by Doug Farren
All eyes turned toward Wang. “Tholtaran history is not very clear concerning this aspect of their philosophy concerning warfare. However, from what I've been able to determine, an adversary must first prove himself to be a worthy adversary before the Tholtarans will allow them to accept defeat.
“Tholtarans will fight until one side is no longer able to engage in battle. The defeated enemy is usually given the option to accept their defeat to prevent further loss of life. What happens afterwards depends upon how worthy of an opponent the enemy was and why the two parties were fighting to begin with.”
“So in other words,” President Steeples summarized. “We either fight them to the best of our abilities and accept whatever terms of peace they offer us after they defeat us or we surrender and become a race of worthless slaves. I vote we fight.”
The was a rumble of agreement around the table. A vote was taken and a unanimous decision was made to fight. Following this vote, the members then turned toward planning the defense of Earth against the coming attack.
39
Retaliation
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===== March, 2069 (Terran calendar) =====
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The long range detection monitor chimed indicating that an unknown vessel had been detected. The operator, who had been idling chatting with the woman at the communications station, glanced at the screen. He frowned and muttered, “That can’t be right. Damn thing’s on the fritz again.”
The communications operator rolled her chair over so she could see what all the fuss was about. “Wow! Better switch to the backup.”
“It has to be a malfunction,” the operator talked as he manipulated his touchscreen. “No ship is…Bloody hell!” As the backup detector array switched from standby to active the screen showed a single, very large object approaching at FTL speed. “Commander! You’d better come take a look at this,” the operator yelled across the room.
Commander Finucan was on the other side of central operations getting a cup of coffee. He stopped pouring, placed the decanter back on the burner, and then walked over to the tactical console. “What have you…Holy cow! What the hell is that?”
“I have no idea sir, but whatever it is appears on both the primary and the backup detection array. It’s also big enough to be picked up far beyond our normal maximum detection range.”
“I don’t care what it is,” the Commander said returning to his command chair. “It’s coming from Tholtaran space and I, for one, am not going to wait around to see if it’s real or not. Comms, begin open transmission to Earth and get me the captain of the Texas.”
Commander Finucan’s right hand came down on a button and the base’s alarm system announced the call to battle stations. As the base prepared itself for battle the face of Captain Bennett appeared on Finucan’s screen. “Captain Bennett, we’ve picked up an extremely large object heading this way from Tholtaran space. It’s traveling at 486c on a direct course for us. Put your battle group at general quarters.”
The captain looked off screen and nodded his head, turned back toward the commander and said, “Have you picked up anything else? Just how large is this object?”
“If our readings are correct, it’s nearly twenty kilometers in diameter. It’s generating so much spacial interference that we’ve been able to detect it at a much greater distance than our normal maximum range. At its current speed it will be here in under twelve hours. If it has an escort of smaller ships we should be able to pick them up in about two hours.”
It didn’t take long for the rumor to spread throughout the entire base that a ship of truly monstrous proportions was bearing down on them. Those who were religious (and some who previously had not been) prayed to their God (or Gods). A silence fed by fear fell over the entire base. The fear became worse when the escort ships started to appear on the screen. Nineteen dreadnoughts and seventeen battleships along with twenty-two heavy cruisers in addition to the monster were heading toward them.
The Thor class battleship was the largest and most powerful ship in the Human fleet. It had a length of just over 450 meters and massed nearly 150,000 tons. A Tholtaran battleship was not only dimensionally larger but it boasted a mass of at least 200,000 tons. The even more powerful dreadnoughts were larger than Human fighter carriers and massed approximately 350,000 tons. These ships alone would have been sufficient to defeat the defenses of Pucker-eight. The giant, which many had begun referring to as the juggernaut, was simply too large to imagine.
Commander Finucan had been pacing the floor of the operations center for the last fifteen minutes. His path carried him behind the communications operator who had been periodically trying to contact the Tholtaran fleet. “Any reply?”
“No sir.”
“Do we still have an open line to Earth?” Finucan was referring to the continuous transmission to Earth that he had ordered the moment the base had gone to battle stations. This had been in response to an order to do so from Earth so that all available information concerning the Tholtaran forces could be received. The communications channel was very tight-beamed and contained a stream of highly compressed data from multiple sensors and a set of five cameras monitoring the operations center.
“Yes sir. I’m not detecting any signs of jamming from the Tholtarans.”
“Thank you. Tactical, how long?”
“Based upon their current deceleration rate they should be within weapons range in about ten minutes. Sir, I think I can get a visual of them now.”
“By all means!”
The main screen in the front of the operations center was replaced with a blurry image. It slowly came into focus as the computer cleaned up the image. Commander Finucan stared unbelieving at what had appeared. “It can’t be,” he muttered. Keeping his eyes on the screen he walked closer until his knee bumped into a console. “I don’t freaking believe it!” he practically yelled.
