Chapter 277: Total War (1/2)

The ships dropped out within a thousand miles of the resonance zone with only a few dozen crossing the line and exploding into molecular debris. The entire Fifth Wave exited jumpspace, their engines bleeding the twisted energies of the half-formed reality as they cooled off, jumpcores recharging, shields coming up as fast as possible, weapons being charged. Every station was manned, every backup station had crew members at it. Every Lanaktallan aboard the vessels were in their armored vacuum suits and plugged into the environmental systems. Every crew member a veteran, every weapon tested, every crew trained and even practiced.

It had been manned in silence.

It had left in secrecy.

It had trained in an empty system in the vast emptiness of the scorched and barren systems between Unified Council Space and the Confederacy.

They had done something unthinkable to even the Mantids. Sacrificed entire fleets to find the edges of the Confederacy's defenses. The Engine's radius had been discovered with only a few thousand ships. The Council had learned to avoid neutron stars, white dwarfs, and pulsars with less than twenty-thousand ships.

They had moved 'above' the Galactic Stub, through the endless dark and silence before regrouping ”above' their target.

It had been months of travel through jumpspace under silent running.

Now they had arrived.

And the Terrans would learn that the Unified Council was the supreme entity of the Galactic Spur, not jumped up lemurs with delusions of grandeur who sought to elevate themselves above their betters.

Fifteen million ships exited jumpspace in a globe around the Terra-Sol System.

Within a second the vast defenses of Terra-Sol engaged.

The fight was on.

Before a fleet of two hundred ships could even finish discharging their cores and drives to be able to bring up their shields C+ cannons with barrel diameters measured in meters slammed shells into the ships, the round impacting inside the hulls.

They were wiped out in the initial barrage even before the C+ cannon battery on Io had fired.

A fleet of nearly ten thousand ships began vomiting out torch-ships and other parasite craft.

The guns from Pluto's Guardian Station (Formerly named ”Eat Shit Mantids” Station) wiped them out of the sky with missile pods that dropped out of hyperspace, oriented, and fired before the pods were even loaded into the graviton assist launchers. The pods themselves oriented and activated their systems, graviton compressing the mass even as it fired itself and the mass driver at the nearest ship at nearly .5C.

The ships and the parasite craft were obliterated.

Nearly a million ships streamed toward each of the planets, firing their guns.

From out of the Oort Cloud streaked missiles, torpedoes, torch-ships, attack craft, and more.

The Unified Corporate Security Council ships were already firing at the planets, knowing that the planets couldn't move out of the way so mathematics stated that the weapons would hit. Everything from nanites to viruses to explosives to just good old kinetic grounds were fired at all the planets.

The Lanaktallan would crush the Terran's home system, the obvious ruling system of the entire Confederacy. They would pound on the Terrans until they could only surrender.

And then the Lanatkallan would destroy them.

Space howled, shuddered, and shattered under the weaponry being brought to bear. Massive warships roared out of their construction berths around Hateful Mars and Betrayed Mercury, launched from the stations around Scarred Venus, cleared for action and launched from the vast shipyards around Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Urectum. From Pluto the big guns kept firing even as the primary weapon system went from standby to charging.

The Lanaktallan had assumed that all of the system's defenses would be cold, would take time to bring online due to the waste of keeping them ready for action.

They were wrong.

Terra had learned that lesson at the hands of the Skanetti before they even built their first colony. Before they had even met the Mantid or Treana'ad. Had learned that the more valuable it was to humanity the harder an actively malevolent universe would try to take it away.

The Lanaktallans smashed face first against what every race of the Terran Confederacy viewed as the worst thing in the known universe to attack.

Fortress Sol.

Around Sol itself graviton generators focused on vast plasma coronal loops, compressing it, shaping it, aiming it. Opening up jumpgates and firing. They were use once or use never weapons. Jumpgate technology was easily jammed or counter-attacked and the crews there didn't give any thought to the fact that their one blow might be the last one of their lives.

Any non-warship jumped out of the system as soon as possible as the vast armories and defenses of TerraSol came online and began fighting.

Above and below the energetic yellow star the 'solar winds' were compressed and aimed in broad sweeps of highly charged particles. The massive compressor stations wrapped each beam around a core of inverted particles.

Every planet, every satellite, even some of the larger pieces of debris in the asteroid belt activated planetary shields and began to fire their guns.

On Luna the massive C+ battery began to fire rapidly enough that the gray dust shivered several feet off the surface, giving it a thin atmosphere for the first time since the Mantid Attack had destroyed Tycho Station.

The millions of soldiers on every planet, every satellite, every large piece of debris ran for action stations, drew weapons from the armory, climbed into cockpits, and readied themselves for the fight.

Tens, hundreds of thousands of Lanaktallan vessels were shredded from the sky. Tens of thousands of ships moved to engage the Lanaktallan fleet.

They were outnumbered by nearly a thousand to one.

The casualties kept mounting, 6%, 7%, 8%, 9%, 10%.

Still the Lanaktallan kept coming, kept firing their guns, kept launching parasite craft, missiles, and torpedoes.

12%. 16%.

Pluto and Neptunian fortifications were under heavy fire, their shields visible by the naked eye from Earth if anyone had been looking. Both sides guns were hammering away at one another.

Another fleet dropped from jumpspace onto the resonance zone.

The Unified Military Council Fleet had arrived. Not a task force. Not a fleet. The Fleet.

All of it that could be spared from defending the vital core worlds.

They would finish these jumped up lemurs once and for all. They knew that the Unified Corporate Fleet stood no chance against the Terrans.

They were merely there to run the Terran magazines dry and expose their defenses.

The UMC drove hard for the planets, sweeping through the 'gaps' in the orbital mechanics like vast tentacles reaching into the Sol System between the planets, hundreds of thousands of ships streaming for anything detected.

The fighting grew more intense. Calling it a 'target rich environment' was an understatement. One Terran Admiral would refer to the space battle being like what it must have been to face a Treana'ad landing or a Mantid invasion.

The Lanaktallan forces didn't bother trying to track the entire battle, they knew their computers weren't up to the task. Instead they each concentrated on their own ships, the ships of the task forces 'adjacent' to them, and their target. They ignored casualties.

The Corporate Security forces knew that any ship that retreated would cause the corporation to be dissolved and absorbed by the Unified Economic Council as well as every family member of every crew member of the fleeing ship would be executed.

They had no choice, those Lanaktallan on the Corporate Security vessels. They clenched their teeth onto their cud, tightened their sphincters, and kept driving into the pounding of the Terran guns, firing back even as their ships were smashed into junk and ruin.

The UMC swept through any gaps in the Corporate Security forces, their ships larger, more heavily armored, better armored, more advanced shielding. The UMC soldiers knew that if they failed, if they fled the fight, their families, all taken hostage, would be killed.

Like the UCS, they clenched their controls and slammed into the enemy guns. There were too many ships for anything sneaky, for any subtle strategies. They knew they had to knock the Terrans out and knock them out fast.

The casualties kept climbing.

22%/4%. 25%/6%.

The shielding on one of the weapon batteries on Pluto failed and the massive C+ cannons were silenced. The rest of them picked up the slack, firing on where vessels had been seconds or minutes before. Another shield fell, then another, and Pluto started taking a pounding.

Torchships, knowing their weapons were ineffective, went to maximum thrust and began slamming into the surface of the tiny planet.

27%/11%.