- CHAPTER 24 -
- Terra Armageddon class Battle Station Guadalcanal -
For a brief second, a single amber contact of a merchant ship on the master system's display holo, known by the staff in Guadalcanal's CIC as the God's Eye View, flickered to the angry crimson of a hostile, weapons bearing enemy. Lt. James Ferguson frowned at the master display, and ran a hand through his slightly wavy short brown hair. Then he entered a series of commands into his LCARS panel that brought up the affected ship. While his personal station's individual monitor wasn't large enough to display the entire Sol system's traffic and contacts like the vast detailed holo projection that filled the center of the room from floor to ceiling, it wasn't designed for that anyway. It was designed to show precise information on individual targets. The whole mishap had happened so fast that he wasn't even sure it had been anything more than a glitch. Just the same, it was better to be safe than sorry.
"Computer, initiate a deep scan of ident 133394-Alpha-Beta-Twin-7946 and show the results on my terminal."
"Processing." Came the sultry feminine voice of Guadalcanal's computer. On his screen, a detailed external view of 133394-Alpha-Beta-Twin-7946 came up, and a caption titled Deep Scan with a % complete bar under it began to increase as the massive sensor arrays of the battle station refocused their power onto a single vessel in Terran orbit. The % bar crept upwards toward completion, but it hadn't quite made it before large sections of the merchant vessel sheared off on his display. Alarms began to wail across the massive station as Sol's multitudinous sensor arrays detected the unscheduled movement of the merchie.
"What the HELL?!"
- ICS Pearl Harbor, That same time -
Along the massive cargo ship, a series of hidden explosives sheared of the cargo cell anchoring struts, freeing them on carefully programmed and mapped out trajectories. Those that remained attached to the ship were breached, dumping their cargo into space. The Pearl pitched violently from the explosions, and to any outside observer it appeared that a catastrophic accident had gripped the ship. Captain Korath activated the com system.
"Mayday Mayday Mayday!! This is the Cargo Vessel Pearl Harbor. We have experienced massive hull breaches across all decks and main power is off line! We require immediate assistance!" Korath had to fight hard to keep the exaltation from his voice, for after all he was supposed to be a panicked Terran merchie captain, not a Klingon who had just completed the first of many victorious assaults on the Terran Empire. Their mission was a success, all that remained now was to sit back and wait for the fireworks to start. He turned to his com officer. "Set that on a continuous repeat." Then he looked at his tactical officers. "Are they moving on course?"
"Yes sir, they will be in striking range in 30 seconds." Macet, his Cardassian weapons officer replied with great relish. Even the normally inscrutable Gorn officer seemed to have a satisfied air about him. A collective sigh of relief went through the massive ships small crew. They had done it, struck at the very heart of the Empire, moved in under the Imperials very noses to deliver a stunning body blow.
"Put it up on screen, and send it to all terminals. The crew deserves to see their handy work for themselves."
- IBS Guadalcanal, That same time -
The bar went to 100% and the vast energies of the battle stations sensors peered intently at the now broken and battered merchant ship. While the ship itself remained the amber of a merchant vessel, the ruptured and drifting cargo containers turned the angry crimson of hostile contacts. The were drifting away on seemingly aimless routes, but then the sensors detected energy spikes that could only be thruster systems. The cargo pods abruptly slowed, then stopped their course. More power spikes were seen on sensors as they began to power up. All of this happened within the space of a second or two, and it took that long for James Ferguson's stunned brain to kick his hand into motion. His hand flashed out to pound the one control on his panel that he had never used. As he pressed it, he spoke into his terminals pickup and his voice was carried across every military com in all of Sol system.
"CASE ZULU! CASE ZULU! All ships target the bogies I am transmitting now!" Case Zulu was a preplanned response to a hostile covert incursion into the Sol system. It had never been used because no one had ever been able to get into the system covertly before. For what it was worth, Lt. Ferguson did everything right. He was just about five seconds to late.
While ships and stations in the middle defensive perimeter were always half at battle stations and half off, and the outer perimeter at ¾ on and ¼ off, the inner perimeter had no stations on battle alert. This was just common sense, as the other two shells of defenses would have noticed any intruder. As a result, no defensive systems or offensive systems were on line near Terra. They began a frantic power up, but it was already far too late to change anything. The cargo canisters finally dropped all pretence of ECM coverage as they shunted all the power their fusion reactors could into the weapons capacitors. While relatively short ranged in the scale of shipboard weapons systems, the Mauler Device was one of the most destructive known. The 20 hidden in the Pearl's ECM hidden cargo pods were each targeted at a specific target.
