Earth on Target (Survival Amidst the Stars)

by Angel Bright

  On the bow of the destroyer, white clouds were puffing and quickly expanding before our eyes.

  We had a strike.

  The side of the battleship was in view. Somewhere toward the tail, the fuselage ruptured, and a part of the ship disappeared in the grayish-white cloud along with rubble of ripped-off equipment.

  The savages met a violent death that was well deserved and overdue.

  The screen banner said “Engine initiation in ten seconds.” The seats promptly swiveled in position to facilitate the crew’s endurance of the extreme overload during deceleration. I activated a flexible air cushion under my body and sank in it as the engine afterburning turned on. The frequency of the pulse jet engines was commensurate with the human crew’s inertia-overload-tolerance limit. Acceleration was also important; we didn’t have time to waste. I could feel the pain everybody was experiencing. I lifted everybody over a soft gravitational air cushion and let them sink in it. The breaking time seemed infinitely long, even to me. Eventually, the frigate entered into a smooth right-turn strike run over the battlefield. We were going back.

  The deceleration took us far away. I had to teleport the frigate to our initial trajectory close to the silver column of departing transport spaceships. The enemy fighters still at the scene had not yet been ordered to form a protective cordon around their spaceship carrier in distress. They were still attacking the transporters. The much larger transport ships kept the fighters off. A group of three destroyers in a triangular formation accelerated into outer space. Not far behind them, my second pair of fighters had crippled a destroyer and were maneuvering around it while its capacitors were charging for the next salvo.

  I ordered them to follow the destroyers while charging their capacitors. Having released all its fighters, Fearless rushed to face the attacking formations of enemy battleships in Prima Davos’s atmosphere.

  The battlefield was an inferno. The wreck of a giant enemy destroyer lay on a small hill. A ball of enemy fighters was pecking with their fire arrows at my four-fighter formation, while the Scorpions of the four fighters were charging. The frigate engaged the enemy fighters with its secondary-weapons system. The attack wasn’t very effective, because the secondary weapons were designed for land targets. Perhaps we could leverage the power of energy emitters with the Scorpions’ capability in the future. It would make a great weapon. If we managed to get away now, we would improve some of our weapons’ characteristics to enhance their capabilities.

  But why weren’t the weapons effective? We had taken them from the captured battleships and mounted them without any adjustments. The protective force fields of the enemy fighters were designed for the same warm yellow-red spectrum of colors. And they reflected the same colors. What if we increased the energy frequency of our blaster beams? Would they be able to reflect them? The power of the beams would remain the same, but for them, the protective force fields would become…transparent!

  I called the weapons master and asked him the same question. I asked him to look into the possibility of adjustment to shooting high-frequency energy beams. He dived down to the blaster posts. I followed him. The inertia momentum when maneuvering in atmosphere was associated with considerable overload. I had to protect the specialist. The frigate hallways were narrow and low to save space. There was no danger of injuries, except in cases of a direct impact or an abrupt acceleration.

  The blaster post turned out to be far away through meanders of tunnels, but we made our way to it. We entered an extremely narrow cabin, and the engineer’s nimble fingers rushed over the control board.

  “Here, look at this data… and this. Amplitude height and sweep. And here are the frequency and intensity settings.”, the engineer said.

  I gave him the frequencies of dark blue, which meant they were at full power.

  “Ready!” he said.

  I asked for the blaster number and sent the officer to change the rest of the blasters’ frequencies to the same setting. I returned to the control room. We concentrated our firepower on the annoying fighters. The star destroyers capable of entering the atmosphere had left the area of the attack. They had received a warning we were coming and withdrew to cut their losses of large ships, while the fighters were covering their retreat. We began to ascend to the upper atmosphere. I went to the post of the shooting officer.

  “I want you to shoot the enemy fighter with blaster number three! None other than blaster number three.”

  “Two fighters on the left at eleven o’clock.”

  “Try blaster number three!”

  The fighters were maneuvering nonstop, and an accurate shot from a single blaster required a high level of professionalism on the part of the shooter. But of course, I had the best shooters.

  “Ready!”

  “Did you hit him?” I asked.

  “I split him into two!”

  “Look for the second fighter!”

  The guided second fighter delayed its withdrawal, and I saw how the dark-blue band reached one of its thrusters that broke off and flew backward while the fighter turned abruptly around on its axis and began twirling in clouds of dust.

  I was about to order the group to gather when I realized they had already gathered. I projected the hologram map of Prima Davos and its vicinity. The red lights assembled in diamond formations of four around each big bright light.

  The squadron of the aggressor feared the small frigate. The attacks on the planetary surface ceased. The enemy was preparing for a massive offensive with all its battleships. This time, the target was going to be us. They took their time to organize. The distance was a little over 34,000 miles. They were within our range.

  “Lieutenant, aim at the big ship,” I said. “Shoot the section of the stern with the generators. Report when ready.”

  “Ready!”

  “Fire!”

