(FYI 2023) The never ending War

Serial type stores usually do not work well for some reason with the short story format however I have had a desire to flesh out the www.abovetopsecret.com... "PAD 2022 Support Cruisers destroyed" short story. Hopefully at least the same 8 of you who read "Support Cruises Destroyed" will appreciate the continuation of, "The Never Ending War."

The Story Continues:

Over the last two and a half years we had tried to capture at least one of the Vader ships with no luck. (The Invaders name, or those who kept attacking Earth's Space force had been shorten to “Vaders” as it rolled off the tongue better, especially when cussing. )

The R&D labs on both Mars and Earth had come up with a few things they believed would assist in the capture of a Vader ship and if they were correct it would be a major victory for us as we knew nothing about why the Vaders kept coming and attacking us. We had dropped many of our missile war heads down from 500 megatons to as little as 75 KT however it always took three consecutive hits by those missiles to bring down a Vader ships shields but, once the shields failed, the Vader ships always did a spectacular self destruct leaving nothing but a haze of cooling molecules floating in space.

So far we had been lucky as only three Vader ships came almost like clock work every six standard Earth months however the most recent attack had consisted of 4 ships; the battle had been brutal as the Vaders had done something to their shields to increase the field strength, thus the 75 KT missiles had little or no effect on destroying one of the Vader ship's shields.

The six month time frame of their attacks presented us with a major puzzle as there were no stars or solar systems in range we could reach at our max speed of 10% speed of light travel. To attain that speed or even faster was not the problem; the problem was not having your ship turn into a Swiss cheese fire ball as it struck some of the 10,000,000 (10 Million) various atoms in a cubic meter of the supposedly empty vacuum of space that existed in our solar system. Even in interstellar space, depending on the area, there was anywhere between 1000 and 100,000 atoms within a cubic meter of space. With anything over 10% light speed and our current shield technology if you hit a pee size chuck of rock it would be like setting off a large hydrogen Bomb upon your shields. Our present shields were good but they could not hold up to that type of bombardment and besides how could we avoid or detect a hydrogen molecule or dust moat with our current sensors ?

Just 5 more years and a few billion credits and we would have better shields or so the big boys kept saying......... As we of the fleet continued to die.

The Puzzle Palace folks kept saying in just 20 'more' years and a few trillion credits 'more' their pardners at the research labs would be able to invent a true warp drive (something they had been promising for the last 120 years); it was always more more more credits with that bunch IMO.

The latest failed plan was to use 3 missiles with 100 Megaton Neutron war heads to kill everything living on a Vader Ship, then board and take over said ship and all it contained for our research and defense purposes. Unfortunately 40 such missiles had been used in the last engagement yet the Vaders continued to fight on as they seemed totally unaffected by the Neutron missiles. We had lost 23 various Space Force ships and crew in that engagement before our battle ships got into position and opened up with their 500 MT missiles and put an end to that crap, right there, right then !

Hopefully that brings everyone up to date as we set out on our latest grand plan.

Our new grand plan endeavor was to use our 4 new EMP cannons which had been installed on the just completed battleship Zeus. Each cannon was capable of firing a pulsed burst of concentrated EMP waves at a rate of 3 burst per second. The cannons had their own Fusion matter drives and there were 4 drives on the Zeus or one drive per cannon. The Zeus was 'one of a kind' and there was much speculation and prayers ridding on the Zeus being able to stop a Vader ship in its tracks. When someone said that I always wanted to say “What tracks !”

The plan was to use 115 kT missiles to weaken a Vader ship's shield and then hit the weaken spot on the shield with the Zeus's EMP cannons.

Great plan until you try to figure out where the Vaders will appear next in our rather large solar system. The Puzzle Palace boys and girls after studying the previous battles had noticed the Vader ships always approached a spot in space within 8 million klicks of a trajectory from which they had first arrived so, we installed everything but the kitchen sink as far as sensors for 60 million klicks either side of their estimated arrival point in space.

