It was after one of these relocations that the space station started the survey of the next sector of the rings, just as it had dozens of times before. This time though one of the probes went off course, a minor malfunction in the navigational computer.
The probe veered off and plummeted into the planet’s atmosphere where the plasma exhaust of its engines reacted, violently, with the atmosphere.
Plasma as a fourth state of matter is volatile but essentially short-lived without something to maintain it. Just like a fire needs both fuel and oxygen to continue to burn. Plasma engines provide fuel from combining a combustible substance with a high-energy charge. This plasma is then a massive conductor and provides a lot of thrust.
The plasma from the engines hit the contents of the atmosphere and found a new source of fuel in an environment that had an abundance of space to explode in. A mushroom cloud and expanding shockwave in brilliant colors from lavender to a green edged midnight blue.
The mushroom expanded, the center collapsed and the plasma storm burnt out, to recover the sudden vacuum the rest of the atmosphere, already continent-sized storms, came funneling in like a hurricane more massive than a moon.
Electrical discharge like lightning only so big it was visible from space would shoot from one side of the twisting clouds to the other. When looking down from orbit, the effect was like water running down a drain to fill up the land below while a mad rave of light and color meshed across the open spaces.
It was a fantastic spectacle which took days to complete a full cycle.
Although the grand show was not entirely unique, it did put a new appeal on the planet’s location in the galaxy. A tourist trade of intent observers would regularly be flown in on starships to stare in awe as more plasma bombs dropped in for their amusement.
Soon an entrepreneur built a small starbase resort, luxurious and meant for the wealthier citizens of the galaxy. It provided many of the amenities such beings would expect and held itself as the establishment from which to sit back, relax and watch the show.
This was why the remote solar system had been chosen by Babble to host the talks among the various ambassadors he was engaged in discussions with. The Balimdor starship had completed their faster than light run into the solar system and stopped a fair distance away from the crowded orbital space of the resort hotel.
This was partly planned and partly practical.
Around the mining area, there were the usual refinery stations, collector ships, and the transports which delivered the gas for sale. Smaller tugs, shuttles, and maintenance craft were always around and at this time also the luxury yachts, private ships and other transports for the next plasma bomb show.
Two thousand kilometers out was enough distance to give the ambassadors time to wake up and prepare themselves to disembark onto the resort and get a good view of the approach. Which was also what had given the Balimdor starship time to get away from the terrible attack that started just seventy seconds after they returned to realspace.
Almost directly opposite their approach, the starlight pinpricks against darkest black of open space shifted and brewed. Something looking like clouds billowed in an area hundreds of kilometers across and just as many high. Powerful discharges of energy cracked among the strange energy effect, a disturbance of high energy and immense gravitational pressure according to the ship's sensors.
SAI silently confirmed for the humans that this was the way the Tempest traveled. Aside from their terrible attacks, terror tactics and genocide their effect on space in faster than light travel said a lot about how they got their name.
To the humans and most mammalian beings, it was distinctly as if space itself boiled out storm clouds pushed along by an unstoppable wind.
The actual physics as described by SAI and giving the humans another minor headache was that exotic matter was pushed out of other space-time realities. Gravitational pressure tore realspace open from inside the faster than light realm the Tempest used to travel.
It was not nearly as neat as any other species’ form of faster than light travel and nothing like using the much higher gravitational force of Gravitonics to create wormholes.
This being the first time that anyone on the Puzzle Box saw it there were murmurs of theory and some concern. Babble, having seen it before shuddered at what was going to happen next.
The storm began to rain, tens of thousands of tiny objects, light glinting in reflections from the nearby sun. Each one varied between half and a full meter in diameter, their surface hard and lumpy.
Science readings showed that there was an immense amount of localized masses coming out of the tear in space-time. Closer scans proved that each of the small objects, each raindrop, had an equivalent mass far in excess of its size.
There was no physical science in the Galactic Citizenship which could compress that much mass density into so small a space. There would also have been no need to try to do something so expensive.
That much mass, no matter the size, meant more power required to move it around in space, so even as a ship’s armored hull it was impractical in the extreme. Considering their size and the density the sensors couldn’t reliably define anything about the interior of the raindrops.
If there were anything organic inside it would have to be small, so would the equipment like power supply and engines. Something must have been there to make that tear in space, or something on the outside might have been holding the tear open.
Many of the beings watching, particularly the Domum, considered that these were perhaps just the equivalent projectiles from a railgun.
Fire and forget ordinance meant only to destroy.
It seemed that their assumption was right at first, the raindrops “fell” from the storm clouds into the mix of space-faring vessels and the mining station as well as the luxury resort as if they were being pulled down to the surface of the planet behind them.
Fundamental physics held that force equals mass times velocity.
