Sign In
Register
Help
PRELUDE
It was almost poetic that the largest conflict in galactic history would be started in events completely silent. So many historical battles had been touched off by sound - the "shot heard 'round the world", the thermonuclear horror inflicted above Germany, and most of all the ultimate defeat of the Scinfaxi, once and for all, a tornado of fusion, noise, and destruction ending the war that had shaken Earth to its very core. The destruction of the first Scinfaxi invasion force, particularly its ending, had become legend through the years, propagandized in German textbooks as a "victory of the Führer", told to generations of American and British schoolchildren, deemed a Communist success by the Soviets. It was for the worse, then, that nobody knew the real events behind what truly happened in that hour.
That story is history, however. This is the story of the Second Scinfaxi Wars. How Earth, split yet again by the inevitable rivalries of communism, fascism, and democracy, would fight valiantly, side by side, yet again. But, of course, they had no choice. The Others had returned.
CHAPTER I
A German fighter in the void of space tumbled end over end. In space, there was no friction, no way to prevent a ship with disabled propulsion systems from going to the infinite reaches until it ultimately was incinerated inside a star, or swallowed in a black hole, or simply exploded as its chemical fuel degraded the metal that carried it.
Unless, of course, you had backups.
A magnetic field holding the antihydrogen disappeared silently and invisibly - though the effects were neither silent nor invisible to the man in the cockpit. The antimatter obliterated the remaining fuel in the engines, causing an explosion that would have destroyed the ship had it not had protective measures. Inertia, for better or for worse, was still present in this void.
The on-board navigation systems sprung to life, adjusting the craft so that it would reach its destination in the time allotted for the mission. The man in the cockpit, by now, was splattered across the control panel - this mission did not require human assistance, so naturally the inertial dampening systems were shut down to save power.
The ship's ion drives were humming to life now, using the raw power of the antimatter to excite the inert gas in the ion engines and fire it out the back of the fighter. The ship shuddered as the propulsion systems strained to keep up with the amount of energy being produced. Radiation in the form of gamma rays filled the cockpit - but that was fine. Whatever was left of the pilot wouldn't be able to put up any objections.
All these things came together to launch the ship forward, meandering at sublight speeds to its destination, a remote system, codenamed Omega by the Democratic Federation and god-knows-what by the Germans and Soviets. The fighter continued spinning - any counterthrust would simply slow it down. The blinking panels in the cockpit alerted the disemboweled pilot to the fact that he would run out of oxygen in thirty seconds. Computers were so cold.
CHAPTER II
It was, by contrast, warm and sunny in the Reich's Taktische Hauptsitze, and several men fell asleep at their control panels. Nothing "exciting" per se would happen for about eight and a half hours, and the Inspektor was on important business. A control panel beeped, a light flashed, a panel broke under the weight of a lazy technician's face. Thankfully for the man, it was shatter-resistant and the panel simply broke in half, sending the technician's head into the open circuitry below. The man was carried off minutes later, and the pleasant glow of Freiburg II's twin suns continued to tire the sleepless staff, radiating through the glass in the control room's large pane.
A man dressed in dark red and black walked around the rocky, mountainous terrain surrounding the Reich facility, careful not to make too much noise. Taking careful note of the Reich security (or lack thereof), he drew his carbine and attached the tacgrenade launcher to the barrel. With a click and a whirr, the carbine calibrated itself and displayed the words "Подготавливайте для того чтобы сгореть" on its integrated display screen. The man folded the tripod down on the weapon, placed it in position, and inserted a small chip into the slot behind the LED screen. With another whirr the weapon swiveled to line up the perfect trajectory to blow open the wall with the minimum amount of force and noise. The man pressed a button on the remote trigger, and seconds later, the wall crumbled, the steel plating underneath twisted due to the heat of the explosion. The Soviet spy smiled, used a crowbar to pull apart a large enough opening to fit through, and entered the facility.
CHAPTER III
The German facility was rather utilitarian, the spy thought, as he paced through the corridors. Wires hung from the ceiling every now-and-then, and exposed equipment, not even protected by an energy barrier or glass panel, glimmered through the irregular cracks in the wall. It was a sharp contrast to the "Golden Planet"'s normal beauty, this marred facility. Walking around the corner of the well-worn corridor, he noted a security camera to the upper left, pointing straight down the hallway curving to the right about four feet from where he was standing. The spy took a mental note and grabbed at an EMP pack from his satchel. Seeing no immediate threats, he took an alternate route, going around through the circle of corridors. When he got within a foot of the camera, he removed the covering of the pack, placing the sticky side against the back side of the hole in the hallway's dirtied plaster. He set the timer for ten minutes - long enough time, but he'd need the camera off when he made his escape. Darting off to the opposite direction of the camera's view, he decided to take an alternate route to what he wanted.