Eye tearing bright lances of silver blue fire speared from each of the 20 jettisoned cargo canisters as they fired their hidden weapons simultaneously. The first 10 were targeted at five nearby battle stations, and they struck like the wrath of God. With no shields, and with only their fixed armor to interdict them, the massive beams struck home and shattered the massive constructs like they were made out of balsa wood and not reinforced duranium and ablative armor. If they had fully energized shields and deployed armor from their ablative armor generators, the battle stations might have physically survived the assault. But with only their passive defenses in place there was no chance at all and their fragmented hulls disappeared as their internal antimatter stores met with the expanding debris of the stations. The night side of Terra glowed as for a few moments Sol gained five our more miniature suns. Another six Mauler's were targeted on six nearby shipyards and they shattered them even more easily than they had the battle stations. Three Mauler's were targeted at the gargantuan Bengal class Spacedock that orbited Terra like a second moon. The huge station could house up to three Wraith's in it interior, and its crew numbered in the hundreds of thousands. While even three of the powerful Mauler's wouldn't be enough to outright destroy a Bengal class Spacedock unless they were extremely lucky, they could severely cripple the station and any ships that it housed in its cavernous interior.
The Spacedock was farther away from the Mauler's than the Armageddon Battle Stations had been, and as such had had precious extra time for its stunned crew to respond to the Case Zulu command. But even so, its shields were still nebulous and its ablative armor generators still in the process of deploying when the three swaths of destruction came crashing in on it. The beams punched through one side of the titanic mountain of alloy and nearly powered through the other side as well, only stopping when the struck the inside of the deployed ablative armor. Inside the docking bay, massive hunks of molten metal spewed from the Mauler beams path to strike at the helpless docked ships inside. They were powered down and utterly defenseless as the shards of station careened into them at high speed. One struck a docked Wraith and cut the powerful vessel in half. Another bowled through three Defiants and an Intrepid, leaving nothing but expanding plasma in its wake, before the relatively intact far wall of the docking bay stopped it.
A smaller chunk of debris sheared off the rear half of a Sovereign's port nacelle, and it was only because the ship wasn't powered that it didn't cause a warp core breech. But none of that mattered as an Akira class was cut free of its moorings and careened into a docked Achilles class ship. The collision wouldn't have been very bad if everything had been left alone. The Akira was drifting slowly and wouldn't have caused any great damage to either ships when they met. But Murphy's Law came back with a vengeance and the Akira's frantic helmsman, a mere ensign fresh from the Academy and virtually alone watching the docked ships bridge, pressed the wrong button on his thruster control panel. The Akira, instead of slowing its drift towards the helpless Achilles, actually sped it up. The two ships crumpled together till their torpedo reserves and antimatter fuel tanks ruptured. The resulting powerful explosion caused a domino effect with the other docked, unshielded ships, and the entire surviving docking bay went up in a massive fire ball that jetted out the three jagged and splintered holes that the Maulers had made like three tongues of fire. The massive station lost all power and began to list slightly because of the expelled force of the explosion and with no systems online to counter it.
The final Mauler was targeted not at a space station or shipyard, but at Terra herself and the San Francisco Bay area of North America. Specifically it was locked in on the exact coordinates of Council Tower and the Council session currently underway there. Like the space born installations before it, Council Towers defenses were barely beginning to come online when the Mauler's silver blue beam of destruction hit. One moment the assembled councilors from Terra, the important Terran colonies, Vulcan and the important Vulcan colonies and the small Hydran contingent had been in impassioned debate, the next they were gone, never having known what had hit them. The Mauler beam shot down through the atmosphere, sending a blast wave of superheated air in front of it. The building simply disappeared in a flash of sun bright fury as it was disintegrated under the beam's assault. An expanding ball of plasma erupted from the center of the attack outward, toppling the nearby towers, and great hunks of earth and pulverized cityscape were thrown skyward much like a volcanic eruption. The blast front was similar to a nuclear device's, and a nearly solid wall of flame roared over the unsuspecting city, blowing buildings, air cars, shuttles and people away without any difficulty at all. The blast wave leveled most of downtown, reaching out to claim one tower and the entire center span of the famous Golden Gate Bridge. What wasn't leveled by the blast wave was pelted by thrown up chunks of earth and debris, some the size of large shuttlecraft, that rained sometimes a considerable distance from the impact site. The first attack by the Great Alliance on the Terran Empire was a stunning and complete success.
