Titan battle, p.1
Titan Battle, page 1
Thorim knew he was dreaming, again.
He was alone, in the deadly vacumm of space, surrounded by stars, without a space suit. Somehow, he was able to survive. This is a dream, after all.
He glanced below him and saw something familiar to him after all these years in space.
A planet. A terraformed world, with vast blue oceans, brown-green landmasses, and white clouds. A world filled with life. Human life.
That 's Tau Ceti Five. I earned my commission from the Fleet Officer Academy down there…
Suddenly, massive beams of light flashed from behind him. Each beam was so powerful that Thorim instantly knew that each one had the destructive power of megatons of TNT. Worse, there were thousands of them, coming from thousands of warships.
Enemy grazer beams!
The alien beams slammed into the planet below him - a beam for every major city. From his distance, he could see the white-hot blooms of nuclear-level mushroom clouds expanding on the surface of the planet.
Millions of human souls are dying. The planet is being bombed. And I can 't do anything!
And then he saw something that shocked him even more.
No, no. That isn 't Tau Ceti Five! It's Earth. That landmass looks like Africa!
Enraged, he urged himself to move towards the enemy fleet while sitting inside the cockpit of his fighter. I'm in my old fighter now. The old mark eight.
He could see the enemy. Thousands of warships. Some as small as mere destroyers. Others as large as entire cities. All of them looked insectlike, menacing - with laser turrets and tachyon pulse projectors ready to decimate every last human on the planet, or for that matter, the universe.
Why? Why? Why won't you aliens leave us alone? Why do you all insist on killing every last one of us? What is your fucking problem, you galactic bullies?
Far ahead of him, he saw one of the alien warships turn towards him. It was futile, he thought. He controlled a small one-manned fighter against an fleet of multi-kilometer alien warships.
That one warship aimed at him with a laser meant for destroying entire cities. Instantly, in his cockpit, he could hear targetting scanners locking onto his fighter. The alien ship fired.
A flash of light was all he saw.
"WHY?" yelled Thorim in the vacumm of space, even as the laser beam engulfed him.
xxx
Sector General Jason Thorim woke up from a dream that was all too familiar. He had another one of those starfighter dreams, where he was a starfighter ace.
That was a long time ago. He hadn't been in a cockpit in eight years, he reminded himself. Why do I still dream that I'm in a cockpit?
He stopped panting, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and got out of bed. His quarters were vast for a sleeping compartment within a federation warship. He had rows of medals lining one wall. Pictures of his family, friends, and associates lined another. He had plants around his desk, and even a set of chairs for when he intended to have company. His most treasured items were on display in a far corner. A baseball bat from his father. The shoes of a celebrity athlete. His lucky ring.
He went to the sink and buried his face in his water-filled hands. Then, he stared at himself in the mirror. Anyone who saw Jason Thorim would see the same thing. He had a sharp austere-looking face, with short hair that had already turned white. Even though he was only forty, the years of stress as a commander of millions had worn him. But when they looked into his eyes, they saw youthful eyes ‒ eyes filled with passion and warmth. Those were the eyes that looked out at the life he had lived to now. And had led him to make the choices he had made until now.
Jason Thorim, born from a Caucasian mother and an Asian father. That's me. That will always be me, even when I make good decisions and mistakes. And he had made so many mistakes in his life.
But he had made good decisions, too. The decision to take charge when the commander of his first ship had been immobilized… The decision to fight warmongering aliens instead of surrendering to them, even when the odds looked bleaker and bleaker…
But there were the questionable decisions. He remembered… the time he had to give the order to abandon whole worlds to that same enemy. The thought of giving up all those lives to save more lives. It haunted him. And… he knew that in the future, he would have to make more of those decisions on an even grander scale. That was the responsibility of being a war commander —
The comm bell rang.
"Yes?" said Thorim.
"Sir," said a familiar lieutenant's voice, "you told me to remind you at 0140 hours when we arrived on position."
"Well done, lieutenant. I'll be on the bridge in a minute."
"Can't wait, sir." The line cut off.
Chapter 3
Bridge, Federation Starship Newson, Alpha Centauri System
Jason Thorim returned the salutes from all the bridge crewmen and commanded, "Return to your posts, everyone. We have a big job to do today."
He watched as all sixteen crewmembers of the flag bridge returned to their stations and computer consoles. There were light fixtures everywhere. Even the holograms had light, and Thorim knew that any time now, these holograms would show the states of the enemy fleet.
Captain Fletcher approached him. "General, all ships are in position as you ordered, except for two. The Aristotle and the Archimedes. They are currently twelve hours late. Both ships report that they suffered primary drive failure and couldn't repair them in time for the battle."
