Nova Wars

In one hundred twenty five million years we have never been beaten, thus it is only a fact of the universe that we can never be beaten. There is nothing that can threaten our dominance. Not these Mantid returning from their defeated past, not this upstart Confederacy, and certainly not some overly-clever lemurs. - Lanaktallan Unified Military Council, opening days of the Second Precursor War

It's called Victory Disease. The only thing worse is when the politicians sell the hard won gains of the military for their own pet projects and enrichment. The only thing worse than that is when the screaming starts. -Welkret Book of Beliefs, anonymous.

You have no chance. Make your time. - Unknown, Terran Age of Exploration

The 314th Combat Fleet consisted of nearly two hundred combat vessels, including forty ships of the line in the superheavy dreadnaught class. There were mass tenders, orbital fire support vessels, marine troopships, orbital drop trooper carriers, aerospace carriers, and even manufacturing ships. In total the combat fleet contained eighty combat vessels and one hundred support ships.

It was a large fleet in a sector that had been quiet since the end of the Second Mar-gite War just a little over two hundred years ago. True, it had been slowly reduced from two thousand ships to two hundred, but it still had enough firepower to wipe out a stellar system and planet crack everything in sight.

It even had the Superluminal Matter Disruption Cannons as well as the Superluminal Quasi-Kinetic Impact Array Cannons. There wasn't much that could face it in known space.

The task forces and combat fleets out near possible hostile nations at the Confederacy's boarders only numbered a few dozen ships.

Nothing like the 314th Combat Fleet.

Admiral (Lower Decks) of the Iron Shelvant was a Crel'tik, one of the species that was considered Near-Civilized by the Lanaktallan Unified Council. At 1.5 meters tall and fifty-five kilograms he was average for his species, with dark brown fur covering his body, close set eyes on either side of his muzzle with another pair of eyes at the rear of his temples. He had been in the military, thanks to the standard longevity treatments, for nearly three hundred years. He had commanded a light frigate during the Mar-gite Resurgence, engaged in combat multiple times during the three decade long war. He had been a bridge officer toward the end of the Second Mar-gite War, after nearly a hundred years of fighting.

He had seen scores of planets burn with white fire during those two wars.

Which meant he disagreed with Admiral (Upper Decks) of the Warsteel Jumfrek, a Maktanen out of the Sword Hoof Lanaktallan Systems.

Admiral Jumfrek had ordered the Combat Fleet to go to jumpspace and head straight for NV-838417, which had sent a message torpedo claiming they were under heavy Mar-gite attack. The Admiral believed that the overstrength Combat Fleet should be able to handle any Mar-gite Resurgence Constructs that might have drifted into the system.

Admiral Shelvant wasn't so sure. It was only 65 light years from the Fortress Systems. There were two other 'rings' of systems between NV-838417 and the current posting for the 314th Combat Fleet. The two rings consisted of 35 planets that could provide a task force of at least 25 ships if NV-838417 was in trouble.

The torpedo had been launched at an unknown date, and had dropped out of the upper hyperspace bands the day after TerraSol had announced its return to the universe.

It had taken the Admiral nearly two months to get the Combat Fleet moving, despite his promise in public that the Fleet would be enroute within 48 hours.

"One hundred twenty seconds to realspace reentry," came over the speakers.

Admiral Shelvant had an odd feeling. Things didn't add up right.

True, the current posting was off the main shipping lanes and had grav-eddies and hyperspace sheers around the system, but something just didn't sit right with Shelvant.

The torpedo being damaged? OK.

The fact its launching telemetry indicated it had been launched along with over fifty others? OK.

There had been five Mar-gite Mega-Structures entering the system. OK.

The fact that there was 17.5 billion sentients on the two settled planets meant they needed help. OK.

But why the torpedo? Why carry the Case Omaha? Why start yelling a Case Normandy?

NV-838417 ha combat ships. The defensive rings should have provided combat ships to help defend the system.

"Ninety seconds."

Admiral Shelvant felt that something was off.

But Admiral Jumfrek had faced the Mar-gite as well. Had been in charge of task forces, ship battalions, strike forces, while Admiral Shelvant had been an off bridge and then a bridge officer before commanding only a few lighter vessels.

Admiral Jumfrek was convinced that they could make a difference. That planetary defense could have held out against Mar-gite Mega-Clusters and with the addition of the 314th Combat Fleet's Army & Marine compliments, the Mar-gite could be pushed off the planet.