- Terra Armageddon class Battle Station Guadalcanal -
For a brief second, a single amber contact of a merchant ship on the master system's display holo, known by the staff in Guadalcanal's CIC as the God's Eye View, flickered to the angry crimson of a hostile, weapons bearing enemy. Lt. James Ferguson frowned at the master display, and ran a hand through his slightly wavy short brown hair. Then he entered a series of commands into his LCARS panel that brought up the affected ship. While his personal station's individual monitor wasn't large enough to display the entire Sol system's traffic and contacts like the vast detailed holo projection that filled the center of the room from floor to ceiling, it wasn't designed for that anyway. It was designed to show precise information on individual targets. The whole mishap had happened so fast that he wasn't even sure it had been anything more than a glitch. Just the same, it was better to be safe than sorry.
"Computer, initiate a deep scan of ident 133394-Alpha-Beta-Twin-7946 and show the results on my terminal."
"Processing." Came the sultry feminine voice of Guadalcanal's computer. On his screen, a detailed external view of 133394-Alpha-Beta-Twin-7946 came up, and a caption titled Deep Scan with a % complete bar under it began to increase as the massive sensor arrays of the battle station refocused their power onto a single vessel in Terran orbit. The % bar crept upwards toward completion, but it hadn't quite made it before large sections of the merchant vessel sheared off on his display. Alarms began to wail across the massive station as Sol's multitudinous sensor arrays detected the unscheduled movement of the merchie.
"What the HELL?!"
- ICS Pearl Harbor, That same time -
Along the massive cargo ship, a series of hidden explosives sheared of the cargo cell anchoring struts, freeing them on carefully programmed and mapped out trajectories. Those that remained attached to the ship were breached, dumping their cargo into space. The Pearl pitched violently from the explosions, and to any outside observer it appeared that a catastrophic accident had gripped the ship. Captain Korath activated the com system.
"Mayday Mayday Mayday!! This is the Cargo Vessel Pearl Harbor. We have experienced massive hull breaches across all decks and main power is off line! We require immediate assistance!" Korath had to fight hard to keep the exaltation from his voice, for after all he was supposed to be a panicked Terran merchie captain, not a Klingon who had just completed the first of many victorious assaults on the Terran Empire. Their mission was a success, all that remained now was to sit back and wait for the fireworks to start. He turned to his com officer. "Set that on a continuous repeat." Then he looked at his tactical officers. "Are they moving on course?"
"Yes sir, they will be in striking range in 30 seconds." Macet, his Cardassian weapons officer replied with great relish. Even the normally inscrutable Gorn officer seemed to have a satisfied air about him. A collective sigh of relief went through the massive ships small crew. They had done it, struck at the very heart of the Empire, moved in under the Imperials very noses to deliver a stunning body blow.
"Put it up on screen, and send it to all terminals. The crew deserves to see their handy work for themselves."
- IBS Guadalcanal, That same time -
The bar went to 100% and the vast energies of the battle stations sensors peered intently at the now broken and battered merchant ship. While the ship itself remained the amber of a merchant vessel, the ruptured and drifting cargo containers turned the angry crimson of hostile contacts. The were drifting away on seemingly aimless routes, but then the sensors detected energy spikes that could only be thruster systems. The cargo pods abruptly slowed, then stopped their course. More power spikes were seen on sensors as they began to power up. All of this happened within the space of a second or two, and it took that long for James Ferguson's stunned brain to kick his hand into motion. His hand flashed out to pound the one control on his panel that he had never used. As he pressed it, he spoke into his terminals pickup and his voice was carried across every military com in all of Sol system.
"CASE ZULU! CASE ZULU! All ships target the bogies I am transmitting now!" Case Zulu was a preplanned response to a hostile covert incursion into the Sol system. It had never been used because no one had ever been able to get into the system covertly before. For what it was worth, Lt. Ferguson did everything right. He was just about five seconds to late.
While ships and stations in the middle defensive perimeter were always half at battle stations and half off, and the outer perimeter at ¾ on and ¼ off, the inner perimeter had no stations on battle alert. This was just common sense, as the other two shells of defenses would have noticed any intruder. As a result, no defensive systems or offensive systems were on line near Terra. They began a frantic power up, but it was already far too late to change anything. The cargo canisters finally dropped all pretence of ECM coverage as they shunted all the power their fusion reactors could into the weapons capacitors. While relatively short ranged in the scale of shipboard weapons systems, the Mauler Device was one of the most destructive known. The 20 hidden in the Pearl's ECM hidden cargo pods were each targeted at a specific target.
