Alexander Galaxus: The Complete Alexander Galaxus Trilogy

by Christopher L. Anderson

  “Please, Nazar, no eulogizing before the proof,” Alexander cautioned. “Besides, I cannot quite get myself to consider it combat. It’s more like shooting fish in a barrel, albeit very fast and hard to see fish. We’ll see how our intrepid Grand Admiral reacts. The Alliance, thus far, has helped. I expected them to proceed to Terra at flank speed, but it appears they are satisfied with standard cruise. That gives us more than enough time to accomplish the plan, for the present at least.”

  “It is their formations,” Nazar observed. “They are attempting to maintain their strike formations in superluminal flight. With over two thousand ships on the Golkos Seer’koh front that is a colossal feat. I believe your fleets have taken the wiser course of action by moving in squadron sized packets, with the fleet in a loose formation. That also makes it more difficult for scans to estimate the number of ships in a superluminal signature. The size and configuration of the signature constantly change, thereby increasing the margin for error.”

  “Yes, the Alliance seems bent on maintaining a large unwieldy formation through their advance,” Alexander said. “It's an ancient problem to march or sail in a formation that is at once defensible on the move and able to deploy rapidly at the onset of battle. Our commanders ran into the same problems in superluminal when our fleets were created. We solved these problems by improving the ship’s autopilots over the galactic standard, something I would have thought patently impossible considering our complete unfamiliarity with the equipment. Fortunately, however, the principles are largely the same as those of our aircraft autopilots. The circuitry is still beyond us, I’m told, but the logic commands in the imprinted software are not. Our engineers actually modified some of the software we use in games to alter the autopilot programming, making it more responsive at higher superluminal factors. I was rather surprised, Nazar, that the Alliance had not done the same.”

  “You must remember, Alexander, that Alliance technology, and that is to say Galactic technology, has been established for hundreds of kicellia. There is little need for the gradual progression of technology that led to the current empires. You would say we stagnated, because of all the cultures in the known galaxy the only ones I know of which advance for the sake of advancement are Terrans. The rest of the galaxy enjoys the consistency of the status quo. We jockey for position and make minor changes in the relevancy or irrelevancy of principles, but on the whole our cultures and our technology advances at a very even and gradual rate. There are no meteoric rises in ability, such as Terrans are used to.

  It would have been patently impossible for one of the other cultures to make the paradigm shift from a water and air based military to a space based military; even though you have already done so. The change is too great. That is one of the great disadvantages for the Alliance. Whether they fully realize their difficulty I cannot know. Originality is not a beneficial character trait in either the Golkos or the Seer’koh; especially in the upper echelons of their military. Still, there are a few clans in the Golkos ruling class which are noteworthy for their recalcitrance and energy. More often than not their effect is merely antagonistic, but every once in a while some daughter or son of worth and power rises from the ashes of their ancient families. There is one such Golkos commander by the name of Khandar. I must assume that he has found a way to gain control of the military. He is their most capable general, and a glory seeker. Our dossier describes Khandar as bold and innovative by Galactic standards.”

  “Galactic standards?” Alexander muttered, somewhat amused by the term; and guessing Nazar’s meaning.

  “I must be careful of my words as they are in context with yourself, Alexander. You are too proud to accept even the praise of a friend, but the fact remains that you and your warrior ancestors are changing our definitions of war and warfare. Maybe we are simply rediscovering what was painfully obvious thirteen kicellia ago to my ancestors. They, as do you Terrans, lived war. We, their descendents, proud though we may be, live only the ritual and tradition they have left us. My conclusion is that our creativity is atrophied. We must relearn what you do instinctually. It is the price the Chem have paid for peace; a price the galaxy is on the verge of paying.”

  “It is a price well worth paying if any surety of its reward could come of it,” Alexander told him slumping heavily in his chair. “Do not criticize the feat of your thirteen millennia of peaceful existence, Nazar. It is easy to make war. Cowards make war with greater facility than the brave make peace. I look at what I have done, and though I can find few acts or events that I would change still I would that they had not been necessary. I am guilty, nonetheless, of destroying this peace of yours. It bothers me to think that my name will, at the very least, go down in galactic history as the warlord who brought an end to the galaxy as we came to know it. Yet what bothers me more, Nazar is that I do not know if I have the strength of the courageous being who would somehow find a peaceful end to this destruction. I realize, and I accept, that I feed off the glory. Will I then be remembered as a Napoleon, dying despised? Napoleon allowed his political greed, if you will, to overcome his sensibilities and destroy much of the glory his genius won. I would rather not leave this stage as a despot.”

  “Your magnanimous victories hardly label you as such. Certainly your name is feared and respected throughout the known galaxy, Alexander, but there is no brand of evil burned upon your brow. Rather the opposite. I know for a certainty that this Alliance war is taxing on their home systems. It is an interesting irony that Galactic legend still holds such powerful sway over the character of our people, and yet these same people by and large revere the man they know as Alexander. Indeed, this is a most unpopular war on both sides. Each feels the necessity to make war, and in their own minds each is justified. However, there is also an underlying sadness. I guess from my limited knowledge of your people Alexander that whether they realize it or not this is not the way they envisioned meeting their galactic neighbors.”