Which is why the 134th Combat Fleet was only minutes away from dropping out of jumpspace and into n-space again.

"Sixty seconds."

He was currently standing on the Show Bridge, which was largely ignored and a ceremonial feature in modern ships, but since it had been built in a Lanaktallan shipyard it was full of legacy stations and features.

Still, the Undisputable Might of Space was a fully modern vessel, less than two decades old. It was a sphere, which modern ship-building theory espoused had the least surface area to defend with point defense, shield emitters, and other important features. It had the most internal volume, allowing for redundancy and extensive internal systems as well as weapon systems hidden mostly inside the hull. The weapons were all modern, with magazines five times capacity as the old days, with higher firing rate and capable of much more damage.

"Thirty seconds."

Still, it felt off to Admiral Shelvant.

I feel like I'm carrying a pistol to an atom smasher fight, he thought to himself.

"Ten seconds," sounded out.

He reached out and grabbed the bars in front of him.

"Reentry."

Stars suddenly streaked into view and the swirling colorful gray mists of jumpspace were replaced with the velvet blackness of deep space.

"Sixteen thousand kilometers from the resonance zone boundary. Right on target," sounded out.

The Show Bridge was largely crewed by midshipmen and junior grade lieutenants who all remained silent, staring at their consoles and data boards, hands away from their keyboards and controls, which were locked out anyway.

The whole show was being run from the Combat Bridge now.

Admiral Shelvant moved up to the holotank as it flickered and went live.

"There they are," he heard Admiral Jumfrek stated, his hologram flickering to life.

Five Mar-gite Megaclusters appeared, their icons burning with a sullen red light. They were halfway into the system.

Admiral Shelvant noted that they were on the opposite side of the stellar mass from the inhabited planets. Their direction and speed meant they would stay opposite of the planets, in a triangle.

Probes were launched, went to hyperspace, and 'skipped' toward the clusters.

Less than two minutes and they were in place. Close enough to get visual on the clusters as the probes deployed their scanner arrays.

The clusters were massive to anyone who had never seen them before. Two hundred miles long, conical shaped, the 'mouth' ten miles in diameter with the rear end only a mile in diameter.

"Only"

Shelvant knew that through basic geometry the cone 'only' held roughly six hundred fifty billion Mar-gite.

"Break the Combat Fleet into four Task Forces," Admiral Jumfrek said. "We'll leave our support and command vessels back here. Have them move around the stellar mass and approach the Mar-gite clusters," the Admiral rubbed his hands together. "We can knock this out fairly quickly."

Admiral Shelvant heard the communications officer report that there was still broadcasts from both planets. Hysterical broadcasts begging for help or evacuation, but none of them reporting any Mar-gite making landfall.

Admiral Shelvant squinted.

It looked odd to him.

It didn't feel right.

"You don't think it's strange that they're opposite of the stellar mass from the planets?" Shelvant asked.

Jumfrek turned 'toward' him. "No. Both planets have excellent planetary defense shields and weapon arrays, as well as orbital defense systems. The Mar-gite are obviously waiting for reinforcements or we caught them before they finished feeding on stellar emissions and left."

"This feels off to me," Shelvant said.

Jumfrek motioned at the holotank. "The data doesn't lie. They are out of position, an insufficient force to keep us from pinning it down and destroying it. Once again showing that the Mar-gite are essentially mindless, incapable of tactics or planning," the Admiral gave a harrumph. "It was obvious during the Second Mar-gite War and the Mar-gite Resurgence that they are essentially mindless. Biologically, they don't even have brains."

Shelvant ignored the sly innuendo that he was a complete ignoramus.

The Combat Fleet broke into five task forces. Four to circle the stellar mass, the support and command vessels to hang back only a third of the way into the system, past the gas giants and deep into the Resonance Zone.

The whole time Admiral Shelvant watched the holotank.

It just felt off.

He watched as the fleets moved around the stellar mass. Despite the apparent slowness of the icon's movement in the holotank, Shelvant knew that the ships were crossing hundreds of millions of kilometers every hour.

Shifts changed and Shelvant tried to take a nap, having to resort to ASMR in order to get some rest. When he returned, the ships were just crossing 'around' the stellar mass.

He moved up to the holotank, looking down and into it.

