I'm not used to this. They should have found someone bloodthirsty ... or ... lavathirsty? Thirsty for whatever happens to Silicoids when they die. They needed someone crying out against the rock people, to reclaim stars that in their view are rightfully ours - who would put the war before everything else. The Order was aware that we needed a military commander in chief to direct the distressingly-necessary operations against alien incursion into our space, to allow us to react swiftly and efficiently, but they needed someone eager for the job, excited about military. Unless they
wanted self-doubt, hesitation, and greater concern for our research than for our wars, why would they have chosen
me? Maybe that's it: Maybe they felt that no necessity is so great that we should lose sight of our ideals. But ... that isn't a way to win a war. I think?
Just for one thing, would any other people have tolerated their new commander-in-chief starting out by scrapping parts of their fleet? I did that as almost my first action in office once I'd familiarized myself with the situation. Admittedly, they were century-old unarmed Scouts sitting in orbit at stars that already had real ships in their fleet, and an outdated destroyer-class scanner ship carrying just three lasers, sitting around in the same spot as our devastatingly powerful one-ship navy of a spacefleet that has a battle scanner of its own - but even so, does that send the right message? I at least could have started with the transports I requested, and the aggressive orders I issued to our starfleets.
That ... might not be what our admirals were expecting anyway. We already have seventy million people due to reach Uxmai the year after next, and here I'm sending more than half the Zoctan defense force, nearly half of Nature's population, and all but one of the - remaining - ships in our Nature defense fleet
past it to Proteus. If this sounds crazy, it ... might be because it is. But hear me out: You'll notice we're sending our Ultimatum directly in Cryslon's direction here, and sending it alone: Everything else, slower and much older, is traveling separately. The Ultimatum will reach Proteus next year with time to meet the transports back at Uxmai and then move forward again if necessary. And, sure, I could have sent everything down to Uxmai instead, but if we wait until next year, Nature's population will take that much longer to start growing again, and won't be able to grow as
much: We'd have to send fewer to Uxmai - definitely too few to take the planet - or let most of the people on our incoming transports die with no place to land. So I'm juggling things around here to get the most out of our troops that I think we can. There's not much chance we can actually conquer a heavily-armed Silicoid planet with just fifty-two transports, but we'll have at least a small chance, and we'll at least cut way down on their local production capacity - and in case they try to reinforce with transports from other worlds before we're ready to take over ... well, that's why the laser fighters are heading down there. I'm leaving enough at Zoctan to take out another colony ship if one shows up, and given where our main fleets are moving - and where Mentar is - I don't consider Nature really under threat, and lots of little lasers, obsolete as they are, should do fine at shooting down enemy transport fleets. I'm not
undermining our military efforts here; I'm just not sure I'm being aggressive
enough! Like, I should probably have sent more transports from Mentar to Uxmai than I did if I
really wanted to push forward, so Nature could turn to Proteus again
next year ... and the shipbuilding I've orderd at Mentar, Paradise, and our Backwards colony would probably, um, involve at least one ship with a wepon on it.
