Galacta - The Battle for Saturn The Story Admiral Richard Stevens sat back in the control cockpit in the central ship of the battlecluster Sword of Vengeance. Long distance scanners were just picking up the fringes of Saturn's rings. And in there with all the rocks and dust were sure to be the aliens' spycams. "As soon as they sense us, they'll be on us like a swarm of mad hornets," he warned the pilots. Stevens made a conscious decision to relax. No sense going into battle nervous. Scared, sure. Fear can rapidly sharpen the mind, but nervousness can just as quickly dull it. And don't even consider panic as an option. That'd be death for sure. His head hit the padded rest, and his eyes closed, but not in sleep. In his mind, Stevens was replaying the events and headlines of the past four years. Back in '83, he'd have still been serving as a first officer under Admiral Bigg. "Got promoted when we lost Bigg in the battle --- hah, not a battle, more like a wipeout --- of '86," he thought. Bigg was a good man, and Stevens would have chosen any other way to get his command. But you've got to take what they give you, and he rose quickly from Admiral of the South Polar, Bigg's old command, to his present station as Rear Admiral of the Outer Reach. The Prexy didn't think Stevens should be risking himself like this in the Sword of Vengeance, but didn't have the nerve to deny him. He ran through it in his mind: "But it was in July, 2183, that the universe changed for us --- for humans --- forever. That was when the researchers at Dark Side University found the alien fleet on their way to Pluto. What a shock that was to everyone. Seven SETI projects had played out over the two centuries since their inception, and not a peep was heard from outer space. The big ears never heard a thing. And now, it was a big eye finally tossing the Homo-exclusivists on their ears. The four kilometer faceted telescope on the dark side of the Moon spotted over 30,000 individual objects moving into the solar system, all in a very organized formation. No one who saw the images for a moment believed it was an interstellar meteor shower. "The odd thing about them was that they never emitted any radio signals, and radar sensing always returned an empty field. Half of the pols wanted to send an envoy, half of them wanted to send missiles, and half from each camp waffled daily. It was this sort of chaos that led to the first screwup. The pols wouldn't authorize continuous use of optical telescopes in the asteroid belt --- too many special interest groups still prospecting for silicon in the asteroid belts via optical sensing --- and, inevitably, the DSU telescope lost them as they went in the shadow of Jupiter. They were still outside the orbit of Pluto, but Jupiter got in the way of the line of sight. After three or so hours, Earth overtook Jupiter in orbit, and we could again see where the fleet was. Except they weren't there. "They looked for months, and never found them. More like, they found us. "November of that year was our first encounter with the aliens as a race. It didn't go well. In fact, it didn't go at all. The rare-earth mines on Pluto suddenly dropped out of radio contact, and ore shipment slugs stopped coming through. Ships were diverted there immediately, of course, but their radio contacts with us were inevitably of the nature "Everything looks okay. Wait, what's that......." After the third ship was lost, we stopped trying. Nothing happened for two months, then in February of '84, "nothing" happened again. "An amateur astronomer on one of Neptune's moons was searching for Pluto, but didn't find it. He told his father, an astrophysics researcher, who double checked his son's coordinates, and also didn't find it. Now, it may seem odd that the first person to discover that Pluto was missing was a child, but remember, planets aren't in the habit of going on vacations, stepping out for a bite to eat, or even going off to sit in another room. They're big hunks of rock on infinitely predictable paths around the Sun. There's no NEED to watch where they're going, because the math completely predicts their behavior. It was only a few hours from the boy's first report till every telescope, radar antenna, and scanner in the outer solar system was pointing where Pluto should have been. Some were scanning all around, wondering if someone had been playing a joke on them --- not thinking for a moment that it's really hard to hide a planet under a dark tablecloth. "Once the news reached Earth, fury was all. Nothing else was talked about for months. Everyone had a theory, but the most common one was the government party line --- A black hole ate it. In the military, few believed it, because we have long memories, unlike Joe Average who gets reprogrammed every week by his senseset. The whispering in the halls of every war spacecraft was the same: The aliens ate Pluto. Okay, maybe they didn't EAT it, but it IS missing, and so are the aliens, and so are all the miners and the rescue ships. "About half of the monitoring stations continued to try to find Pluto or at least some clue as to what happened to it, without success, until December of that year. That was the month everyone went nuts again. The Neptune Orbital Research Center stopped transmitting. It wasn't located on the planet itself, but on one of the moons. The planet probes stopped sending data at the same time. It was like someone had said "SHHH" to a planetary system of thousands of people. Not a peep was heard again. "Of course, ships were sent, with the same results as on Pluto. The ship would near its destination, everything would seem just as it should, then a sudden crackle of static, and nothing. Never heard from again. The media went totally crazy with it. No one could decide who was to blame, but it sure wasn't them. Business as usual for the pols, but this time they were pointing fingers at industry, the military, the universities, anyone. It was a terrible time. "Three months