Chronicles of Sol: The Fall

The councilwoman sighed, as she tossed another report onto the growing pile of read reports. It was just one more in a long list of reports that she had to go through. If there was one thing she really hated about this job it was all the paperwork. She glanced at the clock, and let out another heavy breath. It wasn’t nearly late enough in the day, and she really wanted to be somewhere else right now. There was a reason for that. Her daughter was participating in a play today, and she really wanted to be there to see it. She had even pulled a few favors so she could get out of here early. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the chair, so she was still stuck coming in today.

She pulled another report. No, it was actually another request from the military for more funding. She stamped it, denied, and moved on. There were better uses for Confederation funds, than the military anyway. Besides, many would say they had too much funding already, and she personally agreed. Moving the request aside, she grabbed the next item, a report on planned military actions to counter pirate activity in the Soelis sector. The seventeenth patrol fleet was planning to sweep the Delta Four system. She made note of this, and set it aside. This was just one example of them having too much funding. As they clearly had enough funds to waste on countering pirate activity, when they should be leaving that to local police forces.

Before she could much think on why, there was a knock on the door, before a younger woman walked in. “Mistress. Sorry to disturb you, but I have a new report for you to review, and it was marked Urgent.”

She sighed, and held her hand out, “Thank you, I’ll look over it.”

The young woman handed her the report, and she glanced at it. Noting the classification on it. She sighed, it was one of those reports. Hopefully it was something that could actually wait. She glanced at the clock, because if it wasn’t this was really unfair. In fact she almost felt like crying, as she opened the report on her monitor. It was a report from her interests among the Rydia Clan. One of several small powers controlling Delta Four.

Apparently they had encountered a few strange ships, and the planet Iridia had been bombarded, the surface cracked. Who the ships belonged to, and why they had destroyed the Cathamari colony there remained unknown. Her contact had forwarded everything he did have on the alien vessels.

She brought it up, the pirate cruiser’s sensors were honestly crap. The feed on these alien ships was practically meaningless. Based on size, and shape they were clearly fighter craft of somekind, but the cruiser had detected no mothership for them. She had never heard of fighters able to traverse interstellar distances without a mothership, so there must have been one somewhere in the area. The lack of data the pirate cruiser has on the fighters suggests an answer however. The pirate cruiser simply couldn’t detect it.

Flicking through the data, she sighed. Beyond them being fighters, and what weapons they were observed using, there was not much else to tell about them. They were armed with some kind of particle weapon, nothing too interesting about that. Their other weapon was far more interesting, it was some kind of shield penetrating torpedo. It used a photonic warhead, that unleashed a massive photon burst on detonation, and the cruiser had taken a pounding from these warheads. Unfortunately the sensor data the cruiser had on them, was rather limited so she was unable to determine how they were penetrating the shields of that cruiser. Worse the photon bursts, had saturated the area with radiation that had ionized the cruiser’s sensor clusters which had further hampered data collection.

Overall this was the most useless report, she had ever seen. Other than data on two weapons, she had nothing. No discernable data on how the ships moved, no data on their shield configurations, no data on their armor, no power signitures, no nothing. She sighed, wiped the report from her computer, and secured the pad. Glancing at the clock it was time to leave. This report was going to have to wait. There wasn’t much she could do about it anyway. The loss of one Cathamari planet wasn’t all that important, and while intriguing there was not much to say about a few mysterious alien ships. Besides her daughter was far more important than some little conflict in the middle of nowhere.

Cathamari Deep Space Monitoring Outpost G2117-A:

Alarms blared, and the sole occupant of the outpost, grumpily rolled off his bunk. He glared at the cursed alarms, and complained aloud about them going off in the middle of the night. Of course the only one he had to blame about them going off was himself, as he was the one who had programmed the conditions under which they would go off.

