“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Hastelloy instructed. “I can’t fight the Novi Republic alone, and neither can you, but together…”
“Many have tried and failed miserably in their attempts to repel the Novi’s aggression. With the Nexus preserving their losses, the Novi are unbeatable. What gives you confidence that this time will be any different?” the Alpha leader asked.
“This time the Novi will not have the use of their Nexus device in battle,” Hastelloy offered. “It amazes me that your people worked so hard developing your mass density constraining technology in an effort to trap and destroy the Nexus during battle. How did it never occur to your people that interfering with the Nexus might cause the Novi to avoid conflict with you altogether?”
“I suppose you have a way to interfere with the Nexus’ ability to gather life forces and are willing to share it with us, your new allies?” the Alpha said with unmistakable skepticism.
It was all Valnor could do to remain seated at that point in the discussion. Was the captain serious? Was Captain Hastelloy actually offering to hand over the Nexus interference technology they used on Earth to the Alpha? This could tip the balance and reignite the Alpha wars, and this time the fight would be without the Novi’s ability to regenerate losses.
This had gone too far, what was he thinking? These were not trusted allies committed to reforming the Novi Republic. They were animals obsessed with its destruction. The Alpha may be smaller in number and exiled to eke out a meager existence around a rogue planet, but that could change. With the Nexus interference technology, everything would change. What was he thinking?”
Just then, Valnor had his covert view of the meeting ripped away. The image viewed through his left eye vanished in an instant and was once again replaced with a view of his navigation workstation. To his surprise, he saw the captain’s meeting displayed on his workstation. Had he mistakenly hit something to bring the image up on his screen?
Valnor took a quick look around to see if anyone noticed his eavesdropping. No one to his left paid him any mind, but as his head rotated to the right a stout torso appeared in his peripheral vision. He looked up to find Gallono towering over him with his arms folded across his chest and a disapproving glare threatening to set Valnor ablaze.
“That’s what I thought,” Gallono declared. “What do you think you’re doing? You have no right to invade the captain’s privacy. Turn it off, now!”
“You’re seeing what I’m seeing, right?” Valnor asked. “The captain is going to give them the Nexus jamming technology so that they will join him in fighting against the Novi Republic.”
Gallono looked ready to terminate the feed on his own, but seemed to change his mind mid-motion. Instead he turned up the volume at the workstation long enough to confirm that Valnor was speaking the truth. In that combustible moment of realization, the commander looked like he had been sucker punched in the jaw, kidneys and solar plexus all at once.
“This is not reform, this is revolution. This is not honorable service to the Republic; it is treason and conspiring with the enemy. This is not what any of us signed on for,” Valnor managed to contain in an emphatic whisper in order to keep the rest of the bridge crew unaware. “This is a line I will not cross for Captain Hastelloy. Not him, not anyone.”
“Nor I,” the commander acknowledged, “nor I!”
Gallono snapped back to his full height and whirled his head around to face the science station. “Tonwen, get over here.”
“In a moment I…”
“Right! Now!” Gallono snapped with a short thrust of his hand toward himself while still managing to contain his volume level.
Tonwen needed no further prodding. He dashed over to join Valnor and Gallono listening in on the captain’s negotiations taking place in the adjacent room.
After a silent moment spent listening in, Tonwen said with a surprising level of calm in his mannerisms, “That cannot be allowed to happen.”
“Damn right it can’t,” Valnor added. “Our duty right now is to preserve the Nexus device this ship carries. We can still get a message buoy out between those restriction field gaps.”
Gallono shook his head with fierce determination. “I’ll do you one better than that. We will send dozens of buoys with our location and our sensor readings of the Alpha’s position. I want to leave no possibility that at least one doesn’t make it through.”
“Might I also suggest including a recorded copy of the captain’s meeting with the Alpha in there,” Tonwen added. “It can only add to the urgency of the Novi Republic’s response. Otherwise they may be inclined to let the Alpha finish us off before attacking the system.”
Gallono seemed to lose his nerve with that suggestion. “The captain will be branded a traitor. He, check that, all of us are already in hot water with the Republic. Including that recording will be the proverbial nail in all of our coffins.”
“The captain may have lost sight of his greater good, but we have not. We need to send the recording as well,” Valnor insisted.
He could only imagine the internal struggle going on inside Gallono’s mind. After all these lifetimes of unwavering, unquestioned friendship and service, now it was all coming down to a brazen act of mutiny. The unflappable commander appeared on the verge of a mental breakdown before slamming his fist down on the navigational workstation to turn off the display.
Gallono looked up at Tonwen with newfound determination. It was as if he had stepped through a door and locked it behind him. “Do it. As many message buoys as we have. Match their navigation computers to Valnor’s gap detection calculations and get them underway as soon as possible.”
“Yes sir,” Tonwen said in an emotionless monotone voice only he could convey at such a monumental juncture.
Chapter 26: Unilateral Action
“Status?” Commander Gallono asked of Valnor.
