by Lee Guo
He saw another human battlecruiser get totaled by a Titan’s tachyon pulse cannons. The beam of superluminal destruction crashed into the human battlecruiser and deconstructed it. Whatever the pulse beam hit simply lost cohesion and seemed to bubble before dispersing away into a cloud of atomic debris.
There was screaming on the net. People on the fleet command line were yelling and people were dying.
I’ve got to do something quick. I’ve got to make a miracle happen. The plan I have is only an idea but it may work!
Trevor gazed into his map display and immediately zoomed in on the enemy Titan that was closest to him. He zoomed in so much that now he could see its entire hull in full clarity. He saw all the scorch marks and craters on its armor. He saw where the armor had been utterly ravaged, yet no matter where he zoomed, he could not see a hole through the enemy Titan’s armor that would be a good spot to detonate his bombs. Its armor was that thick. Nor... could he see a place in its drive ring that he could hit to prevent it from moving. He knew because other fighters have been trying to fire at the titans’ drive ring, but unlike their superdreadnoughts, these drive rings were heavily armored.
But! There was something else he could strike at, that was on the outer surface of the Titan’s armored hull ‒ the Titan’s tachyon pulse cannons. Each Titan had two of these exposed on the forward surface of its body. The armor protected its power generators, its antimatter cores, but it did not protect its TPCs.
Inside his cockpit, he zoomed in on the particular tachyon pulse cannon using his targeting displays. He saw it in full detail. It looked like a giant half-kilometer wide radar dish. He had seen how it worked. Every four seconds ‒ when it was activated ‒ the entire dish glowed in bright auburn. Then, it channeled all its energy outward into a massive pulse beam that demolecurized the target.
He saw all the scorch marks on the dish, the effect of so many laser and bomb hits that had struck it. There was no shortage of human fighters and human ships who had purposefully aimed at a dish in hopes of knocking out 50% of a titan’s main firepower. Trevor also knew that if he followed everyone else and struck it normally, he would deal little to no damage to the tachyon pulse cannon. People had been hitting it for the whole day, destroying part of the dish, but the cannon still functioned.
But! What if he struck right when it was about to fire ‒ when all the energy from the Titan’s antimatter core had charged the dish to full power? And what if he hit it right when it did fire ‒ when the pulse was just beginning to exit out of the dish and out into space?
What would that do?
He didn’t know, but he wanted to try.
To do that, he had to time his hit perfectly. He knew that the Titan’s TPC fired every 4.05 seconds. He would have to get within knife fighting range of the Titan and launch his four antimatter bombs ‒ short range missiles ‒ perfectly on cue.
Inside that cockpit, he manipulated his controls so that his fighter accelerated into a perfect position right in front of the enemy Titan ‒ no small feat since the Titan was moving sideways at 0.2c in an attempt to dodge all the plasma bolt shots from the human capital ships. Then, he activated his antimatter bombs and programmed the missiles’ warheads to explode right on time. Then, he waited for the perfect opportunity to hit the TPC right when it fired.
A second passed.
Another second.
He spammed the firing button and let his missiles loose!
On the map display, he saw his extreme short range antimatter warheaded missiles rush forward at 0.65c right into the enemy’s tachyon pulse cannons. It was so perfectly timed that the moment his four bombs connected with the TPC, the TPC had just finished charging and had begun to fire.
His bombs detonated!
Suddenly, a MASSIVE explosion took place that was more massive than the total destructive payload of his bombs’ four 500-megatons of TNT. The Titan shook with a sheer awesomeness that could only be caused by its entire forward hull imploding on itself. For a moment, Trevor’s sensor array was blinded by the volume of energy, but when it settled, Trevor gasped in surprise. The Titan’s entire forward hull had been… demolecurized!
A quarter of the Titan’s hull had been broken into composite atoms ‒ armor and all! Gases were streaming out of its innards, and power conduits gushed out plasma. Secondary explosions blew out of its exposed innards in the same way human ships had done when they were hit by a tachyon pulse beam.