He lumbered out of the room, trying not to let the alarms grate on his ears, and made for the control room. Thankfully it was only a few meters down the hall in this tiny outpost. The whole station only had a few rooms, and they could be counted on one hand. There was his bedroom, the control room, the general purpose room, a single cargo bay, and a small shuttle bay. All of them located on a single deck, and connected via a single central corridor. None of the rooms were particularly large, and this tiny outpost was his domain, here he was lord. Not that he had anyone to rule over, it was rather lonely here. Not to mention quite boring, so boring in fact that he had taken up a few hobbies to pass the time. As it was honestly quite rare for the alarms to go off, as the sensors almost never picked up anything worth his attention. As such even while he was annoyed that the alarms were going off, he was also curious as to what set them off.

Throwing open the hatch to the control room, his large form lumbered across the tiny room, to the single bench set before the bank of control consoles. Pressing a switch, he disabled the alarm, and quickly brought up the logs. The sensors had logged an anomaly. He blinked, when he saw it, and looked again. The figures didn’t change, and yet it was not possible.

He ordered the computer to confirm the readings, and it quickly reported the same figures. According to this, long range sensors had detected the Drakul’s Sword on a direct course for the homeworld. Now normally that ship even with that course should not have triggered the alarm, what had was its anomalous speed reading. The ship was lit up like a beacon on the sensors, and putting out more heat than it had any right to be emitting, and tearing through space at an unbelivable warp eight point two. That was simply not possible for the ship, even with the drives redlined at a hundred and fifty percent the vessel would not be able to breach warp five, and yet here it was moving at warp eight.

Just to be sure, he ran the scans a third time, and yet the impossible remained. He had the Drakul’s Sword moving on a course for Cathamair at a velocity in excess of warp eight, well beyond what her class three warp drive should have been able to achieve. No ship in the fleet could move that fast, not even if they redlined the drives well into burnout territory. He knew that quite, well. Among the hobbies he had picked up since he got stuck here was reading, and he had read just about everything in the library. Any subject that caught his interest, and that included warp theory. Thanks to that reading, it was painfully obvious to him that the Drakul’s Sword had been modified in a fashion not known to Cathamari science.

Turning, he forwarded his scans, and sensor reports to fleet command, and slumped on his bench. Already he was trying to wrap his head around how such a speed was possible. He did keep an eye on his screens though, he was kind of interested to see how this played out, and with the Drakul’s Sword traveling at warp eight he wasn’t going to have to wait long

Already he could see a few ships moving to intercept, but they were restricted to speeds around warp four, they were never going to catch the Drakul’s Sword. They were simply too slow, and the distances too great, even with favorable positions they were not going to be able to close the gap quickly enough before the ship slipped the net. The only ships that had a chance of meeting the ship in battle were those attached to either the Home Fleet or the Grand Fleet, both of which called Cathamair their home port, and as such often had elements in the system. The two fleets had a fair number of ships, and at any given time about ten thousand ships were on station to help defend the homeworld. It was afterall the seat of the Grand Warlord, and needed to be protected from other warlords seeking to overthrow the current Grand Warlord.

At least that was normally the case, but he knew that the current Grand Warlord had engaged in quite a few campaigns that had proved quite costly. The campaign to conquer the humans for example was among the most costly in recent memory with horrendous casualties, but there were a few other campaigns that had come close in losses sustained. He knew that ships from the Grand Fleet as a result of this had been stationed along the borders with the Krall, especially given the rising tensions. Even on this remote little station he had heard that a war with the Krall was almost inevitable. Still even with the recent movements of the fleet the garrison was quite substantial with several thousand ships in system to defend. If he had to guess the home fleet would likely intercept the Drakul’s Sword at Cathamair. He would not have too long to wait for the answer, it would be there in just a couple of hours, a distance that normally would have taken weeks to cross.

He was still there, a couple of hours later when the Drakul’s Sword finally arrived. No one had requested anything from him in that time, much less thought to speak to him, as he monitored the vessel. He had noted that it had been hailed a few times, but no reply had come forth from the ship, as it hurdled through space at mind-boggling speeds, and left a heat wake that could easily be seen from three sectors away.

It dropped out of warp fairly close to the planet, and its heat signature remained very high. Not surprising given the sheer heat the ship had been generating, and he knew that this signature meant the engines were likely running at temperatures several orders of magnitude higher. It was a miracle that hadn’t slagged themselves during the trip, and how they had withstood that kind of heat was equally mind-boggling.

