by Andrew Beery
The use of hostages in war was a time honored tradition in Ashtoreth culture. General Bar’Jona and AG had argued about what they could do about it. The General had been of a mind to simply accept the losses. Commander Stone flatly refused unless there was simply no other choice. Fortunately Corporal Yreeb had come through. He had been able to locate the specific building in which the twenty VIP hostages were being held. Armed with that information, Admiral Faragon, General Bar’Jona and AG put together a plan to storm the facility and free the captives. First, though they needed to neutralize the threat posed by those nuclear weapons.
Bar’Jona’s operatives within the city had been able to locate most of the charges. It actually turned out to be quite simple. Niegar had placed guards around each of them to insure that none of the Basharites tampered with them.
Gunny Ramirez’s troops were the first on scene, as AG had expected.
“Top dog, this is little dog. We have found our first bone. Permission to bury it, over.”
AG toggled his comm. “Understood little dog. What is the disposition of the guard dogs?”
“They are unfriendly and unaware of our presence. We should have no trouble taking the bone from them.”
“Little dog, you have a go to proceed. Put the guard dogs down quickly and quietly. Top Dog out.”
***
Roc watched the message buffer that he and Lieutenant Sassi had setup. He knew from their previous exchanges that the battle for New Hope had started a few minutes ago. Soon a signal would arrive and his team would be cleared to begin their part in the operation. No sooner had he thought it, did the word ‘GO’ magically appeared in the buffer.
Roc’s throat issued a soft gurgle. This day had been long in coming but it was finally here. He reached over and pulled the general alarm. On cue his merry band of insurgent misfits began their campaign of sowing chaos. Power systems failed. Security monitors went offline. Communications rerouted randomly. Most importantly, every last loyalist soldier found themselves on the wrong end of a weapon. Those that were not killed outright where placed in holding cells.
Roc knew that what they had accomplished would not have been possible at any other time. With most of the Praefectus’ soldiers deployed and with the other replicant facility essentially shutdown, this was the only time the insurgency would be able to take control of this facility and maintain control long enough to do what they must.
Praefectus Niegar had most certainly heard, by now, of the uprising in T’Nagra. But Roc was guessing that he was too busy with the simultaneous attack on New Hope to do much about it. What Niegar didn’t know was that Roc and the other had spent years learning the intricacies of the replicant system. They now knew how to purge the active engram databases. Niegar was one replicant away from being well and truly dead. The loyalist engrams had been moved to an offline backup. Any replicants made from this point forward would be General Bar’Jona’s men.
***
Lord Captain Asdartu leaned back in his command chair. He was reluctant to admit it but he was impressed with the Lord Admiral’s plan. The fact that he was even thinking of ‘her’ as ‘Lord Admiral’ spoke volumes.
The armada had arrived far outside the target system. All long range surveillance systems had been destroyed as well as the hyperfield disruption buoys that made travel near the planet all but impossible.
At this point Asdartu would have rushed in with his overwhelming force of five hundred battlecruisers to crush the enemy. The Lord Admiral was more cunning however. Rather than rushing in she had set about insuring her ships had the best chance possible to overwhelm the usurper.
The previous defenders had reported a massive battlestation the likes of which no one had seen before. They had thrown everything they had at the beast and it hadn’t even blinked. The Lord Admiral had decided to take a more cautious approach. She ordered a full three hundred of the ships under her command to locate the ten largest asteroids in the inner belt. Then in groups of thirty ships each, they were to surround those asteroids and shroud them in a linked hyperfield that would be controlled by a special device her father had installed on her flagship. Once the massive rocks were disconnected from space-time by the surrounding hyperfield the ships would accelerate to twenty percent the speed of light and release the hyperfield so that the asteroid in question would be on an intercept course for Bashar.
Asdartu had been disturbed by this plan initially but the Lord Admiral had just smiled and pointed out that the battlestation was easily one hundred times the combined mass of all ten asteroids. It should be more than up to the task of dealing with them. The real question had to be… would it be able to deal with the asteroids and her five hundred ship strong armada at the same time?
***
Cat whistled. She had to give the alien commander credit. She had not expected this. They had somehow managed to redirect and accelerate ten massive asteroids towards the Basharite home world. Nine were on a direct course. The tenth would come close but ultimately miss.
“WhimPy, are you seeing this?’ Cat asked.
“Indeed Admiral”
“Is it going to be a problem?”
“Fortunately Admiral, the KEWs will not strike my shields at the same time. If they did it would be unlikely the shields would hold in the non-regenerative mode you are attempting to deploy them in.”
“How many simultaneous or near simultaneous hits can the shields take at once?”
WhimPy paused for a second. Given the raw computational power at his command, Cat was sure the pause was for conversational effect rather than a need to think.
“Under optimal conditions, and with my shields extended around the entire planet as we have been discussing, I should have no problem handling two within ten seconds of each other. Three within a minute of each other. Beyond that and the likelihood of the primary and secondary power couplers on the shield extension satellites failing begins to approach a certainty.”