“Our best time to launch will be in one minute. We can get fifteen through in the first wave and another ten probes away three seconds later. The remaining four will have to wait twelve seconds after that for the next gap to appear in the restraining field before we can launch them. It’s the best we’re going to get,” Valnor determined.
Getting that many probes off so quickly was very good news, yet Gallono looked meaner than a smoking volcano as he gave the order. “Sync the launchers and the probe nav computers to your program. Then let the central computer take it from there.”
Gallono, with his head inclined toward the captain’s office asked, “Will they still be occupied in there during the launch sequence?”
Valnor looked down at his workstation’s display observing Captain Hastelloy still seated across the conference table from a hologram of his Alpha counterparts. “I see no signs of them wrapping things up in the next thirty seconds if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” Gallono said with a groan weighed down with a profound dread of the future. “Don’t bother notifying me when the probes launch. You can leave that honor for the captain.”
Valnor switched his workstation view to show him a top-down tactical display of the system centering on their ship while he waited to launch the probes. A green semi-transparent shading around the diamond-shaped vessel represented the combined gravitational fields created by the various mass density field generators placed throughout the asteroids surrounding the rogue planet.
The green haze grew darker at overlapping points and lighter where the restriction field stretched thin. As individual asteroids moved along their orbital paths, the constraining field seemed to ebb and flow at random in both size and color. What seemed random to the naked eye, though, was mathematically predictable to the ship’s central computer.
Valnor watched as fifteen white blips jettisoned away from the ship. At nearly the same moment his eyes noticed several instances of tiny black holes poke through the green haze. They were there for the briefest of moments, but it was enough. The nearly imperceptible gaps in the restr
iction field allowed the tiny message buoys to slip through using their space fold engines.
As long as Tonwen loaded the proper navigational coordinates, one or all of the probes would reach Novus in the next few seconds. It was anyone’s guess after that how the Novi council would react to the message. Would they take it seriously or treat it as a hoax? Would they react immediately or wait too long? Would they try to mount a rescue or invade with the intention of destroying everything including their ship? Only time would tell.
Ten more probes launched seconds later and managed to slip through the constraining field, narrowly escaping ahead of harassing fire from nearby Alpha ships and weapons platforms mounted on asteroids. All got away, but it was a close call for some. This did not bode well for the third wave of probes making it safely out of the system; the Alpha were onto their game.
A set of heartbeats passed in complete silence until a colossal roar rivaling an elephant stampede erupted from inside the captain’s office. The door snapped open and Captain Hastelloy burst through with his strides rattling the floor panels with every menacing step. He rushed over to Valnor seated at his workstation, grabbed him by the collar with both hands, and yanked him to his feet, “What have you done?”
“I,” Gallono corrected while placing a calming hand on the captain’s shoulder, “gave the order that you should have issued the moment we arrived in this system. I don’t trust these Alpha any more than I did Goron or his sidekick back on Earth, and neither should you.”
A warning from the navigation workstation broke the tension by announcing the deployment of the final four message buoys. All three watched the display as the tiny probes left the ship and met destruction by Alpha weapons the instant they cleared the vessel’s shielding.
“I should have known better than to trust a Novi, even one from the old ways,” the massive hologram of an Alpha warrior snarled in its native language while stepping through the office doorway to stand at full height on the bridge. With the ceiling of the bridge rising only six foot six inches high, half the hologram’s head vanished from view into the deck above. “You cannot flee this system. Nexus or not, all of you are dead men.”
“Why would I be here with a lone ship if my intentions were other than genuine?” Hastelloy insisted in the Alpha language as he inched his way closer to his command chair. “I could have sent the coordinates of your stronghold to the Novi, and they would have attacked without warning. I came here in good faith seeking your...help and friendship.”
“You may have, but they did not,” the Alpha declared while sweeping his hand across the air in front of him to encompass the entire crew compliment.
Hastelloy reached his chair and touched a screen built into the left armrest. An instant later, a silver antenna descended from the ceiling and hit every crewman on the bridge with a blue paralysis beam.
“They no longer matter. The remainder of the ship’s crew knows nothing of this mutiny; they will follow my orders. I am with you in the fight that is to come. You have my word,” Hastelloy declared.
“Trust the word of a Novi? Never again,” the Alpha leader growled. “If this ship moves even a single atom’s length from its current position, every weapon we have will open fire.”
“You’ll need everything you have to repel the Novi when they arrive,” Hastelloy cautioned.
“That is the only reason you are still here,” the Alpha responded before the hologram dissolved into thin air.
With the confinement beam rendering him immobile and mute, Valnor had plenty of time to evaluate the situation. His instinct was to conclude that Captain Hastelloy had flat out lost his mind. Spending thousands of years on Earth defusing impossible problems devoid of ideal outcomes had taken its toll on the great man. The high stress, highly corrosive environment he endured for so long finally broke him.
It was a plausible explanation. After everything they had been through, the Novi arriving at Earth to bring them home should have been a glorious moment for him. The unbearable weight of responsibility was finally going to be lifted off his tiring shoulders. Instead, Captain Hastelloy found himself thrust into yet another impossible situation where he needed to fight those he struggled so hard to reach. It would be enough to drive even the greatest of men to madness.