"STATUS CHANGE! GRAV SIGNATURES! MASS SIGNATURES!" called out over the speakers.

Little dots erupted from all five gas giants, marking with strobes of grav drive signatures. Larger icons slowly separated from the five gas giants, detected by their mass than any drive system.

The larger icons were massive. Some tens of thousands of kilometers long and a thousand kilometers thick.

Shelvant just stared as NavInt tagged the larger ones as some kind of Mar-gite construct when the emissions were verified as whatever the system the Mar-gite used.

There were dozens of them.

He turned to open his mouth to call out to Admiral Jumfrek to get the fleet out of the system when it happened.

A blinding white flash went off.

Shelvant was unaware that he was falling to the deck in a grand-mal seizure. His head was full of a buzzing roaring as his datalink implant malfunctioned and filled his brain with static and random data.

The ship went dark around him. The drives cut out. All systems went down and the backup batteries failed even as the reactors went dead.

After a long moment he picked himself up. His head was throbbing, he could hear static, his vision was blurry.

A decade or so prior he had been involved in a ground car collision and suffered a cerebral contusion, colloquially known as a concussion.

It felt the same.

He looked around. Several of the control boards had exploded or imploded. Since the ship wasn't in combat, it was still under atmosphere and nobody had had their face shields down.

Five crewmembers were unmoving on the deck, their heads surrounded by blood colored according to species and what their hemoglobin was based off of.

The rest of the crew was either slumped in their chairs or on the floor. Restraining belts had retracted.

The artificial gravity was on. There was pinlights from only a handful of the emergency lights and those were flickering and audibly buzzing.

One bloody crewmember picked himself up, moving to an intact board.

"Nothing. Ship's dead," he said. He shook his head. "Damage Control Command is down."

Early in his career, Shelvant had been a senior grade lieutenant aboard an eighty thousand year old Lanaktallan micro-cruiser that had suffered a complete power failure when it had brushed the legendary but rarely actually encountered ion storm.

Shelvant staggered over to the crewman. "Does your implant work?"

"Aye, sir," the crewman said.

"Use it to contact other crewmen. Get a datalink network up. See what's going on in engineering. The network will use each datalink as a processing and repeater node," Admiral Shelvant said. "Get medical up here, we have casualties."

"Aye, sir," the crewman said. He touched the side of his hemlet.

Shelvant slapped the crewman's faceshield shut then closed his own, moving across the deck.

The holotank suddenly flickered to life. Status checks flowed by. He saw that a zero-point reactor had activated.

He didn't even know holotanks had built in zero-point reactors.

EYELI'IKMO'NY INDUSTRIAL CONCERN

DUMBWIRES SYSTEM

FOR WHEN STUPIDITY MIGHT CARRY THE DAY

appeared in the holotank.

A window opened up with "YOU MUST ACCEPT THE TERMS OF SERVICE" at the top, a dulled out "ACCEPT" button and an active "CANCEL" button at the bottom. The text box was full of legal jargon.

Shelvant hurriedly shuffled through the ToS, hitting "ACCEPT" as soon as he could.

The End User Agreement popped up and he snarled as he rushed to the bottom and hit accept again.

"YOU MUST DISABLE AD-BLOCK!" appeared.

Grinding his teeth, Shelvant hit the button.

DUMBWIRE SYSTEM LINKAGE IN PROGRESS! HURDY-HUDRY-HUR AT 01%

Admiral Shelvant just held onto the bar, swallowing thickly.

At 8% nearly two thirds of the Show Bridge Crew was on their feet.

At 15% the adhoc DCC officer's board went live and the bleeding crew member went to work.

At 20% the elevator door opened and medics rushed in, hurrying to the fallen crewmembers.

When it ready "HURDY HUDRY HUR AT 35%" his suit went live. On his visor appeared "IDIOT BOX ONLINE! DURRRRR!" and he gasped as the environmental kicked in, flooding his suit with cool air.

At 45% the battlescreen projectors spun up, going to full power even though apparently nobody had control over them.

At 50% the antigrav steadied out.

At 73% the holotank suddenly cleared from the status reports and came back online.

The ship was running off of passive sensors, but it showed the terrible truth.

The ships of the four task forces had not continued their controlled curve around the stellar mass. Instead, their arc had widened as their speed kept them from orbiting the stellar mass.

There were over a dozen of those massive clusters heading for the command and support fleet. All of them over ten thousand kilometers long. They were moving at .65C and obviously maneuvering.

