- CHAPTER 25 -
- Outskirts of San Francisco, That same time -
A hand moved away from a simple control station. Seconds later a thunderclap was heard and a lance of energy sun bright blue/white speared down from the heavens, turning the dusk surrounding Terra's capital brighter than high noon. The initial thunderclap began to fade, but then a nearly subsonic rumble was more felt than heard. It rose in intensity and while the flashbulb like glare was beginning to subside, the destruction it had wrought was only just beginning. The initial blast wave of compressed air was billowing out from its epicenter, blowing through or knocking over anything that was in its path. The tall towers in downtown San Francisco were all gone, either shattered or toppled by the force of the initial blast. But the blast wave wasn't the most destructive offspring of the Mauler's assault.
Flowing outward at a more sedate but still insanely high speed came the billowing furnace of fire and rubble. The wall of flame washed around and over buildings and structures that survived the initial blow of hurricane force winds, scorching block after block as it spread. Worse than the flames themselves was the ash and pulverized bedrock that fell around it. It was far more deadly than a volcano eruption, for the explosive force that hurled the debris high into the atmosphere had been sudden and unexpected. Splinters of granite bedrock, some as big as a Frigate sleeted back down to earth like fiery raindrops. And with them came the ash. The horrid stuff descended in an asphyxiating blanket of death all of its own. It filled everything, flowed into every opening in the shattered ruins of the Terran Empires capital city in a swirling gray snowstorm. Anyone unlucky enough to have survived the initial destruction was doomed to die more slowly as the very air itself seemed to become solid ash.
And the reason it happened at all was because of one man. He stood next to the control station, starring awe at the destruction he had allowed to visit upon Terra. It was unlike anything the world had experienced since her last great war. Yet even WW III's darkest hours were but a child's tantrum compared to this. As he stared the blast wave finally struck him, its small debris and sand that it carried along with it caused his shuttle car's shield to shimmer as the banshee like winds swirled around the lone island of safety in a vast sea of destruction. But he was situated far enough away that it had already lost most of its force. And the fire storm that followed on its heels was already slowing to a crawl as the initial out gassing was replaced by air trying to flood back into the vacuum the firestorm had created. A vast column of smoke, ash, and pulverized rock and buildings reached towards the sky like a massive funeral pyre.
The console at the man's side had but one purpose, to activate a small, unnoticed program in Council Tower's mainframe. At a prearranged time, it had been his job to activate it. He had pressed the activation command exactly on time and the program set about its dastardly task. Mere seconds before the Mauler device fired from orbit, the entire defensive apparatus was paralyzed and shut down by the Trojan computer virus. Normally that wouldn't have mattered, for the system automatically went into individual, secure power and computer backups within seconds should such a thing happen. But in the exquisitely precise time frame of its activation, a few seconds were all that were needed. While the shield would have barely held off the Mauler's assault, it wasn't there when it struck and thus the beam raced in as unopposed as its siblings attacking space born targets.
"Oops!" Within the safety of his shield bubble, Jack Chambers spoke to himself as no one else was around to hear him.
Then his neutral expression took on a very Machiavellian grin as he realized that he had actually done it. The Terran Council was gone, save for him and one other. As such, emergency powers were granted to him as one of only two political entities left to run the Empire. It would have been better if Greg Betare had been present in council as well, but his ally/superior from the Orion Cartel had said that it wasn't currently necessary to have him eliminated. He had merely shrugged. The plan was a sound one and he knew that his tidy little piece of acting these last few months in Council sessions should put him above suspicion. After all, who would suspect that the one who most vehemently wanted to attack the rumblings in the outer territories was also in league with them.
- Sector Capital Qo'noS, Former Klingon Empire Space, That same time -
Mechanical muscles whined quietly as the ranks of battle armored troops walked out of the Planetary Palace. Once they reached the edge of the structures canopy shield, they stepped into the normal light drizzle that seemed to be Qo'noS' only weather capability. The building itself was the most heavily fortified one in all of Qo'noS, and its majesty was highlighted only by the pale moonlight cast by Praxis as it peeked through the odd break in the cloud cover. Why were lights needed in the middle of the night when there were various forms of power armor mounted sensors that worked far better than the Mk One Eyeball in the dark. It was situated on top of a small hill, and for over 400 feet in every direction the ground was thoroughly cleared of any thing that could be used for cover. The nearly invisible beams of the Tachyon Detection Grid crisscrossed the entire distance between the foliage and the walls of the complex. They were also placed at hidden locations throughout the surrounding forest for quite a few square kilometers. Nothing would be sneaking up on this installation. Not that all of the elaborate defenses hadn't stopped the more stubborn of the local inhabitants from trying every once and a while. The Governor's security commandant could only shake his head. It would take both a heck of a lot of modern equipment and even more manpower to crack this building's security. And it was all to protect one man. He was the representative of the sector's Council Member while she was away on Terra. As such, he enjoyed freedom and privilege almost as great as her own, and he exercised it every chance he got. His late night. 'parties'. were sometimes quiet raucous. But Commandant Peter Issard didn't worry about that. It was a suggestion that the Governor rein in his habits and urges that had gotten the previous Commandant demoted all the way down to Private and ten hours in the agonizer. As such, Peter knew better than to question the Governor.
