CHAPTER 12

The alert klaxons blared painfully throughout the Golkos-Seer’koh fleets. The sudden appearance of a large superluminal signature on an intercept course from Terran space caught the fleets immobile and completely by surprise. Grand Admiral Koor and Admiral Khandar exchanged perplexed glances, but no words, and hurried to the bridge.

“Report!” she demanded

Captain Moltor, commanding the Golkos flagship Nived Sheur, stepped up smartly and told her, “Grand Admiral the Terrans are coming out of superluminal, initial count is five hundred and sixty-one enemy vessels in three formations,”

“So few?” the Grand Admiral asked in a perturbed voice. “This must be some trick.”

Admiral Khandar studied the scan minutely, shaking his head. “Perhaps, but the core of this fleet is of different design than the Terran warships we’ve noted previously. Also, they are approaching us in a semblance of a classic attack mode. Their speed is greater, but the central mass of ships is in a hollow sphere formation.”

“Are they mad, to attempt such an attack with so few ships? We outnumber them four-to-one!” Grand Admiral Koor paced the deck, her doubt growing.

“Grand Admiral I think I have the answer,” Moltor told her. “Scans show the central core of one hundred and forty-seven ships to be enormous in size and mass. They are approximately five times the volume of the standard Galactic battleship, and three times the mass. In addition their power curves are remarkable; well over triple the signature of a standard battleship.”

“So that is it: they’ve built super-battleships and they look to crush us with firepower!” Grand Admiral Koor smiled, now perceiving she knew what she was up against. She dashed to the holographic display, her eyes greedily devouring the data. “A battleship is simply a battleship despite the firepower, and now we can bring more weapons to bear on a single target than if the Terrans had made three battleships to every one of these! Deploy the fleet for envelopment of the super-battleships!” Grand Admiral Koor set herself in her command chair, assured of the correctness of her guess. Her confidence was so great that she actually asked Khandar for his opinion.

The Admiral shrugged, saying, “I must admit, Grand Admiral, I can find no fault with your conclusions. The Terran’s, strapped by time and resources, could very well have settled on this as their solution. The flank formations are composed of standard squadrons led by battleships. They are flanking the core.” He pointed out the standard Terran battleship squadrons. “Yes, they are beginning to build speed, as the Terrans did against the Chem. I expect the standard formations will accomplish the “Alexander’s Wheel” tactics we have noted previously, whilst the main core comes to bear upon our fleets. It is a logical strategy, at the least.”

“Maybe,” Koor mused, her certainty sinking for some strange reason, “but why the attack? Why not conserve his resources, or bring more of his fleet to bear?”

“I do not know, Grand Admiral,” Khandar admitted. “At this point we can only speculate. However, by taking the offensive Alexander takes the initiative. We therefore meet him on terms of his own choosing. They may not be terms totally to his liking, but we are by our very positioning and intent of invasion dictating his necessary responses. By attacking he gains a slight amount of flexibility he would not have in defending, and a good general always looks for an advantage no matter how trifling.”

“I would say your argument makes sense, Admiral Khandar, if these Terrans were not so strange to us,” Koor admitted. “They are aggressive to the point of foolishness. If I did not distrust this Alexander and these Terrans so implicitly I would share your confidence.”

“I cannot lay claim to any supreme confidence, Grand Admiral,” Khandar told her. “I am, like you, trying to make sense out of the situation. I do believe Alexander is employing an offensively oriented defense, but beyond that I do not know. I cannot say where his other resources are, I can only guess. It may be that Alexander planned a pre-emptive strike upon all the forces of our invasion. If so, what forces the Quotterim-Bael and Syraptose have brought to bear on the Terran frontier are facing a similar situation. I am, unfortunately, probing in the dark at the moment.”

“A grudging admission, but an admission nonetheless, Admiral Khandar, I thank you for your candid thoughts.” Koor told him, and then she laid her hand on his shoulder in a gesture of conciliation. “We have had our differences, but now I need your skill and loyalty. Help me to win this battle and crush this dangerous foe!”

“You have all of my efforts!” Khandar replied sincerely.

