Chapter 34

Other than various scouts keeping an eye on the aliens via the breadcrumb trail of satellites the Empire had set up, not a lot else was happening, except for training exercises and constant weapons mods for the various fleets to try and get a balance of conventional and anti-alien weaponry. Taisha had ordered, and had built, an optimised battlestar defence grid around the station. She was in negotiations with the Technocracy to supply them with some for what they designated critical worlds, though with a simplified operating system that the second tier AI networks they had bought could cope with.

That the two Realms got on with each other very well indeed had come about by a decision of the leadership of the Technocracy to always be scrupulously honest with the Empire in all its dealings with them. What a lot of the other Realms hadn’t realised was that the AIs the Empire used could immediately tell if someone was lying to them, no matter how good they were at keeping a poker face. Hence the Empire was impressed enough to go the extra mile for a Realm that dealt honestly with it, something it rarely encountered at first with any other Realms.

Not that the Technocracy was anything special in terms of technology or governance, though they did attempt to protect their citizen’s rights wherever possible. But their willingness to aid in the fight against the aliens as well as supplying the basic ores necessary to produce corillium meant that they were the Empire’s customer of choice in that part of the galaxy they resided in and the Empire normally dealt with other Realms via the Technocracy. A similar situation was developing with the Kingdom, though it was still very early days there as the Kingdom was currently dealing with a multitude of internal problems, mostly caused by nobles as well as the previous regimes putting well-born incompetents in key roles around their infrastructures. As the new regime was insisting on competence and the nobleborn thought they had a job for life, this was causing friction with the old nobility who controlled a lot of the cashflow around the Kingdom. That it hadn’t degenerated into a civil war was more down to the old King’s estates generating income and the fleets controlled by the spaceborn forcing compromises that neither side particularly liked, but could live with.

For me personally it was a time of both work, learning and having a lot of fun with friends as well as growing ever closer to Tillan on a personal level. There was still much about his job that he couldn’t talk about, but his personal and family life was now open to me as was my own to him. I wasn’t as yet sure where my career path would take me (as was Tillan with his own career) but for the moment we just enjoyed the here and now with each other.

‘All is prepared?’ the master asked.

‘All is prepared!’ came the expected adoring reply.

‘Loose our power upon this pestilential prey!’

‘As you command!’

The scout Misty Cloud was currently keeping an eye on the alien fleets and swiftly contacted Tafta Station to put the various fleets on high alert.

“Numbers at or about four hundred thousand,” Comm Officer Mutra reported.

“Damn, that’s a lot,” her husband Pilot Janta added quietly in the background.

“Hole in Space is tracking the progress of their attack fleets; we’ve been ordered to remain in place and report if they send any more.”

“Gods help us all if they get the upper hand,” Janta stated reverently.

“Amen to that!”

Alarms were going off in all parts of Tafta Station as shuttles poured into and out of it to pick up and carry off duty personnel to their various ships. I was with Flinn and Torun as we abandoned our duties at the Station’s medical centre and raced to don our armour and then board a shuttle to the Assault Carrier Spitfire where we had been assigned. Tillan, I knew, had joined Taisha’s crisis team in the well-armoured depths of the Station.

“Reports are telling us that it’s a massive fleet bent on our destruction and appears to be heading directly to Tafta,” Flinn, who was tied into the higher level comm grid, informed us.

“How many?” Torun asked.

“Over four hundred thousand of the buggers.”

“Damn, do you think we’ve offended them somehow?” I asked with a grin.

“I certainly hope so,” Flinn replied with a broad smile.

“They’ll outnumber us by almost ten to one,” Torun added in hushed tones.

“Our weapons and tactics are so much better now,” I comforted her. “They’ll also be up against a battlestar grid that’s been designed to take them out, plus the station defences. Aunt Taisha’s been working nonstop to beef things up.”

“Gods, I hope you’re right, Kiria.”

“We’ll also have the help of the local Realms to pick off the damaged alien ships,” Flinn added. “All are carrying as many missiles as they could cram onto them.”

“We will not lose!” I stated out loud to all who could hear us. “The Empress commands!”

“And we obey!” came a roaring cry back from various Troopers surrounding us.

“Fleets are all reporting in as ready,” Gollant reported to Admiral Clessik.

“And our local Allies?”

“Are on their way. Technocracy is sending all they’ve got. We’ve also received word that the Kingdom is as well. Other Realms are also reporting that they are sending what they can.”

“Advise them to go after those attacking craft unless they have a bunch of missile carrying types,” Clessik advised.

“Sending the word out, sir,” a Comm Officer replied.

“Move us out! The Imperial Fleets will engage the enemy rear; the Gershonian, Melanoqui, Hegemony and Emirate fleets are to protect the station as planned,” Clessik ordered.

The Imperial Fleets split into two wings and moved rapidly out to pre-planned positions where hopefully they could act as the hammer to Tafta Station’s anvil.

