The Carlson Chronicle An Infinity Chronicles Story
Act 20: Trust is earned, but Command is taken.

Garshan High Command HeadQuarters

Garshain

13-Jun-2352

DuChance and Shival sat arrow straight in the outer office chamber to the Admiral of their militaries naval arm. Neither of them had ever been here for disciplinary reasons, but then again, neither of them had ever had their commands blown out from under them before.

Looking over at Lacy, Elaina smiled, taking in the younger woman’s soft, yet rounded curves, ample bosom and slender waist. She was about to ask the Sub Captain if she had plans later, when they were both called into the inner office.

Sitting behind the large, blood red desk, sat Admiral of the Fleet, Elisia Banachek, a fiery red head of extremely evil disposition, and winner of many of the Garshan’s earliest victories, and like the two of them seated before her, an Eternal. Sitting in the two chairs opposite her desk, Lacy tried not to fidget, while Elaina lit one of her Root-weed cigarettes. The tangy aroma stung Lacy’s nose, she coughing once.

“So, do either of you incompetents want to tell me how you lost your respective commands to a race we catelogued not 200 years ago as being a primitive backwater, still using rockets!?”

“Don’t look at me, I ran afoul of an ‘Infinity’.” Elaina said, taking a long drag. Lacy simply gawked at her.

“An ‘Infinity’?! We destroyed every one of those ships. How the hell did you find one?” She demanded, as the Admiral merely let the younger girl ask her questions for her.

“My task force found Marrok, and as we were leveling the place, an ‘Infinity’ and a half dozen of those new Terran battle cruisers showed up. The ‘Infinity’ sent some kind of command order, Galhadian in origin no doubt, causing our ships to go from combat ready to shipyard stand by, dropping our shields and leaving us helpless. The rest is history. What’s your excuse? I heard just one of those battle cruiser’s nearly killed you, yet it still serves.” Elaina seethed, going for the kill. Lacy buckled, as she expected.

“They got lucky, plus, they have full, pre-civil war Galhadian technology, no doubt given to them by Lorelei.” Lacy shot back.

“ENOUGH!” Admiral Banachek ordered, rising from her chair. The Marrokian slave girl chained to the side of her desk cowered, thinking she was about to feel the whip again, but no whipping came. Elaina looked at her, and recognized her immediately.

“Yes, be still my sweet little pet. No more whippings for you today, former war goddess.” She said, as Loci, having been whipped to within an inch of her life more then 10 times today alone, cowered back toward the far wall.

Smiling, Elisia moved to sit on the corner of her desk, facing her two best ship commanders.

“I’ll give you both a second chance. The leader of the Terrans is a human male, alledgedly the son of Barnard and Claudia, remember those two?” She pointed out. Elaina smiled while Lacy seemed shocked. Loci however, sat up arrow straight at that revelation.

“And...I hope... he makes... you all burn!” She shrieked, as Elisia turned back to her, and triggered the neuro-shocker in her slave collar, Loci reduced to a screaming, writhing bag of flesh on the thickly carpetted floor. Turning off the device after Loci died, she turned back to her two errant ship handlers.

“Find this human, and bring me his head. I’ve pulled 4 fleets off of our borders with the Vor’Gosh. Oh, don’t worry about them, the fleets pounded their worlds extra flat before leaving. Those wretches retreated back into their caves like they always do. I’ll send the 116th and the 88th Marines to chase them down further into their holes, and finish the job. Fighting on one front is bad enough.”

“Which fleets?” Lacy asked, still looking at Loci’s body, twisted in agony.

“The 1st Vanguard, 3rd Deep Strike Legionnaires, 4th Loyal Guards, and the 84th Whiskey Battle Squadron.” Both Elaina and Lacy’s eyebrows shot way up at that fleet’s mention. It had been the Admiral’s main fleet back when she was winning prizes for the High Council.

