ZNS 2228
Fatigue clung to Ditvish like a suffocating shroud, his crimson eyes heavy with exhaustion. The crew’s voices murmured in the background like distant echoes. He had been awake for forty-five hours straight. Even with a steady schedule of stimulant drinks and injections, he could feel the fight being sapped out of his body every passing minute. His fingers, once nimble on the controls, now moved with a leaden slowness, the tactile sensations dulled by the ceaseless grind of exhaustion. But he couldn’t succumb; the weight of responsibility chained him to the command chair.
A beep on his console snapped him out of his hazy trance. He blinked, the world momentarily sharpening around him.
“Ten Whiskers, we are getting… a local transmission,” Skvanu reported, seeming hesitant.
“Which squadron?”
“None of them, Ten Whiskers,” he replied, taking a deep breath. “There’s a Lesser Predator communication drone two thousand kilometers to our bow. It… appears to be hailing us.”
Fully awake now, Ditvish stood up from his chair. “Two thousand kilometers to our bow? Have the whole fleet scan the volume!”
The sensors of the entire fleet focused on the area around the detected drone. The sensors strained, their electronic eyes unblinking, in search of their elusive adversaries. Sensing their continued failure, Ditvish sighed and looked at Skvanu.
“What is the communication drone saying?” he asked. “Play it on the main screen.”
Skvanu fiddled with his controls for a brief moment, and the screen filled with the presence of one of the Lesser Predators.
The bridge crew silenced at the displayed recording. It was not the first time they had seen a specimen of the enemy, but they were more accustomed to seeing these images in training films, interrogations, and prison camps. It— She… began to spoke in well-translated Znosian.
“I am High Fleet Commander Grionc of the Malgeir Sixth Fleet. Ten Whiskers Ditvish, you have fought with determination and cunning, but your ships have been defeated. You have lost Datsot and Gruccud. Your twenty-six squadrons have been trapped and we can slaughter you like meal animals at any moment of our choosing. There is no escape. Surrender with honor, and you and your crew will be treated with the kindness you do not deserve. You have a few moments to decide. If not, well, this wasn’t my idea in the first place, and I only promised to try.”
The message cut off.
Ditvish hissed with anger, staring at Skvanu. “Send this straight back to the animals: our lives were all forfeited to the Prophecy the day we left the hatchling pool. Your threats of death have no effect on me or my crew. We will make sure enough of you Lesser Predators join us in the afterlife for it to be worth it. The Prophecy will be fulfilled through us.”
“Yes, Ten Whiskers.”
The response came back almost instantly. This time, Ditvish could tell the predator on the screen was no mere recording. This was a live transmission relayed through the communication drone.
“Curious, for an excommunicated Znosian to invoke the Prophecy. Or did you not hear, Ten Whiskers? You are no longer considered part of Prophecy. State Security has condemned your entire crew and thrown you out of the Prophecy. Even your high command has abandoned you. If you miraculously escape, all that awaits you back in Znos is torture and death. And if you die here, there is no afterlife. Not for you, if you believe in the Prophecy anyway. What awaits you in mortality is no different from the void that awaits the rest of us.”
“Predator lies!” Ditvish hissed at the screen.
She replied, smug creeping into her voice, “I knew you’d say that. Which is why I came with the receipts. Roll the tape and see for yourself.”
The screen was replaced by a video that began to show a remote hearing on Znos. The cursed State Security Agent, Svatken, began her accusations — weaving a preposterous tale of scandal and betrayal — presenting from her screen obviously fabricated evidence of his fleet stealing supply ships from the Navy, killing his own subordinates who were loyal to the Prophecy, and preparing a full-species schism to the gasps of the shocked judges.
By the second minute, Ditvish knew in his heart that the recording was real. No fabrication of the enemy could understand this much of Znosian culture, express this much nuance, and elaborate with this much historical context.
Svatken then walked the judges through the dozen or so rolls of drone footage, the testimony of his poor five whiskers officer (obtained through torture, undoubtedly), the intercepted recording of a message from one of the ship masters of Atluftrosh’s raiding fluffle who he thought dead, ending with the final and most damning discovery: the fleet of supply drones hidden just one sector away from Datsot.
None of which he’d seen before. Obviously, they must all have been fabricated by Svatken. He knew he should have done something about her earlier…
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The commission judges ate it up, displaying shock and outrage at every revelation.
Now that Ditvish thought about it, the hearing results were most likely pre-determined.
“And even if this is not apostasy of the first order, a crime not seen in Navy leadership in centuries,” Svatken concluded to the hearing audience, “The alternate explanation is incompetence from a ten whiskers that is so outrageous it may as well be apostasy. Not only that, the Ten Whiskers has refused to take responsibility for these failures, as is his duty not only as an officer of the Navy, but as a civilized member of the Znosian species. In light of these shocking evidence, State Security demands that he be stripped of his rank, arrested, questioned extensively to root out co-conspirators, and then permanently removed from the Prophecy.”
