The Stuff of Nightmares

"We're in visual range, sir," Heluna stated,

"Onscreen…" Anzyl said, walking to the center of the bridge.

A hellish ship of nightmarish proportions loomed towards them.

Garishly large, equal in size to the Nexus, this behemoth of a vessel looked like a humongous lionfish from the depths of hell. Large rear, and narrowed towards the front. Dull gray metal and blood reds strewn across its hull, highlighted with hellish hot ember oranges. Its dorsal ridge from bow to stern, lined with thousands of metal spikes, each at least 5 to 10 decks in length. Its starboard and larboard fans with saw-like spikes that would shred any hull it breezed past. Tucked under them were six wing-like fan Blades. And the underside, sprawling out like a spider about to pounce, were gigantic glowing hot razor blades, the length of the whole ship itself. At the tip of the vessel was a gaping open maw, blazing hot red as if it led to the depths of hell itself.

Every person on the bridge gazed at the ship in horror and shock. Even the Jem'Hadar leader Zide'mok was taken by the sheer monstrosity that lingered towards them.

"BaQa ghyu'cha' Ql'yaH…" Eroga spoke out loud, standing up slowly.

"WOE! Language Lieutenant!" Anzyl protested, turning to scold her, but he froze.

Eroga, warrior woman of the mighty Klingons. Daughter of Drex, Granddaughter of Martok and Sirella. Highest house of the Klingon Empire… trembled in morbid terror, face and skin as pale as a ghost, knees locking, and hands trembling. "It's real…" she gasped, "It's real…" her lips quivered, voice shaky.

"Eroga what is it?" Anzyl asked, looking at the warrior's mortified gaze.

"It's real… It's real…" she repeated.

"Lieutenant!" Neil boomed, attempting to knock the warrior back to her senses. "The Captain asked you a question!"

Shaking her head back to her senses, "Ghosts, demons… horror stories that warriors told children to make them behave. The Fek'ihri…" she panned her head slowly to the captain, voice still shaking, "I suggest we go to red alert…"

"Stuff Of Klingon Nightmares!? Hell yes, Red Alert!" Anzyl declared, sitting down in his chair. The bridge went dim, and red lights flashed. "All hands battle stations, shields up and all weapons ready!"

The gigantic vessel slowly lumbered towards the Nexus. The Cyclonic Shielding activated, making an orb of bluish energy around the ship with bands of denser energy in long longitudinal strips, from top to bottom. The bands of energy began spinning rapidly until they were indistinguishable, and a constant blue aura radiated from the vessel.

The Fek'ihri Dreadnaught lifted its large razor blade claws like a praying mantis about to pounce, and in one fell swoop, slashed the Nexus.

The Cyclonic Shielding worked as Tey'un designed, and deflected the razor blades like an expert fencer parrying an attack.

"Lock all weapons and fire!" yelled the captain; the ship rocked with the impact. Veirik grinned, hoping he would hear those words one day. He typed and pressed buttons on his console as the silver and gold lining of the Nexus shined, and eight different-colored energy beams formed on the saucer section and fired off in a rainbow of destructive energy. Red phaser, orange antiproton, yellow kinetic, green disruptor, aqua plasma, blue tetryon, purple poloron, and pink transphasic beams condensed and launched at the dreadnought. Catching the monstrosity off guard, explosions and pieces of the hull were ripped and burned off.

It was evident that this prey would not go down as easily as its previous hunt, and that the Nexus had fangs and teeth as well.

The dreadnought flared its under wings open, and like a beehive that was just poked, thousands of smaller tiny hot orange vessels swarmed out from under the hull.

"There's no life signs in that swarm, sir!" Keten declared, "It looks to be all non-organic drones."

"The Lost Souls of Grethor…" Eroga muttered under her breath in horror.

At the same time, the dreadnought's maw narrowed down and let loose a humongous flamethrower of hellish flames and napalm.

"Did it just shoot a flamethrower at us?!" Anzyl yelled as the ship rocked and shook, "In Space?!"

The Cyclonic shielding's design shined again as the spinning shields deflected and spattered out the flames with ease, but it seems the flamethrower was more a distraction display, as now thousands of tiny hot red bee-like vessels swarmed and collided with the ship, ricocheting and bouncing off the cyclonic shielding.

It was clear that the tactics of the swarm were to hit a single point in a target and wear that point down to puncture the shielding and hull of the intended victim. However, with the rotating and spinning shields, the damaged spot moved on at lightning speeds, so that a single crack would never form, as by the time the damaged shield array came back around the perimeter of the ship, it was back up and fully charged. The bee-like vessels were just deflected and ricocheted like bees flying into a box fan set too high.

"Shields at 85%!" Keten declared.

"Fire at will, get those things off us!" The captain yelled.

The omni-directional array lets loose colorful display beams from all over the Nexus, making it look like a disco ball, with each beam destroying a vessel with a single second shot.

"Sir, there's too many of them!" Veirik yelled, as the ship rocked back and forth from the onslaught of the swarm, "And they are dying too fast to absorb and drain their energy for the plasmonic leech system to refill our weapon batteries."

"Options?!" Anzyl yelled back.

"If I set all eight beams to a 45-degree wide Antiproton beam," Veirik yelled back,"The power would be reduced, but we would be able to do a full 360 sweep of the entire area. It seems the swarm was designed to overwhelm, and minimal defenses, and Antiproton seems to be the most effective." He shputed as the lights flickered dye to the ship's power supply was being maxed out.

"Divert power from auxiliary and engines and give it all you got! We're not going anywhere until this thing is destroyed!" Anzyl commanded.

The Nexus, covered from bow to stern in a thick layer of swarming bee-like ships, hummed loudly as the Octo Omni-directional beam array began to surge, and with a bright orange light, a full 360 disc of antiproton energy radiated from the ship's hull.

As the name suggests, the energy beam breaks the molecular bonding between protons and neutrons, disintegrating most forms of matter on impact.

The disc spun on the center axis, and every bee-like ship the wave passed over exploded in a puff of fifiery orange plasma. In a matter of seconds, the disc completed a 180-degree rotation, erupting in a cascade of orange explosions, erasing the entire swarm, leaving no traces that there was one at all.

"YES!!!" Anzyl leapt from his seat, and cheers of victory erupted from the bridge.

The fiery wave ended in the vacuum of space, and in a dusty cloud of bee shrapnel, only one thing was clear. The hellish dreadnought was pissed.