Chapter 151: Chapter 145

Hours later, approaching the passage between Papua New Guinea and the southern tip of the Marianas Trench system, Captain Omen ordered the Arboretum to close its shields. The fleet was too large to go unnoticed if anyone was looking hard enough, but a giant lantern was asking for trouble close to the trenches.

“Enemy sighted captain!” an ensign near the bottom of the chamber called. He swiped at his small section of the main screen and tossed it up, where the captain caught it with an imperceptible motion of his hand. The tiny video file responded to his command and played, first in a small window only for him, then larger once he approved it, for the entire command crew to see.

It was footage from their long range drones, which circled the fleet and sent footage of any potential threats ahead.

A great dark bulge extended from the trench, spreading out across the sea floor. Something bulbous was jammed inside the trench as far as the eye could see on either side. The footage from the drones explained the recent earthquakes.

The Kraken was shoving itself into the earth’s crust, along a major fault line. The bulbous bulge jammed in their portion of the now extended Marianas Trench was the massive creature that had been hunting them for the past three weeks, since Thresher arrived on board. The Kraken, rank 9 affiliate in all of BuyMort, here to end their world and destroy all life on their planet.

Tresher had arrived from the last planet the Kraken had destroyed, the previous earth. He had been a military man before, serving the Dearth Conglomerate on their naval vessels. Now Captain Omen heard the bones in his hand creak as he reflexively crushed them into fists at the sight of his enemy.

Kraken, a massive creature that traveled in an even bigger ship. To the monster inside, it was more akin to a suit, Thresher had told him. Its body was modular, shifting and flexing massive amounts of cartilage and muscle depending on its needs. The ship was similar.

“Whale-Bugs, Captain!”

Captain Omen’s head jerked up from the spectacle on the main screen. A smaller video channel showed a pod of oversized isopods, on approach from directly below the fleet. They had the rough appearance of a pill-bug but came equipped with diamond hard claws to rip apart their ships, and ravenous appetites for the fresh water stores on each vessel. Each was the size of a mature blue whale.

“Come around, tell the fleet to keep moving and inform them of the threat,” Thresher barked. “Deploy short range drones.”

“Weapons, report.” Captain Omen snapped.

“Aye Captain! Weapons ready!” his officer replied.

Captain Omen pointed at one of his officers. “Open a channel to the fleet,” he ordered.

The young man at the station obeyed, giving the captain a thumbs-up when it was open.

“Fleet, this is Whalehunter. We have whale-bugs on approach and are within the outside range of Kraken’s defensive tentacles. Follow your escort vessels and continue moving south. No matter what happens, we must leave Kraken’s range with all speed,” he said. “Orders are going out now.”

The comms officer nodded and killed the channel. Captain Omen quickly cut the military fleet into two, the escort and assault ships. Each knew their roles already and were moving into position before the final formation orders were even sent.

Their smaller destroyers were faster than the whale-bugs at full tilt, which was important for how they engaged the creatures. The ocean boiled as the massive BuyMort bugs approached, churning the water with their lobster-like tail flaps.

“Destroyers, engage,” Thresher said, calmly. “Distract and harry, standard operation.”

Several commanders on the destroyers acknowledged his orders and began quickly distributing targets. The largest of the whale-bugs was left for Captain Omen, but the rest began twitching as high-intensity, short-range laser fire filled the water with boiling trails of bubbles. Cigar-shaped submarines rolled and dove, peeling off individual whale-bugs from the pod and distracting them.

The lasers were not enough to penetrate the bug's armor, but it could be devastating if it got into the delicate undersides, and most of his destroyers wanted those targets. They all had running kill count competitions and were primarily jockeying each other for the lead.

“Helm, full speed ahead. The big one is ours, eh Captain?” Thresher asked.

“Aye,” Captain Omen answered. He stared at the various screens around him, watching the whale bugs separate and chase his smaller vessels. “Ram the matron bug. Shields, prepare the spear.”

