A single human missile is a terrifying weapon. Tipped with a fusion warheads, their massive drive gives them more than twenty thousand kilometres of powered flight. Radar-scattering armour . Powerful computers tucked into its core guide its flight, prioritizing targets and attack patterns with ruthless efficiency. And advanced sensors, blending centuries of human ingenuity and the pinnacle of galactic technology, always knows where its victim is. A human missile never loses your scent.
Few captains have had to worry about just one missile, though. In battle, humans launch salvos of thousands.
Each Exorcist-class cruiser can lay down two missile pods every six seconds, and each pod holds seven missiles. Over the course of a minute, a squadron of twenty-four cruisers can thus ready a salvo of thirty-three hundred and sixty missiles.
The humans brought fifteen full-strength Exorcist squadrons to the First Battle of Sol. Then they’d towed another five thousand system defence pods into place, each of which could spit out eleven missiles.When they fired, a hundred thousand missiles streaked towards the forty Daan heavy cruisers and the GCS Ram.
Just shy of a thousand missiles targetted each heavy cruiser, closing the seventeen-thousand kilometre gap in twenty seconds. Most of them never fired a shot, their sensors and crew overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the human’s attack. Others loosed graser burst after graser burst into the missile clouds, or tried to dash back to the safety of the gate. None of it was enough. The missiles found their targets, and energy screens designed to slow lasers and gravity fields did nothing to dampen the warhead’s fury.
The remaining sixty thousand missiles attacked the Ram, saturating the superdreadnought’s point defences and slamming through towards the hull. Though its hundreds of graser batteries scored missile kills by the dozens, it hardly mattered. Fifty thousand missiles got through.
Only one Daan cruiser survived the first salvo, saved by some tacticians thirst for prisoners when the humans were still unaware of the Ram. The missiles left it untouched even as the other thirty-nine raiders broke apart under the strain of hundreds of nuclear detonations.
The Ram wasn’t so easily killed. Its hull was blackened, its sensors momentarily blinded, and dozens of its graser batteries melted shut, but it hardly mattered. It suffered cosmetic damage, warranting minor repairs at best. The humans hadn’t stopped it.
The Ram kept coming.
On the bridge of the RFS Unforgotten, the Nedji’s battlesong had risent to a fervered crescendo . The bridge crew was alert and ready, the usual background chatter replaced by a grim focus. In the span of {five minutes}, our newfound human allies had destroyed more Daan than we had managed to do in our {two millenia} adrift in the stars. It was a little intimidating.
The Ram was still coming, though. We were still dead.
Faith O’Neal, finished yelling at the Daan commander, made her way back to Mottled-crest-broken-tailfeather’s observation post. “That bastard’s tough.”
“Of course it is,” the Nedji replied. “It’s a superdreadnought that can waltz through a nova. The Compact built three of them a few {centuries} ago. Haven’t had to replace them since.”
We watched helplessly as the Ram fired its main gun, a titanic graser with an astounding range, and tore through one of the smaller human dreadnoughts. The UHS Constantinople bled escape pods as its crew abandoned the doomed ship.
Our status display flashed ‘weapons free’ as the human admiralty scrambled to respond. The orders didn’t really affect Mottled, a linguist by training, but it was still nice to be included.
A steady stream of missiles began to pound into the Ram, the human cruiser squadrons staggering their fire into a concentrated stream of destruction. Some scattered randomly over the surface the superdreadnought’s hull, forcing their grasers into defensive fire and masking the fragile Exorcists, but most of the missiles spiraled in as a concentrated beam of fire. As the barrage of fire walked back and forth across the Ram‘s hull, graser blisters began to fall silent.
It wasn’t enough. The Ram‘s armour, forged to withstand the fury of a star held the missile’s fury at bay. Its screens, able to strip a nova of its fury, left terrawat lasers wanting. Its lance struck out once more and the UHS Dauntless was lost with all hands. Our battlesong rose and fell, mourning the loss of the fallen even as it thirsted for more.
The Ram kept coming.
The battlesong sang out over the speakers of the UHS Harrington as it shook with five gravities of acceleration. Gold-crest-soaring-wings quivered beneath the force: even with the help of an oversized crash couch and a small, virtually undetectable inertial dampener, the Nedji warrior’s bones still threatened to shatter and slice him apart. He’d volunteered for this hell a {week} ago, determined to prove his species worth to the fabulous new race, and had trained alongisde Third Squad ever since. Now he and the rest of the human boarding complement sped towards the Ram.
