The sequel premise would almost write itself... since of course nobody believes the crazy incompetent general that lost an entire fleet to primitive monkeys and tries to blame ghosts... so obviously somebody won't stay away from Earth, they must have still suffered heavy losses, as it's impossible for a fleet to get obliterated with zero enemy losses, no? :)
Alternatively, cue another alien race, frenemy/rivals of the failed invaders, who most surely must be able to do a lot better, especially since they got invited to a nice easy co-invasion...
Cool idea! What I was kicking around was we coerce that failed general into helping us assassinate the emperor, and if people still want more, there could always be a few other stunts we pull to destabilize them from the shadows.
The General was fitted with a covert tracking device, and with his men and his message was loaded onto our smallest and oldest derelict shuttle. Fitted with a distress beacon and launched atop a Saturn-IX and aimed at the star system coordinates beaten out of them, the fuse was lit without any ceremonious countdown.
As the would-be invaders fucked-off at 10Gs, Colonel Daniel Kelly turned to his lieutenants. "Open an encrypted channel to Command. I need to speak to General Mattis immediately."
"On screen 4, sir. Please stand by."
"Colonel, report." The General was all business.
"Xenos intercepted at Kuiper Lane. They brought a fleet, there is no question this force would be an invasion rather than surveillance. We catalogued 3 larger class of ship than before. We tagged the fuckers and returned them to sender. The shuttle they are on won't be able to land, only orbit, so their people will have to recover them once they reach their system and get within beacon range. We assumed they gave us incorrect coordinates under duress. At any rate, assuming they want to live, they'll find their way home, then will be debriefed. And we will know where they are."
"Negative, Colonel. That is not good enough. We can not tolerate any intel to fall into enemy hands. They think we are ghosts. So let's haunt them and see them in hell. I am dispatching 2nd and 3rd Fleets to your orbit. You will fall under Admiral Franklin's command. After rendezvous you will infiltrate Xeno space, locate their shipyards, colonies, outposts, and home worlds."
"And then?"
"And then, son, you will be at war. You'll bring the stained glass of their planet back to decorate my kitchen."
"Aye aye, sir!" The screen signed off. The Colonel took a deep breath. Invaders wanted to take his home planet. No fucking way. "Lieutenant! We are at DEFCON2, prepare to enter formation with 2nd Fleet. All men at their stations!"
The sirens immediately began to sound their alarms, and the ship came alive as cooling systems and weapons came online and worked through their checklists. Turning the ship to face fleetward was hardly completed as dozens of carriers and hundreds of destroyers and frigates began to appear out of rift space and join the formation of patrol skirmishers that had defended the system. Colonel Kelly ordered his command and all units to coordinate to the closest carrier and secure the hangars to join under their warp bubble. Though his fleet of skrimish fighters were excellent for Federation patrols countering pirates, they didn't have jump drives or rations for longer missions. Or military shields, for that matter.
As his ships refueled, secure on the carrier, he left his men to their training and made way to report to the Admiral to relinquish command and integrate his skirmish reports and intel with their forces.
Admiral Franklin was every bit of 6-foot-20. If the devil was a cyborg, then the bible might have been true. Hell was certainly real, as the Admiral had clawed his way out of it a dozen times in his 200 years. There was so little meat left on the man that he no longer had to eat. God couldn't stop Admiral Franklin's 3rd Fleet without Admiral Franklin. And Admiral Franklin would not stop, ever, until you were dead. The Colonel shuddered. It was much colder on the bridge than out in space, it seemed. "Admiral" he announced himself.
"Colonel, welcome to the Executer. You have skirmish data to upload?"
"Yes, contact with three new enemy classes. A much larger force. We ambushed them with EMPs and phased particles beams. All the information is here, everything we saw in battle and after we boarded." You hand him the data slate and he plugs it into an arm jack.
"So, it's aliens instead of commies, today? What a refreshing change of menu. Ensign, time until 2nd Fleet arrives?"
The Ensign calls back immediately "94 seconds until rift exit!".
The Admiral turns back to you. "You are tracking these invaders?"
"Yes."
"Show me." You contact your crew to integrate sensors with the Executor, and in a moment a spare screen displays the beacon and vector. And past the screen and out the bridge windows the rift begins to tear as the bow of the single ship called 2nd Fleet emerges from subspace.
