Chronicles of Sol: The Fall

The Minara woman looked over the footage, the incident at Telgros was something else. They had known the menace were a threat, but to see it first hand revealed just how powerful the alien weaponry really was. Telgros has previously been an almost idyllic world with vast grasslands, lovely forests, lakes and mountains. The alien bombardment had reduced the planet to a volcanic hellscape, with vast seas of molten magma leaking from the crust and rivers of lava. Volcanic outgassing had reduced the atmosphere to a barely breathable state, while vast chunks of the planetary oceans were simply vaporized.

Amazingly of the three million colonists and troops on the planet, only half a million had perished in the bombardment, with a further hundred thousand dying in the fighting before that. That was six hundred thousand dead, and that number only grew when you factored in deaths in space, but not as dramatically. The loss of the station had cost the lives of some five thousand people, while the attack on the Bountiful Treasure cost three hundred people their lives.

“It’s amazing anyone survived, why isn’t the surface glass though?”

“The aliens use charged particle bolts, not plasma. Plasma weapons used in bombardment tend to ‘splash’ or ‘explode’ on impact with the target. This has the effect of superheating and flash-vaporizing the materials. The alien particle bolts don’t lose integrity the same way, they tend to keep traveling in a straight line, flash-vaporizing and tearing through everything in their path. As such instead of glassing the crust, they cracked it, releasing vast amounts of volcanic gasses and magma.”

“I guess that explains the oceans,” said the Minari woman in response.

“Not entirely, those particle bolts carried a lot of energy, when they hit the water they would superheat it as they passed through it and thousands of them rained into the oceans. Effectively boiling them away, while still punching holes into the sea floor.”

“I still find it surprising that anyone lived through that.”

“From what we can tell the localized ground shields were able to withstand the bombardment, thereby protecting the major settlements. Sadly we still have to evacuate, as the colony is no longer capable of supporting the colonists, but lives were saved.”

“Agreed, any idea how much was lost?”

“We are still trying to get an exact estimate on how much the aliens took, but as near as we can tell they emptied the local warehouses of Erudite, Ephon Crystals, and Tungari. They also made off with the local reserve of Deuterium. Enough material to supply a small fleet for weeks if not months.”

All of those were valuable, and if the menace had taken the contents of the warehouses, that meant they had a large supply of them, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what they would do with it, “We must step up our efforts then.”

The young man with her glanced at the data from the Bountiful Treasure. “Well the good news is that we now know how their shield penetrators work.”

“Right, I heard something about that, any progress on a possible countermeasure?”

“Not much, our scientists have come up with several proposals, but all of them require a redesign of fleet shields. The easiest is multi-layered shielding with independent rotating band modulations, projections indicate this would cut the alien shield penetration chances by half but it remains possible for an alien warhead to penetrate the shields and strike the hull. Another project proposes wide band, active jamming pulses to try and disrupt the alien sensor nodes. Blind the torpedoes, so they can’t ascertain our shield configurations. Not unlike what we do now with traditional weapons, but with a few tweaks. Given the nature of the alien torpedoes, we can’t be certain how effective this will be against them, considering they ignore standard electronic warfare techniques.”

“Meaning we might still be dependent on shooting them down. Anything that can stop them from piercing our shields entirely?”

The man nodded, “Our scientists went back to Dulmar's theories. Looking into alternative shield configurations.” He paused and tapped a button bringing up a simulated shield bubble. “Multiadaptive triphasic shielding. In theory, these shields will stop just about anything you throw at them including shield-penetrating warheads. The alien warheads use a modulated electromagnetic shield to bypass our shield bubbles, a triphasic shield wouldn’t care about that, in fact, electromagnetic shields can’t even match a triphasic matrix, they allow permutations not possible with electromagnetic energy barriers..”

“And how long would this take to implement?”

“Years, sir. Sadly Dulmar’s work with Triphasics is rather... limited. In many ways, he was ahead of his time, a genius, but sadly not all his ideas for next-generation shielding got funding. No one wanted to invest in Triphasics at the time, they were more interested in Omicron shields since they were a clear improvement based on proven technology.”

