Author's Preface
Humans don't win through excellent engineering. They don't have the bravest soldiers or the best tacticians.
They don't even have the most modern technology.
They win because they don't know how to give up, or when to give up.
In their war against the Niphill, their invasion force of 230,000 ships and troop transports was destroyed by Niphill black-hole weapons.
The Aligned Systems lost more ships in one hour than the rest of the galactic community had in the last three millennia.
Every other race would have sued for peace that instant. Many of the Aligned Systems wanted to.
The Humans grunted, and then began construction of a 500,000-strong fleet, destroying the Niphill Empire in three wars lasting hundreds of years.
— The Niphill Wars and the Cartagian Wars: A Comparison, 120,342 P.I.
"Sir, defense satellites are active, minefields active, drones active. All autonomous system defenses active."
Yurdantho nodded in acknowledgment to the reporting officer, as he had seen Admiral Sanders do. The Human crew were professionals, on the same level as the best Nuk crews he had ever worked with.
"Status of the attack squadrons?"
The defensive ship cocoon around the planet had always been divided into two layers. Active and passive defense. Nuk and Human ships were active, Psstips and Shraphen passive.
Admiral Sanders's plan also included an attack plan, if they needed one. In this case, the planet would be defended by Psstips forces only. Nuk and Humans would position themselves in an X-shaped formation, with the Shraphen Veyr protecting the flanks.
The holotank showed the fleets moving quickly into position.
"On their way. Last elements will reach formation in nine minutes."
Too slow. That was too slow. By then the Hyphae might have decided who leads and we lose the element of surprise.
"How many are in firing position?"
"Seventy-five percent, Sir."
"Zeus, generate a firing solution. We need to hit every stretch of the enemy fleet with equal force. Hold mines and drones back for now."
'Yes, High Ordinator. Calculating.'
The CIC door opened and Sanders stormed in. Her movements did not have a hint of tiredness, surprising for Yurdantho, who knew she had just slept.
"High Ordinator, situation."
"The wormhole closed. A large part of the Hyphae fleet is now cut off and without leadership. We have a small window of opportunity to decimate them, before they reorganize into a new command structure."
Yurdantho expected her to argue with him. Or to ask clarifying questions. To his surprise, neither happened.
"Very well. Continue."
The Admiral stood aside, almost demonstratively two steps away from her usual spot in the CIC.
Yurdantho did not know what to make of it, but time was of the essence, and every second lost explaining left more enemy ships intact.
"Zeus, status of the firing solution?"
'All ships informed and confirming targeting. With the new variable-speed cannons on Human and Nuk ships, we can ensure that the first and second volleys hit inside of half a second. Ensuring the destruction of almost 3,000 enemy vessels. After that, the hit rate will drop below 10 percent quickly.'
Three thousand ships was a lot, but given the size of the enemy fleet it was nothing. The goal was not to wipe them out with one volley. The goal was to keep them from organizing.
"Signal the fleet. Fire on my command."
He looked over to Admiral Sanders. It was still her command, her decision.
She studied the holographic map, again a cup of coffee in her hand. Where did she get those?
The admiral nodded back.
"Fire!"
He had been aboard Nuk ships when they fired the spinal gun, but never on a Human ship.
Expecting nothing but a slight twinge in his optical nerves from the projectile entering FTL transit, he was surprised to suddenly see smells and hear feelings.
Human spinal guns ran centrally through the crewed areas of the ship, increasing the odd sensory effects they caused.
Blinking his inner eyelids in quick succession, he watched the stream provided by the drones closest to the fleet.
I will never get used to seeing the effects of Human FTL cannons.
Batract ships were flying in one frame, and a picosecond later they would invert, as the Humans called it. Large parts of the FTL projectile's matter instantly decayed into strangelets, radiation, and exotic matter as the projectile struck the enemy hull. The rest of the matter hit the hull straight on with unimaginable force.
Hulls bulged inward faster than even electronic eyes could see, before stretching and ripping the ship apart, pulling more hull and armor after them as they accelerated through the weaker inner parts.
The crew of those ships not even knowing they were dead before being ripped apart into molecules.
The ammunition was not protomatter-infused, since no Batract ship could even withstand a strafing shot.
Another factor of the so-called Davies shots was the conical field of death behind the struck ships. Debris ripped or melted from the target was accelerated to a high single-digit percentage of lightspeed, striking ships behind and around the intended target.
The first volley destroyed 3,601 enemy ships with 3,000 shots.