The tactical officer, along with everyone else in the room, was staring at the immense ship that was closing in on them. Its shield had not yet been raised allowing them to see the details of its construction. The juggernaut's central structure was that of a cube. Attached to each of the six faces of this cube was a pyramidal structure. If the points could be placed inside a sphere, the sphere would have measured nearly twenty kilometers in diameter. “You recognize this thing, sir?” the tactical officer asked incredulously.
The commander turned toward the tactical officer, pointed at the screen with an outstretched arm, and replied, “I once saw one of those on a trip to Tholta, the Tholtaran home world. At the time, I was told that it was an orbital defense station. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that it was capable of interstellar flight. I’ll bet you the other races of the Consortium don’t know about it either.”
At that moment, the juggernaut's shield sprang into existence causing the ship to appear as if it had been surrounded by a silvery sheen. The juggernaut's shield was very different than that of any other ship. All other shields where perfectly spherical extending out a certain distance from the ship it protected. The juggernaut's shield, on the other hand, gave the huge ship the appearance that it had been suddenly covered in silver bubble-wrap. It was obvious that such a monstrous ship required a very different method of shielding it.
The Human ships had been charging their sledgehammers in anticipation of the coming battle. Like silvery decorations the crackling balls of energy waited to be launched. Captain Bennett was about to give the command to open fire when the Tholtaran's struck first. Hundreds of beams leaped across the gulf of space. The shields of the Human ships, recently strengthened with Tholtaran technology, briefly held against the terrible onslaught. A second later, Captain Bennett issued the command to fire.
Sixteen brilliant points of light along with dozens of beams of invisible energy converged on three Tholtaran heavy cruisers. The shields flared under the impact of the beams. Just as the sl
edgehammers were impacting the Tholtaran shields the Human beam weapons vanished. The ships that had been generating those beams were now lifeless and silent. Two of the Tholtaran heavy cruisers suffered major damage as their shields failed to stop the sledgehammers.
With the defending fleet out of the way, the Tholtaran's advanced on Pucker-eight. The bulk of the fleet stopped outside of the base's weapon's range. The juggernaut continued to advance. As it's immense bulk settled into position above the base, Commander Finucan gave the order to fire. The base's gigantic laser batteries poured gigawatt's of energy into the unyielding shield protecting the juggernaut. Hundreds of missiles were fired at the invader only to be blasted into vapor with ease.
The Tholtarans had originally built the juggernauts to provide them with a means of delivering planetary scale weaponry protected by planetary scale defenses to an enemy's doorstep. The original plans had called for a large ship but nothing approaching the size of the juggernaut. The engineers tasked with designing the ship first scaled it up so that it could mount planetary scale weapons. Then they added the stardrive. Because of the ship's size, the power requirements of the stardrive forced them to make the ship larger to accommodate the additional power generators.
The engineers then turned their attention to defense. They quickly discovered that no matter how much power was available, a single shield surrounding the entire ship (which by this time had become considerably larger than anticipated) would not be capable of providing the desired amount of protection. Shields, by their very nature were perfectly spherical and the generator was therefore mounted near the center of the ship.
After years of research the Tholtaran engineers discovered a way to link multiple shield generators located around the surface of an object to allow them to create a single shield. It was very strong but incredibly power intensive. Each shield generator required its own dedicated fusion reactor.
By placing hundreds of these generators next to each other the engineers were able to create a shield structure that was able to protect the new juggernaut. The shields actually interfered with each other causing them to deform slightly giving the shield's exterior the appearance of silvery bubble wrap.
Unfortunately, because of the power requirements of this new shield size of the ship grew even larger. Of course a larger ship required a larger stardrive which in turn required more space for power generation which meant the surface area the shields had to protect was larger giving rise to even more room needed for power generation.
This cycle continued until the juggernaut reached its current mammoth dimensions. Most of the ship's interior was filled with automated machinery. It was unbelievably inefficient but it was also the only ship in existence that could effectively defend itself against an attack from a planetary weapons array while at the same time delivering an equivalent counter attack.
Twenty enormously powerful sledgehammers slammed into the juggernaut's virtually impregnable shield. Eleven of them were deflected and caused no damage. Nine of them, however, impacted within a few meters of each other and, along with the ground-based lasers that had been targeting the exact same area, managed to briefly overload the local shield generator. The juggernaut's hull exploded into space. Molten junks of armor burned their way through the ship's outer bulkhead and into the shield generator. The damaged generator exploded blowing a fifteen meter hole in the side of the ship.
The Tholtaran engineers had designed their ship to withstand such damage. Interior bulkheads of thick armor limited the damage to a single shield generator module. The surrounding modules automatically adjusted themselves to compensate for the lost module and the ship was once again fully protected. In comparison to a normal sized ship, the damage would have been significant. But, considering the enormous volume of the juggernaut the damage was inconsequential.