So here's our Ultimatum arriving at Proteus alone. The good thing about one-ship navies is that you don't need any other ships! True to its name, it offered the Silicoids a warning: Stand down weapons and return to the negotiating table, and discuss terms for peacefully sharing the worlds in our space, finding ways to live together in peace and... anyway. It didn't matter because they didn't let us finish, even as far as explaining what we'd do if they
didn't. So we had to show them. Nine rocket tubes couldn't hurt our self-repairing battleship, so we just flew in and bombed the military installations. This took ... a distressingly long time. Sixteen fusion bombs isn't very many. It didn't matter since they couldn't do any permanent damage to us though, and even our heavy ion cannons could penetrate their shields. In fact, you can see the special orders I gave the ship when their last base was barely holding on: To fly back out of bombing range and finish the base off with
only the beams, to minimize collateral damage. This way, we killed none of their civilians, and only destroyed a single factory. Of course I refused to bomb the planet from orbit after that; in fact, the Ultimatum left immediately, heading for Uxmai as planned. The transports will be covered, also as planned, by the Nature Defense Fleet, which should arrive next year, simultaneously. Well, and good, but I mentioned shipbuilding. Mentar hasn't finished yet, but the others just did:
Replacing our slow, outdated Learn 2.0 with its feeble lasers - and our Scouts with nothing at all - are this pair of Learn 3s: Completely unarmed ships with sublight drives, scanners, reserve fuel tanks, and nothing else aboard. They can serve a purely peaceful, scientific function, exploring the galaxy at three times the speed as the little Scout ships and learning more about what they see. And, when what they happen to see is an enemy starfleet, they can tell us what we're up against so we can prepare accordingly. I
could have armed them, yes, but we've reached the point where the extra expense wouldn't be worth it for a ship with this design. One is on its way to Reticuli, where I can see a couple of Silicoid Shark destroyers. The other is bound for Sol, where Alexander is gathering an attack fleet. In the meantime, because I couldn't bear to send a real fleet of transports from here at Mentar last year, instead of following up the first set it sent to Proteus, Nature is joining in the Uxmai invasion, bringing the number due to arrive there next year all the way up to 93 ... plus one Ultimatum.
Say, does everyone remember that deep-mining operations on Uxmai decades ago made the place a rich source of neutronium? Which made the place really good at building ships? Because they've got a dreadnought of their
own in orbit now that they just finished! I was really, really worried for a moment that we'd made a terrible mistake - and then I checked the battle scanner readings, and was reminded that Silicoid spaceship designers have literal rocks for brains. This Monitor isn't anything close to the state of their art, and although those 41 gatling lasers would be scary for a fighter fleet, nothing that ship carries can daunt our Ultimatum. Eleven missile bases aren't enough to hurt it either as long as they're just spitting Hyper-V rockets, so we - slowly, but eventually - bombed them all away after the Monitor, apparently realizing what it was up against, beat a hasty retreat. And with that ... well ... that's when everything went wrong.
It turns out I'm not the only hesitant commander, longing to research in peace, whom we've put in charge of our military operations.
On Uxmai, we outnumbered the Silicoids more nearly by
three to one than two. In an all-out fight, horrifying losses were projected: All of their people and over sixty million of ours ... but the projections were for
slightly over sixty million. We landed with such overwhelming numbers that General Pi edade immediately offered terms of surrender to the Silcoid population - and under cover of negotiations and pretending to consider the offer, the Silicoids surrounded and ambushed our forces. When Pi edade offered quarter to surrounded forces, they pretended to surrender, then used the opportunity to ambush our attempts at mercy, strapping explosives to the bodies of the first Silicoids to go into custody while the rest concealed their laser rifles and deflector shields and opened fire on everybody. The battle raged for days, and when a truce was agreed so both sides could recover the wounded and the dead, the Silicoids sent commandos in medics' uniforms to cut down our medics and wounded, not caring how many of their own wounded were simultaneously killed. At every turn, wherever we tried to stop or slow or reduce the bloodshed, the Silicoid forces looked for any way they could to use it - not to their advantage, since instead of being freed to return to other Silicoid worlds, the result was their unanimous death, but instead - to kill as many of us as we could. We were prepared for their numbers; we were prepared for their focused combat technology and their willingness to fight. We weren't prepared for their total disregard for their own lives and the conventions of terminable war: The Silicoids fought as though their own lives didn't matter - as though all that mattered to them was ending ours - and as though they never expected to need us to trust their word again under any circumstances; as though the only outcomes of the battle or the war they would accept would be our total extermination or, perforce, their own. Expecting none of this, not knowing how to respond, we lost millions more lives than anyone's projections could have anticipated, and were unable to save a single Silicoid life on the ground: Those that didn't die in suicide charges died by detonating suicide bombs, only multiplying the unspeakable horrors of war.