“Aye Captain!” Shields replied. “Spear formation readied. Deploy on your command.” The woman at that station held a hand out over a red button on her console. Beside it, a living representation of their water shield around the ship glowed.

“Weapons,” Thresher said. “Prepare the fresh-water-bombs.”

“Belay that,” Captain Omen said. “We cannot risk Krakens attention, this fight must stay quiet.”

“Aye Captain,” Thresher snapped. “Weapons, prepare hunter-killer torpedoes.”

Captain Omen nodded slowly, paying attention to the insects' formation. His short range drones were in position and feeding them a constant stream of data, and Captain Omen wanted to predict the insect’s movements.

The whale-bugs had shown up in numbers about two days after BuyMort had arrived and had been regular threats against his fleet since its earliest days. Captain Omen was used to fighting these foes, but this fight was going to be different.

Whale-bugs primarily nested around fresh water sources in the ocean depths, making them particularly dangerous around island chains, as they clustered near several fresh water runoffs and would swarm if approached.

Dearth, in their infinite wisdom, had set up self-installing desalination stations on the sea-floor in hundreds of locations within the first week. Since then, they had scaled back their Nu-Earth project and abandoned the majority of the stations. Which made for perfect whale-bug pod nesting locations.

Captain Omen had been mapping them out, but there were so many their fleet just didn’t know about yet. Roughly two dozen whale-bugs threatened his fleet, which indicated the right size for a pod of the creatures from a ruined Dearth desalination point.

They had been built for ships to dock with and had great storage bladders. Those were the first things the whale-bugs split open once finding a desalination point. But the plant itself was dug deep underground and fed the rest of the station from a pipe. So the whale-bugs typically tore everything but the pipe out and used it to feed from.

Two dozen was about all a naked pipe could support. One large pod leader, followed by its most fortunate children. The usual course of action was for Whalehunter to punch through the leader, and sprinkle a few large depth charges, each with a fresh water lure. The smaller whale-bugs would often grab the bombs and curl around them before detonation.

“Now!” Captain Omen snapped.

His shields officer slapped the button and activated the ship’s water shield. Great surges of energy ran along the outer hull and permeated the water around them, gathering it and forming blocks of shaped ice as strong as steel.

Several rigid blades formed around the edges of Whalehunters prow, which gathered a razor sharp tip of gleaming metallic ice as its speed increased dramatically. The lead whale-bug grew larger and larger on the monitor.

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“All hands,” Captain Omen snapped. “Impact in two.”

They burst through the first giant isopod, cutting it in half easily. Their water shield let go and the metallic water sloughed away, the blades falling free and sinking, covered in whale-bug gore.

“Hunter-killers ready, XO!” The weapons officer barked.

“Deploy,” Thresher replied.

Three individual capacity miniature subs deployed from Whalehunter, launching from the nose cone in a stream of bubbles. Each carried an eager combat pilot, and a miniaturized version of the water shield on board their mother vessel.

They wheeled and spun around Whalehunter, ready to punch through any whale-bugs that engaged the large craft.

Whalehunter diverted and dove again, in an attempt to avoid the fleet. The whale-bugs were intent on the vibrations of that many engines in the water and were ignoring any destroyers that were not engaged with them directly. Captain Omen’s ships were outnumbered

“How many broadhead torpedoes do we have XO?” Captain Omen asked.

“Thirteen, sir,” Thresher replied.

“Deploy them.”

“Aye, Captain. Weapons! Prepare broadhead magazines!”

Some of the whale-bugs broke off and responded to attacks, but the primary surge was after the Arboretum. Unsurprising, it was a hot ship with a big engine. Whale-bugs liked vibrations and heat, along with fresh water and meat. Really, any organic material was feed for them, but the Arboretum was bait they didn’t seem able to easily resist.

Several whale-bugs latched onto the outer hull of the massive submarine and calls for help began to come through on coms.

“Fire broadheads!” Captain Omen ordered.

