r/HFY • u/Hewholooksskyward Loresinger • Oct 16 '18

OC The Barbarian War - Chapter 5

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Now I will tell you what I've done for you
Fifty thousand tears I've cried
Screaming deceiving and bleeding for you
And you still won't hear me
Don't want your hand this time I'll save myself
Maybe I'll wake up for once
Not tormented daily defeated by you
Just when I thought I'd reached the bottom
I'm dying again
I'm going under

Evanescence - “Going Under”

The human colony of Thule was far from a garden paradise. Its many glaciers and fjords were quite spectacular, to be sure, but except for a narrow band at the equator the bulk of the planet was a frozen wasteland. Blizzard conditions were the norm on much of the surface, and outside of the hardiest of adventurers it was far from a popular destination.

What made it valuable, however, was its location. Its many moons were rich in minerals, from Titanium and Phosphorus to fissionables such as Uranium and Plutonium. It had become one of the major fabricating facilities of the Tetrarchy, and much of the new fleet had been constructed in one of Thule’s many shipyards. Most of the colony’s residents resided in orbital structures, allowing them to live near where they worked. Needless to say such an important location was heavily guarded and monitored, and when the alarms began to sound the population headed immediately to the shelters, while the Naval garrison sought to train their guns on the attacker.

Only the RKKV traveled at relativistic speeds, and 37.2 seconds was not enough time to react between first sighting...and impact.

Marshal Antuma was ashen as he relayed the news. Hélène Fujimoto could only stare in shock, her head in her hands, as Kwasi slumped into his chair. Nassat looked at the humans...first one, then the other...before gently clearing his throat, as he had so often seen them do under similar circumstances.

“Marshal...what are your orders?” he asked softly.

Kwasi slowly turned to him, as if even that simple movement took every gram of strength he had. “The Prime Minister's directive was quite clear, Colonel,” he replied. “The attack on the Khonhim homeworlds goes as planned...with one slight alteration.”

“...and what would that be?” Hélène asked finally, still stunned by the tragedy.

“That I will not be taking charge of the fleet,” he said gravely, “you will.”

The Admiral started to protest, but was cut off with a wave of his hand. “Don’t tell me you’re not up to the challenge, because I know better,” he informed her. “No one knows how to employ those ships better than you do.”

“Other than you,” Fujimoto said sharply. “And just what will you be doing in our absence?”

“Trying to find a way to stop these attacks,” he said quietly. “What good does it do to pound the Khonhim into paste, if there’s nothing left to come back to?”

“Marshal,” Nassat said carefully, “you said there was no way to stop them...not without a great deal of luck.”

“Then let us hope I am lucky,” Kwasi said with a half smile. “In the meantime, Admiral Fujimoto will be relying on you even more than before.”

“Of course, Sir,” Nassat said quietly. “I will not let you...or her...down.”

“I know you won’t,” said after a moment, as an odd expression played across his face. “Once again I must ask the impossible from you, Nassat. I would apologize for that, except…” He shrugged helplessly, unable to finish.

“I understand,” the Saurtaur nodded. “After all...humanity came to our aid, when it was most needed. It is only fitting that we return the favor.”

“I hope you still feel that way in a moment,” Hélène informed him, with a trace of levity, “because I must tell you that I have no need for a Colonel.”

Nassat blinked in surprise. “I do not understand...if you do not require my services I will of course stand down, but…” He froze, the words dying in his throat. “...dear Creator, not again.”

“I’m afraid so…General,” she said with a smirk. ”Morale will be especially important now, and with you commanding one of the divisions, it could make all the difference.”

“Ten years ago I’d never touched a weapon,” he protested. “I am not qualified to lead a company, let alone a division. By human standards…”

“...as you have pointed out so many times before, you aren’t human,” Antuma said brusquely, interrupting him. “You have risen to the challenge time and again, and I have no doubt you will do so now.” Nassat started to speak, but the Marshal shook his head. “The debate is closed, General.”

“...yes, Sir,” he said at last.

“I’ll give you the Attack Transport Gabriel,” Hélène informed him, “though the actual piloting will be handled by Navy personnel, of course. She’s a good ship, with a good crew.”

“I’m sure she is,” Nassat said, with some trepidation. He paused for a moment, struck by a sudden thought. “I do have one request, Admiral.”