GNN didn't report on the battle, nor on its aftermath - when we arrived at Uxmai's planetary labs, we found nothing but rubble, smoke, and flame, as the Silicoids had detonated their most-powerful explusives in them - nor did it report on the battle at Proteus that followed: A battle of a very different kind. Word had reached General Hoeg wi of what had happened back on Uxmai, who learned from what turned out in hindsight to be General Pi edade's mistakes. At Proteus, we fought strictly by the book, giving no quarter and asking none, knowing none would be given and that every offer would be abused - and the results were exactly in accordance with projections. Our forces were too few to win at those odds, but they reduced the Silicoids' fighting force and military production capacity on the ground by something over eighty percent, paving the way for the next wave of our troops ... whenever they might come. It was my own hesitation, already described - together with the impact of the massacre at Uxmai - that would give the Silicoids of Proteus further years of life. I would be pleased by this had they not so amply demonstrated that every moment of their lives would be dedicated to our destruction.
What GNN
did report, you can see: A freak interaction between the magnetic fields of Nature Prime and a major stellar flare from its primary actually caused a subtle but discernible change in the planet's axis of rotation, slightly reducing the size of the polar regions, with subtle and complex ramifications across the climate of the entire world. Hurried efforts were made to secure the two factory-cities, and the students of Nature have quickly adapted, adjusting their crop cycles to take advantage of the planet's newfound fertility. Thanks to this small environmental shift, Nature now has the potential to become the second-most-populous world in our empire, following only Paradise Prime itself - but won't do so anytime soon, as the population boom that followed the shift consists mostly of Psilons eager to leave the world for others with less-impoverished mineral resources ... such as Uxmai and Proteus.
Some also had a third new star system in mind: It was also in 2402 that the third starship I ordered during my tenure, likewise unarmed, would complete, and with its dead-world-ready colony base, top-flight sub-light engines, and complete lack of any other systems, its destination was sufficiently clear, if only from the name it was given. We've had the environmental controls we need for several years now, and I felt it was high time that - instead of just denying it to the Silicoids with our Doubts - we actually established a Zoctan colony. The three new worlds we had added or hoped to add to the empire are - at least at this moment - our top priorities.
Relatedly, all the little reserve funding we were able to make available by scrapping our Scouts and slow scanner ship is being poured into Uxmai now that we've finally established control of the colony, enabling the survivors of the terrible battle there to begin terraforming the poisoned remnants the Silicoids had left of the world as well as cleaning up the industrial waste that covers its surface almost as thickly as the snow. If there are more important matters to attend to than our newest, richest colony ... well, we should know about them soon.
Well ... this does tell me something, but I was hoping to learn more. On the one hand, the Silicoids' Shark destroyers are slow, clumsy, inefficient heavy laser boats without any shielding, so I don't have to worry about the pair that were escorting another of their colony ships toward Zoctan. The new-style Human Warship on the other hand, is extremely dangerous to our fleets, with two layers of deflector shielding and 25 beam weapons on each duralloy cruiser hull more-than salvaging their largely-worthless five-shot rack of Hyper-V rockets, rendered vulnerable mostly by their primitive targeting computer - older even than our own, though supported by a battle scanner - and complete lack of tactical or strategic speed. There's a much bigger problem - for us - with this Warship though: Apart from the thirty-six missile bases, it's completely alone at Sol. When I ordered this Learn 3.0 built at Paradise and dispatched it in this direction, it was because our long-range scanners showed - unsurprisingly - that this was the muster point for the Human battle fleet, which I've assumed was preparing for an attack on Paradise ever since Alexander tore up our mutual non-aggression agreement. That fleet isn't here at Sol anymore; it's departed, passing our Learn 3.0 in hyperspace, meaning our ship arrived just one year too late to scan that fleet ... which at this moment is indeed crossing the stars directly toward Paradise.
You can see it inbound here, just at the edge of the screen, while our spaceyards report the completion of 17 Nimbus 3.0 fighters at Mentar - the first armed ships built during my tenure as commander in chief. They're simple ion fighters, with our best engines and maneuverability and nothing else aboard except the pilot and a single ion cannon apiece. Also, of course, the fact that Paradise has been busier with research than with assembling its planetary shield. I ... have I said before that if the Order should have chosen a more warlike commander-in-chief? Either way, there's more bad news coming - this time about the Silicoids who - apart from the setbacks we've dealt them - have been steadily taking over the galaxy.