  “Eight-minute recharge. Be ready at fourteen twenty-five.”

  “Approaching enemy fighters. Formation five o’clock, formation nine o’clock, high-speed point twelve K. Start releasing crystals in a circle at every ninety degrees, with two crystals in the wake.”

  “Release initiated!”

  “To all fighters: initiate the Scorpions, and open fire on the destroyers and the cruisers. Lieutenant, initiate a blaster attack on the enemy fighters. Weapons Master, did you set the blasters? Start setting the fighters, too. Call them onboard in pairs.”

  “Scorpion, three minutes to full charge.”

  “Observer, what’s the result of the attack on the fighters?”

  “Penetration registered foreshortened two-fourths with respect to the first major target.”

  “Shooter, prepare for fire on the second large target. Pilot, draw near to formations point ten К. Commander, take over control.”

  “Roger that!”

  Our weapons were blasting away with increasing intensity.

  Burning-hot beams that were aimed at us bounced off our crystal refractors and hit the aggressors’ protective force fields. The crystals were ineffective as a weapon because of the refracted blaster beams’ low power, but they created the illusion of three times more fire points than we actually had. Our estimates proved to be correct, but the concept needed updating. We needed to design crystals for the high frequencies of the blue energies.

  “Second major target hit! Twelve-minute recharge. Be ready at fourteen forty-two!”, the shooter said.

  “North fighter formation attack subdued! Three shuttles destroyed!”, the ship commander announced. “Large enemy ships severely damaged!”,

  Commands and reports were pouring. The crew was caught in a difficult tactical situation.

  I was the only one without any direct responsibilities. I sat in front of the holographic console to evaluate the effect of the damage we inflicted on the enemy’s fleet. The huge ships were not only bases for the shuttle fighters but also centralized energy sources. We hit one of them near its center, but they managed to bring the damage under control. Another spaceship
carrier was pierced diagonally, and the destruction was considerable, judging by the huge gas mushroom spreading over its midsection. Two more destroyers were put out of commission. The aggressors were no longer capable of a mass attack. Their swift withdrawal was the only reasonable option they had.

  They escaped and left their fighters behind.

  They must have been psychologically defeated after our minifrigate routed their fleet of huge destroyers. This was a second defeat with direct fire on the large ships from a distance.

  We were again being rewarded with military trophies in the form of new technologies and specialists whom we were going to share with our allies from Prima Davos. The attackers had overestimated the power of their technology, and their plan was to burn the entire surface of the planet to ashes.

  “Three minutes to full charge of the Scorpion,” the power engineer announced.

  “Assign targets to all Scorpions. Fire when ready,” the minifrigate commander ordered.

  The enemy formation stirred. The survivor ships began destroying their own struck star cruisers. They had realized the value of what they were about to abandon.

  In only a few seconds, another four star cruisers would have been destroyed. A big ship that we had damaged started accelerating away.

  The ship commander ordered: “Fighters, small-caliber fire on the retreating big ship!”

  “Copy that!” answered the blaster officer.

  “Delta Bravo One and Two, when ready, fire on the stern of big ship.”, added the commander.

  Our approach to the formation attracted fire from eight surviving destroyers withdrawing toward open space but still in the blast area. Our fire was controlled by computers impartially tracking their targets.

  The lights in the control room flickered.

  “Eight-minute charging! We will be ready!” reported the blaster officer.

  The dagger of vengeance descended over the heads of the executioners.

  21 Calamity and Triumph! A Meeting with an Overlord

  Ten days had passed since we landed on Prima Davos. Majestic ruins of great cities were the last vestiges of a once-flourishing civilization. Widespread fires were poisoning the atmosphere. The forests were buried in ash. Murky rivers carried dead bodies. The seas had shrunk enormously.

  Death was all around us.

  Amid all of this, we were looking for survivors. We found separate groups hiding underground in shelters, military bases, and other facilities. We identified the locations of the last resistance of the planetary batteries and visited these places first. There were oases around them with preserved vegetation. We found functional military installations. Their staff had survived. Some of the staff members had managed to bring in their families and thus save them, but most of them hadn’t been this lucky. Rescuers arriving from the colonized planets on aircraft of every shape and form wandered through the ruins searching for survivors. Eventually, the rescue operation became more organized. Medical and distribution centers were set up. Volunteers began clearing the ruins at places where groups of survivors were likely to be buried.

  I sent one of the big transporters to the battlefield where the invaders had been defeated, and we were able to save an incredible number of survivors from under the ruins. We thoroughly searched them for arms for their own protection, because the angry Prima Davosians were likely to kill anyone carrying a weapon. We mercilessly filled the halls with as many war prisoners as we could and placed them in makeshift camps amid the ruins of the big cities. Their job was to dig the ruins and search for and rescue survivors. The time of reckoning came crashing down on their heads.

  The Prima Davosians had no mercy.

  Any pilot who fell into their hands after a forced landing on Prima Davos was brutally murdered by a crowd of furious locals. The fighter pilots left behind by their motherships to cover the retreat—who had been killing, bombing, and incinerating Prima Davos just a moment ago—were now doomed.