The Harrington and her sister ships cut their acceleration for the final approach, flipping their noses out away from the ship as they streaked towards the invader’s massive bulk. As they covered the last few hundred kilometres, the missile salvos thickened and electronic warfare drones joined their more explosive brothers, tripling the number of targets the superdreadnought’s already overworked sensors saw. The stealthy Payload-class Attack Shuttles, built with the same sharp lines and radar-absorbing armour of the larger Exorcist cruisers, were all but invisible in the maelstrom.
A lucky graser strike still killed claimed the ninety-three lives onboard the UHS Mayhew, though, tearing the ship apart before the pilot had even a chance to notice the threat.
The eleven remaining boarding vessels fired their thrusters as they slipped into the bomb-scoured shuttle bay, each turning a spectacular collision into a gentle landing. Only the powerful inertial dampeners Nedji engineers had installed on board the landing ships, activated now that they’d cleared the superdreadnought’s field of defensive fire, kept their crews from dissolving into paste.
Their soft impacts were all but unnoticeable against the rhythmic pounding of the hundreds of warheads striking the Ram every few seconds. A handful of engineers filed out of the ship and started cutting through the superdreadnought’s sealed access hatchways, visors dimmed to protect their eyes from the blinding light thrown off by their own fusion bombs.
They’re insane, the Nedji thought. Every single one of these humans are insane.
On the Harrington, his squad was running through their last-minute combat checks with ruthless efficiency. The Nedji’s preparations were simpler than the human’s — aside from two quick checks on his helmet’s seal and his flechette launcher’s ammo count, everything was automated. Somewhere in the bay, a human cranked the battlesong to keep it from being drowned out by the harsh clacks of eighty men readying weapons and armour.
The small huddle of officers and senior noncoms broke apart and headed back to their squads, Third Squad’s section leader among them. The warrant officer didn’t seem pleased with the news he’d gotten.
“Intel just bumped their initial force estimates up. They’re predicting five or six platoons worth of Nyctra shock troopers in addition to the Daan regulars, so we’re outnumbered again.” He looked over at Gold. “Tweetie, how bad is it?”
The nickname had stuck despite the young Nedji’s fervent protests, but he was starting to get used to it.
“Nyctra are worse than the Daan, Chief. The Compact trains ’em for front-line work — something about them making other races uneasy — so they’re disciplined and competent. Their code of honour’s rigid, though. Manage to take one prisoner in battle and he’ll trail after you as meek as a pup.”
“Pretty much spot on with NavInt’s primer. For the rest of you grunts, just shoot the scary wolves with guns. A shot to the head’ll drop ’em if you can’t get rounds into their centre mass. Daan won’t go as easily, though, so keep putting rounds into them until you hit the braincase. No standard parts on those bastards, so walk your shots.
Primary objective’s unchanged: seize the bridge and stop this monster. Barring that, bring their big gun out of commission and buy the fleet some more time.
Don’t fuck this up, marines. Nothing else can stop this beast.”
He broke off as the lieutenants voice rang out through the bay. “Hats on, people, the techs just finished with their hole. We’ve got a job to do.”
Continued in comments, of course.
On the Unforgotten‘s bridge, the battlesong morphed into a rhytmic chant, each bar straining against the furious tempo. Out in the void, the Ram continued to fly through the teeth of the human ambush.
The small casualty counter in the corner of Faith’s screen ticked past ten thousand as the superdreadnought’s main gun tore apart a seventh human capital ship. The human ambassador leaned forward as she watched a fresh list of the injured and the dead scan across the display, her face drawn into a tight grimace.
“You don’t have to keep watching, you know.”
Faith turned towards to Mottled, her face grim. “I’m not looking away from this. When we finally track down whatever monster’s responsible for this, I’m going to make them pay tenfold for every death and every injury. They’re gonna scream.”
The way her voice snarled out her last sentence almost sent me scurrying for safety. If this was one of the human’s emissaries of peace, what were their warriors like?
A flurry of new movements on the main tactical display wrenched me back into the present. The fleeing Daan cruiser had reversed course and aimed itself at the human’s far flank. It doubtless hope to pick off a few easy kills while the missile cruisers were distracted by the Ram. It was a foolish and suicidal move, but the Daan captain was probably too stupid to realize that. Instead he charged forward with reckless abandon.