The Zeus and its accompanying battle fleet of 128 ships spent five months going to the point in space waiting for the next attack from the Vader ships. We were lucky the fleet had arrived a standard Earth month early because instead of a 6 month semi-scheduled attack the Vaders arrived early with 8 of their black ships. It took two 24 hour earth standard days for the ships to come into weapons range and this time the Earth Space Force fleet did not pussy foot around but opened fire with over 1000 500 MT missiles on 7 of the Vader ships which were destroyed quickly even though their defensive fire had managed to destroy a large percentage of the inbound missiles. The 8th Vader ship was left to Zeus's fleet and the EMP cannons along with the 115 KT missiles. The Zeus opened up with 3 missiles which did not weaken the Vader ship's shield like had been expected so another 3 missiles were sent to impact in the same area. Understand while this was going on with the Zeus over 128 Battle cruisers were also firing their particle beam weapons and Lasers at the Vader ship which drew fire away from the Zeus. As the next 3 missiles struck, the sensors on the Zeus indicated that the Vader shield had a small area where the shield was down to an estimated 17% of its surrounding strength; evidently one or more of the Vader Black ship's shield emitters had been damaged. At that point Captain Striker commanded all 4 EMP cannons to fire on that degraded spot of the Vader ships shield and “continue firing until something happens !”

The Zeus and Captain Striker did not have to wait long as the black ship went from firing multiple energy beams and missiles to completely dark. No power emanated from anyplace on the black Vader ship that the sensors on the Zeus could detect. The “Cease fire” command was almost drowned out by the cheers from those who made up the command crew of Zeus's Bridge as they saw the effect of the EMP cannon's work on the Vader's black ship.


The Zeus and all the attending ships were ordered back as everyone knew the Black Devil Vader ships had a propensity to blow up on their own accord so it now became a deadly game of “wait, hope, and see.”

Every 4 earth standard hours the Zeus was ordered to hit the Vader ship once again with a full spread of the EMP cannons as no one wanted to take any chances with the Black devil ship once again coming back to life . This continued around the clock for the next 16 earth standard hours as the Vader ship just drifted with no power emanating from it's large dark hulk.

Next entry and the story continues:

4 shuttles each with a flight crew of two, 60 armed Marines, and two research engineer scientist who specialized in ship construction were dispatched to gain entry into the Vader ship. Gaining entry was the easy part once they found a door to a loading bay. Their plasma cutting torches with some difficulty managed to cut a 4 by 8 foot hole in the door after about an hour of tedious work. The cutting team expected a huge decompression of the loading bay compartment but there was no escaping atmosphere of any kind once a hole was punched through the thick door.

The first Space Force Marine squad entered the created opening with weapons raised and ready for a fight but there was nothing, just the blackness of a dead ship.

I will not bore you with the details but will just give you the high points of what was found on the captured Vader ship.

(1) There were no biological life forms on the ship as the ship itself was an A.I. Critter/creation.
(2) All ship wide maintenance was conducted by various sized droids who were multi tasked to perform different duties and repair work. There were 2 emergency battery powered 5 KT nuclear destructive devices that out EMP cannons had stopped from activating and blowing the black ship into a fading glowing cloud of plasma.
(3) What we would consider a command center/Bridge was nothing more than a bank of core processors which were fed information by all the sensors and Droids of the ship.
(4) The command center was about the size of a small walk in closet you might find on Earth.
(5) It took almost one Earth standard year (and three new Vader attacks) before we finally got the black ship back to Earth for our scientist to figure out the coding and language that the Black Ship's A.I. used.
(6) When we were finally able to communicate and decipher the Vader mission statement..... What we found from this A.I. was despicable and disturbing, yet explained much.
(7) Their sole mission was to destroy any Sentient life they found in the universe. Their reasoning was simple computer logic as their creators who had given them their version of life had tried to destroy them; therefore all Sentient life bad..... A.I. Good.
(8) The Vaders had fought and destroyed 53 Sentient species in the last 1000 years of their travels. If you were a plant or a dumb lizard they left you alone. However if you made fire you were to smart or would become to smart to exist in their now claimed galaxy.
(9) This particular Vader ship had come from one of the 69 mother ships which traveled the galaxy. Each of the mother ships could and usually did manufacture 3 of the black ships every 4 to 5 earth standard months depending on the resources their Vader mining droids could acquire .

(10) We were the first species the Vaders had encountered advanced enough to fight back and survive so consequently, we Humans had become a priority for elimination.

The Never Ending War

THE END

a reply to: 727Sky

Well done!

I agree this format is limiting as you portray what could be expanded into a book.

At least they now know how the shields work.

P

Thanks for submitting your story.


We wish you success in the Contest!
Johnny

a reply to: 727Sky

A fantastic sci-fi read with the hallmarks of everything that changes, some things remain the same, and the drive behind wartime innovation.