“Understandable, but indeed unfortunate. Get as many people on it as we can, just in case we need these Triphasic shields.”

“Aye, Ma’am,” was his reply just before he left. Leaving her alone to consider the wider implications of the incident. The loss of Telgros IV was an embarrassment for the Valorian people and reflected poorly on the fleet. That alien battle carrier would have to be dealt with and steps would need to be taken to prevent the incident from becoming more widely known. She was just glad the Menace had chosen a relatively minor and remote world. She shuddered to imagine what they would do if such damage had been inflicted on a more important world. They would be hard pressed to hide such a thing, and with tension rising on the borders, she knew it was only a matter of time before they were at war. They weren’t ready now, even if some of the clans didn’t see it, but hers did. The Confederation was heading for war, the Voskar were a constant thorn that would have to be crushed sooner or later, while elsewhere the Toral Confederacy was getting uppity again. Already minor skirmishes had been reported along the border, but so far the Toral didn’t dare invade. Losing a world like this, however, was a show of weakness, they would pounce instantly if it became more widely known.

The last player of concern however was the Malora, while the Malora were historic rivals of the Toral Confederacy, in recent years the two races had begun to grow closer together. She was worried about a possible alliance between the two. Over the centuries the three races had been rivals competing with each other for resources and territory, with a number of bloody conflicts over the years but nothing more than skirmishes had been fought in the last few centuries. Nothing of the scale of a full-fledged war, which had allowed the clans to focus on expanding their trade networks, growing their wealth and generally expand the Confederation into the vast interstellar empire it was today.

Against either race, she was fairly confident of victory, but together they would be hard-pressed to defend their territory. Then again, with the menace making a mockery of the fleet, it was perhaps time to reassess those projections.

Valorian-Toral Border; 71.9 Lightyears from Telgros IV; 1430 hours:

“Forward shields collapsing captain!” shouted the brutish hulk of a figure crouching by the engineering station. It was almost comical, if they weren’t in the middle of a battle.

The captain almost chuckled at the thought, but she’d always been amused by the size of her friend. As a species, the Toral were noted for being large, typically around three meters tall for a male, with females like herself being notably smaller averaging about half that size.

As a species, they were noted for rather extreme sexual dimorphism. All Toral had four arms, but males were covered with thick lush fur, had thick facial tusks, and fierce eyes. They were also far larger, and much more muscular. Despite their powerful and imposing figures, the average male was typically pretty gentle and easygoing, unless you got them angry, then you die.

Females like herself, were much slimmer by comparison and nearly hairless. They also lacked the facial tusks of the male, but they did have a long tail which ended with a stinger. Females like herself were able to use that stinger as a defensive tool, as it contained a rather potent toxin, a paralytic to be specific.

Why her engineer brought those thoughts to mind was due to his sheer size, he made her feel tiny, as he dwarfed other males. Pushing the thoughts aside, she focused back on the battle. Honestly she wasn’t too concerned that forward shields were going down. As the Valorian ship was currently pulling back, their plasma torps were potent, but slow to reload. Their pulse cannons, while faster to fire, weren’t much of a threat, secondary defense screens could hold them off, or if need be the hull plating could absorb the hits.

Her hull was protected by several layers of plating, starting with a polymer coating, which would vaporize in response to an energy blast, creating a dispersive cloud. Underneath that were several spaced layers of armor plating each one reinforced with an ablative layer. The materials used in the standard nonablative layers, were chosen specifically for high thermal resilience, without compromising on structural toughness. The result was a potent if highly classified alloy simply referred to as NLM-223. It was a laminated metal and polymer mix with a unique nanoscale structure that offered fantastic properties for spaceship armor.

“Reset the shields, bring us to a new heading of one one seven mark five two,” she ordered, while glancing at her console to see the current charge levels for the main cannons. The main weapons on her cruiser were twenty-two Particle Lance Projectors. These were heavy particle cannons, that fired in half-second pulses, delivering a highly concentrated burst of neutrons and protons, with about 60-35 split between them, the remaining five was a random mix of subatomic particles stripped from the source material. These weapons had fantastic range and these lance bolts could tear though most defenses in short order.

