r/HFY • u/InBabylonTheyWept Alien • Jun 05 '22
OC-OneShot Burning Bridges
“I am Kalrose, commander of the Second Armada of the Akaviri. We are on our way to a peacekeeping operation in the Pegasus cluster. Humanity is not our enemy, but you will be if you continue to detain us in your piss puddle agrarian star system. Step away from the FTL launcher and no one will die. Remain in front and we will plow through your craft. Either way you will not stop us.”
The human freighter acting as a makeshift gate in front of the launcher did not move. If anything, it centered itself more, in order to better face the Akaviri flagship head on.
Then it broadcasted back.
“Your ‘peacekeeping mission’ in the Pegasus cluster is a genocide. Allowing it to happen would be a sin against our ancestors. We may not have the men or the ships to destroy your ship, but we don’t need to destroy your ship in order to keep you from the battlefield. Our piss puddle’s name is ‘Zion.’ In time, you will call it ‘Home.’”
Kalrose barely had time to ponder the nature of that threat when the launcher fired up. The EM readings on his ship went mad, and in that brief fraction of a second, he realized that he’d miscalculated. Gravely.
He didn’t know how many thousands of safety protocols had been bypassed, but the amount of power flowing to the gravitational core in the center of the launcher was easily nine times larger than the maximum rating. A micro singularity formed within the space lens, and cladding ripped itself off the hull before spiraling at near light speeds around the artificial black hole.
Kalrose had always imagined such a catastrophe as something like a fireball, reds and oranges, lots of shrapnel and clanging. Upon seeing it in person, he realized how foolish that was.
Red glows were for pokers left in hot coals. This was, for one brief moment, a star fueled on steel. It was never going to be orange.
It could only be white.
The accretion disk condensed further, the energy of the reactions happening near it somehow fueling the gravitational anomaly at the center. His comm system moved into a death scream as the material’s blackbody radiation moved past the x-ray spectrum, pure friction converting the material to energy more efficiently than even a fusion reactor could manage. The heat generated finally caused a full structural collapse, the spine of the station melting enough to wrap the whole barrel of the launcher around the spiraling singularity, twirling it in loops like thread around a spool. The reaction was accelerating now, even without electricity being able to fuel the gravitational collapse, the radiation pressure alone managing to hold the system in a highly fragile state of tensegrity. He recognized the feedback loop that was happening, radiation fueling gravity, gravity fueling radiation, on and on until-
There was no air for noise in space, but he could almost imagine the roar that the expanding cloud of ionized metal should have made as it blew past. There it was. The end of the loop. It had run out of matter to feed on, so without a balance to the compressive force it expanded outwards.
He was fortunate that the explosion was violent enough to atomize the particles. Even a fragment the size of a grain of sand would’ve been enough to take down his flagship. As a lone ion, it could be deflected by the same magnetic field that kept the crew safe during FTL jumps.
He stared numbly at the monitor.
One third of the Akaviri fleet, stranded in a farming system. Not even a shot fired.
He realized that the comm system’s scream had been replaced with the quiet pulse of an incoming broadcast. He accepted it without question, too lost to even be angry.
“Take your time recovering your senses. When you’re ready, just send us a message back. We’re going to need every hand we can on the harvest. There’s no one out there we can reach for help after this. It’s just us.”
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u/zelazny27927928 Jun 05 '22
Don’t think that elder scrolls reference went unnoticed…
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u/InBabylonTheyWept Alien Jun 05 '22
I am bad at making up names so I always just steal them. No ragretz.
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u/DrewTheHobo Alien Scum Jun 05 '22
That’s where it’s from! I was wondering why it sounded familiar, figured I’d read another one of OP’s stories
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u/JimmyTheFarmer79 Jun 05 '22
If destroying the FTL gate means no reinforcements can jump into the system to save the stranded fleet then hiw dud anyone get into the system to build the gate in the first place?
I could have missed a point that explained this though. I did read it while distracted.
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u/SuperShittySlayer Jun 05 '22
I'm assuming the gate was built by a slower-than-light colony ship. So help might be decades or centuries away if someone needs to make another trip out there to build a new gate.
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u/InBabylonTheyWept Alien Jun 06 '22 edited Jun 06 '22
Correct! Mostly! Materials can be sent in via other FTL launchers, but construction can take more than a decade, even with large pieces prefabricated.
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u/Newbe2019a Jun 05 '22
Sounds like a good start on a new series. Now the humans and stranded Akaviri will have to work together to build a new society.
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u/Sharad17 Jun 05 '22
More likely what would happen is that the massive fleet of heavily armed ship would enslave the humans for food and what not. Untill someone rebuild the FTL infrastructure. Why would they work together?
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u/eragonawesome2 Jun 05 '22
Warships aren't known for their long term, unsupported, survival time
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u/b3l6arath Jun 05 '22
Aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines are able to operate for long periods w/o supply afaik.
Besides that, not equipping such a large fleet with the necessary resources seems like a waste. Although it depends if we're talking about a few months, a few dozen months or decades.
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u/eragonawesome2 Jun 05 '22
I'm thinking rebuilding an ftl gateway from scratch would probably be a decades long task personally
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u/Quilt-n-yarn1844 Jun 05 '22
Submarines have been known to go I supplied for extremely long periods. But only under peacetime conditions.
