Back Home – The Dual War
by Warringer
Chapter 35
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"God damn..."
Several of the Marines stared openly at the imposing figure that had just left one of the three Transmitter LAVs. The figure was about two meters tall and dressed in a modern version of a medieval armor. Thick shimmering green plates of armor over an elastic black material, the head encased by a likewise shimmering green helmet with the face hidden by a golden visor. One the Armor the Marines could see a Special Warfare Badge being printed on the right shoulder armor, while the rank markings of a Master Chief Petty Officer were printed on the left shoulder armor and the front of the helmet. On the left chest everyone could read the inscription 'SPARTAN-117'.
"Is this some sort of sick joke?"
Colonel Martin, the commander of the Marine Expedition Force on Rustoner asked as he walked up to the green armored figure and put his, smaller one meter ninety in front of it. In response the figure crossed its arms.
"Gee, so much for my great entry."
Martin narrowed his eyes, trying to look through the golden visor.
"Sorry, no joke, sir," the figure said and saluted." Master Chief Jack O'Neill reporting for duty."
Martins eyes narrowed further.
"What the hell is going on here? What is a frikkin' SEAL in this getup doing on a Marine operation?"
The helmeted head turned around towards the LAV.
"I think you can come out, Carter. You can explain this better than me."
The short haired blond woman in normal BDUs left the LAV, carrying a hardened milspec laptop. There weren't any rank markings on the BDU's, neither were there any other indications that the woman was part of the military. The woman stopped next to Master Chief O'Neill.
"Doctor Samantha Carter," the woman introduced herself." I'm working with the Master Chief here."
Martin crossed his arms so that he essentially mimicked O'Neill.
"I'm still waiting for my answer."
Carter fidgeted a little, while O'Neill never so much moved.
"Sort of a combination of life fire test and a publicity stunt of the Pentagon, Colonel."
Martin glared at Carter with narrowed eyes.
"Life fire test? Publicity Stunt?"
"Well... You see... Master Chief O'Neill is wearing the prototype of the new M244 Mjolnir Medium Powered Armor, primarily developed by the Marine Corps, but Microsoft and General Dynamics took over the project. And Bill Gates wanted to create a sort Real Life Halo Master Chief. And the Pentagon thought of it as a good idea. And Chief O'Neill was the one they selected after two month."
"Halo Master Chief?" Martin stared at O'Neill now, who was flashing him a Victory sign with his right hand.
"And than there was also Professor Habuki," Carter continued and O'Neill flinched ever so slightly." She essentially made the Spartan II project come to reality on Chief O'Neill."
"I'm still feeling that BIG needle she probed me with," O'Neill added with a shudder.
"And she modified his M244 a little. But the Pentagon wants some data and footage from a real fight between the Master Chief and the Doranians before they present the M244 to the general public."
Martin glared at O'Neill.
"Well," he began, showing a clear aversion against O'Neill," I don't think that I can do much about this. And open that visor. I want to know if you are making faces at me."
Martin turned around, while O'Neills visor opened up, showing that he was indeed making faces at Martin. That got a good number of chuckled and laughs from the Marines. Martin turned back around, only to look a the smiling face of O'Neill.
"Just that you know, O'Neill, I don't like this one bit."
"Neither do I, sir. I'm forgot to program my VCR for the new episodes of The Simpsons."
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"Slipstream Event," Garrett could hear his tactical officer say." Analysis running."
Garrett narrowed his eyes. As far as he knew the Dilgar didn't have much friends and no one was scheduled for entering this system, neither freighters nor anything else.
"Doranian Slipstream Signatures. I read a multitude of contacts from the ID catalog, mostly Cruisers with several Dreadnoughts. One hundred vessels. We have a small Dilgar patrol of several Tratharti Gunships and one Ochlavita Destroyer engaging the Doranians."
Garrett cursed. There wasn't any doubt why the Doranians were here. They were most likely after the Dilgar. And the Bright Horizon had just docked with one of the orbital habitats of the Dilgar, to unload some of its freight.
He glared at the tactical screen and cursed again as the icons representing the Dilgar vessels perished, but not without taking three Cruisers with them.
"Com, notify Battle Master Len'dar and the other ships," he said and paused for a moment." We are going to engage the Doranians. Charner and Parhar are going to guard the Bright Horizon. We and Daring are going to play sniper until the Doranians come into range of the other weapons, so I want to tie the targeting systems both ships via tacnet. Yugiri and Mainz get into flanking positions. I want the maximum of our firepower on the frontal arc."
He breathed in deep.
"I'd like the Dilgar on guard and flanking positions if possible."
"Battle Master Len'dar wants to speak to you, sir."
