arun prabhu
22nd January 2006, 01:41 PM
This is a reworked version - the plot's been
extensively reworked - of a story I posted here a
while ago. Note, the plot is so reworked that it's
really a new story. Anyways, like before, I'd be very
grateful indeed if the list members would read this
story and comment on it. And while you're at it, tell
me if you'd buy this story if you see it in a
bookstore? I have dreams of turning pro and I want to
know how far along I'm down that road.
*crosses fingers* Here you go...
Kurukshetra
Chapter 1
'...' ==> vspace communication
*...* ==> thought
The war that had lasted three millennia was almost
over. The tide had turned against the Demon horde a
thousand years before, but their territory was so vast
that it had taken the Terran Fleet ten centuries just
to drive them back to their initial beachhead. The
Terran campaign had been ruthless beyond compare and
seen the death of hundreds of thousands of suns and
millions of planets. A full ninety percent of the
galaxy's sentient races and an even greater percentage
of non sentient species were extinct not because they
participated in the war but because their home star
systems happened to be too close to the battlefields.
The intentionally inflicted damage to the
galactic ecology was horrible. The war had torn the
heart out of the Milky Way and the threat of radiation
poisoning was so high that not even the Terrans, one
of the hardiest of all races, could survive in the
arms without radiation shields. The only two sectors
to remain habitable were the Terran stronghold in the
galactic core and the Demon stronghold in the tail of
the Perseus Arm, and even they were doomed as the
dying flare of a thousand stars reached out to them.
And yet, even with the object of the war
utterly ruined, the two races fought each other. The
Terrans continued to use the same ruthless tactics
that had protected their race against the
extra-galactic invaders and the Demons defended their
territory with a ruthlessness born of desperation.
They knew that if the technologically superior and
infinitely more barbaric Terrans gained access to the
Gate, their pan-galactic empire was as good as dead.
It was their fondest hope that they would hold the
Terran Fleet at bay until the Gate closed for another
seventy million years and to make that hope a reality
they sacrificed billions against the Terran war
machine.
But as coldhearted as the Demon High Command
was, not even they were so crazy as to send a fleet of
70 million ships into a headlong charge into the maw
of the Terran Home Fleets. Unless there was a good
enough reason and as he stared at the approaching
juggernaut heading right down his command's throat,
Fleet Marshal Reynard Arsu, thrice winner of the Medal
of Valor and commanding officer of the four million
strong Home Fleet Three, tried to imagine what that
reason could be.
"What do they hope to accomplish with this
Fleet?" he wondered. He was so baffled that he
uncharacteristically spoke aloud instead of using his
avatar for the purpose.
'Sir?' Lieutenant Charles Green's avatar asked
him through the vspace dialog, the advanced interface
that allowed bioforms and bitforms to interact
directly with each other and between themselves. Green
sounded bewildered, which he was, not having the
benefit of Arsu's experience to analyze the situation
from the strategic perspective.
'I didn't mean to startle you, Charles,' Arsu
replied, 'it's just that I'm unable to think of one
logical reason why the commander of yon fleet would
want to throw his command away with this suicidal
charge.'
'They're Demons, Sir. It's the way they are.'
'Nonsense, Charles. No one wishes to die. Not
even Demons, even though every last member of their
race is willing enough to throw away their life at a
command.' As are Terrans, he did not add.
The Lieutenant wisely chose to keep his
silence. There was no point arguing with the old man,
he had learnt long ago. At one hundred and thirty
seven, Arsu was not only one of the oldest surviving
Terrans, but he was also one of the biggest jabber
mouths in history. *Not to mention the most brilliant
and successful commander ever in the Fleet's long and
illustrious history.*
Seeing that Charles chose to keep his thoughts
to himself, Arsu turned his eye back to the plot. He
thanked lady fortune for the stroke of good luck that
had brought the Demon fleet within sensor range of
Home Fleet Three while it was off station and engaged
in maneuvers. If the Demons had been half an hour
late, sensors would not have picked them up. It was
not improbable then that they might have launched a
deep strike at the colonies in the core, or even
happened on one of those shipyards. But as their luck
would have it, they had not. Arsu knew that without
the element of surprise, which had been the Demons
best friend since the earliest days of the war to
offset Terran technology, the Demons would fail to
achieve their objectives. And while it was highly
possible that Home Fleet Three and whatever
reinforcements that Home Com could send to its aid
would not survive the battle, the colonies would
survive, which was all that mattered to the Fleet
Marshal.
'Payeng, have Sarah compute a maximum Time to
Interdict course at a distance of 120 light years from
the core with initial maneuvers starting in ten
minutes. Please be so kind as to raise the TFCs on the
comm. and inform them to switch to OffCon 2. Pass the
necessary course correction orders to the TFCs with
instructions to pass them down their chain of command.
I want Home Fleet Three on that course in ten
minutes,' one of Arsu's avatars informed Commodore
Alyssa Payeng, the highest ranking member of his staff
even as another passed Green his orders, 'Charles,
send a priority one communiquι to Home Com on the VHF.
Inform them that a major assault is underway in Sector
Three and that Home Fleet Three is moving to
interdict. Enemy strength is upwards of seventy
million units. Warn them to expect more incursions in
other sectors. If the Demons are willing to throw the
labor of sixty years away here, I expect that they're
willing to do the same elsewhere. Request whatever
reinforcements they can scrounge up at short notice.
Apprise them of the situation as it develops.'
'Aye, Sir.'
'Sarah, I assume that the course you have
computed will ensure that the Demons are never out of
sensor range?'
'Teach your mother to suck eggs, Sir!' Sarah
replied in a crisp voice. She was Arsu's third and
final aide de camp, and the lone bitform in the club.
Of the three aides, she had worked with the Fleet
Marshall longest and knew him better than he did. She
was his best friend and confidant, and it was even
rumored in the fleet that the two were lovers.
'What's the time to intercept if the Demons
stick to their current course?' One of Arsu's avatars
asked in a sober voice as the vspace dialog split into
thirteen smaller frames to show the other twelve
sharing a brief laugh at the retort.