He did it!
The next step… was staying alive! Trevor quickly stopped viewing the fruits of his spirited labor, and manipulated the controls of his fighter so it turned tail and ran in a trajectory back to his home carrier.
“Sandy!” yelled an exhilarated voice in his helmet speakers. “Was it you? What the fuck did you do? Tell me!”
Trevor told his wing commander what he had just done, and moments after that, Wing Commander Jerome Bottis promised to relay the information up the chain of command to the CAG and ultimately to Sector General Yamato…
Bridge, Federation Starship Yorktown, above the wormhole to Sol, Alpha Centauri System
“And that’s how he did it, sir!” said CAG Michio Williams on the comm line with Yamato.
“Brilliant,” replied Yamato. “Tell all our flyboys with bombs remaining to do the same thing to the other Titan. And tell them to hurry before that Titan realizes we can use its own demolecularization beam against itself.”
“Yes, sir! And what about your battleship plasma darts? Won’t they be able to do the same thing?”
“I don’t know if our capital ships can hit the remaining Titan’s TPC dish accurately enough. The Titan is sliding pretty fast. I think only our bombers can get in close enough to perfectly hit the Titan’s TPC right when it’s about to fire.”
“I understand, sir. I will relay the order, Michio out.” The line with the CAG closed.
Nevertheless, Yamato shrugged… it didn’t hurt to try.
What the boy did ‒ this Sandy Gray ‒ was brilliant. And what was even more brilliant was that this was the same flyboy who had taken out a superdreadnought during the first fighter-bomber strike.
Yamato pressed a button on his command chair and spoke into the fleet command line, “All capital ships, shoot the remaining Titan’s tachyon pulse dish array the moment it is firing. I know, I know, most of our shots will miss but some will hit on target. Once the last Titan is neutralized, all ships are to reverse and head back into the proximity of our pulsar guns. That is all.”
**
The remaining capital ships of the human armada did exactly what Yamato commanded. The entire firepower of the remaining human fleet fired at the last enemy Titan’s tachyon pulse cannons. But it was the bomb strike from a human fighter that did it. A bomb, carefully timed and perfectly aligned inside of knife-fighting range, hit the last Titan’s TPC dish right when it fired its pulse beam. The Titan’s forward hull blew up in a gigantic explosion that demolecularized 25% of its entire total body. If the strike had hit any later, the Titan might have deactivated its TPCs.
Once the two Titans had been utterly crippled ‒ with parts of their forward hull exposed to space without any armor to protect them ‒ the human ships fired into their innards and further destroyed their internal power stores. Massive detonations took place in each titan as entire sections, never meant to be this exposed, took damage from human plasma cannons. Titan-A limped and exploded, showering the universe with a massive internal fireworks display that broke its hull into three pieces. Titan-B managed to turn around using its main partially-functioning propulsion drive so that most of its exposed surface veered away from the human fleet.
Bridge, Federation Starship Yorktown, above the wormhole to Sol, Alpha Centauri System
“All ships, retreat back into the proximity of the Pulsar Guns. Defend the pulsar guns at all costs!” For a second, Yamato sat within his command chair and grinned. But that grin disappeared just as easily.
There was good news and bad news
.
The good news was obvious. The enemy’s deadliest weapons had been annihilated. The bad news was that, in doing so, he had lost… 45% of his fleet.
Yamato scanned the health status reported from each of his ships’ damage control teams ‒ each parcel of data appearing as holograms in front of his command seat.
He shook his head, grunting in pain at the fact that his fleet had been so utterly battered. None of his ships had functioning shields, anymore. A full 10% of ships had lost primary drive mobility due to damage to their drive rings. The other 15% had lost control of their main reactor and were now powerless. And the last 20% had exploded with all hands lost.
