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The Mecdunnue was called the Big Mac by the Mavericks. She was part of the Ruhar 7th Fleet under Admiral Kune's command and tasked wwith suporting the Alien Legion above Stiglord (Squidworld). It was the ship that Lieutenant Colonel Emily Perkins and the Mavericks were aboard, although the Mavericks team had been spilt up between several dropships. After witnessing the destruction of the Dal Turnaden, thrusters under the nose of the Big Mac fired to point the ship away from the planet and the shattered remains of the Turnaden, while the assault carrier’s main engines spun up to full emergency thrust. The big engines were slow to ramp up and the acceleration built up almost imperceptibly. In the dropships that had not yet launched, pilots saw with alarm their mother ship’s new course, clawing for jump altitude. Their orders had not changed, the assault carrier was still spitting out dropships one at a time, each launch accompanied by clusters of sensor-jamming decoys. On the tactical data feed, all the pilots had seen what happened to the Turnaden and every single one of them was eager to get the hell away from the carrier as fast as possible. The Big Mac needed to increase speed to achieve a stable orbit, then escape velocity, then rocket away past an imaginary line where the planet’s gravity well was weak enough to allow the formation of a jump wormhole that would bring the assault carrier somewhere, anywhere other than under the deadly guns of the enemy SD network. The engines reached full military thrust, then the engineers authorized releasing safety mechanisms until the mighty engines were vibrating on their magnetic mounts at seven percent more than their rated power. X-rays struck the shields along the topside of the Big Mac. The intense photons were deflected outward, spread out along the outline of the shields around the top and both sides of the ship, or partially absorbed by the generators. Circuits in those generators overloaded and tripped off, protecting the generators but weakening the ship’s defenses. That assault carrier had been struck twice by X-ray lasers, and even through the static-y sensor feed, the Big Mac had its nose tilted away from the planet, its engines burning hard to gain altitude. The long flames firing out from the booster motors at the ship’s aft end. Those boosters, which could only be used once before they had to be replaced, were rarely used and always used only when there was no other choice. The Big Mac flared as an X-ray laser beam burned right through weakened shields, armor plating and structural frames to slice the assault carrier in two pieces.[1] |
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