'Thirty six hours roughly, Sir,'
Arsu's avatar nodded harshly in acknowledgment
as shipboard klaxons finally rang announcing an
increase in BatCon status. The bitform admin of his
seat responded to the change by molding itself into a
protective cocoon around Arsu and sank towards the
floor. It filled with synth-support, a nanite rich
liquid medium that served to both protect a person
from high gee combat maneuvers as well as keep them
supplied with the requisites of life. Similarly,
across the ship and throughout the Fleet, all occupied
seats transformed into cocoons while the unoccupied
ones sent redundant messages redundant because the
klaxons would have warned the crew to rush to their
duty stations to their bioform partners summoning
them.
For Arsu, the virtual battle plot in vspace
grew to the size of an amphitheatre with the Demon
fleet painted as a red tetrahedron at the edge. From
now, until the Demon fleet was within a light year of
Home Fleet Three, the scale of the battle plot would
change to expand and more details would be added in
realtime as they became available.
True to the Fleet Marshall's orders, Home Fleet
Three swung to action in ten minutes and as the hours
passed, the two Fleets, originally separated by a 1000
light years, slowly closed the distance between them.
The Terrans used the fact that higher acceleration in
transit space, the bizarre super-reality that allowed
FTL travel and communication extended the range of
sensors and increased the visible band of transit
spectrum to their advantage. In the first few hours,
Home Fleet Three gradually decelerated to postpone
battle and to give time for reinforcements to link up
with it while at the same time keeping the Demons
within sensor range. By the time Sector Three Reserve
and its million ships linked with Home Fleet Three,
the range was down to 300 light years, which was just
beyond the extreme range of shipboard Demon sensors at
maximum acceleration. The Terran Fleet accelerated at
this juncture, both to close ranks quickly with the
enemy as well as to stay beyond range of Demon sensors
longest.
Not everything went according to plan in those
thirty hours, though. During that period,
communications from Home Com came in through VHF
confirming Arsu's suspicions that the attack was
multi-pronged. What he had not suspected was the
strength of the seven diversionary Demon fleets.
Together the eight Demon fleets had 165 million ships
between them, making it the largest armada ever in the
course of the long and bitter war of genocide.
Nobody at Terran High Command had even
suspected that the Demons had such a large reserve
hidden away beyond the Gate in Andromeda. And even if
they had, no one would have believed that their ever
cautious enemy would throw the labor of centuries
and it must have taken the Demons more than a century
to build such a fleet even with all the reserves of
Andromeda at their disposal away in a single action.
The war that was almost won became a mad scramble for
survival and all that stood between Terra and utter
destruction were the eight Home Fleets, the Sector
Reserves and the Colony Fleet, the last of which Home
Com refused to commit to battle. Yet, even as the
Terran Navy clambered to mount an effective defense,
the reason for the mad all out attack remained
unclear.
Oh, the final objective of the Demons had never
been in doubt destruction of all life in the Milky
Way or failing that, forward defense of the Gate for
the duration it remained open but with the Gate due
to close within forty years, there was no reason for
the Demons to believe that the Terrans were a long
term threat to survival, or at least, High Command
hoped they had none. Still, there was no denying
reality and the fleet from hell racing headlong
towards the galactic core could have only one
objective in mind: destruction of the colonies. But of
the reason and the modus operandi, none in High
Command had the vaguest idea. It was not until Home
Fleet Three was thirty four hours into the event and
the range reduced to a hundred and twenty light years
that the modus operandi was revealed and again, it
surprised the hell out of High Command.
It started as an observation by a Petty Officer
manning Sensors in one of the hunter killer screens
attached to Task Force 8.3. PO Harkley was one of the
few career specialists in the entire Terran Navy and
with seventy years of service behind her in sensors,
she was one of the few living Terrans with the ability
to make sense of a hunter killer's raw sensor data fed
directly to her in vspace. Hunter Killers were the
lone hunters and scouts of the fleet and when not
attached to fleet duty, they operated behind enemy
lines disrupting lines of communication, playing havoc
with enemy logistics and gathering intelligence. They
were used as the crucible where future fleet leaders
were molded. Their crews were made of extremely
competent, blooded spacers with a few career
specialists with decades of experience like PO Harkley
thrown in to act as mentors.
Besides her experience, PO Harkley and the
sensor bitform had worked together for more than a
decade and one's skills complemented the other. The
two of them made as perfect a team as was possible in
the real world and going through the raw sensor data
in real time, the Petty Officer noticed the telltale
signatures of ships exiting transit space in the Demon
fleet's rearguard. She and her partner placed their
suspicions before their screen commander, who was
intrigued by their finding. He ordered his screen to
pool their sensor data for better resolution and filed
a report to the Flotilla commander. The Flotilla
Commander found the report interesting, too, and
passed it up the chain of command. The report ended up
in Arsu's hands within minutes and even before Arsu
could react, his Flag Captain had shared the report
with the TFCs, who exercised their own prerogatives as
Flag Officers to pool the sensor data of the whole
fleet. The picture that emerged showed up to a hundred
Demon ships leaving transit space every few minutes
with monotonous regularity.
The TFCs formed their own conclusions from the
information at hand and passed on their suspicions to
Arsu. Arsu had drawn the same conclusions himself and
even though he did not have irrefutable proof, he
ordered Home Fleet Three to go to flank speed. He
briefly considered ordering the transports attached to
Home Fleet Three to stay behind, but decided against
it. The two fleets were close enough now that even the
slightest deceleration would place the transports
within the visible band of the Demon sensors. The fate
of Terra hung in the balance and nothing that could
jeopardize her future could be permitted.
'It appears this assault is a suicide run
after all. Charles, dispatch another priority message
to Home Com. Apprise them of the new Time to
Interdiction. Send them the report on the Demon
fleet's rearguard and warn them that my officers and I
suspect the Demons of using string weapons in close
proximity to the galactic core.'
'Yes, Sir.'
'Attach this note to Flag Marshal M'butu
Ching: Release Colony Fleet for action before it is
too late.'
'With all due respect, Marshal, Colony Fleet
will be massacred if they go up against this enemy,'
Payeng commented.
'Your information is a little outdated,
Alyssa. I can't go into the details, but trust me,
Colony Fleet can take down everything the Demons have
in the galaxy without breaking a sweat.' To Lt. Green,
'you have your orders, Charles. Get the TFCs on the
comm. too. I want to consult them.'
'Do you think Home Com'll release Colony
Fleet, Sir?' Payeng asked once Green signed off.