  “In all actuality, this is often how we feared contact would be made,” Alexander told him. He sighed, adding, “We have a strange sense of destiny, we Terrans. We always envisioned contact to be made violently, with the fate of our civilization at stake. There is a damnably perturbed secret desire to in us to be battered by overwhelming odds to the point where all is nearly lost, then to rise up, bloody but indomitable, and destroy our foes. That is the paradox of Humankind. The strangest thing in all of this is the fear of Terra by the Galactics. Certainly no Terran envisioned that.”

  “Nor have the Galactics, to be perfectly honest, until now. Though we lived with the “Legend of Alexander” there is a difference between legend and reality. Fear can be healthy for a being, but the Galactics have taken it to extremes. They fear you far more than legend has it. This may be more because the Galactic populace thinks they know you, Alexander, and they are as afraid of being wrong about that as they are the “Legend of Alexander.” Somehow the legend would be all the more terrible if this enlightened and powerful being we know as Alexander was to be the barbarian of legend as well. Alexander has stirred our opinions about ourselves. He’s made an entire galaxy realize their level of over-civilization.”

  The Chem man thought for a moment before coming to a conclusion. “I would say our “edge” is gone. We are like a sword left to dull and rust with disuse. That is the intriguing thing you offer us, and what we fear to lose if we are wrong about you, Alexander: our youth renewed. Yet that in itself is a dangerous gift. We can see too much of our youth and reject it, or have it thrust upon us forcefully and be destroyed by it. With gifts must come wisdom, both from the bestowed and the bestowed. That is Alexander’s contribution beyond war.”

  Alexander massaged his temples, saying, “Nazar, you are at your most dangerous when you are in a philosophical mood. I must say seriously that I can only hope to be what the Galactics have seen in me, not what they fear I am. I bear the same burden with my own people as well. I hope I am enough of an ox to bear the weight.”

 
Nazar laughed. “You were made to bear such weight, Alexander. More than any other being I’ve known, even to Nazeera, you relish the weight upon your shoulders. It feeds your need to be important, and your resolve to succeed. That being said any lesser use of you would have been a waste. Besides, this drama is too deliciously fascinating not to occur. Galactic history would be poor indeed without the audacious rise of Alexander, Overlord of the Terran Empire!”

  “It is not the rise of the Empire over which I worry Nazar, it is the eventual fall.”

  “What of it? Every empire falls, Alexander. Did not your namesake tell us “It is the striving forward which matters?” He was wise. What use is honor or bravery if a people are too worried over future consequences to take the least of risks? Where would Terra be now if Terrans hid their heads Scythian-like in the sand when this crisis rolled upon them? Their civilization, their history, their future would have been in the hands of others. Fortune smiled that the judges would have been the Chem, but it could just as easily have been the Golkos.”

  “Yes fortune favored us there,” Alexander nodded.

  “No. History favors those who make their own fortune. That you know. You’ve said it often enough.”

  “I’ve said it through many lives,” Alexander smiled. “You know, Nazar, there’s a fair amount of Viking in you. You’d have made a wonderful pirate.”

  Nazar beamed. “A Viking, eh? Well now, that is uncommonly kind of you. I’m forced to agree, as I’d look wonderfully fierce in horns!”

  CHAPTER 24

  Captain Konstantinov stopped his pacing of the Gagarin’s bridge to glance at the ship’s chronometer. His brows drew together and his eyes narrowed to slits.

  “Are we ready?”

  “All boats are in firing position for the ambush Captain!” the First Officer informed him.

  “Synchronize all ship’s chronometers one more time, and charge up the capacitors,” Konstantinov ordered. “All ships prepare to fire!” He glared at the main viewer, checking it against the tactical hologram. One hundred submarines formed a wide ring three rows deep about an empty point in space. The ring was thousands of kilometers in diameter, but each ship stood ready, facing into the center. On the edge of the viewer was an enormous swath of distortion. Distances were jaded on the two dimensional display, but it was soon apparent that the distortion was progressing at an extraordinarily rapid rate perpendicular to, and directly towards the center of the ring.

  “They still don’t see us through their distortion pattern,” Konstantinov noted, adding, “Let’s hope this works as well as it did in the trials. We only have one shot from this firing position.” The Captain’s concern was apparent, and warranted. Their mission was to harass the invading Alliance fleet, but as that fleet was travelling at superluminal velocities the task was easier said than done. Ironically, Konstantinov’s picture of this task was remarkably similar to the U-boat war in the North Atlantic circa World War Two. The Alliance fleet was for all intents and purposes a convoy, and his submarines were a classic wolf pack. The fast submarines would harry the periphery of the Alliance, forcing it to maintain its formation, whittling it down, and slowing its advance. The standard Terran squadrons shadowed the Alliance fleet, waiting for stragglers like hungry sharks. It was a sensible plan, but for the laws of trans-superluminal physics which prevented a ship from firing at superluminal velocities. Try as they might the Terrans could not get around this restriction. The blaster with its energetic plasma stream punched a hole in the superluminal field about a ship. The result was a complete and violent disruption of the field which sent the ship careening out of superluminal and out of control. By firing its blaster projectors at high speed a ship could actually tear itself apart in the departure from superluminal. This restriction was one of the reasons Galactic warfare evolved into the formal static doctrine that it had. A ship could always escape by going into superluminal, and a fleet could avoid engagement by never coming out of superluminal. The Terrans, therefore, had to find another way to harass the Alliance fleets if they were to slow or prevent them from speeding unmolested to Terra. Therefore, Alexander revisited the concept of the ambush.

