MEDUSA REIGNS

It was very quite in the cool, nearly dark command center of the massive warship PNS Justification, and all eyes were riveted on the dreadnought's main holo-display in the center of the room. Nearly fifty people watched in shocked silence as long range scanners unbelievably identified the dozens of vessels that continued to emerge from the nearby warp point as Kanga warships. Only a few were larger than a heavy cruiser, but there were so many of them; over a hundred at last count, and the light task force that was watching them only numbered a half dozen. Even though three of the Pact warships were massive dreadnoughts, they were clearly no match for an enemy warfleet of that size.

Warlord Miguel Solano watched from his command chair, shocked by the conclusion that the sudden appearance of this invading force signaled that the Central Maui Fleet guarding the Heinreich System had been eliminated, and the human population of the planet was most likely dead as well.

Dressed in the space-black traditional Warlord’s uniform, Solano gritted his teeth in anger at that. Over 40 billion people had perished in Heinreich, and those damn Kangas were gonna pay! A traditional hispanic native from the planet Adobe, Solano’s temper flared until it shone bright hot and a bitterness in his chest and throat came to a boil. His small task force was unlikely to stop this huge invading fleet, but the Kangas were racial cowards and would stooge around near the warp point until they were sure it was safe to proceed in-system.

“Sir?” the voice shook Warlord Solano out of his reverie. As he looked to the Captain of the Justification, he realized the black man was pointing to the holo-display. Clearly the Kanga ships had finished their transit into the Caracas System, and there were 144 of them according to the computer in his eye displays. Of those, forty-four were battlecruisers, the rest destroyers, and it was clear to Solano at that moment that the Kangas had focused on building the smaller ships to break through the Pact’s forces that had been trying to batter their way into the large Kanga colony at Goth Beg.

But how had they broken through? Solano wondered.

The Central Maui Fleet was the Clusters’ primary striking force, and Fleet Admiral Ogarkov was a very good fighter. The only way for the loss of the entire Central Fleet to occur was for Ogarkov to attempt a warp point offensive, something he was under strict orders from the Hortalez Comptroller not to do. The complete loss of the Central Fleet was clearly a catastrophic blow to the war effort against the Kangas, and Solano briefly thought that it was hopeless to defend the Cluster capital, just two warp points away.

Warlord Solano watched the displays for a moment more, then both he and his crew hurriedly began to work. The recon drones covering the warp point were obviously not detected, and the only reason that they were there at all was the training cruise that Solano had embarked on to shake down the green personnel of his dreadnought division. His crew was busy around him, jacking into the cybersynth computer that was the core of the warship, testing phased array radars, bringing up point defense systems, and preparing the ship for battle. Using his interface, Solano saw his other two dreadnoughts, the Kingaroy and Victoranna, move to alert stations as well. The three escorting destroyers, the Stout, Blaze, and Jotunheim, moved in closer to his capital ships, preparing to screen them against incoming fire.

Captain Ham Bennington, who commanded the massive Justification, walked over to where Warlord Solano was sitting, and stood by his side, casually looking at the crew and androids as they went about their work.

“Sir?” he said with some reverence, for Solano had been in over 30 combat situations, with a confirmed 48 Dionii capital ship kills. “What are we going to do?”

Solano, who was much shorter than any of his regular staff or crew, pondered the situation for a moment, looking intensely at his retina display, and then said, “We fight! Case Bonaventure if you please, Mr. Bennington.”

The huge black man stared for a moment, wordless, and then said, “Yes Sir!” He quickly began moving around the command center, urging his crew to work harder as he began briefing his officers.

“Someone had better let Maddogs know.” Solano barked, as he leaned back hard into his command chair. The battlecomp estimated combat range within two hours, and he thanked the gods that they had been running in stealth mode when the Kangas entered the system.

The sudden sluggishness by the inertial dampeners of the ponderous dreadnought told Solano that the ship had begun to slowly turn, headed into harms way. The Warlord once again felt a flash of adrenaline at the prospect of battle, the surge that he had grown to love and was able to channel into a lethal weapon of force.

Solano thought for a moment and then pushed a button on his armchair, lighting up two vidscreens attached to his left arm rest. A dark, swarthy man in a Captain's uniform appeared, followed immediately by a blonde-haired woman, also in a Captain's uniform.

"Rao, Barb, I assume you are receiving the same data we are."

Both nodded briefly, and Solano continued, "We're gonna target the BCs. That's the heavy metal and if we can knock 'em out, Maddogs can easily mop up the remaining light forces. So this is what we are going to do...."

The huge space station orbiting the blue-green world Caracas was known across the Cluster as Meetpoint Station, and it was the primary port of call for the entire system. Unfortunately, since the outbreak of a massive civil war within the Pact of Humanity, it had also become a haphazard command center for the defense of the entire Caracas System. Although the planet only had a population of twelve billion people, the whole area was a staging ground and repair depot for the Maui Central Fleet, whose attempts to batter its way past the Kanga defenders in Goth Beg during the last three months had failed miserably.

