The Alexanderov Federation

#2 - Growing Pains

By Robert Huntingdon

Chapter Ten - Revelations

A few hours before Admiral Gretskov and the sixth fleet emerged from the jumplane from Alpha to Beta Celtsi, a white hiss of artificial static burst into an active communication between the Admiral and his counterpart in the Kilora space forces. Although automatic dampeners cut the volume almost instantly to prevent hearing damage to the bridge crew, the brief burst still caused the Admiral's ears to ring slightly. He spun in his chair to his communications officer. "What's going on? I thought tachyon-burst transmissions were impossible to jam. Did we run into a quasar event of some sort?"

"I don't think so sir. The pattern is too regular to be natural, it must be artificial."

"The New Orion's provided tachyon-burst technology to all our races when they turned over the guardian satellites to our peoples. Could they have held back this companion technology only to tip their hands now? And if so, does that mean we are walking into a trap?"

"I don't know sir."

"Neither do I. Encrypted message drone to fleet command immediately. Then order the fleet to push their engines to the wall. If it's not the New Orions, then the Tachidi may have arrived early and we need to get there in time to help."

Two hours later...

As the sixth fleet poured out of the jumplane into Beta Celtsi, shields up and weapons primed to fire, every ship began scanning the system furiously... only to find nothing but debris. Not a single ship was in the system. "What happened here?" demanded Gretskov.

"I can't say for sure sir. Some sort of very powerful scanner jammers are active, but to our new scanners they are little more than white noise that I'm just filtering out. From what I can tell so far, it looks like a massive battle was fought, but I'm not reading any non-Kilora ships in the debris. It seems whatever hit them either caught them completely off-guard or massively out-gunned them, or both," replied his science officer.

"How are communications?"

"Still out sir, but this system is definitely the source of the jamming. The power level is so high I've had to put filters in to protect our systems from frying themselves," replied his com officer.

"Can you find the source of the jamming?"

"I think so, sir."

"You think so?"

"Well," replied his science officer, "it's a bit difficult. The source is cloaked, but it's putting out so much energy to jam us that it's rather like trying to cloak a star, sir."

"Tactical, coordinate with sciences, target the source and destroy it. Now."

"Aye sir." His ships began firing at what appeared to be empty space off his port bow. As the beams and missiles crossed the boundary into the cloaked area, the weapon fire appeared to just vanish into thin air. Only the occasional burst of radiation or occasional bits of odd debris that would float out of the cloaking field betrayed the fact that the fleet's weapons were having any effect at all. After nearly five minutes of constant fire, a large explosion finally announced success with massive a shock wave, but aside from a few bumps and bruises, all ships and crew came through OK. Gretskov's com officer quickly spoke up. "That did it sir. Communications and scanners are both functioning perfectly again, and the planetary defense nets are hailing us."

"On screen."

"Admiral, glad you made it. We were worried for awhile, and yet at the same time glad you weren't here yet."

"What hit you?"

"We're not sure. They used cloaking devices of some sort to sneak in and get in range of our ships, at which point they simultaneously activated some incredibly powerful sensor jammers and that com jammer that cut our communication, decloaked and began firing. We were able to filter out the jamming enough to realize that it wasn't a particularly large armada nor were the ships all that large, but little more. The surprise alone caught our ships like a powerful undertow and they destroyed many of our ships before they could even raise shields. Though their ships packed a lot of punch once our surviving ships raised shields they were at least able to make a bit of a contest of it, but it was far too little too late. As soon as our fleet was destroyed, the enemy just headed out of system, towing their damaged brethren with them!"

"They do not wish to be identified, then. That means it probably wasn't the New Orions, and it is therefore imperative that we do identify them."

"But how can you accomplish that?"

"We shall have to search the debris feild. They towed their damaged ships out, true, but surely they must have left behind fragments too small to collect. Plus we can try to recover bits from the destroyed jammer station. We shall endeavor to identify them by those."

"I wish you the best of luck, but the Tachidi are only a few weeks away, Admiral, you will not have long to work. And with our fleet destroyed, our civilians are surely beached and covered in sand!"

"Perhaps, perhaps not. How many ships are in the Tachidi fleet, do you know?"

"Over 2000, we believe. Their technology is quite weak, but against so many ships, what can you hope to accomplish?"

Gretskov smiled, even though to his distressed counterpart it meant little. "Oh, don't let numerics blind you to the opportunities afforded by good tactics, my friend. Though we might end up losing, I think we can win. But even if we don't I have little doubt we will make them pay quite severely for their attack here, and what we fail to take out I doubt will be enough to overwhelm your planetary defense nets."

"I hope you are correct, Admiral. I will leave you to your investigation, I must go to an emergency meeting of my colleagues with Maetrillin's representative as we re-think our plans for this war."

One week later

"Tannert! Great to hear from you. How has your trip been so far? And why are you using Omega encryption?"

"Because what I have to say needs to be kept quiet for now, Admiral. As for the trip, it's been cramped and tiring, Admiral, as you no doubt expected. But we've gotten a lot done. I've been killing the travel time by reviewing the old rejection files with Del Rey. We've been burning a lot of tachyons, but we've found another twenty-five great ideas buried in those files, all of which can be applied by our engineers without a dry-dock. I expect several of these will be going out to the fleet shortly."

"Good. I hate to think too much about the wasted lives from those fools rejecting everybody's designs like that, but hopefully now that Del Rey has taken over the department things will improve."