Out of 29 functioning human battlecruisers, he had lost 13. Out of 8 human superdreadnoughts, he had lost 4.
There was, however, some additional good news. All this time, his pulsar guns had been firing. Those two stationary superguns each had been sending out 500 megaton bursts of destruction every half second. He had been able to destroy a good 20% of the enemy’s capital ships using the vast operational range of his pulsar guns. But that was all the destruction he had wreaked on the enemy capital ship fleet aside from their now deceased titans. His capital ships had been firing at the enemy’s titans the whole time and had never managed to even get off enough damage on the enemy’s battlecruisers to incapacitate even one of theirs ‒ let alone their superdreadnoughts. Oh, how he wished his pulsar guns could have wrecked the enemy’s titans, but unfortunately the titans were never in range. This was a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing was that his two superguns had done a lot of damage on the rest of the enemy’s fleet.
He glanced at the enemy numbers, also displayed before him in holographic format. There were 30 operational enemy battlecruisers left, out of the original 36. Eight enemy superdreadnoughts still functioned out of the original 10.
Knowing the sheer imbalance of capital ships between the two fleets, Yamato knew he should retreat.
But there was one chance, and only one chance to turn this battle around. If he could keep his pulsar guns alive, he might be able to deal far greater damage on the enemy fleet than what they could on his.
Yamato watched the holomap and saw all his ships retreat in a path back into the proximity of his pulsar guns. He knew what the enemy commander was thinking ‒ he/she/it was thinking that now that the Argonan Titans had been neutralized, there was no more point in keeping the other Argonan capital ships in defense of them. Now, the rest of the Argonan capital ships should do what was most tactically efficient, which was to destroy the humans’ highest offense-lowest defense ratio’d units ‒ in other words, Yamato’s pulsar guns.
And that’s exactly what the enemy did. They followed the human fleet as it headed back in defense of the human pulsar guns, not because they wanted to attack the human fleet in the immediate sense, but because the human fleet was in the same trajectory. The human ships were rightly in the way…
**
The human pulsar guns fired. And so did the remaining human capital ships that had retreated to the point where they created a wall in front of the pulsar guns.
But the enemy was relentless. The enemy jammed their capital ships through the human defensive parameter so that they could fire on the heavily shielded pulsar guns, and once range was reached, each enemy ship fired.
Since the pulsar guns were stationary, they could not dodge the enemy’s beams. Every grazer beam that the enemy fired managed to splash into the pulsar guns’ shields, which quickly drained despite being so heavily shielded…
Bridge, Federation Starship Yorktown
2 minutes later…
Yamato saw the shield saturation around his pulsar guns go down to 30% in less than two minutes of beam punishment from the enemy’s capital ships. This was not good. Not good at all. In less than a minute, his pulsar guns would be shieldless!
Also… Yamato knew for a fact that once his superguns lost their shields — that would be it. His pulsar guns were not like the enemy’s titans. They did not have hundreds of meters of armor protecting every direction. Worse, also unlike the enemy’s titans, they were stationary. The enemy would be able to pinpoint their attack on various points of the pulsar guns’ armor.
The only good thing was that while his two guns were taking the beating, they were also firing back and so were his capital ships. And… because the enemy concentrated their fire on his superguns, the remaining human capital ships were taking little to no damage at all.
He saw on the holomap as an enemy superdreadnought went down due to concentrated fire from three human battlecruisers… at nearly point blank range. The enemy superdreadnought took vast numbers of plasma dart hits into its internal structure, crippling power flows and causing secondary explosions. The same happened to another Argonan battlecruiser on the other side of the battle 200,000 kilometers away. Both enemy ships lost main power and suddenly stopped firing on the pulsar guns, and started drifting like lifeless wrecks.
He saw another enemy battlecruiser take a full hit from a pulsar beam. The powerful beam tore through the enemy ship’s armor and into its innards, instantaneously blowing it up like a firework’s display. The enemy battlecruiser then disappeared in a flash of white light when all its metal exploded into plasma… probably from a power core detonation.
