Sentience 1: Storm Clouds Gathering

by Gibson Michaels

  A multitude of polls had showed Tucky voters virtually split on the issue of secession. Tucky had strong economic ties to the staunchly Union planets of Hio, Indinara and Illini, while sharing a strong cultural bond with Ginia, Tensee and Souri. Tucky had little to gain and much to lose from a war between the planets. The election results of 3860 showed that Tuckians strongly opposed both secession and government coercion against the secessionists. Most Tucky citizens felt that Tucky should play the role of mediator between the Confederacy and the Alliance federal government. The Tucky planetary assembly had passed a neutrality bill back in May, when it became obvious that the Marrot administration intended to use force against Tucky’s Southern sisters, and the governor sent messages to both sides demanding that they observe Tucky’s neutrality in the coming conflict.

  Pro-Union organizers, fearing a surge in secessionist sympathy, called for an early special election on congressional and legislative seats on a weekend when only pro-Unionist legislators were warned to be in attendance. Barely producing a quorum, the early election bill was passed and set to occur in early June, so their pro-Southern opponents had no time to campaign on the issues at hand. The secessionists foolishly boycotted the election in protest. This allowed the pro-Unionist contingent to fill the Tucky assembly with pro-Union legislators, resulting in veto-proof Unionist majorities. The unexpected result was a pronounced imbalance between the actual opinions of the people of Tucky, and the voting legislators supposedly representing them. Afterward, the pro-Confederate contingent became the staunchest supporters of Tucky's neutrality.

  In November the secessionists, citing this manipulation of the Tucky elections as proof of the non-representative nature of the Tucky legislature, held their own secessionist convention, passed their own Ordinance of Secession and applied for admittance to the Confederacy.

  The Confederate Congress, perhaps a bit too eager to embrace what was certainly less than a clear majority of opinion of the people of Tucky, accepted Tucky as a member of the Confederacy, although the Unionist legislature remained firmly in control, in the Tucky capital of Ankfort. Although on paper, Tucky was now officially a part of the Confederacy, in reality it remained firmly in the Union camp, and Confederate Fleet forces avoided Tucky space out of respect for Tucky’s neutrality.

  The Confederacy conducted its first national elections in November, officially electing Lincoln Collier as President and rubberstamping most of the Confederate Congressmen as officially elected representatives of the Confederate people. Nothing really changed, other than lending the same leadership a new level of legitimacy.

  Chapter-38

  A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor. -- Aldous Huxley

  January-February, 3862

  The Union’s incredible industrial capacity revealed itself most remarkably in the sheer volume of warships and fighters it managed to produce in the six months after losing so many at Ginia the previous July. Unfortunately, its ability to produce new Fleet units far exceeded its ability to train new spacers in the skills necessary to crew them. The South had a similar problem, especially in the training of new fighter pilots.

  By February 3862, standing Fleet assets from Io, Wisco and Illini were joined at Illini by a task force detached from Waston under the command of Rear Admiral J.T. Turner, to form the new Fleet of Tensee, under the command of Vice Admiral Grant Loggins. Loggins was ordered to attack Confederate forces in the Tensee system in February, while a new offensive against Ginia was scheduled to launch shortly after.

  Loggins’ fleet stopped in the Tucky system to refuel, ignoring Tucky’s declaration of neutrality. Admirals Campbell and Bradley agreed to a multi-prong offensive, aimed at spreading Confederate defenses too thinly to be effective everywhere. The Consortium and their governmental puppets didn’t seem to care what the admirals did, as long as they did something, did it successfully, and didn’t lose another massive fleet in the process.

  The Norf Fleet Shipyard orbiting the Confederate planet of Ginia truly worked miracles in getting damaged warships back into fighting shape. Only the Federal carriers, and cruisers who’d had their sterns blown off, were still in the yards awaiting new reactors and engines.

