Back Home – The Dual War
Warringer
Chapter 20
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Bismark had pulled the former slaves together. There was something strange going on. He was pretty sure that it weren't Doranians who had pulled the transport through slipstream. But he had learned to be careful during his time as slave.
Most of the freed aliens however were a little too passive to really thing about doing anything, only the six Shin'bi and the two Nomards were really in a shape that allowed them to fight now. The Shin'bi because they were new slaves, while the Nomads were tough folk all in all.
He was glad that they had been able to get a few weapons, not much but it should be enough for some resistance if needed. The six shock sticks from the slavers and four rifle like weapons. The Shin'bi had taken the shock sticks, as they were trained for close quarters combat, while Bismark and the Nomads had taken the rifles.
Bismark looked out of the cockpit windows, observing where they were brought to. A black shape slowly became visible from the ink blackness of space, nearly as dark colored as the surrounding space. Than on an unseen command light switched on, bathing parts of the shape in while light.
Bismark could see the shapes of something that looked very much like weapon turrets, like he had seen on German Battleships when his father had shown him Wilhelmshafen back in the war. He was unable to tell just how large the turrets and the ship itself were, as he lacked any reference point. However, he could read a large dark gray, but still visible script running along the bow of the ship.
"Nautilus," he read out loud, clearly surprised about the latin letters.
Next to him Haruka raised the eye ridge her race had instead of eyebrows. She was something of the unofficial leader of the six Shin'bi, being the eldest of them from the looks of it.
"You seem surprised," she said.
Bismark continued to glance at the massive hull and nodded.
"It's a little complicated," he explained." That was the name of the ship, I guess. It was written in latin letters from my homeworld."
Haruka blinked surprised.
"I didn't know that your homeworld had space ships."
"Neither did I."
For a moment he remembered '20.000 Leagues Under the Sea' from Jules Verne. Than he remembered that he looked very much like a cross between Robinson, Tarzan with a bit Frankenstein thrown in for the good measure. He chuckled a little remembering that his father would have beaten him black and blue for reading those idiotic books as young boy.
Outside the Transport was directed towards a large open hangar door. The small crafts pulled it into the hangar before disengaging their tow cables and the transport settled down on the deck.
Bismark frowned. He just hoped that everything went alright in the next minutes.
"Lets get to the airlock," he said and grabbed the Doranian rifle.
He and Haruka went towards the airlock, where the other Shin'bi and the Nomads were already waiting.
"Okay," Bismark said." No shooting until I say otherwise. We're going to see how this works out."
The others nodded and they stared on the airlock symbols. All knew that there was a vacuum on the other side and that they had to wait for the pink light that indicated that the hangar was repressurized. They didn't have to wait long.
One of the Shin'bi forced the airlock open, a short wind showing that there was a slightly lower pressure outside.
Bismark was the first to leave the transport, jumping the three meter to the ground as if he had just jumped from a low step. The energy rifle was pointed forward, even if it was a little to large for him, looking more like a 08/15 machine gun.
An airlock in the hangar opened and Bismark wasn't all that surprised to see several humans in blue uniforms, pointing rifles at him and the Shin'bi and Nomads that now dropped from the transport behind him.
After a moment another human in a khaki uniform came from the airlock and walked towards them two of the men in blue following him. The man in khaki had one of these new baseball caps on his head, like Bismark had seen during his time in the US when his companion had invited him to a baseball game. The cap was blue and read 'US Navy'.
Bismark lowered the rifle and stepped towards the man.
"Captain Nemo, I presume," he said dryly in English with his very notable German accent." I an Joachim von Bismark."
He reached out to shake 'Captain Nemos' hand, while the man blinked a few times.
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Ramsey blinked a few times as the shook the hand of the man that had introduced himself as Joachim von Bismark. The man was clearly an Earth human, he had a very notable German accent in his English, had called him 'Captain Nemo', an all to clear reference to Nautilus and the 'I presume' was also a sowhat clear reference to Earth history. But the grip of the hand was a little stronger than he would have thought.
"Captain Marco Ramsey," he finally said, introducing himself." United States Navy, Commander of the USS Nautilus."
Bismark chuckled a little.
"At least I was right that you were the Captain."
Ramsey noted the very thick metal collar around the neck of Bismark, the run down clothes, more rags actually, the layers upon layers of dirt and the very long beard, knowing that this man was one of the slaves from the transport, just like the armed aliens behind him.