Three men sat around the central table in the newly painted Command Room, with staffers sitting around each of them, attentative as the men watched their retina displays with surprise. Two of them men were dressed in business suits, while the third was clearly in an Admirals’ uniform. After several moments, the man in uniform, Fleet Admiral Yumi Hamashiro, sat back in his chair and grimaced.

“Well, that’s that then.” He said, with a heaviness in his voice. A senior Admiral with over 60 years of service within the Pact Navy, Hamashiro had just received his “tombstone promotion” six months ago and was farmed out to this backwater system. No one knew that within months a civil war would explode with a fury all across the Pact, and that he would again be placed on the front lines of battle.

The man in the blue suit was obviously the System Commander, and Terrence Maddogs was known throughout Maui Cluster as a hard-nosed fighter.

Hamashiro leaned forward: "I'm in pretty decent shape. My carriers are all available or nearly so, but my pilots could use some more training time. The bases are still building so they're out of it, but planetary assets……well, Zhao?"

The System Comptroller was a large, fat man of ancient Chinese descent. He looked at the Admiral without any expression for a moment, then turned to Maddogs and arrogantly said, “Well, we have thirteen Army divisions training on Caracas, and enough planetary fighters to decimate any fleet. I for one, am not worried.”

Both of the powerful men looked at the Hortalez official with disgust, but Hamashiro continued.

“Well, that’s ten light carriers, with fighters. I have good escorts, and three capital missile battlecruisers, but we are very light on long range firepower and I have no capital ships to speak of.” Technically that wasn’t true though, for their were seven dreadnoughts and two superdreadnoughts in various forms of repair in the space station they were meeting in, but none of them were very combat capable.

The nearly bald Maddogs leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table and said, “I think we should let the Kangas close and fight them here, using the station’s defenses as well. Look, there are over 100 warships, Yumi. You’d be dead meat if you went out and tackled them.”

“Alright, good idea. But what about Solano? He is a sitting duck out there.”

“Don’t worry about Solano, Yumi. He didn’t become a Warlord of the Pact by being stupid.”

Both men again glanced at Zhao, but he appeared bored with the whole affair. Then they looked back at the small holo-display in the center of the oak table. A flashing light in the graphic appeared, indicating Solano’s task forces’ position. Clearly he would take on the Kanga warships headed in-system, because he was unfortunately lying doggo in the enemy’s path to the planet and they could easily run his slower ships down.

It really was a stroke of bad luck for Solano to take the newly built warships out for a shakedown cruise, hoping to test their new weapons. As Maddogs looked at the task force icon, he silently prayed against all hope that those new weapons would help Solano, because right now nothing else in the universe could…..

The command center of the PNS Justification was hushed, with androids and humans moving around quietly. The small hispanic man in the chair at the center of the room was locked into its frame, his space black Warlord uniform in stark contrast to the white chair he sat in. The man, known throughout the Pact of Humanity as one of the best fighters in the galaxy, pondered his situation, he knowing deep in his heart that surviving the onrushing battle would be almost impossible. With three dreadnoughts and three escorting destroyers, the battle seemed hopeless as an overwhelming wall of enemy warships closed.

Solano was watching his retina display with interest. The AWACs drone that the task group had fired off nearly an hour ago was giving his warships excellent data on the enemy's movements. Luckily, the drone was stealthy as well, otherwise it surely would have been detected and destroyed by the Kangas.

Watching his commanding officer, Captain Ham Bennington, also a career Navy man, waited patiently for the signal. Hours had passed since the first initial contact with the enemy force entering the Caracas System, and those hours had been used to fine tune their data. All Kanga battlecruisers, twenty Lucifer-class and twenty-four Baphomet-class, had been identified and targeted accordingly. During their nearly recent battles with the Kangas, the Pact Navy had learned that the Lucifer's were the deadly long range missile ships, and the Baphomet's were heavy plasma gun warships. What hadn't been learned however was the effectiveness of the new Medusa-class dreadnoughts that they were currently testing. And now the test had come.

A slight movement caught Bennington's eye, a swoop of the Warlord's hand downward, and he immediately called out, "Fire!"

While over ninety light seconds away from the enemy fleet, the massive dreadnought Justification dropped her drive field. At that moment, the stealth features of her upgraded drive also dropped, making the ship horribly vulnerable and completely visible to the oncoming enemy ships.