She smiled, and gave the order to fire on the Valorian cruiser before it could get out of range. Nine projectors lit up and discharged violet death at the retreating Valorian vessel.

Her shields flared brightly as the energy beams slammed into her shields. “Direct hit, enemy shields holding.”

She glanced at her console, the cannons were cycling, but they were almost ready for another pulse, the moment they went green, she ordered, “Fire!”

Valorian shields were strong and their ships, fast, but she would put her faith in Toral engineering any day. Another violet pulse rippled across space striking the hostile cruiser amidships. This time her shields didn’t absorb the full impact. “Direct hit, moderate damage, their lateral shields have failed.

Sadly they were slipping out of main gun range, so she had to rely on a different weapon. “Load missile tubes, lock weapons on target.”

“Missiles, ready, sir!”

“Fire!”

The ship hummed as a series of launches took place, in moments, hundreds of antiship missiles were in the void. All seeking the same target. These were Pulse missiles, they were tracking projectiles, armed with a short-range ionic particle lance and a high-yield fusion warhead. Upon closing with a target, they would first fire a focused ionic particle pulse, that would disrupt shields and burn through armor, before detonating with a shaped fusion blast.

She relaxed a bit, as she watched the projectiles seek their target. This wasn’t her first skirmish with a Valorian cruiser and by now she was pretty sure it was dead. They were tanky, and fast, but Valorian vessels were also somewhat predictable once you understood their tactics. They were excellent skirmish vessels, designed to take advantage of their strong shields, by slipping in and out of range. At long range they would pelt you with their long range rapid fire pulse cannons, dealing constant damage to the target, while closer up they would fire devastating plasma torpedo volleys. However, they were quite fragile once their shields were broken. It was why she hadn’t really used the missiles earlier, best to wait until the Valorian shields were failing.

Then suddenly, she watched the Valorian ship start firing on her missiles. “Sir! The Valorians have begun targeting our missiles.”

She blinked, that was odd. Never before had she seen the Valorians employ point defense systems, they had always relied on their strong shields. Not that she blamed them, almost nothing could get through them while they were up, but that was also the weakness. Once down the Valorians were left with precious little to defend themselves.

On the screens the missile counts fell rapidly, 300, 200, 100, then the missiles entered pulse range, discharging their single shot lances, even as the point defense cannons on the Valorian cruiser continued to fire. Missile counts kept falling, but a number of warheads survived to make contact. For a moment the sensors were blinded by the immense flash of multiple high yield fusion cores detonating. Flooding the area with a massive electromagnetic and ionic pulse, along with superheated plasma and gamma rays. Much of it focused on the cruiser.

When the detonation cleared, it revealed an intact cruiser, damaged but still there. “Direct hit, heavy damage to the target. I’m reading multiple hull breaches, her shields are down and she appears to have lost all power to her primary systems. Main reactor failure imminent, I estimate five minutes before complete reactor meltdown.”

She smiled, well it seems that was a kill anyway. “Bring us about, spool up drives one and two, and prepare for an immediate hyperspace jump.” She turned to the science console. “Do we have the Simple Devestation’s vector?”

“Aye, sir, heading two two three, mark zero four they are on course for the Valorian world of Arnium.”

Recalling the specs of the rogue battleship Simple Devastation, she figured they would need to take a hyperspace pause before then. “Likely points for them to exit hyperspace to recharge?”

“Several, sir, but if they are planning to avoid Valorian patrols, which seem unusually dense in this sector, I’d go to grid 118-23, its pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Only one star system in the area, no habitable worlds, no local trade routes or major resources of any kind. The local star system doesn’t have much in the way of planets either, mostly just large space rocks, but there is a gas giant and its moons in the area.

“Sounds like a possible place to check,” she replied, “Helm set course for grid 118-23.”