later, terrible turned to horrible. A vigilant eye was by now being kept on every planet and moon in the solar system, but a freak power outage brought down all the monitors around Uranus -- those set to monitor Neptune -- for three hours. When the scanners and scopes came back on line, Neptune and its moons were gone. "For once, the pols did something right. There were scare riots and suicides and mass-murderers on every block. They got together and in less than a week, hammered out the Solar Defense Concordance Treaty. It was a nasty bit of work, and there's still parts of it that aren't fully understood. But the important part was the intent: Every country and every company would contribute 20% of their Gross Product for research and defense of the solar system. Loopholes galore didn't stop everyone from jumping on the band wagon. It makes good business and political sense to be seen trying to save the human race from total extinction. "Out of the US's 20 percent came about 80 percent of the space going warships. All of us US Space Force jarheads got recommissioned under the SDC's new Solar Defense Force navy. Only thing good to come of that was increased pay. They wanted to keep all the experienced hands in, and all the experienced hands wanted out --- it was now really dangerous in space, apparently. So they changed the charter, eliminated all early retirement pay, and added 150% to our paychecks. Suddenly, again, space was a nice place to be. Keeps the enlistment lines long, too. "The first sheep led to the slaughter was my old fleet under Admiral Bigg. I'd been bedridden on the Moon with pneumonia from a faulty suit air processor, and just missed the fleet leaving for points out. I was mad as hell then, but when the fleet suddenly vanished like all the other ships we'd sent, I composed a thank-you note to the suit processor manufacturer. Never sent it, of course. "With the SDC Treaty in full effect, and the SDF making headlines as the biggest and best fleet ever (how could it not be, with 80% of the world's ships forced to join it), people were settling down, sort of. Newsreel footage from the 1940's in England reminds me a lot of what people were like back in '86. Business as usual, but a very real undercurrent of panic and despair. Lots of new babies that winter. After the fleet didn't return, SDF pulled an old warship design out of the Israeli archives and hacked it up a bit, tacked on new weaponry, new energy sources, and called it a "brainstorm." "After we finished chuckling about that, we took a good look at the design, and liked it. Seven ships mounted together for transport, but unlatching one-by-one for enemy combat. The idea was interesting. Common military strategy would dictate sending all seven ships in at the same time, to battle in flanks. But since our enemy was apparently capable of annihilating an entire fleet at once, better to send in a ship at a time, in hopes of doing more damage. Of course, only fools would want to pilot these individual warships. Somehow, the computer found 17 fools who were smart enough, agile enough, and low-enough rank not to know anyone who could jigger the files. We winnowed that down to the smartest, and designed the cockpits of the ships around them. "While all of this military planning was going on, the aliens were back to their old tricks. Most of the civilians on the colonies at Uranus had been evacuated after Neptune went, but there were still some caretaker staff still in place. These people were the next to go. In January on 2187, their communications stopped being received. When, three months later, the entire planet vanished, it would have been anticlimactic, save what the monitors found. There were 251 various sorts of scanners, sensors, radar dishes, telescopes and radiation detectors pointed at Uranus when it went, and the data we got from them was fascinating. "The planet, its rings, and its moons all started emitting increasing levels of broad spectrum radiation, from low infra-red, through visible light, to gamma rays and beyond. The emissions peaked 20 minutes later, when the planet was completely white hot. The light was then flicked off, like a switch, and there was nothing left of the planet, or its moons. Speculation went wild over what kind of device did this, why it needed to be done, who was doing it, anything and everything. The best minds got together and muddled out a theory on how the device worked. They explained it to the civilians like this: Imagine a lump of coal. When you burn it, it makes smoke, and ash, and produces energy. In this case, the planet itself is being burned from the inside out. This energy is being used for some unknown reason. But the effect of this process is that the microscopic percentage of energy escaping from the collectors the aliens placed inside the planet is enough to heat it white hot. When the planet is burned away to nothing, the light goes out, and nothing remains. "They figure it takes the aliens about three months to set up their planet burner. It took us eight months to build the Sword of Vengeance Battlecluster. Seven of the brightest (and dumbest) pilots in the SDF fleet, and me, sitting in a control module, deciding which of them will go to die next. What a news event. What a media circus it was. We left in May, and now here it is the middle of July. Two months of encouragement, thank you's, and best wishes from everyone we know, and billions of people we don't know. Saving the species would be a lot more fun if they weren't so pesty about it." Suddenly red beacons spring on all around the control center. Long range scanner indicates alien ships closing fast. Stevens snaps the safety covers off the ship-docking controls, and commands the injections of moderate stimulants into all his pilots. He thinks, "They're ready to go, give their lives in the battle for Saturn." ------------- The rest of the story is included with the second and third chapters of Galacta. Check out ORDER.TXT for details.