by Solea Razvan
378th Heavy Fleet Flagship.
30 minutes earlier.
“We finished circling around, laying course for a second attempt at the crater.” Valyria said to her commander as the fleet began its maneuver.
“Don’t bother, the enemy will be in firing range in about 30 minutes, we just fried all of our main engines with the deceleration, it would take us 5 minutes to turn around, another 13 to stop again and at least 30 more to position ourselves properly for the crater I had in mind, we’re done.” Metternich lamented as he supported his forehead with both arms from disappointment at just how much they krifed up.
Everything was now shot to pieces, they where outmanned, outgunned, isolated and in the open.
“Send a message to the whole fleet, I want a concentrated barrage fired at the asteroid at………let’s say point B12, if we are too be captured, let’s at least make sure they don’t get our ammunition.” he ordered and with a nod of her head and a regretful sigh she gave the ordered to the fleet.
“Outnumbered and outgunned, hopelessly and with defeat staring us in the face, this is where the hero would usually pull of some weird stunt or give a strange order and presto! The tide would be turned and we would win the day.” Valyria mentally lamented to herself, as she gave a side gaze to her commander who moved his forehead from his hands and had enveloped the right hand with the left and has glued his mouth to them, while supporting his chin with the thumbs of his palms.
“This is not some fantasy, this is reality, and no one can pull that off…………..not even you commander.”
“First volley of the barrage has impacted point B12, second volley is being prep-ACTIVITY DETECTED ON THE SURFACE OF THE ASTEROID! POINT B12 IS COLLAPSING ON ITSELF; IT LOOKS LIKE SOME KIND OF CAVERN!” The pulsar operator reported from the visual display screen.
“ALL UNITS RUSH TROUGH THAT HOLE! CRUISERS IN FRONT! CARRIERS IN THE MIDDLE AND BATTLESHIPS IN THE BACK AS A REAR GUARD! AND KEEP THAT SECOND VOLLEY READY! WE MAY NEED IT!” Metternich ordered from the top of his lungs and the bridge crew turned to their commander, surprise at his reaction, Valyria in particular was taken aback by his sudden response, her brain started to process what she, along with the rest of the crew had just discovered about their leader.
For while they where grasping at this newfound and unexpected turn of events and their brains where still processing this new information, Metternich had already formed a response for this new development, and not just any response, but the most efficient and practical of them all!
It was only a split second faster than them, but that mattered, and then and there for all of them, one thing was clear, and that he was a natural born survivor who could seize the moment.
“Looks like my previous statement was wrong after all!” she thought to herself happily as she guided the fleet into the metero, away from the Volunians.
Ear system, Volunian Fleet Flagship.
No words came from Yemen’s mouth, for no words could comprehend what he had just witnessed, but his crew had no qualms about that and where happy to exclaim their astonishment.
“We are detecting a huge cavern from the area where the Imperial Fleet fired! Looks like its big enough for their ships to get in, one at a time!”
“How could this happen, meteors that size don’t just………..they aren’t……….they can’t be penetrated by a single volley!”
“Looks like it was a dustroof filling.”
“A what?”
“Sometimes on asteroids, caves and craters fill with space dust that overtime becomes compressed and forms a sort of cork made out from dust, small pebbles and stones, those things are called dustroof fillings.”
“Well it’s good to know, and hurray for you, YOU GET A KRIFFING LOLLIPOP!”
“But, that should have been detected when Balisha was built, how could this be overlooked?”
“Well, compressed sand can appear to be a big solid piece of rock, and it many aspects it is just that, you would need a massive and constant amount of kinetic energy in just the right quantity and delivered in a very slow manner in order to make the sand loose enough to be blasted away, but not so much that it could float out of the crater, but the odds for something like that are a million to one!”
And that sentence hit Yemen harder than what he just saw happen before his eyes.
“The doors! The bloody doors, those massive beasts of iron where inserted forcefully on the entrance way of the single deep crater that contains Balisha, we attached them slowly and methodically so the very body of the meteor itself would hold it in place, once the nails of the door where hammered in!” Yemen thought to himself, as he remembered the slow and arduous process that they used to make the best attachments for the doors possible.
It had taken three days for them to slowly push the nails inside the meteor, during which, he once walked on the meteor’s surface and felt how the whole massive space rock vibrated.
What made matters worse was that they did do scans of the rock, but that was before beginning construction and they did no such scans during its creation, after Balisha was installed, and especially after attaching the doors.
“We did this.......NO........ I DID THIS!” the thought struck Yemen like thunder, a sensation which he was familiar with, the realization making his heart stop beating for a moment, but he had been a soldier for most of his life and his military training and decades and more of battle kicked in, so he regained his wits.
“How long until we reach Balisha?” he asked.
“Seventeen to sixteen minutes sir, we should be able to-“the navigations officer reported.
“THERMAL ENERGY SURGE DETECTED AT THE ENTRANCE WAY! IT LOOKS LIKE THE TWO HALFS OF THE GATE HAVE BEEN WELDED FROM THE INSIDE!” the pulsar officer reported, adding even more horrifying news to this already dreadful day.
“Aren’t gates supposed to be heat resistant!?!”
“Their design to withstand fire from the outside, not from the inside, it’s not like the crew of those bases would have suddenly declare that their doors are hostiles and open fire on them!”
“AND NOW WE PAY THE PRICE FOR THAT OMISSION!”
“THAT’S ENOUGH!” Yemen shouted as he brought order to his panicking bridge crew, he could only imaging what the other ships must be dealing with, if this if how the Flagship sailors where behaving.
“Comms contact Codolatecas, tell him that he is to move his fleet to the rear of the meteor and besiege that new breach with the first fleet, Baflashin will take his second fleet and fire on the entrance and try to pry it open, the third fleet will bombard the surface of the asteroid in search of other dustroofs.”
“Also helmsman, get this ship to the first fleet, that’s where the main fight’s gonna be and that’s where we will be needed!” Yemen ordered and they all complied and carried out his orders, all under his watchful and hard gaze. They took comfort in that gaze, for to them their leader appeared to know how to counter this sudden catastrophe and looked calm and unbothered by it.
But in truth, he was barely keeping himself together; it was only trough his many years of practice in maintaining the illusion of calmness, that he managed to not show, just worried he really was.
“That new cave is so narrow, that we can barely fit two ships, and the enemy has more than a hundred ships on the other side the cave will be impossible to storm and with Balisha they’ll outlast any siege, we must get the doors opened or find another dustroof, if not, if not…………….”
Yemen could not finish that line of thought, as if there was some danger of that thought becoming a reality, even if it was just a sliver of imagination.
So he could only close his eyes and grit his teeth in anger at the enemy, and with self-hatred, he clenched his fists behind his back, as he though to that day in which he was on the meteor, when it vibrated the strongest and trough being in physical contact with it, he remembered what sound the doors made, as the nails penetrated the body of the rock. He remembered how
he was astonished to hear it and how he and the rest of his lieutenants had a good hearty laugh, upon realizing what the noise sounded like then.
But now, no one was laughing.
“This is perhaps the greatest military crisis ever to befall us, and it’s all because of those damn vibrations! Damn them and the sound they made!” Yemen mentally raged as he almost shouted out loud, but he was old, so he did the shouting in his mind.
“THE GREATEST MILITARY DISASTER IN OUR NATION’S ENTIRE HISTORY, AND IT WAS ALL BROUGHT ABOUT BY VIBRATING ROCK FARTS!”