Novella Sword of Antar

Sword of Antar
Author	Sudazima

The Sword of Antar it said, a mighty vessel once, a Re superdreadnought, infact a mighty vessel only an hour ago without a doubt. Now it had to face Justice, a Breeze class ship sacrificed as little more than a battering ram. Casting the antarean ship in fiery collision the Re ended up in an descending orbit at Kustat, at the far end of the empyrean reef.

Out of breath just a minute ago, but with the collision imminent he could hold it. They seemly flew so slowly, but in reality were just that far away. when the Justice first made contact with the grand antarean vessel it split apart on the massive forward bow specially designed to protect the huge spinal ion cannons within. Chandreshkar could see the nameplate thrown into the darkness of space. Looking like a mere sticker from this distance he had seen it up close in person at the docks, it was a huge piece of metal with building sized letters "USNV Justice". a massive explosion at the impact site shook him around. This small pod didn't have space audio visualizers but the shockwave of material and debris hitting the outside still sounded like thunder struck him. The Sword of Antar was backing out and under as hard as it could, but such a large ship does not easily budge left or right and couldn't dodge the capital ship ram they had setup.

Here Chandreshkar was, blasting away from danger in an escape pod. This wasn't according to plan of coarse but it seems like the results don't lie.

The indicator panel clearly calculated a stable low-orbit. That won't do he thought and programmed a burn with the retro rockets, normally used to avoid collision it would now serve to send him to the crash site of the Sword of Antar to help salvage it, whatever will be left. Once an engineer, it was going to be exciting to examine the wreckage of the superdreadnought. But for now it was time to sleep, the sun was just about behind the planet now anyway. Looking out, space was such a black empty void. Some thought it was disconcerting but not Chandreshkar, it was simply calm and at peace he thought, it is the people that made it into a war zone.

---

Alarms. He had slept for hours! it was plain white out the window so he must be in atmo already, the distance indicator was out of whack by the reflecting clouds. Lucky the brakes had not auto-fired so far off the surface or it would have been a bad landing.

He was hailed like some sort of hero, being from the Justice he was THE one to bring the Sword of Antar down to the ground. Well I say down but in reality it was standing up straight, here he was expecting a wreckage to be salvaged but it was going to be an assault to capture the ship instead. Like a immense tower at least several kilometers high it had bored down into the surface to stay upright like that. The lower parts where clearly damaged but the rest was almost completely intact, including the nose where the Justice hit. What had seemed to be a destructive collision from space was really only Justice breaking on the Sword of Antar'es hull.

"This is not getting any easier either" he thought.