Cat swiveled in her command chair to face the main viewscreen. “Lieutenant Sassi, coordinate with WhimPy. I want a 3D plot on the main screen. Please plot the nine asteroids that are on a collision course with the planet. If any two of the rocks are going to hit within ten seconds of each other, color them yellow. If three or more are going to hit with a minute of each other, color them red. The rest go ahead and color green.
Within a few seconds the visual Cat wanted was on the board. It was not good. One rock would arrive well ahead of the others. Four would arrive as two pairs a good three minutes apart. Unfortunately the remaining four would arrive with forty nine second of each other.
Cat hit her comms. “Captain Kirkland, I need your assistance… and that of Hikaro as well.”
***
Captain Hikaro Takei of the GCP Exeter stared at the massive behemoth in his path. The asteroid was traveling at just under twenty percent the speed of light. At that velocity it was just over ten minutes from striking the planet.
Somehow he had to divert as much of the mass of the asteroid out to the path of the planet as he could… and he had no time in which to do it.
“Weapons, lock forward launch tubes on that beast. Fire sandies one through four. Set for subsurface impact.”
Sandies were an early adaptation of Heshe nanite technology. They were construction nanites designed to disassemble a target. They would quite literally turn that massive asteroid into sand. Unfortunately, that in and of itself would not help the situation. The mass of a hundred pounds of sand is the same as the mass of a hundred pounds of rock. They would suck down the WhimPy’s shields it they hit just as much either way.
The key was the second order Captain Takei was about to issue.
“Helm, take us to course three, three, mark four. Ahead one quarter light. At thirty light seconds all stop and turn us about.”
“Weapons, as soon as we have come to a stop and are facing the side of that beasti… fire all remaining tubes. Nuclear charges… Set them to detonate one quarter klick from
the target surface.”
His hope was that the sandies would loosen the surface of the asteroid enough in the few minutes they would have to work their magic; the force of the nuclear blast would be like a person blowing snow off a leaf.
***
Lord Admiral Nsati stood and watched as her fleet closed with the enemy. Everything was timed so that things would happen at once. The asteroids would threaten the planet forcing the battlestation to move to intercept them. Her first wave would rush in towards the other side of the planet. The enemy would know she was doing it but they would have no choice. A fleet of ships might hold a world hostage with kinetic Energy Weapons but an asteroid the size and speed of the ones she had placed in motion would kill the planet.
It was possible that one or more of the massive rocks she had hurled would actually hit the world. If that happened the results would be unfortunate for anything living on the surface… but the empire could always use another rich mining colony… even if it was a sterile wasteland.
The asteroids were timed to strike in progressively more difficult patterns. Even a ship as big as the battlestation would be hard pressed to defend against them and the armada that it was facing. Victory was all but assured!
As the first of the asteroids neared the planet, Nsati became concerned. The massive battlestation was not moving. Instead an impossibly large nimbus surrounded the planet. The battlestation seemed to be the source of said nimbus. The projectile hit the shield and was absorbed.
Lord Admiral Nsati sat down. It was said no battle plan ever survived contact with the enemy. That certainly seemed to be the case today.
Chapter 26: A Prelude to Rebirth
“The first one is hitting in 4… 3… 2… 1… Impact,” Commander Ben said from his station. “Shields are holding at ninety six percent. There was a minor fluctuation in emitter platform sixteen but it is stabilizing.”
“Keep half an eye on it number one,” Admiral Cat Kimbridge said from her command chair.
“Commander Martinescu, launch your fighters. Coordinate with the Yorktown, Exeter and the Relentless. I want full umbrella coverage below the shield. If they manage to knock it out even for a second a few of their enemy fighters could sneak through and do some real damage.”
“Aye Aye Admiral.”
Cat had borrowed the Yorktown’s First Officer so that he could coordinate the flight operations of the combined taskforce during the upcoming battle.
“Admiral,” Commander Ben interrupted. “The first pair of the second wave of asteroids is coming in hot. They will be here in 3… 2… 1… Impact one… Impact two.” Ben checked his board. Shields are at sixty percent and climbing. Platform sixteen has a primary power coupling failure. Switching to secondary… Sixteen is firming up.”
“Tell me that sixteen is one of the platforms that was designated for trinary redundancy.”
Ben looked over his board. “The good news is it was… the bad news is the work was not completed. In fact, because they were working on it, the access port was open which is likely why we are seeing an issue now.”
“So what you are telling me,” Cat said in frustration, “is… if we had just left it alone we might have been fine?”
“That does indeed seem to be the case. The second pair is now coming in. Impact in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… Impact… Second impact.”
“Status?”
“Shields holding at fifty one percent… and now rising. Number sixteen did just fine this time.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way. How long before those final few make it here?”
“About six minutes Admiral.”
“WhimPy, how are you holding out?”