Built like a warhead for each man, woman, and child, the ship was little more than the thrust and targeting systems of a platform whose bulk was 95% fissile. 10,000 square miles of launch ports on a rift-drive, the front of the ship was made up of 200 megaton warheads, stacked nut to butt in a honeycomb, electronically and sequentially fired from gimballed rail-gun silos at 60% of c. Capable of firing two-hundred-million independently-targeted warheads per second, it was almost intended as a joke when it was proposed, but no one was still laughing after the first Xeno incursions, and so a dead man's switch was built. Man's ingenuity is fueled by necessity and hubris, so eventually the dead-man's switch was given a navigation and propulsion system, and sent to the Lagrange point as a point defense.
And now it was going to move to the Xeno cluster. A third of the Kuiper belt had been refined to build this ship. I briefly wondered if it's mass would affect Earth's orbit as we left the system.
With the whole armada together, the Admiral gave orders to sync FCS and navigation. He chose a formation and submitted his tactical map to the inter-fleet AI, and gave the signal to jump. The fleet moved into the rift, all sensors passive and shields in stealth mode, emerging immediately from the subspace on the other side, at the tail of the Saturn IX returning with it's message and it's tail tucked.
There was a lot of EM here. The system was heavily populated with noise of communications arrays. Point sources indicated hundreds of orbital stations, colonies, outposts, shipyards, military installations, and home worlds. The Executor fire control system AI confirmed a firing solution for each source and dispatched it's itinerary to the fleet. In a microsecond all targets were assigned their own dozen MIRVs, cataloguing and prioritizing military targets, supply chains, communications, and defenses.
The Admiral called for a comm-link to 2nd Fleet. The screen flickered and a voice came over the intercom: "This is our would-be invaders home system?"
The Admiral responds "It was. Permission to engage all targets."
A wall of plutonium silently leaves in wave after wave from 2nd Fleet. While firing, the stealth is disabled, and within a few moments a helmsman declares "PING! Vector 240, declination 50 degrees, 4000km!"
"We've been ranged!"
"Launch detected!"
"Shields are maxed, Admiral"
"Launch detected!" "Launch detected!"
"Evasive rift jump solutions ready for Nav!"
"Launch detected!"
"Projectiles entering point-defense range in 20 seconds!"
Admiral Franklin laughed like Microsoft Sam while millions of drone fighters dispatched in response from each of the dozens of carriers and formed a swarm cloud for extended range point defense and intercept around the fleet perimeter. Coordinating their fire, they could intercept and destroy billions of incoming projectiles before exhausting their energy reserves. But it would prove unnecessary as only 4 launches were detected and they had all been intercepted.
"Return fire! Target on screen!" Sensors across the fleet swung to the coordinates of the last ping, but there was nothing there.
"No contact!"
"Cycling scan frequencies!"
"Launch detected!"
"Firing solution to launch origin! Paint them with the terawatt beam cannon before they can maneuver!" The incandescence of superheated metal from the laser would allow target locks on the infrared longer than otherwise
"Target's shields are cycling, but lock acquired!"
"What the fuck?! Sir, they are moving post-relativistically!"
"Admiral, we can't maintain lock!"
The Admiral has heard it all before. He was enlisted once. Became a man a thousand times. Seen death a thousand times. And so he knew the determination of the captain of this enemy ship. He understood that that captain would do anything to avenge the system which was going Nova at this time. The battery launched 8 minutes before would see a million warheads impact every broadcast antenna in the system, and every mile apart on the ground, just to be sure. Admiral Franklin knew war like this enemy pilot knew fear. He snaps into his fleet-comms: "All ships, return through the rift immediately!" That captain was gonna try to rift jump into the bridge, he suspected. Franklin suspected this because it was what he would do. And because it would work, if they weren't quick. He hadn't suffered any casualties in this hit and run campaign yet. And as the rift sealed behind them, he turned back to me.
"Colonel, thank you for your intel. You are dismissed."
Returning to my ship in the hanger, I began my debrief. I wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Yet we commit first-strike genocide without first contact. The blithering "military" we routed at Kuiper Lane may have well been pirates, for all their decorum and success. The only ambassador we sent was Uranium. The only intel we had was what they told us while interrogated. We towed back the ships they didn't scuttle when we boarded, and we discovered nothing interesting to our 24th century physics and materials science. So what possessed them to come to our system and invade? Why throw themselves upon our spear?"
Maybe we were the invaders. But as the Admiral would always say, "History can't ask a pile of ash."