  Konstantinov and his submarines were about to put the idea into effect. His submarines waited at a pre-coordinated point along the Alliance course. The ships were small in size and mass, and motionless, making their signatures almost invisible to the Alliance scanners when they were hampered by their own superluminal distortions. The timing was critical, and had to be controlled by computer. The actual amount of time the Alliance ships were to be within the target area was almost infinitesimal, so everything had to be perfect.

  “One minute!”

  “Captain! The New Jersey and her squadrons are coming out of superluminal in attack position on our flank!” The First Officer called.

  “Synchronize her chronometers to our firing sequence! All ships lock blasters in on computer controlled firing sequence!” Konstantinov ordered. The one hundred and fifty-six ships of the Seventh Fleet, less the twenty-five ships of the Iowa squadron, acknowledged the Gagarin’s chronometer and waited. The superluminal distortion of the Alliance fleet suddenly rushed through the center of the ring.

  “Fire!”

  Simultaneously every ship fired blindly into the preset killing field. Plasma streams from the Terran ships bolted through the empty space, searching like fingers for invisible coins. In immediate response ship after ship dropped out of superluminal and into normal space. The Terran ships did not wait, pouncing mercilessly on the stricken vessels. The onslaught was ferocious and sudden. The Terrans expecting a sharp fray, but these were not Chem ships and crews, determined to die in battle. They were Golkos and Seer’koh caught completely by surprise, finding themselves suddenly thrust into normal space and surrounded by the dreaded Terran battleships. Even as the first broadside from the New Jersey bloomed, gutting a mighty Golkos battleship, the first calls of surrender were crowding the ethernet. In a matter of moments all thirty-seven Alliance ships which dropped out of superluminal either surrendered or were destroyed.

  Captain Konstantinov was livid with the Alliance ships.

  “Fight damn you fight! What treachery is this?”

  “They are all surrendering, Captain, we’ve orders from the New Jersey to hold our fire.”

  “Fantastic, now what? What are we going to do with them? We don’t have enough ships to take prisoners! We’re supposed to be on our way to the next ambush!” Konstantinov was consumed with frustration, and he voiced the new dilemma facing the Terrans. What indeed to do with their prisoners?

  #

  Five decurns of hell followed for the mighty Golkos-Seer’koh fleet. Their sensors all but useless. Their enormous superluminal interference pattern blurred out everything. All the Alliance ships could do was to press on. A half a dozen times the first ambush was repeated, and each time Alliance warships fell out of superluminal into normal space, there to become prey for the Terran wolves. There was simply no viable defense against the attacks. By necessity the field disrupting shields had to be maintained at minimum levels during superluminal velocities. The ships were left open to damage from even a glancing blaster shot. More damaging was the disruption of the superluminal field which inevitably occurred when a blasters plasma stream penetrated it. The result was instantaneous and violent: a radical departure from superluminal that threatened to overload the inertial generators and tear the ship apart. It was a grim situation considering the frequency of the attacks, and the attrition, and none knew it more than Grand Admiral Khandar. Finally, as they suffered yet another withering ambush, there was no alternative.

  The Captain of the Nived Sheur stared at the Grand Admiral in shocked disbelief, requiring Khandar to coldly repeat the order, “I said turn the fleet around, Captain. Return to the coordinates of the Terran firing. Do not make me repeat myself!”

  The Captain did not need to be told again, and slowly, ponderously, the Golkos-Seer’koh fleet turned about. A series
of rapid fire orders redeployed the fleet into an envelopment formation, no mean task for the Alliance pilots, but Grand Admiral Khandar would brook no argument. His Seer’koh counterpart, bobbed nervously at his side as the mass of ships turned slowly about. Only half as tall as the rakish Golkos the reptilian Seer’koh nevertheless spoke her mind, “We are taking a great risk, Grand Admiral. We have no idea where the rest of the Terran fleet is. This may be another of the Terran traps, or at best a delaying tactic. We can hardly afford the delay any more than we can another defeat.”

  “Admiral, we cannot afford to allow Alexander the initiative,” Khandar interrupted. “If we allow these harassing attacks to continue our fleet will be at only fifty to sixty percent strength when we arrive at Terra, if we arrive. We must meet aggression with aggression. A sharp blow now while we have the odds in our favor will do as much to restore our own morale as it does to plant doubt in the minds of the Terrans. Those two equally important factors make this a risk worth taking!”

  The Seer’koh accepted the explanation, bowing her slender head.

  “Grand Admiral, we are approaching the coordinates,” the Captain informed him. “There are faint echoes on the scanners, but it is difficult to tell whether the Terrans are still there.”