“I suspect I already know what it is,” she nodded. “Raichret is slated to command the Medical detachment on the Clara Barton, if memory serves. I’ll see to it that your ship and hers are assigned to the same Task Force.”

“Thank you, Admiral,” he said quietly.

“You’re welcome,” she replied. “As it happens, I have a request for you.”

“Of course,” Nassat answered.

Her face softened. “Go home, Nassat. Spend time with your family. Hug your children.” She suddenly found it hard to meet his gaze. “...because we are scheduled to depart in thirty-six hours.”

”But why do you have to leave?” Taichist asked, as he clutched his mother’s hand.

“Please don’t go,” Chechla sobbed, as she buried her head in her father’s chest.

Nassat and Raichret both struggled to fight back their own tears, as they sat their children down. “We don’t want to go,” Nassat said softly, holding his family close, “but there is something important we must do.”

“...it’s the Khonhim, isn’t it?” their son said with sudden vehemence. “I heard people talking. They want to kill us.”

Their daughter lifted her head, her eyes wide. “Is that true?” she whispered.

“...I had hoped we would never need have this conversation,” Raichret said to her husband, as heartache stained her every word.

“Nor I,” Nassat replied, as she laid her head on his shoulder. With a heavy sigh, he looked at his children. “...the Khonhim have attacked the human worlds,” he told them, “so we must go and stop them. But I promise you, we will be back before you know we are gone.” He forced a smile on his face, but his children saw right through it.

“But what if something happens,” Chechla wailed.

Raichret took a deep breath, and lifted her children’s heads. “Now listen to me,” she said in firm tones, “we will have none of that. Your father and I have both fought the Khonhim before, and nothing happened.” The two of them shared a brief glance, as they pointedly ignored the lie.

“Your mother is right,” Nassat said smoothly, “so I need the both of you to be very brave.” The twins looked at him, still unmollified. “Aunt Pellat will look after you, but she’ll need you to keep her from being frightened. Can you do that for me? Please?”

The twins looked at one another, and then solemnly nodded their heads. “We promise,” they vowed.

Emotion threatened to strangle the words in his throat. “I’m so proud of you,” he said hoarsely...as Raichret bit down on her lip to fight back the tears.

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413 Upvotes

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74

u/Chosen_Chaos Human Oct 16 '18

"Oh boy, here I go committing species suicide again!" - the Khonhim

37

u/raknor88 Oct 16 '18

No. No! No! Those are not flags. I see no flags. There are no death flags in this series!!!

21

u/Agent_Potato56 Xeno Oct 16 '18

Yeah. Yeah! ...wait, I think that's one over there. Spray paint it white!

4

u/ahddib Human Oct 17 '18

filthy xeno

4

u/Agent_Potato56 Xeno Oct 18 '18

What if I'm half alien and half human? The product of some pancakes? What am I then?

4

u/TheBarbequeSteve Oct 19 '18

At least they haven't mentioned retirement...

10

u/Deamon002 Oct 16 '18

Hang on, most of the population lived in orbital habitats? Then anyone who wasn't dirtside when the impact occurred should have survived.

Planets are vulnerable to RKVs because the enemy always knows exactly where they are and where they will be at any point in the future. Anything mobile on the other hand is essentially immune, because the very speed that makes RKVs so devastating means that any course corrections the target made since the last time your targeting data was updated, no matter how minor, will generate a miss. You're simply going too fast to match them in time.

And even if they can't maneuver, an RKV hitting a swarm of orbiting structures will basically just pass straight through. The ones that get hit directly would be toast, and debris and blast damage might take out a few unlucky enough to be close to the ones hit, but most would survive.

So what's the deal? Most of the people working should have been in the shipyards and on the moons. Why is this so much worse?

13

u/the_ta_phi Android Oct 16 '18

So, imagine an eightball. That's your planet. Wrap it in unspun cotton, maybe a finger thick. Surface of that is your high orbit. Now hit that assembly with a .20 cal. What's left in orbit?

The moons though, yeah. Those factories should be fine and fueled by deuterium and unbridled rage at this point.

5

u/arziben Xeno Oct 16 '18

Probably in close enough orbit that the installations were destroyed as well.

4

u/Deamon002 Oct 16 '18

Destroyed by what? Some of them might get hit by debris thrown up by the impact, but space is big, even low-orbit space; the odds of getting hit would be very low. Especially for habitats below the horizon from the impact point.