Peter sighed as he watched the troops warped in the equivalent of a pre WW III main battle tank stalk out into the woods. Seconds later, the watch that they had relived came back towards the palace. His ever-present data monocle showed each individual's status, as well as that of his armor and systems, as they entered its field of view. Part of him longed for the time when power armor wasn't needed, but he knew that those days were long since past. With the destructiveness of modern hand weapons, an unarmored human didn't last very long on the current battlefield. And even now, the current generation of power armor had yet to advance beyond the current crop of new heavy weaponry. The new weapons had been developed primarily to attack and defend against the Borg, but they were just as deadly, if not more so, vs. other threats. Weapons like the PPHC, a large rifle that housed a scaled down pulse phaser cannon that was nearly ¾ as destructive as its larger cousin mounted on starships. Then there was the new projectile rifles. While the latest versions of the phaser rifle and hand phasers could automodulate to overcome Borg defenses, they were still not as effective as solid weaponry. Old fashioned bladed weapons had made a great resurgence from the dustbin of history during the early days of the Borg/Imperial war, and with a little modern tweaking they could be made strong and sharp enough the cut most anything. But they required the wielder to get up close and personal with a Borg drone, and with their introduction of assimilation tubules during what was known as the Great Adaptation Offensive that became a very bad thing to do if it could be helped. Since a drone's shields could be penetrated by physical objects, but could eventually adapt to energy weapons, Imperial R&D had set about to build the ultimate combat rifle.
The end result had been dubbed the grav gun. It was basically a rail gun in premise, but it used the same tech that allowed for artificial gravity to pull the bullet along instead of having it pushed by magnetic fields. As a result, the bullet could reach speeds in excess of Mach 11 when it left the barrel. Their were three settings for the weapon, armor piercing seeking bullets, high explosive seeking bullets, and a futuristic shotgun like flechette launcher. The seeking bullets enabled radically off bore attacks at the expense of accuracy and velocity. There was only so much current level Imperial tech could do with a bullet the size of a persons pinky finger that mounted both impulse thrusters, sensors and a crude but effective computer to think for it all it. The AP variety housed only a tiny amount of explosive, and it was only used if the target's armor couldn't be penetrated, otherwise it just bulled its way though leaving a rather large exit wound. The HE round held a tiny amount of matter/antimatter explosive in a similar configuration to a photon torp. Once it came in contact with a target, the matter and antimatter met and blew the target apart. The ensuing small fireball usually took out multiple unarmored targets. The flechette option was truly deadly against unarmored small clusters of individuals. Hundreds of alloy slivers erupted out of the barrel with each shot, and at 11 times the speed of sound the level of destruction against soft tissue and even bone was astounding.
Peter shook his head to clear away the images that sprang into his mind. He had seen firsthand what a grav gun could do and it wasn't pretty. Slowly, he made his way away from the window towards his bed. He only hoped that he would sleep soundly, for he knew that the nightmares would come again.
- Hillside overlooking the Planetary Palace of Qo,noS, That same time -
A lone figure, sheathed in a slightly different set of power armor stared through an old fashioned pair of binoculars. While his armor was currently unpowered, it had its governors off so its joints could move freely. No electronic devices were active on either him or his squad, but they could be at an instant. The binoculars told him that the guard change had occurred precisely on schedule. It was his teams job to secure the Governor once his and the other teams had breached the palaces security. And if everything else went according to plan, the Governor would have no place to escape to, and no reinforcements would be coming from elsewhere on Qo'noS. The Klingon warrior smiled a tooth filled smile that was hidden by his armor's helmet. Soon the Klingon Empire would be reborn, and his squad would have the pleasure of seeing the Governor's face when he figured it out. If not, then they would be in Sto-Vo-Kor with the honored dead and the privilege of executing the Terran Empire's Governor would fall to another group of warriors. Today was a good day to die!