'Colony Fleet is stationed too close to the
front lines and even if it weren't, DefCom will refuse
my request. They won't even use it for the
counterattack.'
'But all eight Home Fleets combined don't have
the manpower to stop this attack, Sir.'
'We are the only ones hopelessly outgunned and
outnumbered, Alyssa. The other Home Fleets will suffer
very heavy losses in battle, but they'll repulse the
pincers in their sector. That juggernaut,' Arsu
pointed to the Demon fleet icon, 'will crush us. We
cannot allow it. If that fleet gets into the galactic
core, we lose the colonies and the war.'
'Sir?'
'They're nuking stars along their path,
Alyssa. Doesn't that tell you anything? That Fleet is
not here to nuke the colonies. It won't even attempt
to break into the core. It's here to nuke enough stars
near the galactic core to make the colonies
uninhabitable.'
'But why? The galaxy is already doomed. Within
two thousand years, even the deepest colony in the
core will become uninhabitable. All they had to do was
wait until the Gate closes in thirty seven years and
retreat back to Andromeda.'
'Do you think that Home Com was unaware of the
long term ramifications of our tactics when they
ordered the indiscriminate use of string weapons ten
centuries ago?' Arsu asked, taking a deep breath. 'The
decision was taken with the knowledge that we were
dooming ourselves unless we could develop the
capability to navigate the void between galaxies. It
was taken because if we had not pursued the scorched
earth policy that denied the Demons the ability to
build battle-capable fleets here in the Milky Way,
forcing them to rely on Andromeda, we would be extinct
now and they would have been free to pursue their
genocidal agenda.
'So, even as we destroyed stars all over the
galaxy, we worked in secret to develop the capability.
We succeeded three hundred years ago and Colony Fleet
is built using that technology. My guess is the Demons
wised up to Colony Fleet a long while back and that
fleet up ahead is their response. I suspect their High
Command ordered this attack to force us to act before
we had enough of the new hulls to be decisive in war.
If they force our hand now, we're doomed. If we invade
Andromeda now, we might be able to establish a
beachhead there, but we won't have the strength in
numbers to defend ourselves long enough to establish
viable colonies. That is why Home Com will refuse to
release Colony Fleet we don't want the Demons to
know how unimaginably powerful they are and that is
why we'll have to not just stop that fleet in its
tracks but destroy it utterly. We need the building
capacity of the core worlds for seventy more years.'
'But we can't, Sir. Stop that fleet, that is.'
Arsu smiled ruefully.
'We can and we will. As to whether we'll
survive the attempt well, that's not important now,
is it?'
Payeng's avatar started to reply, but Green,
who had signed on again and was listening to the
conversation intently, signaled that he had a message
for the Fleet Marshal.
'Yes, Charles?'
'TFCs are waiting on the comm. Sir. We've also
received a reply from Home Com.'
'Let's see Home Com's reply first.'
Green nodded an acknowledgement and pasted the
reply so that both the Commodore and the Fleet Marshal
could look at it at once. The message was short. It
read:
Request for Colony Fleet denied. Home Fleet Three will
engage enemy alone and push him back. If necessary,
Home Fleet Three will defend Terra to the last man.
Signed,
Flag Marshal Adrian Kuznetsov
PS. You know what to do, Reynard. Do it.
Arsu read the message and sighed. He shook his
head and turned to Green.
'I'm ready for that meeting now, Charles. I'll
need you and the Commodore at the meeting.'
The TFCs and their aides took their seats in
vspace as Arsu and his aides entered the meeting room.
Their discussions fell by the wayside and they looked
expectantly to the Fleet Marshal who had a grim
expression on his face.
'Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. We don't
have much to discuss and I'd like to make this quick.
I'd thought that I'd have a last minute discussion
with you to go over Plan Z one last time, but I've
just received a reply from Flag Marshal Kuznetsov. She
has refused my request to release Colony Fleet for
defense. Her orders are that the combined Home Fleet
Three and Sector Three Reserve will engage the enemy
and do our duty, defending Terra to the last man. I
plan to carry out her orders. I've decided to scrap
Plan Z and open with string weapons release pattern
Sigma. We will launch as many salvoes of string
weapons as are necessary to utterly crush the Demons
in this sector.
'We are within range of Demon sensors now and
this is a tough decision to make but we will not
split the fleet. In fact, I'm ordering all transport
commanders to stick to the course and not deviate from
it in any way. Just as we had no inkling that the
Demons had this little surprise up their sleeve, I
don't want them to learn our intentions until it's too
late. However, all non-essential personnel in the
transports will be jettisoned with their ships with
enough maximum life support reserves and their
emergency beacons timed to activate four hours from
now.'
'Excuse me, Fleet Marshall, but did you just
tell us that you want to use string weapons in transit
space?' Admiral Mark Schuster asked.
'Yes, I did. I know no one's ever detonated
string weapons in transit space before and lived to
tell the tale and that we won't survive either, but
we're all dead anyway and if I'm to die, I'd like to
sign off in grand style by taking that whole damn
fleet with me. As to air-defense, this is what we'll
do...'
Two hours later, the range dropped to three
light years between the lead elements of the two
fleets. A minute later, when the range was reduced to
two light years effective range of Demon ship
killers in transit space the Demon fleet fired the
first shots of the battle.
The Demon commander, a wily old warrior
herself, was fooled into a false sense of security
during the approach by Arsu's headlong charge and by
the fact that the Terran Fleet was meeting her command
just 120 light years from the Terran border. She had
feared that she would lose the element of surprise
throughout the voyage and that her command would
suffer very heavy casualties, but when the enemy's
response indicated that she had managed to achieve
surprise, she relaxed. Even though the response was
stronger than expected, the fact that the opposing
commander was charging her like a dumb male in heat
filled her heart with such great confidence that she
let her guard down. She did not pause to consider that
the enemy commander of this particular sector was
supposed to be a cunning warrior himself and explained
away the larger than expected strength of his fleet to
cosmic coincidence.
*Probably some fleet returning to the
frontlines had happened to be at hand and when he
found out we were dropping by what a surprise that
must have been he assumed command of it before
rushing to give us battle. Must have thought that his
technology made him invincible or something.*
Since she did not know that she had failed to
achieve tactical surprise utterly, she did not suspect
the desperation that drove Arsu. Sure, she believed
that his actions were driven by desperation, but she
suspected a different kind of desperation one that
every man feels when caught with his pants down.
