SciFi and Fantasy Stories: That which we fought for p.2

            “This is the UES Goliath all ships please report in.”

            “UES Retribution ready.”

            “UES Revenge green lighted.”

            “UES Narcissist all set.” One by one the ships reported in until all were accounted for, the ships were huge, many more than a hundred cubic miles in size, designed and built by every nation on earth every one was unique. The largest and the flagship of the fleet was modeled after the super star destroyer Executioner from the 70’s hit Star Wars that was remastered in the nineties and prequalized at the turn of the century, The Goliath was a master piece of engineering and was one of The United States additions to the fleet, only the Japanese ships could match it in technological mastery and efficiency while a few of the Russian ships outstripped it in sheer fire power, the Spanish speaking countries had banded together and built a small number of fast ships with adequate fire power and the Muslim nations had created a few well balanced ships that were equally good in all aspects. Europe had designed and built star ships in a stand and deliver manner, heavily armored and shielded the carried a vast array of heavy weaponry but leaned heavily on star fighter support and other ships if enemy fighters came into the battle. Africa built it’s ships with a wild assortment of weaponry and had hulls with specially designed outer layers that earned them the nickname of ‘Chameleons’ although they couldn’t stand against the Australians who had their ships equipped with mostly light weaponry and a large number of missiles and fighters, they were the only ships in the fleet equipped with cloaking devices that rendered them invisible to sight, infrared, ultraviolet, radar and, any other sensing devise they had been tested against. Every ship carried their own complement of fighters as well as at least one squadron of F27s, fighters that had been designed by a team of the best fighter craft designers on earth at the time. Every ship represented the spirit and last hopes of the nations they came from, each was masterpiece in their own right.

            Many independents had also built ships, there were close to a thousand independently built star fighters being carried by the larger ships and about a hundred larger ships built by earth based companies wanting in on the action, more than a few of these were equipped with weapons that their designers believed were capable of destroying the Ghorloth home world, everything from Deathstar like lasers to missiles and bombs supposedly capable of reducing the entire planet to rubble. These independent ships, although part of humanities last hope, were not officially part of the fleet and did not have the fleets scramble codes, were not part of the fleet’s check-in, and would very likely not be coordinated with during battle.

            The fleet set out. There were no sad farewells, no great sendoff, news of the fleet had never reached television or radio since these could be read outside of the solar system, with only newspapers and the internet carrying news of the fleet, word did not get around very fast. Also the fleet was a Starfleet it was in space, any cheering crowds would have been flash frozen long before they became a cheering crowd. There were very few messages from earth to the fleet for essentially the same reasons. The only communications were carried by low yield lasers targeted to special reception stations on earth and the hulls of the ships.

            In addition to its fighters and missiles. Each ship also carried three weapons of destruction so powerful as to make Albert Einstein and the other designers of the first atomic bomb gasp in horror, these were the weapons decided to be most capable of destroying the Ghorloth home world, the very last hope of all humanity rested in these three different weapons carried by each ship.

***

            She was neither pretty nor even especially noticeable. She wasn’t tall, had no breasts to speak of, her nose had been broken once but wasn’t really crooked. She couldn’t have cared less. Despite anything that had gone before, she had been promised; she was now a fighter pilot. Multiple arrests on everything ranging from flagrant parking violations to flying the getaway vehicles for bank robbers and terrorists. It had all been worth it, she had become known as one of the greatest pilots of all time if not the best and the entirety of her checkered past had gotten her one thing, one place, one goal. She hadn’t designed the goal, never decided this was what she wanted, never imagined it possible. She was now, by request of the president of the United States, who she might add had been nearly refused except for one thing, well, two things. She had come aboard the U.E.S. Goliath on two conditions, one was that she would design the fighter she flew, the other was the allocation of one cubic mile of space refitted and built to her exacting specifications. The fighter was a marvel, she had designed it with little help from the ‘experts’ she had been allocated for the task and had made full use of her technological education she had received in college. The Phoenix she thought, that should be its name, no, a better name, Firescreamer. That was right. She had offered several innovative ideas for weapons, controls, engines and other things. The long cigar shaped fuselage, modeled on cartoonish rocket ships of olden times with the cockpit set low and far back fit like a glove and its four inertia drives she had designed from scratch set on struts outside the body and just behind the four powerful jetspray lasers, also of her own design, allowed it to push human endurance beyond anything it had ever encountered, only she could pilot it fully because of her extensive skeletal and vascular ‘improvements’ it maneuvered like a dream and took little more than a strong thought to push it into flight.