As if angered, the juggernaut's titanic weapons spoke. Planetary scale beams of pure energy lashed out from the orbiting fortress and battered against the base's defense shield. Despite the fact that the shield had been strengthened it was no match for the unbelievable forces being brought to bear against it. For a brief fraction of a second, the shield fought a loosing battle against a force it could not stop. The Tholtaran beams tore through the shield and meandered across the face of Pucker-8.
When one of those incredible beams touched a building, that building literally exploded as the walls instantly vaporized. Weapon installations melted to form rivers of white-hot steel. The ground exploded in great gouts of superheated rock. The underground bunkers survived for a few seconds longer but the power of the Tholtaran weapons was irresistible.
After thirty seconds of continuous fire the juggernaut's weapons became silent. As the Tholtaran fleet moved off it left behind a pool of cooling molten material that had once been Pucker-8.
* * * * *
“We've lost the signal,” the communications operator said in a quiet voice.
Admiral Hunt's insides were churning and he felt as if he might discharge the contents of his stomach at any moment. The unbelievable destructive power of the Tholtaran juggernaut was still fresh in his mind. Setting his jaw, he walked over to the phone on his desk and picked it up. In the top floor of the United Nations building an identical phone began ringing. On the second ring the President picked up the receiver. “This is President Steeples.”
“Admiral Hunt sir. The Tholtarans have just obliterated Pucker-8. After...”
“I saw the video feed admiral,” the President interrupted. “How are you planning on defending Earth against a ship like that? Why did we not know that the Tholtarans even possessed such a ship?”
“It is my professional opinion Mr. President that nobody in the Consortium was aware of these ships until now. According to what Commander Finucan said, he was told that they were orbital defense stations. It is quite obvious that they are far more than that.”
“Agreed. So how do we kill it? The thought of that thing hovering overhead gives me the chills.”
“We saw in the video feed that it can be damaged. It's not indestructible. But it's going to require a tremendous amount of concentrated firepower. I recommend we pull all available ships back to Earth and arm them with every nuke we can salvage.”
There was silence on the other end as the President contemplated the enormity of this task. “You realize that you are asking the nuclear nations of the world to voluntarily give up their primary means of defense. I'm not sure I can convince them to do so.”
“Show them the video sir. If the threat of the extinction of the human race by a single Tholtaran ship doesn't convince them then I doubt that anything would. It's the only way. We've got to hit that ship with everything we have.”
“Any idea where they will strike next?”
“Olympus.”
“How long?”
“Based on the speed the ship was traveling at when it was picked up by Pucker-8 I would estimate between ten and fifteen days.”
“All right. Evacuate all unnecessary personnel. Pull every ship you can from the base except for enough to give the impression that we are defending it. Strip the base of anything we can use to defend Earth then get those ships back here so they can be armed. I want this done within a week. I'll see what I can do about getting you those nukes.”
“Understood sir.” The admiral gently placed the handset back into it's charger. Taking a deep breath to compose himself, he turned to his staff and began issuing orders.
* * * * *
“Excuse me sir.”
Jay Kauffman pulled himself away from the view he had of San Diego bay and looked to his left. A young man in his early twenties stood in the glare of the walkway's overhead lamp. It was nearly one o'clock in the morning and the air was crisp. A light sheen of dew had formed on the walkway's railing. “Can I help you?”
Jay had been having trouble sleeping and had gotten into the habit of going for long aimless walks late at night. On this particular night he had stopped to look out over the ba
y at the glowing city-scape of San Diego. He couldn't help but wonder how the city's sleeping inhabitants would react if they knew of the approaching Tholtaran fleet.
As Jay faced the person who had intruded on his thoughts recognition set in. “What are you doing out at this time of night Phillip?” Jay asked
“Oh good! I'm glad I found you Mr. Kauffman.” Phillip was a very intelligent student of advanced stardrive theory. He was Anita's choice to take over Jay's old position within AST. Jay remembered giving Phillip permission to stay in the house for the next few days so he could read Jay's early notes on continuum calculus. Jay suspected he was secretly working on a biography of the creator of the Human stardrive.
“I think you should come back to the house Mr. Kauffman. CAIN is acting a bit odd.”
That got Jay's full attention. “Define odd. CAIN is a machine, he can't act odd.”
The two started back toward the house, a walk of about a mile and a half. As they walked, Phillip explained. “I was digging though your old research notes and when I asked for the next set of equations CAIN seemed to forget where he had put them in his file system.”
“That's possible. He could have a storage unit going bad.”
“This was different,” Jay glanced over and he could see a measure of concern on the kid's face. “CAIN acted almost confused. It was like listening to an old man with dementia. He rattled off a string of incomprehensible sentences, some of them in languages I've never heard before, and then apologized.”
“He apologized?”
“Yes. He knew something had happened. When I asked him, he shrugged it off saying it was a glitch caused by a bad data link. I don't buy it. There's something not quite right with him.”
Twenty minutes later Jay walked into his study. “CAIN! Are you okay?”