“Lacy, darling, you’ll take the 1st and 3rd and head for the Terran’s homeworld, some blue-green rock they call ‘Earth’, while you Elaina, will take the 4th and my Whiskey to Center. Pound Lorelei to scrap metal, bring me her A.I. core, and that will be that. Then we can return to Galhadia, and finish what the Kanin started. My scouts tell me they located the Kanin deep strike force, that went looking for the Galhadians mythical ‘Lost Colony’. Found it in the Bineer Galaxy. Now, make haste! I want these ‘Humans’ wrapped up in less then 3 years, not accounting for travel. Dismissed!”

“By your Command!” They shouted, standing and saluting, their right hands, clenched as fists, first slamming into their chest, above the left breast, then swinging outward, palm open, arm raised at a 45 degree angle relative to the floor. Turning, then hurried out of the room, as Elisia turned to a slowly recovering Loci, pulling the long knife from the top of her desk, and stalking closer and closer toward the still dazed Marrokian, a flash of steel, and then nothing, as her office door closed...

“See you at Center, sister!” Lacy said, as she moved toward the waiting shuttle that would take her to her new command, some 345 ships strong, most of which were battle cruisers or larger. Elaina smiled, waved back, and boarded her waiting shuttle.

1-Aug-2352

Inside the Maiden, close to the inner edge,

‘Richelieu’

Jett adjusted her sensor gain for the 4th time as they slid slowly along, scanning all COM frequencies, looking beyond the edge of ‘Maiden’s Folly’, listening for Garshan Command chatter. On her third time across the lower EM bands, she found something.

“Hey Cap, is this it?” She asked, piping the COM chatter to the main bridge speakers. The language was Garshan for certain, as everyone who served with the UDF was educated in not only their field, but also in the languages of the Garshans, Vor’Gosh, Galhadians and Marrokians.

“Get a triangulation on that signal! Pinpoint it’s location!” Alex ordered, flipping a switch on his left side arm rest, sending an automated signal back to the rendezvous point.

“Think it’s a gathering of ships or just a few merchants?” Amy asked, turning in her seat and looking to him. He stopped to listen to the chatter again.

“No, that’s a battle group out there, and they mentioned Lorelei by name!”

“Oh great! Think they’ll make a play for Center?”

“They’d have to send a whole armada to take on Center!” Jett said with a laugh. She was the only one laughing however.

“If they DID send an armada, Center might not survive. They’re about equal in tech. Hmmm, this gives me an idea.” He said, patching his implant COM, or i-COM, into the ship’s COM system, and calling his little sister...

“Message from Alex? Wait one.” Jared said, as he patched Lorelei into the circuit.

“Yes Brother, what’s wrong?”

“Lorelei, did you and Jared fix your Fold engine from the parts on that ‘Infinity’?”

“Yes Brother, why?”

“Ok, I need you to Fold to these coordinates, ASAP! I wanna mess with the Garshan’s heads a little bit. Plus, unless my sensors are screwy, it’ll put you 128 parsecs closer to the supply systems, cutting their transit times to a third.”

“And it will throw the Empire into disarray until they can link back up with me. Tell me, why do you want me in the middle of the ‘Maiden’?”

“Your shields. They’re EMF’s right?”

“Yes, but...” She began, as it hit her a second later.

“Jared, prepare to fold to these coordinates!” She said, as she began an intensive power transfer, the Fold engines coming online slowly...

“Jett! Send word to the rendezvous point, Fold to these coordinates in 30 minutes. In the meantime, let’s go kick the hornet’s nest.”

“Aye boss. Message sent, setting course, ready!”

“Take us out. Red Alert!” He ordered, sitting back into his chair, activating the power transfer to the main guns.

“So, what’s your plan hun?”

“The Garshans are gonna make a play for Center, so, let’s level the playing field, even tilt it a little bit into our favor.” He said with a grin.

As the ‘Richelieu’ slipped out of the ‘Maiden’, and entered the system designated Omicron 912, or the ‘Hornet’s Nest’, a valuable, asteroid rich forward staging system the Garshans had claimed deep in the Phoenix Sector, far away from even the closest Human controlled system, Ironsides notwithstanding, Jett’s sensor board lit up with ship-borne contacts almost immediately.