"Well, then something I just found yesterday you will really dislike."

"What did you find?"

"Somebody improved the cooling systems for graviton weaponry by over 400% well over five months ago, but the submission was rejected just like all of mine."

Goodman choked on his tea. "Are... are you telling me what...?" and he trailed off, too furious to continue.

"Precisely, Admiral. Over three months before the battle of Rotan Prime a cooling system that would have helped significantly was available, but we weren't allowed to know of it. Worse yet, two full years earlier a quick-charge capacitor was developed that would have still been useful. With the two combined we could have tripled our firing rate and not had a single gun damaged. We could have completely negated the Raas superiority in missiles, and maybe even gotten off without a single casualty."

Goodman's face was now turning quite purple, but his voice was surprisingly quiet and calm. "So what are we going to do about it?"

"Del Rey has already begun making some quiet arrests, hiding things under fake transfer orders and other disguises. We strongly suspect a conspiracy and don't want to tip our hands until we can round up the whole collection of traitors. We've also got the FCID involved, they and the FIS have after all just gone through a major house-cleaning and we expect they are clean of traitors, even the accidental type, those who don't realize what they are doing is harmful. Considering their institutional shame over not figuring out the Raas earlier, they are especially motivated right now and are working insane hours to try to catch up. We had to convene courts-martial to charge the people we arrested, of course, but we've been able to get the tribunal to work with us on timing. Normally we'd have to prosecute within a month, with the current state of emergency we are being given time to compile more defendants and charges. The tribunal members all see how close the Federation was to complete collapse only a few months ago. Had Satrag and the Tachidi and the Raas attacked a few months earlier, before we could put Graviton Beams on all our ships and before we could get the evidence of Raas misdeeds out to fire up public support for war, we might well have lost the wars and the survivors been torn apart from internal dissent. Dissent which we suspect would have been primarily prompted by outside spy activities."

"Who is responsible?"

"We can't say yet, sir. Obviously not the Raas, it appears they had no outside contact and whoever is behind this just used the holes they created in our defenses to get in themselves. We have found two traitors with direct links to an outside agency that appears to be Nommo in origin."

"This sort of thing wouldn't even occur to a Nommo, Tannert."

"We know that sir. It's simply not in their psyche to do this kind of spying, and even if it was they would be too honorable to attempt it on such a long-standing ally, indeed, an ally it now looks like they may be heavily depending on for the lives of billions of their civilians. The obvious suspects would be the Evon. It's their type of game. But we can't prove it."

"So how badly are we penetrated? Do I need to start investigations of my officers?"

"I doubt it, sir. We've identified those two for sure and three more in very key positions we believe have been compromised. They in turn have corrupted a large number of their underlings, though most of them just went along for money or power or obeyed orders because they didn't know any reason not to. The damage appears to have been focused on very key spots, which had things gone to plan would likely have been plenty to accomplish the job. And that's another sign pointing at the Evon. They're very interested in efficiency, sometimes too much so, and that appears to be the case here. They thought they had more than enough, but two key events were mistimed and the whole house of cards is now collapsing."

"I suppose that's good news. Well, please keep me informed as much as you can."

"I will, Admiral. Tannert, out."

A few hours after the Dragonfly emerged from the jumplane from Sol to the unexplored rim system on the other side, the scanner alarms came alive. "Captain, this system is inhabited by Eoladi!"

Rosetovsky smiled quickly. "Interesting. Have you been able to identify the system yet?"

"Sir, I believe this is Alpha Eridani. I expected this to be the rest of the Eridani sub-group after we found Epsilon Eridani on the other side of the lane from Alpha Cent, but I couldn't be sure since the jumplanes didn't exist the last time our people were out among the stars. How we ever managed to build an empire without the jumplanes to speed up travel I can't comprehend."

"Probably the engines back then were more powerful brute-force devices that got the job done but had no elegancy to them at all. Well this was some of the key territory of the Old Earth Empire, hopefully it can become a powerful contributor to the future of the Federation now. But, we haven't been hailed yet. Do they not see us?"

"We aren't in stealth mode, sir, but the ship isn't all that easy to spot even then. They could just not see us."

"Well send a hail. The Eoladi were always friendly to Earth after we appologized for destroying so many gas giants before we realized what we were doing. Hopefully they will remember that."

"No responce, Captain." He worked his board for a few minutes. "But I don't think they recieved the message, sir."

"Why not? Are our transmitters malfunctioning?"

"No sir. I don't think they have tachyon-based communications. I'm detecting lots of radio signals though."

"Radio! That's barely light-speed! How can a galactic civilization possibly survive on mere light-speed communications?"

"Sir, I've pulled in the radio transmissions and tied it into our translators. It turns out we are being hailed after all, sir. Audio only, though."

"Well put it on."

"I said, who are you and what do you want! Answer me already!"

"This is Captain Rosetovsky of the Alexanderov Federation. I appologize for the delay in responding, we only now recieved your transmission. We come in peace, simply seeking to explore the galaxy again and rebuild what we lost to the Antarans."

Aside from the quiet, ever-present and easily ignored sounds of bridge equipment, there was absolute silence.

Rosetovsky looked around. "What's going on, did I say something wrong?"

"Sir, it will take fifteen more minutes for your response to reach the nearest planet."

"Madness! Can we cut the transmission time?"

"We can move closer, sir, but they probably have planetary defenses. We should probably wait until they give us permission."

"I suppose you're right. Hold position for now and lets wait to see what reponse we get from them."

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