Six of those aliens were anthropomorphic dragons, slightly taller than Bismark and Ramsey and clearly distinguished as male and female, while the other two were white furred centauroid creatures, with several wolf-like features, one larger compared to the other. The dragons were armed with some sort of spiked metal baseball bat, while the centauroids were holding the same kind of rifle as Bismark.
"I take it that you are the cause of the distress call," Ramsey said and noted that Bismark became more serious." I guess you can be glad that we were there first. A Doranian Cruiser was just ten minutes behind us."
Bismark nodded and than looked at the armed sailors behind Ramsey.
"May I ask you for todays date?"
Ramsey had a pretty good idea why Bismark wanted the date.
"September 25th 2003."
Bismarks face first showed surprise, making place for untamed fury and hate. Even through Ramsey knew that it wasn't directed at him, he took a step back.
"70 years," Bismark spat out before switching to his mother language." Wenn ich diese grauen Hurenböcke erwische, drehe ich ihnen die Hälse um."
That was followed by a stream of curses in a number of alien languages.
Ramsey let Bismark swear, while he looked at the transport, directing his attention to the seemingly eldest dragon, a female by the looks of it.
"What did you do with the slavers?" he asked in Intercosmo.
"Beat them up," she answered, showing two rows of sharp teeth in am expression that seemed to be a grin." Than we threw them into one of the transport cells."
Ramsey nodded
"You were the only 'slaves'?"
The woman frowned.
"No, there are eight others still in the transport, but they are passive about the whole thing."
Ramsey nodded again and than turned to one of his crewmen.
"Chief, organize a ladder and get your men inside the transport. Get the slavers to the cells and all former slave to med-bay for a complete check up. Than quarter them in the Marine barracks. Since we don't have Marines yet, we should have enough space there."
"Aye, sir."
He turned back to Bismark as the Chief gave his orders and smiled.
"I think you really want to get a shower."
Bismark just grinned.
"Its time for one," he said." I had my last back in 1934. I'm covered in dirt of 70 years. And I could need a good shave."
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Mancuso shook his head as he looked at the report from Ramsey.
"I should have seen this coming," he muttered and sighed.
"I gets us needed informations about Doranian technology and psychology," his aide noted." Better than anything Langley can come up with. Not to mention that we now have some more dirt about the Doranians."
Mancuso glared at his aide for a moment.
"I still don't have to like it."
Than he sighed.
"Okay, I want you to leak the information about the Doranian slavery to CNN. Make sure that they get the information about Mr. von Bismark. I'm pretty sure the Germans want to give the Doranians a piece of mind after this."
The aide raised an eyebrow in a very Spock way.
"Sir, the Germans want to give them a piece of mind already. Hamburg, Berlin and the Ruhrgebiet got hit very bad. A million dead, another million still missing and three million injured."
"Just do it, Lieutenant."
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Ramsey chuckled a bit as he looked at the now very cleaned up Joachim von Bismark. If you didn't see the US Navy Service Khaki he was currently wearing, as there were no civilian clothing aboard in his size, he looked very much like his grandfather Otto Fürst von Bismark, just with more hair.
Bismark stretched as he entered the mess hall and walked towards the table Ramsey was sitting at. He handed a box back.
"Thank you for the razor blade."
"No problem, Mr. Bismark," Ramsey answered with a smile.
"Please call be Joachim, Captain. I insist."
Ramsey chuckled.
"No problem, Joachim. But only if you call me Marco."
This time Bismark chuckled.
"A magnificent ship you have here. A far way from the liner I used to come to the United States. To think that technology advanced this far in just seventy years."
"Well," Ramsey said," The ship is a little too far advanced for our technology. Up until two weeks ago, we didn't even really know that extraterrestrial life even existed. We had just put a few men on he moon thirty years ago."
Bismark blinked and than looked unbelieving at Ramsey.
"What?"
"We had bad luck and the Doranians dropped by. They dropped a bunch of rocks at us and destroyed a number of cities. Including parts of Hamburg, Berlin and the Ruhrgebiet in Germany."
Bismarks face became very serious.
"Verfluchte Katzen," he cursed.
"We had some help with Earth defense and destroyed the attack fleet. Or we would be slaves now too."
"Or pray."
Ramsey nodded.
"As far as we can tell... Anyway, Earth got a few powerful friends. Two of them are currently setting us up with a few ships to defend Earth, while we build up the necessary infrastructure to build our own ships."