Acting on her belief, she activated the plan that
supposed she had both strategic and tactical surprise
on her side.
The plan was a variant of Demon fleet SOP for
offensives against a numerically inferior enemy and
like any carefully crafted plan for battle it had a
starting, intermediate phase and final phase. It
called for a scenario where the Demon fleet would
close ranks with the enemy and employed a brute force
approach to ensure victory. The idea revolved around a
battle of attrition at very close range where Demon
strength in numbers would offset Terran technology. It
was a risky plan that when all was said and done,
accepted heavy casualties for the opportunity to rout
the enemy on the battlefield.
The Fleet Marshall, on the other hand, had used
his fleet as bait dangling it before the enemy
commander in the expectation that his opponent would
make a mistake in judgment and willingly commit his
fleet to battle. He knew that at very close ranges,
Demon anti-torpedo batteries would stand little chance
of successfully intercepting his string weapons; none
at all if they were launched in tandem with a massive
ECM salvo.
And so, to the Demon commander's misfortune,
her battle plan fit nicely into Arsu's own, a fact
that she remained forever unaware of. She was so taken
by Arsu's ruse and by her own logical arguments that
even while the two fleets drew ever closer, she
thanked her Gods that the Terrans had not opened fire
with their hellishly accurate torpedoes at long range.
As per the plan, when the first Demon screen
reached effective engagement range of the vanguard
elements of Home Fleet Three they opened fire. The
fleet was too large and spread too far that it was
beyond the capability of Demon fire control to
coordinate such a massive salvo. So, instead of trying
to accomplish the impossible, Demon command had
devolved fire control down to the level of flotilla
commanders. The staggered releases would reduce the
effectiveness of the salvo, but since the first and
last torpedo in any salvo would be less than ten
seconds apart, the reduction would not be that great.
A staggered but massive salvo of 1700 million
torpedoes made a beeline for the Terran fleet. Roughly
one in twenty carried ECM packages that tried to
befuddle Terran sensors with gravitic mirages. The
rest carried thermonuclear shaped charges or
anti-matter warheads with yields between a hundred
megatons and ten gigatons.
'The enemy has opened fire, Sir,' Sarah
reported. 'Responding. Threat axis: 45, +30, -29 to
48, +31, -28 degrees.'
'Range?'
'One point nine light years. Thirteen seconds
to first salvo.'
Arsu nodded. The battle was going to be short
and brutal, even by the standards of head-on
engagements at point blank range, which were very
vicious indeed. There was nothing he could do to
control the flow what flow could there be to a
battle lasting less than two minutes and he would
remain a mute spectator in the most crucial battle in
Terran history.
Having anticipated the kind of monstrous
salvoes that they would face, Arsu and the twenty task
force commanders twenty from Home Fleet Three and
five from Sector Three Reserve had tasked twenty two
of the task forces with providing air-defense for the
fleet. The fleet responded to the Demon move with a
massive barrage of its own. The two clouds of
torpedoes raced towards each other and the space
between the two fleets exploded in violence as Terran
anti-torpedoes missiles and anti-shipping torpedoes
exploded in the path of the incoming salvo. They threw
massive pulses of x-ray laser at them and directed
pulses of electromagnetic energy at them stripping
hundreds of millions into their individual atoms or
damaging them enough to veer off course. Three such
barrages followed, and then shipboard plasma banks lit
up, decimating the Demon salvo even further. Even as
the first wave was being annihilated, the Demon fleet
launched another one, but not before the first Terran
salvo containing 24 million anti-shipping torpedoes
were launched by the three task forces tasked with the
job. All 24 million torpedoes were armed with ECM
packages except for sixty that mounted string weapons.
'First wave destroyed with minimal loses,'
Sarah reported. 'Third salvo will overwhelm
air-defense.'
Arsu winced mentally as his battle plot showed
ten thousand ships destroyed outright mostly in the
vanguard with another fifty thousand showing various
degrees of damage. Still, Sarah's last comment almost
provoked a snort of amusement. No doubt, the Demon
commander's CIC was feeding him the same useless
information. True, the third salvo would not intercept
his fleet for another fifty seconds, but they would
not survive that long. The star killers would
intercept their targets in less than twenty five
seconds and when star-killers blew, they didn't leave
much behind. In fact, he suspected that there would
not be enough atoms left of the two fleets to fill a
glass jar. But he did not need twenty five seconds to
launch his two back up salvoes. All he needed was ten
seconds and he had them. They were almost certainly
unnecessary for his first salvo would intercept the
Demon fleet in just under twenty five seconds, but he
wanted them in the air as a precaution.
The first salvo of Terran anti-shipping weapons
targeted at the Demon fleet shot through transit
space, through the maelstrom of Terran anti-shipping
fire and through the nigh impenetrable curtain that
was Demon air-defense shield. They died by the
hundreds and then the thousands and then the hundreds
of thousands. Scattered Demon fire tore through their
ranks as the range closed and their guiding bitforms
braved the very pits of hell to deliver their payload
into the bowels of their nemesis. Even with all the
ECM cover they had, only a few thousand survived to
reach their destination and hidden in their ranks were
fifty nine string weapons one had caught the edge of
the pulse of a directed anti-matter warhead, which had
fried the guiding bitform and detonated the initiator
seven hundred gigaton yield warhead. The star-killers
exploded as per the timers mounted inside their
warheads timers that were synchronized to the pico
second.
Every ounce of matter within a point one light
year radius was ripped apart into their constituent
quark particles as the rules of the universe changed
locally for a miniscule fraction of a second. A hole
point two light years in radius in real space simply
ripped most of the Demon fleet apart. The gravitic
shockwave from the rip was felt a hundred light years
away in real space and as a side effect, thirteen
stars went supernova and twenty more went nova. The
survey ships that examined the area two days later
concluded that all Demon vessels were destroyed in the
titanic explosion. And since no evidence that even a
part of Home Fleet Three survived was ever found, it
was presumed that it was caught in the explosion and
destroyed completely.
The truth was not realized until four millennia
after the battle when advances in theoretical physics
allowed Terran physicists to accurately predict the
effect of string weapons in transit space.
