I read like a drug user. I have to have more and more, and the better books get reread. I find that I learn more every time I read them. One series by David Weber is not listed here at Fanfiction, that is the one beginning with Mutineer's Moon where our own moon is really a warship 1700 kilometers across.
I looked at this massive ship, something that could slaughter our entire race, and remembered the Death Star from Star Wars, where a ship less than 1/10th it's diameter (Only 160 kilometers according to Wookiepedia) did destror Aledraan with a single shot, which the massive ship Dahak could not without extreme measure.
Another thing that caused this story to be was a recent video game where you can pick who is fighting whom, and the characters from the Jay and Silent Bob movies were arguing about who was a better super hero, Aquaman, or Wonder Woman. The commercial has a scene where Wonder Woman is about to become shark food, so we might know how that turned out.
So after rereading the series, and seeing A New Hope just last week, this came to mind. Obviously, it is AU...
We May Never Know...
Grand Moff Tarkin stood in the command center of the Death Star, and he was satisfied with the campaign so far. Completing the Death Star, using it to obliterate Alderaan. Now they were enroute to the Yavin system, where the transponder aboard the Millenium Falcon had gone silent. Perhaps the Rebels were there. If so, which ever of the 26 moon they had landed on would be destroyed. If all else failed, he'd make the two occupied moons tell him where they had gone. Or maybe he'd just reduce all twenty six moons and three planets to shards, after letting a few people escape to spread the word.
The Emperor had finally taken the gloves off. Obey or your entire planet becomes an asteroid belt.
He was contemplating which of the planets in the Hapes Cluster would have to die when the hatch opened behind him. He didn't need to ask who it was; no one else aboard needed mechanical assistance to breath. "What is I, Lord Vader?"
"I sense a great disturbance in the Force, Grand Moff." Vader said.
"Like what you claimed to have felt when Alderaan died?"
"No." Tarking turned from the hypercpace tunnel to spear the man with his gaze. As he was the direct representative of the Emperor, Tarkin couldn't punish him for his temerity. But he had never liked the fool.
"Then be more specific."
"Something has... appeared in the Yavin system."
Tarkin wanted to ignore it. There was evidence that someone had literally built the Corel system in the distant past. Centerpoint Station was proof of it. But as far as he was concerned, if the Empire could not do it, it was flatly impossible. "We will find out soon enough."
"And if it is hostile?"
"We may never know. However if it is a threat, we will destroy it as we did Alderaan."
Vader merely looked at him. "I will be in my fighter when we arrive. I will launch and find out before you...indulge yourself."
Tarking merely waved, returning to his view.
After Sheskar, Colin McIntyre hadn't known what to expect in the Defram system. Sheskar had been a fleet base, and seeing the asteroid belt that had all that remained of the planet had been like being drenched with ice water. Defram in it's own way had been worse. Two planets reduced to lifeless balls of rock.
Kano had been the first actual clue of what had happened in Defram. An accidental release of a bio weapon on a Galactic scale meant there may not be an Empire to contact. But they needed ships, and the next best place to find them was Birhat, Fleet Central. While going there pretty much assured that Dahak would not be there to help defend Earth from the Achuultani scout fleets, he really had no option.
The Achuultani had spent seventy million years going through the galaxy eliminating every other race that might ever become sentient. In fact the asteroid that slaughtered off the Dinosaurs 65 million years ago had merely been because they might one day develop a sentient species. Four human empires had fallen to their attacks, and one planet of less than 8 billion people had no chance in hell of defeating the main incursion alone. At least, not without some serious back up.
So he had given the orders, taken his ship into Enchanach drive yet again.
Yet because of that decision, he could barely sleep. He'd awoken from a nightmare of spears of kinetic energy weapons destroing every place he had ever seen or visited as he ran frantically from one to another carrying only an ubrella as if it would protect them. He'd have to see if Cohanna had a shrink in her medical staff to explain that imagery.
He knew it bothered his crew, what there was of it, but he decided to go to the bridge. He stepped into the grav tube, shooting almost a thousand kilometers from where he wandered to the bridge. At least Dahak had stopped calling everyone to attention when he arrived, thank god for small blessings. He threw his links into the computers, and began the one thing any commanding officer hated; paperwork.
By their very nature, Astronauts define Obsessive-Compulsive. Ever since the B17 had been developed, every aircraft larger than a private plane had checklists that had to be completed before rolling. In fact the very first B17 prototype had crashed upon takeoff because of an error in making sure everrything was right; the pilot had not unlocked the elevators that allow the plane to climb. So astronauts were trained to be sure everything was exactly as it should be before you even touch the stick, or light the candle.
As much as he loathed paperwork, it had to be done, and doing a few hundred reports was just the brain numbing he needed to get to sleep. He was in a fifty page document about the enhancement procedures and for the ship's crew when suddenly alarms went off. The main view tank which surrounded the bridge flashed, then suddenly Dahak dropped out of drive.
"Colin, we have hit a subspace anomaly that forced us out of hyperspace." The main computer reported. "Detection, planet at eleven light hours. Detection, ship under power from moon three to moon 13 of that planet."
His heart leaped. "Do you have a location?"
"Negative." For a long moment, the computer was silent. "Evidence suggests that this is not the same galaxy. Scanning the anomaly suggests it is an Asherali phenomenon, what Earth science calls a 'wormhole'. They are unstable and are usually only detected at stellar distances. There is not a lot of data about them in my memory banks; but it is theorized that such a wormhole links across interstellar distances. From what has been recorded here, that should be intergalactic distances.
The wormhole is fluctuating, and will collapse in the next five minutes. I would suggest-" The voice paused "Detection, large object, 50,000 kilometers distance. Size 160 kilometers in diameter. It appears not unlike the prototype warships created in the Mycos system in the first century of the Fourth Imperium."
