- CHAPTER 46 -
- Section 31 10th Fleet Operating Under Phase Cloak, Qo'noS Orbit -
The bridge of the Section 31 modified Wraith that was Section's 10th Fleet flagship was deathly quiet. First, Sector 10 Defensive Fleet had been all but crushed after scarcely a minute of combat by what appeared to be a mostly Klingon attack fleet. There were a smattering of Cardassian Hideki's, Galors and Keldons, along with a few ships that were unknown but most certainly of Cardassian design. Fewer in number yet still present were ships that looked like modern descendants from ancient Lyran, Gorn and Mirak designs. The Breen were here as well, their claw like asymmetrical vessels unmistakable. A similar sized portion of the enemy fleet as the Cardassian contingent was made up of entirely new vessels. They appeared almost raptor like, and seeing as how the only former major power not accounted for was the Romulans, it stood to reason that they were the new Romulan vessels. The small yet powerful fleet of Section warships hid behind its impenetrable phase cloak and watched the enemy fleet as it descended around Qo'noS and began to birth drop ships and assault shuttles.
Getting as detailed scans as they could of both all of the new enemy craft, paying especially close attention to the Bastion sized warship of evident Klingon design, the fleet of 1 Wraith, 5 Sovereigns, 3 Galaxies, 10 Prometheuses and 30 Soulwolfs turned out of orbit. Engaging slipstream for Section 31 Covert Starbase 334 in sector 13 to report what they had had dropped into their lap to a higher authority. Though decloaking and helping Sector 10's defenders attack might have held them off for a while longer, they would have been incapacitated just like the rest of the Starfleet vessels. They wouldn't have done much good, and they would have undoubtedly allowed Section's most secret weaponry to fall into the enemy's hands. The enemy was doing far to well as it was, they didn't need any freebies. But if a counter to their new weapon couldn't be found, there was nothing between Qo'noS and Sol that would even make them slow down.
What the Section fleet didn't know was that virtually simultaneously, similar fleets such as the one attacking Qo'noS were attacking Cardassia Prime, Romulus, Lyra, Mir, Gornus and Breen Prime. They were also meeting with rapid success in their attacks, and it would only be a matter of time before they turned their sights away from retaking their traditional space and shifted to revenge against their Terran oppressors. And if this single fleet would suffice to eliminate the Terran Empire, the damage that all of them put together could reek was unimaginable.
- Qo'noS Planetary Palace, that same time -
The MCP's sensors told the sad tale all too readily. Though the surrounding countryside was devastated, in many places the very ground itself turned to a molten cauldron of hell birthed on the surface of the world, it wasn't enough. Nor had Peter deluded himself into believing that it would be. Modern weaponry might be immensely destructive, even though his army weapons were mere pop guns compared to what starships threw around, yet even it was unable to stop a determined enemy. Especially one that outnumbered your own forces at least 1000 to one and had heavy armor and artillery to back up their numbers. Qualitatively the enemy was proving an even match to the Imperial Army units stationed on Qo'noS which in and of itself was bad enough. But mated with their quantitative superiority and firm control of the high orbitals ensured their eventual victory. The Klingons knew this all to well and were pressing home their attacks in spite of their initial losses. The initial assault waves of APC's, infantry and tanks had been crushed just short of the palace walls, as testified by the still burning hulks of armor strewn across the open field that now ringed the palace. It was sheer good luck that none of the vehicles fusion bottles had let go, lest they take out nearly a whole side of the pentagon shaped outer wall. The safeties had functioned properly on all of them though, sending the reactants bleeding out of emergency shunts instead of mixing and going critical.
The mobile shield emitters that had been emplaced to fill the gap between the planetary surface and the umbrella like theatre defense shield were shimmering nearly constantly now as the enemy opened up on them with everything that was in range. All his own troops could do was sit and wait. While the fixed installations mounted in the outer armored walls of the Palace could be tied in to the frequency windows of the shield emitters, his troop's weaponry couldn't. Thus they were stuck idle behind the shields, the heavy weaponry lancing out above their heads the only defiance offered against the oncoming enemy. While the warship grade quantum tubes and PPC fire the fixed weaponry were putting out were welcome, it was the helpless waiting, the inability to do anything that itched away at Peter.