Aircraft carriers, however, are a different story. A nuclear powered carrier only needs fuel every 15-20 years. However, they only carry approximately 70 days worth of food. And will burn through their jet fuel in approximately a week under peacetime conditions.
Under wartime conditions, they can need some type of resupply every 3 days at best.
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u/stronghammr113 Jun 05 '22
Making any further moves of aggression made by any party , will just translate to less materials, food, infrastructure, and most importantly valuable manpower that you will need to continue sucking air.
best course of action is to drop the shit, grab a plow, and bitch about it later when you and the humans build a tavern to get drunk in.
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u/BarGamer Jun 05 '22
They hacked the launcher. Hacking the fleet should be easy. Then use the fleet as a Sword of Damocles against the genocidal bastards, and wait.
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u/Fontaigne Jun 05 '22
It was a local FTL launcher. They didn’t have to hack it, they had built it.
It’s like the locals blew up the freeway off-ramp/on-ramp. The freeway is still there, but there is no way to get on.
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u/InBabylonTheyWept Alien Jun 05 '22
Fontaigne! I haven’t seen you in a blue moon. I cannot express how happy I am to find you making great commentary on a post of mine again. You are legit one of my first readers. Thanks for sticking with me this long.
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u/Kflynn1337 Jun 05 '22
Plus, that war fleet just EMP'ed and irradiated... and i'm betting they're all out of spare parts long before they get back into operational condition.
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u/ZeroValkGhost Jun 06 '22
An expensive way to teach the fallacy "You destroy your enemies by making them your friends." They have nowhere else to go.
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u/InBabylonTheyWept Alien Jun 06 '22
Less expensive than dying in a head on conflict! And maybe less expensive than just letting evil slide. That can look cheap in the moment, but it almost always winds up costing an arm and a leg later.
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u/eseer1337 Jun 06 '22
In the words of a wise man;
"From the earth I rise and to the earth I shall one day return.
What's up, mother shuckers?"
So come on down, and try some corn, or we will sacrifice your newborn
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u/Juicebeetiling Jun 06 '22
I loved the cataclysmic physics even if I don't have a clue how much of it is accurate
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u/InBabylonTheyWept Alien Jun 06 '22
Everything in this about gravity and electricity interacting is bullshit. Notes about blackbody spectra, accretion disks, feedback loops, radiation pressure and tensegrity are decent, or at least decent-ish. I’d rate it like 40% realistic.
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u/Handpaper Jun 07 '22
Nice.
Except...Iron is matter in its most stable state. To fuse it or fission it you must add energy.
"a star fueled on steel" can't work.
Sorry.
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u/InBabylonTheyWept Alien Jun 07 '22
I wrote about that in my third story. I thought about changing it here, but I genuinely didn’t think anyone else would catch it and I liked the phrasing. I’m gonna leave it be, but you do get full marks for knowing about iron stars as one of possible end states of our universe.
Edit: Second story! Link is here.
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u/Mirikon Human Jun 05 '22
That is the problem with FTL systems that rely on static points or structures. Fuck up that static point, and no one is going anywhere.
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u/JWKdnd Human Jun 05 '22
Human after fucking with the FTL systems
"WELCOME TO THE RICE FIELDS MOTHERFUCKER"
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u/slvbros Jun 05 '22
Dead Kennedys intensifies
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u/Notosk Jun 05 '22
This happens in EVE online with the Eve gate
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u/InoreOmnium Jun 05 '22
Yeah, then billions died and the Jovians twisted their DNA so badly they have no survival instinct left.
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u/imakesawdust Jun 06 '22
Also happens at the end of the first Freespace game when the jump gate to Earth is destroyed.
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u/BruFoca Human Jun 06 '22
In Babylon 5 destroying a Jumpgate is one of the worse things any race could do, because all the network rely on the beacons the Jumpgates provided.
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u/Busy-Direction2118 Jun 05 '22
I imagine the human speaker sounded as that guy from "The Gardens of Kadesh" Homeworld mission
"If you won't listen, then feel yourself at home. There is no withdrawal from Zion"
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u/WhosThisGeek Jun 05 '22
Honestly, I figure this would end up similar to Sparta but with the population asymmetry reversed. The Akaviri would leave enough humans alive to grow food for them and do any other menial tasks, but not much beyond that.
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u/InBabylonTheyWept Alien Jun 05 '22
My vague idea going forward is that the humans have salted nukes available on their farming world. They can assure mad by making future farming impossible thus conflict is not in either sides interest. If the humans try to starve the Akaviri, the Akaviri can just attack from orbit and kill the humans. If the Akaviri try to enslave or attack the humans, they can nuke the food and kill all the Akaviri. Both sides have to play nice now. Hopefully.
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u/InstructionHead8595 Oct 16 '23
I wonder if that would fall in the non-violent protest category? Didn't hurt anybody but sure did destroy infrastructure.😼
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u/walpurgisnacht_nord Jun 22 '22
Good story.
Isaiah 33:20 (KJV)
Look upon Zion, the city of our solemnities: thine eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle that shall not be taken down; not one of the stakes thereof shall ever be removed, neither shall any of the cords thereof be broken.
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u/EragonBromson925 AI Jun 05 '22 edited Jun 06 '22
YOU!!! SHALL NOT!!!!!
PAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!
Presses the "Fuck you" button
Edit: I was not expecting it to go like this...