The Kanga fleet paused in their advance for a moment, getting good scans on the Justification and her companion ships. But what they didn't see was the twenty-four missile pods that the three dreadnoughts had dumped out the sides of its flanks and were grabbed by tractor beams. Quickly aligning themselves towards their targets, these pods began to rapidly move under their own power, stalking the Kanga battlecruisers. The Kingaroy and Victoranna had dropped their drive fields at the same time and began dumping pods into space as rapidly as possible. Each dreadnoughts’ eight tractor beams grabbed a pod, and after a moment of target recognition, fired at the enemy fleet.

Alarms began howling in the command center of the Justification as continuous missile pods were dumped into space and sent on their way. Moments passed and now dozens were stalking the enemy warships, who began picking them up on their scanners and aligning to meet them. Anti-missile defenses among the Kanga ships began to come up slowly, but it was far too late to stop the first missile pods. The missiles separated from their transport buses and accelerated to light-speed velocities. Dozens howled in at incredible speeds, bypassing the mass of escorting destroyers surrounding the battlecruisers and antimatter suddenly spalled as the first of forty missiles impacted on a single Kanga warship.

Cheers and shouts rang out across the Justification's command center and Warlord Solano pounded his armrest in satisfaction as the first Kanga battlecruiser immolated in fire. He smiled hugely at his tall black Captain, who returned it with a piano bright smile from his chair, and continued to view the main holo display.. Two, three, four.....the enemy battlecruisers were dying quickly now, but they refused to die alone. At eighty light minutes, they continue to close on the small Pact Navy task force, taking pods with them in death as their point defense systems desperately fought to save the ships from nuclear fire.

The range was falling rapidly, and soon the enemy would be able to return fire, and Solano began to seriously worry. With the drive field down, even the massive shields that the Medusa-class boasted could not protect them for long. But by now half the enemy battlecruisers had been gutted, and Pact missile pods continued to flay the enemy force. Missiles rained down a deadly fire on the Kangas, who were now scattering, breaking the tenuous defense nets that were the only protection from the incoming fire.

From the tactical section, an officer spoke in the general direction of Solano, "Our ECM is still offline, Sir." Solano briefly nodded, and glanced back to the battle.

Watching the Kanga antics, Warlord Solano leaned back into his chair and began to sweat. Having sustained heavy losses, would the Kangas break off?

We should have wiped them like so many species after we conquered them. Stupid idea to keep aliens around anyways.

The missile pods were still going in, they had several more minutes of fire left, but then his task force would be defenseless. His escorting destroyers were only point defense platforms, and would be useless in a close-in fight. He watched his display closely; the Kingaroy's fire was shaky but the Victoranna was solid, inflicting heavy damage on the enemy fleet. Nearly all the Kanga battlecruisers were dead, lamed, or seriously damaged....and then the Kangas began to flee.

All had been going well. The Justara Master had taken several minutes to transfer his fleet safely into enemy space and their were no warp point defenses, as expected. Their most recent victory in the enemy's former system had been glorious, but caution was too be expected as they probed deeper into enemy-held space. The main Huyanna Fleet was still located at the enemy planet, but this force had been tasked with scouting out the new enemy system. Everything had gone well until several warships had been detected over eighty urul away. They must have been operating under a cloaking field, something the Huyanna had not been able to perfect yet. The blasphemous Hummmmans had many weapons and tricks in their use, and many a Master had fallen into their traps, but he would not.

He had just ordered a course correction to intercept the few warships on his screen when all h'yell broke lose. Incoming missile fire began to lash the Hyanna fleet as long-range pods, dozens of them and each carrying several missiles, were being tracked. It would be several moments before they could close the range to the Huyanna fleet and fire their on-board missiles, and the Master barked an order.

Ships began to move, closing up and initiating defensive nets, but it was too late.

Missiles, highly deadly and packed with antimatter, began to attack his heavy warships. Titanic explosions began to erupt among his vessels and the Master pounded his hairy fist for a moment into his chair, and then began to issuing a string of orders. They were much too far away to effectively fire on the enemy warships, but he could close the range as rapidly as possible and destroy them in short order. His beam armed destroyers would make short work of the small Hummmman forces.

Watching the incoming fire with grief and fear, the Master realized that only his heavy warships were being targeted by these damnable missiles, and that only a flek of warships were doing such lethal damage. He ordered courier drones to be readied. This data must get back to the High Master of the Fleet.....and then sudden explosions rent his ship, throwing the Master into his control panel. Darkness invaded his mind, and the last thought he ever had was that he was going to meet the Three Gods unvanquished..…

This vessel can launch up to 8 pods per tactical turn, and fire them the next turn. It has to have its drive field down, its ECM doesn't work either, thus the need for the massive shield and PD combo. At TL 10, it costs 36MCr per SBMHAWK2 loaded with SBM-a, and this vessel can carry up to 160 of them. The total load out of this vessel costs 5,760. In this load out, it can volley up to 40 missiles per salvo, for up to 20 turns.