Rumors of Wars: The Askirti Chronicles - Book 2

by Danny A. Brown

  One of those two dreadnoughts was already breaking up while the second received the full burst of all forward lasers on the Mars along with that of several battleships.

  Sensing they could hurt this foe, the Zikars began swarming the battleships.

  “Hurit has received significant damage! Power is down fifty percent! Sahale is being attacked!”

  “They’ve learned quicker than we hoped, tighten the formation and release fighters,” Tabitha ordered.

  Within just a few minutes, the Mars had launched three thousand AI-powered Bolzen fighters, and the other four other dreadnoughts in the fleet launched two thousand each. These would hunt down and disable or destroy all the smaller enemy ships, allowing Jackie more of a free hand to deal with the larger threats, which she wanted to capture rather than destroy.

  As the larger ships drew closer together, they concentrated their fire on the enemy while additional Zikar capital ships closed in. With two thousand enemy warships to start with, this was a major battle by any standard, even if it was just supposed to be a supply convoy.

  As the fighting intensified, there was a large flare off the port side of the Mars.

  “The Galilahi is gone!” someone screamed.

  Indeed, where the heavy cruiser was just moments ago was now an expanding field of debris, all hands lost.

  Jackie’s heart sunk. This was the first large ship she had lost, but with a war on, she knew it would not be the last.

  The space around them was filled with warships firing at one another, pieces of ships tumbling in the void, and the bodies of many thousands, some of which were still alive in their vac-suits awaiting a slow death as they were resigned to watch the battle play out around them in the black.

  “Deploy all MACs and all dropships,” Tabitha said.

  Marine Assault Craft started deploying from all over the fleet as every ship destroyer-size and up had them. In them were some of the deadliest soldiers anywhere, Askirti marines, and their ACUs. The ACUs had thoroughly impressed all the marines at this point as they had cross trained with the AI-driven robots. Foot soldier and robot alike were entering into the crucible.

  Jackie’s ship was the only one not to deploy its soldiers, as the entire complement of marines and ACUs was her personal guard. She had argued about that to the point of the other ship captains pleading for her not to deploy them.

  The dropships came from the four heavy transports in the fleet, housing over one hundred and forty thousand ACUs. They came at the enemy like an angry swarm, attaching to civilian and military ships alike. Jackie always thought it was a novel idea that a dropship could be used in both boarding actions and atmospheric drops, so she planned for both, and today it paid off.

  While there were friendly troops now on most enemy ships, there was no way they could hold their fire. Indeed, they dug ruthlessly into the enemy, as the enemy fired off everything they had.

  The flag bridge had replaced the hologram table with an empty space used to display a larger hologram. On it was a very complicated display that showed each ship, its vector and its disposition. That is, friend or foe, has it been boarded, and has the boarding action succeeded. The battle computer then communicated this information to every ship in the fleet, both for coordinating fire and for all ships to know when an enemy ship has been “turned.”

  Slowly at first, then it picked up the pace as enemy ships started changing colors from red, indicating enemy warship, to pink, indicating boarding action in process, to green, indicating they successfully took it over. Other ships were gray, showing disabled, while yet others turned black, meaning destroyed. The Askirti ships were all blue.

  It was hard to watch the ones that were pink with boarders turn black. Even though she knew most of the boarders were the ACUs, there were still no small number of marines, real people, in play here. Not only that, but she wanted to steal as much from the Zikars as she could and use it against them.

  As the battle began to wind down, it became apparent that about a third of the enemy warships had been destroyed outright, another third damaged to varying degrees ranging from catastrophic and needs to be scrapped to the still flyable but needs minor work. And the last third was what she really wanted. More than six hundred warships virtually undamaged. The same could not be said for their previous owners.

  And of the convoy fleet, twenty-two thousand civilian ships, only a few hundred were lost. None of the troop transports in convoy were taken, they all chose to self-destruct rather than be captured.

  The convoy ships were full of valuable supplies, much of which would be repurposed. Even the ships themselves were quite valuable, as some of the freighters were immense, much larger than her dreadnought.

  How do they make something that big? I thought the Bojovník-class ships were the largest ships around.

  <>

  What about these warships we’re capturing. With as flimsy as they appear to be, would it even be worth it to refit them?

  <>

  What am I hanging on for?

  <>

  Well, that is a surprise!

  <>

  Good grief. How old is old?

  <>

  Silence

  <>

  Seriously? That was like five hundred years ago! What are we going to do with these besides recycle them?

  <>

  Jackie was perturbed they would even consider ships that old.

  <>

  The corvettes were quite stealthy, able to sneak right up to an enemy without being detected. But to have a fleet of more capable destroyers that had that capability would be yet another game-changer.