Thorim nodded. "Tell them to get here as fast as possible, Captain. If they don't get here in time, tell them to hide in the system." And prey they don't get caught by Argonan hunter-killer parties.
"Yes, sir," nodded the Captain.
"How is the wormhole matrix?"
"The wormhole is at full power, sir. It'll be able to transport our entire fleet back to Sol if and when we need it."
"And the bomb?"
"Fully operational and in place, sir."
Thorim nodded. "Good. What does the sensor probes show about the enemy fleet?"
"Let me pull it up, sir. Ah, here we go. After the 8th battle of Alpha Centauri, they are left with 2 Thornguards, 12 Superdreadnaughts, and 48 battleships, and 120 smaller vessels. A full 20% of them are under repair, according to the sensor probes, and exactly 5% have suffered drive failure and won't make it to the battle with the rest of their fleet."
Thorim understood. "That's their mistake." Actually, it was not a mistake at all. Time was at essence. Any time the Argonans gave to humanity meant more time for the remaining human forces within the system to finalize repairs and regenerate shields. In all likelihood, time was not on humanity's side. "You may return back to your duty, Captain. I'll call when I need you."
"Aye, sir." The captain bowed and walked back to his chair in the middle of the flag bridge.
Thorim's chair was a little bit more to the aft. The admiral's alcove, or Fleet Combat Information Center (FCIC), stood in the back quarter of the flag bridge. It contained numerous hologram projectors and hologram charts. Data Display panels surrounded the admiral's chair, as did the holograms. Three officers worked there along with Thorim.
Jason Thorim took a seat, surveying the data displays before him. He literally saw the enemy fleet, heading towards his way. It would take 6 hours for them to enter combat range. He had that long to wait for the final showdown.
He sighed and closed his eyes.
The war was not going well. Not at all.
The Third Intergalactic War, or what some people simply called the Argonan War, had started three years ago when the Argonans, a race of bipedal lizards, declared the human sphere as part of its economic expansion zone. The Argonan leadership, under their then-leader Emperor Zegrwa the Second, had declared that humans were nothing but bipedal competitors to Argonan success as a species in the galaxy. This culminated in the War Amendment to their then-constitution, which stated that all alien races within the Galaxy must obey the Argonan Emperor or be vanquished. A year later, the Argonan constitution was abolished and all power came to belonging to the Argonan Emperor.
Soon after, the Argonans declared war on Earth.
The Third Intergalactic War had started well for humanity. The Argonan's initial offensive across three crucial star systems was pushed back by the human 2nd, 4th, and 8th fleet. At one point, another race of beings called the Aloquad had even allied with humanity and joined the war in the Human Federation's favor. But it all changed when the Argonans developed the artificial warp nexus.
Typically, all stars were connected to each other through wormholes created by two nearby stars' gravitation attraction to each other. When one large gravitational mass was placed near another gravitational mass (ie: two nearby stars), a natural phenomenon occurred that created a wormhole. Using wormholes; fleets, warships, starships, and civilian vessels could traverse the distance easily. Also because of wormholes, a friendly fleet could protect the stars deeper in the chain if it could block an enemy fleet from reaching the stars behind the friendly fleet. This was called bottlenecking and it made intergalactic warfare very intuitive. If you could prevent an enemy fleet from reaching deeper into the chain of interconnected wormholes between systems, you could prevent them from ever attacking the highly population dense regions of your star nation (which usually were also the industrial breadbaskets crucial to maintaining the war effort with new off-the-line warships).
But the Argonan's artificial warp nexus broke all that. Using new unrivaled technology, the Argonans could create a new and sudden artificial wormhole that can conne
In the first months after the Argonans began using their AWs (artificial wormholes), they had completely annihilated the industrial breadbaskets of both the human star federation and its ally, the Aloquads, using their hit and run tactics behind the main frontlines. Humanity and its ally were powerless to stop them. A full 600 billion had died on those eradicated planets, a full testament to the power of these artificial wormholes.
Because of losing the industrial core worlds, humanity could not afford to lose any more human warships because they simply could not be replaced easily. The Argonans, on the other hand, could afford to do so because they had a fully healthy undamaged industrial core of systems that pumped out more ships. Within months, the war went from being slightly in humanity's favor to being out of control to the point where the human federation's star parliament began seriously considering surrender as a possibility. The only thing that prevented the human federation from all-out surrendering was Earth.
For hundreds of years, Earth was the center of the Federation's industrial might. It could produce 30-40% of all of humanity's warship production capacity. And thus, it was a very enviable target for Argonan strategists. If the enemy could glass Earth and its orbital manufacturing bases, then the enemy would have struck a deep blow to humanity's war effort. There were two things that made that nearly impossible. One - Earth was not connected to any O class stars that had allowed the Argonans easy access and acted as staging points to transport their striking fleets deep into humanity's heartland. Secondly, it was not connected to the wormhole chain system like nearly all stars were connected to neighboring stars - at least not in any usual way.
