Chapter 292 (1/2)
There had not been many references to it in the data that the Unified Council could discover, but right before the Great Herd dispatched their might to crush the upstart Confederacy, the data was found.
The Pubvians.
According to the data, they were a herbivore species, three legs, two arms, a head. They primarily ate vegetation, were a three-sex species, and were largely peaceful. However, they were part of the Confederacy and the data the Lanaktallan managed to acquire showed the location of their homeworld.
The Great Herd knew that the Pubvians wouldn't need planet cracked. They had seats on the Confederate Senate but had not seated any members as far as the Lanaktallans could tell. Their seats and boxes were wreathed in black cloth, obviously to show that they refused to take part. A show of force and an occupation would be good enough to tear the Pubvians away from the Confederacy and possibly provide a new neo-sapient servitor species and a jumping point fro the Great Herd to colonize what was left of Confederacy Space.
Still, the Lanaktallan knew the system would be defended. They were part of the Confederacy, and the Confederacy seemed to almost fetishize weaponry.
The Corporate Fleet that dropped into the system had over a hundred thousand ships, ten thousand of them troop ships.
The Grand Most High of the 238a34 Task Force had suffered headaches, joint aches, the entire trip to the world. Of course, he'd spend a year in jumpspace, and the medical doctors aboard his ship had told him that his growth was possibly from such long exposure to jumpspace.
He ordered his scanner technician and his sensor techs to do a sweep of the EM wavelengths before he ordered his ship inward into the system. The rest of the Corporate Fleet roared forward, each eager to be the first on the planets, the first to take over the system, to be the Task Force that forced the Pubvians to surrender.
The Grand Most High frowned when his scanner technicians and sensor technicians reported that, aside from the stellar mass, there was no electromagnetic emissions. No artificial signals.
The system was quiet, except for the typical natural sounds a stellar system put out.
The Grand Most High ordered a gravatic scan thrown up on the main screen.
Yellow star. Fifteen planets, five of them gas giants. Two in the red zone toward the planet, one in the yellow zone toward the planet, two in the green zone, two in the yellow zone opposite, then the rest. Five gas giants with rings.
No moons. No satellites.
No signals.
The ships of the Corporate Fleet that headed for the gas giants reported nothing.
The Grand Most High ordered his troops to get in their armored vac-suits and get to battle stations.
This felt... wrong somehow.
He ordered his ships to head toward the outermost planet and to go slow.
No resistance so far.
The Grand Most High had been part of a Corporate Fleet that seen the lemurs utterly smash apart a Precursor AWM fleet of thirty harvesters and their supporting vessels, then rip apart a Corporate Fleet that outnumbered them 10:1.
If the Confederacy was truly here, the Corporate Fleet should have been engaged already. The Confederate ships, even those that weren't part of Space Force, had horrific ranges and punishing weaponry.
He knew for a fact, had seen it with his own eyes, that the Terrans could hit targets light hours away.
Where are they? he wondered as his ship drew closer to the barren outer planet, which had a thick ring around it.
”Bring our active sensors up. I want a scan of that planet,” the Grand Most High said.
”It was quick-scanned. No energy readings, no shields,” his sensor tech said. ”It was bypassed by the Task Forces who were supposed to attack it.”
”There's something wrong here,” the Grand Most High said. ”If this was Confederate Space we would already be under attack. If this was in actuality a Confederate species home system, half of our ships would be wreckage by now.”
”They cannot resist us,” his navigator said in the dead tones of a badly programmed computer speech synthesizer. ”The Great Herd has never known defeat. All who attempt to stand before the Great Herd are trampled by its righteous hooves.”
”I know, I know, faithful one,” the Grand Most High said, feeling a stirring of an unfamiliar emotion. The ones who spoke like that reminded him of when he was a young colt and his little sister had been born dead. Like something he didn't know about until it was gone had been taken from him.
Many of them, most of them, no longer responded to their own names. A few, a handful, had proclaimed that they had different names than what was in the database, but most just went about their duties while occasionally spouting off rhetoric.
”Long range active scans coming back now,” the scanning tech said.
”Anything?” the Grand Most High asked.
”Oh. Um, yeah,” the scanning tech said. He reached up and pressed his upper palms against his side eyes. ”Sorry, my head hurts.”
”Just do your best,” the Grand Most High said.
”A lot of the debris is metallic in nature,” the scanning tech said. ”There's plenty of debris of the material that makes up normal orbital debris rings, usually dust from moons that failed or left behind by comets or ejected from comet strikes.”
”What kind of metallic debris?” the Grand Most High asked.
”Launching a drone,” the sensor tech said.
”Beginning evasive stealth maneuvers,” the navigator said.
There was silence for a long time, while the ship slowly changed position using minimal drive power and being careful not to light off their gravitic systems. Just reactionless drives that could be heavily shielded.
”Grand Most High, you're going to want to see this,” the sensor tech said.
”The Grand Most High sees all,” the point defense officer intoned from where the Grand Most High had tasked him to watching an empty plas cup on a chair instead of manning his normal station.
”Yes, yes I do, faithful one,” the Grand Most High replied almost automatically. ”Put it up on the main screen.”
The screen changed from the system itself and the progress of the Corporate and Military Fleets moving inward to the debris field around the outermost planet. Normally just dust and rocks, a ring was little more than an object of appreciation and visually appealing, no threat or interest to a ship with debris fields.
Onscreen was a space ship.
Or rather, parts of space ships.
All of the hulks were dead in space.
No energy readings. No lights. No signals.
Just dead drifting hunks of metal.
A corpse in an armored vac-suit drifted into the picture and the drone focused on it. The faceplate was smashed, but the leathery vacuum dehydrated face was obviously Terran. The cybernetic eyes were dark and cold.
The probe moved in on the ship, sweeping by the crushed and shattered prow of a dead ship.
RNV Roy Batty was on the prow.
It had taken multiple hits, the armor cratered, pitted, slagged, torn open to expose the internal spaces. The probe focused on a gun battery with a lemur still strapped in, his dead hands on the controls, a large chunk of metal through the lemur's chest, pinning it to the seat.
”Something bad happened here,” the sensor tech said quietly.
”I concur. Take the drone to the surface of the planet,” the Grand Most High said. He turned to the navigator. ”Take us upwards, still stay in full stealth.”
The ship moved slowly through the darkness. Further in the stellar system the ships were landing on the planets, all of which had put up no resistance. The Task Forces assigned to the planets outside of the yellow zone were ignoring their targets and focusing on the planets in the green and yellow zones, all in a hurry to be the ones who forced the Pubvians to surrender.
The Grand Most High, he was feeling an odd feeling. It reminded him of when he had seen an elderly Lanaktallan pass out behind the wheel of a hovercar and slid toward the crowd. Not when it hit the crowd, not when he was positive it would hit, but when the car started swerving, before the elderly being had slumped.
A Terran would have told him it was dread.
The probe swept down, skimming across the surface. There was a lot of dust, a lot of crystallized frozen elements.
And a lot of craters.
One of the craters revealed machinery in the depths that was dark and unmoving. Some of the craters were surrounded by mangled and destroyed machinery and buildings. He could see lumps around the smaller craters and knew, somehow, that vehicles were under those lumps.
The probe suddenly swooped in on something.
It looked like nothing at first, but it had caught the probe's rather dim VI's attention.
”Is that a Terran?” the missile defense officer asked.
”It looks like it,” the sensor tech said.
As it got closer it came into focus better. The probe put up size estimates based on shadows and laser ranging and the Grand Most High felt relief fill him.