Perhaps we knew they had death spores available already - and I have no doubt at all of their willingness to deploy them on their fleets - but if we want to continue striking back against them, there's more bad news: The Silicoids have developed Merculite missiles, very like those our own weapons engineers have been trying to devise - an adaptation which makes our Ultimatum battleship, designed as it was against the limited threat that Hyper-V rockets offer, far more vulnerable to Silicoid missile bases. Their double alliance with the Mrrshan and Meklar peoples would be troubling too if we were closer to the next High Council, but the unpredictable shifts in their lines of alliance and war are likely to reshape their diplomacy again long before the vote, fortunately - even if we're not able to take the reshaping into our own hands in the interim!
Here's one of the problems with that theory. When I talked about the Human fleet that was mustering, I may not have emphasized just how terrifying it is. With ten cruisers - half of them Warships, the monsters of ship-to-ship combat our Learn 3.0 was able to scout, and the other half Escort cruisers, with completely unknown armament - and more than fifty destroyers of three different types, this fleet is - or could be - a major threat. The Warships, at a minimum, would shred our old laser fighters and even the new Nimbus fighters in numbers anything like what we've got. They can't penetrate our planetary shields ... er ... once we build one ... but like all the rest of us, the Humans have nuclear bombs available, and if either of their more-numerous destroyer designs - the "Battleship" and "Dreadnought" classes presumably named to sow confusion about their true size - or the Escort cruisers turn out to be dedicated bombers, it's going to take a lot of firepower to bring them down. The problem gets even worse if the Escorts are shielded up to the state of the Humans' art, focused as they are on force field technology. We have five years to pull a defense together, so I'd really, really like to have gotten my scanner down here in time to see what we'd be facing - but I'll have to do my best with the information I've got, because that just wasn't a physical possibility.
You'd think the Order of Scientific Genius itself would be directing our continuing efforts to colonize our part of the galaxy, but this colony is kind of a special case. It's so close to Mentar, and we pursued so many other pursuits before finally enabling and then building and sending a colony here that could actually keep our people alive on the dead surface of Zoctan V, that I felt the name needed to acknowledge the fact: We're finally here, at Longlast! (Our cultural proclivity for inserting spaces at unusual places in our names does sometimes extend to removing them, naturally.) I must admit though ... the reason I'm the one in charge of naming the place is that anything to do with Longlast right now has to do with the military: The name
may also be a kind of plea to the galaxy at large: May our colony here last long!
You can see a little piece of what I'm talking about here. Mentar, our closest star, is getting Longlast started with twenty million immigrants, but we've got two incoming Silicoid fleets trying to take the place from us already. These are really just leftovers from before the world was claimed: The two Shark destroyers that will be there soon were escorting one of their colony ships before they realized their armed colony design was close to worthless as a combat ship, scrapped it, and designed a new one - and the other incoming fleet is another colony cruiser of whatever their new design turns out to be. We've got some time before that arrives, and we might even find out what's on it by then if we're lucky. The Sharks are fortunately easy to deal with, so what I'm mostly calling attention to here is a small consequence of the Silicoids' profligate habit of making and breaking alliances: Without taking advantage of Silicoid fuel bases, the three Bobcat destroyers above their Centauri colony have no way of getting that far from ... wherever Mrrshan space turns out to be - but now that they're there, when the alliance breaks, they'll be able to attack and give their transports an approach vector before the last of their remaining fuel runs out on them. Millions will likely die because of their mutually-deceptive diplomatic games - but there are still more terrible results that can accrue from them: Results we're trying to work to prevent, though at prices that themselves would be impossible to stomach were the alternative not so plainly worse.
I will hope for a future without war - without the need for me or anyone to be commander in chief of military - but I fear that future, should it come at all, must be distant.
