The Alexanderov Federation

#2 - Growing Pains

By Robert Huntingdon

Chapter Eleven - Tachidi Raid

"Grendarl? But we defeated them over five years ago now, they've been our allies ever since! Why would they attack the Nommo?"

"You forget the vanished colony from Wasilkoff IV, Admiral."

Mulkahey groaned. "Of course! So that's where they went!"

"It certainly appears that way. Worse, it appears that the New Orions are, if not officially their allies, at least helping the Evon to cause trouble for us."

"We suspected the Evon were up to something, but we didn't know what. But secret dealings and steak attacks are so typical of them."

"Indeed. We found no bodies, so we can only assume the station was automated and we might hope the Evon don't realize what we know yet. I only wonder what else they were up... to... But you know something, don't you sir?"

"I can't say, Admiral, I'm sorry. At this point is is simply critical we do not take ANY risk that might let the Evon know how much of their plans we are onto. Not until we both understand the scope of their plans and have a counter ready. But thank you for this information. Please send me all the evidence on high-speed shuttles immediately so we make sure it cannot fall into Evon hands."

"I don't like it, but I suppose you have a point, there is a possibility we will be defeated and captured."

"And even if none of you are captured there is a possibility your ships could tell the tale after you're gone. Delete ALL files with maximum security as soon as you have sent the originals to me, Gretskov."

"That may not be enough, Admiral. There are rumors the Evon can read the mind of a corpse."

"We've always dismissed that as hype and nonsense, but you're right, that's a risk we cannot take. Have all your ships equipped with dead-man devices. If the crew is all dead or the ship is boarded, have it destruct in a fashion to leave nothing but sub-atomic particles."

"I'll see to it immediately, Admiral. I will also warn our crews not to evacuate damaged ships until after we win so that we do not allow the enemy the opportunity to capture defenseless escape pods with crew that know too much. But we only have about a day before the Tachidi arrive, so I'll have to go if we're going to get done in time. Please excuse me, Admiral. Gretskov, out."

After weeks of confinement to the tiny high-speed shuttle, Commander Tannert was absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to stretch his long legs and breathe fresh air. Unfortunately, he could only spare a moment to do so before he had to hurry inside to meet with Del Rey. They'd just caught a major break in the investigation and his presence was needed to help unravel the technological details of just what they had uncovered.

The guards knew he was coming, so after a very hurried -- though still extremely rigorous -- security screening he was escorted inside to his new laboratory at a flat out run. His long loping strides allowed him to keep up with the shorter security guards who ran at his side with ease. Of course they might have been holding back to let him keep up, after all, they couldn't very well guard him if they dashed on ahead of him. Well no matter, he was here now and his team was all assembled. Time to get to work.

The Eoladi did indeed remember the Humans, but their suspicions of anybody coming through that particular jump lane were high. Such suspicions were, of course, quite understandable in light of the number of ships they had lost attempting to push through the Guardian there. The armada that was waiting in the system now made great sense, as they didn't know what was destroying their ships, they just knew it was incredibly powerful and they couldn't understand why it hadn't yet come to attack them. Now that they were convinced of the truth they were delighted to re-acquaint themselves with his people, and they graciously accepted his gift of tachyon-burst communications.

With that they had been able to communicate with the Federation and the Federation with their Republic, and both sides had been delighted to resume their old alliance. Perhaps someday soon the Guardian could be cleared out of Sol and the two would merge. In the meantime, it was time for him to return home. The Eoladi had had little to reciprocate his gift with, but they graciously gave him a full starmap of their three systems, which unfortunately left him with nowhere to explore. A deal had already been worked out for both sides to send colony ships around the Guardian to take over planets the other couldn't use. The off-road travel would be quite slow, but at least the Eoladi would no longer be trapped in a back-corner of the sector and the Federation could reclaim several valuable hard-surface worlds of the Old Earth Empire.

Well it was a long trip to the other end of the Federation, but perhaps he could get another exploration berth once he got there. He sure hoped so.

As the seventh fleet prepared to depart from Wasilkoff, Admiral Goodman and Captain Riley tearfully hugged their children goodbye. The Raas war had been different, after the long refit delays the Seventh was no longer supposed to be involved in the main fighting anyway. For all their losses at Rotan the fleet they faced there was barely half of what the Ninth fleet had had to fight in Mahktoz. Fortunately, with advanced knowledge of the tactics the Raas fleet would use, and with the Raas denied the assistance of planetary scanners and defenses, what could have been a meat-grinder turned out to be nearly as "easy" as the battle of Rotan Prime. Also, at the time they were preparing to depart for Rotan they hadn't really had any other options either, all transportation between Wasilkoff and the other colonies had been military transports or cargo vessels, neither of which would have been suitable for sending the kids on. Leaving them in Wasilkoff hadn't been an option; while Wasilkoff II had reasonable planetary defenses operational it was also the frontier, so it could too easily face a major attack. Plus there was nobody there either of them knew well enough to entrust the kids to.

