Chapter 277: Total War

The ships dropped out within a thousand miles of the resonance zone with only a few dozen crossing the line and exploding into molecular debris. The entire Fifth Wave exited jumpspace, their engines bleeding the twisted energies of the half-formed reality as they cooled off, jumpcores recharging, shields coming up as fast as possible, weapons being charged. Every station was manned, every backup station had crew members at it. Every Lanaktallan aboard the vessels were in their armored vacuum suits and plugged into the environmental systems. Every crew member a veteran, every weapon tested, every crew trained and even practiced.

It had been manned in silence.

It had left in secrecy.

It had trained in an empty system in the vast emptiness of the scorched and barren systems between Unified Council Space and the Confederacy.

They had done something unthinkable to even the Mantids. Sacrificed entire fleets to find the edges of the Confederacy's defenses. The Engine's radius had been discovered with only a few thousand ships. The Council had learned to avoid neutron stars, white dwarfs, and pulsars with less than twenty-thousand ships.

They had moved 'above' the Galactic Stub, through the endless dark and silence before regrouping "above' their target.

It had been months of travel through jumpspace under silent running.

Now they had arrived.

And the Terrans would learn that the Unified Council was the supreme entity of the Galactic Spur, not jumped up lemurs with delusions of grandeur who sought to elevate themselves above their betters.

Fifteen million ships exited jumpspace in a globe around the Terra-Sol System.

Within a second the vast defenses of Terra-Sol engaged.

The fight was on.

Before a fleet of two hundred ships could even finish discharging their cores and drives to be able to bring up their shields C+ cannons with barrel diameters measured in meters slammed shells into the ships, the round impacting inside the hulls.

They were wiped out in the initial barrage even before the C+ cannon battery on Io had fired.

A fleet of nearly ten thousand ships began vomiting out torch-ships and other parasite craft.

The guns from Pluto's Guardian Station (Formerly named "Eat Shit Mantids" Station) wiped them out of the sky with missile pods that dropped out of hyperspace, oriented, and fired before the pods were even loaded into the graviton assist launchers. The pods themselves oriented and activated their systems, graviton compressing the mass even as it fired itself and the mass driver at the nearest ship at nearly .5C.

The ships and the parasite craft were obliterated.

Nearly a million ships streamed toward each of the planets, firing their guns.

From out of the Oort Cloud streaked missiles, torpedoes, torch-ships, attack craft, and more.

The Unified Corporate Security Council ships were already firing at the planets, knowing that the planets couldn't move out of the way so mathematics stated that the weapons would hit. Everything from nanites to viruses to explosives to just good old kinetic grounds were fired at all the planets.

The Lanaktallan would crush the Terran's home system, the obvious ruling system of the entire Confederacy. They would pound on the Terrans until they could only surrender.

And then the Lanatkallan would destroy them.

Space howled, shuddered, and shattered under the weaponry being brought to bear. Massive warships roared out of their construction berths around Hateful Mars and Betrayed Mercury, launched from the stations around Scarred Venus, cleared for action and launched from the vast shipyards around Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Urectum. From Pluto the big guns kept firing even as the primary weapon system went from standby to charging.

The Lanaktallan had assumed that all of the system's defenses would be cold, would take time to bring online due to the waste of keeping them ready for action.

They were wrong.

Terra had learned that lesson at the hands of the Skanetti before they even built their first colony. Before they had even met the Mantid or Treana'ad. Had learned that the more valuable it was to humanity the harder an actively malevolent universe would try to take it away.

The Lanaktallans smashed face first against what every race of the Terran Confederacy viewed as the worst thing in the known universe to attack.

Fortress Sol.

Around Sol itself graviton generators focused on vast plasma coronal loops, compressing it, shaping it, aiming it. Opening up jumpgates and firing. They were use once or use never weapons. Jumpgate technology was easily jammed or counter-attacked and the crews there didn't give any thought to the fact that their one blow might be the last one of their lives.

Any non-warship jumped out of the system as soon as possible as the vast armories and defenses of TerraSol came online and began fighting.

Above and below the energetic yellow star the 'solar winds' were compressed and aimed in broad sweeps of highly charged particles. The massive compressor stations wrapped each beam around a core of inverted particles.

Every planet, every satellite, even some of the larger pieces of debris in the asteroid belt activated planetary shields and began to fire their guns.

On Luna the massive C+ battery began to fire rapidly enough that the gray dust shivered several feet off the surface, giving it a thin atmosphere for the first time since the Mantid Attack had destroyed Tycho Station.

The millions of soldiers on every planet, every satellite, every large piece of debris ran for action stations, drew weapons from the armory, climbed into cockpits, and readied themselves for the fight.

Tens, hundreds of thousands of Lanaktallan vessels were shredded from the sky. Tens of thousands of ships moved to engage the Lanaktallan fleet.

They were outnumbered by nearly a thousand to one.

The casualties kept mounting, 6%, 7%, 8%, 9%, 10%.

Still the Lanaktallan kept coming, kept firing their guns, kept launching parasite craft, missiles, and torpedoes.

12%. 16%.

Pluto and Neptunian fortifications were under heavy fire, their shields visible by the naked eye from Earth if anyone had been looking. Both sides guns were hammering away at one another.

Another fleet dropped from jumpspace onto the resonance zone.