  Again, politics reared its ugly head. After hearing of Loggins’ violation of Tucky’s neutrality, Confederate President Lincoln Collier issued orders for Admiral Rawley to send a 3rd Fleet unit into the Tucky system to “defend our Southern sister from further Union incursions.” Rawley protested the order most vigorously, stressing that the Federals had done no damage to Tucky, and that intelligence showed that Loggins’ fleet was en route to Tensee, where those assets would be sorely needed to repulse an impending Federal invasion there. President Collier ignored Rawley’s protests and allowed his order to stand. Confederate Secretary of Defense Hugh Johnson exacerbated the problem when, without notifying the president, he bypassed Rawley and issued movement orders directly to Vice Admiral Carpenter, ordering him to take his entire Task Force-31 to Tucky.

  Thus it was that Admiral Rawley had only TF-30 available to him when Loggins’ invasion fleet arrived in February.

  As Tensee also possessed an extensive asteroid belt, Rawley ensconced his single remaining task force within it, much as Thorn had done the previous July at Ginia. Loggins, wary of allowing the enemy to get into his rear as Bishop had done, ordered his fleet to thoroughly search through the asteroids for the Confederate ships. They found them — but usually only by being on the receiving end of incoming missile and pulse-laser fire.

  Neither side could utilize their fighters effectively within the dense asteroid field, so some very nasty ship-to-ship fighting amongst the drifting hunks of rock and iron ensued. Confederate fire from initially hidden positions took its toll on the probing Federals, but the Union fleet’s 3:1 numerical advantage slowly pushed Rawley back. The day might have ended very differently, had Rawley not been victimized by interfering politicians.

  Rawley managed to conduct an orderly withdrawal from the Tensee system. With his most direct route to Bama blocked by a Yankee fighter screen, Rawley withdrew TF-30 to Missip with casualties and damage, but without the complete loss of a single ship. Loggins, victimized by the Confederates’ only revealing their position after gaining the first shot, lost almost 40 percent of his fleet, but he’d managed to dislodge the Confederates and drive them from the Tensee system.

  March, 3862

  After conducting makeshift repairs to those of his damaged ships not destroyed outright, Loggins dispatched one task force under Rear Admiral Turner to attack Confederate Vice Admiral Helen Grove’s half task force at Arka, while dispatching a second task force under Rear Admiral Gonzalez to attack Rear Admiral Randall Pike’s half task force at Souri. Like Rawley and Thorn before them, both Grove and Pike both employed Thorn’s hide-in-the-rocks tactics, and obtained similar results — a lot more Union casualties, but eventually resulting in Confederate withdrawals before superior numbers.

  Rawley forwarded news of his defeat at Tensee, and subsequent withdrawal to Missip, to both Grove and Pike. Rawley’s TF-30 crews worked feverishly, utilizing what they could of Missip’s civilian shipyards, making repairs to the damage sustained at Tensee. Long-range scans performed by Confederate scout ships confirmed that the majority of Loggins’ damaged ships remained in orbit above Tensee. The planet itself had not yet been occupied, as Loggins had not brought any transports bearing Fleet Marines along with him. The Tensee governor withheld usage of Planetary Guard in-system fighters, opting to hoard them against the day they might be needed to disrupt Union troop drops attempting to occupy the planet.

  There still loomed the possibility that Loggins’ ships might bombard Tensee’s industrial sites from orbit, so speed was of the essence for Rawley. Rawley wanted to hurry and strike back at Loggins to drive him back out of Tensee, b
efore his widely dispersed fleet could regroup and be reinforced by another full fleet, known to be en route from Hio under Vice Admiral Marin Carlos.

  Rawley also issued orders for Vice Admiral Carpenter to bring TF-31 and rejoin him at Missip, but Carpenter refused to move from Tucky, until released by the president to do so, as his original orders to move there had come directly from the secretary of defense in the president’s name. After being driven from Arka and Souri, Grove and Pike rendezvoused with Rawley at Missip and, after hurried repairs, TF-32 followed TF-30 back to Tensee.

  The Planetoid Discol, City of Waston

  March, 3862

  “You’ve been unusually quiet lately, Bat,” said Vice Admiral Enrico Melendez. “Anything on your mind?”

  “Something bad is about to happen to J.T.,” answered Commander John “Bat” Masterson.

  Startled, Melendez asked, “A premonition?”