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extensively reworked - of a story I posted here a
while ago. Note, the plot is so reworked that it's
really a new story. Anyways, like before, I'd be very
grateful indeed if the list members would read this
story and comment on it. And while you're at it, tell
me if you'd buy this story if you see it in a
bookstore? I have dreams of turning pro and I want to
know how far along I'm down that road.
*crosses fingers* Here you go...
Kurukshetra
Chapter 1
'...' ==> vspace communication
*...* ==> thought
The war that had lasted three millennia was almost
over. The tide had turned against the Demon horde a
thousand years before, but their territory was so vast
that it had taken the Terran Fleet ten centuries just
to drive them back to their initial beachhead. The
Terran campaign had been ruthless beyond compare and
seen the death of hundreds of thousands of suns and
millions of planets. A full ninety percent of the
galaxy's sentient races and an even greater percentage
of non sentient species were extinct not because they
participated in the war but because their home star
systems happened to be too close to the battlefields.
The intentionally inflicted damage to the
galactic ecology was horrible. The war had torn the
heart out of the Milky Way and the threat of radiation
poisoning was so high that not even the Terrans, one
of the hardiest of all races, could survive in the
arms without radiation shields. The only two sectors
to remain habitable were the Terran stronghold in the
galactic core and the Demon stronghold in the tail of
the Perseus Arm, and even they were doomed as the
dying flare of a thousand stars reached out to them.
And yet, even with the object of the war
utterly ruined, the two races fought each other. The
Terrans continued to use the same ruthless tactics
that had protected their race against the
extra-galactic invaders and the Demons defended their
territory with a ruthlessness born of desperation.
They knew that if the technologically superior and
infinitely more barbaric Terrans gained access to the
Gate, their pan-galactic empire was as good as dead.
It was their fondest hope that they would hold the
Terran Fleet at bay until the Gate closed for another
seventy million years and to make that hope a reality
they sacrificed billions against the Terran war
machine.
But as coldhearted as the Demon High Command
was, not even they were so crazy as to send a fleet of
70 million ships into a headlong charge into the maw
of the Terran Home Fleets. Unless there was a good
enough reason and as he stared at the approaching
juggernaut heading right down his command's throat,
Fleet Marshal Reynard Arsu, thrice winner of the Medal
of Valor and commanding officer of the four million
strong Home Fleet Three, tried to imagine what that
reason could be.
"What do they hope to accomplish with this
Fleet?" he wondered. He was so baffled that he
uncharacteristically spoke aloud instead of using his
avatar for the purpose.
'Sir?' Lieutenant Charles Green's avatar asked
him through the vspace dialog, the advanced interface
that allowed bioforms and bitforms to interact
directly with each other and between themselves. Green
sounded bewildered, which he was, not having the
benefit of Arsu's experience to analyze the situation
from the strategic perspective.
'I didn't mean to startle you, Charles,' Arsu
replied, 'it's just that I'm unable to think of one
logical reason why the commander of yon fleet would
want to throw his command away with this suicidal
charge.'
'They're Demons, Sir. It's the way they are.'
'Nonsense, Charles. No one wishes to die. Not
even Demons, even though every last member of their
race is willing enough to throw away their life at a
command.' As are Terrans, he did not add.
The Lieutenant wisely chose to keep his
silence. There was no point arguing with the old man,
he had learnt long ago. At one hundred and thirty
seven, Arsu was not only one of the oldest surviving
Terrans, but he was also one of the biggest jabber
mouths in history. *Not to mention the most brilliant
and successful commander ever in the Fleet's long and
illustrious history.*
Seeing that Charles chose to keep his thoughts
to himself, Arsu turned his eye back to the plot. He
thanked lady fortune for the stroke of good luck that
had brought the Demon fleet within sensor range of
Home Fleet Three while it was off station and engaged
in maneuvers. If the Demons had been half an hour
late, sensors would not have picked them up. It was
not improbable then that they might have launched a
deep strike at the colonies in the core, or even
happened on one of those shipyards. But as their luck
would have it, they had not. Arsu knew that without
the element of surprise, which had been the Demons
best friend since the earliest days of the war to
offset Terran technology, the Demons would fail to
achieve their objectives. And while it was highly
possible that Home Fleet Three and whatever
reinforcements that Home Com could send to its aid
would not survive the battle, the colonies would
survive, which was all that mattered to the Fleet
Marshal.
'Payeng, have Sarah compute a maximum Time to
Interdict course at a distance of 120 light years from
the core with initial maneuvers starting in ten
minutes. Please be so kind as to raise the TFCs on the
comm. and inform them to switch to OffCon 2. Pass the
necessary course correction orders to the TFCs with
instructions to pass them down their chain of command.
I want Home Fleet Three on that course in ten
minutes,' one of Arsu's avatars informed Commodore
Alyssa Payeng, the highest ranking member of his staff
even as another passed Green his orders, 'Charles,
send a priority one communiquι to Home Com on the VHF.
Inform them that a major assault is underway in Sector
Three and that Home Fleet Three is moving to
interdict. Enemy strength is upwards of seventy
million units. Warn them to expect more incursions in
other sectors. If the Demons are willing to throw the
labor of sixty years away here, I expect that they're
willing to do the same elsewhere. Request whatever
reinforcements they can scrounge up at short notice.
Apprise them of the situation as it develops.'
'Aye, Sir.'
'Sarah, I assume that the course you have
computed will ensure that the Demons are never out of
sensor range?'
'Teach your mother to suck eggs, Sir!' Sarah
replied in a crisp voice. She was Arsu's third and
final aide de camp, and the lone bitform in the club.
Of the three aides, she had worked with the Fleet
Marshall longest and knew him better than he did. She
was his best friend and confidant, and it was even
rumored in the fleet that the two were lovers.
'What's the time to intercept if the Demons
stick to their current course?' One of Arsu's avatars
asked in a sober voice as the vspace dialog split into
thirteen smaller frames to show the other twelve
sharing a brief laugh at the retort.