\> Admiral Franklin was every bit of 6-foot-20
6 foot and 20 what? Inches? you know there's 12 inches to the foot, right?
Did you mean 7 foot 8 inches?
Wait... what?
No.
They have no concept of stealth tech... they canāt see our ships...
Why are we not attacking?
(Grins)
They have an entire Empire out there. And have no way whatsoever to even SEE our craft? Have reduced this technological advantage to a primitive systematic belief in ghosts?
Why are we not attacking?
For Gods sake man... ATTACK!!!!!
šš
Great story. Forgive my natural inclination towards evil.
The problem with conquering an Empire is that said Empire becomes your newest source of headaches. Everything needs doing, but there's nowhere near enough competent people to do it. Even fewer that won't take the opportunity to try to pull another change in management.
It's all too likely to be a bad deal all round. Best to just leave it be, wait for the collapse, and buy sectors for pennies on the dollar.
No no. Donāt run the Empire. Break it apart. Smash it. Then allow the little parts all fight each other. Take the bits you want, use stealth tech to take out any who look like they are organising, then... then... Er...
Iām being evil again aināt I?
I must stop doing that. Sorry.
I'm talking the penny-stock option. At a cheap enough price point, almost anything can be a worthwhile investment.
Look at Alaska. At the time it was bought, it had almost no value, but with investment and exploration, it provided an excellent return.
If you can buy out sectors for cheap, it only takes a few prosperous worlds to pay for the lot, and then you basically got everything for free.
Or, you know, make the populace have this idea of "freedom", supply them with weppenz, and let them topple themselves and we can afterwards make "an offer they can't refuse"...
By pretending to be the good guys. Embracing the bad guy side means you pave it and send your guys to start from scratch without resistance or local culture to integrate.
When it works. We DID that. Or tried. Everyone should know about agent orange and napalm in Vietnam. They're still there. We literally were the Bad Guys. Hurt so many of our own and their people. oof.
"Just defoliates..." is not the term I'd use for thousands of Vietnamese and a near equal number of vets being slowly poisoned over their lifetimes. And still so.
But, making a parking lot, is a fair point. If you're just going to embrace the tyrannical route anyway.
Between this story and the post 'the barrier' I got an idea for an interesting kind of passive defense megastructure. An 'Oort Swarm' trillions of cold matte black steel javelins in overlapping orbits around a system able to punch through anything not sufficiently shield and completely undetectable. The only way in or out would be through temporary windows in the swarm that would open and close at various intervals as the overlapping shells of javelins shift around eachother.
Gravitic perturbations from just a couple of light years away are enough to disturb cometary bodies and send them into the inner system, some of those were extinction level size
Even ignoring enemy action doing the same on purpose, by crowding that space with stationary kill missiles, any shift, or even accident will turn those missiles from stationary to potentially relativistic.
All it takes is as previously stated just fling rocks yourself. Or swing a gravitationally massive object somewhat close, and wait for the inevitable clearing as orbits decay and wander apart
With a bigger budget you could have eliptical orbits with the combined perigees forming the enclosing spherical region, this would both increase the velocity of the projectiles and mean any perturbations in the spherical region could only throw them further out as opposed to into a dangerous inner orbit. I'm not imagining a solid wall here so much as a region a few thousand km thick with enough spikes passing through it as to make any attempt at passage unacceptably risky, the sheer number and velocity of projectiles would prevent the clearing of any permament lane outside of those pre-planned into the initial projectile orbits.
This plan forgets how incredibly vast space actually is. The outer shell of a solar system is so incredibly vast that it would be more than rare that any two of your spikes would ever be in visible range of each other, even with trillions of them.
/u/SpacePaladin15 has posted 8 other stories, including:
* [Mutually Assured Destruction](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/lny3nc/mutually_assured_destruction/)
* [Human Thrill-Seeking](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/llntmm/human_thrillseeking/)
* [Someone to Love](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/lk1wzc/someone_to_love/)
* [You'll Never Take Us Alive](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/lis97l/youll_never_take_us_alive/)
* [Humans Fight Fire](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/lhckfi/humans_fight_fire/)
* [It Was Just a Prank](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/lf9utk/it_was_just_a_prank/)
* [The Gods of Creation](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/lesi6d/the_gods_of_creation/)
* [The Human Word 'Sacrifice'](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/ld15ys/the_human_word_sacrifice/)
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Clearly they have some knowledge, they referred to it as Terran space, and hearing a human voice over the comms. They also want to invade earth, so presumably they know its inhabited by intelligent life.