The judges discussed it among themselves, and the video sped up that part. The pronouncement came seconds later on the video, as grave as they were certain: that Ten Whiskers Ditvish was to be-
“Shut it off, now!” Ditvish ordered, knowing that regardless of the transparency of the lies spoken in the video, his officers would force themselves to obey them as if they were real.
“Yes, Ten Whiskers,” Skvanu obeyed without hesitation, knowing what was coming next too.
To the credit of their discipline, none of the bridge crew members said a word nor acknowledged what they clearly heard. More likely, Ditvish thought, the dullards didn’t make the connections.
“Believe me now?” Grionc asked, and he could hear her satisfaction even through the translation. “That mess is what awaits you all back on Znos.”
“Lesser Predators trickery,” he snarled. “Like all predators, your species specializes in manipulation and exploitation of innocent species like ours. Congratulations. You have just proven what we already knew: that you would stoop so low as to fabricate… such a… dishonest fiction. Now, join us in battle, and you will see what glories await my crew and spacers in Znos when they find that we have destroyed the supposedly legendary Lesser Predator Sixth Fleet. Your people will despair. Your worlds will fall. They will be cleansed of all traces of your barbarism. And then and only then, the Prophecy will be fulfilled through—”
“Sure, sure,” Grionc snorted, rolling her eyes. “I’ve tried my best this way. Now we’re going to try the more fun way. Every hour, we will call you again to see if you have changed your mind. I will try my best to pretend not to enjoy this in front of the… civilized folks also watching this, Grass Eater, but it will be oh, so very, very hard. See your ten ugly whiskers in an hour.”
Then the transmission cut out.
“All ships to battle stations now,” Ditvish ordered. “I don’t care if you have to fry your circuits to boost your radars. I want the enemy found!”
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They waited another thirty minutes before the attack. Just when the Znosians were beginning to think the Lesser Predators had been bluffing, it happened without warning.
The missiles glided noiselessly out of the Terran ships in the dark of space. Three Falconet long-range missiles from each of the eight state-of-the-art combat vessels, the best that Sol could imagine in its forges of war: next-generation Python-class missile destroyers.
Their purpose was not reconnaissance; it was not subterfuge. They were not built with large volumes dedicated to cargo, communications, nor devices of trickery. Their purpose was combat, space combat, and like their builders, they were masters of their craft.
The Python’s engines’ impressive performance specifications were not required. Not today.
Today, they were not asked for complex maneuvers or innovative tactics; they were merely the deliverers. The messengers of death.
The released Falconet anti-ship missiles coasted silently towards the enemy fleet, waiting, programmed to go loud when they got detected. But they were not. The Znosians could not even detect the much larger ships that launched them, and these missiles’ frontal arcs were coated with the same radar and thermal absorbent paint their motherships were. Their quiet onboard sensors did not even register on the enemy’s threat reaction instruments.
Not until they were a mere five hundred kilometers away: a few of them were finally spotted by the enemy’s thermal sensors staring straight at their semi-occluded drive plumes.
But that was too late. Way too late.
Most of their targets did not even have time to activate their point defense systems. A couple did manage to start tracking them with their relatively primitive fire control radars, causing the missiles to instinctively release their state-of-the-art penetration aids: decoys, electronic dazzlers, and all. The Znosian point defense systems were barely patched to understand that this was something that missiles could even do from their previous encounters with the obsolete Pigeon missiles, and the super-Terran intelligence chips on the Falconet sighed metaphorically in disappointment that the point defense computers on the target ships could not even possibly understand just how outclassed they were.
They took their time to adjust their flight paths in terminal maneuvers. The hopelessly confused defenses of the enemy obviously did not pose enough of a threat for that to be problematic. Most of them went for the location of the enemy reactor core.
A couple of the more creative missiles decided that a hit to the enemy’s ammunition magazines could prove to be a more interesting experiment for the Terrans who launched them.
And a particularly inspired Falconet decided that the enemy bridge, full of enemies after all, could be a more valuable target. It was, of course, wrong; its plasma jet vaporized the enemy ship’s bridge and its entire frontal section but did not instantly destroy the ship. Ah, better luck next time, it thought before it made its disappointed damage report and incinerated its own intelligence chip as the self-destruct sequence kicked in.
For the remaining, the plasma jets from the modern anti-ship missiles lanced into the critical areas of the enemy ships, and two full squadrons (minus half of a lucky ship missing “only” its bridge and its frontal hemisphere) of Znosian Navy ships disappeared into expanding clouds of debris and radiation.
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“It’s Squadrons 6 and 20, Ten Whiskers,” Skvanu reported in astonishment. “They’re gone.”
Ditvish said nothing, merely sinking into his command chair in despair.
“It’s a new kind of enemy munition,” Skvanu continued. “We did not even see most of it coming with our sensors aimed at them. A few ships in Squadron 5 claimed to have spotted a sensor ghost on their thermal sensors before impact, but no one successfully engaged any. Squadron 5 Leader is taking full responsibility for this failure.”
There were no sounds on the shocked bridge except that of the engine hum for a minute.
Skvanu broke the silence. “Ten Whiskers, what should we do?”
“Call the Lesser Predators again.”