“Contacts! I got almost two thousand ships out here! A few are small, like freighters and shuttles and such, but well over 1500 are battle crusier or larger.”

“Engage ECM Cloak!” He ordered, and as soon as she flicked two switches, they disappeared from everyone’s scopes.

“Ok, that main asteroid, the one the size of Australia, that’s their base, for sure. It’s got the largest amount of EM traffic going to it and coming from it.

Jett! Order ‘Peter the Great’ and ‘Prince of Wales’ to begin a stealth run on that base. Target only their defensive systems, so we can land troops here. I would rather play resource denial via capture then resource denial via destruction, get me?”

“We got you, Sir!” Came Jett’s, Bridgette’s and Suzy’s voices in near perfect harmony from their pit. Amy giggled and Alex chuckled.

As they slid silently through the Garshan’s defensive network of sensor sats and patrol ships, they got a first-hand view of what it was they were bringing to the fight. Over 2000 ships, all well in excess of the million ton range, some even heavier than the biggest ship ever fielded by Humans, an immense battleship laid down after the invention of hyper drives, and now collecting micro-meteorite dents and cosmic dust in lunar orbit of Earth, it being much too costly to field. The ‘Juggernaught’, massed well over 10,000,000 tons, with a volume displacement just south of 25,000,000 Cubic yards.

“Damn! Those are some big ships!” Suzy exclaimed, looking at some of the Garshan heavies. Alex frowned, as Amy looked at him.

“Problems hun?” She asked.

“While we could attack them here, since we’ve caught THEM napping, once they shield up, we’ll be running and hoping we make it to the ‘Maiden’ before we get our asses handed to us.”

“How many Andros could we get here in say, 4 hours or less?” She asked, a plan forming in her mind.

“With or without Escorts?” He countered.

“Without. We don’t need them, and they’d just be in the way.”

“Maybe half a dozen. Why?”

Smiling, she searched the computer’s historical database, looking for something she’d seen while in the role of Mattie. It was on a music and video sharing site on the worldNet, and only remembered it because of the back story behind it. Finding it finally, she set it to play over the bridge speakers.

Everyone sat up at attention then back into their seats, as the theme song from the movie ‘The Magnificent Seven’ played. Turning to Alex, she smiled.

“Get them here. We can do this, but we got to do it right, and hammer their asses hard and as a cohesive unit. I trust you know what I mean!” She half shouted over the music.

Looking around the bridge, as everyone seemed to be absorbed by the musical score, Alex smiled. He remembered the movie, and the original that spawned the western remake.

Sending a coded message back across the ‘Maiden’, he pulled in all the available Andros in this sector of space. He was rewarded with no less then six affirms...

An hour later...

“While I like the back story laddie, I have a better musical score to really get the troops focused.” Kinsman said.

“This should be good.” James added, looking at the big Irishman.

“Oh, it’s a hoot, I can assure you o’ that!”

“Ok, spill.” Alex said.

“Wagner, blasted across all the COM freaks, including all the Garshan ones. Jam their COMs with it.” He said, as James started laughing.

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning!” He half shouted, and only three others in the room got the reference: Kinsman, Anderson and Ericka, all of which laughed.

“Wagner? Oh! The ride! Yes, Definitely.” Alex said with a mile wide grin.

“Ok then, it’s settled. We strike from their center. Slip deep in-system, and rape those bitches. They’re sitting ducks right now, as they load up for wherever they think they’re going. But, after we’re done with them, the only place they’re going is to meet their god, Ozum.” Alex said with a grin.

“Orders Admiral?” James asked, and as he looked at the small sea of faces, most of which were friends or family, he smiled.

“Let’s kick some Azure haired ass!”

The ships collected to do just that: ‘Richelieu’, ‘Andromeda’, ‘Valkyrie’, ‘Yamato’, ‘Prince of Wales’, ‘Peter the Great’, and ‘BonHomme Richard’, along with 40 ‘Graf Spee’ class escort cruisers...

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