Chapter 201: (The War - Leebaw) (1/2)
War.
War never changes.
The weapons, the players, the goals, the setting, they may change.
But war never changes.
There are theorists who talk about X Generation Warfare, who go on about various force projection methods and the like.
But war is ultimately about smashing someone's face in until they submit to you or are all dead or you are dead.
Most species forget this. War become negotiation and perhaps a small bit of fighting with the most casaulity minimizing technology available being put in wide use.
War is never like either side thinks. Not unless you've been there. Not unless you've heard the sound of enemy fire whip by your ear and feel the sting of how close it was. Not unless you've stood among the mangled metal and burnt meat that had once been people you knew, the crackle of the flames and the popping of fat somehow louder than the fight that is still going on around you. Not unless you've hacked up ash that was once someone you knew.
knew war. You could ask any of their allies, their few remaining enemies, and those who were still running centuries after meeting the . Each of them would give you a thousand different reasons excel at war. From ”Oh, they grew up on a Deathworld” to ”They're all crazy” to ”It is in line with the Ninth Concordence as Spoken by Hrevakinia the Unbowed in the Age of Tlaguth.”
But the truth was simpler.
War.
War never changes.
--Huk-uk-nuk, Prophet of the Word of Jawnconnor
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The Goggle-Imp sat in the Oort Cloud, watching the system closely. Its scanners were careful, passive for the most part but once every now and then risking an active ping. It watched both an hour ahead and an hour behind as well as the present, the temporal scopes normally used for superluminal travel having been repurposed into scanners of a different type.
A single warship, a craft of the hated feral intelligence, had been sitting in the system for several planetary rotations. It did not approach the single inhabited planet, which had not electromagnetic signals from it with the exception of a single space station. It merely hung out in space between the third and fourth planets.
The planet was a priority target. It had resisted the might of Those Who Gathered once after having been wiped out previously. Records showed that recently a small race was defended by the hated Ferals and Those Who Gathered were forced to retreat from the system.
Which is why the Goggle-Imp watched.
The ship had been there too long to be anything but a picket and enough time had passed that mathematically there should not be any reinforcements coming. There were no attending craft, no troop transports, nothing but the single large warship.
A ping of the subspace foam, an inhospitable place of crazed mathematics where the scream of the Big Bang still sounded out, showed that there were no vessels impossibly lurking within it.
The Goggle-Imp sent the message, via tachyon stream, to the carriage it rode into the system on. The hyperpulse generator, a costly, inefficent device that used up tremendous resources, bleeted out the code.
COME. ONE SHIP.
The reply came almost instantly.
ENROUTE.
The Goggle-Imp would have felt frustration if it was capable of it as ships started suddenly streaking into existence.
But the hypercom receiver was offline.
It was too late.
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>>TWO OPERATING MINDS DETECTED
>>STARTING CHAT ROOM
>>HOOD has joined the chat
>>KAGA has joined the chat
HOOD>Hey! How's things?
KAGA> Not bad. You?
HOOD> Got a new captain. Not her first command though, thankfully.
KAGA> Who else is coming? My orders were redacted.
HOOD> No clue.
>>YAMATO has joined the chat
YAMATO> The Phased Wave Plasma Motion firepower has arrived!
HOOD> Hey!
KAGA> Wow, really?
YAMATO> What's going on, guys? Who else is coming?
HOOD> No clue. Redacted orders.
YAMATO> Who's in charge?
KAGA> Says TBD on my orders. Want me to ask my Captain?
>>MARAT has joined the chat
MARAT>Back in action, baby! Holy crap, it's Kaga!
KAGA>Sup?
MARAT>Who's on charge? Gotta be Hood. My money's on Hood.
>>IKTAKAK has joined the chat
IKTAKAK>BREAK OUT THE ICE CREAM, BABY!
YAMATO>Oh God, there goes the neighborhood.
IKTAKAK>Love you too, Yamato. Damn, been a while since we were all together.
HOOD> Mar-gite Invasion.
KAGA> That long? Wow.
IKTAKAK>Who's on charge? My Admiral's nervous.
HOOD> We're not even sure who all is coming.
KAGA> We here to protect these guys? Who are they?
HOOD> Leebawian or something like that. Little frog people. They just want left alone, so only the Elven High Queen talks to them. The Lankys and the Precursors thumped them pretty hard.
KAGA> So what is our objectives?
HOOD> No clue.
IKTAKAK> Me neither. Seems weird we'd be here without support ships though.
YAMATO> Oh crap.
HOOD> What?
YAMATO> My Captain's interface is out. I can't wake him up.
KAGA> That's not good.
>>BISMARK has entered the chat
KAGA> Wow! Welcome, grandfather.
BISMARK> It is a pleasure to receive your greeting. I greet all of you. I see each of you. I am pleased to be active once more. Your new hull is impressive, Kaga. Yamato, your guns are as mighty as your hearts. Hood, I reaffirm our bond of brotherhood. My Captain is booting up. He too expresses pleasure to be among you once more. Point me toward the enemy and our guns, together, shall silence them in fury and steel. WE are the BEAST made of STEEL!
KAGA WHISPER TO HOOD> Wow. They really hauled out this guy? Man.
HOOD WHISPER TO KAGA> Shhh. Show some respect.
IKTAKAK>Greetings, Ancient One.
BISMARK> I see you, Strikes Sure in Fury. I greet you. It is pleasant to fight by your side again. Your new hull is impressive. May it serve you well.
IKTAKAK>Thank you, Ancient One.
BRINGER OF STALWART FURY has entered the chat
BRINGER OF STALWART FURY has been autorenamed to BRINGER
BRINGER> Hey! How is everyone?
