Cold War
by Warringer
Chapter One
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"The first being of the Ancient Alliance had been woken in 1965, about seven years after the Visitor Conflict. It needed about six years to awake all one and a half million fugitives from stasis sleep. One and a half million people from six different races.
"The Ancients, a race that calls themselves one of the First Ones. They are a mono-gender extremely humanoid race. In fact every member of this race seems to be a female human supermodel. They also are anatomically correct when compared to a human female, it would even be possible to insert plug A into slot B, not that it would conceive new life.
"The Kartanin, a sleek humanoid feline race from a dessert planet. They are very humanoid, but with catlike faces. Instead of finger- or toe-nails they have razor sharp retractable claws. Male Kartanin are with around five feet eight a little taller than the females with around five feet two.
"While the Kartanin are basically cats, the race of the Wlatschides are basically wolfs. These about two meter tall digitigrade upright wolfs are the third race of the Ancient Alliance.
"The fourth race of the Ancient Alliance are the hydrogen breathing Maahk. These egg laying silicon and carbone based lifeforms are not having emotions like humans or other races and tend to be very logical. They are also a race that reproduces very fast, each female laying up to twelve eggs every six month. In less than twenty years their number got from under 50.000 to six millions at Maahkor, their colony on the Moon near the Great Trench.
"The Hauri are the fifth race. They are a very humanoid race, about two meters tall and seem to be little more than leather like skin over their skeletons. But their looks are deceiving as they are stronger than most humans. Their green eyes normally seem to be glowing in a demonic fire.
"The last race are the Swoon, the strangest of the Ancient Alliance. They resemble feet long cucumbers with two legs, for arms and a small surprisingly humanoid face.
"Since they have been waken from stasis, they are very grateful to the NATO and now fully accepted members a good number of them working closely with humans. Most of them have settles down near the Great Trench, while some went to Earth to live in cities like New York, London or Berlin."
-- exert from a lecture of NATO history at the University of Tel'Aviv
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21. March 2001
Slowly the Akula-class recon vessel Suchoi floated in space near NATO Side 2, one of the O'Neil colony areas. It was operating under full EMCON, not a single EM signal coming from it as it listened to the EM signals coming from the NATO Side. Optronic computers filed through the streams of data coming from its passive sensors, trying to find new information about NATO operations.
It was essential that the Suchoi was there and both sides knew it. The NATO knew that a KGB recon vessel was near their Side and the KGB knew that the NATO knew. Side 2 was especially of interest for the KGB. One of the main Howaldtswerke - Deutsche Werft GmbH Space Docks was located there and it was rumored that NATO build one of their new Graf Zeppelin class super carriers in that dock.
Even if the NSS Graf Zeppelin went through its trails near Titan and the KGB watched it closely, they knew next to nothing about the newest implementation of NATO fleet doctrine. All they did know however were just rumors. Rumors that the Graf Zeppelin wasn't only a super carrier but also a possible ship killer, rumored to carry a pair of mass drivers larger than any mass driver on Soviet super dreadnoughts.
Until now the KGB didn't knew that these rumors were true. The two thousand three hundred meter long Graf Zeppelin didn't only carry four CAW worth of Starfuries, but also a good number of weapons that wouldn't be out of place on a battle cruiser, a pair of really large cap ship killer mass drivers and enough missiles to spam the fire control systems of a small Soviet Cruiser Task Force.
Some of the data Suchoi received would be very useful to KGB, but only if the ship would have survived a, for them, unfortunate coincidence. The last thing the sensors of the Akula class ship registered was the sudden increase of gravimetrical forces right on top of the ship. It was too fast for the computer to come to the right conclusion that a Jump Point to Jump Space opened, as the whole ship imploded, exploded and was ripped apart at the same time by the gravity sheers coming from the opening Jump Point.
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It was a few days ago that Commander Soral Molari had gotten new orders from Centari Prime. A Centauri merchant doing the route from the Centauri system of Courtor to the Markab system Tiree had reported strange tachyon signals coming from a small system near his route. He hadn't been the first to report them, but in the last years those reports had grown more numerous.
Normally that wouldn't be of much interest to the Emperor or the Centaurum, but the merchant had been a member of the Refa family and Lord Refa had made pulled some strings. And now Commander Molari was on his way to this system in the middle of nowhere.
He was ordered to take a look at the system and than report back to Centauri Prime. With any luck, the system could turn out to be a system worth conquering. But the defeat through the Narn still sat deep, so they had to be careful. But he was confident that his four Vorchans could deal with anything he would meet, should it turn out to be hostile.
