Darkworld: Earth

2.52.

The sensitive sensors of the ESF’s Toormondas and monitoring stations throughout the solar system detected the motions through the hyperatomic plane at the same time. The technicians reported the findings to their superiors immediately, and the alert was sent out.

The solar system was placed on red alert. The wakes of twelve ships in formation had been detected. They were heading straight into the system, but their exact exit point couldn’t be pinpointed.

Aboard the Yonohoan flagship, Diego argued with Bob. He was exploring the alternatives to remaining in stealth and observing the outcome of the battle, preferring a more active role. This argument was resolved when Bob contacted General Turnball, who explicitly ordered Diego to maintain the neutrality of the Yonohoan ship in this matter.

Aboard the Good Question , Captain Anders began his role as a front-line observer. His ship was no longer equipped with drone operators and attempts at weaponizing a Toormonda. Instead, it was operating on a skeleton crew. They contacted the Yonohoan government, who began sending their verified data stream to their allies to bear witness to the battle.

Captain Moon, aboard The Other Shoe, cursed as she requested instructions from the command structure, which was unfortunately in chaos. They were supposedly in a state of readiness, but the Shoe had been caught out of position as it had moved to the asteroid belt in order to demonstrate the Yukopan weaponry.

Eventually, she was ordered to engage her stealth systems and remain in place.

On the surface, the public broadcast systems sent out emergency alerts, instructing the citizens to shelter in place.

The second battle between Earth and the Rosantean Empire was about to begin.

~~~~~~

Captain Rohon stood by the scanning station as the flagship of the suppression force emerged near the second largest gravity well of the star system. The other ships were set to appear in strategic locations in order to swiftly counter, suppress, and/or destroy whatever rebuilt fleet the primitives had managed to build since Captain Yoko’s doomed mission.

He watched as the hologram began filling in the details of the system. The sensors were sensitive enough to pick up micrometeorites from light-minutes away, but were set to ignore anything without a significant energy signal or objects smaller than a standard dwelling. The ships that it detected were magnified a thousand fold in comparison to their actual size in order to give an impression of the strategic layout of the Earthlings.

He smiled. As expected, they had been caught with their pants down.

“They’re hailing us using that quaint radio protocol of theirs,” their communication tech said.

“Reply along the same frequency in terms that they will understand. They are suspected of piracy and attacks against the Rosantean Empire. They are to surrender their ships immediately. Their soldiers will be placed in stasis and transferred to the Empire for trial. Their system will remain under lockdown until the threat of piracy has been neutralized,” Rohon said in a calm and commanding voice.

It was unnecessary, the message had already been recorded and prepared for this encounter. The broadcast was sent.

All ships responded back moments later.

“ You have five minutes to depart from Sol system” was the most common message. The communications officer watched as the translations of the responding ships repeated the same message endlessly, counting down until the battle began.

“One of the ships is instructing us to fornicate with our mothers,” the communication officer informed the captain. “He is questioning our parentage and the validity of our offspring. He is … getting creative with his insults. Either that or Earth customs are bizarre beyond belief.”

“Identify that ship and prepare to destroy it as soon as they open fire upon us,” Captain Rohon instructed.

The ship was highlighted and the computer immediately disengaged the target systems, countermanding Rohon’s orders.

It was a Toormonda.

Rohon sighed in frustration. He couldn’t override the systems that prevented them from simply destroying the educational ships without first verifying that there were no civilians aboard. He’d heard that the Earthlings used Toormondas in their battle formation and he didn’t truly understand why they would put a ship with such low armaments in the field of fire. It wasn’t like they were human shields.

Of course, he wasn’t aware of just how devastating the economic impact of the battle from the last humiliation had been. He’d been in stasis for the last ten years before being briefed on this mission and sent out to subjugate the darkworld for the glory of the empire.

He was distracted from other concerns when he realized that the Oort Cloud was filled with ships that were squawking back with civilian IFF transponders from his own empire. He frowned; the last thing he needed was civilian observers from his own people as he knowingly violated intergalactic treaties.

He queried who owned the ship and laughed aloud when the answer came back. It was the cowardly Yukopans. They refused to come near a human system, trading with the majority of the empire only through intermediaries. The treaties regarding them effectively separated them from civilization entirely, and he couldn’t believe that they had the nerve to come into a war zone.

He dismissed them as a threat.

Wars were won and lost based on intelligence. Rohon’s commanders decision to keep him in the dark of the severity of the Empire’s situation would cost them dearly, and the lack of oversight that the Yukopans had enjoyed would come back to haunt them.