'Thirty six hours roughly, Sir,'
Arsu's avatar nodded harshly in acknowledgment
as shipboard klaxons finally rang announcing an
increase in BatCon status. The bitform admin of his
seat responded to the change by molding itself into a
protective cocoon around Arsu and sank towards the
floor. It filled with synth-support, a nanite rich
liquid medium that served to both protect a person
from high gee combat maneuvers as well as keep them
supplied with the requisites of life. Similarly,
across the ship and throughout the Fleet, all occupied
seats transformed into cocoons while the unoccupied
ones sent redundant messages redundant because the
klaxons would have warned the crew to rush to their
duty stations to their bioform partners summoning
them.
For Arsu, the virtual battle plot in vspace
grew to the size of an amphitheatre with the Demon
fleet painted as a red tetrahedron at the edge. From
now, until the Demon fleet was within a light year of
Home Fleet Three, the scale of the battle plot would
change to expand and more details would be added in
realtime as they became available.
True to the Fleet Marshall's orders, Home Fleet
Three swung to action in ten minutes and as the hours
passed, the two Fleets, originally separated by a 1000
light years, slowly closed the distance between them.
The Terrans used the fact that higher acceleration in
transit space, the bizarre super-reality that allowed
FTL travel and communication extended the range of
sensors and increased the visible band of transit
spectrum to their advantage. In the first few hours,
Home Fleet Three gradually decelerated to postpone
battle and to give time for reinforcements to link up
with it while at the same time keeping the Demons
within sensor range. By the time Sector Three Reserve
and its million ships linked with Home Fleet Three,
the range was down to 300 light years, which was just
beyond the extreme range of shipboard Demon sensors at
maximum acceleration. The Terran Fleet accelerated at
this juncture, both to close ranks quickly with the
enemy as well as to stay beyond range of Demon sensors
longest.
Not everything went according to plan in those
thirty hours, though. During that period,
communications from Home Com came in through VHF
confirming Arsu's suspicions that the attack was
multi-pronged. What he had not suspected was the
strength of the seven diversionary Demon fleets.
Together the eight Demon fleets had 165 million ships
between them, making it the largest armada ever in the
course of the long and bitter war of genocide.
Nobody at Terran High Command had even
suspected that the Demons had such a large reserve
hidden away beyond the Gate in Andromeda. And even if
they had, no one would have believed that their ever
cautious enemy would throw the labor of centuries
and it must have taken the Demons more than a century
to build such a fleet even with all the reserves of
Andromeda at their disposal away in a single action.
The war that was almost won became a mad scramble for
survival and all that stood between Terra and utter
destruction were the eight Home Fleets, the Sector
Reserves and the Colony Fleet, the last of which Home
Com refused to commit to battle. Yet, even as the
Terran Navy clambered to mount an effective defense,
the reason for the mad all out attack remained
unclear.
Oh, the final objective of the Demons had never
been in doubt destruction of all life in the Milky
Way or failing that, forward defense of the Gate for
the duration it remained open but with the Gate due
to close within forty years, there was no reason for
the Demons to believe that the Terrans were a long
term threat to survival, or at least, High Command
hoped they had none. Still, there was no denying
reality and the fleet from hell racing headlong
towards the galactic core could have only one
objective in mind: destruction of the colonies. But of
the reason and the modus operandi, none in High
Command had the vaguest idea. It was not until Home
Fleet Three was thirty four hours into the event and
the range reduced to a hundred and twenty light years
that the modus operandi was revealed and again, it
surprised the hell out of High Command.
It started as an observation by a Petty Officer
manning Sensors in one of the hunter killer screens
attached to Task Force 8.3. PO Harkley was one of the
few career specialists in the entire Terran Navy and
with seventy years of service behind her in sensors,
she was one of the few living Terrans with the ability
to make sense of a hunter killer's raw sensor data fed
directly to her in vspace. Hunter Killers were the
lone hunters and scouts of the fleet and when not
attached to fleet duty, they operated behind enemy
lines disrupting lines of communication, playing havoc
with enemy logistics and gathering intelligence. They
were used as the crucible where future fleet leaders
were molded. Their crews were made of extremely
competent, blooded spacers with a few career
specialists with decades of experience like PO Harkley
thrown in to act as mentors.
Besides her experience, PO Harkley and the
sensor bitform had worked together for more than a
decade and one's skills complemented the other. The
two of them made as perfect a team as was possible in
the real world and going through the raw sensor data
in real time, the Petty Officer noticed the telltale
signatures of ships exiting transit space in the Demon
fleet's rearguard. She and her partner placed their
suspicions before their screen commander, who was
intrigued by their finding. He ordered his screen to
pool their sensor data for better resolution and filed
a report to the Flotilla commander. The Flotilla
Commander found the report interesting, too, and
passed it up the chain of command. The report ended up
in Arsu's hands within minutes and even before Arsu
could react, his Flag Captain had shared the report
with the TFCs, who exercised their own prerogatives as
Flag Officers to pool the sensor data of the whole
fleet. The picture that emerged showed up to a hundred
Demon ships leaving transit space every few minutes
with monotonous regularity.
The TFCs formed their own conclusions from the
information at hand and passed on their suspicions to
Arsu. Arsu had drawn the same conclusions himself and
even though he did not have irrefutable proof, he
ordered Home Fleet Three to go to flank speed. He
briefly considered ordering the transports attached to
Home Fleet Three to stay behind, but decided against
it. The two fleets were close enough now that even the
slightest deceleration would place the transports
within the visible band of the Demon sensors. The fate
of Terra hung in the balance and nothing that could
jeopardize her future could be permitted.
'It appears this assault is a suicide run
after all. Charles, dispatch another priority message
to Home Com. Apprise them of the new Time to
Interdiction. Send them the report on the Demon
fleet's rearguard and warn them that my officers and I
suspect the Demons of using string weapons in close
proximity to the galactic core.'
'Yes, Sir.'
'Attach this note to Flag Marshal M'butu
Ching: Release Colony Fleet for action before it is
too late.'
'With all due respect, Marshal, Colony Fleet
will be massacred if they go up against this enemy,'
Payeng commented.
'Your information is a little outdated,
Alyssa. I can't go into the details, but trust me,
Colony Fleet can take down everything the Demons have
in the galaxy without breaking a sweat.' To Lt. Green,
'you have your orders, Charles. Get the TFCs on the
comm. too. I want to consult them.'
'Do you think Home Com'll release Colony
Fleet, Sir?' Payeng asked once Green signed off.