I'd guess whilst they've met human diplomats and civilians, and maybe some soldiers, they've never met this particular military force, maybe special forces? Or a home guard kitted out with prototype tech?
>At first, the legends did not convince many people. The word of criminals and peasants was not exactly reliable, especially when they were making far-fetched claims. That all changed when **our government sent three military reconnaissance ships to scout out a potential conquest of Earth. And they just vanished.**
>Word leaked out to the press of the failed operation, and suddenly, those ghost stories had a lot more credibility among spacefarers. Smugglers, merchants and slave transports alike began to avoid the Sol system, for fear that they too would disappear. Taking a longer route increased expenditure on fuel, but it beat being snatched up by the spirits.
>I was not one of the believers though. Ghosts didnāt exist and religion was a hoax, as far as I was concerned. These tales had to be exaggerated, little more than the results of trauma and overactive imaginations. After mulling it over, I guessed that the Terrans had set up some sort of mine field in their systems.
>I shared my hypothesis with the other generals. I suggested we proceed with the invasion, and simply deploy drones ahead of our fleet to activate any traps. After a brief discussion, they unanimously agreed to my plan and selected me to head the mission. It had been my idea, after all.
If I were one of those generals, I'd say: "Of course it's a trick, but that doesn't change the fact that we have no intel about human military capabilities beyond the fact that they have something that can make 3 recon ships disappear and a bunch of scary ghost stories."
"Your hypothesis is plausible, but it hasn't been tested yet. We send scouts out for a reason, dammit! We need to send another scout and figure out a way to get observation or recordings of an attack back. If we can't even get a glimpse of their weapons, perhaps we should scout a system where we have more information more solid than campfire tales."
Anti-matter weaponry. The general mentions that they're the only thing that can break their shields, but that most armies don't use them bc they're too expensive to manufacture.
But guess who spends an unreal amount of money on weapons. That's right, humanity!
1) Want alien spaceship.
2) alien spaceship has anti-matter pre-requisite.
3) So anyway, this is what we found on the ship. Darpa reports anti-matter expenditures were pretty much on target.
Been following your series since it started and just finished the rest of your catalog. Just wanted to say thanks and glad your writing awesome stories
Stealthy bois! I wonder if any of the aliens once had the concept of stealth but 'outgrew' it because they could never build anything that would fool their own advanced sensors?
Wordsmith: "Mind you, this was the Empireās flagship, designed to withstand the direct hit of a nuclear missile."
My Internal Monologue: 'Well that's just adorable.'
Dude, i had such a mind\*uck a moment ago.
I was like : didn't I read it a year ago ?
And this story is literally a year old.
How the duck did I even found this ????
I know you're probably not up for it, but can you make a sequel for this?š No pressure, mate. Just do what you love to do.
I second all of that, more!
did you mean # MOAR
MOAR!
***MOAR***
I, u/A_Fowl_Joke, hereby issue a request for more of this delightful reading material. AKA, # MOAR
I, u/LuiLeDiamond, in response to u/A_Fowl_Joke, request this story on the subreddit known as r/HFY, to receive a sequel.
MOAR STORIESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
MOAR
MOAR
**MOAR!**
***m O O O O O O O O O A r 111!1!1***
MOAR
Sure, I can try to brainstorm a sequel! Just need a couple days
The sequel premise would almost write itself... since of course nobody believes the crazy incompetent general that lost an entire fleet to primitive monkeys and tries to blame ghosts... so obviously somebody won't stay away from Earth, they must have still suffered heavy losses, as it's impossible for a fleet to get obliterated with zero enemy losses, no? :) Alternatively, cue another alien race, frenemy/rivals of the failed invaders, who most surely must be able to do a lot better, especially since they got invited to a nice easy co-invasion...
Cool idea! What I was kicking around was we coerce that failed general into helping us assassinate the emperor, and if people still want more, there could always be a few other stunts we pull to destabilize them from the shadows.
Take your time, mate. Just don't burn yourself out.š
Your offering has pleased the Readers. Writing shall now be your life's purpose.