Garrett nodded and the image of Len'dar appeared on the screen. The Dilgar showed a face set in stone as he looked at Garrett.
"It is time for you to go, Captain," he said with a sigh." It seems that the universe finally finds the time to deal with our race once and for all. But we are not going without a fight."
Garrett snorted.
"Yeah right," he said dryly." As if I could do something like that. You are not completely able to defend yourselves and need the help. We are not going to leave. We stay and fight."
Len'dar stared at Garrett for a moment.
"I don't really know what to think of this..."
Garrett smiled a thin smile.
"Don't waste time with thinking. Act."
Len'dar cut the connection from his side.
"Our ships have reached their positions."
Garrett nodded.
"Commerce long range bombardment."
With that Sabre and Daring opened fire, their spinal lasers lancing out at the Doranian ships, while missiles were launched from both ships.
"Concentrate the fire on the Dreadnoughts."
Thrusters fired on both Sabre and Daring, turning the ships slightly as they fired at the Dreadnoughts, their high energy lasers slamming into the shields with a high rate of fire. The lasers had slammed into the shields forty times before the shields collapsed. The next few laser impulses went through the thin armor and the entire ship, to get through the other side of the hull, even through much less intense. Five times the attack was successful before the commanders of the Doranians ships began to make maneuvers to get them out of the area of attack.
By than the missiles, about fifty of them raced into the formations of Doranian ships, but less than half of them had any effect, leaving damaged, shieldless or destroyed Cruisers and a single heavily damaged Dreadnought behind.
"The are getting into range," the tactical officer noted after a few minutes, while the Doranias were decimated by the long range laser bombardment." And several Dilgar ships have moved into formations."
"Fire at will to all ships."
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Kotok was a simple world. It wasn't to large, nor was it to small. Its temperature was slightly lower than that of Earth, but one could live quite nicely on it. Kotok was a world colonized by the Centauri first, but they decided to bring many Narn slaves to the planet. When the Narn fought to free themselves from the Centauri the first time, all Centauri on Kotok were killed or hunted from the planet to become a Narn colony.
During the second Centauri occupation Kotok became an agricultural world as it had little in the way of natural resources, large farms and the like were covering a sizable part of the planet. With the second freedom in the wake of the Dilgar war, Kotok remained an agricultural world, but the Narn took it back, again hunting away or killing all Centauri.
Now Kotok was the home of about ten million Narn, most of whom were busy on their farms, working for the only real export goods. There was little in the way of a defense, as the planet wasn't considered very valuable and could be easily taken back from the Centauri. There was a single, lightly armed, space station and a few small system ships, mostly old T'Loth Assault Cruisers and Sho'Kos Police Cutters, stripped of their Slipstream drives.
Freighters were arriving to export the agricultural goods of Kotok, while the few systems hips patrolled through the system.
But that peaceful scene was disturbed as four complete Doranian Invsions fleets, four of twenty arrived close to Kotok. The space station was the first to fall, perishing in the offensive fire of one thousand Doranian ships. Cruisers entered orbit, their mass drivers directed at the planet to bombard major settlements and military installations, while Landing ships rained down onto the surface.
The few system ships encountered the same fate as they tried to fight against the Doranians with inferior numbers. Some captains tried to notify the Narn High Command, but they weren't able to get through the dense jamming of the Doranians. Likewise none of the freighters was able to leave the gravitic field of Kotok to engage their slipstream drives to flee to safety. Only one single Sho'Kos Cutter was able to flee for the asteroid field of the Kotok system before the Doranians could even see it.
Later there could be time to warn the homeworld.
The same scene repeated in four other systems close to Kotok, one of them a minor border garrison, where the Doranians lost a quarter of an invasion fleet to the Narn defenders, but the Doranian High Command had calculated with such things.
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"Damn it," Garret cursed as Sabre shook from another hit midships." Get that damned Cruiser."
"Shields are back up," he heard his tactical officer say, while he heard a number of small secondary detonations from the Starfury bays, resonating through the entire superstructure of the Frigate.
It was the second time that Sabre's shields had been pierced and broken down. Only the thick armor of the ship had prevented it from getting destroyed twice. The first hit had slammed into the armor protecting the engines and ruptured a number of reaction mass feeders to the massive Nova based engines, reducing the effective power to two thirds.
Sabre turned a little to bring half of her arsenal to bear at the Cruiser that was trying to pass Sabre to reach the few remaining Dilgar vessels. Bolters and railguns spit plasma bolts and railgun projectiles at the Cruiser. Even as the Cruiser tried to pass the weapons remained true to their targets. Finally the shield buckled and collapsed, with the bolts and projectiles raining down on the thin hull armor, opening huge gaps in the hull. Some of the bolts penetrated raction mass tanks and reactors setting them of to detonate in a spectacular display.
