arun prabhu wrote:

Chapter 2

What the survivors found themselves in was their worst
nightmares come true. Fleet Marshal Arsu's bold � some
would call it insane � gamble with string weapons
might have stopped the Demon fleet cold and broke the
invasion's back, but it threw Home Fleet Three and
Sector Three Reserve across time. The laws of physics
being what they are, they found themselves trapped in
the past two decades before the Opening, the event
that unleashed the Demons on Milky Way.

Facing her ancient foe alone and bereft of supplies
with the mighty industrial complex that stonewalled a
pan-galactic empire stolen from right under her feet,
Terra found herself backed into a corner by want of
time...
-- Extract from The Scribe's Portrait of The Fleet
Marshal

Don't much like that.

"Here's my course to transit," Goodman replied,
uploading a copy of the course plan for the Admiral's
guidance, "I want your squadron to cover me while I
slip through their flanks after the main body.  I
can't afford any delay, so this has to be straight up
slugfest."

"Haven't you heard? Us brainless, muscle-bound, thick
armored heavies prefer slugfests," the Admiral replied
with a broad smile and a wink.

"Ah! Admiral, about that...I didn't mean any harm when
I made that remark. I was..."

"It's all right, Carl, I'm not angry. I know you
didn't mean it. Well, not really, but you were cooling
off with friends after a long exercise where me and
mine cost you the victory flag and well... Everyone
has those days when your mouth runs faster than your
brain and nothing seems to go your way."

 "Um..."

"This is where you say, �I'll craft you a fine little
statue as a sincere token of my apology, Admiral.'"

"Yes, well..." I wonder who told him I carve statues
in my spare time?

"That's settled then," the Admiral went bulldozing
ahead. Then, in a sober voice, "You do realize your
course heading's a dead giveaway, don't you? They are
going to be shooting at you and only at you."

"I guess I'll have to trust you to keep them off my
back, Sir."

"I promise you your trust won't be misplaced."

The two men looked each other in the eye through the
dialog and nodded as one.

"Now, Carl, if I might make a suggestion..."

So it was that when Goodman and his fleet of hundred
thousand strong hunter killers set sail, they were
preceded by a much smaller fleet of six thousand
battleships that sailed two minutes ahead of them. The
Demon commander was thus left with no choice but to
engage the heavier ships charging him at flank speed.
He knew that the heavies were not his targets,
however, and so, he took out the least damaged ships
under his command on a vector that while reducing the
engagement window with the heavies was also an
intercept course with the hunter killers. In doing so,
he made the cardinal error of splitting his forces
before battle against a numerically superior enemy
with a tremendous firepower advantage over his forces.
Not that he had much of a choice. He had his orders
and his mission after all, and they would not be
fulfilled by sitting still with his heavily damaged
and nearly useless compatriots and waiting for the
Terran battleships to fall upon him like the wrath of
heaven.

Admiral Karthick nodded to himself when he saw the
Demon commander's reaction to his movement. He had
hoped to provoke something very like it from his
opponent, though he was fully prepared adapt to the
unexpected and overcome it.

I'd delete everything after "opponent".

"It appears that your plan is working, Admiral,"
Goodman said.

"Not perfectly, unfortunately. I'd hoped that he'd
take a higher percentage of his ships on the intercept
mission. But this will do quite nicely."

"Personally, I think it would have been much harder
for us if he'd accelerated away from us and had his
main line engage us first. I can see where he's going
with this, though. When all he has to fulfill his
mission is a fleet of half-dead ships, accelerating
towards the Nayak limit isn't a much better
alternative what he's doing now."

"I agree with you too. It would have given him greater
wriggle room later on, but I'm not going to complain.
If he'd managed to slow down my squadron's advance
with the stranded ships, he would have made transit.
Total destruction of that fleet at that point would
have become a pipedream, not to mention hopelessly
complicated your tactical situation. I suspect that if
such a turn of events were to occur, we'd find just
how wrathful the Fleet Marshal can be when he's
displeased. Why, I shudder to think of it!"

Goodman chuckled.

"He might even order us drowned in boiling oil."

The Admiral shot him a queer look at his weird sense
of humor. Drowned in boiling oil, indeed!

delete "at his weird sense of humor"

"Right. This is how we'll respond to the Demons'
maneuvers..." He briefly described his plan about
interposing his squadron between the mobile component
and Goodman's hunter killers and bypassing the
immobile component altogether.

Terrans were taught very young to go sparingly on
their bionets precisely because overuse was lethal. It
took hundreds of hours of training in real time �
years in apparent time when one was connected to a
high speed bitform tutor � to overcome the barriers
against such abuse of the bionet as the exertion of
conscious control over the number of active avatars
programmed into their psyche. And even with the best
training, talents such as Arsu with the ability to
handle ten or more simultaneously were so rare that
there were less than a dozen born in any generation.
They were so revered for their abilities that Home
Com, in one of the few instances of nepotism in Terran
society actually installed protocols in their bionet
to override conscious command and render them asleep
before gross misuse of avatars shut down their bodies.

That's not what nepotism means.  I think the word you may be looking for 
is "favoritism".

"I think I'd better catch some shuteye before the damn
protocols kick in and I fall off my feet. Flag Admiral
Deepak has the command. He's rested for � what? � four
hours."

Oguso was not a fan of the maneuver himself and
considered it too complicated and too limited.
Complicated because success depended on too many
variables and even when the variables were favorable,
achievement of the end goal was iffy unless the enemy
was one step away from a rout. And limited because
minute variations in local gravity altered relative
positions of the fleet elements after transit events.
Commanders who were dumb enough to try it while making
transit ended with one of their flanks overrun and an
enemy that had fled the coop. For this reason, a good
officer folded his flanks in such a way that his fleet
made transit as a single unit rather than several
disparate elements. And if the folding maneuver was
not properly executed, it created a window that could
be used to the chasee's advantage.