Vader settled into the seat of his fighter, and brought the systems up. As he finished the Death Star suddenly dropped out of hyperspace. He looked ahead through the forcefield that held the atmosphere. The thing was enormous, far larger than the Death Star. He instinctively hit the throttles, and his ship shot from the landing bay. As he climbed he saw a huge three headed Dragon literally emblazoned on the huge ship that confronted them.
Princess Leia stood beside General Willard at the main tank, and her heart sank. The technical readouts that R2 had carried had agreed with the sensor data the Millenium Falcon, that the Death Star they had escaped from was 160 kilometers in diameter. The notes in that data had also mentioned that the ship had taken 22 years to complete. Yet the thing that sat there 11 light hours away was 1700 kilometers across. Had they built more than one?
Willard looked at the data feed from Yavin 13. "A lot bigger than we anticipated." She wanted to scream at him, but the officer was calm. "I don't know what her commander is thinking, though. At eleven light hours distance it will take them a day to get close enough to interdict us. Our fighters can make ten sorties in that time." He tapped a button. "All personnel not working on the fighters or among our last out will evacuate immediately. All fighters launch."
"Sir?" The sensor officer merely tapped his console. Now there were two huge ships out there.
Willard looked at the scans. "Why would the Empire send two ships that size to deal with us?" He shrugged. "We may never know."
"Report!" Tarkin roared. There was a buzz of conversation behind him. "Damn it, report!"
"We dropped out of hyperspace due to a mass shadow, sir." There is a ship 50,000 kilometers ahead. It's... It's huge."
The screen suddenly showed a sweep of hull metal that seemed to loom over his ship. Someone reduced the view until he could see it all. It was a globe that dwarfed the Death Star, with some kind of dragon covering the side they could see. Where could the rebels have found such a monstrosity? "Main gun, target that ship, all guns target that ship. "Somebody fire!"
Down deep inside the Death Star Commander Kris looked at the massive target he had been ordered to destroy. "Commence primary ignition." He ordered.
Unlike a turbolaser that used tibanna gas shells, the main gun of the ship was what was being called a gravitonic disruptor that drew power directly from the main reactor. But they couldn't just pull the trigger. It was a delicate dance of taking about two thirds of the ship's systems offline to build up the power in the capacitors, and that took several seconds.
While computers are perfect for figuring probabilities, they do not deal with them well. A human will look at a tout board and willingly put their money down. While most don't even realize it, the odds of winning the big prize in the California Lotto is equivalent to betting you will be struck by a meteorite walking down the street. People deal with 'might', and 'could' and 'probably' by ignoring it. Otherwise the human race would be huddling in their homes terrified that a meteor will send us on our way in the next few minutes. After all, one wiped out the dinosaurs right?
Dahak detected the energy being diverted to fire the main weapon of the small ship confronting him even as every turret aboard it began peppering his hull with frankly weak laser bursts. A crude form of his own beam weapons, a gravitonic disruptor. But a very large one. He took seveal femto seconds to determine the throughput, and the time before he estimated before it could be fired. It was more powerful than his own weapons, and the time was too short to assure even an enhanced human could react.
He knew his shields might stop the weapon, that his battlesteel hull could probably take such as hit, and that if it did the damage probably would not be severe. However as the only known warship surviving of the Empire, he knew definitely that he could not accept any damage. The ship he faced had shields that were coming up, but they were made to fight larger warships. He surmised for a femtosecond that if they had time, he could have dceployed fighters that could actually fly through them to attack it. If they had time.
As his crew was still getting over the surprise, he acted. Instead of using his own beam weapons, he selected a Mark 10 hyper missile with a gravitonic warhead. Designed to pass through shields in hyper spcae before popping back into N-space, he could literally put it inside that ship, and he did.
In a time too short for anything but his own computer to comprehend, the missile was selected, fired, and impacted. Due to the small size of his target he missed putting it directly in the center by a dozen kilometers. The warhead detonated, sucking everything within ten kilometers into hyper space, making the entire ship it had hit also try to fill that space with parts of itself. The main reactor, almost as large as Comp Cent aboard Dahak was ripped from it's housing by that vortex, power leads as thick as a human being were torn like threads, and as the vortex died, the magnetic containment field gave way, releasing all of that ravening energy inside her. Tarkin, along with over a million crewmen died before they could realize that it had happened.
"Target destroyed."
Colin stared at the screen as the enemy ship merely exploded, scattered parts of it bouncing off the meters thick hull. "Dahak..."
"I am sorry, Colin, but they were bringing up a weapon more powerful than my own beams. It would have caused damage to the ship, and as the sole surviving battle ship of the human race, I could not allow that."
"I understand." Colin replied. "Any chance of survivors?"
"There is one fighter that had been launched before they began their attack. It is now headed toward the 13th moon of the planet ahead. That would be the only survivor."
"Do we even know why they attacked us?"
"We may never know, Colin."
"Let him go. You said the wormhole was destabilizing..."
"Yes."
"All fighters, return to base. I repeat, all fighters, return to base." Ground control ordered. In the X Wing labeled Red 5, Luke Skywalker shuddered. He had felt, something. Ben had told him that he felt something from the Force, like people screaming in terror, then gone. He had felt the same thing from the target zone. He looked at his sensors, tied as were the ground sensors into those of Yavin 13. Far ahead of them, one of the huge ships had vanished as if it had never been. Now, suddenly the larger one moved, then was gone.
"Luke? Return to base." Biggs told him.
"Oh, right." He swept into a turn. Behind him, R2 asked a question. His eyes flicked to the translator screen. "I don't know what happened out there, R2." He shrugged. "We may never know."