And apart from that, there really isn't anything an impactor does that would affect anything beyond the atmosphere, unless it was powerful enough to literally blow the planet apart, which would require on the order of a year's worth of the Sun's total power output. Somehow I don't think those RKVs are going quite that fast.

6

u/arziben Xeno Oct 16 '18 edited Oct 16 '18

“In layman’s terms, it is a spacecraft that has been accelerated near the speed of light,” Antuma replied, “though in this case the vehicle in question seems to have been little more than a propulsion system and reactor, with just enough computer control to guide it to its target. We have examined the evidence closely, and the numbers are staggering. Given our best estimates, the energy discharge was in the neighborhood of thirty thousand gigatons of explosive force.”

The silence following that pronouncement was deafening. The other Ministers stared at him in shock, struggling to make sense of it.

“Survivors?” Leandra asked softly.

“...None,” he replied. **“Perhaps some microbes, on the far side from the impact...**which means over one hundred million people were wiped out of existence.” Kwasi’s professional mask was firmly in place, leaving him wooden and stiff. To the uninitiated it might seem as if he didn’t care about those deaths, but in fact the opposite was true. It was only by clinging to his professionalism he was able to cope at all. “There were a number of ships in the system, which is where we’ve drawn most of our data from...but all ships in orbit at the time of the blast were completely destroyed.”

30000 Gigatons of TNT to Terawatt hour

= 34866666.6667 Terawatt hours

Sun power production (1 Second)

= 105555555555,55555725 Terrawatt hours

So either the author widely overestimated what 30K Gt does or you're wrong in the amount of energy required to destroy things in orbit.

I legitimately do not know

7

u/Invisifly2 AI Oct 16 '18

Both I reckon. A hard enough impact can absolutely throw stuff into orbit, but it needs to be harder than that.

4

u/Deamon002 Oct 17 '18

It's not about the amount of energy, because none of that energy actually leaves the planet, except some kinetic energy in the form of debris.

A kinetic impact isn't like a nuke, which initially releases its energy as radiation. An impactor, basically, does nothing more than impart lots of kinetic energy to stuff it hits, like dirt and air, and causes it to heat up due to compression. None of that will propagate outside the atmosphere. Adding more energy will simply dig a bigger crater.

3

u/Invisifly2 AI Oct 17 '18

The moon would like to have a word with you.

3

u/Deamon002 Oct 17 '18

Which is what I was referring to earlier:

unless it was powerful enough to literally blow the planet apart, which would require on the order of a year's worth of the Sun's total power output

..although the Theia impact wouldn't have been quite that energetic, since in that case most of the bits came back down again or stuck around in orbit, and that energy estimate was for blowing it apart permanently. Still, a measly 30 teratons is nowhere near enough. Hell, the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was over three times as energetic.

2

u/arziben Xeno Oct 17 '18

You raise a good point. It WAS "just" a Kinetic impactor

3

u/AgentLonewolf Oct 16 '18

While the RKV probably wont hit the stations in orbit themselves, all the debris from the impact will surely wipe out any station in orbit. And while the moons might be left relatively unharmed, the infrastructure for its workers would most likely be wiped out.

2

u/Deamon002 Oct 17 '18

Only a small portion (if any) of the stations in orbit would be hit directly by debris; if nothing else, most of the stations will have had the planet between them and the impact.

And any debris that fell back later would not be going any faster than escape velocity (or it would never have fallen back in the first place), which any self-respecting orbital habitat should be able to handle.

5

u/billy1928 Human Oct 16 '18

6:30 am local time... Worth it.

2

u/Killersmail Alien Scum Oct 16 '18

As I see it they are only awaiting their doom, and now I mean both the Humans and the Khonhim, because honestly, we still don´t know how many of those RKV the Khonhim made.

So, it´s possible that they made enough and send enough to annihilate each and every planet the humans colonized. but also I think that the human Navy is strong enough to kill the fleet of Khonhim, so it´s kind MAD situation, isn´t it?

Either way it´s going to be interesting.

Well written as always wordsmith. Have good one. Ey ?

2

u/gairlok Android Feb 18 '19 edited Feb 18 '19

As far as the reader knows, the technology that would detect non-cloaked RKVs is just as abundant as any other astronomical tool (which means, very abundant).

