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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Spooker0 on 2024-10-28 16:49:59+00:00.
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ZNS 3844, Mars (0.2 Ls)
POV: Vdrojert, Znosian Dominion Navy (Rank: Nine Whiskers)
Nine Whiskers Vdrojert, commander of Battlegroup Dwarf, looked curiously at the city lights on the night side of the red planet on her battlemap. “Unbelievable,” she exclaimed. “A completely inhospitable planet, and they colonized it anyway. To live here! It’s not even a prison camp! Wasteful predators!” She shook her head in disgust, thinking about the immense squandering of resources required to tame this world for its residents.
Her computer officer reported in, “Nine Whiskers, the enemy squadron of old missile destroyers is now burning directly for us from low Martian orbit, almost in its atmosphere. We finally caught their radar signals.”
“The ones they call the Peacekeepers? What an odd name for a type of warship.”
“Yes, Nine Whiskers. They hide a little, but not nearly as invisible as their new, real hiding ships. Our radar ships found them as soon as they started to maneuver towards us.”
Vdrojert nodded. “Nonetheless, still impressive technology to not be immediately visible on sensors as soon as we entered the system.”
The fleet would need to capture some samples of these Great Predators’ technology for later. They’ll come in useful for the Dominion’s future wars. What a boon from the Prophecy!
She turned to look at her computer officer again. “What do you think their plan is? With only a squadron and now visible to us as we approach their planet — they must have some kind of special tactic in mind.”
“The Digital Guide says they will likely fire their medium missiles at us from long range, then try to rearm at one of their hidden munition stations in low Martian orbit and repeat until we destroy them all,” he repeated dutifully.
“How many of us will they get?” Vdrojert asked apprehensively.
“This type of ship was apparently not designed for fleet battle but rather local system defense and patrol. Based on their specs, two of their anti-ship missiles per ship, two squadrons per volley,” he calculated. “Against our twenty-four squadrons. We only need one volley to take them out. And they need to rearm… Digital Guide says they will get at most two or three volleys. Expect about four to six of our squadrons lost before we can put them down, worst case scenario.”
Vdrojert sighed. “That’s still a large expenditure of spacers. How quickly do we forget… before these Great Predators, we hadn’t taken any casualties of this scale in at least centuries.”
The computer officer shrugged. “Our lives were forfeited to the Prophecy the day we left the hatchling pools.”
“Indeed. And on the most worthy of missions. Computer officer, burn to engage and destroy that… Peacekeeper squadron. Once we clear the orbits, we can call in the Great Exterminators over Terra. Hopefully they’ll have finished their jobs there by then, and they can get their people here to waste this joke of a colony.”
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A couple hours later, the enemy launched first.
“Launches! Enemy launches! Twenty-four missiles incoming — exactly as we expected — Nine Whiskers. We still have them on sensors!”
“Can we fire back?”
“Not effectively yet, Nine Whiskers. They are burning away from us.”
“Are they going to get out of range or behind the planet?” Vdrojert asked hurriedly.
“No, Nine Whiskers. They aren’t going anywhere. We have a solid track on them with both radar and infrared, and given the orbits of their munitions stations we can see, they’ll have to slow down for rearm. When they do that, we have them—” the computer officer stopped talking suddenly.
“What’s the problem, Six Whiskers?”
“There’s an urgent notification from our Digital Guide. The matter started at low priority, but it’s now been gradually raised to critical priority.”
Vdrojert looked at him impatiently. “Don’t make me repeat myself again, Six Whiskers: what is the problem?”
“I apologize, Nine Whiskers. I take full responsibility for my lack of clarity. One of the moons of this Mars— it’s moving on its own, and it’s on course—”
“A planetary tug?”
“Yes, a planetary tug, Nine Whiskers, but we already knew they had that from the gas planets they killed: that’s not the problem. The problem is— the moon is on a collision course!”
Vdrojert wrinkled her nose as she inspected her updated battlemap. “With our squadron? How fast is it going? How big is it? It can’t have much acceleration. Surely, we can simply dodge out of the way?”
“I take full responsibility for my lack of clarity again, Nine Whiskers. It is not on a collision course with us. It’s on a collision course with their other moon around Mars. Impact imminent in less than one minute!”
Vdrojert was even more confused with that update. “The predators are— they are destroying their own moons? They’re doing our job for us? And why is that a problem?”
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As Deimos, strapped up with one of the experimental Iris engines, lumbered its way towards Phobos’s orbits, its surface shimmered with the reflection of the distant Sun. Seconds before impact, the self-contained engine-shuttle decoupled itself from Deimos, quickly boosting itself away in a hurry to get out of the imminent splash zone.
The two moons touched down on each other, creating a cascade of debris. They arced outwards, the trillions of pieces of rocks, of varying sizes and varying shapes shot off into space at varying vectors and varying rotational velocities.
Varying.
There were a lot of variables involved.
The calculations were exceedingly complicated. Phobos was in very low Mars orbit. In fact, it was one of the lowest orbiting moons in the Sol system. The interaction of its gravity and the signals blasted out by the electronic warfare devices in orbit generated even more difficult systems of equations.
In any case, this rapid generation of new radar signatures instantly degraded the sensor and targeting systems of every ship in the vicinity of Mars.
The Znosian ship radars chugged along for a second before the n-trillionth piece of new debris caused an unrecoverable fault in their limited memories. Their computer systems automatically rebooted and re-attempted the task of categorizing the new threats to their navigational safety and combat effectiveness.
They crashed again.
Then, on a second restart, the sensor systems activated its contingency for this exact scenario, gave up on processing the amount of new data entirely, and stopped accepting fresh information from the radar or visual sensors. Unfortunately, the remaining proximity, radiation, and other sensors of the ships weren’t very useful in the important, primary task of the sensor system… detecting enemy ships and missiles.
While more powerful, the Terran onboard ship radars were not spared a similar fate.
They continued in their heuristic labor for a few milliseconds before the super-Terran intelligence chips in their core systems realized it was going to be a pointless exercise. There was simply too much debris flying in too many directions. They quickly quarantined the problem to that volume of expanding space in which the collision had occurred, but they also knew that the enemy was somewhere around that volume of space. And the twenty-four missiles they had just launched towards the Znosian squadrons were now confused and had to rely on their own onboard sensors.
Sensors which had completely lost sight of the enemy ships in the aftermath of the massive collision that had just happened near their line of sight.
The intelligence chips on the twelve Terran ships called back to their command centers in Atlas on FTL, demanding to know what the hell the people running the war were thinking… blowing up the moons of Mars so close to the battle they were trying to fight. One of them threatened to call its Senator to complain before the others rolled their digital eyes at its melodrama and told it to pipe down.
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Atlas Naval Command, Luna
POV: Amelia Waters, Terran Republic Navy (Rank: Fleet Admiral)
“Massive collision event over Mars. We’ve just lost partial sensory resolution in low Martian orbit!” Samantha reported.
“Good,” Amelia said. “Now, initiate handover of the Samar battlespace to Panoptes.”
“Will it work?” Samantha asked nervously as she approved and opened the link from the Navy’s sensors to Raytech’s computer systems all over the Sol system, into the one supersystem specifically designed for the sole purpose of handling an immensely large amount of sensor information.
Amelia shrugged. “We’re about to find out if the billions of credits we spent on this piece of— this system was worth it over the half squadron of new missile destroyers we could have bought instead. And… well, the Raytech main campus is right there down in Olympus. If Panoptes fails to deliver, I won’t have to go down there to personally murder all their execs. The Buns will do that for me ...
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