"We have reached the position," he heard the navigator say.
Molari nodded. This system didn't have a Jump Gate, but the nearby hyperspace lane was enough to give them the navigational information they needed to reach this system.
"Prepare jump back to normal space."
The Jump Engines of his Vorchan needed some time to charge. As the time was up they started to tear at the barrier between normal space and hyperspace, twisting it until a rift opened between the two layers of space and opened up to a hole the Vorchan could use to leave hyperspace.
For the first few moments nothing happened, other than the four Vorchans bombarding the surrounding space with radar and laser pulses to get a good first look around.
"Commander," one of the sensory operators said unbelievingly," You should look at this."
Molari blinked once and than looked at the main screen of the bridge and the picture it showed now. Than his jaw opened in shock at the picture in front of him. Dozens of silver looking rotating cylinders were hanging in the inky blackness of space. Sensory data appeared next to the picture, telling him that each of the cylinders was about 60 kilometers in length and eight kilometers in diameter.
He closed his mouth after a few moments and swallowed. Those things were huge.
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The Bremerhafen Space Dockyards of Howaldtswerke - Deutsche Werft GmbH was busy. The NSS Thielmann, the second Graf Zeppelin super carrier of the NATO neared completion and NATO wanted to introduce her into service as soon as possible. Smaller shuttles, space going cyborgs and robots were putting the last hexagonal modules of the dozen meter thick carbon based armor to the still exposed areas of the carbon steel main hull, while others were slowly installing armored antennas and put some of the retractable AEGIS turrets through trails.
In the stern area, the three large fusion drives fired for a few moments at low power, without moving the large one hundred million ton vessel from its spot, only if the ship activated its gravitational fields it would move with a maximum acceleration of twenty gees.
But the Thielmann wasn't the only ship that neared her completion. Several missile destroyers, cruisers and battle cruisers were also nearing their completion, forming the Thielmann's task force.
The Bremerhafen Space Dockyards were one of the most important dockyards of the NATO and so she was protected by three Dreadnought and two Carrier Task Forces, while two armed space stations, several dozen weapons platforms and a single object dubbed colony laser presented the fixed defenses of this dockyard. The Pentagon was more than confident that this would be enough to hold back any Soviet Force long enough that reinforcements could arrive before they reached the dockyard.
Aboard of the NSS Iowa, the heavy dreadnoughts of Dreadnought Task Force 10. life went as usual and people were bored from the job of guarding the dockyard and the NATO colony side. It was common knowledge that Stalin was currently busy in the asteroid belt near Ceres, no doubt something that was bad for NATO.
The sudden explosion near the Side Two however changed the bored atmosphere. Crewmen ran towards their posts as General Quaters was sounded aboard the ship and all sensory systems went online and listened and looked out into the direction of the explosion.
"Okay, what do we have here?" Rear Admiral Samuel Danniels said as he entered the bridge.
The commander of the Iowa, Captain Kewok, a Wladschid, turned around, his gray eyes showing confusion. Danniels knew that it had to do with whatever happened to sound General Quarters.
"We measured a Jump Point opening just outside of the gravitational well of the Earth-Moon system," he said with a slightly growling voice," It was followed by an explosion."
"Sir," he was interrupted by one of the sensory operators," Four unidentified objects left the Jump Point."
"Do we have a silhouette scan?"
"Not yet, Admiral, but we get it in about one minute."
Danniels nodded and looked at the lupine commander of Iowa.
"What do you think?"
Kewok looked at one of the screens showing the reflex data from the Jump Point.
"I don't know," he said," It doesn't look like the Jump Engine signature of the Soviets. The closest would be the signature of a Vorlon client race from the War."
Danniels nodded. Kewok had been a low ranked officer during the War between the Ancient Alliance and the Shadow-Vorlon Alliance, before he went into stasis aboard one of the seven ships that crashed on the moon, about two million years ago. After waking he had been the first to as NATO to enter service and he had become something of prime example for other woken aliens.
"Not after two million years," Danniels said.
"We don't know that, Admiral."
"Sirs, we have enough data from the silhouette scan."
Minute differences during scanning of the four contacts with LIDAR and Radar had been calculated and formed a vague silhouette of the four vessels, appearing on the screen. The vessel on the screen had something of a bird of pray. Four swept forward wings and a thin main body.
Danniels looked at Kewok, who shook his head. He had never seen such ships.
"Well, than," he said," I guess we have a First Contact at our hands."