Earth had only one wormhole connecting it to the rest of the galaxy and it was an artificial wormhole created using wormhole gates. This artificial wormhole, using technology that was completely different from the artificial wormholes the Argonans had discovered, allowed for dual way transport between Sol and Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri, on the other hand, had 8 naturally occurring wormholes that connected it to the rest of the galaxy.
But the Argonans wanted Earth, and they wanted it badly. They sent fleet after fleet in attacks on Alpha Centauri in hopes of controlling the system and gaining the only passageway to Sol, and Earth. After months of effort, at last they succeeded in whittling down Alpha Centauri's far numerous orbital forts and defenses to the point where the only defenses left was the hypergate to Earth.
That set up the ninth battle of Alpha Centauri, where the remaining fleet elements of the human sphere collected around the hypergate to Earth along with all the fixed defenses that protected the entrance to the human home system.
Sector General Jason Thorim opened his eyes, and stared at his remaining task force elements displayed holographically before him. He had about 60% of the enemy's total tonnage for the coming battle, and that didn't include their technological inventiveness. The enemy's technological strength was due to the fact that they had developed along different lines with a different purpose. From the beginning, Argonan warships were made to conquer. Human warships were made to defend. In other words, Thorim's remaining ships were behind numerically and qualitatively. It would be a hard battle.
Luckily, he had fixed defenses that made the two soon-to-engage forces more equal. He gazed at the holos before him, seeing his stationary pulsar guns and stationary HET lasers, which were powered by antimatter and could generate extremely energetic gamma ray beams.
He switched the holograms so that it showed a map of the system. Now, he saw everything. And… it was clear to him that - except for the area around the wormhole gate to Sol and Earth - the enemy controlled everything in the Alpha Centauri system. It was sad. Alpha Centauri had two habitable planets, with over 8 billion population in total. And yet, keeping them safe was not a priority for Sector General Thorim. He was effectively giving them up, because he simply could no longer defend them from annihilation level blasts that the enemy would surely do when - if - the enemy kicked the remaining human ships out of the system.
Their lives, all 8 billion humans within the system, was no longer a priority. Jason Thorim shook his head. To think that he got to the point where he could play around with 8 billion lives as if they were only resources to use to combat the enemy. It saddened him. Yet doing so was essential if he wanted to win. And in order to win, he had to make sure that the 20 billion lives on Earth was safe, and that meant he must protect the artificial wormhole to Sol over the 8 billion lives in Alpha Centauri.
And if he couldn't do that, then he would have to do the unthinkable. He would have to disconnect the artificial wormhole connecting Sol with Alpha Centauri. The reason was none other than the fact that he could not allow the enemy to kill off all 20 billion humans living on Earth. If the enemy did that, then it was impossible for humanity to win against the Argonans. Earth was the last industrial manufacturing center for the entire human star nation. Without it, there would be no more new ships to enter the fight. And there would be no more hope. Earth was humanity's last hope, so it had to live, and if that meant disconnecting the only route to Earth than so be it. One day - if disconnected - that route could be opened again, and Thorim would still have a chance of retaking all the planets and star systems that he had lost so far in the war. But if Earth was bombed, then that was it. The war was over.
And so that was why all ships were being routed to a position above the wormhole gate to Earth. He must protect that wormhole gate, to prevent the Argonans from reaching Earth, and if he couldn't protect it, then he would have to order all his ships through the artificial wormhole back to Sol, and then destroy the wormhole gate to Sol.
Jason Thorim stood there, in the middle of a vast array of Holograms, fully knowing that his next decisions - with or without his direct command - would influence the future of the human race and the future of the galaxy in this region of space. He knew it and he stood idle, gazing at the vast foray of movements, both enemy and human.
And then… there was nothing else but to wait.
Chapter 4
Officer's Mess, Federation Starship Newson, Alpha Centauri System
Beck Grim knew he was as good as dead when he saw his cards. He gulped, and assembled a bet. He pushed 20 green chips forward. And his opponent, Marie Devries, called.
Beck wasn't aware he was giving any tells but he was a gambler, and he wanted to win, so his only choice was to continue bluffing. He gulped, again, and assembled an even bigger bet - 60 chips this time - and pushed them forward.
His opponent thought for a while, then called, again.
The final street came. It was the last opportunity for Beck to take down this pot by overbetting and the only solace was that he had seen his opponent hesitate before calling him down in the previous street. Beck was not one to give up - especially to a girl - and so he assembled a bet - an over bet - of around 200 chips, and he splashed it forward confidently. To make it even worse for his opponent, he eyed her with a stern and confident expression that said, "I beat you".