This time they did have another option, and though it pained them both greatly to do so, Goodman realized that it had to be done, and was eventually able to convince Sarah of that as well. Riley's father had been career military and was always getting called away, Goodman's had been a politician who wanted to spare his kids the ugliness of frontier politics and so traveled to the capital "for the week" but only once every month or two was able to make it home for the weekend. With both their parents missing so much of their childhoods, they did not want to do that to their kids.

However, Matthew Roberts needed more recuperation and rehab time before he could return to active duty, so he was being shipped back to a better hospital on Kitjef, and Clarissa had requested an extended leave of absence to go with him. She had gladly agreed to take McIntyre and the kids with her to Kitjef, where they would stay with Sarah's parents for the duration of the war. With so much less knowledge of Satrag's abilities, it just wasn't worth the risk. But that didn't mean they wanted to do it, and the goodbyes took a very long time. Eventually, however, they had no choice. Everybody's ships were ready to go, so with one last round of hugs and tearful farewells, they finally parted company.

Despite a huge technological advantage the Sixth Fleet was overwhelmingly outnumbered. Fortunately Gretskov had one more ace in the hole, a heavily stealthed scout craft (which was not numbered among his 150 combat vessels) that the Tachidi simply had no chance to detect. With it positioned inside hyperspace but hiding just far enough outside the jump lane to be out of the Tachidi's ships' paths, Gretskov could know exactly how, when, and in what formation the enemy would emerge. Naturally 2000 ships was way too many ships to have all emerge at once. As the leading elements of the Tachidi fleet began to emerge from the jumplane from Theta Celtsi to Beta Celtsi, they were so grossly overconfident that they emerged in small groups of only 10 ships at a time. Apparently they wished to flaunt their expected victory at the Kilora Tribe a bit. He chuckled at such foolishness and gave the orders to fire at anything they could target. His ships were standing off in the outer edges of their range, such that they could target the enemy ships with their graviton beams but the enemy couldn't fire back at him. Even with shields up and weapons prepared to fire they were absolute no match whatsoever for Gretskov's fleet, which blew them out of space so quickly the fleet even had three minutes of clearance before the next group of 10 ships emerged. Apparently the Tachidi didn't expect that any ships would be left in the system to defend it, which suggested very strongly that they were firmly allied with whomever had launched the sneak attack earlier.

"Gretskov to all ships, keep it up as long as they continue to emerge in dribs and drabs. This won't last long, even Tachidi will have to wise up soon, but we'll take advantage of their stupidity as long as we can."

A second wave, then a third, and all the way to the 20th emergence continued to make the same foolish mistakes. But that was only 200 ships, the Tachidi had over another 1800 left. Then they started coming out in groups of twenty. Although they no longer had as much break time between emergences, the Sixth continued to destroy everything before the next emergence. The Tachidi were slowly starting to wise up, however, after only 10 more failed emergences they started sending ships in groups of fourty at their engine's top speed.

This was finally enough to prevent Gretskov from killing every ship before the next group emerged, but his ships were still destroying everything the enemy put out before it could get inside their own weapon's range. But it was no longer a sustainable situation. Every single group he destroyed found him with another five to ten more ships outside the jumplane than before the previous emergence. Although another seven full emergences were destroyed before the situation became untenable, Gretskov was finally forced to admit it was time for a new strategy.

"All ships, back away at maximum speed, but keep firing at anything in range. We have to concede control of the jumplane to them, but take heart, we have already destroyed a large chunk of their fleet!"

A few muted cheers sounded around his bridge, and he knew that this was as much to show their support and trust in him as to express any actual elation over their success so far. There were still another 1426 ships to destroy, and while his greater range would give him huge advantages, nothing could save him if the enemy managed to get their entire surviving fleet in range quickly enough. He was still outnumbered nearly ten to one, and even the comparatively weak Quark Cannons and Anionic Energy Missiles the enemy carried could do damage if they managed to range on him. Both of their primary weapon types had about half the range of his Graviton Beams and Merculite Missiles and did around a third of the damage per weapon, and he had nearly 6 times their weapon count per ship, after all his ships were about three times as large as the Tachidi frigates. Plus with the improvements Tannert had uncovered and quickly distributed his ships could maintain a sustained fire rate far greater than the enemy could even conceive of. Still, swarm tactics would defeat him, so he had to make sure to deny that opportunity to the enemy.

