Earth on Target (Survival Amidst the Stars)

by Angel Bright

  After passing the average range line of the armaments of our fighters, our rightmost fighter gave a blaster shot with minimum power at the huge front ship to reconnoiter the frequency characteristics of its protective fields. A weak orange-red circle started pulsating along with its protective shield, which was pushed forward. This was something new, but it had no frequency changes.

  The protective shield of the flagship blinked at almost the same time to allow a blaster volley from its left-bow turret to the minifrigate.

  Our reflective shield took and reflected most of the energy of the volley, and our protective field shook heavily in blue concentric circles. Fearless shook mightily and spun along its length.

  The pilot sharply forced the right-bow maneuvering engine to take the calculated firing position, but its reflective shield was hit by beam strikes two more times. The strikes failed to reach our protective field.

  The angry voice of Admiral Prega now echoed in the ship’s speakers.

  “Main caliber, fire at target number one. Dragons, a volley at targets two, three, four, and five!”

  Our protective field and reflective shield were turned off and then turned on after the volley. The four fighters scrambled closer and attached themselves to the external electromagnetic ports for quick withdrawal. I teleported Fearless back to the asteroid line and the main group of our fighters.

  I received a message from Admiral Prega.

  “The five targets were hit. Targets number one and two have suffered greater damage. The others have depressurization in their bows. I am sending video footage.”

  Our Scorpions were breaking through these protective fields. But the Kerrani Federation knew their defense was inefficient. Was it possible this attack was politically motivated? All those groups had no compassion, and the losses of the main partner would bring only satisfaction. After that came the calculations of the allies in the battle line.

  “Should we go there? Are we ready for a pointless self-sacrifice? Who would benefit if we are to lose some of our ships?” said Admiral Prega.

  This was what I was relying on. I wanted to shake their belief of the omnipotence of the leader who had suffered losses from an unknown device and a ship that disappeared.

  We were waiting and observing. Our Scorpions were charging.

  The fleet groups were intensively decreasing their speed.

  Within a few minutes, a cascade shutdown of the individual fleets of the general telecommunication channel began. Around the left-flank group, the fighters moved and began to group around their base ships. The doors of the hangars were opened, and the fighters began to come to their ships on threes. This battle group was one of the many symmetric groups on the right flank. The next left-flank group moved to retreat, and the fighters followed it up, coming back inside. One of the strongest second-line groups began to unfold to intercept and return the retreating ships back to their place. The situation became more complicated both militarily and politically. The disintegration of the forced military alliance began. The two battle groups were getting closer to one another, as the smaller one began a vigorous turn to the open space. The hot tips of their accelerators lit up.

  The more massive ships of the pursuers began to lag, but from them detached smaller yet quicker pursuers to delay the fugitives through defensive maneuvers.

  The crucial moment in the allied fleet camp came. The weaker and smaller fleet did not want to take a front of opposition to the New Empire but instead chose to wait as a neutral. And the larger fleet lost the advantages it had planned and positioned against us. It was now important to punish the escapees so that the other four of the first line did not flee. Now was the time to demonstratively support the hesitation of the extortionists and that of the extorted.

  I announced combat readiness for the entire fleet and teleported the minifrigate Fearless behind the escapees. I matched its speed with that of the group and turned the bow equipped with Scorpion-1MD against the pursuers. We started an occasional shot at the nearest small speedy enemy ships. We opened our protective field. I wanted to see the frequency spectrum of the enemy beam weapon and the penetrating frequency across their protective fields to adjust our guns to them. The first orange-red thermal shot was not late. Fearless’s answer was also orange-red. A bright-red spot began pulsing on the front protective shield. From the Fearless central panel, we started the frequency readjustment of our protective field and guns according to the measured data. I checked the data and included some more frequencies whose rays would increase the effect of the damage after neutralizing their security fields. We did a trial series of shots to the pursuers’ leader, which lost control of its flight. Behind its stern appeared an orange-red glow. It began changing the trajectory of its movement; at its high speed, this was a very difficult task. I ordered the stealth technology to be turned on. I released three crystals at the ship’s frequency and teleported Fearless to the other side of the group of pursuers, who were about catch us. We began automatic flank shooting with the blasters at the pursuers, without the need to use the Scorpions. Our beam weapon was well coordinated with our power generators, so we were able to damage the front ships. Among the pursuers, turmoil turned into chaos. As a black dot against the background of open space, Fearless was undetectable. I left three crystals again and teleported the minifrigate to its place among the other Earth ships. My goal was to bring discord and disorder into the group of candidates of power imposed by force.

  A second group began their withdrawal encouraged by the chaos among the pursuers. Another group of the “strong ones” sent encircling teams to prevent the first line from collapsing, but the remaining ones started moving.

  The secret to these coalitions was that there was always a winner and a loser. Sometimes, the loser lost thousands of years. And when a meeting with a new master promising a new status happened, the loser got a chance for change. That chance was never missed, even at a high price.