  “Gut feeling.”

  “Any substantiating facts, to back up this feeling?” asked Melendez.

  “Admiral, if there were, then by definition, it wouldn’t be a gut feeling anymore.”

  “Smart ass.”

  “Any idea where J.T. is now, sir?”

  “I think his task force is at Tensee, with Loggins.”

  “In that case, I think Chris Rawley is about to stick something sharp and pointy up Loggins’ ass.”

  Twenty minutes later, Melendez went to see Admiral Bradley concerning Bat’s sixth-sense alert. Even Doug Campbell was starting to believe in Bat’s uncanny intuitive leaps.

  Troxia Station, in orbit around the Trakaan Planet Troxia

  Fraznal had been unusually cooperative in sharing staggering amounts of information the Trakaan had gathered, concerning an incredible multitude of human languages. The Raknii had one language. The Trakaan had one language. It appeared that humans had over a thousand languages. Fraznal claimed the Trakaan could not be sure of exactly which of all these human languages the Raknii might actually run across, so he’d forwarded information on them all. He had also cautioned Raan and Drix that humans were incredibly adaptable, innovative and fluid in their culture, so it was possible they might also run into languages not in the Trakaan databases.

  Region-Master Raan issued calls for a massive build-up of supplies and additional Imperial Fleet assets, before initiating the move of the station to one of the five inhabitable planets the Trakaan had traded to the Raknii, for the return of their conquered planet Troxia. These five planets were positioned such that they made excellent jump-off points for their impending assaults on the known human planets.

  Fortunately, Supreme-Master Xior had already begun pulling hundreds of fleets from within the thousands of regional fleets spread across the entire Rak Empire, against the day the prophesied aliens were discovered. No one dreamed that discovery had already been made while Xior, Raan and Drix were having their discussions in the imperial palace on Raku. This left the Rak woefully short of the initial Fleet strength that seemed prudent to have positioned well forward, when combat against these ultimate predators was actually initiated. It was going to take considerable time to gather the envisioned Raknii armada together.

  END

  To be continued, in Defying the Prophet: Book-2 in the Sentience trilogy.

  An Excerpt from Book-2 of the Sentience trilogy: Defying the Prophet

  Commander Kathy Edison had been lucky. As executive officer aboard the light cruiser USS Cheyenne, on guard duty here at Minnos, she’d continued fighting the ship against these strange invaders after Captain Robinson was killed by a disabled enemy ship, which intentionally threw itself into the Cheyenne’s bridge compartment.

  Edison had finally been forced to announce “abandon ship,” after energy bolts went up Cheyenne’s ass and overloaded her #2 reactor... which promptly went into thermal runaway. Edison did everything by-the-book. She verified her surviving crew got off safely, set the auto-destruct charges and was the last one off. She’d watched with some satisfaction as her life pod sped away from her doomed ship, as the destruct charges she’d set took out another enemy ship that got too close, while trying to stick yet another energy blast into the old girl’s butt.

  Fortunately, her life-pod’s reentry system worked as advertised and she safe-landed near a pig farm, on the night side of the planet. Her satellite communicator had stopped working… the whoever-the-hell-it-was that was attacking them had probably knocked the birds down. From what Edison had seen, they were shooting at anything that moved up there. She’d even got a glimpse of some atmospheric fighters tangling with the invaders surprising little ships, just before her pod crossed over into the night-side of the planet and began its landing cycle. A half-mile hike and a short, but intense moment with a frightened pig farmer holding a shotgun, and she’d been on the farmer’s landline communicator to Fleet HQ in Minnaplis. A rotary winged rescue vehicle picked her up an hour and a half later, and whisked her back to HQ for debriefing.

  “They had the strangest warships I’ve ever seen,” Edison stated. “Almost destroyer class, but not quite… more like what you’d get if bred a destroyer to a cutter. Guess you’d have to call them the equivalent to the old corvette class. Didn’t see any variations either — like they all were made from the same mold, like cookies. They looked cramped... really cramped. I’d really hate to try standing up in one of the damned things.