One hundred of his ships were of a new design of beam cruiser that also carried a small rack of missiles, the other fifty were light cruisers based more on the Sharktooth design and carried massive numbers of PD beams, fifteen launchers for the "chaff"-style missiles that so devastated the Grendarl fighter corps, and a small collection of interceptor fighters. Although designed for PD work his Excelsior-class light cruisers were capable of doing damage to the enemy as well. They carried fifty rounds of "chaff" missiles as well, and those would not be detected by the enemy due to their stealthing. Each round of fire would give him 6000 missiles, and though individually each missile would barely scratch the enemy forty or fifty impacting in the span of a second or two just might be enough to destroy a ship. If not they would surely weaken its shields heavily, greatly helping the offense-oriented beam ships to finish it off. His Petersburg-class cruisers only carried 15 shots for their five racks of larger missiles, however, and though only two or three missiles would all but guarantee a kill right now wasn't the time to waste them, for with their superior numbers the Tachidi would surely swat any such missiles he fired completely out of the sky before any of them got close. Once he had thinned the enemy down, his missiles would no doubt wreak absolute havoc on the survivors, but not yet.

"Break up into the five elements I assigned you earlier. We had slightly greater success than I hoped, but not enough to guarantee victory. We must deny the enemy the ability to use swarm tactics. All groups launch fighters then scatter and assume maneuver tactics. Nip away at the edges of their formation to try to tempt them to break formation. Fire one round of chaff missiles every minute, targeted in clumps on the outer edges of their formation. They're almost certainly going to attempt to pursue a single group, so use our engines' better performance to our advantage. Don't let yourself get trapped up against a gravity well or an asteroid belt. Fighter groups, assume evasive courses and attempt the slash maneuvers I outlined for you, beginning in thirty seconds."

A series of acknowledgements flooded in but his com officer filtered them out and merely logged them. His ships rapidly split up into five elements of thirty ships each, each with twenty of the Petersburg-class cruisers and with ten of the Excelsior-class PD ships. His fighter craft were all crewed by Grendarl, as well, so on top of better equipment his fighters had maneuverability that the enemy simply would refuse to believe even as they saw the evidence with their own eyes. The fighters now began to execute the tactics he outlined for them earlier. Standard fighter tactics were to use large swarms of fighters to overload the enemies PD abilities and use their superior maneuverability to circle around a ship at a time, keeping up a constant rate of fire that would, over time, drain the enemy vessel's shields and eventually destroy it. Gretskov didn't have enough fighters for such a strategy to have any effect, but he had a new idea he wanted to try out. He knew the enemy's PD weaponry wouldn't do much of anything to his fighters, especially considering their high maneuverability. Instead his ships began shooting random paths through the enemy formation, all the while firing their weapons at the enemy. Their graviton beams were far weaker than even the weakest PD-class ship-mount weapon, but they were enough to cause small drains in the enemy shielding. And with their constant shifts in direction the greatest threat to the survival of his pilots would be one accidentally running into another. The Tachidi basically ignored his fighters for a few minutes since they weren't really doing any real damage and concentrated on pursuing his second group. Oh they fired PD weapons at his fighters of course, but even the few of them that actually hit his fighters didn't accomplish anything. Meanwhile all five of his main ship groups simply maintained separation and continued to fire beam weapons and chaff missiles at the enemy. As his ships racked up another 350 or so kills, the Tachidi finally got frustrated and began to swat at his fighters with real weapons. Unable to attack his main ships they attacked what they thought they had a chance of hurting. And again they were dead wrong. Not one of his fighters was able to be hit, but the crossfire destroyed over 400 more Tachidi ships before they wised up!

"Gretskov to fighter groups, you've accomplished your mission. Return to base. All ships, stay sharp, they are going to have to realize soon they have to try something new or they will be completely destroyed without even scratching us."

But either the Tachidi just didn't to realize the battle was hopeless for them just yet, or maybe they just didn't have any other ideas to try. They were now down to about 650 ships and much of their PD screen was destroyed. Of course their missile ships in the core had been constantly firing on his groups, but they had accomplished absolutely nothing as Gretskov's PD screen just swatted their missiles out of the sky with nearly contemptuous ease. As the enemy missile ships ran out of missiles and the surviving ships began to slow in realization they were out of options, Gretskov gave new orders again.

"All Petersburgs, fire one round of real missiles... mark!"

As 500 missiles tore into the remaining ships simutaneous with continued graviton beam fire, the Tachidi fleet all but died. With only 189 ships left, the Tachidi finally lost all cohesion and began to run for it. They were far too late. Another round of missiles from the Petersburgs finished them off completely. Gretskov finally smiled, realizing he had carried the day against truly impossible odds, destroying every ship sent against him and managing to do it while only having a few ships slightly damaged and losing merely four fighters, all to collisions rather than enemy fire.