“I’m touched that you would ask Admiral. I am ‘holding out’ just fine. I’m rotating my orbit about the planet so that my regenerative shields take the bulk of the impact from the next few KEWs that come in. This should adequately replenish my energy reserves. Also it appears that the commander of the Ashtoreth armada is dissatisfied with the status quo.”
“Meaning what?” Cat asked.
“Meaning there are five hundred ships firing thousands of missiles each at the non-regenerative shield surrounding the planet. The good news is they are targeting the shields in such a way that should the shield fail the remaining missiles will likely fly off into space.”
“Will the shields hold against all of that?”
“Possibly,” WhimPy said calmly. “The real question is… Can the shield hold while at the same time dealing with the remains of four large inbound asteroids? The answer to that question is probably not.”
***
Commodore Jason Ruck scrambled to move faster. WhimPy had taken the bulk of the impacts of the last four incoming asteroids. Two of them were nothing more than shattered remnants of the larger rocks they had been just a few hours before but at nearly twenty percent the speed of light they still packed a sizable wallop.
The Ashtoreth Armada had begun firing on the shield at about the same time. In the end it was more than it could handle and the shield failed. A number of nuclear tipped missiles passed through the space that had once been protected by the shield. Most just headed off into space… on couses that would eventually take them into the sun.
A number of missiles, far in excess of five thousand, raced towards the planet’s surface. Between the Scorpion-class attack fighters and the firing batteries on the Yorktown, Relentless, Exeter and now the Mador it became a race to shoot them all down. In the end, only seven missiles made it through and they all impacted in the deep ocean. There would likely be a minor tsunami somewhere on the planet but it could have been much worse.
As the Yorktown taskforce battled the missile barrage, WhimPy took on the Ashtoreth Armada. While the Heshe modifications to its programming specifically prevented it from being the aggressor in any conflict, WhimPy was a superb defensive platform.
Powerful Heshe energy weapons flashed out from its surface. Over the course of the next thirty minutes, WhimPy-101 managed to severely damage or disable over ninety percent of the Ashtoreth ships attacking the planet.
Unfortunately, those ships were not the only threat left to Bashar. A small handful of missiles had not shot off into empty space nor did they enter the planet’s atmosphere. These few hit the atmosphere at just the right angle to bounce off on a completely new course. In this case, they hit the tenth asteroid as it made its nearest approach to the planet. They nudged it just enough that it would impact on the far side of the planet away from the WhimPy.
The Mador was the closest ship and so Jason took on the challenge of diverting this final asteroid before it destroyed the planet. Unfortunately he had few options. All he had left in the ship’s weapons inventory were a few SJ rounds and a large number of Sandies.
The SJs would have been perfect but no one had been able to make SJ-suicide jumpers work since the Great Disruption changed the way hyperfield dynamics functioned. The sandies would tear apart the asteroid but its massive amount of kinetic energy would still effectively sterilize the planet.
Jason knew he had only one weapon left that could get the job done. A few minutes earlier he had made the difficult choice to use it. Even as he raced to main engineering, his crew was abandoning the ship.
Three minutes later, the GCP Mador, piloted by her captain, plowed into the side of a large icy asteroid. Her fusion generators overloaded and she exploded in a fireball that rivaled the Basharite sun in brightness. It was all Commodore Jason Ruck could do… but it was enough.
***
Anthony Stone wondered some days why he bothered to get up. This was one of those days. His troops had succeeded in securing both the nukes and the hostages. With the threat of massacred civilians off the table, he and General Bar’Jona had begun their joint offensive to root out the loyalist Ashtoreth soldiers.
They had been well on their way to achieving this goal when an irate mob of Basharite men and boys decided to step in and help. They were completely outclassed by the
professional and well-trained Ashtoreth soldiers. Almost as fast as they rose to attack they were subdued and captured. It was a testimony to the Ashtoreth training that the Gators didn’t just kill the attacking mob.
Instead what Commander Stone was faced with was another hostage situation. Only this time the enemy held close to four hundred very foolish and very scared civilians. The officer that held the hostages had called for Commander Stone, by name, and asked that he present himself in person to negotiate terms.
AG walked up to the office building were the Ashtoreth officer had agreed to meet him. Supposedly the hostages were inside the building. His Stark suit was in combat mode but he had deliberately deactivated the cloaking circuitry before quick-timing it out of the TOC. General Bar’Jona had been adamant that he not go. With over four hundred lives on the line, AG didn’t feel he had a choice. They reached a compromise when Master Gunny Jeremy James Hammond offered to go with him fully cloaked.
When AG reached the designated spot he stopped. A door opened in the building he was standing in front of and AG receive two surprises. First the officer that would be carrying out the negotiation was none other than Praefectus Niegar himself. The second surprise was that the Praefectus has a female prisoner with him. And not just any female. This was Elder Nstra Durn. The Ashtoreth office held a plasma pistol to her side. She looked completely terrified.
“So you are the famous Commander Anthony Grant Stone,” the Gator said in passably good English without the aid of a translator.
“I’m impressed you can speak our language. I take it you are Praefectus Niegar, former ruler of this world.”