- Outskirts of San Francisco, That same time -
A hand moved away from a simple control station. Seconds later a thunderclap was heard and a lance of energy sun bright blue/white speared down from the heavens, turning the dusk surrounding Terra's capital brighter than high noon. The initial thunderclap began to fade, but then a nearly subsonic rumble was more felt than heard. It rose in intensity and while the flashbulb like glare was beginning to subside, the destruction it had wrought was only just beginning. The initial blast wave of compressed air was billowing out from its epicenter, blowing through or knocking over anything that was in its path. The tall towers in downtown San Francisco were all gone, either shattered or toppled by the force of the initial blast. But the blast wave wasn't the most destructive offspring of the Mauler's assault.
Flowing outward at a more sedate but still insanely high speed came the billowing furnace of fire and rubble. The wall of flame washed around and over buildings and structures that survived the initial blow of hurricane force winds, scorching block after block as it spread. Worse than the flames themselves was the ash and pulverized bedrock that fell around it. It was far more deadly than a volcano eruption, for the explosive force that hurled the debris high into the atmosphere had been sudden and unexpected. Splinters of granite bedrock, some as big as a Frigate sleeted back down to earth like fiery raindrops. And with them came the ash. The horrid stuff descended in an asphyxiating blanket of death all of its own. It filled everything, flowed into every opening in the shattered ruins of the Terran Empires capital city in a swirling gray snowstorm. Anyone unlucky enough to have survived the initial destruction was doomed to die more slowly as the very air itself seemed to become solid ash.
And the reason it happened at all was because of one man. He stood next to the control station, starring awe at the destruction he had allowed to visit upon Terra. It was unlike anything the world had experienced since her last great war. Yet even WW III's darkest hours were but a child's tantrum compared to this. As he stared the blast wave finally struck him, its small debris and sand that it carried along with it caused his shuttle car's shield to shimmer as the banshee like winds swirled around the lone island of safety in a vast sea of destruction. But he was situated far enough away that it had already lost most of its force. And the fire storm that followed on its heels was already slowing to a crawl as the initial out gassing was replaced by air trying to flood back into the vacuum the firestorm had created. A vast column of smoke, ash, and pulverized rock and buildings reached towards the sky like a massive funeral pyre.
The console at the man's side had but one purpose, to activate a small, unnoticed program in Council Tower's mainframe. At a prearranged time, it had been his job to activate it. He had pressed the activation command exactly on time and the program set about its dastardly task. Mere seconds before the Mauler device fired from orbit, the entire defensive apparatus was paralyzed and shut down by the Trojan computer virus. Normally that wouldn't have mattered, for the system automatically went into individual, secure power and computer backups within seconds should such a thing happen. But in the exquisitely precise time frame of its activation, a few seconds were all that were needed. While the shield would have barely held off the Mauler's assault, it wasn't there when it struck and thus the beam raced in as unopposed as its siblings attacking space born targets.
"Oops!" Within the safety of his shield bubble, Jack Chambers spoke to himself as no one else was around to hear him.
Then his neutral expression took on a very Machiavellian grin as he realized that he had actually done it. The Terran Council was gone, save for him and one other. As such, emergency powers were granted to him as one of only two political entities left to run the Empire. It would have been better if Greg Betare had been present in council as well, but his ally/superior from the Orion Cartel had said that it wasn't currently necessary to have him eliminated. He had merely shrugged. The plan was a sound one and he knew that his tidy little piece of acting these last few months in Council sessions should put him above suspicion. After all, who would suspect that the one who most vehemently wanted to attack the rumblings in the outer territories was also in league with them.
- Sector Capital Qo'noS, Former Klingon Empire Space, That same time -
Mechanical muscles whined quietly as the ranks of battle armored troops walked out of the Planetary Palace. Once they reached the edge of the structures canopy shield, they stepped into the normal light drizzle that seemed to be Qo'noS' only weather capability. The building itself was the most heavily fortified one in all of Qo'noS, and its majesty was highlighted only by the pale moonlight cast by Praxis as it peeked through the odd break in the cloud cover. Why were lights needed in the middle of the night when there were various forms of power armor mounted sensors that worked far better than the Mk One Eyeball in the dark. It was situated on top of a small hill, and for over 400 feet in every direction the ground was thoroughly cleared of any thing that could be used for cover. The nearly invisible beams of the Tachyon Detection Grid crisscrossed the entire distance between the foliage and the walls of the complex. They were also placed at hidden locations throughout the surrounding forest for quite a few square kilometers. Nothing would be sneaking up on this installation. Not that all of the elaborate defenses hadn't stopped the more stubborn of the local inhabitants from trying every once and a while. The Governor's security commandant could only shake his head. It would take both a heck of a lot of modern equipment and even more manpower to crack this building's security. And it was all to protect one man. He was the representative of the sector's Council Member while she was away on Terra. As such, he enjoyed freedom and privilege almost as great as her own, and he exercised it every chance he got. His late night. 'parties'. were sometimes quiet raucous. But Commandant Peter Issard didn't worry about that. It was a suggestion that the Governor rein in his habits and urges that had gotten the previous Commandant demoted all the way down to Private and ten hours in the agonizer. As such, Peter knew better than to question the Governor.