"Tell them I need it ASAP. Whoever's commanding that
fleet is one smart bastard and I'm going to need all
the help I can get to outwit the son of a bitch."


"James," Goodman said to his aide.

Huhn?  Wha?  A single extra line is not enough warning of a scene 
change.  You need to use a transition like "On board the Terran ship 
"Crazed Chainsaw Maniac"

"Do you need anything, Sir?" James asked.

"Get in touch with Captain Kumar and get me a probable
list of systems the enemy could be making for."

"Yes, Sir."

"Have communications open a conference and invite the
flank commanders."

"I'll get right to it, Sir."

"I want real time updates on enemy movements from now
on till they make transit."

"Consider it done, Sir."

"That'll be all for the time being. Make sure you get
all three tasks done ASAP. They're all mission
critical."

James closed the dialog with a nod. Goodman cleared
his mind and used the quiet to rest and relax his
overworked bionet. He wasn't going to get another
chance till his hunter killers had won the battle
post-transit and hunted down the last of the
survivors.

Whoever's in command on the other side has a good head
on his shoulder. He is going to pounce on whichever
flank is slowest at breaking contact and try to fuck
up my schedule.  And if he hits them hard enough,
things are going to become dicey post transit. Just
thinking about how big a potential this has of
becoming a clusterfuck is giving me a headache. Oh,
yes, I'm not going to enjoy the next few hours. Not at
all.


Sure enough, one of the six flanks � the southernmost
one � was a tad too slow to comply with Goodman's

delete "too"

orders. One of the pack commanders made the decision
to delay the execution of his instructions after one
of his ships was hit by an errant graser beam from an
exploding warhead. Since the damage was slight and
easily repaired and the commander was relatively
inexperienced, he decided to use his pack to buy the
crew of the damaged ship the few minutes they needed
to get back on their feet. He was confident of the
success of his mission and his superiors � flush with
the confidence of victory �signed off on it even going
so far as to slow down their own breaking maneuvers by

braking

a few dozen gees. As is most often the case in times
of war, the repairs took longer than planned and Oguso
seized the opportunity by feinting an attack on the
northernmost flank. Before the commodore in charge of
the southernmost flank could communicate orders to the
contrary, a small detachment of 500 ships under the
command of an aggressive captain swung threateningly
towards the main body Oguso's fleet whilst his
attention was concentrated on the northern flank. It
was a testament to their training that the reaction
was almost instantaneous and perfectly executed.

"As near as I can triangulate, the lead elements of
Xelma Two are approximately sixteen light seconds
behind the rearmost elements of Xelma One. Offhand,
I'd say that Xelma Two its prey within the next
quarter turn, Sir."

"Which means that the battle is probably long over in
our time..." Upan noted aloud. After a brief pause, he
turned to Olin and issued his orders, "Establish a
laser comm. link with the convoy and pass the order to
stay put with their drives running hot. Instruct them
I want the engines kept running quiet-like
emission-wise, 

Ew.


ut ready to make a run for it should a

need arise."

The Communications Officer gave another barely
detectable wriggle of his antennae as he executed his
orders. Upan waited until he Olin shot a look in his
direction, silently informing the captain that the
message was sent. Upan turned his attention back to
the tank and the battle.

The seconds ticked slowly by for what seemed like an
eternity until suddenly the tank flared with a great
many new strobes of light that sprang to life between
the two alien forces. The torpedoes � at least Upan
assumed they were torpedoes were at least four and a
half times faster than the ships � and they were fired
from a range a fourteen and a half light seconds,
which was light years beyond the reach of Dawe
technology. The holograph whitened from four colossal
explosions each with a yield many orders of magnitude
higher than the most powerful ones in the Empire's
arsenal. So powerful in fact that Upan considered it a
miracle his ship's electronics weren't all fried by
the EMP alone.

When the display returned to normal almost two minutes
later, Xelma One was reduced in absolute numbers to a
size smaller than Xelma Three. The survivors of Xelma
One broke ranks and fled, but they were picked off one
by one by the enemy and within minutes, the last of
them was a rapidly expanding cloud of gas destroyed by
an explosion that was only an order of magnitude more
powerful than the most powerful warhead deployed by
the navy. Immediately afterward, another large fleet
appeared directly in front of Xelma Three and made
short work of it with more of those unbelievably
powerful warheads.

Upan wisely decided to continue to run silent until he
had proof positive that Xelma Two and its companion
fleet had left the system through whatever mysterious
means they entered it before getting his ships under
way.

"The main reason we went to Offcon 3 was because our
astrogators established our position beyond doubt.
Thus, we know for certain we're not trapped in
Andromeda. We're, in fact, in the Scutum Crux arm of
the Milky Way. This is good news in one sense and bad
news in another. For if we're in our home galaxy, the
question arises then where did all the supernovae go?
Did we travel back in time or were we transported to a
parallel universe? 

Ah.  If they'd managed to establish beyond doubt that they were in 
Scutum Crux, then they'd already know that the stars were more than 
3,000 years in the past.  3,000 years of stellar movement can't be 
mistaken for anything else.

The meeting was, incidentally, a nice break.  This story's greatest 
weakness is a lack of human dimension to the characters. 
Professionalism is nice but if you have too much of it, the characters 
seem like machines.  The main problem with this story is the sheer 
intensity of the technical information being sprayed at the reader 
though.  Makes it difficult to wade through.  Honestly?  I think you 
might benefit from not giving us a blow by blow of the mop-up operation. 
  Just show us it happening from the POV of the Dawes.


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