'Colony Fleet is stationed too close to the
front lines and even if it weren't, DefCom will refuse
my request. They won't even use it for the
counterattack.'
'But all eight Home Fleets combined don't have
the manpower to stop this attack, Sir.'
'We are the only ones hopelessly outgunned and
outnumbered, Alyssa. The other Home Fleets will suffer
very heavy losses in battle, but they'll repulse the
pincers in their sector. That juggernaut,' Arsu
pointed to the Demon fleet icon, 'will crush us. We
cannot allow it. If that fleet gets into the galactic
core, we lose the colonies and the war.'
'Sir?'
'They're nuking stars along their path,
Alyssa. Doesn't that tell you anything? That Fleet is
not here to nuke the colonies. It won't even attempt
to break into the core. It's here to nuke enough stars
near the galactic core to make the colonies
uninhabitable.'
'But why? The galaxy is already doomed. Within
two thousand years, even the deepest colony in the
core will become uninhabitable. All they had to do was
wait until the Gate closes in thirty seven years and
retreat back to Andromeda.'
'Do you think that Home Com was unaware of the
long term ramifications of our tactics when they
ordered the indiscriminate use of string weapons ten
centuries ago?' Arsu asked, taking a deep breath. 'The
decision was taken with the knowledge that we were
dooming ourselves unless we could develop the
capability to navigate the void between galaxies. It
was taken because if we had not pursued the scorched
earth policy that denied the Demons the ability to
build battle-capable fleets here in the Milky Way,
forcing them to rely on Andromeda, we would be extinct
now and they would have been free to pursue their
genocidal agenda.
'So, even as we destroyed stars all over the
galaxy, we worked in secret to develop the capability.
We succeeded three hundred years ago and Colony Fleet
is built using that technology. My guess is the Demons
wised up to Colony Fleet a long while back and that
fleet up ahead is their response. I suspect their High
Command ordered this attack to force us to act before
we had enough of the new hulls to be decisive in war.
If they force our hand now, we're doomed. If we invade
Andromeda now, we might be able to establish a
beachhead there, but we won't have the strength in
numbers to defend ourselves long enough to establish
viable colonies. That is why Home Com will refuse to
release Colony Fleet we don't want the Demons to
know how unimaginably powerful they are and that is
why we'll have to not just stop that fleet in its
tracks but destroy it utterly. We need the building
capacity of the core worlds for seventy more years.'
'But we can't, Sir. Stop that fleet, that is.'
Arsu smiled ruefully.
'We can and we will. As to whether we'll
survive the attempt well, that's not important now,
is it?'
Payeng's avatar started to reply, but Green,
who had signed on again and was listening to the
conversation intently, signaled that he had a message
for the Fleet Marshal.
'Yes, Charles?'
'TFCs are waiting on the comm. Sir. We've also
received a reply from Home Com.'
'Let's see Home Com's reply first.'
Green nodded an acknowledgement and pasted the
reply so that both the Commodore and the Fleet Marshal
could look at it at once. The message was short. It
read:
Request for Colony Fleet denied. Home Fleet Three will
engage enemy alone and push him back. If necessary,
Home Fleet Three will defend Terra to the last man.
Signed,
Flag Marshal Adrian Kuznetsov
PS. You know what to do, Reynard. Do it.
Arsu read the message and sighed. He shook his
head and turned to Green.
'I'm ready for that meeting now, Charles. I'll
need you and the Commodore at the meeting.'
The TFCs and their aides took their seats in
vspace as Arsu and his aides entered the meeting room.
Their discussions fell by the wayside and they looked
expectantly to the Fleet Marshal who had a grim
expression on his face.
'Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. We don't
have much to discuss and I'd like to make this quick.
I'd thought that I'd have a last minute discussion
with you to go over Plan Z one last time, but I've
just received a reply from Flag Marshal Kuznetsov. She
has refused my request to release Colony Fleet for
defense. Her orders are that the combined Home Fleet
Three and Sector Three Reserve will engage the enemy
and do our duty, defending Terra to the last man. I
plan to carry out her orders. I've decided to scrap
Plan Z and open with string weapons release pattern
Sigma. We will launch as many salvoes of string
weapons as are necessary to utterly crush the Demons
in this sector.
'We are within range of Demon sensors now and
this is a tough decision to make but we will not
split the fleet. In fact, I'm ordering all transport
commanders to stick to the course and not deviate from
it in any way. Just as we had no inkling that the
Demons had this little surprise up their sleeve, I
don't want them to learn our intentions until it's too
late. However, all non-essential personnel in the
transports will be jettisoned with their ships with
enough maximum life support reserves and their
emergency beacons timed to activate four hours from
now.'
'Excuse me, Fleet Marshall, but did you just
tell us that you want to use string weapons in transit
space?' Admiral Mark Schuster asked.
'Yes, I did. I know no one's ever detonated
string weapons in transit space before and lived to
tell the tale and that we won't survive either, but
we're all dead anyway and if I'm to die, I'd like to
sign off in grand style by taking that whole damn
fleet with me. As to air-defense, this is what we'll
do...'
Two hours later, the range dropped to three
light years between the lead elements of the two
fleets. A minute later, when the range was reduced to
two light years effective range of Demon ship
killers in transit space the Demon fleet fired the
first shots of the battle.
The Demon commander, a wily old warrior
herself, was fooled into a false sense of security
during the approach by Arsu's headlong charge and by
the fact that the Terran Fleet was meeting her command
just 120 light years from the Terran border. She had
feared that she would lose the element of surprise
throughout the voyage and that her command would
suffer very heavy casualties, but when the enemy's
response indicated that she had managed to achieve
surprise, she relaxed. Even though the response was
stronger than expected, the fact that the opposing
commander was charging her like a dumb male in heat
filled her heart with such great confidence that she
let her guard down. She did not pause to consider that
the enemy commander of this particular sector was
supposed to be a cunning warrior himself and explained
away the larger than expected strength of his fleet to
cosmic coincidence.
*Probably some fleet returning to the
frontlines had happened to be at hand and when he
found out we were dropping by what a surprise that
must have been he assumed command of it before
rushing to give us battle. Must have thought that his
technology made him invincible or something.*
Since she did not know that she had failed to
achieve tactical surprise utterly, she did not suspect
the desperation that drove Arsu. Sure, she believed
that his actions were driven by desperation, but she
suspected a different kind of desperation one that
every man feels when caught with his pants down.