A good three minutes and a few close encounters with guards later, the spy noticed something rather interesting. While he certainly couldn't read German, what looked like the controller for the orbital cannon sat behind about three feet of steel in front of him. Glancing through the heavy glass panel, he could see a technician working. This wasn't in the mission packet, but it would be an invaluable asset to the German Navy if there was to be some "accidents". There were three grenades in the carbine's launcher, and the spy took a certain pleasure in destroying German property. The spy did some math on his digipad, uploaded the measurements of necessary force and explosion strength to a chip, and inserted the chip into the carbine as before. Up the tripod went, and the grenade shot out of the barrel with a deep "shunk". The titanium-tipped grenade sailed through the glass, shattering it and landing near the technician. The German picked up the grenade in disbelief before it exploded, sending him about twenty feet backward, through a plate glass barrier, and into an adjacent laboratory. So much for the measurements. The Soviet broke down the tripod and wiggled through what had been the window moments before. It looked as if pressing a key on the circular panel and moving a joystick controlled the cannon's potential movement. Right now, the fleet was sitting in orbit above the east ocean. That was about to change.
CHAPTER IV
The Soviet spy walked over to the panel and pressed a small green button. The design was similar to to models he'd trained on, an Andagis DX-1 Orbital Defense System. His suspicions were confirmed as he bent around the side of the monitor and saw the serial number. Things like this undoubtedly came in handy when attempting to override security protocols. The DX-1 was powered by a small fission reactor somewhere within the base. Interruption of power triggered a backup power system to activate, which would help him inject commands with no authorization, but it would automatically trigger a base alert, and that's something he wanted to avoid. The trick was to keep sending commands to the console without letting it know its main power system was disconnected. The spy took a screwdriver from a satchel on his left hip and unscrewed the rectangular panel on the rear of the console. Squeezing between the wall and the console, he found the main power wire, attached to a plate magnetically clamped onto another plate on a circuit board. He then a green lever, temporarily cutting dataflow from the power side of things. With a bit of tugging, he managed to pull it off, and snap the dangling backup power plate in its place. Connecting his digipad to the secondary data port and running a specially designed program on it fooled the computer into thinking the main power source was still available. With the proper connections made, he quickly backed out of the small gap and went to work at the console. Pressing a button to enable a timer, he checked the amount of time he had left on the EMP pulse (about three minutes by now) and set it to two and a half – the distraction would help. Pressing a final button to enable the countdown, he quickly reconnected the main power supply, disconnected his digipad, and ran out the door.
Now the hard part. He had two minutes to get to the control room, get the information, then leave. As he turned the corner, he noticed a set of double-sided glass doors separating the control room from the hallway. Throwing all subtlety out the window, he fired his carbine twice into the door, shattering it. No guards were on station, and only a few technicians were there, rapidly spinning around in their chairs to see what was going on. The spy shot them both in the chest, running over to a console and attaching his digipad. Fortunately, this would be much easier than the ODS – the commands were pre-loaded by Soviet intelligence and all he had to do was execute them. The transfer was at about eighty percent, and the orbital cannon should go off right about now.
CHAPTER V
T+0.005 seconds. Power flows from the nuclear reactor to the acceleration chamber.
T+0.010 seconds. The power builds up in sixteen sets of capacitors.
T+0.011 seconds. The first set of capacitors discharge into a coil. The coil builds up a magnetic charge. The magnetic projectile is forced through and is accelerated rather quickly.
T+0.055 seconds. The projectile has cleared all sixteen coils and is now traveling at a speed far greater than escape speed.
T+2.150 seconds. The projectile has cleared the atmosphere. Due to its size, it retains at least 97% of its speed.
T+3.102 seconds. The projectile is roughly ten kilometers away from the fleet, who has just now detected the cannon's launch. The fleet's computers do not sound an alarm. It must be a sensor malfunction. The crew enjoys their lunch.
T+3.103 seconds. The projectile's microprocessors detect a sufficient distance. They pull a lever, causing the projectile to burst into halves, spilling millions of micrometer size spheres flying out in all directions at the same velocity the projectile once did.
T+3.110 seconds. The spheres impact the ships' hulls. Most hulls at this time are designed to survive millions of micrometeorite impacts. They are not designed to counter tiny anti-battleship cannon spheres, which contain various unpleasant explosives with chemical formulas and names much too long to write here.
T+4.000 seconds. Most of the lower decks of the smaller ships are completely depressurized. Here and there, an explosive reaches a joint or key weld point on a ship and fractures it, causing massive chunks of metal studded with holes to fly off in random directions. These chunks are treated to survive burning up in atmospheres, as ships land almost daily.
T+One minute. A Democratic Federation embassy worker is having lunch with a German businessman, seated near the window. Brass music is playing, and he is eating a pork dish. Light reflects off an object into his eyes. He turns his head to notice it is glaring off a piece of flying metal roughly ten feet wide. He says "Whoa," as the piece of metal crashes through the window, taking his German colleague's head off, narrowly missing himself, setting his table on fire, smashing the entertainment console in the center of the room, breaking through the men's bathroom wall, and making a substantial hole in the wood floor. The floor erupts in flames. Many things run through the Federation's assistant representative on Freiburg II's mind, none of them good, if the Germans were to suspect somehow he was involved in this. The embassy worker runs.
This post has been edited by (DoV) Tokakeke: 17 March 2007 - 03:11 AM
MultiQuote
.gif)