Ninth Missile Squadron, the Daan cruiser’s target, dealt with the threat by shifting their aim for a mere {twenty-four seconds}. Six hundred missiles soon wiped the last remaining Daan cruiser from the sky.
Their actions followed the human’s naval doctrine to the letter. They’d recognized an imminent threat and destroyed it with overwhelming force, using their only long-range weapons system to do it. The entire series of events had been professional, by the book, and utterly, horribly, wrong.
{Five seconds} after Ninth Squadron redirected their fire away, a battery of graser blisters onboard the Ram suddenly found their sector free of incoming targets. Freed from their desperate point-defence, the automated systems cast their sensors outwards, tracing back along the paths of the unknown projectiles that had held their attention just microseconds ago, only to come up short up against a dead end 8,000km away from the superdreadnought. They could trace the missiles back to the pods, but the pods seemed to spring from nowhere.
That kept them puzzled for an entire {seven seconds}. On the eigth, their analyysis guessed at the presence of human missile cruisers in the region of space between each pair of pods. A tentative shot from one of the battery’s seventeen remaining grasers confirmed the guess, and the rest of the blisters opened fire.
Ninth Squadron, Eleventh Squadron, and most of Tenth Squadron were wiped from existence before the human admiralty could rebalance their fields of fire. The damage had already been done, though. With almost a tenth of their cruiser strength gone and their ammo reserves dangerously low, the human barrage was starting to falter.
The Ram kept coming.
The human boarding party had landed in an empty portion of the ship. Thousands of crew quarters, storerooms, and living spaces were deserted.
“Another empty room,” moaned one of the marines as he cleared another cabin. “Why the hell would the Galactics send in an abandoned ship?”
“Plausible deniability, shitpump,” Master Corporal Jenkins fired back. “Send a ship through the gate stuffed to the brim with the Compact’s finest and someone’s gonna talk. Send the same ship with a crew of Daan privateers, though, and you can act all innocent if anyone tries to point fingers. ‘Our warship? But it couldn’t be our warship! The crew’s been on-planet for months.'”
“Sounds like the Compact,” Tweetie added. “Their bureaucrats hate getting their hands dirty almost as much as they like keeping things nice and stable.”
“Damn right they don’t. It’s why the hole lot of ’em is doomed.”
Several groans broke out over the channel, and one Corporal Puck tried to cut him off. “Don’t get Jenkins started, he’ll never stop.”
If the corporal heard any of the objections, he didn’t let on. “Y’see, the whole thing really just boils down to sticks. Galactics have been fighting with sticks for millennia. They carve the best sticks, put together the best anti-stick armour, even teach the best classes on stick wars. Plus they make sure all the fights always come down to who’s got the biggest stick. Keeps things nice and safe for the bureaucrats.”
The squad moved into an empty cafeteria, Jenkins pausing his rant while they scanned the room with machine-like efficiency. Then they moved into another empty corridor and he started up again.
“Then we come along. The Compact storms through the gate, sticks a-swinging, and we just hide in the bushes and throw rocks. They start trample around, try to hunt down the handful of guys we do have holding sticks, and we sneak in close and bash ’em in the back of the head with a rock. And then we can pick up their stick and dress up in their armour. We’re gonna do it here, we’re gonna do it again, and before long we’ll be holding all the sticks and all the rocks. Galactic fuckers don’t stand a chance.”
“We won’t either if they sneak up on us while you’re gabbing, corporal,” growled the warrant officer. “Keep this channel clear unless you’ve got something useful to add.”
“Sorry, chief, just filling Tweetie in on the new galactic order.”
“That’ll be the day. Just shut your trap and watch your sector.”
Third Squad advanced the next hundred or so {metres} in silence, then rounded the corner and stepped into a Daan ambush. The squat, asymmetric aliens boiled out through air vents and storage lockers, all but invisible until it was too late.
The first volley of shots caught both the squad’s sergeants, four privates, and the warrant officer. Their powered armour, built to stop bullets and deflect lasers, barely slowed the pulse rifle fire: every shot proved fatal.
The surviving marines dove into the safety of an abandoned restroom before their fallen friends had collapsed to the ground. Tweetie was close behind, his four eyes wide with terror. When a Daan tried to follow,the four humans shredded him with flechettes.
Outside in the hall, the warrant officer’s strained voice rang out over his armour speakers. “Got a present for you, uglies.” He detonated every one of his grenades, filling the hallway with shrapnel and fire.