Under the guidance of Admiral Khandar the Golkos-Seer’koh fleets moved forward in their standard cube formations, but the cubes now maneuver slightly and slowly around the projected course of the Terran sphere. The Terran sphere of super-battleships continued on course, unperturbed, but the Terran wings which consisted of normal battleships, cruisers and the like, distanced themselves from the sphere and began to maneuver towards the Golkos-Seer’koh in a series of three dimensional crossing maneuvers more reminiscent of Alexander’s battle with the Chem.

The fleets closed quickly, the Terran sphere not slowing until within several thousand kilometers of the Alliance formations. The outer arms of the Terran flanking forces raked the outer echelons of the Alliance formations with fire, but the Alliance ships refused to alter their course or engage them. Instead the Alliance formations held on a steady course, and when the Terrans were at extreme range they opened fire. The coordinated firepower of the Alliance fleets concentrated as it was on such a small region of space was awesome. Fire splashed off the shields of the huge Terran ships without apparent effect, but the Terran super-battleships held their fire.

“Continue a constant bombardment, Admiral, their shields cannot hold forever,” Grand Admiral Koor ordered.

“It will be done, Grand Admiral,” Khandar nodded, examining the scans of the Terran superships as they closed. His first impression was of the discipline of the Terran crews, and their ability to hold their fire until within effective range under such a massive bombardment. As the Terrans drew closer, however, their silence became unnerving. Khandar tried to convince himself that it was just another of Alexander’s ploys; the Terran Overlord was somewhat infamous for the nefarious mind games he played upon the Alliance intelligent effort. If this was the reasoning behind the Terran delay it was working. Khandar could see the bridge crew of the Nived Sheur tensing for the inevitable Terran response. With each passing moment the impending broadside of the super-battleships increased in its theoretical severity.

Doubt entered the Admiral’s intuitive mind with the full force of a hammer blow, and he stared at the sensor displays of the Terran ships with renewed intensity, as if his desire could unlock their secrets. He isolated the images and scans of a single ship, and scoured it minutely. The obvious finally hit him: the single blaster projector. These ships fired all of their energy through a single projector, concentrating all their power on one target. Khandar shook his head in disbelief. Could the Terrans have made such a blunder? Certainly such a projector would have a great amount of power, but experiments on just such a weapon had been done a hundred kicellia past with no success. The problem was one of too much power, and at the same time not enough. The single projector weapon had enough power, in theory, to overwhelm a target ships shield, but in reality below a certain threshold of energy the projector wave got in its own way. This threshold was theoretically too large for a blaster projector to reach without vaporizing. In a standard galactic blaster the projector beam itself set up an interference pattern with the backlash of energy built up outside the shield. It could not punch a hole through the shield instantaneously so an enormous pool of plasma built up outside the shield which interfered with the incoming beam. The only way for a single projector weapon to work was to pump enough energy into the beam to completely saturate the target shield upon striking it, and no ship, not even the Terran’s superships, had that much power. Unless the ships had an entirely different purpose, Khandar thought, and as the thought struck him he glared at the tactical display. The Alliance fleet completed the envelopment. Another quick glance showed the Terran flanks withdrawing. A shot of icy fear crushed Khandar’s chest.

“The shields on one of the Terran ships are buckling!” Moltor exclaimed.

Khandar rushed to Grand Admiral Koor’s seat. “Grand Admiral it is a trap! Get the flagship away from the Terrans, those are deathships!”

Koor simply stared at Khandar, unable to comprehend what he meant. Moltor suddenly exclaimed jubilantly, “There she goes!”

On the fringes of the Terran sphere, now deep within the womb of the Alliance envelopment, a super-battleship lost her shields. The flashes of blaster fire were just upon the point of reaching her hull when suddenly it erupted in a colossal flash of light so brilliant that the viewers could not fully compensate for it. The light consumed the ship, but instead of exploding spherically it sprang forth in an undiluted stream of energy. As if sentient the stream reached out and found a Golkos battleship in the same formation as the Nived Sheur.