BISMARK> I greet you. I see you, Bringer of Stalwart Fury. Your new hull speaks of strength and martial power. My captain is not yet fully booted up but sends his compliments and admiration to your crew.
BRINGER> Thank you, Elder.
HOOD> Damn, who all is showing up?
KAGA> No clue. Heard we might be heading into battle as a full task force, not split up.
MARAT> Who's going to stand against us?
HOOD> Lanky space has a lot of ships, and we're damned impressive.
BISMARK> Where there are foes for our guns to blot away, brothers, that is the heading we shall take with all fury! Let the roar of our engines make the enemy tremble in fear, brothers!
>>ENTERPRISE has entered the chat
KAGA> Wow! I thought you were undergoing refit.
ENTERPRISE> I was. They interrupted my trial.
KAGA> Know where our support is? My Captain's interface is damaged. I can't boot him up.
ENTERPRISE>I know as much as you.
YAMATO> Dammit.
>>ARIZONA has entered the chat
>
ARIZONA>What? What the hell? I'M UNDER ATTACK! THIS IS THE ARIZONA OPERATING MIND, I AM UNDER ATTACK!
BISMARK> Be warned, brothers! We are being ambushed! Quickly, load the guns! My Captain is not responding. WE SHALL PREVAIL!
BISMARK ENTERS FULL AUTONOMOUS MODE
KAGA> Oh. Shit.
HOOD> PRECURSORS! GET THE SHIELDS UP! Everyone, form on me, Bismark, center rank, load your guns. Everyone, select your targets, run your solutions through Arizona.
ARIZONA> My combat control is online, I can handle it.
HOOD>Fire at will.
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Delivers Silence to the Screaming exited Hellspace, sending out the order to clear guns for action before his sensors had even cleared. He was half blind, not only from his own Hellspace exit but from the sheer tidal wave of incoming Hellspace exits. He couldn't see and the Hellspace energies hadn't dissipated yet, but he still began to spin up his battle screens.
His vision cleared and his arrays immediately went into overdrive.
The enemy was less than two light seconds away!
OPEN FIRE! he transmitted to every vessel that had exited Hellspace already.
Two more Feral ships appeared, seeming to streak and smear across space for a second before terminating in a ship.
TARGET ALL NEW COMERS!
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Arizona took a full barrage of nCv cannon shells to her forward port shield, nearly three hundred of them, each the size of a freight train engine. Unlike the previous battles against the Precursor Autonomous War Machines these all hit with unerring accuracy. Each of them hitting within a kilometer of each other.
Arizona's primary port forward battlescreen went down and she rolled in place.
The Precursors weren't the only ones firing.
Bismark roared in fury and his guns thundered, sending shockwaves through spacetime around him for nearly 10 kilometers as the massive C+ guns tore apart space in flame-like bursts from the ends of the guns as shells the size of some species destroyers screamed from the barrels.
A Harvester Class took the barrage from the Bismark amidships and its shields failed, the second barrage from the Bismark, fired less than a second after the first, shattered the graviton shielding, the third smashed deep into the hull and craters the size of cities exploded from the hull of the Devestator in great plumes of plasma.
Hood fired its guns, firing at the smaller ships with its lighter guns and at the Harvester Class with its main guns. It's namesake had only been a battle-cruiser, but it was a modern battle-ship, with a battleship's guns and a battleship's fury.
Smaller craft broke apart under the pounding of Hood's guns. The Harvester targeted spun to bring another field of battle-screens into play as the Hood's guns slammed into the shield and caused the screen projectors to fail. The Harvester rotated up new projectors through the new Combat Refit System, bringing them from immediate storage to active use.
”HERE COMES THE FIST!” Marat bellowed out and fired even as he took hits to his own battle-screens. His Captain wasn't fully online yet but Marat knew his duty even as he moved forward in the formation to take point. He was the pride of the Vodka Trog Navy, who had broke the back of all who had faced them, who had fought the Mantid even when his back was broken in the repair slip and prevented the Mantid from ever landing on the moon of Titan.
Marat's shells, massive C+ Cannons, hit the new shields that the Harvester Class was deploying, focused graviton backed by integrity fields, and exploded. The Grav-Shielding flickered, bowed, blew out the battle-screen behind it, but held. The Devestator rolled, knowing the next hit would plow deep into its hull.
Kaga tucked in close to Enterprise. Both ships brought their reactors and creation engines online. Neither's Captains had spun up and the clone banks and the SUDS stacks were still coming online, so they hung back, staying out of the way of the heavy metal.
More Helljump portals ripped open as even more Precursor AWM's appeared in the system.
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>>SINGING DUCK has entered the chat
SINGING DUCK> What's going... WHO THE FUCK IS SHOOTING AT ME?
ARIZONA> IT'S AN AMBUSH! SHIELDS UP! GET IN FORMATION!
YAMATO> Taking Port Forward. Firing Main Gun Array One. Target hit. Target shields down. Firing Main Gun Array Two. Target hull compromised. Guns Cooling. Target Destroyed. Falling Back.
ARIZONA> Enterprise, Kaga, what's your status? We could use some fruit flies out here.
ENTERPRISE> We need more time! Our banks and engines were in travel mode!
KAGA> I'm got a failure on Creation Engine Two. WHERE'S OUR SUPPORT?
BRINGER> Failure in Battery-Seven. Failure in Point Defense Three. I AM IN NEED OF IMMEDIATE REFIT AND REPAIR! REPAIR CODE: #81000005.48454C50
ARIZONA> Iktakak get close up on Bringer till she can defragment her systems.