Any outsider looking in at the situation would reach that conclusion, yet Valnor could not accept it. All those years spent serving under his unwavering command aside, in the here and now, the captain appeared to be in complete control of his faculties. For three solid hours Valnor watched him dash about the command deck from one workstation to the next. He preloaded automated command programming at some of the stations to help him man the bridge on his own. He sent communications out to the rest of the ship’s crew, answered incoming questions, and fulfilled requisition requests at other workstations.
His concentration never faltered. His every action methodically worked for a goal of him being able to command the entire ship, crewed by over thirty-thousand Novi, all by himself. It was ambitious, but plausible. Everyone below decks focused on their respective task of keeping the ion engines running, loading the weapons systems, responding to hull breaches, and so on. Only the command bridge knew who they were fighting, and that was controlled by Captain Hastelloy.
Out among the stars the Alpha did their best to prepare their defenses. On the tactical map shown on the main screen, each inhabited moon around the planet looked like an anthill recently disturbed. Thousands of ships ranging from top of the line bulwark cruisers all the way down to single pilot maintenance tugs with spare parts resembling functional wave blasters strapped to them came out of hiding. Anything space worthy with a potential to inflict damage or draw fire was pressed into service by the Alpha refugees in a desperate attempt to stave off extinction.
Not long after Captain Hastelloy finally sat down in his command chair to take a deep breath, all of his preparations and that of the Alpha were put to the test. Novi vessels began appearing on the display through their respective space fold event horizons. In short order, the entire system was encircled in a sphere of Novi ships holding position, content to make sure the Alpha had no viable avenue of escape from the pending engagement.
In all, roughly two thousand Novi vessels, two whole sector fleets, arrived en masse along the upper-right quadrant. Rather than dive straight into the Alpha’s web of destruction woven between the thousands of well-armed asteroids, the Novi line of ships employed what Valnor deemed an ingenious approach. The wall of ships rushed forward, fired their salvoes, and then darted away in time to dodge most of the fire emanating from the asteroid field. This gave the Novi fleet the appearance of a spinning conveyor belt as each ship took its turn rotating in, firing, and retreating before sustaining much damage.
On the Alpha side of things, the level of damage sustained was quite severe. Unlike a spacecraft moving at near the speed of light, the asteroids were stationary. Every fusion torpedo the Novi vessels lobbed at the giant hunks of rock did enormous damage. It did not take long before the Novi’s rolling assault began pressing in like an asphalt grinder carving up a road.
Hastelloy had seen enough and opened a communication channel to the Alpha. “Minister Cerberus, listen to me. You need to engage them inside the asteroid field with your ships. You outnumber them three to one and they are restricted to moving only within the avenue they have created for themselves so far. Use their same tactic of darting in and out of the still functional asteroid weapons along their perimeter.”
“Your suggestions are neither required nor wanted,” the Alpha leader hollered back in his language.
Despite the harsh rebuke, the Alpha fleet began maneuvering the way Captain Hastelloy prescribed. Valnor watched with horror as wave after wave of punishing assaults pummeled the Novi formation. The Novi tried giving chase in the beginning, but the punishing fire from the functional asteroid weaponry made short work of them.
Reinforcements trickled in using space folds that penetrated as far in
to the Alpha system as the still functioning restrictor fields would allow. Eventually those new arrivals stopped appearing, and the now encircled Novi vessels formed around their two collector ships. The instant the last fighting craft met its destruction, the collector ships vanished from the engagement; ships were lost, but no lives thanks to the Nexus.
“Well done, but they are only regrouping for another plunge into that large gash they cut through your defenses,” Hastelloy advised. “This time they will do it more methodically and clear their surroundings before moving forward. That same tactic will not work twice.”
“What do you suggest then?” a voice clearly frustrated at the fact that Hastelloy spoke the truth barked back.
In response, Captain Hastelloy paced past Valnor as though he was a statue and used his navigation workstation to send the Alpha a set of commands. “Do this and you will survive the next assault. Fail to heed my advice and this battle is over.”
Valnor noticed a few minutes later on the display that the green haze representing the space fold constraint field put out by the Alpha was changing shape. The Novi’s first assault sliced a wedge deep into the green sphere. Valnor expected them to redeploy their generators to close the gap; but instead, they deactivated more and allowed the wedge to penetrate their defensive lines even further.
This had to be part of the captain’s big picture plan. He helped the Alpha with the initial skirmish to gain their trust, and now gave them advice that would lead to their ruin. In that moment of realization, Valnor felt an overwhelming sense of shame well up from deep within him for ever doubting the captain. The man was a tactical and strategic master and was always, always three steps ahead of anyone else.
Ten minutes later, Valnor watched the next Novi assault wave materialize. As predicted, they pressed as far into the Alpha defenses as the mass density fields would allow to continue the attack, believing that would place them where the prior assault stalled. Unbeknownst to the Novi commanders, that position had now changed.
Origins: A Greater Good Page 17