her voice. She would be lying if she denied pleasure in what was about to happen.

Seconds later, a trio of 42" sabot high-penetration rounds and eleven 73" slugs ripped into the spindle, almost tearing it in two. Another command sent another volley crashing into the hulls, and cheers—more of relief than of triumph—went up in the CIC. The Ward, her quarry killed, began a turn back toward to the main fight.

The basestar was not dead. It was wounded; mortally. Worse yet, inertia could take it to only one destination. That left one option, one last card to play. It was a terrible option; the humans had never understood the basestars' purpose. But what did it matter now? The antennæ were wreckage, and the Centurions on the bridge calculated that if any of their brethren below decks were still alive, they were damaged beyond repair. They powered up the sublight drives, and the basestar staggered toward the Ward, slowly at first but with gathering speed.

In the CIC, the Tactical Officer saw it first. "Sublight! All ahead flank! Helm, drop the bow and roll!"

On the basestar's bridge, it became apparent that a slight course-correction was needed. The thrusters were dead, but there was a way, a chance, and they had gained inertia enough to risk it. A Centurion keyed the secondary drives, and for just a moment, one sputtered to life. It was enough. That finished the basestar, its spindle giving way, but no matter. The ship was now a pair of disci, aimed directly at the enemy's gun-deck, approaching on a perpendicular roll, the array with the still-functional sublight drives pulling ahead of the other. They had Ophion's gravity on their side now, diving faster, faster…

In the CIC, the Command Staff had begun to react. The big ship was accelerating and turning in response to the Tactical Officer's screamed order, but too slowly. The gunners returned their attention to the basestar and began tearing it apart, round by round, but too slowly. It was all too little, too late. The one basestar had become two wrecks, which the Ward's gunners were turning into chunks of varying sizes, most of them still very large, and traveling with no less velocity.

The fragments of the first hull ripped into the Ward like a shotgun blast, tearing away armor-plating and weakening the outer hull. Then the mostly-intact second hull arrived. It struck the keel on a steep angle at frame 30, just astern of the aft flight-pod pylons. It tore through the outer hull and broached the inner hull, lancing into the spaces and structure beyond. Dozens of compartments were laid open to space, and vacuum came invading into the ship, grabbing at everything in its path. From bow to stern, the crew heard a terrible, cacophonous noise, a wrenching, writhing howl of concrete and steel giving way, peppered with the pop-pop-POP of compartments failing and venting, each one closer to the hearer than the last.

Had any Centurions survived the impact, they might have taken a grim satisfaction that they had done to the battlestar what she had so nearly done to them: As the basestar's remains lunged through the battlestar's main structural members, she was cut asunder.

The wreckage ripped open tylium tanks and severed fuel-lines. At this point, the ship's throat was cut even had her back not been broken. She was well-enough engineered that the fuel system did not depressurize, but with the engines no longer fed, what little fuel was left in the manifold could last only so long. Bare minutes after the impact, the main engines failed, leaving only the smaller inboard, which was by far inadequate to the task it would immediately face.

At that moment, the mighty Ward's fatewas sealed.

The engagement had drawn her too close to Ophion. Now the gas-giant had its hooks in her, and she had nothing sufficient to resist that terrible grasp. She could not maneuver away; the RCS might have turned her, but only the main engines could have produced enough delta-v to escape, and they were dead. She could not jump away; the FTL system been spared, but the reactor had not, its core automatically SCRAMming as shrapnel plowed through the coolant system, depriving her of main power.

For a brief moment in time, a few minutes but no more, the Ward hung as close to motionless as anything in space can, venting gasses and sparks, her two halves apart but adjacent. They were already falling, but they fell together.

Then, ever so slowly at first, the bow began to tip downward.

"Holy gods." In a Viper nearby, Lieutenant Edward Nagala was well-enough educated to understand what was about to happen. He had little time to contemplate it; a Raider had parked itself on his tail, intent on doing the same thing to him. "The Graces defend them," he was well-enough bred to mutter, for all the good it would do them.

In the Ward's CIC, the mathematical certainty of the ship's fate had not yet become clear to the Command Staff. Emergency lights gave only the most tenuous illumination, and the computers were just as shocked as were their operators. ID=06 OVRFLW ERR, the helm computer complained, to the bewilderment of the Specialist manning it. 0x9 I/O BLOCK PARITY ERR, it added, helpfully, IN DMA E1:44:96:A7.

It was the Flight Dynamics Officer and her team who realized it first—the people who tracked the ship on paper that still worked rather than using electronic systems that were confused if they were not dead. They hastened from their nook on the starboard side of the CIC—the 'Nav Shack' in the Fleet's parlance—to advise Commander Kerr. Bleeding profusely and in shock, Kerr was unable to process this information. It fell to the X.O., Colonel Dallas, to issue the last order recorded, and the only one left to give: Abandon ship, by any means possible.

In the next few, brief minutes, as Ophion loomed closer and closer, the definition of 'by any means possible' rapidly became looser. If it could fly, it was stuffed full of people and launched. But manning the lifeboats, such as they were, would have been as much use as getting in a LandRAM and driving it off the fantail. The monster had them.