At 95% the ship fired probes toward the contacts.

At 100% the lights flickered twice and then stayed on.

"YOU ARE NOW STUPID!" appeared in the holotank.

Shelvant ground his teeth and shook his head.

You know what, I don't even care any more, he thought.

One of the probes went active and the window opened up in the holotank.

"Sir, the board keeps doing its own actions. I'm having problems overriding anything," one of the crewmembers said from over by the sensor stations.

"We'll figure it out as we go," Shelvant said. "Any word from Combat Control and the Combat or Tactical Bridges?"

"Negative, sir," the crewmember by communications said.

The medic finished working on the cuts on one of the crewmember's face, gave them a shot to help with any brain swelling or any clots, then hustled for the elevator door.

"What hit us?" Shelvant asked.

"Don't know. Whatever it was, it crashed everything. We're running off of some kind of backup redundancy system for the redundancy and emergency systems," the crewmember at DCC said. "I've never heard of a dumbwire system."

"Probably Lanaktallan, thank the Old Gods," Shelvant said.

The window was showing the massive constructs as they spread out, some slowing down, some speeding up. As he watched the two speeding up seemed to contract.

"Is there a mass change on either of these?" he asked the sensor watch.

"Negative, sir."

The 'mouth' of the cone suddenly glowed with bluish energy and the two large ones seemed to suddenly slow.

From their mouths slid long constructs, easily a hundred miles long, the 'point' only a hundred meters wide.

There were dozens of constructs from each of the larger constructs.

As the latter third exited the 'mouth' the probe could see that it was covered with Mar-gite, narrow toward the forward section, thickening at the back.

"What the fuck?" Shelvant blurted out. He blinked. "Tag those as Mar-gite Spears."

"Aye, sir," rang out.

"Incoming objects on collision course with fleet elements!" tactical called out.

"Get the Combat Bridge up!" Shelvant yelled.

"Other ships are starting to respond. Half of the ships are broadcasting 'hurdy-hurdy-hur' over their transponders," Commo reported.

"Get us linked up! I want commo back up," Shelvant said.

He made a decision.

Forget hurt feelings, I'm going to have to assume whatever that flash was destroyed the combat and tactical bridges. That leaves us, he thought.

"Do we have navigation or steering?" Shelvant asked.

"No. Says the dumbwires are at 15%," navigation reported.

"Negative, sir, Dumbwires at 85%," the helmsman called out.

Shelvant stared as the Spears separated into discrete groups, steering to target eight of the ships of the fleet.

The counter-fire was sporadic and poorly aimed. Point defense was thin and inaccurate.

Shelvant breathed a guilty sigh of relief when he realized that the Undisputable Might of Space wasn't targeted.

Sensor section was able to launch drones and get good looks at the spears as they came in at .85C. Other sensors focused on the targeted ships.

Shelvant wanted to close his eyes as the first of the 'spears' hit.

The tips smashed into the battlescreens, which were on emergency power. The leading meters were ripped into energy as the battlescreens shredded it. The next length was torn into its component atoms.

Then the next length was shredded into splinters.

Battlescreen sections failed.

The spears, still moving at .35C, slammed into the battlesteel superstructures of the ships.

The Mar-gite at the back were flung forward, glowing a bluish gray, their limbs unfolding.

Boarders, went through his head.

The spears slammed completely through the ships, easily a hundred meters of burnt, twisted, shattered, and carbonized reinforced calcite shaft exiting out the other side to hit the still operational battlescreen sections, making them flare.

The Mar-gite hit the hull. Some were unable to slow down and exploded when they hit the battlesteel armor. Most hit and shattered, smeared across battlesteel. Still others missed the ship to whip across and slam into the battlescreen, where they were torn apart into energy and atoms.

But not all of them.

Thousands hit the hull.

"Bogeys are launching another salvo," Sensors said.

"Get the net up," Shelvant said, wishing he could wipe his mouth. "Get the net up or we're all dead."

"Bogey detected! Two hundred kilometers off the port bow! Bogey is slowing!" sensors called out.

Shelvant flicked through the windows.

It was a small, silvery looking teardrop, only a hundred meters long, twenty meters wide at the widest point.

He looked at Coms. "Tell what Marines you can..." he said. He glanced at the teardrop.

"Prepare for non Mar-gite boarders."