Close to 3 percent with a single volley. Enough to make them angry and confused, not enough to beat them…
The missile frigates had launched what Yurdantho could only call a cloud of missiles.
Then the next salvo of FTL projectiles was launched.
His neurons, still excited from the last dublette, reacted even stronger.
For a fraction of a second, the CIC disappeared and he saw a different kind of space, orange, void of any structure.
Then he saw it. A Vrahl , a demon of Nuk religion. And the six-eyed demon seemed to have seen him.
Before he could focus on the mystical being hovering in the orange nothing, the vision ended.
The CIC returned around him, warning sirens blaring about his suit's structural integrity, calling for his attention.
He had begun to open his flightwings, the sharp claws beginning to tear his suit.
"High Ordinator, can you hear me?"
He was on the ground, the face of a medic close to his visor.
"Yes, what happened?"
"You need to calm down. I'm injecting you a mild sedative. You lost consciousness. Do you suffer from transit sickness?"
What in the name of the Old Ones was transit sickness?
'Some Humans, as well as other species, have critical adverse reactions to transit shocks, such as Davies Guns produce.'
Zeus helpfully explained while Yurdantho tried to grab the floor to make it stop moving.
"Sir, I'll inject a neural stabilizer. It is compatible with your metabolism, according to computer simulations, but we have to transport you to the medstation."
Yurdantho saw Admiral Sanders order the fleet. He couldn't understand a word, thrown out of the command channels of the CIC.
Sanders, fighting his fight… No.
"Inject whatever you want, but I'll leave the CIC only as a dead Nuk."
"Sir!"
"I said no! I will not leave my post. My health is not important, this fight is!"
The medic shook his head, then began speaking to someone on another channel.
Yurdantho had difficulty focusing as the sedative slowly began to work.
Must not drift…
He tried to focus on the screen. Not sure how long he had been out, he saw the enemy fleet was now shown at only slightly above 110,000 ships.
Two volleys? Three?
Then he saw something that caught his eye. Clustering. The vision dimmed. He fought his body to stay awake — what he saw was important. The Batract were clustering around different ships.
They are reaching a consensus and will attack soon.
"Zeus, tell Sanders… fire at the center of the clusters… new leaders."
'Understood, High Ordinator.'
Forcing his upper body up, he pulled himself back against the side of a workstation so he could see the battle better. Still shaken from the Vrahl , he watched targeting rectangles appear around the ships at the center of the hundreds of clusters.
The ships around the Niobe fired multiple volleys.
The Niobe isn't firing because of my weakness…
Then the drug won, and Yurdantho drifted away.
————
Admiral Sanders watched as the medics transported the sedated High Ordinator into the medbay.
"Zeus, make sure he has a data slate next to him when he wakes up. I'm sure he wants to know how the battle is going."
'Of course, Admiral.'
She then returned to the fight at hand.
The strike against the emerging command structure had done more damage than she initially thought.
All but three clusters had turned into a chaotic mess again and were actually retreating. But the remaining three began focusing their fire dangerously.
Three Nuk vessels had to fall back because of damage sustained, and two Human missile frigates were mission killed.
The crews were drifting in lifeboats while continued laser and plasma fire still impacted the dead hulks. SAR was on the way, Nuk battleships providing cover. Via the googly eyes stream, she saw tiny orange balls of fire erupting and dying a second later. Each one marked lives ended too soon.
You're witnessed…
She fought back a tear. She had served with some of them for years.
Later, Cassidy…
The enemy fleets began to advance on their position.
Ninety thousand are running. We can deal with the other thirty thousand…
"Signal the fleet. Continue harassing the retreating forces with FTL fire. Activate the minefields and drone swarms. Swarms under my control."
The retreating fleet had to be kept under constant pressure, otherwise they could coordinate. She wouldn't risk being the victim of a pincer movement.
The holoscreen in front of her changed. The formerly blue concentric spheres of dots, representing the minefields, turned red.
The fleet hit the first minefield.
The screens had to darken. For the Flirr on the planet, it had to look like a second, brighter sun had risen.
For minutes the explosions continued. The sensor techs tried their best to get any readings, but the radiation created by the large detonations made any sensor useless.
Using googly eyes, Sanders took the short break to look at her fleets. The ships' shields handled the radiation without issue, and for the first time, she could see the shields — glowing green and red from the ionized particles hitting the massive magnetic fields.
Her fleet and the planet below it glowed with iridescent auroras…
In another day, and other circumstances, it would have been the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
The Batract had just hit the largest minefield Sanders had ever ordered laid, armed with antimatter shock charges.