Weapons obeyed, and trails of bubbles streaked from the front of the Whalehunter. The broadhead torpedos acted like self-seeking arrows. A non-explosive tip deployed large blades on impact, punching through the target without causing collateral damage to his fleet. They had limited fuel sources and often got stuck in the hard armor plating of the whale-bugs, but normally after a fight they could be recollected.

Escort ships engaged, moving in to grapple the bugs off the Arboretum. Each came with heavy nose-mounted claw-hooks. The goal of each ship was to jam their nose-blade into a bug and peel it off the larger ship. Most succeeded, but one failed. The bug shifted at the last moment, and the change in position ruined the strike.

The nose-blade glanced off the whale-bug’s armor and the smaller ship spun into the depths, trying to right its diverted trajectory. Sparks erupted from the Arboretum and a burst of bubbles indicated a hull breach. The whale-bug’s rear end wiggled as it crammed its sharp mandibles further into the wounded vessel.

Captain Omen pointed at the screen. “Someone get that bug off that ship!”

The Bone-Picker suddenly lurched on-screen, far out of formation. The flat-topped boat was covered in submersible salvaging equipment, and a singular madman was on deck in a diving suit. Thresher noticed and blew up that portion of the screen, sending it to Captain Omen with a wave of his hand.

Tiny on the screen in-spite of the blown up image, the person struggled and fought against the currents on the flat top of the ships deck. They gripped at lines and climbed aboard a deck-mounted harpoon launcher. It was for hooking shipwrecks and pulling them off reefs or out of sunken crevices, but Captain Omen saw the madman’s intention at once.

The broad blades on the harpoon would not only punch through the armored plating on a whale-bug, but its heavy anchoring chain would also hold and pull the creature away.

“Bone-Picker, this is Whalehunter command. Divert course to adjust for the angle of the Arboretum’s port side dive,” Captain Omen said. Coms relayed his message and the ship on screen suddenly jerked as it moved to match the larger ship.

“Do it,” he whispered in his native tongue to the madman on the Bone-Pickers deck. “Do it!”

The tiny figure struggled up the final steps to the harpoon launcher and pried open the door to climb inside. A few seconds later, a great hooked blade fired, trailing a heavy chain through the water.

It connected, and the whale-bug jerked as it sustained a massive injury. The harpoon deployed wide, dull blades, and the Bone-Picker suddenly dove hard. The harpoon launcher twisted, bending the ship's frame as it pried the whale-bug free in a stream of bubbles.

“Full speed ahead!” Captain Omen shouted, pointing at the freely sinking bug. “Shields!”

“Aye, Captain! Spear formation ready!” His shields officer was smiling, her hand already in place over the console.

The sub under their feet rumbled and moaned as they pushed it further, faster, streaming bubbles as the water shield formed blades and a wickedly sharp tip around its nose again.

“All hands! Impact in two,” Thresher shouted into the ship-wide coms. The bottom of the massive Arboretum sailed by overhead as they punched through the whale-bug, sending it spiraling to the bottom in pieces.

His other ships began reporting success in their own battles, and their final broad-head torpedo found its target, punching the last of the whale-bugs out of the water with a critical strike before it could reach any of the vulnerable ships.

“Whalehunter, this is Arboretum. Thanks for the save, we’ve sealed bulk-heads and are good to continue at half submerged speed.” His comms officer played the message for everyone to hear, and the small room burst out in a light smatter of cheers.

“Thank the Bone-Picker, Arboretum. Glad you’re okay, repair drones from Whalehunter are already en route. All ships, ahead at submerged-half. We avoided the notice of our primary enemy, let us not waste our luck further,” Captain Omen said. He took a full breath and let it out.

Fiji was next, and then, the open Pacific, toward the former south-western United States. Hope for his people had arrived earlier that day in the form of a direct bounty request, for the live capture of one Molls Shevelanth. 

Tyson Dawes’ girlfriend.

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