  Okay, now you have my attention. How many ships are we talking about?

  <>

  Jackie’s eyes got wide as she knew after today her fleet would grow significantly.

  ##

  After regrouping, they approached the planet where the supply fleet came from. There were no orbitals, only a shipyard. It was Jackie’s guess that this is where the convoy escorts were manufactured.

  “So how large is that shipyard anyway?” asked Tabitha.

  “It has twelve slips, two of which can accommodate dreadnought-sized warships,” Pari responded. “The records I found show that it is fed by mining operations here in this system. It is self-sufficient, such is the richness of the asteroid belt here.”

  “I think we need to hang on to this system,” Jackie chimed in. “Any idea how large the population is on the planet?”

  “It’s not very habitable, perhaps fifty million. Many of them live under domes,” her AI added.

  “Obviously, we have a lot of work cut out for us to integrate them into our way of doing things,” Tabitha said.

  “The Commonwealth said they already have plans for worlds like these, as we take more Zikar systems, we’ll be relyin
g heavily on our partners to help us transition them,” Jackie said. “Pari, we’ll need to assemble teams to upgrade that shipyard, and security to keep our secrets secret.”

  “I’ve already got just such plans drawn up!” it responded enthusiastically.

  “Once the Commonwealth gets here,” Jackie went on, “we’ll move out and to the next target. While this was a major manufacturing system, the next few systems have major populations. Here, I’ll put the outline up on the wall screen…”

  Chapter 15

  San Agustin

  As the months went on, Helen could not help but despair over her situation. Most of her surviving crew had been woken up from stasis, and most, but not all, were treated for their injuries.

  It amazed her that her enemy went as far as removing her battle scars and giving her rejuvenation treatments, making her look not a day over two hundred. She did not expect to be treated well, none of her people did. This was tainted, of course, by the fact they would not wake up her guardians, nor would they repair her spinal injury that prevented her from walking.

  They give me my beauty but enforce my confinement. I suppose they are smart about that.

  The lack of electronic translation devices was a source of many of her headaches as she desperately wanted information.

  “Alesium, thank you for coming!” she said to the tall, thin man approaching her.

  “High Queen, how may I serve you?” he responded.

  “What is your take on these people?”

  “They are a mystery to me. I honestly do not think they are the enemy we have been fighting,” he responded.

  “And what about the clone?”

  “Another mystery. High Queen, I was quite startled when they took me to another facility on this moon.”

  “How so?”

  “I got a better glimpse at some of the technology they are using. They use…” he looked away, almost unable to speak, “thrusters. Thrusters power all their ships.”

  With a curious look on her face, she asked, “Is that so terrible? What does that mean?”

  “Our historians postulated the possibility of such devices in wide-spread use by our ancestors before the reactionless gravity drive was invented, but we are talking about truly primitive devices,” he said with a most curious look on his face. “I would not feel comfortable knowing I was riding on a ship where the rear of it was powered by a giant, continuous explosion.”

  Helen was taken back. Alesium was her chief engineer, a brilliant man, as only the best were selected to serve aboard her flagship, and he was befuddled. And technology predating the grav-engines? It seemed impossible. The tech was so simple, basic, really, and had existed since…well, its always existed, hasn’t it?

  “What is your hypothesis? Who are these people?” she asked point-blank.

  “High Queen, I know this is incredibly difficult to say, but unless I get more information, that is an impossible question to answer. My best guess is that we are in a black region of the galaxy, my other theories are even harder to comprehend.”

  The black regions were regions the mighty Homem Empire did not venture. They were minor pockets inside the galaxy that ships entered and did not return. They postulated that they led nowhere locally, but were in fact tears in space and time that led to other galaxies.

  “I think it is also possible these people are your people. Or perhaps descendants of our common ancestors.”

  Helen paused thoughtfully. Descendants would mean she had been asleep longer than she thought.

  “Doesn’t explain the clone. I mean, why? Why clone me?”

  “It makes no sense, I’ll agree. But if you look at what they know, I believe you are still crippled,” she winced when he said that, “because they just do not know how to fix you.”

  The look on her face was priceless. Any physical problem could be fixed. That tech too had existed forever in their long, recorded history.

  “They use the robots of our enemies, they use the uniforms of our enemies, but they are not our enemy?”

  “I did not say they are not our enemy, just not the enemy we know.”

  “I want another theory,” demanded the queen.

  “Well, this could be an elaborate hoax to throw us off our game,” he said with a knowing look. “They could be after Project Ishtar.”

  She gave him a hard stare and said, “never mention that again! Not here! Understood?”