“I do hope they don’t decide to head elsewhere, sir,” Gollant chuckled.

“From what the Misty Cloud reported, that massive fleet of theirs is stuffed with those one-way attack craft. No sign of their harvesting ships, though there are a lot of their close-in defence crafts reported having jumped out as well,” Clessik replied thoughtfully.

“Well, we’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”

“Yes,” Clessik acknowledged. “We’ll take out a huge chunk of them even if we lose ... not that I intend to lose.”

“I should think not, sir,” Gollant laughed.

“Prepare a fleet-wide broadcast,” Clessik ordered.

“Yes, sir!” the Comm Officer replied. “Ready.”

“This is Imperial Admiral Clessik to all Imperial personnel. The aliens who have reduced the populations of hundreds of worlds are on their way here. We have assembled one of the largest and mightiest of our Allied fleets to oppose them. It is my belief we can win, not easily, perhap’s and not without sacrifice. Yet it is also my belief that in future years historians will write of this battle and claim it to be humanity’s finest moment where we ended the dominance of a parasitic culture that preyed upon us as we know they have preyed upon others. In the Empire we often say ‘The Empress commands, and we obey. This time Humanity commands!”

“And we obey!” came the almost reverent reply from the bridge of the Superdreadnought Empress Amantil. Elsewhere this reply was repeated on ship after ship as the Empire and her Allies prepared to meet the aliens head on.

‘The prey are preparing to meet us in numbers,’ a controlling intelligence in charge of the tracking suite advised the others.

‘Good, it will save us chasing them down later.’ the senior controlling intelligence replied, gaining consensus from the other intelligences, each in charge of a section of the massive fleet.

‘The defence ships will jump in at the moment we emerge,’ another intelligence reported.

‘As the masters commanded,’ the senior replied. ‘No doubt they will expect us to attack as we did the last time, though the modifications the masters designed will not allow them to fire with impunity at our flanks.’

‘We cannot fail! This pestilential prey will fall to our righteous wrath and we shall feast upon them!’ the consensus roared mentally.

True to previous encounters, the aliens emerged well away from the planetary sun of the Tafta system in pretty much their standard emergence/jump zone. The attack ships immediately moved to what was assumed their maximum speed heading directly for the station and planet. This was followed up by a mass of what the Empire now called close-in defence ships who moved at a far slower velocity towards the station, presumably to mop up any potential survivors.

“Move in,” Clessik ordered the two Imperial groups comprising of the 4^th, 5^th, 6^th and 7^th in his group and the 12^th, 13^th, 25^th and 26^th being the other jaw of the trap.

The Imperial fleets moved efficiently and in formation directly towards the close-in defence fleet of the aliens, swarms of Heavy Fighters leading the way. This caused a large group of the defence ships to come to a halt to block the alien advance whilst the others carried on ponderously towards the station. The alien attack fleets ignored all this, boring in towards the station and the waiting Imperial Allied fleets.

Because the aliens had proven entirely too predictable in their tactics, the attack fleets found themselves running a gauntlet of carefully positioned missile and beam mines and began to take minor attrition from them, though not to the point where their losses were anything other than minor. To a human Admiral, this would have made most pause and cause a change of plans: to the aliens, they had their orders, right or wrong and they carried onwards, their intelligences believing once they were through, their numbers would still be able to overwhelm the prey.

“Punch us through that screen,” Clessik ordered as his group reached beam range of the alien defenders. “Assault Carriers are to launch saboteur squads as soon as we get through, we know their weak points now, let’s take advantage of that.”

“Yes, sir,” Gollant replied. “Orders sent.”

The Heavy Fighters went in first, their dispersion beams slashing away at the alien armour in specific places and stripping away any surface mounted defence weapons. Other Heavy Fighters followed, launching grav driven deep penetration fusion missiles at those areas, knowing that critical drive systems were now exposed. This was followed up by a charge led by the Imperial Battlecruisers, each mounting the latest Imperial version of the dispersion beam which rapidly exposed the armoured core of the now helpless alien ships to a well-placed hyperbeam shot from the Battlecruisers secondary weapons.

“Launch saboteur squads!” came the order from the Captain of the Spitfire.

“Why the hell do we have to go in against them?” a Trooper bitched from the far side of the packed boarding pod. “That’s what Fleet’s for surely?”

“Because there are too many of them and they need our help,” I admonished in cool tones.

“You heard the Officer, Taral!” a sub-Monitor almost yelled at the guy. “We’re going in because they need our help and they don’t give a shlecking damn about your safety or hurt feelings!”

“I was just commenting!” Taral almost squealed.

“Then do it in your head and stop boring the rest of us to tears, you shlecker!”

“Pod launched,” the AI informed us. “Target selected.”

“We go in; we find the power generation point; we blow it up; we leave,” I stated. “Simple as that. We know where it is too.”