Location: Gobi Galactic Position: Perseus Arm Astronomic Location: Milky Way The Unified Authority sent a spy ship into space near Gobi. The ship dropped a communications satellite and broadcasted out. The satellite carried a video feed that the Unifieds wanted us to see …a warning. It showed the fleet of ships we had patrolling Magus, a planet in the Sagittarius Arm.
On the screen, the ships and the planet are plainly visible. A pair of mile-wide discs, the Magus broadcast station, floats in a distant corner of the screen. The station blends into the vastness of space though an occasional flare in its electrical field gives its position away.
Made up of ships from the Sagittarius Inner and Central Fleets, the fleet patrolling Magus includes one fighter carrier, seven battleships, and a fringe of destroyers, cruisers, and frigates. The ships sit in a loose cluster, the smaller ships toward the edge and the fighter carrier in the center.
The first two anomalies appear between the ships and the broadcast station. They look like budding flowers made out of electricity. Unified Authority battleships emerge from the anomalies.
The shields protecting the U.A. ships glow the color of a fading sun. The hulls of the ships are sharp and sleek, they seem to slice through space as they approach the patrol.
Our carrier launches her fighters. Our battleships fire torpedoes and particle beams. Our destroyers fall into place, flanking the intruders, allowing our ships to hit the enemy from every angle. In past battles, the Unified Authority’s new shield technology has been strong but not impenetrable. Hit it with a sufficient amount of strength, and it will break down. In a prolonged fight, our fleet has more than enough torpedoes to break through the shields.
A third U.A. battleship broadcasts in on the other side of our fleet, between our ships and the planet. The enemy approaches our ships like wolves attacking a flock. They are predators, unafraid, ready to kill.
If our ships had broken formation and run, some of them would have made it to the safety of the broadcast zone. The U.A. ships are self-broadcasting, they cannot follow ours into the broadcast zone without being destroyed.
With his fighters launched, however, the captain of the carrier cannot cut and run, so our battleships slowly shift into position, forming a border around the carrier.
The Unifieds have a new toy that they want us to see—upgraded torpedoes.
As the U.A. ships muscle their way into our formation, they fire torpedoes at our battleships. Instead of stressing the shields, these new torpedoes obliterate them. They strike the clear, electric panes that form our ships’ shields and explode in a glittering flash of red and yellow and gray. The shields light up like glass reflecting bright sunlight, then they vanish.
Admiral Liotta, the newly appointed commander and chief of the Enlisted Man’s Empire, froze the video as a torpedo struck the forward shield of the fighter carrier. He let the feed run for another second, froze it, then pointed to the antennae that projected the shields. “Do you see what’s happening here? Right here. Look at the antennae. Did you see how they caught fire and exploded. Did you see that? These new torpedoes make our shields overcharge.
“Now look at this. See here, on the shields.”
Fire smoldered where the torpedo had struck the shield of a battleship. It wasn’t a flaming fire, not the kind of fire that gets extinguished by the vacuum of space. This looked like phosphorous, as if the chemical had somehow attached itself to the shield and fed on itself.
“One hit. One hit. All they needed was one specking torpedo to knock out our shields,” he said. “There’s no telling what other damage it did inside the ship.”
He started the video feed rolling again, this time closing in on one of the Unified Authority battleships as it attacked.
The U.A. ship fires a second torpedo, striking our unshielded carrier just below the bridge. The armor gives way immediately. Flames burst out of the ruptured hull and disappear. As the disintegration spreads along the hull, armored tiles break off like scales, and the ship seems to decompose before us.
Admiral Liotta stopped the feed. “It appears they are using two kinds of torpedoes, one for shields and one for ships.” He replayed the attack, this time without pausing for explanations.
Shaped like a knife, the Unified Authority’s new battleships have torpedo arrays on either side of their hulls. The ship charges in, hitting multiple targets, leaving them moldering in her wake. A destroyer, two cruisers, and a battleship, are demolished with two shots as the U.A. battleship streaks toward our fighter carrier.
Hoping to stop the inevitable, our fighters swarm the enemy battleship. Fast and small, they are well suited for attacking battleships, baffling their guns and torpedoes with agile maneuvers; but they are too weak to damage the U.A. ship. Their cannons and rockets peck at the shields, causing no damage. They are like bees attempting to defend their hive from a bear. No, it’s even worse. They are like minnows attacking a shark.
With our fighters pecking uselessly at her shields, the first of the U.A. battleships fires a torpedo at the fighter carrier. The forward shield lights up. It shimmers and erases as a second torpedo strikes the carrier across her bow.
The front of the carrier caves in on itself, coughing up huge sprays of debris and fire. Bodies fly out in the eruption, men who died the instant the torpedo hit the ship and men who died when they entered the vacuum of space.
The U.A. ship fires one final torpedo, which erases any chance of survivors. When that last torpedo strikes, it breaks the fighter carrier in half.
* * * Seen in real time, the demolition looked even more brutal than it did in slow motion. The Unifieds knew they only needed two shots to destroy our ships. The first shot was the jab. The second shot was the fatal blow.
We all sat in silence for several seconds after the feed ended. “Damn,” I whispered quietly so that no one else would hear me. Why should we even try to defend ourselves? I thought. If the Unifieds attacked those ships to send us a message, the message they were sending was, “Give up all hope.”
“We did not lose every ship in that encounter. After they destroyed the fighter carrier, the Unifieds allowed our remaining ships to escape,” said Liotta.
“What were the damages?” asked Admiral Wallace. “How many specking ships did we lose?”
Liotta looked at his notes, and said, “Nine ships. Seven fighters.”
“Only seven fighters?” I asked.
“We’re in contact with the other fighters. As soon as we are sure the coast is clear, we’ll send a carrier out to retrieve them.”
“Admiral, who shot the video?” I asked.
“Unknown,” said Liotta. “We should assume the Unifieds sent a spy ship to record the battle.”
“The sons of bitches sent a spy ship to record a specking massacre,” said Wallace. “What a nightmare. What a specking nightmare.”
“Well?” asked Liotta. “Any suggestions?”
“It seems obvious,” said Captain Holman, who had been the late Admiral Jolly’s right-hand man. Holman and I were still orbiting Gobi, still in the Perseus Arm. Liotta and Wallace appeared through the magic of a confabulator.
“What’s obvious?” asked Liotta, shooting Holman an icy glare. He did not like having a captain at a summit for admirals; and he especially disliked having that captain participate as if he’d been invited to speak.
Holman looked around the table to see if anyone had seen whatever he had seen. If he was looking for support, he had wasted his time. Not finding any backers, he turned to Admiral Liotta, and said, “We don’t need to fight them, they’re not trying to take our planets from us. They want their barges back; but they can’t fire at the barges because they need them as much as we do. You with me so far?”