AM mines weren't the best choice, given how unstable antimatter was, but they were ideal for printing large quantities of mines when you had six super-Jovian gas giants providing kilograms of antiprotons free to harvest. The rest was easily sourced with a fusion core running dirty for a while.
Antimatter was cheap, but had to be produced on-site. No one was crazy enough to transport pissed-off matter that wanted to annihilate you for sneezing next to it.
Between the outermost ring and the middle ring were the drones, and she was now in full control of one and a half billion of them.
The cheapest drone was deadly for fleets if a thousand hit you at once. And Sanders had some anger to get rid of. Throwing drones from a defensive position wasn't as fulfilling as ripping ships apart with PDGs, but it had to do.
And as soon as the quagmire of radiation was gone, she would rain down hell on the surviving ships.
With a command on the controls of her space suit's sleeve, she started the VR interface.
The CIC around her disappeared, replaced by the space around the ship.
Color-coded clouds around her marked the drone swarms.
Producing them had taken every molecule of protomatter the fleets had, as well as every spare metal. Like some officers, she had even donated jewelry to the fabricators to provide gold for the circuits.
It was the biggest drone swarm ever used, bar Sol's defense swarms.
And she controlled it now.
Hovering in space like a ghost, she woke up the breacher drones.
She had always loved being at the front in combat. Her trainers had called her an adrenaline junkie, and said she would have made a better Marine.
Right now, she was in the battle. A ghost of revenge, a god of destruction, summoning the embodiment of wrath. Breachers.
As the name said,they breached hulls with their protomatter warheads. Only fifty centimeters across, they needed the protomatter to evaporate hull, and they were astonishingly good at it.
Now she waited for the Batract fleet to emerge from the radiation cloud that hid them from the sensors.
With a wave of her hand, she ordered half of the breachers to circle clockwise and the other half counterclockwise, so she could start a pincer attack the moment she had targets.
The first things emerging from the cloud were derelict hulks. Broken-apart pieces of former warships, parts ripped apart by explosions, parts almost looking cleanly cut apart.
Ten or more small fragments drifted out, then the pieces became larger. Full ship-halves, the sections where the mines had hit smashed in like by the fist of a god.
The first functioning ships appeared, still missing large parts of their outer hull. They would be a waste for the breachers.
She looked for a blue-colored drone swarm close to the cloud and found one. Extending her hand and making a grabbing motion, she ordered the swarm to attack the first ships. Blue was the color for breakers.
Armed with small explosives and laser cutters, they entered through the breaches and could take a ship apart from the inside. Much to the detriment of the enemy ship's crew.
Well, bad luck. You should have stayed home…
The breakers entered the ships and began their work. Cutting apart the hulls from the inside, blowing up what they couldn't cut, they were a joy to watch.
She sent another swarm to deal with the debris and derelict hulks, remembering how the debris clouds had fouled the Infectors' fire.
If the other fleet turns around, I need a clear field of fire.
Then the intact ships appeared, one by one, and with a grin, Sanders hit them with the breachers.
For Burrow, you bastards.
The Hyphae had learned from their previous encounters and had their laser PDGs ready. The swarm was decimated by laser fire from the ships, but Sanders had seemingly infinite replacements.
Each ship had to be struck only a few times for the breakers to get in, and as the ships continued to exit the radiation cloud, they were hit again and again.
The more the fleet advanced, firing at the clouds of drones as well as the waiting fleet around the planet, the more ships veered off, gutted from inside.
Shedding parts and even bodies, the hulls fell apart like model planes without glue.
After only about five thousand ships, it was over. Sanders felt almost sad it ended. No enemy ship was left attacking. Some were still moving forward, shaken by internal explosions, like an animal in its dying convulsions, but they were no danger to the defenders.
With a final activation order to the yellow-colored burglar drones, Sanders ended the VR command session.
Burglars captured debris and sent it to the foundries on Pioneer tenders. Either gaining intel or at least raw materials, they provided the refined metals that kept the fleet fighting light-years from supply hubs.
"That was it?"
Sanders couldn't believe only a little over five thousand ships had survived the minefield.
Grabowski answered from the sensor station.
"Sir, it seems antimatter mines are highly effective against Batract ships. The radiation kills the organic parts of the ships."
"Okay, let's keep this for the after-mission report. What about the retreating fleet?"
"They're on an escape vector and reaching transit velocity."
"Target?"
"If they don't change vector — the Nuk system."
Each ally under attack. They want to see who breaks first…