Jenkins chuckled softly. “Mommy always did say I was born to lead.”
The shot that hit the RFS Unforgotten was, from the Ram‘s point of view, a happy accident. The frigate would have crumpled before a direct hit. Instead, the massive graser beam had barely grazed them, its true fury aimed at where the UHS Majestic sat just fifty kilometres aft.
Even a glancing hit was enough to shred the frigate’s hull, though. The helmets and magnetic clamps on Faith and Mottled’s combat suits deployed with frightening speed, saving them as the bridge’s air rushed out through a jagged hole. Mottled felt a jolt of horror as the battlesong cut off, but it faded when he found that the comm channel was still active.
The radio channels remained silent. The Nedji looked around the bridge, puzzled. Where were the damage reports? Where were the sound offs? Why wasn’t anyone doing anything?
He quickly found the reason. The Flocklords body floated in the middle of the command bubble, run through by dozens of splinters that had snapped off from the outer hull. Most of his staff and second-in-command had shared his fate: only a catatonic intelligence officer and the human military attache had survived, both of them were wounded.
Mottled keyed his radio to Faith’s private frequency. “We’ve got a problem.”
“Yeah, of course we do, the side of the ship just disintegrated.”
“It’s worse than that.” When her eyes followed his outstretched grasping-arm to the centre of the bridge, she paled. “Everyone on this ship who knows how to run a ship just got shredded.”
“Not everyone,” she said grimly. Another icon popped into our circuit as she tapped at her wrist-screen. “Hey Karamazov. Still remember how to command a ship?”
“Yes ma’am.” The Rear Admiral’s answer sounded a little bit distracted, his attention focused on the {two-foot} shard of metal protruding from his leg. “Why, got one for me?”
“Yep. How ’bout the Unforgotten.”
The channel went silent for a moment. “Can we even do that?”
“Their entire command staff just bought it, I don’t think anyones going to raise much of a fit.”
“Very well.” His icon shifted over to the general channel. “This is Rear Admiral Karmazov. I’m assuming command of the Unforgotten: any objections?”
The channel was silent save for the singer’s mourning. After waiting for what felt like the appropriate amount of time, Karmazov continued.
“Alright then. Damage reports, if you’d please.”
Out in the void, the Ram kept coming.
Jenkins was barking out orders as the survivors of Third Squad charged towards the bridge.
“Alright guys, you know how this works. Wallace and Roberts, you’re on suprression with me. Puck, put a round through anyone who pokes their heads up. Tweetie, go play deathball.”
Three grunts and a squawk met his orders. By now we all knew what we were doing.
Tweetie was a little surprised at how well he fit into the squad. The first time they’d charged one of the Daan barricades, the Nedji warrrior had lagged behind, watching the marines land shot after shot with frightening accuracy. Even with the battlesong driving him forward, he hadn’t been able to match the human’s ferocity.
The third time they’d overrun a pocket of resistance, he’d kept pace with the rest. He’d led the charge by the fifth, using his smaller size and greater agility to bounce between the wall’s of the dreadnought’s narrow corridors, zipping forward faster than the terrified Daan could react. After clearing the ninth barricade and losing two more men, Third Squad found their strategy.
Now, just outside the command bridge, they readied themselves to use it again.
Tweetie was crouched, ready to charge forward one last time, when the shakes started again. Another shot of stims banished them away, but it wasn’t a good sign. Without the rush of the drugs and the battlesong, the little avian would probably have collapsed hours ago.
As the humans opened with scavenged pulse rifles, Tweetie sprang forward, diving over their heads and latching his claws onto a ventilation grate. He quickly leapt off, his head brushing the ceiling as he zigged across the corridor, and scrabbled against the smooth plating with his claws for the briefest of seconds. Then he was off again, already more than halfway to the enemy fortifications. A hail of pulsar darts boiled the air mere inches below him.
They paused {a few seconds} later, giving him just enough time to dive behind the makeshift barricade a score of Nyctra soldiers had errected. He hit the ground softly, tossed a grenade directly behind the enemy troopers, and bolted around the corner.
When he poked his head back around the corner, his human friends were finishing off the remaining Nyctra. Their terrifying accuracy more than made up for their lack of agility.
“Tweetie, you are getting way to good at this,” remarked Roberts. “We might just have to find a way to keep you.”
Puck grabbed a fresh pulse rifle from the dead defenders and began to take up a position outside the door, but Jenkins stopped him short.