  “They launched no missiles at all, that I saw,” Edison continued. “Just energy weaps and small ones at that. Looked to be about the equivalent of two, twin 3 or 3.5-gigawatt pulse-lasers up front, with a single twin mount at the stern.

  “Their armor appeared to be similar to destroyer class. Even medium-yield missiles took’em right out. Didn’t seem to have any ECM either. Almost every missile we fired, hit. We were kicking the hell out of them until they got behind us… just too damned many of them. Couldn’t maneuver to keep them off our tail. They were everywhere.”

  Elite Rak demolition specialists wearing space armor landed upon the outer surface of the human’s orbital fort and blasted their way past the fort’s airlock doors and hundreds of Raknaa assault troops stormed inside, only to be met with significant resistance from the station’s human crew. Eventually though, numbers won out and with the fall of the orbital fort, a narrow arch existed where the assault fleets could approach the planet in relative safety.

  Ten full assault fleets, filled with over 500,000 of the large Raknaa warriors, a sub-breed of the Raknii race, had accompanied the fleet-of-fleets to the human planet. The six assault fleets that ran the gauntlet of missile and pulse-laser fire from the two forts that could still target their approach, now positioned themselves and began raining Rak shock troops down on the planet’s surface. Assault shuttles by the thousands blackened the skies above the human cities. More atmospheric fighters rose to oppose the landing, destroying hundreds of shuttles, but Raknii warships finally took them out after their bases were located.

  As the surviving 215,000 Rak assault troops were pulling themselves together into fighting organizations to occupy the planet, the humans pulled yet another surprise out of their playbook. Artillery rounds began driving the lightly armored Rak infantry vehicles off of the roads. The Rak were unfamiliar with indirect fire and their advance was slowed significantly until Rak warships located and destroyed the strange tube-like weapons lobbing high explosives across absurd distances, to land with incredible precision amongst the Raknaa assault troops.

  Even as the Rak assault troops regrouped and again began their advance towards the cities, strange heavily armored, tracked land vehicles carrying mammoth explosive firing projectile tubes, began shooting direct-fire anti-armor and anti-personnel explosives, which chewed the approaching Raknaa to pieces. Only the Rak warships had sufficient firepower to destroy these armored monsters, but there were too few of them left to prevent massive Rak casualties.

  The Raknii were baffled by the aliens’ behavior. These humans just didn’t seem to realize that whoever controlled
space, controlled the planet, so either humans were too stupid to understand when they were beaten, or they had more strange surprises awaiting the advancing Raknaa. The latter turned out to be the case, as when the Rak warships descended low enough to engage the human’s armored vehicles, they received another nasty surprise. Clouds of mobile, shoulder-mounted missiles having armor-piercing warheads rose to meet them from formations of human ground troops supporting their armor. By the time the Rak warships finished off the last of the armored behemoths, only 106 Rak warships remained and over half of the Raknaa assault force had been destroyed in just the first four turns of ground combat.

  The surviving 125,000 Raknaa again regrouped into fighting units and engaged the 20,000 Alliance Fleet Marines and Planetary Guard troops in some of the nastiest infantry combat in recorded Rak history. The human troops appeared to be using some kind of projectile weapons that did terrible things when they impacted on the bodies of the unarmored Raknaa. Of course, the Rak energy rifles produced similar effects on unarmored human bodies as well, but most of the human warriors appeared to be wearing some kind of resistive body armor, the likes of which the Raknii had never seen. Machine gun nests took a terrible toll on charging masses of Rak warriors, reminiscent of ancient Japanese banzai charges. Automatic weapons spat an unimaginable amount of deadly projectiles that shredded the Rak assault troops.

  The remaining warships aided with fire support, whenever especially well-entrenched defenders needed removing, but the humans were actually employing thrown explosive devices… another idea that absolutely amazed the Rak. Later, the humans introduced the Raknaa to indirect mortar fire. Their warships were often unable to locate the small, mobile launch tubes and thousands of Rak warriors actually fled from the inexplicable rain of death, coming from Dol only knew where. These humans were absolutely enamored with explosions and had devised an incredible number of ways of creating them!