He stared angrily at the approaching line heavy tanks, barely seen behind their camouflage skins. What gave them away was when they volleyed their disruptor turrets at the ever-weakening shield.
"Sir," one of his staff in the MCP said, to emotionally exhausted to do more than list the cold hard facts in a monotone, "the shield in sector 5 is nearing failure. Breech of the perimeter on that flank is estimated in one minute. PPC tubes are beginning to overheat due to extended use." Which was true, Peter thought with mild surprise, they had been in use for close to eight hours now, which would put strain on any dirtside cooling system that didn't have space to lend a helping hand. Had the Palace really been under attack for such a long period of time. Oh well, time flies when you're having fun! Peter snorted at his own gallows humor.
"What is the status of our depletable munitions?" He queried.
"HVM's are nearly gone thanks to the last enemy push, we have only six left. Phalanx torps are not much better off, we are down to only about 10 apiece for our four remaining mobile AAA batteries. Fixed Quantum batteries are down to only 66 torps total in their collective magazine." Which was actually good news of a sort. The weapons were hitting targets much closer to the frail energy barrier that sheathed the palace. The blast wave from a nearby explosion of a few hundred megatons wouldn't do much of anything to the palace or the vehicles that guarded it even if their shields went down. But his exposed armored infantry were another story. Though their power armor was tough, it wasn't that tough, and aside from it, all they had were their foxholes and prayer to protect them from the hell on earth growing up around them.
As the staffer spoke, the canopy shield allowed another volley of the nearly depleted torpedoes through to strike at an attacking frigate. It then shimmered as the wreckage of the targeted B'rel slammed into it only to skip along it's domed surface to finally crash to earth a good 10 klicks away. Along the horizon, a near continuous wave of green heavy disruptor bolts rained down on the straining perimeter shields. Far too few pulse phaser cannons replied back at them. A few had been taken out in the earlier attacks, some had already succumbed to overheating and shut down, their emitters fused. Then, with a final pop of sound and shower of sparks, the shield emitter that had been covering Palace perimeter sector 5 died. The final barrier of armor that covered the PPC batteries and torpedo launchers in sector began to develop glowing craters as the disruptors steadily ate away at its now exposed surface.
"Transfer the reserve armored infantry to sector 5. Tell them to hold as long as they can."
The last of the Palace Guard's infantry activated their AG thrusters and hopped over to dig in beside what was left of sector 5's defenders. The enemy's heavy hover tanks and APC's were already passing where the shield had been, with armored infantry taking what shelter they could behind them. A handful of Imperial infantry opened up with their PPHC's and HVM's, causing the shields of a few tanks and APC's to flare and die. When they brewed up, they added their own deafening explosions to the din of combat. There were to few defenders left to stop the advance though, and the dead tanks surviving brethren slaughtered the infantry who dared defy them. The breach widened, and more of the enemy streamed past the mangled and dead Imperials. The few remaining infantry guarding perimeter sector 1 and the MCP shifted orientation and began to send a flail of AP grav gun rounds towards the oncoming infantry. But that to was considerably lower than what is should have been. Grav gun rounds were also dwindling to non- existence, and the lone replicator in the palace that could manufacture them was both running low on proper bulk element reserves and was unable to meet the massive demand anyway.
"They're getting to close, evacuate the MCP and return to the Palace. We're all being demoted to infantry till our capture of death." The rear hatch popped open and the staffers nearest the door exited first to open a path in the Conquistador's cramped interior for the Commandant to exit. He was just stepping down onto the ground when two HVM's found their mark on the MCP. The force of their combined kinetic impact caused the Conquistador to splinter with the sound of a massive clang. The MCP's explosion scant inches behind him picked up Peter and threw him off of the ground and into the armored flank of the palace wall. It was only thanks to his power armor and personal shield that he survived at all. Pieces of flaming white-hot shrapnel landed about him, starting small fires in the short dry grass near the palace wall. Other than being slightly dazed, Peter found himself only slightly worse for the wear. His power armor was another thing entirely. His HUD showed that his shield capacitor was depleted and his aft armor severely compromised. The suits left shoulder and hip joints were lightly damaged, limiting their full range of movement slightly. The micro fusion reactor that was the suits power supply was only operating at 23% capacity, which meant that shields would recharge very slowly unless he hooked up to an external power supply. Looking at his hands, he saw that his cammo skin had been damaged, because his hands showed only the matte gray of unpowered cammo. Peter needed to get under cover fast. The enemy assault would be upon him in seconds.