  The five fleets on the first line were the losers, and the three large fleets of the second line were masters who had always issued orders that the first line had obeyed unconditionally. But for them, today was the decisive day of change; for the great ones, it was the day of treason. Today, they lost the empire’s trust and did not win the same privileged position in the New Empire. They put themselves in a situation with no escape.

  Today marked the beginning of the erasure of the erasers. One of the great criminals was the Kerrani Federation, which had made the erroneous conclusion that it was our first ally.

  Thirty hours after the Kerrani system fleet Commander tried to blackmail me, the first of the five outer planets in the System was attacked; forty-one hours later, the second one was attacked. The attackers were two of the small fleets. They used the convenient occasion to prove their loyalty to the empire and to achieve the privileges they were dreaming of. The collapse of destroyed warships exceeded our needs.

  I was thinking of meeting with Procurator Sai Ga Agar, but I decided not to. I was becoming more like Numeros. I watched from the side how these monsters were exterminating each other.

  I despised them. I hated them.

  But how far was I going to go as a dumb witness? What new option could I suggest?

  The violence was expanding.

  And how much had I dreamed of meeting the aliens when I was little. I had wanted to meet smart aliens with a highly developed civilization. They would come, take charge of us, and teach us reason and morality, and we would worship them.

  Corba had enough strength to deal with the invasion, but it was not in a hurry. It wanted the impression of just a local conflict and to slowly grind the strength of the weak. I needed to learn from this way of being inconspicuous in active action. Defense with the local minimum number of warships plus planetary batteries and good team training created the necessary mood to support defenders. However, both sides were playacting for both sides of the hall. Everyone was happy with the show and after a while would forget it. And after the sur
prise defeat of several powerful groups, Earth drew attention to itself as an imminent threat to each of its neighbors. We attracted unnecessary attention, and now we had to be quiet. Again, we gathered our weapons, and I started the retreat to the solar system. I first withdrew the asteroid where outpost number 1 was, which had collected the highest number of Earth technological secrets.

  There was another opportunity for development after this situation. We could attack, create alliances, break off territories from the empire, and organize a separatist republic. It would shake the galactic everyday life. But we were not ready. Our entire Solar Federation was one planet and several detached settlements. We could not make even a single warship with our own strength. We had neither a secure Earth battery defense nor a powerful economy. We had no rear for expansion. Our place was at home. We were the fortress wall to protect our compatriots, and our power was in them. The solar system was boundless enough to satisfy our needs for a millennium.

  27 Development of Earth Medicine against Possible Biological or Chemical Warfare

  Our withdrawal took place exactly as planned. Maybe our departure seemed strange just as the ostensible chance to head a strong military alliance was opened, but we perceived it only visibility with no substance because the main military force of this alliance would have been more than four thousand warships among the coalition participants. The twenty or thirty warships on Earth would have seemed pathetic and irrelevant.

  Upon arrival, we distributed the large ships in Earth’s orbit with the task of reservist-crew training. We were pulling people out of their jobs for a month, and after some specialized trained, we were releasing them again to continue their work on the repair of destroyed warships entering the orbital docks. We had knowledge, and we had specialists, but after the loss of Prima Davos, the supply of spare parts stopped, and the ships were missing out on important items we had no idea where to get. We put them in security zone to wait, but we knew we had to deal with ourselves. The production factories were no longer there. We had to re-create technologies for which we had only theoretical knowledge. However, we created mixed groups of specialists and scientists, and each group was given a task to create production technologies and production lines. The exact metals to create the necessary alloys were missing. They experimented with plastics and natural insulating materials, but they could not come close to matching the extraterrestrial material with exceptional characteristics.

  I took one of the original interchangeable blocks and described what energy emission I was seeing and what I assumed was its essence. But even though the alloys were accurate, we lacked data on the sequence of technological processes to produce successful copies.

  We resorted to using ads to recruit specialists from Prima Davos because, with the destroyed factories, their knowledge and professionalism would surely be lost. Nobody showed up. We also sought Commodore Kobo, but he refused to cooperate. They had broken relations with us after we had twice risked helping them, and the risk for us was to be completely wiped out as a civilization.

  Even the prisoners of war we held on Mars were included in the work in the repair docks in orbit around Prima Davos. But still…

  I turned to the command of the fleet orbiting around the moon and asked for alien specialists who had come back with us.

  There were such people.

  They were even more numerous than what I had expected. Many of them had reached high positions in the departments where they worked. Others were gathered together with Earth experts at the withdrawal points and had returned with us because of the literal bureaucratic execution of the order “Everyone.” I immediately instructed the heads of the scientific groups to dig up among them for the appropriate specialists. I still had little hope that something could happen. I believed in the maxim “If you want something and think about it constantly, it will certainly happen.”