  I sent my crew to scout for high-ranking officers and specialists in different areas among the war prisoners who might have valuable information for mind copying. We did not conduct interrogations.

  I teleported all captured wrecked ships into the solar system. We had experience in restoring such powerful military spacecraft. We recruited a great number of captured engineers to dismantle entire intact sectors of severely damaged ships and used them to replace the corresponding sections of ships designated for restoration. We had learned that if we managed to put together one ship as a model, we could restore a few more by copying.

  We created a map of the star system with its planets and added new information about the planets and the aggressors, their colonies, and their military bases. The information was detailed because we didn’t have to beg for it. We simply took it using advanced Earth science. The prisoners could not hide anything.

  We even found information about planets that were about to be colonized. This opened interesting opportunities, for which we reported to the newly founded Department of Interplanetary Relations on Earth.

  Earth’s human population was catastrophically insufficient to meet the demands of our space fleet, which was gaining force and rapidly growing in ships and manpower. Humans were needed in the growing industries sector, in the political arena of the interplanetary relations, in the intelligence sector tasked to provide information about the numerous planets, and, quite frankly, in every area that we chose to develop. And now, our only ally needed human help for recovery. They needed food and materials, technologies and teachers, and everything we were able to develop, but there was no way for this to happen. Sooner or later, they would ask us why we didn’t share our knowledge about the technologies we used to defeat the aggressors—namely, the technologies on which the Scorpions and our protective force fields were based.

  We returned to our laboratories on the moon, with the urgent intention to reset our weapons and even to change their principles of operation. We wanted to develop our crystals to refract beams in a narrow zone of high frequencies. We installed additional blocks to enable the weapons master to remotely reset our fighter blasters from the mothership. The specialists were exploring and adopting innovations from the captured ships and weapons.

  We streamlined the process of mind copying of valuable knowledge. We began large-scale medical testing for recruitment of future Earth engineers, commanders, managers, and other spacecraft crew members for the three types of space cruisers. We urgently expanded the big underground cities on the moon and Mars and on Saturn’s and Jupiter’s satellites, and the latest scientific achievements were being implemented in the manufacturing of new reactors, engines, and spacecraft. We developed better protective force shields and force field and shield deactivators similar to those of our enemies. We had something to work on, and the dispersion of our military forces was both our weakness and our strength. It was our weakness because we did not have a massive rapid-response impact force to counteract a possible massive attack, whereas it was our strength because our agile maneuver units could rapidly shift missions and directions and could attack the enemy simultaneously from multiple directions. The outcome of a confrontation depended on how much time we would have.

  Hopefully, time would not be an issue, for now with the help of the original Earth weapons and defenses, we had defeated the enemy’s enhanced aggressive formation for the second time.

  It was time to work on our intelligence and counterintelligence operations.

  We had experienced intelligence specialists, but even they were not prepared for field work against the huge stellar empires.

  We introduced complex procedures for reprogramming of the high-impact blasters and adjustment of their settings to the most efficient high frequencies so they could penetrate the protective shields of the large enemy ships. Nobody knew the principle of operation of our protective force fields except me and the small group of scientists who took part in their development and made the final adjustments to the settings of the military defen
se machines and emitters of specific energy combinations.

  I had ordered the team in charge of mind copying of the captured commanders to look for information about the overlords. I was interested in memories of personal meetings, rumors, pictures, places of residence, or anything at all, as long as it had something to do with the invisible, powerful, and ruthless enemies.

  We were conducting special sessions for such information. We managed to collect some information, but soon the scientists found out that every participant in the military operations had been subjected to a procedure for deletion of such information. Any such memories were deleted.

  The assessment of the value for mind copying of one of the new war prisoners captured around Prima Davos raised suspicion that he might have had meetings with one or more of the overlords. One of them was the overlord who had exercised a control and disciplinary role on one of the command ships. The information had not been erased because of explosive decompression and the ensued panic. The gas jet resulting from the breach of the wall of the control room must have pushed this overlord. He had probably teleported himself somewhere in space. I received a recording and series of pictures, but I ordered a mind copy, too, so I could really participate in the memories of this creature.

  I had the prisoner brought to my office for a personal interview.

  A naked, tall creature covered in thick hair entered the room. A huge, strong skull; large golden eyes; and overhung eyebrows made for a menacing appearance. The alien had muscular body, short arms with three-fingered hands, and short legs with three-toed feet.

  He wasn’t the same race as the crews who had attacked Prima Davos.

  I pointed to the corner where I wanted him to stand. That’s right, I wanted to humiliate him.

  His eyes blazed with anger, but he obeyed.

  Our eyes met for a moment, but he quickly looked away. His attention was briefly caught by my rings, which were copies of the ones I once saw in the portrait of Hasterazis. I silently watched him. He didn’t bow down but rather kept his eyes focused on the wall right in front of him.