Scrambling up from where the explosion had thrown him on his stomach, Peter scurried over to a nearby staffer who was slowly getting up. Grav gun bullets splattered the wall next to him, and he thanked God that both his ECM was still operating and that the enemy had fired homing shots instead of boresight. The small seeker head in a grav gun bullet homed in on the ECM generated signature thrown a few feet away from the generator. The first staffer seemed to be all right, but the only other one whom had preceded the Commandant from the MCP laid motionless in the smoldering short grass. Peter's suit sensors showed no sign of life in the staffer, and it was evident why. There was a meter long splinter of alloy jutting out of the side of the staffer's power armor. Peter had been terribly lucky, for that dead staffer could have just as easily been him. Taking in the staffer's death in a glance, Peter grabbed a hold of his sole surviving staffers arm and bolted for the small personnel portal through the palace wall.
"Activate personnel access hatch Alpha 01, authorization Peter Issard, Palace security Commandant, Code Alpha Alpha Nine Charley Enable." A series of 10 doors' irised open after verifying Peter's IFF beacon and commed security code. Each was over a foot thick of laminated alloy and armor. The twin survivors from the MCP dashed through with the armored doors' irising shut behind them. After their passage, a faint burst of sound was heard as forcefields snapped back on between each of the 10 closed doors'. The personnel and larger equipment and vehicle door beside it were almost stronger than the rest of the wall thanks to their multiple layers of armor plate and forcefields. Giving the still slightly dazed staffer over to the waiting medics, Peter half ran half jumped across the courtyard to the entrance of the palace's bunker. Like the outer personnel door before, the bunker's armored portals required both either a clean identity scan or an IFF beacon plus a personal authorization code to open. Peter again supplied his code and the fresh set of armored doors swooshed aside.
After rushing down the corkscrew corridor and opening another four sets of blast doors, he finally arrived at the turboshaft that would take him into the bunker. The ride was a good ways deeper into the earth, but the turbolift took him there rapidly, making the distance seem much less than it really was. The lift doors opened out onto the Spartan furnishings of the bunker. The bunker itself was deep enough under ground and armored enough that it could survive several direct hits from heavy torpedoes. If the enemy had something approaching the phaser lance in power, even the bunker's defenses wouldn't prove much of an obstacle, and judging from the attack on Terra they did indeed have a comparable weapon. But if all they had wanted to do was destroy the palace, they could have done that from orbit and not wasted so much resources on trying to take it via ground forces. No, they wanted something in the palace itself, and despite the common myth of Klingon's not taking prisoners, Peter was willing to bet that that was exactly what they wanted. Peter was something of a student of Klingon culture, the true one, not the one twisted by the Terran Empire to serve its propaganda purposes. He knew that the Klingon's took prisoners when they thought it would best serve their aims, as the evidently did now.
The Planetary Governor of Qo'noS and Sector 10 was cowering like a terrified animal in the corner of the bunker, the ministrations of the two female slaves he brought with him doing nothing to calm him. He only vaguely resembled the slug of a man that had gloated on his good fortune mere days earlier. Oh how he had relished his newfound power upon learning of the death of Sector 10s Council Member. It would mean that he would soon ascend to the upper echelons of power in the Empire, for the Council Member had been grooming him as his successor for years now. The old fart had been as impotent as a piece of bleached wood, and it as a good thing for Governor Stiles that he was, for it meant that he had to search for his successor outside of blood ties. Yet now all that was for nothing. There had been no time for the Governor to evacuate, and now he was stuck here, doomed to whatever fate the Klingon's had in store for him.
