Battle for the Stonehenge Beacon

The blue-green alert crystals of the small ship blinked frantically. Yes, yes, thought the pilot. Just let me write another line of code and I’ll get to you. There was always an emergency somewhere. If he must stay here all alone at the edge of nowhere, at least he would spend most of his time in activities he enjoyed, like the game he was now designing and debugging. Auditory alarms suddenly burst throughout the craft. How can anyone think with all that din, he said to himself, breaking away from his pastime? He first checked the tell-tales to make sure that all systems were operating correctly, standard procedure from the academy. Then he tried to find out the reason for the unexpected alert status. What he saw amazed him. It brought this seasoned Observer to full awareness. A battle of awesome proportion was occurring off his starboard bow. Attacking was a tremendous tube-shaped Dark ship. He immediately recognized it as one of those giant, draconian monster ships of the Syssphinx Brotherhood. The ship looked more like a long asteroid or small planetoid than a ship. But camouflage was not this race’s strong point. Spread across the top surface of the raggedly long, pock-marked cylindrical craft was the well-known symbol of Brotherhood. Those seeing it for the first time might laugh—the ship seemed hardly a serious threat. Very few still existed that thought that. The symbol was ragged too, as if it had been drawn hastily, maybe in blood. It was a red circle, pierced by three thick, red, parallel lines, equidistant to each other. One line split the circle in two; the other two lines were tangent to the sides of the circle. Equally placed down the long body of the ship were wide bands of orange color. The ones closest to the ship’s target erupted continuous white-hot blasts of force. The Observer had never seen weapon structures like this before. They seemed to be able to fire from any location on the band which encircled the ship. There were only a half dozen in action now, but if the entire ship had them, there must have been hundreds of them—it was a battle fortress. Weapons blasts from the Syssphinx ship were centered on an area just in front of it, on an object attempting to move away from it. The continual fire seemed to be aimed at... The Observer almost lost his breath as he saw the object of their attack. Could it really be? He quickly checked his database. The information on this subject was mostly the stuff of legend, but the large, gossamer substance stretching before the Dark ship, trying rapidly to escape it, could be nothing other than...a Lorelei. He had trouble believing what he saw, and quickly forgot all of his previous projects. The Lorelei. A race of beings about which very little was known. He knew no one who had ever seen one. The only visuals that existed in the vast Observer libraries were drawings of what the creature might look like. It could evidently change its shape. They were thought to be ancient, as old as the galaxy itself. It was said they were not sentient creatures who flew ships, such as the Syssphinx, or beings fused with their ships, such as he was, but that they were the ships themselves. An ancient space-faring race of beings whose purpose no one knew. This was a wonderful two-for-one day. Not much more was know of the firing ship inhabitants, the Syssphinx. The only certain fact about them was that where their ships appeared, where the blood red of the Syssphinx three-line circle symbol appeared, death followed. Negotiations were useless, surrender yielded no quarter, and their powerful craft were all but omnipotent. The event occurring off his bow was incredibly rare. It was the type of event that an Observer waited eons to observe. He instantly forgot his bitterness about all of his long years of observing ho-hum spatial anomalies to send record of to the Academy. He must record this event in every detail. He broke himself out of his awe. The drama before him was quickly going out of range. He activated the main drives of his cloaked ship. The short pyramid craft moved under his expert control and easily matched the speed of the battling vessels. Consistent, bright energy beams continued to leap from multiple bands on the Dark ship. They seemed to find a mark every time they fired. But who could tell? What exactly was space and what was Lorelei? Where they hits or misses? On the other side, the thin, almost transparent substance of the Lorelei, a hundred times larger than the gigantic Dark ship, and easily a thousand times larger than his own, spread before him. All three were traveling near the speed of light. He checked his charts. They were far from any civilized regions, down a long arm of a spiral nebulae. The Lorelei was taking a real beating. Did it have no defenses? Suddenly a combination of three destructive beams of light, sheared into the creature, cutting a large gap in the diaphanous, fabric-like area near its stern. A seldom-used sub-band of his detector flared to life and quickly burned out. Was this a weapon? Or was it a death cry of the Lorelei? Another indicator on his screen blinked. He activated another display and saw that a planetary system had come into range. Nine planets: two gas giants, two spheres too close to the sun to matter, the third planet, a lush tropical world, the forth an arid desert, the rest ice worlds far from their sun. Linked in speed as he was with the other ships, the Observer moved with them toward this solar system. The Dark ship had ceased firing, perhaps to recharge its weapons, but continued to match speed and heading. Then suddenly, it rotated one-hundred and eighty degrees, so that its drive engines could decelerate, slowing toward the planet. Additional multiple orange bands appeared on its aft—additional weapons preparing to fire. The Observer reversed his engines. He knew the Lorelei was slowing as well, but had no idea how. There was no indication of propelling mechanism. It just floated through space as if thrust, inertia and motion were of no concern to it. Wouldn’t they just love this footage at the academy! The Observer rechecked his recording units. All were functioning. Truly a feast for his colleagues at the academy. He would finally get the recognition he wanted. The Dark ship moved in for its final kill. The speed of all three had decreased immensely as they entered the planetary system. The Lorelei was a huge fabric-like creature, seemingly tossed by the solar wind. What a shame to watch it die. In places, its beautiful gossamer body was ragged and shredded, in other places, burned. In others, a multicolored vapor drifted from tiny fissures in its surface. Was this the life blood of this legendary creature? Was this the benevolent creature, known in myth throughout the universe, now a dying carcass drifting in death? Abruptly, the Lorelei shifted trajectory and contrary to all physical and natural law, made a sharp right-angle turn, and accelerated incomprehensively inward toward the yellow sun of the planetary system. The Syssphinx Dark ship immediately fired another volley, but missed the Lorelei because of its maneuver. The Observer could not help but sigh in relief. The Lorelei was not dead, but pretending. Was the Lorelei’s tactic merely to avoid the deadly rays, or had it something else in mind? Passing the fourth planet, the Lorelei began to decelerate rapidly and it became obvious to the Observer that it was heading for the third planet. What would the Dark ship do? He need not have asked. It had changed course in pursuit. More orange bands sprang to life on the surface of the Dark ship and began a constant firing pattern from at least a hundred weapons ports.