~~~~~~~

The ultimatums were exchanged and recorded by all observers.

The countdown began.

The timer hit zero, and the Rosantean fleet maintained their positions, continuing to squawk out demands that Earth’s forces surrender.

Earth politely submitted their answer.

The guns fired simultaneously, and the void echoed with the silence of war.

~~~~~~

“Stop talking about my mother! She is a beautiful and proud woman!” came the message from the flagship. The communications officer of the Good Question turned to Captain Anders in surprise.

“He sounds distressed,” the officer observed.

“Continue your diatribe,” Anders suggested. “It’s not professional, but psychological warfare is a legitimate tactic, and aside from silent witness it’s one of the few measures of support we can provide during this time.”

“Sir yes sir,” the communications officer confirmed, and he resumed shouting colorful insults about the parentage of the soldiers of the other army. They seemed to be sensitive about their mothers, so he focused on that.

~~~~~

Three of the subspace munitions identical to Doctor Strangelove existed. All three of them were launched from their respective carriers the moment the clock hit zero. Arriving virtually simultaneously at their destination, the timers on their thermonuclear devices were set to three seconds.

The Rosanteans had no defense against the weapons delivered via Tunnel Drive. The nuclear explosion ripped through their ship, turning the hyperalloys into molten slag and the personnel into atoms.

The enemy fleet was reduced to nine, a quarter of their initial number, in the first five seconds of the engagement.

~~~~~~~

Diego watched helplessly as the battle began. The holographic orrery was filled with icons indicating ships with their various allegiances.

The largest number of ships belonged to the Yukopans, and most of them were uninvolved in the battle. They had questioned the humans who had been directing their people during this time of transition on whether or not they should get involved, and the humans had instructed them that only the vessels with human commanders aboard should proceed in the line of combat.

There were less than six destroyers with human captains aboard them. They were still in the exploratory phases of the integration period. The captains had no idea what their weapon systems did. Even if they understood the energy that was fired, the yields meant nothing to them, and some of the weapons were esoteric.

Captain Moon didn’t care. She pointed at the nearest Rosantean ship during the countdown and instructed the Yukopans to target it with everything they had. The ship, which had come out in the orbit of Mars, had counters for each weapon that impacted its shields.

But not all of them at the same time.

The shields were overwhelmed and the ship’s systems were damaged. The energies of the various weapons were mostly spent in the opening salvo, doing minor damage to the hyperalloys of the hull. Several exterior weapond, including the point defense cannons, as well as all airlocks on the side that took the damage, were destroyed.

But that was less important than the effects of the failing of the systems that protected it from the Kirata beam, which persisted long after the shields failed. The sustained EMP burst along with that esoteric energy that accompanied it which the humans had no previous name for ripped through the computer systems, leaving the ship dead in the water.

Including the life support systems.

The Other Shoe’s systems reported a kill, and Captain Moon took it at its word, directing the crew to interlock with the other forces and move into position to support the fights against the other, more distant enemies.

The crew of the ship waited for rescue from the victorious forces. They waited nervously without any way to watch the battle, but remained confident that their allies would come for them once the savages were dealt with.

They were correct that the victorious forces would come for them.

The question was whether they had enough oxygen to last until then.

~~~~~

Rohon’s ship rocked with the blast as the weapons from the ESF impacted his ships shields and other countermeasures, but the defenses held. He watched in confusion and then horror as one third of his fleet simply vanished. Three of the twelve ships were hit by some weaponry which there seemed to be no counter for, resulting in a megaton level explosion. The fourth was ambushed by one of the Yukopan ships striking from stealth.

He calmly took a breath to center himself, and began assigning priority firing targets for the gunnery officers and technicians to focus on.