  And it happened.

  We found specialists who had been involved in manufacturing processes, and one of them was even involved in the design of technological lines related to the processing of ingredients for those universal electronic blocks, which had many applications. The news inspired us, and we expanded the search for such specialists.

  But shortly after, we realized we were also missing the machines for these technological lines.

  We became dejected once again. Two other engineers used to design such machines for specific processes but were not familiar with the whole production line. Still, we collected data and parts of the whole process, hoping to logically add the missing links in the chain.

  I entrusted the management of this significant process to military engineers of the Earth Command. They had proved themselves as responsible and motivated officers in carrying out special tasks, and this was one of the most special ones. It was only a matter of time before a fleet of warships numbering many thousands would fall on us. Even another fifty or one hundred warships of ours would not change the outcome of the conflict. We were nailed to Earth. The few satellite worlds of the solar system were irrelevant. All of this production we were in a hurry to start would be an unnecessary effort. We needed orbital and planetary long-range batteries in a single complex for the protection of the near space. We saw tankers with poisonous or explosive gases. What about biological protection? These were civilizations with thousands of years of traditions in science and therefore had survived one against another and against each other.

  The scenario was a nightmare.

  I would demonstrate destruction to the enemy by using the enemy’s weapon. I would respond to cruelty with greater cruelty. There was no room for humanism here. In most cases, the winner was the one who hit first.

  We began to put strong points on all planets, satellites, and asteroids by digging these support bases deep beneath their rocky surfaces. We armed all strong points with a Scorpion-3 with a narrow beam whose range was about two hundred thousand kilometers. A well-devised plan for the tactical and strategic defense of the Earth Federation was draining all our resources. Attacking streams of warships and avoiding the fire would concentrate on the relatively narrow canals leading into a large area where I could use my most powerful and long-range weapon—Tempor One—with maximum efficiency. I had used it to destroy large objects before, but later I realized there was a more economical way of energy efficiency. Namely, I could combine temporal displacement with my ability to swap the area covered by this displacement with another area from where I wanted to move the temporal balloon and bring it back to the present reality. Unfortunately, the area which I was able to transfer was limited depending on the energy environment from where I took the active actions. For this reason, the most powerful Tempor One power plant was installed on Mercury, the closest safe and most powerful area of the solar system. Collecting multiple warships in a restricted area was the optimal option for quickly and efficiently removing the threat of attack on a large number of combat squadrons. However, the very orbital position of Mercury created strategic problems for its use in combat. Much of the time, Mercury was located behind the sun, and when it was in a position suitable for firing, we had to wait for our position on the surface of the rotating planet to show.

  Thus, a Tempor One was on the orbital asteroid HT361288, too. I could put that asteroid on convenient strategic positions.

  On Mars, the bombing with icebergs from the asteroids continued. The planet was wrapped in a terrible stormy and poisonous atmosphere. All people, except service teams, were pulled back to Earth or to the orbital Martian complexes near the repair docks to participate in the restoration of the thirty-six battleships destroyed in the previous battle for Earth.

  The strategic location of the solar system, remote from the closest star branch of the galaxy and with a large intermediate gap, protected us from a rapid surprise attack by a large fleet. We watched and carefully controlled every celestial body crossing this gap. We were winning time. Humanity was numbering nine billion. This figure had to double and triple, and humanity had to adapt
to life in all the planets of the solar system. We already had knowledge and technology capable of such a feat and then to spread. But we needed to finish our Martian experiment with success as a foundation of our first development strategy.

  The rings of Saturn were a life-giving source of water seemingly stored for us—the powerful, intelligent human beings—and gave us the opportunity to develop life on all the dead planets. We already had theories to create retention screens for the desired planetary atmosphere with the preferred conditions and temperature regimens. All the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn would become planets with tropical living conditions, and the reduced force of gravity would be attractive for life and tourism. We had already taken the initial steps for these transformations. Mankind was impatient and exported its first colonies of enthusiasts near our military fort posts, which made serving on desert planets more tolerable. The enthusiasts were impatiently exploring the ore resources of the planets and, in particular, searched for the currently trendy raw materials for the universal blocks for our electronic systems.

  The solar system was poor in these valuable ingredients.

  The appearance and development of our star, the sun, had happened based on other laws of physics, and we did not succeed in our searches for this mineral wealth.

  The Earth Government was successfully coping with the organization of all these activities, and I returned to my beloved student mages at Moon University. The government had made the correct decision to use their extraordinary abilities in its activities, and they were constantly traveling between planetary colonial settlements. I gathered a team of newcomer enthusiasts and further developed the idea of universal healing as a mandatory course in the first year. We started by looking for the emergency signal that each cell that had received damage sends to the immune system and the rapid response centers of the brain. Heavily damaged cells send such a signal only once, just before death. Perhaps the signal is different, and they do not get help.