Yamato nodded happily, surveying the battle’s kaleidoscope of activity. His eyes then fell on his carriers which were rearming his remaining fighters with antimatter bombs. This was very good, knowing that he would be able to launch another wave of fighters soon…
And then the first pulsar gun lost its shields.
Suddenly, Yamato winced as the holomap showed twenty enemy ships simultaneously turn and concentrate their fire on the lone shieldless supergun. Their grazer beams wrecked the gun’s armor ‒ each beam pulverizing its carbon nanofiber outer layer. Unlike Titans, the supergun was not as heavily armored, and, because of that, its outer surface quickly shredded. Weak spots into its internal structure quickly revealed themselves as its armor peeled off…
And the enemy ships still kept firing relentlessly…
Yamato sat there and ran his hands through his white hair. Stressed, he didn’t know what to do. He searched his brain. Nothing came up. There was no solution. He had to take the loss of his superguns full frontal. Damn it! There’s no solution to keeping my superguns alive! The only good thing is that while the enemy is concentrating on them, I can concentrate on the enemy with the rest of my fleet.
But time was running out.
Cockpit, Fighter 004, inside carrier Yorktown, Alpha Centauri System
“Hurry up! Reload! Reload!” yelled Trevor Gray at the maintenance crew.
“We’re doing as fast we can, Sandy!” the maintenance chick yelled back.
“Make it faster! Every second in here is a second where our fleet is dying without me!”
“Jeez, Sandy! Do you want to get killed that bad?” the girl said.
Trevor laughed. “I want to kill that bad. It’ll take their whole fleet to kill me!”
The girl didn’t say anything, and rightly so.
Trevor retracted back into his cockpit and entered the world of his thoughts.
As much as he wished it wasn’t true, it did take time to refuel his antimatter stores… as well as reequip his fighter with antimatter bombs. As much as he wished it could have been done in an eye blink, reality simply wasn’t so. So he sat inside his cockpit for several minutes, completely aware that the battle out there could have been fought and lost without him.
He was also very aware that his performance in the last sortie would be remembered and taught throughout maritime history, if there was a history to go back to.
For all he knew, the Argonans could win the war and annihilate the human race.
The Argonans… damn them! The Argonans were fierce warriors ‒ not just because their emperor declared them to be so. The Argonans had always been aggressive and domineering. They wanted everything, systems, planets, even
to the point where all other races had to be subservient to them. Trevor supposed it was time that someone fought back, someone like him and those who fought beside him. Someone like… the entire human race.
The truth was… he hated the Argonan emperor and the foot soldiers who followed said emperor. He hated their warrior ethos. But at the same time, he respected them for their courage and their aggressiveness to take control of their destiny. They were so aggressive that they were willing to commit great acts of crime to fulfill their role in galactic domination ‒ crimes like the bombing of entire worlds, crimes like the killing of billions of innocent civilians. Trevor didn’t know whether he’d do the same thing if he were put in their position… simply to win a war that was only based on economic domination and racial pride.
Maybe he might. Maybe he wouldn’t. Trevor understood himself well enough to know that he wasn’t above killing people to further his own gains and ambitions. Gods knew, as a youngster, he had broken laws and committed crimes when he thought he could get away with —
“We’re done, Sandy!” yelled the maintenance chick. “You’re good to go! Go bomb another superdreadnought for me, will you?”
Trevor gave a thumbs up, and then pressed the button, closing the cockpit hatch. He manipulated his controls so his antimatter generator activated to full and his Yatimis sliding drive became green.
When he gave a last look outside his bird, he saw the tails of the maintenance chick (and her crew) scrambling to get out of his way.
Without another thought, he punched the acceleration key, and his bird zoomed out of the hangar bay, through the force shield that kept the oxygenated atmosphere in, and out into deadly space.