The battle over New Omelos had long since reduced to an uncoordinated battle. Daring and Mainz were floating in space, heavily damaged but with a number of survivers. But like Sabre they had shown that they were the best Earth could filed. Armor was a a relatively good substitute to shields, as they were protecting the ships long enough for their shields to come back online, while the internal bulkheads and security systems held it together.
Daring for example had her entire starboard hull opened to vacuum by a Dreadnought, but she had continued to fight through three shield collapses until her shield generator had been hit and with it the reactor. Other than the reactors of most other races and like all EF reactors it failed to explode, instead there was a short lance of plasma venting into space. Two Cruisers had than gone and pounded into the armored hull for a minute before taking on Dilgar ships.
Mainz had a similar fate, but she had continued to fight for several minutes after her shield generator had been destroyed. Now her entire engine section as a molten piece of slag.
"They are withdrawing!" the voice of his tactical officer screamed nearly hysterically." The Doranians are withdrawing!"
Sabre shook a last time before and Garrett stared at the tactical display. He could still see two or three Cruisers fighting against some damaged Dilgar ships, but they finally left.
Garrett closed his eyes and slumbed into his seat as good as he could in zero-g. The fight had been a close one. The Dilgar were still a sowhat effective force, but their material was not the best. They had lost nearly half of their remaining ships, while the Doranians had lost three quarters, including all Dreadnoughts.
Today heroes were born, but not many had survived the battle that made them heroes.
"I want a full report of all ships. Make several copies of the engagement data. We need to let Earth know about it."
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"Home sweet home," Tenchi said with a sigh as he looked up at a large group of protesters as he stopped his rented car.
There wasn't much happening at Vega and the Ferrons had build up several complete Planetary Defense Networks around their planets with a surprising speed. Most of the satellites were relatively small platforms, not much more than a reactor, a heavy gravitic cannon and a computer control system. Most of them had been build on Reyan, the seventh planet of Vega, and the large industrial complexes. The PD Networks had been completed two weeks ago.
The completion had resulted in a less hard work with the 1st Expeditionary Fleet and Tenchi had enforced that the ships of the fleet were to come back to Earth for a leave of at least two weeks. Some of the ships were docked with Nathan, where they were going through maintenance, while Dark Knight had docked with Shabazza as she maintained herself.
Setsuna and K were currently on Hawaii, having a nice time, while D had remained back on Shabazza to act as a sort of relay station for him. That way he always got the latest news when it came to GDI business.
He shook his head as he dropped his disguise as elder man and left the car. He was dressed in civvies and if someone who knew him would look at him, they couldn't say that he was in his late forties now. He grabbed a duffel bag and shouldered it as he closed the car.
He shook his head as he looked at the protesters that were camping in front of the shrine that was now the Jurian Embassy. Than he snorted. The Minbari had set up their Embassy in Geneva, the Centauri in Monaco, with Londo Molari as their Ambassador, while the Narn had chosen Moscow as place for their Embassy.
Even through the demonstration was larger than four month ago, it had lost much of its quasi-religious strength. Sure he could see posters and the like everywhere, but there weren't many of those left who were screaming over the high fence that now surrounded the shrine and the Masaki home. Well, it could be the winter and the fact that the temperatures were a little below zero. And as most of the protesters seemed to come from Arabic nations, it wasn't really a surprise.
He sighed again as he walked towards the front gate. As far as his grandfather had told him, the first few weeks after First Impact had been problematic with Ayeka. The stress had gotten to her and there hadn't been a Ryoko where she could take out her frustrations. Now she had calmed down, but she still spoke against all what happened on Earth currently. To her Tenchi should still hand Dark Knight over to Jurai and Earth become part of the Jurian Empire again, as it should be as 'colony'.
But something was bothering Tenchi, it was the strange report he had gotten from G'Kar through a call from his grandfather. The old Narn was up to the same tricks as his analogue from the Earth Alliance universe and had watched Ayeka for some time. Than he had send a simple reference to Dark Knight, 'Book of G'Quan, page 578'. Dark Knight had a copy of the Narn book in her memory and the look of the pace had creeped Tenchi out.
The page in question had shown a Shadow Battlecrab. Tenchi knew that G'Kar had seen the attack on the Battlecrab, but that had happened to fast for him to realize.
Than there was also the other part of the message. 'She was surrounded by living Shadows,' he had written in the Narn language with a capitalization of 'shadows'.
A small part of him wanted to know Setsuna by his side, but he had to deal with this problem on his own. But he would only do so when he had been home for some time.