These raindrops had more mass each than entire cities; just one of them carried enough momentum from the tear in space to generate the equivalent force of several megatons in nuclear warheads.
They tore through the space tugs and blew them apart in small explosions of superheated gas, the metals, and engines combining in split seconds into the irradiated matter that vaporized into rapidly cooling plasma.
The larger starships shields flared brightly, and briefly before red-hot rimmed holes were drilled through their hulls. Internal explosions of radiation tore them open from the inside. With multiple raindrops striking every surface there was barely any time to see what happened between one hit and then the rest.
Those starships followed the tugs into oblivion.
The larger transports had much better shielding, as did the mining vessels, it also helped that theirs was usually on unlike the others who had responded as quickly as they could to active the defenses.
Raindrops beat into them and bounced off, leaving bruised expanding radiation from each impact flowing over those shields. If there had been only a few, then they might even have survived, but dozens were striking every available surface.
These well-protected starships were also beaten into expanding vapor.
At the angle which they fell most of the raindrops scythed through space just a bit beyond the
Space stations and some of the closer starships. Those few, which did manage solid hits, bounced off their shields, the space stations having bigger generators.
If these dense raindrops, or perhaps hailstones would be more descriptive, simply fell toward the planet then the worst was over. Babble watched has horror crossed the faces of the beings when the video showed these hailstones slowing down and then veering off in different directions.
Each of these small things could move around in space on their own, at a much slower speed but still relative to any other starship capable of interstellar flight. They had overshot the station and surviving starships by thousands
of kilometers.
That would typically give the starships at least plenty of time to get away, maneuver out of the gravity well’s closest drag and escape into faster than light drive.
The Balimdor starship was already turning around, the captain calmly directing navigation to plot an emergency escape vector. The drives were spinning up, engine tubes glowing a white-blue with the acceleration.
Neutrino spin inertial dampeners kept the various Beings on board from being squashed to the nearest walls as they accelerated to over fifty gees in only a few seconds.
The exotic faster-than-light manifold failed to open.
Gravity waves emanating from the Tempest rift in space collided with the drives attempt to exert its own pressure on other faster than light particles. Interference on a scale even the Domum interdiction military vessels could not produce.
By all sensor readings, the effect covered almost a full light second from the Tempest rift, more than three hundred thousand kilometers.
The starships closest to the rift had no chance, with their engines pushed to maximum, beyond safety limits; they could achieve hundreds of kilometers per second in just a minute or two.
The Tempest hailstones were faster.
They looped back from their initial straight lines down and through the devastation they created. Some topped their speed at three hundred gees and could probably have kept accelerating.
Whatever technology allowed them to not only fly through space without any visible engines was also so much more advanced than the Galactic Citizenship. Nothing the Domum military had built, their most advanced designs, could keep a Being safe at over seventy-five gees.
The hailstones struck again, Tempest impacted starship’s shields at their slower but still potent mass times velocity.
Some of the shields held for several strikes, designed as they were to survive the shots from railguns with higher velocity although smaller projectiles depending on the source. Domum military would be able to put out any number of different shots, the Tempest seemed to be content with ramming everything in sight.
Multiple angles of severe blows spread the load over the shield generators, the starships that had their own defensive weaponry fired back. Tempest hailstones rebounded from shields with glowing sides, the irregular surface of their bizarre craft highlighted by plumes of radiation.
Where a railgun shot hit a hailstone, it was shoved off course, sometimes with a slight pitting, new molten craters in the side also glowing from the radiation.
There was no sign that they had shields, nothing electronic or electromagnetic to protect themselves. The Tempest relied on the super dense material their hailstones were made of, and there didn’t seem to be any losses.
Perhaps if a coordinated effort was made the civilian starships could have cracked apart a few of the Tempest. They didn’t have the discipline or firepower, Obragon Vax admitted that some of the captains must have kept cool heads, but all in all, it would have made no difference.
The computer counted thirty thousand and more Tempest already in the battle.
The outcome was as inevitable as it was horrifying to watch.
The asteroid mining station had its outer shields taken down, then the Tempest impacted the rock and the metal home of the Beings inside. The video couldn’t show them if the asteroid cracked before the space station was destroyed, it was academic either way.
They broke apart and along with the other debris began to fall down into the orbit of the ringed planet below them. Whatever resistance the civilians could put up didn’t buy them nearly enough time to get away, they all got perforated and became expanding globes of glowing space dust.
Mining drones and freighters further out were doing precisely what the Balimdor were. Striking out for open space as fast as they could manage.
None of them would ever make it, the Balimdor had just arrived, within protocol range, they had been a light second away from any local space traffic and were already nearing the edge of the interdiction field.
Tempest hailstones split off from the leading group, accelerating again they sent dozens after each of the nearby starships. Everyone watching could see that they were doomed.