- Section 31 10th Fleet Operating Under Phase Cloak, Qo'noS Orbit -
The bridge of the Section 31 modified Wraith that was Section's 10th Fleet flagship was deathly quiet. First, Sector 10 Defensive Fleet had been all but crushed after scarcely a minute of combat by what appeared to be a mostly Klingon attack fleet. There were a smattering of Cardassian Hideki's, Galors and Keldons, along with a few ships that were unknown but most certainly of Cardassian design. Fewer in number yet still present were ships that looked like modern descendants from ancient Lyran, Gorn and Mirak designs. The Breen were here as well, their claw like asymmetrical vessels unmistakable. A similar sized portion of the enemy fleet as the Cardassian contingent was made up of entirely new vessels. They appeared almost raptor like, and seeing as how the only former major power not accounted for was the Romulans, it stood to reason that they were the new Romulan vessels. The small yet powerful fleet of Section warships hid behind its impenetrable phase cloak and watched the enemy fleet as it descended around Qo'noS and began to birth drop ships and assault shuttles.
Getting as detailed scans as they could of both all of the new enemy craft, paying especially close attention to the Bastion sized warship of evident Klingon design, the fleet of 1 Wraith, 5 Sovereigns, 3 Galaxies, 10 Prometheuses and 30 Soulwolfs turned out of orbit. Engaging slipstream for Section 31 Covert Starbase 334 in sector 13 to report what they had had dropped into their lap to a higher authority. Though decloaking and helping Sector 10's defenders attack might have held them off for a while longer, they would have been incapacitated just like the rest of the Starfleet vessels. They wouldn't have done much good, and they would have undoubtedly allowed Section's most secret weaponry to fall into the enemy's hands. The enemy was doing far to well as it was, they didn't need any freebies. But if a counter to their new weapon couldn't be found, there was nothing between Qo'noS and Sol that would even make them slow down.
What the Section fleet didn't know was that virtually simultaneously, similar fleets such as the one attacking Qo'noS were attacking Cardassia Prime, Romulus, Lyra, Mir, Gornus and Breen Prime. They were also meeting with rapid success in their attacks, and it would only be a matter of time before they turned their sights away from retaking their traditional space and shifted to revenge against their Terran oppressors. And if this single fleet would suffice to eliminate the Terran Empire, the damage that all of them put together could reek was unimaginable.
- Qo'noS Planetary Palace, that same time -
The MCP's sensors told the sad tale all too readily. Though the surrounding countryside was devastated, in many places the very ground itself turned to a molten cauldron of hell birthed on the surface of the world, it wasn't enough. Nor had Peter deluded himself into believing that it would be. Modern weaponry might be immensely destructive, even though his army weapons were mere pop guns compared to what starships threw around, yet even it was unable to stop a determined enemy. Especially one that outnumbered your own forces at least 1000 to one and had heavy armor and artillery to back up their numbers. Qualitatively the enemy was proving an even match to the Imperial Army units stationed on Qo'noS which in and of itself was bad enough. But mated with their quantitative superiority and firm control of the high orbitals ensured their eventual victory. The Klingons knew this all to well and were pressing home their attacks in spite of their initial losses. The initial assault waves of APC's, infantry and tanks had been crushed just short of the palace walls, as testified by the still burning hulks of armor strewn across the open field that now ringed the palace. It was sheer good luck that none of the vehicles fusion bottles had let go, lest they take out nearly a whole side of the pentagon shaped outer wall. The safeties had functioned properly on all of them though, sending the reactants bleeding out of emergency shunts instead of mixing and going critical.
The mobile shield emitters that had been emplaced to fill the gap between the planetary surface and the umbrella like theatre defense shield were shimmering nearly constantly now as the enemy opened up on them with everything that was in range. All his own troops could do was sit and wait. While the fixed installations mounted in the outer armored walls of the Palace could be tied in to the frequency windows of the shield emitters, his troop's weaponry couldn't. Thus they were stuck idle behind the shields, the heavy weaponry lancing out above their heads the only defiance offered against the oncoming enemy. While the warship grade quantum tubes and PPC fire the fixed weaponry were putting out were welcome, it was the helpless waiting, the inability to do anything that itched away at Peter.