The General was fitted with a covert tracking device, and with his men and his message was loaded onto our smallest and oldest derelict shuttle. Fitted with a distress beacon and launched atop a Saturn-IX and aimed at the star system coordinates beaten out of them, the fuse was lit without any ceremonious countdown. As the would-be invaders fucked-off at 10Gs, Colonel Daniel Kelly turned to his lieutenants. "Open an encrypted channel to Command. I need to speak to General Mattis immediately." "On screen 4, sir. Please stand by." "Colonel, report." The General was all business. "Xenos intercepted at Kuiper Lane. They brought a fleet, there is no question this force would be an invasion rather than surveillance. We catalogued 3 larger class of ship than before. We tagged the fuckers and returned them to sender. The shuttle they are on won't be able to land, only orbit, so their people will have to recover them once they reach their system and get within beacon range. We assumed they gave us incorrect coordinates under duress. At any rate, assuming they want to live, they'll find their way home, then will be debriefed. And we will know where they are." "Negative, Colonel. That is not good enough. We can not tolerate any intel to fall into enemy hands. They think we are ghosts. So let's haunt them and see them in hell. I am dispatching 2nd and 3rd Fleets to your orbit. You will fall under Admiral Franklin's command. After rendezvous you will infiltrate Xeno space, locate their shipyards, colonies, outposts, and home worlds." "And then?" "And then, son, you will be at war. You'll bring the stained glass of their planet back to decorate my kitchen." "Aye aye, sir!" The screen signed off. The Colonel took a deep breath. Invaders wanted to take his home planet. No fucking way. "Lieutenant! We are at DEFCON2, prepare to enter formation with 2nd Fleet. All men at their stations!" The sirens immediately began to sound their alarms, and the ship came alive as cooling systems and weapons came online and worked through their checklists. Turning the ship to face fleetward was hardly completed as dozens of carriers and hundreds of destroyers and frigates began to appear out of rift space and join the formation of patrol skirmishers that had defended the system. Colonel Kelly ordered his command and all units to coordinate to the closest carrier and secure the hangars to join under their warp bubble. Though his fleet of skrimish fighters were excellent for Federation patrols countering pirates, they didn't have jump drives or rations for longer missions. Or military shields, for that matter. As his ships refueled, secure on the carrier, he left his men to their training and made way to report to the Admiral to relinquish command and integrate his skirmish reports and intel with their forces. Admiral Franklin was every bit of 6-foot-20. If the devil was a cyborg, then the bible might have been true. Hell was certainly real, as the Admiral had clawed his way out of it a dozen times in his 200 years. There was so little meat left on the man that he no longer had to eat. God couldn't stop Admiral Franklin's 3rd Fleet without Admiral Franklin. And Admiral Franklin would not stop, ever, until you were dead. The Colonel shuddered. It was much colder on the bridge than out in space, it seemed. "Admiral" he announced himself. "Colonel, welcome to the Executer. You have skirmish data to upload?" "Yes, contact with three new enemy classes. A much larger force. We ambushed them with EMPs and phased particles beams. All the information is here, everything we saw in battle and after we boarded." You hand him the data slate and he plugs it into an arm jack. "So, it's aliens instead of commies, today? What a refreshing change of menu. Ensign, time until 2nd Fleet arrives?" The Ensign calls back immediately "94 seconds until rift exit!". The Admiral turns back to you. "You are tracking these invaders?" "Yes." "Show me." You contact your crew to integrate sensors with the Executor, and in a moment a spare screen displays the beacon and vector. And past the screen and out the bridge windows the rift begins to tear as the bow of the single ship called 2nd Fleet emerges from subspace. Built like a warhead for each man, woman, and child, the ship was little more than the thrust and targeting systems of a platform whose bulk was 95% fissile. 10,000 square miles of launch ports on a rift-drive, the front of the ship was made up of 200 megaton warheads, stacked nut to butt in a honeycomb, electronically and sequentially fired from gimballed rail-gun silos at 60% of c. Capable of firing two-hundred-million independently-targeted warheads per second, it was almost intended as a joke when it was proposed, but no one was still laughing after the first Xeno incursions, and so a dead man's switch was built. Man's ingenuity is fueled by necessity and hubris, so eventually the dead-man's switch was given a navigation and propulsion system, and sent to the Lagrange point as a point defense. And now it was going to move to the Xeno cluster. A third of the Kuiper belt had been refined to build this ship. I briefly wondered if it's mass would affect Earth's orbit as we left the system. With the whole armada together, the Admiral gave orders to sync FCS and navigation. He chose a formation and submitted his tactical map to the inter-fleet