Babcock had tried to warn the Tachidi, but they would not listen. And now they had begun to pay the price.

Gretskov was not entirely correct in his summary. One enemy ship was still in-system, an Evon scout using the same cloaking systems that the earlier fleet had used. It had come in with the last group of Tachidi ships to emergy from the jump lane without the Tachidi or Gretskov knowing it was there. Completely undetectable so long as it maintained silent running and avoided eclipsing a major source of background radiation that the cloak simply couldn't handle, it continued to spy on the Nommo and Gretskov until all was lost. Unable to do anything about the battle, however, it had finally been forced to head back to the jumplane. Carefully darting inside the jumplane at the same time Gretskov's scout vessel was emerging, it again escaped detection. As soon at it was safe from counter-detection it opened up a channel to its masters and reported everything it knew. Having been constrained to use passive sensors much of the time, it did not know why the jamming station had failed to take out Gretskov's fleet nor what had happened to it, but it was able to report the complete destruction of the Tachidi fleet to Lord S'tar. Unsurprisingly, he did not take the news well.

Lord S'tar paced in his plush office on Orion Prime furiously. Grek those doznab humans! His plan had been brilliant, he was sure of it, but somehow they had defeated it anyway. His agents kept failing him, and though each time it appeared to be merely bad luck or accident or understandable mistakes, the sheer number of failures made him wonder if his agents weren't in fact working for the Federation instead! First his agent on Wasilkoff II failed to prevent the humans from developing their slodding graviton beams that gave them such an advantage in combat. But the agent's explanation did make sense. He had used his mind-control techniques to keep the main researchers stumbling down blind alleys and making mistakes as they attempted to build their prototypes, and who could possibly have expected a minor lab rat like that to actually see what all the other researchers had missed! And then for her to actually notice the carefully omitted connection his agent had forced Messon to leave out! Totally unexpected circumstances, his agent had claimed, and S'tar had grudgingly agreed. Had the humans been forced to rely on their older Hard Beams they would surely have failed to take Rotan Prime so quickly. His agent had apologized profusely and even offered his life in penance, but S'tar had refused his offering and given him a new mission of finding out all he could about the enemy technology base. Surely there must be a weakness, an area they hadn't researched as much as others where a weak point could be found. But so far his agent had been unable to give him anything there either.

His agents on Kitjef had not completely failed him, at least, but they alone could not win the contest for him. They did at least keep him advised of what the Federation was up to, and they had enjoyed some small successes in stagnating the Federation technological base yet further, but they were mere annoyances. At least they had not been discovered yet, although two mentioned some highly suspicious transfers among many of their contacts.

And now Gretskov and his thrice greked Sixth Fleet had defeated the Tachidi. His fleet of cloaked ships were supposed to have destroyed both him and the Nommo fleet, but they had arrived early and foolishly attacked anyway. The admiral in charge of that fleet had already been executed for that mistake. Still the jammer station had been destroyed, something he was absolutely sure that Gretskov could not have accomplished with weapon fire even had he been able to find the station to target it, which he also could not have done, so the self-destruct must have worked as designed. Pity that Gretskov's fleet had not been caught in the blast, but perhaps it exploded before he entered the system. The automated systems on board hadn't reported his arrival before the hourly update drones ceased, so that was a plausible explanation.

Still, had the Tachidi won the day, his agents could have then planted evidence to show that the Federation was assisting the Nommo in the development of forbidden biological weapons designed to target his people. That would have given his people the needed excuse for an attack and ten months from now he would be enjoying his victory tour of the ruins on the former Federation capital of Kitjef.

Now he didn't know what to do. Oh his fleet could still attack the Federation and thanks to their Antaran weaponry they'd almost surely win, but his people would then face reprisals from everybody else in the galaxy, possibly even from his pretend-allies the New Orions. He knew the New Orions were using him as a stalking horse to rid the galaxy of the Federation in hopes of then turning on him and destroying him and anybody he left behind, but he had already planned to prevent that. The New Orions had installed security devices in his fleet that would enable them to destroy his entire fleet if he turned on them. But if the enemy couldn't get the detonation signal to the devices then the devices wouldn't activate. His people had immediately set to finding a way to extend the jammer technology from the jammer station to providing a defense for his ships against Antaran treachery. Unfortunately, they had only been able to come up with a limited-use defense, something he could activate but once activated he could not turn off and could only use for about four months before the delicate circuitry burned out and his ships were again left defenseless. Each ship now carried three, extending his operational time to a year, but if he hadn't completely destroyed the New Orions within a year of begining operations his people would be destroyed.

A new plan was obviously needed, and he immediately set about trying to think of one.

Back to Fan Fiction index