Bismark nodded.
"Than what are you doing here?"
"Operation 'Red October'," Ramsey said with a grin." We gather information about Doranian systems, fleet strength and cause general ruckus. We just started though. We're going to leave a satellite in this system and move to the next system."
Again Bismark nodded.
"Than we won't get back to Earth very soon," he noted.
"No, you will need to be patient. But I believe you can help us with closer information about the Doranians. My superior officer reminded me that we have to treat the slavers according to the Geneva Convention."
Bismark frowned.
"I would have like to help you 'gathering' other information..."
Ramsey sighed.
"I knew you would."
Than he looked over to the group of Nomads and Shin'bi, who currently were sitting at another table and talked.
"But I'm sure that we will find something for you to do. But before we do..."
Ramsey took a laptop from the bench beside him, placed it on the table and than nodded towards an ensign.
"... I believe that you would like to know what happened in the last seventy years. We got a few history books from Earth and Ensign Williams will help you to work with this computer, so that you can read them."
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"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
That quote from Oppenheimer, who quoted it from the Indian Bhagavad Gita, came to Washuu's mind as she stared at the holo screen and the results of yet another idea hatched by a Earth human mind.
The screen in front of her showed a planet, or rather the remains of a planet after a 'Jump Bomb' by US Navy Captain Miles Kantor, who was working at the Pentagon. At the moment he was the head of a new office that had been build during the last few days to channel the US efforts to understand the new technology. Kantor's office was in effective contact with Washuu and Nathan, like many other similar offices all over the globe.
The Jump Bomb was simple, easy to build and effective in its workings. And it was a device that had every right to be called 'Planet Destroyer'. The simulation she had done had several runs, each in a different distance to an Earth sized planet. And it had always destroyed the planet, even from a distance of a million kilometers.
Okay, from a million kilometers distance if only had cocked away the atmosphere and surface of the hemisphere turned to the 'Jump Bomb', but even that did effectively destroy the planet. Completely planet busting was achieved from a minimum distance of 40.000 kilometers. And the closer to a planet the bomb was set of, the smaller the resulting rubble was. At a hundred kilometers above the planet, it was reduced to bits the size of grain of fine sand.
The worst thing about it was that it was frighteningly easy to build. One just needed two small one-shot, instable Jump Point generators, easy to build with sub par components, and strap them to a small Quantum 0 slipstream drive with a small guidance system for terminal approach.
You than needed to pre-charge both jump drives, launch it outside the target system and it would get to slipstream, approaching the target system. Than it would drop from slipstream and activate the jump drives, creating a pair of Jump Points inside of each other. The resulting detonation would devastate everything up to two million kilometers around it, destroy a planet and even get through upper Quantum three level shielding.
And that was the problem with this 'Jump Bomb'. It was easy to build, small enough to be transported by a Monsoon over great distances, no one besides the Earth humans and maybe those Ferrons knew how it worked and could be produced in great quantities over a short amount of time.
And it gave Earth a weapon that was more powerful than everything every other race had, besides maybe some of the weapons she had designed herself. It gave Earth a weapon that was so terrible that they could effectively threaten every power in the galaxy without much more than setting it of close to an unpopulated world.
Again parallels with nuclear weapons came to her mind. The Jump Bomb was on a interstellar scale the same as a nuclear device was on a planetary scale. And it could be build with even Quantum 1 level technology.
And this weapon showed another thing about mankind yet again. Their great potential in just about everything.
Mankind had the racial talent to do more with the technology it had than any other race. They used these technologies to the logical end and didn't simply abandon them if they had a new, better technology. They would combine technologies that weren't meant to be combined.
For a moment she laughed. The rest of the galaxy would see mankind as upshot barbarians who would never have their understanding for art. But they would be wrong. Washuu had visited some museums and had seen that the artists of mankind had produced more Great Art in the last three thousand years than any other artist in the galaxy over the last ten thousand years.
Than she thought back at the weapon and a few other things she knew of Earth. They also had the potential to be as inhuman as possible. Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot came to mind. And the recent terroristic attacks only strengthened that thought.
Mankind would change the face of the galaxy. One way or the other.
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"Slipstream Event!" came the report from the sensory technician on duty," Distance 50.000 klicks."
Ramsey frowned. Nautilus had changed the system just two hours ago and were now in another system that was listed as 'Outpost'. He turned his head around as he heard the door to the bridge open. Bismark and one of the Shin'bi, Haruka he believed, entered.