“No pulse rifles in there, it might fry something important. We’re gonna have to go in with the old tech.”
Tweetie glanced down at his empty grenade belt. “Do we have any flechettes left?”
Jenkins just laughed and tossed his pulse rifles to the floor. “A few, but it hardly matters. Has Roberts had a chance to tell you about that martial arts obsession of his?”
The battlesong had lost its energy. Mottled wasn’t sure when it had happened, but he knew why.
The human fleet lay in ruins. Only two human dreadnoughts remained, more than half of the Exorcist missile cruisers had been vaporized when their plunging ammo reserves forced them to slow their bombardment, and the Ram had almost cleared the ambush. The superdreadnought’s hull was scarred, not broken — mankind had hit it with enough warheads to crack a small planet, and still it surged forward like some ancient primal god.
Yet the humans fought on, their stubbornness astounding the battle-weary Nedji. Their ships were broken, their leaders cut off or dead, but they refused to accept defeat.
The UHS Normandy, its laser array useless against the Ram‘s powerful screens, bled air and lifeboats as it accelerated towards the superdreadnought. The capital ship crumpled as it collided with its much larger bulk, then exploded with the force of a small nova as its oversized fusion reactors overloaded. Thirty graser blisters fell silent.
Scattered missile squadrons tried vainly to keep up with the Ram, pushing their engines far beyonnd the limits of their crew in order to fire salvo after salvo into the fast-receding superdreadnought. One by one they fell silent as their acceleration took its toll on their crews.
And on the bridge of the Unforgotten, Karmazov still gave orders. He was a whirlwind of energy, speaking with a quiet authority that seemed far louder than any scream or shout. Something about his bearing pushed the Nedji crew forward.
“Weapons, where are my grasers.”
“Nearly back online, sir. Damage control’s routing a new power line as we speak.”
“Excellent. Engines, what’s the status on thrust?”
“Just came back online, sir. Compensators should follow shortly.”
“Let me know the moment they’re powered. Helm, start plotting a course for the Ram. We’re going to fly right down its throat and see if we can’t do a bit of damage before it rips us out of the sky. Comms, you still alive?”
“Aye, sir.”
“I don’t care if you have lean out the window and yell, you keep that battlesong going out. Understood?”
“Yessir.”
“You feel that, Helm? Compensator just kicked back in. Weapons, what’re you doing with my guns?”
“Just brought them online, sir, we’re running the initial tests—”
“Forget the tests, we wouldn’t have time to fix them anyways. Warm ‘er up for a real shot.”
Karmazov paused.
“Helm, get the Unforgotten underway. Let’s go spit in the devil’s eye.”
Faith’s clear voice broke into the fray. “Belay that, Rear Admiral.”
The bridge paused, every eye turning to stare at the human diplomat. The goofy smile spread across her face couldn’t have been more out-of-place.
“We’re picking up a new broadcast from the Ram, Karmazov. You’re going to want to take a look.”
About thirty of the surviving human marines milled about the bridge of the Ram, splitting their time between eyeballing their prisoners and gainingcontrol of the ship’s systems. Jenkins was fiddling with a control panel built into an oversized command chair.
“Damnit, I could’ve sworn I’d figured out how to turn this fucker on.”
Gold staggered over and swept an appraising eye over a small readout on the armrest. “You did,” he said, voice slurring with exhaustion.
Roberts let out a cackle. “Think you flipped it on about two minutes ago.
Jenkins sat bolt upright, his face ashen. “Wait, it’s on?”
The tired Nedji nodded serenely. “Yep.”
“And broadcasting?”
“Yep.”
“For almost two minutes?”
“Yep.”
“Shit.” Jenkins paused. “The LT wouldn’t happen to be hovering just outside the door, ready to swoop in at the last minute and save me, would he?”
“Nope, he bought it about an hour back.”
“Fuck. Well, here goes nothing.”
He took a moment to gather himself before turning to face the pickup.
“This is Master Corporal Walsh Jenkins, broadcasting from the bridge of the GCS Ram. Could you stop shooting at us? We’ve got their stick.”
While the humans cheered, the Nedji rejoiced. Their singer sang a new song, a song of victory, and the Unforgotten‘s comm buoy carried it out to the rest of their exiled race. And at the end, after the last stirring chords of celebration had ended, the Nedji added a short message:
Come join us. We’ve been without a home for far too long.