The crew watched, horrified, as the battleship’s shields promptly gave way. The stream cut through the metal of the battleship, splitting it in two. The fore and aft sections of the battleship spun crazily away from the center of the disaster trailing glowing clouds of saturated plasma. Then the engines in the aft section imploded. The shock wave bracketed the Nived Sheur, and metal fragments showered her shields. The inertial dampeners could not compensate for the sudden blow and crewmembers lurched across the deck. Power dropped off line, taking the sensors, light, control boards and gravity with it. The Nived Sheur went suddenly dead. Only the cries of fear, pain and anger told the commanders that anything on the ship besides themselves still lived. Then came a series of concussions so violent that emergency power sputtered on and off for several moments. A lull in the cacophony finally pervaded the smoky interior of the Nived Sheur. Emergency power came back on line, and the lights, control boards, and sensors came back to life. Gravity came back on, though fortunately the emergency circuit kicked in and brought it on gradually, allowing the crew to slowly freefall to the deck before full gravity was restored. The Nived Sheur re-entered the engagement, but it was several moments before Koor or Khandar could assess the situation.

The two Admirals found themselves next to each other, staring at the small emergency holograms. Neither had any idea at the moment how long the Nived Sheur had been out of action, but they realized with a sickening reality exactly what the Terran super-battleships were and their purpose. It was all too late. By the time they ascertained their position fully half the Terran super-battleships had already self destructed, and with each inferno they took with them at least one Alliance ship. The space around the wounded flagship was calm now, and they could easily discern why: not a single capital ship in the Nived Sheur’s formation survived.

Khandar shook his head. “It is just as well we lost power, the Terran’s obviously knew the whereabouts of our flagship formation and targeted every capital ship. Their sensors must have shown us without power, and therefore not worth wasting a shot.”

“We must get the fleet out of here, Admiral,” Koor told him, “to remain is death.”

“The Terran’s have just about spent the last of their deathships,” Khandar told her, and they watched as a dozen ships went up in the space of a single moment. With each self destruction of a Terran “fireship” there was a corresponding death of an Alliance vessel, sometimes more than one. The shields of the Alliance warships simply could not withstand the full force of a concentrated matter-anti-matter engine explosion.

The two Admirals watched helplessly as a string of three Alliance vessels went up in one cataclysmic eruption. The energy stream imploded a battleship’s shields and carried on through a heavy cruiser and a destroyer before it became diffuse enough to be diverted by the shields of other potential targets. Everywhere were the glowing hulks and damaged hulls of Alliance ships, hundreds of them. The destruction, so great in opposition to their expectations, and the prolonged silence of the flagship, caused the breakup of the fleet without the Grand Admiral’s order. Khandar pointed out the panic stricken ships wheeling out of formation and fleeing the Terran super-battleships. They escaped one danger only to run full into the hornets’ nest of the Terran flanking formations. The Terran flanks, composed of standard squadrons, lay in wait for the fleeing Alliance ships like wolves. As soon as an Alliance vessel, or vessels, broke from the protective firepower of their massive formations the Terrans pounced upon them, pummeling them into dust before they could run or help could arrive from the main body. Scores of Alliance vessels met this fate, and it might have been hundreds had the Terrans had enough ships to fully exploit the confusion.

“You see they’ve gotten away from the deathships without our help, but also without discipline or regard for formation. Now the Terrans on the flanks are having a field day. We are strangely fortunate, Grand Admiral. Had the Terrans attacked with a thousand ships to support their deathships they could have annihilated us. As it is they can only inflict a due amount of humiliation and suffering.”

“What can we do to salvage the situation, Admiral Khandar?” Grand Admiral Koor asked, completely drained of all insight or resolve.

“Have I the Grand Admiral’s permission to address the fleet?” Khandar asked.

“You may do whatever is necessary to preserve the fleet, Admiral.”

“As you command, Grand Admiral,” Khandar nodded, and immediately he was on the ethernet directing squadrons to rendezvous for support, forming flank echelons to protect his main body against the Terrans, moving the remnants of the central body away from the remaining Terran deathships, and organizing the orderly withdrawal of the fleet deeper into the Golkos frontier. Khandar’s efforts took time to accomplish, and the Terrans took advantage of it. It was another fifth of a decurn before the remnants of the Golkos-Seer’koh fleet regrouped enough to repel the force of harrying Terrans. When they did so they withdrew, leaving the wreckage of the field to an unlikely victor.