"Three ship. Positive ID. Ship identified as Doranian Dreadnaught, ID Number 042-221-331, and Doranian Cruisers, ID 228-553-040 and 293-696-589. Course Vector Pattern indicates Patrol movement. Gamma Sagittarii, Nu Sagittarii, HR 6960. Rest of Patrol Pattern is open."
Ramsey nodded. The ID numbers had been randomly generated and crossed from a list to individually ID any ship they encountered and as far as he could tell, the catalog was coming along nicely, just like it did back on Earth with submarines. Even out here, each ship had an individual signature.
He glanced over to the two visitors. They seemed to be a little surprised about what was going on, especially Bismark. He noted a short glimpse of hate crossing the Germans face before he turned back to the bridge crew.
"Okay people," he said," Time to test our weapon systems."
He could see a few evil smiles, but chose to let it slide.
"Lets see what those little Barracudas can do. Give me a full spread of both barracuda turrets on both Cruisers and get me a fire solution for the spinal laser on the Dreadnought."
A holographic display appeared in the air above the bridge, showing a large representation of the Nautilus, while the three Doranian ships were smaller icons in a corner. Nautilus turned about to present its broad side towards the unsuspecting Doranian warships, while the remained on her course and the turreted twin missile launchers turned to face the Cruisers.
Ramsey pulled his old stop watch from his pocket and
Red lines spread out from the launchers and showed the targeting solution for the Barracuda Antiship Attack Vehicles. The lines crossed the course of the Doranians a good distance in front of the Doranians, as it was simple celestial mechanics to tell the best course.
"Fire spread one," the fire control officer called out and a two pairs of blue dots started to follow the red lines," Laser com link established."
Four Barracudas had been fired, accelerated to move towards their targets before they activated their engines and started the Terminal approach. All the while they got course corrections from the powerful passive sensors of Nautilus, like torpedoes fired from submarines.
Another four lines spread out from the turrets and meet at the same part of the Doranians course as the first four lines.
"Fire Spread two. Laser com link established."
Another four blue dots followed the second set of red lines, slightly faster and on another orbit. They would hit their target at the same time as the first missiles would hit their target. Ramsey started his stopwatch and looked back at the hologram.
Again the massive bulk of Nautilus turned about, this time tom present her bow towards the Doranian Dreadnought. Again a thin red line shot out from the bow of Nautilus, but this time hit the largest Droranian Icon on the display.
For a moment he looked over to the two guests before looking at the stopwatch and the hologram.
"Twenty seconds," he said and his eyes followed the blue dots of the Barracuds AAVs.
It was silent on the bridge and if someone talked they did it very silent. It was a trained reflex every submariner had and that would need some time to lose in the interstellar medium of space where the molecules were so thin that they didn't carry sound.
"Ten seconds. Ready for Spinal Laser."
Deep within the ship capacitors were charged and shutters readied to pour the energy from the capacitors into the laser.
"Five Seconds. Ready for 'Swiss cheese' fire protocol."
The name of the fire protocol was chosen because the spinal laser would fire at its highest frequency, about 120 shots per minute, for ten seconds.
"Two, one, now."
On the screen the blue dots of the AAVs lit up, indicating that they had activated their Ion drives for terminal approach, while they were still a thousand kilometers from their targets. They moved closer and closer at such speeds that the Doranians couldn't really react.
"Spinal Laser."
The massive spinal laser of Nautilus fired for ten seconds, its normal optical beams lancing out at the Dreadnought and stabbing it repeatedly through the tin hull and deep into vital systems, as the crew hadn't reacted yet to the AAVs. Without shields the Dreadnought was defenseless.
"Perfect timing," Ramsey said, smiling slightly as he saw how the icons of the Doranian vessels disappeared from the display and the crew allowed themselves to cheer.
Out in space three short lived suns flared up, slightly illuminating the black surface of Nautilus.
"Roll in the EGADS array," he than ordered," we make a short distance slipstream jump and drop the next recon sat. Than we leave this system for new hunting grounds."
Having said that, he put the stopwatch back into his pocket and turned to the two visitors.
"Are all space battles like that?" Bismark asked after a moment.
"I would hope so," Ramsey said." But I doubt it. Nautilus however will fight all battles like this, if we can help it. The crew has to defend its honor as submariners."