He stared angrily at the approaching line heavy tanks, barely seen behind their camouflage skins. What gave them away was when they volleyed their disruptor turrets at the ever-weakening shield.
"Sir," one of his staff in the MCP said, to emotionally exhausted to do more than list the cold hard facts in a monotone, "the shield in sector 5 is nearing failure. Breech of the perimeter on that flank is estimated in one minute. PPC tubes are beginning to overheat due to extended use." Which was true, Peter thought with mild surprise, they had been in use for close to eight hours now, which would put strain on any dirtside cooling system that didn't have space to lend a helping hand. Had the Palace really been under attack for such a long period of time. Oh well, time flies when you're having fun! Peter snorted at his own gallows humor.
"What is the status of our depletable munitions?" He queried.
"HVM's are nearly gone thanks to the last enemy push, we have only six left. Phalanx torps are not much better off, we are down to only about 10 apiece for our four remaining mobile AAA batteries. Fixed Quantum batteries are down to only 66 torps total in their collective magazine." Which was actually good news of a sort. The weapons were hitting targets much closer to the frail energy barrier that sheathed the palace. The blast wave from a nearby explosion of a few hundred megatons wouldn't do much of anything to the palace or the vehicles that guarded it even if their shields went down. But his exposed armored infantry were another story. Though their power armor was tough, it wasn't that tough, and aside from it, all they had were their foxholes and prayer to protect them from the hell on earth growing up around them.
As the staffer spoke, the canopy shield allowed another volley of the nearly depleted torpedoes through to strike at an attacking frigate. It then shimmered as the wreckage of the targeted B'rel slammed into it only to skip along it's domed surface to finally crash to earth a good 10 klicks away. Along the horizon, a near continuous wave of green heavy disruptor bolts rained down on the straining perimeter shields. Far too few pulse phaser cannons replied back at them. A few had been taken out in the earlier attacks, some had already succumbed to overheating and shut down, their emitters fused. Then, with a final pop of sound and shower of sparks, the shield emitter that had been covering Palace perimeter sector 5 died. The final barrier of armor that covered the PPC batteries and torpedo launchers in sector began to develop glowing craters as the disruptors steadily ate away at its now exposed surface.
"Transfer the reserve armored infantry to sector 5. Tell them to hold as long as they can."
The last of the Palace Guard's infantry activated their AG thrusters and hopped over to dig in beside what was left of sector 5's defenders. The enemy's heavy hover tanks and APC's were already passing where the shield had been, with armored infantry taking what shelter they could behind them. A handful of Imperial infantry opened up with their PPHC's and HVM's, causing the shields of a few tanks and APC's to flare and die. When they brewed up, they added their own deafening explosions to the din of combat. There were to few defenders left to stop the advance though, and the dead tanks surviving brethren slaughtered the infantry who dared defy them. The breach widened, and more of the enemy streamed past the mangled and dead Imperials. The few remaining infantry guarding perimeter sector 1 and the MCP shifted orientation and began to send a flail of AP grav gun rounds towards the oncoming infantry. But that to was considerably lower than what is should have been. Grav gun rounds were also dwindling to non- existence, and the lone replicator in the palace that could manufacture them was both running low on proper bulk element reserves and was unable to meet the massive demand anyway.
"They're getting to close, evacuate the MCP and return to the Palace. We're all being demoted to infantry till our capture of death." The rear hatch popped open and the staffers nearest the door exited first to open a path in the Conquistador's cramped interior for the Commandant to exit. He was just stepping down onto the ground when two HVM's found their mark on the MCP. The force of their combined kinetic impact caused the Conquistador to splinter with the sound of a massive clang. The MCP's explosion scant inches behind him picked up Peter and threw him off of the ground and into the armored flank of the palace wall. It was only thanks to his power armor and personal shield that he survived at all. Pieces of flaming white-hot shrapnel landed about him, starting small fires in the short dry grass near the palace wall. Other than being slightly dazed, Peter found himself only slightly worse for the wear. His power armor was another thing entirely. His HUD showed that his shield capacitor was depleted and his aft armor severely compromised. The suits left shoulder and hip joints were lightly damaged, limiting their full range of movement slightly. The micro fusion reactor that was the suits power supply was only operating at 23% capacity, which meant that shields would recharge very slowly unless he hooked up to an external power supply. Looking at his hands, he saw that his cammo skin had been damaged, because his hands showed only the matte gray of unpowered cammo. Peter needed to get under cover fast. The enemy assault would be upon him in seconds.