The Yukopan ship that had emerged from ambush was at the top of the firing queue.

~~~~~

The return fire from the enemy rocked The Other Shoe , but the shields held. Captain Moon examined the firing plans of the system’s interlocked battle plan and frowned.

Only five other Yukopan destroyers or cruisers were engaging. The subspace munitions were depleted. Eight enemy ships, three enforcers, two destroyers and three cruisers, remained.

The previous battle against a single Enforcer had shown that the majority of Earth’s native defense systems were unprepared to face the Rosantean military. Little time had passed, and few changes had been made to the order of combat.

If only they’d had more time, they might have completed the Yukopan integration into their combat lines. But as she watched, the weapon systems from earth forces were largely shrugged off.

The other five Yukopan ships engaging in battle kept the pressure on their nearest enemies, but they remained out in the Oort cloud. The energies of their weapons attenuated by the time they reached their targets.

What had been an instantaneous kill for the Shoe was shrugged off by the shields of the other Rosantean ships. Further complicating matters, once the Earth allied forces had revealed themselves as part of the battle lineup, the enemy forces had employed directional countermeasures in additional to the omnidirectional energy fields that they’d been employing previously.

“Can we move and shoot at the same time?” she asked the Adjutant.

The furry creature nodded his head in a measured emulation of the human response.

“I mean can we engage the FTL drives, jump into location, shoot, and then jump again?” she demanded.

“Yes, Captain Moon,” the Adjutant confirmed. He continued to use the poetic name Brightest Moon in the Sky in his language, but she had gotten her translator to simply use her rank and name instead of the literal translation.

“How do I do that?” she demanded.

He pointed at the hologram. “Move us where you wish to move and select our targets for us. We will endeavor to make your vision a reality,” he explained.

With a nod, Captain Moon began her tactical repositioning, moving the ship towards the one that was in the orbit of venus, but on the opposite side of the sun from the planet.

“The second we emerge from FTL, fire everything we have and then jump here,” she said, moving the ship a second time to a recovery location from which she intended to observe the outcoem of her maneuver.

Seconds passed as the computers and the Yukopans worked furiously, the massive furry bipeds bouncing around their stations according to patterns that made sense only to them.

“Fire plan locked,” The Adjutant declared. “Excuting.”

~~~~~

The ship that was securing the low orbits blinked out as the ambushing Yukopan ship got the drop on it. Captain Rohon cursed, ordering the fleet to reposition. They were too spread out and while the majority of the enemy was only chaff to be cleared away, the Yukopan vessels were a peer level threat.

Meaning that they had to be treated like a peer. The other captains must have been slow in realizing that they were in actual danger, because it wasn’t until he sent them the request to group up near the third planet, the precious orb which would soon be integrated into the empire, that they realized that they needed to do more than shoot down the primitive vessels.

His communication’s officer was no help. The man would be execute when they returned due to his abrupt abandonment of his station. He was currently sobbing in the corner speaking of the virtues of his mother.

Rohon watched the orrery with one eye as he stepped over to the empty station and began screaming at the other captains to take this seriously.

“Your momma’s so fat that she didn’t even notice she was pregnant with your ugly ass until you popped out of her--”

“My mother is the figure of grace and beauty you primitive Korpan!” the captain yelled back. “When this is over I will board that Toormonda and I will --”

~~~~~

“They have crossed the red line,” Bob informed him. “You may engage at will.”

“Target them all and fire with everything we have.”

“Executing fireplan.”

~~~~~~~

The attacks hit all at once. Four of the Rosantean ships were simply gone after the energy washed over them. Not even debris remained.

Rohon gasped in shock as the flagship of the Yonohoan self defense fleet emerged from stealth.

He stopped screaming at the man who was saying terrible things about his mother and ordered a full retreat.

If the Last Son of Eodar was in the system, then the Empire had made a grave miscalcuation.

They had not sent nearly enough ships.

~~~~~~

The after action report on the empire’s side would say that it was an accident. A miscalculated fire plan executed by a clumsy gunnery officer who was panicking under intense enemy fire.

The people from Earth called it a war crime and a violation of a number of treaties.

The people of the empire pointed out that it was only a kirata beam, and not a weapon that was lethal to the human inhabitants.

The people of earth retorted that the death toll from the three airplanes that suddenly lost control of their engines and crashed into the ocean added up to over a thousand souls.

The people of the empire point out that the majority of the energies were dispersed across the ocean and not on inhabitted land.

The people of Earth calmly corrected them that the western edge of Europe had been caught in the weapons fire had gone black, their technology completely destroyed by the EMP portion of the kirata beam.

The Rosanteans insisted that it was an accident.

The people of the earth didn’t care, they wanted justice for the attack on their home soil.

The officer who had overrided the computer’s safety mechanism said nothing. He was found dead in his cabin before the ship had docked in port. The captain insisted that it was suicide, that he had been overcome with grief over the error and taken his own life.

The people of Earth smelled a cover up.

The encrypted orders that had been transmitted to the crew of the battle cruiser would eventually prove them correct.

But the satisfaction of being right did not bring back the dead.

‎