A cluster of the hailstones grouped together, they seemed to stick to one another, an irregular cluster without uniform shape. Then the large group accelerated hard, even faster than the individual hailstones, and they were on an intercept course with the Balimdor.
Quick calculations on the navigational computer showed that they would intercept them in under two minutes. Just before the science station theorized that they would be able to go to faster than light speed.
Even though the audience watching the video knew the Balimdor starship had made it they still watched in tense silence as the Tempest closed on the escaping vessel.
It was close, oh so very close.
The cluster of Tempest came right up to the Balimdor starship then spun through a set of strange motions. Each one sent off a hailstone at them. Through luck or extremely skilled piloting, the giant starship veered and evaded a few of the hailstones.
The cluster caught up with them, somewhat minimized in size but still a large group, and spun over itself right into the wing of the crescent.
The captain gave the order to go to faster than light speed.
The Tempest cluster hit and then shattered through the shield at the point of impact and then tore through the hull behind it. Ripping out a ragged chunk of the starship just before the straining drive managed to haul them away.
The recording from there was full of crisis response, explosions on the bridge killed members of the crew. The Captain in a heroic effort to keep the ship on course took over from his killed pilot and plotted the next vector to the Puzzle Box before he took an explosive electrical charge and died.
Babble got to the bridge sometime later with other crew, in time to contain the worst of the damage and come out of faster than light drive and deliver his dire message.
As the video turned off and the Domum Alim researchers and scientists continued to examine the other data from the computer systems Obragon Vax turned to look over the crowd.
He gave a pointed look at Babble.
“Did you review the escape yourself before you showed this to us?”
Babble responded in his quiet diplomat's tone, tinged with fear.
“I did, and I had hoped that a Domum military mind would give me some peace.”
“I cannot.”
“What is it? What are they hinting at?” Meriam asked over the human's group channel.
Connor looked bleak, his feelings mixed. “I’m not sure.”
“I am.” Ormond had a grim but determined expression. He had seen this kind of thing before, had studied to do the very same thing.
He broke in out loud to the gathered group, a second had passed in their communication through thought. Neither Obragon Vax nor Babble had said anything else in that brief gap.
“Terror tactics. They want you to spread the news of their coming, just like all of the refugees.”
Obragon Vax nodded at the human, impressed.
“Yes, they allowed you to escape Babble.”
Excerpt from “Conlin Shaw and Orion’s Arrow”.
Humans colonized space in an ever expanding group of worlds, every nation made their own claim to territories out there in the galaxy.
We met aliens, just like us their home groups of differing creed and cultures distributed them to their own clusters in the stars.
What we all had in common was one thing, the threat of complete annihilation.
Space was dangerous sure, but populated space was also vulnerable to anyone with a big enough rock to throw down from orbit. Populations numbering in the trillions lived in a constant and warranted fear that bombardment could end them.
This was all going to change when Conlin Shaw found the Orion’s Arrow, human built and equipped to be the salvation for Humans and aliens alike.
But firs
t, the Orion’s Arrow had a mission for Conlin.
*
“Conlin, we have new space contacts in an inclined elliptical three light seconds out.”
Vickey seamlessly changed to a utility mode designed by Conlin for use by the AI as a naval officer.
Conlin stepped back to the center of the command ring.
“Show me.”
A globe of blue light sprang up around him with a faint set of grid lines showing the three-dimensional space around the Arrow. Distant markers showed the locations of star systems and a rogue comet. The nearest Jumpgate, the one Conlin had used before taking the tug to FTL out here, was also noted.
The most pressing icon was up to Conlin’s left when he looked at it his gaze would have gone to a point on the far ceiling of the bridge if he wasn’t focused inside the hologram.
“Classification Vickey?” He asked.
“The starship is not broadcasting an identification transponder. The Arrow’s database has extensive profiles, however. I have identified the type of ship and the most likely owners from its communication and sensor traffic.”
Vickey paused for another hologram to project up from the floor in front of Conlin, showing a complex set of structures attached together in a standard boxy form. Thrusters at one end and spaced around the long vessel for quick maneuverability. A rotating crew quarters just in front of the rear thrusters and in front of that the cages which held the many spacecraft docked to the main starship hull.
“Class 3 heavy carrier, operational status indicates that the crew is from the RAID Corporation.”
Conlin took a moment to see the sensor images resolve themselves over the three seconds wait between the two ships. A heavy carrier of that kind was well armed and had a flight of a hundred ships to worry about.
“Vickey, spin up whatever FTL drive the Arrow has, we may need to get out of here in a hurry. Send out a standard communication hail.”
“Yes, boss.”
Three seconds for the signal to reach the carrier on narrow beam laser radar. Another twenty seconds or so for them to work out a reply and then three seconds back to the Arrow.
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