Acting on her belief, she activated the plan that
supposed she had both strategic and tactical surprise
on her side.
The plan was a variant of Demon fleet SOP for
offensives against a numerically inferior enemy and
like any carefully crafted plan for battle it had a
starting, intermediate phase and final phase. It
called for a scenario where the Demon fleet would
close ranks with the enemy and employed a brute force
approach to ensure victory. The idea revolved around a
battle of attrition at very close range where Demon
strength in numbers would offset Terran technology. It
was a risky plan that when all was said and done,
accepted heavy casualties for the opportunity to rout
the enemy on the battlefield.
The Fleet Marshall, on the other hand, had used
his fleet as bait dangling it before the enemy
commander in the expectation that his opponent would
make a mistake in judgment and willingly commit his
fleet to battle. He knew that at very close ranges,
Demon anti-torpedo batteries would stand little chance
of successfully intercepting his string weapons; none
at all if they were launched in tandem with a massive
ECM salvo.
And so, to the Demon commander's misfortune,
her battle plan fit nicely into Arsu's own, a fact
that she remained forever unaware of. She was so taken
by Arsu's ruse and by her own logical arguments that
even while the two fleets drew ever closer, she
thanked her Gods that the Terrans had not opened fire
with their hellishly accurate torpedoes at long range.
As per the plan, when the first Demon screen
reached effective engagement range of the vanguard
elements of Home Fleet Three they opened fire. The
fleet was too large and spread too far that it was
beyond the capability of Demon fire control to
coordinate such a massive salvo. So, instead of trying
to accomplish the impossible, Demon command had
devolved fire control down to the level of flotilla
commanders. The staggered releases would reduce the
effectiveness of the salvo, but since the first and
last torpedo in any salvo would be less than ten
seconds apart, the reduction would not be that great.
A staggered but massive salvo of 1700 million
torpedoes made a beeline for the Terran fleet. Roughly
one in twenty carried ECM packages that tried to
befuddle Terran sensors with gravitic mirages. The
rest carried thermonuclear shaped charges or
anti-matter warheads with yields between a hundred
megatons and ten gigatons.
'The enemy has opened fire, Sir,' Sarah
reported. 'Responding. Threat axis: 45, +30, -29 to
48, +31, -28 degrees.'
'Range?'
'One point nine light years. Thirteen seconds
to first salvo.'
Arsu nodded. The battle was going to be short
and brutal, even by the standards of head-on
engagements at point blank range, which were very
vicious indeed. There was nothing he could do to
control the flow what flow could there be to a
battle lasting less than two minutes and he would
remain a mute spectator in the most crucial battle in
Terran history.
Having anticipated the kind of monstrous
salvoes that they would face, Arsu and the twenty task
force commanders twenty from Home Fleet Three and
five from Sector Three Reserve had tasked twenty two
of the task forces with providing air-defense for the
fleet. The fleet responded to the Demon move with a
massive barrage of its own. The two clouds of
torpedoes raced towards each other and the space
between the two fleets exploded in violence as Terran
anti-torpedoes missiles and anti-shipping torpedoes
exploded in the path of the incoming salvo. They threw
massive pulses of x-ray laser at them and directed
pulses of electromagnetic energy at them stripping
hundreds of millions into their individual atoms or
damaging them enough to veer off course. Three such
barrages followed, and then shipboard plasma banks lit
up, decimating the Demon salvo even further. Even as
the first wave was being annihilated, the Demon fleet
launched another one, but not before the first Terran
salvo containing 24 million anti-shipping torpedoes
were launched by the three task forces tasked with the
job. All 24 million torpedoes were armed with ECM
packages except for sixty that mounted string weapons.
'First wave destroyed with minimal loses,'
Sarah reported. 'Third salvo will overwhelm
air-defense.'
Arsu winced mentally as his battle plot showed
ten thousand ships destroyed outright mostly in the
vanguard with another fifty thousand showing various
degrees of damage. Still, Sarah's last comment almost
provoked a snort of amusement. No doubt, the Demon
commander's CIC was feeding him the same useless
information. True, the third salvo would not intercept
his fleet for another fifty seconds, but they would
not survive that long. The star killers would
intercept their targets in less than twenty five
seconds and when star-killers blew, they didn't leave
much behind. In fact, he suspected that there would
not be enough atoms left of the two fleets to fill a
glass jar. But he did not need twenty five seconds to
launch his two back up salvoes. All he needed was ten
seconds and he had them. They were almost certainly
unnecessary for his first salvo would intercept the
Demon fleet in just under twenty five seconds, but he
wanted them in the air as a precaution.
The first salvo of Terran anti-shipping weapons
targeted at the Demon fleet shot through transit
space, through the maelstrom of Terran anti-shipping
fire and through the nigh impenetrable curtain that
was Demon air-defense shield. They died by the
hundreds and then the thousands and then the hundreds
of thousands. Scattered Demon fire tore through their
ranks as the range closed and their guiding bitforms
braved the very pits of hell to deliver their payload
into the bowels of their nemesis. Even with all the
ECM cover they had, only a few thousand survived to
reach their destination and hidden in their ranks were
fifty nine string weapons one had caught the edge of
the pulse of a directed anti-matter warhead, which had
fried the guiding bitform and detonated the initiator
seven hundred gigaton yield warhead. The star-killers
exploded as per the timers mounted inside their
warheads timers that were synchronized to the pico
second.
Every ounce of matter within a point one light
year radius was ripped apart into their constituent
quark particles as the rules of the universe changed
locally for a miniscule fraction of a second. A hole
point two light years in radius in real space simply
ripped most of the Demon fleet apart. The gravitic
shockwave from the rip was felt a hundred light years
away in real space and as a side effect, thirteen
stars went supernova and twenty more went nova. The
survey ships that examined the area two days later
concluded that all Demon vessels were destroyed in the
titanic explosion. And since no evidence that even a
part of Home Fleet Three survived was ever found, it
was presumed that it was caught in the explosion and
destroyed completely.
The truth was not realized until four millennia
after the battle when advances in theoretical physics
allowed Terran physicists to accurately predict the
effect of string weapons in transit space.
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