Scrambling up from where the explosion had thrown him on his stomach, Peter scurried over to a nearby staffer who was slowly getting up. Grav gun bullets splattered the wall next to him, and he thanked God that both his ECM was still operating and that the enemy had fired homing shots instead of boresight. The small seeker head in a grav gun bullet homed in on the ECM generated signature thrown a few feet away from the generator. The first staffer seemed to be all right, but the only other one whom had preceded the Commandant from the MCP laid motionless in the smoldering short grass. Peter's suit sensors showed no sign of life in the staffer, and it was evident why. There was a meter long splinter of alloy jutting out of the side of the staffer's power armor. Peter had been terribly lucky, for that dead staffer could have just as easily been him. Taking in the staffer's death in a glance, Peter grabbed a hold of his sole surviving staffers arm and bolted for the small personnel portal through the palace wall.
"Activate personnel access hatch Alpha 01, authorization Peter Issard, Palace security Commandant, Code Alpha Alpha Nine Charley Enable." A series of 10 doors' irised open after verifying Peter's IFF beacon and commed security code. Each was over a foot thick of laminated alloy and armor. The twin survivors from the MCP dashed through with the armored doors' irising shut behind them. After their passage, a faint burst of sound was heard as forcefields snapped back on between each of the 10 closed doors'. The personnel and larger equipment and vehicle door beside it were almost stronger than the rest of the wall thanks to their multiple layers of armor plate and forcefields. Giving the still slightly dazed staffer over to the waiting medics, Peter half ran half jumped across the courtyard to the entrance of the palace's bunker. Like the outer personnel door before, the bunker's armored portals required both either a clean identity scan or an IFF beacon plus a personal authorization code to open. Peter again supplied his code and the fresh set of armored doors swooshed aside.
After rushing down the corkscrew corridor and opening another four sets of blast doors, he finally arrived at the turboshaft that would take him into the bunker. The ride was a good ways deeper into the earth, but the turbolift took him there rapidly, making the distance seem much less than it really was. The lift doors opened out onto the Spartan furnishings of the bunker. The bunker itself was deep enough under ground and armored enough that it could survive several direct hits from heavy torpedoes. If the enemy had something approaching the phaser lance in power, even the bunker's defenses wouldn't prove much of an obstacle, and judging from the attack on Terra they did indeed have a comparable weapon. But if all they had wanted to do was destroy the palace, they could have done that from orbit and not wasted so much resources on trying to take it via ground forces. No, they wanted something in the palace itself, and despite the common myth of Klingon's not taking prisoners, Peter was willing to bet that that was exactly what they wanted. Peter was something of a student of Klingon culture, the true one, not the one twisted by the Terran Empire to serve its propaganda purposes. He knew that the Klingon's took prisoners when they thought it would best serve their aims, as the evidently did now.
The Planetary Governor of Qo'noS and Sector 10 was cowering like a terrified animal in the corner of the bunker, the ministrations of the two female slaves he brought with him doing nothing to calm him. He only vaguely resembled the slug of a man that had gloated on his good fortune mere days earlier. Oh how he had relished his newfound power upon learning of the death of Sector 10s Council Member. It would mean that he would soon ascend to the upper echelons of power in the Empire, for the Council Member had been grooming him as his successor for years now. The old fart had been as impotent as a piece of bleached wood, and it as a good thing for Governor Stiles that he was, for it meant that he had to search for his successor outside of blood ties. Yet now all that was for nothing. There had been no time for the Governor to evacuate, and now he was stuck here, doomed to whatever fate the Klingon's had in store for him.