Almost instantly after arrival, the Home Fleet began transmitting telemetry allowing him to view what was going on, even if it was more for the benefit of warlords, and fleet leaders in the area.

The fleet had positioned two hundred cruisers between the Drakul’s Sword and the planet, with another three hundred moving into position to intercept. Those two hundred already in position had four hundred additional ships of destroyer or frigate class positioned to support. Utter overkill for a single vessel, but he felt it appropriate. Given what was done to her engines, it made one wonder what had been done to her other systems. It turned out to be the right decision.

The fleet wasn’t even in weapons range, when the Sword opened fire with her primary plasma cannon banks. Angry bolts of red plasma soared across space in a surprising hailstorm of fire at the nearest ships in the path of the Sword. Evasive maneuvers were attempted, but the Sword’s gunners had obviously predicated the maneuvers. Deadly plasma slammed into thirty ships almost simultaneously, with the same destructive force expected of their weapons, but at greater ranges than the norm. All of those ships were destroyed in an instant, but the others had gotten into range. They began firing. What followed was not what he would have expected.

As expected, the Sword’s shields failed with the first few hits, but shockingly her armor withstood the impacts of the plasma barrage, and she returned fire with unerringly accurate plasma barrages. She was even firing them faster than her opponents could. In seconds, she had blown past the initial force of defenders, most of them either destroyed or disabled.

Ahead of her was only a single orbital, and a dreadnought, the CIS Warlord’s Dominion the pride of the fleet. He knew little about it, except that it boasted extremely strong shields comparable to those found on the smaller Krall cruisers. It was heavily armored and had enough firepower to rival a medium-sized fleet. It was a ship that outmatched the Sword in almost every category, but the smaller ship was far more agile.

The Dominion opened fire on the sword first, a massive hailstorm of plasma enough to surely destroy the smaller ship. At least if it hit, it didn’t, and yet it should have. Instead, the Sword in a maneuver that shouldn’t have been possible for her, rolled hard to port. The roll maintained its heading and yet took the ship out of the path of the hail of plasma. Then the sword opened fire, a volley of plasma torps fired straight at the Dominion.

The larger ship wasn’t agile enough to dodge, but its shields should be enough to take the hit. At least they should have been. The torpedos struck the ship amidships. A massive fireball erupted on impact, and the shield flared brightly, before collapsing. The Dominion returned fire with equally minimal effect before the Sword knocked her out of the fight with several surprisingly accurate hits to her engineering section, and the ship went dark.

The orbital never got to fire a shot, it was destroyed by a heavy barrage before it even had a chance to fire on the Sword. Mere seconds later the Sword slammed into Cathamair, at near-reletivistic velocities. It struck the planet less than fifty kilometers from the capital and then detonated in the largest energy burst he had ever seen. A massive fireball, and a wave of debris were catapulted into space in the same breath as the continents of Krathis, and O’kuli were vaporized along with a good chunk of the surrounding oceans. In orbit, hundreds of ships, both military and civilian were destroyed by the shockwave. A massive chunk of superheated rock, slammed into the disabled Dominion and cleaved through the ship, then several smaller rocks bombarded the two halves moments before something exploded claiming the rear half of the ship. The forward section careened into space, along with debris from Cathamair.

Ships on the other side of the planet, however, were shielded by the bulk of the planet from the blast, but the people on the surface were subjected to violent earthquakes, that shook cities and settlements across the globe. Coastal cities even experienced violent tidal waves in combination with the earthquakes. While the planet itself was shifted violently onto a new orbit, one further from the sun. When the dust settled, the devestation was massive both in space and on the ground. He was too busy staring at the devastation to even notice, the rather tiny spike, as an inversion drive engaged, and a tiny probe exited the system. The radiation burst of the blast even served to hide the comparatively smaller burst of the drive.

He like many sat shellshocked at the footage. Cathamair was devastated, billions lay dead, the leadership of the Empire had been decapitated. Who had done this, no one could say for sure, but news of the event would zip across the sector, with unheard-of rapidity. Before the week was out it would spread across the quadrant, but there was no way to hide an event of this magnitude.