Eye tearing bright lances of silver blue fire speared from each of the 20 jettisoned cargo canisters as they fired their hidden weapons simultaneously. The first 10 were targeted at five nearby battle stations, and they struck like the wrath of God. With no shields, and with only their fixed armor to interdict them, the massive beams struck home and shattered the massive constructs like they were made out of balsa wood and not reinforced duranium and ablative armor. If they had fully energized shields and deployed armor from their ablative armor generators, the battle stations might have physically survived the assault. But with only their passive defenses in place there was no chance at all and their fragmented hulls disappeared as their internal antimatter stores met with the expanding debris of the stations. The night side of Terra glowed as for a few moments Sol gained five our more miniature suns. Another six Mauler's were targeted on six nearby shipyards and they shattered them even more easily than they had the battle stations. Three Mauler's were targeted at the gargantuan Bengal class Spacedock that orbited Terra like a second moon. The huge station could house up to three Wraith's in it interior, and its crew numbered in the hundreds of thousands. While even three of the powerful Mauler's wouldn't be enough to outright destroy a Bengal class Spacedock unless they were extremely lucky, they could severely cripple the station and any ships that it housed in its cavernous interior.
The Spacedock was farther away from the Mauler's than the Armageddon Battle Stations had been, and as such had had precious extra time for its stunned crew to respond to the Case Zulu command. But even so, its shields were still nebulous and its ablative armor generators still in the process of deploying when the three swaths of destruction came crashing in on it. The beams punched through one side of the titanic mountain of alloy and nearly powered through the other side as well, only stopping when the struck the inside of the deployed ablative armor. Inside the docking bay, massive hunks of molten metal spewed from the Mauler beams path to strike at the helpless docked ships inside. They were powered down and utterly defenseless as the shards of station careened into them at high speed. One struck a docked Wraith and cut the powerful vessel in half. Another bowled through three Defiants and an Intrepid, leaving nothing but expanding plasma in its wake, before the relatively intact far wall of the docking bay stopped it.
A smaller chunk of debris sheared off the rear half of a Sovereign's port nacelle, and it was only because the ship wasn't powered that it didn't cause a warp core breech. But none of that mattered as an Akira class was cut free of its moorings and careened into a docked Achilles class ship. The collision wouldn't have been very bad if everything had been left alone. The Akira was drifting slowly and wouldn't have caused any great damage to either ships when they met. But Murphy's Law came back with a vengeance and the Akira's frantic helmsman, a mere ensign fresh from the Academy and virtually alone watching the docked ships bridge, pressed the wrong button on his thruster control panel. The Akira, instead of slowing its drift towards the helpless Achilles, actually sped it up. The two ships crumpled together till their torpedo reserves and antimatter fuel tanks ruptured. The resulting powerful explosion caused a domino effect with the other docked, unshielded ships, and the entire surviving docking bay went up in a massive fire ball that jetted out the three jagged and splintered holes that the Maulers had made like three tongues of fire. The massive station lost all power and began to list slightly because of the expelled force of the explosion and with no systems online to counter it.
The final Mauler was targeted not at a space station or shipyard, but at Terra herself and the San Francisco Bay area of North America. Specifically it was locked in on the exact coordinates of Council Tower and the Council session currently underway there. Like the space born installations before it, Council Towers defenses were barely beginning to come online when the Mauler's silver blue beam of destruction hit. One moment the assembled councilors from Terra, the important Terran colonies, Vulcan and the important Vulcan colonies and the small Hydran contingent had been in impassioned debate, the next they were gone, never having known what had hit them. The Mauler beam shot down through the atmosphere, sending a blast wave of superheated air in front of it. The building simply disappeared in a flash of sun bright fury as it was disintegrated under the beam's assault. An expanding ball of plasma erupted from the center of the attack outward, toppling the nearby towers, and great hunks of earth and pulverized cityscape were thrown skyward much like a volcanic eruption. The blast front was similar to a nuclear device's, and a nearly solid wall of flame roared over the unsuspecting city, blowing buildings, air cars, shuttles and people away without any difficulty at all. The blast wave leveled most of downtown, reaching out to claim one tower and the entire center span of the famous Golden Gate Bridge. What wasn't leveled by the blast wave was pelted by thrown up chunks of earth and debris, some the size of large shuttlecraft, that rained sometimes a considerable distance from the impact site. The first attack by the Great Alliance on the Terran Empire was a stunning and complete success.