            The cubic mile of space she had been given contained her quarters, workshop, a modest metalworking shop and a few other things set off in a small corner, the rest was open except for a vast network of heating coils at the bottom and two claws attached to one mile long cables and set on tracks so they could move around the ceiling. One other small feature was a blank metal shed with a large door next to the space she had set aside for living in. all these specifications amazed and confused designers who demanded to know why so much space was left open among other things. All they got was silence, but they did what they were told anyway. They were fools of course, she would have settled for one of those new X-12 fighter simulators with the independent gravity controls instead of an entire cubic mile of empty space, but that was their loss. “Mia Thurmund” she thought to herself, “You have done quite well for yourself this time.”

***

            Hunter Ellington had been a simple mathematician, well, no true chaotician with specialties in three-dimensional analysis could be called simple really, and he had a penchant for strategy games bordering on fetish, he had mastered chess at age ten and beaten the world champion by twelve, from there he had moved into the world of real time strategy games and was being hailed as the first true strategic prodigy, then he went into mathematics and chaos theory, of course, he still had a computer and played strategy games during his free time, he wrote many papers on mathematical applications of such games and wrote insanely complicated algorithms to mimic a human strategic genius which many experts were unable to discern from a true human strategist. Because of all this of course, he had become the fleet’s strategist, and nominal leader during combat operations, he knew everything about every ship in the fleet down to the last fighter. Except why the U.E.S. Divine Wind weighed three hundred pounds more than the total of its combined parts, supplies, crew weights and ammo. That didn’t bother him as much as his intelligence advisor seemed to think it should, that was okay because Hunter didn’t like nor did he pay much attention to his intelligence advisor who knew this but that didn’t seem to stop him from trying. Hunter hadn’t really wanted the job of fleet strategist, but when your someone in the particular circumstances that hunter had been in, and the prime minister asks you to do something, refusing is not likely to result in a very long or productive life, of course he was appreciative of the fact that the prime minister hadn’t gone though with his threat to “De-man” him and sentence him to “clean up single handedly the Saint Christopher Island Radiological Disaster Area” his singular gifts had saved him, of course without them he wouldn’t of ever gotten into bed with the prime minister’s daughter in the first place…

***

            “Man I love this thing,” muttered James T. Conway Capt. Of the U.E.S. Mad Dog he had fallen in love with his command almost as soon as he was introduced and the more he inspected the mighty warship, the more he thought she was flawless. The shields were the most powerful ever designed but with a special frequency modulation that allowed him to fire her one hundred and ten heavy cannons without lowering it. The engines were mounted at just the right position and had just the right amount of arc. She was agile but not so that the helmsman would have to correct after every maneuver, the weapons teams were trained to a fine edge, they could not possibly be better, if he had for some reason of his own say, wanted to hit the A-6 square on a chess board from orbit and possessed a weapon capable of firing so that said chess board would be recognizable as such after being hit, his crews could have done it. Commanding a star ship, he reflected, was what he was born to do, and this star ship had seemingly been created to be commanded by him. If only his wife could have been here, but of course that was why he was commanding the ship, because his wife had died, it was the curse of his memory that he couldn’t forget her because of what her death had brought him, and he knew that as the journey went on, he wouldn’t be able to remember her for anything else. Well, he thought, they gave me a logbook, might as well make use of it, and so he sat down, pulled out a pen and began copying down all the memories of his wife.