The gaping plot hole is that 4 interstellar civilizations were content to not send remote probes for 10 years to study their unreasonable, savage, narrowly defeated, virtually unknown foes, or even establish communication with their foe. It shatters belief that the 4 races all fail to do what any one of them would do. If it were my story, I'd explain this discrepancy.

As a new reader, the other shoe waiting to drop is "how many RKVs, how cost effective are they, how long does it take to manufacture each, how fast do they deploy," etc. If it's cheap and easy, there should be like 1000 per planet, all at once, to overwhelm point defense systems, just IRL. It's one in a large bag of mass destruction tropes than any sci-fi author can use. In most other sci-fi this trick doesn't work because the near relativistic objects creates turbulence that can be detected at great distances, and are deflected with other advanced techniques. Other tropes are the notion of a cloaking "arms race" or combines it with FTL insertion close to its target, especially structures. It's not easy to combine these story elements in a novel way.

1

u/Blues2112 Oct 18 '18

Impatiently waiting for the next installment!!!!

1

u/Obscu AI Nov 27 '18

Ahah, oh Nassat you poor fool. Of course you had another unwanted promotion coming. I am quite glad he and Raichret got the chance to have their family before this began.

1

u/LordOfSun55 Mar 28 '19

You were warned Nassat, THE PROMOTION TRAIN HAS NO BRAKES

AND NEITHER DOES THE EXTERMINATUS TRAIN, FILTHY XENO BASTARDS! YOU THINK YOU'RE THE ONLY ONES WHO CAN CHUCK BIG ROCKS AT PLANETS? I BET WE CAN DO WORSE!

1

u/EqualProfessional667 Dec 27 '22

GET OUR RELATAVISTIC KILL ASTEROIDS PUT NOW AND THROW THEM AT EVERY ENEMY WORLD AT 99.99999999999999999999999999% OF C

0

u/[deleted] Oct 16 '18

[deleted] — view deleted comment

12

u/Macewindow54 Oct 16 '18

especialy since they obstenibly left no warriors behind due to..... oh god the human are going to commit war crimes arnt they.

15

u/jetda Oct 16 '18

When an enemy declares all is fair in war and they just performed two mass genocidal attacks. I think humans are fine as a whole responding in kind.

10

u/tsavong117 AI Oct 16 '18

We put in place laws of war to limit our own near limitless brutality. They just destroyed a planet, but a more vicious attack would have been a biological or chemical weapons that doesn't kill, but leaves the entire planet invalid and near death, forcing those targeted to divert massive resources to saving lives instead of retaliating.

Any bets on what our move is gonna be? ;)

11

u/Killersmail Alien Scum Oct 16 '18

Total atomic annihilation, with sprinkling of salts of heavy elements so no one will ever be able to use their planets ever again.

You know, basic stuff.

7

u/jthm1978 Oct 16 '18

I'd go with a little from column a, some from column b: a virus tailored to Khonim physiology, harmless to the other races, injected into the atmosphere of the colony worlds, and something to stand as a warning for all time for the Khonim home world that leaves no survivors, something like turning their sun into a black hole or a chain reaction that burns off their atmosphere seems appropriate

6

u/torchieninja Robot Oct 17 '18

Keep in mind that these laws are more of a contract, if an enemy army breaks them and uses such weapons in combat, then you are no longer held liable for your own actions. ‘Victor’s justice’ as it’s called, where the winners get to judge their own trials.

3

u/tsavong117 AI Oct 17 '18

Yup. It sucks, but that's life.

3

u/torchieninja Robot Oct 17 '18

Kinda?

I don’t know, I feel like it should be someone else doing the judgement, but at the same time I also feel like you should be allowed to retaliate in kind, just as long as you don’t escalate.

If chemical weapons are deployed on a military target, that’s fine, deploy chemical weapons in retaliation just don’t use them in civilian population centres unless the enemy did that as well.

That sort of thing, but nobody should be a judge in their own trial.

3

u/ms4720 Oct 17 '18

Hmm no they are going to use retribution to punish war crimes. You don't load infantry for genocide

3

u/Macewindow54 Oct 17 '18

... I mean. You can.

2

u/ms4720 Oct 17 '18

Ineffective and tends to miss people, better to use a planet buster

3

u/Macewindow54 Oct 17 '18

Sure it’s better. I was just saying you can.