  ##

  Jackie and her fleet came back after months of attacks to the Zikar’s supply system deep in their space. They had an abundance of supplies, tens of thousands of civilian ships, and tens of thousands of warships, albeit useless warships.

  “It’s a pity it’ll take us so long to get them operational again, much less upgraded,” Tabitha lamented.

  “Yeah, the more ‘modern’ stuff in mothballs wasn’t such a great find,” Jackie responded.

  Indeed, they had found so many mothballed ships they did not know what to do with them all. They found and claimed dozens of mothballed fleets from the second dynasty wars. The Zikar Empire wasn’t so victorious in that war, and most of them had sustained battle damage, much of it significant. It would be a long project just to use some of this. She was not sure the capability existed to bring all of this into modern fighting trim any day soon.

  “The Commonwealth has been overwhelming in their response providing police forces and officials to remake the Zikar societies that have been taken. What a shame their entire religion is based on subjugation and torture of women,” Jackie lamented.

  The Commonwealth was running into a problem that Jackie knew would only get worse should they take the Zikar core worlds. That is the priesthood, political leaders and many of the top military officers had committed atrocities against their own population, especially women, that merited a death sentence. But for now, she had to put that out of her mind. Those that committed such crimes were rounded up and imprisoned until a later time when decisions would be made as to their fate.

  “What’s the estimate on repair and refit for our fleet?”

  “Some of the ships will need weeks, if not months of repair,” Tabitha added.

  Due to the element of surprise in each of their attacks, the Zikars were taken off guard hence minimizing Askirti losses. But she did lose people and ships. Mostly destroyers and light cruisers, but many of her capital ships had sustained massive damage. In a stroke of bad luck, she lost the dreadnought, Rando. Several Zikar dreadnoughts had pinned it down with overwhelming force, destroying it before Askirti forces could help the doomed vessel.

  “We do have our second fleet coming online, and with the range of battle damage across first fleet, time off is in order for the crews.”

  “Of course,” Jackie said, a bit startled she had neglected to give her own crews time off as they had performed admirably. “We’ll send them to Avalon and away from this place.”

  “You do need time off too, we need you to think straight,” Tabitha said looking directly at her.

  “Jeri used to give me the same speech.”

  ##

  Jackie was staring off into the distance in front of a beautiful lake. It was amazing what was constructed in such a short period of time on this planetoid. The lake was huge and irregularly shaped, allowing for people to go swimming or even boating. An open sky was projected above, giving the sense of being planetside. There was even a small forest around the lake with plenty of space for families to play, and there was a surprising number of families here.

  Jackie had learned that since the Zikar war had begun, more infrastructure was moved here than initially agreed. It was not a topic she found comical any more as it was now heavily trafficked.

  This dome with the lake and the trees was the first of fifty that were planned. Indeed, six more were already open. There was a train system taking people between the domes and facilities for shopping, recreation, and anything you could get planet side. What was well known about the human mindset was the more planet-l
ike an installation could be, the better the productivity and overall happiness level would be for the workers. With forty million inhabitants, there were a lot of folks to keep happy.

  Didn’t I agree to twenty million?

  She stared at a family down by the lake, a mother and father with their three children playing by the waters side.

  My heart aches to be them. I wanted only a simple life.

  It would have been better if she had her own dome for privacy, and it was offered to her, but she refused as it was truly too much.

  “I see you enjoy the water,” she heard an accented voice from behind.

  Turning around, she caught an unexpected sight. It was the former High Queen, flanked by Askirti security. Indeed, she was one of the only survivors of the Homem dreadnought given more or less freedom of movement. While her people had their own dome and extensive facilities, they were confined, kept away from the general population.

  “I see you are doing well at learning Standard,” Jackie answered.

  “I asked my minders if I could see you, and being as you are in a public area, they saw no problem with that.”

  “Your minders are for your safety,” Jackie said.

  “So I am told,” she said.

  “What is it I can do for the queen of the Homem Empire?” Jackie asked.

  “Well,” Helen answered wryly, “you could give my people and me a ship and let us go.”

  Jackie resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

  “And where would you go?”

  The former High Queen sat there staring for a moment, “Earth.”

  Immediately Jackie gave her a hard stare, sadness creeping into her eyes.

  “Very well,” she said in a broken voice.

  Then she walked off.

  ##

  “It is like pulling teeth getting information out of these people!” Helen complained.

  “High Queen,” Alesium retorted, “it sounds like they are going to give you something. I will admit, it’s a mystery to me why they are so nice to us but so tight lipped.”

  “Well, my minders allowed me to come back here so that I can inform you all of my trip. They don’t want our people to ‘panic.' Here they come now!”