Peter sighed as he watched the troops warped in the equivalent of a pre WW III main battle tank stalk out into the woods. Seconds later, the watch that they had relived came back towards the palace. His ever-present data monocle showed each individual's status, as well as that of his armor and systems, as they entered its field of view. Part of him longed for the time when power armor wasn't needed, but he knew that those days were long since past. With the destructiveness of modern hand weapons, an unarmored human didn't last very long on the current battlefield. And even now, the current generation of power armor had yet to advance beyond the current crop of new heavy weaponry. The new weapons had been developed primarily to attack and defend against the Borg, but they were just as deadly, if not more so, vs. other threats. Weapons like the PPHC, a large rifle that housed a scaled down pulse phaser cannon that was nearly ¾ as destructive as its larger cousin mounted on starships. Then there was the new projectile rifles. While the latest versions of the phaser rifle and hand phasers could automodulate to overcome Borg defenses, they were still not as effective as solid weaponry. Old fashioned bladed weapons had made a great resurgence from the dustbin of history during the early days of the Borg/Imperial war, and with a little modern tweaking they could be made strong and sharp enough the cut most anything. But they required the wielder to get up close and personal with a Borg drone, and with their introduction of assimilation tubules during what was known as the Great Adaptation Offensive that became a very bad thing to do if it could be helped. Since a drone's shields could be penetrated by physical objects, but could eventually adapt to energy weapons, Imperial R&D had set about to build the ultimate combat rifle.
The end result had been dubbed the grav gun. It was basically a rail gun in premise, but it used the same tech that allowed for artificial gravity to pull the bullet along instead of having it pushed by magnetic fields. As a result, the bullet could reach speeds in excess of Mach 11 when it left the barrel. Their were three settings for the weapon, armor piercing seeking bullets, high explosive seeking bullets, and a futuristic shotgun like flechette launcher. The seeking bullets enabled radically off bore attacks at the expense of accuracy and velocity. There was only so much current level Imperial tech could do with a bullet the size of a persons pinky finger that mounted both impulse thrusters, sensors and a crude but effective computer to think for it all it. The AP variety housed only a tiny amount of explosive, and it was only used if the target's armor couldn't be penetrated, otherwise it just bulled its way though leaving a rather large exit wound. The HE round held a tiny amount of matter/antimatter explosive in a similar configuration to a photon torp. Once it came in contact with a target, the matter and antimatter met and blew the target apart. The ensuing small fireball usually took out multiple unarmored targets. The flechette option was truly deadly against unarmored small clusters of individuals. Hundreds of alloy slivers erupted out of the barrel with each shot, and at 11 times the speed of sound the level of destruction against soft tissue and even bone was astounding.
Peter shook his head to clear away the images that sprang into his mind. He had seen firsthand what a grav gun could do and it wasn't pretty. Slowly, he made his way away from the window towards his bed. He only hoped that he would sleep soundly, for he knew that the nightmares would come again.
- Hillside overlooking the Planetary Palace of Qo,noS, That same time -
A lone figure, sheathed in a slightly different set of power armor stared through an old fashioned pair of binoculars. While his armor was currently unpowered, it had its governors off so its joints could move freely. No electronic devices were active on either him or his squad, but they could be at an instant. The binoculars told him that the guard change had occurred precisely on schedule. It was his teams job to secure the Governor once his and the other teams had breached the palaces security. And if everything else went according to plan, the Governor would have no place to escape to, and no reinforcements would be coming from elsewhere on Qo'noS. The Klingon warrior smiled a tooth filled smile that was hidden by his armor's helmet. Soon the Klingon Empire would be reborn, and his squad would have the pleasure of seeing the Governor's face when he figured it out. If not, then they would be in Sto-Vo-Kor with the honored dead and the privilege of executing the Terran Empire's Governor would fall to another group of warriors. Today was a good day to die!