The Unified Military Council Fleet had arrived. Not a task force. Not a fleet. The Fleet.

All of it that could be spared from defending the vital core worlds.

They would finish these jumped up lemurs once and for all. They knew that the Unified Corporate Fleet stood no chance against the Terrans.

They were merely there to run the Terran magazines dry and expose their defenses.

The UMC drove hard for the planets, sweeping through the 'gaps' in the orbital mechanics like vast tentacles reaching into the Sol System between the planets, hundreds of thousands of ships streaming for anything detected.

The fighting grew more intense. Calling it a 'target rich environment' was an understatement. One Terran Admiral would refer to the space battle being like what it must have been to face a Treana'ad landing or a Mantid invasion.

The Lanaktallan forces didn't bother trying to track the entire battle, they knew their computers weren't up to the task. Instead they each concentrated on their own ships, the ships of the task forces 'adjacent' to them, and their target. They ignored casualties.

The Corporate Security forces knew that any ship that retreated would cause the corporation to be dissolved and absorbed by the Unified Economic Council as well as every family member of every crew member of the fleeing ship would be executed.

They had no choice, those Lanaktallan on the Corporate Security vessels. They clenched their teeth onto their cud, tightened their sphincters, and kept driving into the pounding of the Terran guns, firing back even as their ships were smashed into junk and ruin.

The UMC swept through any gaps in the Corporate Security forces, their ships larger, more heavily armored, better armored, more advanced shielding. The UMC soldiers knew that if they failed, if they fled the fight, their families, all taken hostage, would be killed.

Like the UCS, they clenched their controls and slammed into the enemy guns. There were too many ships for anything sneaky, for any subtle strategies. They knew they had to knock the Terrans out and knock them out fast.

The casualties kept climbing.

22%/4%. 25%/6%.

The shielding on one of the weapon batteries on Pluto failed and the massive C+ cannons were silenced. The rest of them picked up the slack, firing on where vessels had been seconds or minutes before. Another shield fell, then another, and Pluto started taking a pounding.

Torchships, knowing their weapons were ineffective, went to maximum thrust and began slamming into the surface of the tiny planet.

27%/11%.

Pluto broke apart but the surviving guns kept firing. They could fire through other planets, through the debris field, keep hammering the enemy.

Outbound Station, empty except for the military crew after the emergency evacuation, died in a flash.

29%/14%

Still the Lanatkallan kept coming. Tens of millions of ships still remaining. A third of them ignored the Terran military vessels, hitting anything else they could, striking at the planetary defense shields, striking at anything they could see through the haze of jamming.

30%/15%

A third wave arrived.

The Unified Executor Fleet.

All of it.

Millions more ships activated their sublight drives and drove into the system even as they were blown out of the sky.

The casualties did not matter. The Great Herd had plenty more where that came from. The Unified Breeding Council's computers could replace every lost Lanaktallan ten times over in a single generation.

The combined fleet took the Terran fire, smashed into the Terran defenses, crashed against the walls of Fortress TerraSol to ensure there would be another Lanaktallan generation.

TerraSol command could not risk another wave coming in, despite the low casualty rate of the Terran warships and the insanely high K/D ratio, the Lanaktallan were driving hard for the planets and satellites, obviously intending on orbital bombardment and planetary landings.

It had been tested. It had been used at the end of the Mar-gite War.

TerraSol activated it.

Space for a quarter-light year around Terra shimmered, flexed, and wobbled as massive graviton generators created carefully placed and synched artificial singularities.

The TerraSol System vanished into The Bag.

Where the Sol System had been there was only empty space and the gravity shadow of a singularity.

Inside The Bag the fighting roared on.

The last fleet, a combined force of Corporate, Military, and Executor ships dropped out of jumpspace into where they thought the Sol System would be.

Alarms wailed as the carefully placed singularities tore at the ships with their gravities. The ships couldn't jump back into jumpspace that deep in that strong of a gravity well.

The last fleet, the one that was supposed to finish the Terrans once and for all, were torn apart by the singularities that formed the 'drawstring' of The Bag.

Inside The Bag, the fighting raged.

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TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

I couldn't find him. I looked in all the usual places but I couldn't

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ALERT ALERT ALERT

TERRASOL UNDER ATTACK

CASE OMAHA CASE OMAHA CASE OMAHA

ALERT ALERT ALERT

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MANTID FREE WORLDS>FORredeyesTREredeyesSS TERredeyesRASOL is unredeyesder atredeyestack?

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

Who the hell is dumb enough to...

oh.

oh shit.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

What? I thought the Unified Council Ships couldn't even hurt the Terran ships?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

That depends on how badly they want it, kid.

There's roughly 24,000 active duty combat vessels in the system, millions of ground troops on each world big enough to stand on.

Hell, there's practically a Terran Warborg with an anti-ship missile launcher on any asteroid big enough for them to stand on.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

They're not going for the ships, kid. All they need is one lucky shot onto a planet to cause an extinction level event or even break up the smaller planets.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS> Thiredeyess wonredeyes't go as weredeyesll as thredeyesey think it wiredeyesll.

RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

CASE OMAHA CASE OMAHA CASE OMAHA

RIGEL IS UNDER ATTACK BY ENEMY IN FORCE

CASE OMAHA CASE OMAHA CASE OMAHA

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

HANG ON, BROTHERS! TELKAN IS WITH YOU!

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---