In a Raptor that was full to bursting, pushed up against the hatch porthole, Petty Officer Harold Welles watched what happened next. Years later, the Rev. Welles would tell congregations that he might have been the very last man out. In the moment, PO1 Welles knew it, with appalling certainty.

Slowly at first, but gathering speed, the wrecked halves staggered into the outer reaches of Ophion's atmosphere, bent to an unnatural curve by gravity that tugged on her broken back. At this point, the stern section, smaller but more massive, began to fall faster than the crocodile-head and the separation was completed.

And falling they now truly were, as the hazy upper layers of the atmosphere received them. In the CIC, the Ward's artificial gravity failed and Ophion's very real gravity asserted itself, hurling everyone against the forward bulkhead. Dallas felt a tumbling sensation, and with no visual reference, his mind and stomach rebelled as he struggled to right himself and climb toward the Wireless Shack.

The two halves fell into the tops of ammonia clouds. The speed was picking up now, with nothing to slow them down; barely twenty seconds after passing through the cloud-tops, the stern, still nearly right-side-up, dropped below the cloud-deck, followed an instant later by crocodile-head. Those who were still alive and in eyeshot of portholes or turret-canopies were bathed in a sickly yellow, the faraway Helios Gamma filtered through the upper atmosphere. Below, they saw dark ammonia hydrosulfide clouds that for all the worlds looked like vast, rolling, slate-grey seas.

It is from this interlude that we have the final voice transmission from the doomed ship. "To anyone within the sound of my voice," the Virgan accent of Colonel Dallas intones on the recording. "Our ship is broken, but we are not. We die afoot, facing the enemy. Gods save the Queen." There is then a silence before the still-live mic captures Dallas addressing persons unknown within the CIC: "Think we should, ah… Put the top down? We'd, ah… We're really feeling the wind in our hair now."

As she plunged into that dark ocean, wind and thickening atmosphere began to fight the falling giant's velocity. Friction-heating began in earnest, and the crocodile-head, more aerodynamic than the blocky stern, began to outpace the latter. The light dwindled, and the winds buffeting the ship became immense whips, lashing her, peeling away external protrusions of all kinds, and pushing the crocodile-head and stern sections farther apart. Two pieces became four as the flight-pods were wrenched from their pylons, fluttering away like leaves on the wind.

Temperature and radiation were climbing fast, but they were the least of the ship's worries. The immediate problem was the pressure. Battlestars weren't built out of eggshells; their hulls were rated to take direct hits from small nuclear weapons. But those effects, fearsome though they were, lasted for an instant. The Ward was already under eight atmospheres of continuous pressure, and the fist was tightening. The hull could take it, but the exposed, formerly-internal hatchways could not, and a cascade of failures ruptured hatch after hatch, venting compartment after compartment.

A hundred miles down, the ambient temperature soared and the pressure passed thirty atmospheres—more than it takes to crush a car. Outside, it had become pitch-black, punctuated by discharges of lightning that revealed vast, towering structures, hideous methane perversions of cumulus clouds. The wind flung a drumbeat of liquid and semi-frozen raindrops against the hull, an asperous accompaniment to the ghastly percussion of failing hatches.

The last images received from the Ward's transponder system by the battlestars Masada and Electra,still engagedfar above, come from only a few minutes later. An image from the stern shows the far-off husk of the crocodile-head glowing red-hot. It is very likely that this heat would have transferred to the rebar within the concrete frames, turning the ship into an oven. Mercifully, we may doubt that anyone was left alive to die this way: Surely no compartment still remained secure against the cascade of failing hatches.

At 150 miles down, as the husks that had once been the mighty Ward fell below the deepest cloud layers, the pressure topped fifty atmospheres. By now, they were not so much dropping as truly sinking. In any turrets still attached, any gunners still alive who had remained at their posts would have had the best seats in the house. What they might have seen, we can only speculate; at this depth, we believe Ophion to be a soup of hydrogen and helium. But at some point, the show would no longer have gone on. The plexiglass turret-canopies were rated to survive a near-direct-hit, but as the pressure and temperature climbed inexorably, cracks would have appeared. Perhaps some gunners remained until the end, watching with a kind of fascinated horror; with no escape, why not, after all, enjoy the ride?

At 21:36 PST, telemetry from the stern section records the beginning of the end. Even laid open to the atmosphere, the hull began to buckle inward, imploding under the pressure.

Then, at a little after 21:37 PST, all telemetry from the Ward stops. She had fallen approximately 250 miles below the cloud-tops; the ambient temperature was around four hundred degrees and the pressure was approaching a thousand atmospheres. For how much longer the hull may have resisted, and whether it succumbed to pressure or survived long enough to melt, we cannot be sure—

For from the mighty battlestar Ward and her valiant crew—

Nothing more was ever heard.

Decades later, Admiral Nagala and PO1 Welles' daughter will recall these events in "Evaded Cadence," a free Battlestar Galactica eNovel coming in December 2019. Visit www .TheRacetrackChronicle .com for more information