AI, and gave the signal to jump. The fleet moved into the rift, all sensors passive and shields in stealth mode, emerging immediately from the subspace on the other side, at the tail of the Saturn IX returning with it's message and it's tail tucked. There was a lot of EM here. The system was heavily populated with noise of communications arrays. Point sources indicated hundreds of orbital stations, colonies, outposts, shipyards, military installations, and home worlds. The Executor fire control system AI confirmed a firing solution for each source and dispatched it's itinerary to the fleet. In a microsecond all targets were assigned their own dozen MIRVs, cataloguing and prioritizing military targets, supply chains, communications, and defenses. The Admiral called for a comm-link to 2nd Fleet. The screen flickered and a voice came over the intercom: "This is our would-be invaders home system?" The Admiral responds "It was. Permission to engage all targets." A wall of plutonium silently leaves in wave after wave from 2nd Fleet. While firing, the stealth is disabled, and within a few moments a helmsman declares "PING! Vector 240, declination 50 degrees, 4000km!" "We've been ranged!" "Launch detected!" "Shields are maxed, Admiral" "Launch detected!" "Launch detected!" "Evasive rift jump solutions ready for Nav!" "Launch detected!" "Projectiles entering point-defense range in 20 seconds!" Admiral Franklin laughed like Microsoft Sam while millions of drone fighters dispatched in response from each of the dozens of carriers and formed a swarm cloud for extended range point defense and intercept around the fleet perimeter. Coordinating their fire, they could intercept and destroy billions of incoming projectiles before exhausting their energy reserves. But it would prove unnecessary as only 4 launches were detected and they had all been intercepted. "Return fire! Target on screen!" Sensors across the fleet swung to the coordinates of the last ping, but there was nothing there. "No contact!" "Cycling scan frequencies!" "Launch detected!" "Firing solution to launch origin! Paint them with the terawatt beam cannon before they can maneuver!" The incandescence of superheated metal from the laser would allow target locks on the infrared longer than otherwise "Target's shields are cycling, but lock acquired!" "What the fuck?! Sir, they are moving post-relativistically!" "Admiral, we can't maintain lock!" The Admiral has heard it all before. He was enlisted once. Became a man a thousand times. Seen death a thousand times. And so he knew the determination of the captain of this enemy ship. He understood that that captain would do anything to avenge the system which was going Nova at this time. The battery launched 8 minutes before would see a million warheads impact every broadcast antenna in the system, and every mile apart on the ground, just to be sure. Admiral Franklin knew war like this enemy pilot knew fear. He snaps into his fleet-comms: "All ships, return through the rift immediately!" That captain was gonna try to rift jump into the bridge, he suspected. Franklin suspected this because it was what he would do. And because it would work, if they weren't quick. He hadn't suffered any casualties in this hit and run campaign yet. And as the rift sealed behind them, he turned back to me. "Colonel, thank you for your intel. You are dismissed." Returning to my ship in the hanger, I began my debrief. I wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Yet we commit first-strike genocide without first contact. The blithering "military" we routed at Kuiper Lane may have well been pirates, for all their decorum and success. The only ambassador we sent was Uranium. The only intel we had was what they told us while interrogated. We towed back the ships they didn't scuttle when we boarded, and we discovered nothing interesting to our 24th century physics and materials science. So what possessed them to come to our system and invade? Why throw themselves upon our spear?" Maybe we were the invaders. But as the Admiral would always say, "History can't ask a pile of ash."
We can't be the invaders if there are no traces of who we invaded
\> Admiral Franklin was every bit of 6-foot-20 6 foot and 20 what? Inches? you know there's 12 inches to the foot, right? Did you mean 7 foot 8 inches?
Part 2 now up!
_Yeeyeeyeeyeeyeee-!_
I agree most whole-heartedly!
Nah the nature of predators comes first lol
Was going to upvote... but you are at 666 already sooo. I like it. Nice even number
Wait... what? No. They have no concept of stealth tech... they canāt see our ships... Why are we not attacking? (Grins) They have an entire Empire out there. And have no way whatsoever to even SEE our craft? Have reduced this technological advantage to a primitive systematic belief in ghosts? Why are we not attacking? For Gods sake man... ATTACK!!!!! šš Great story. Forgive my natural inclination towards evil.
The problem with conquering an Empire is that said Empire becomes your newest source of headaches. Everything needs doing, but there's nowhere near enough competent people to do it. Even fewer that won't take the opportunity to try to pull another change in management. It's all too likely to be a bad deal all round. Best to just leave it be, wait for the collapse, and buy sectors for pennies on the dollar.
No no. Donāt run the Empire. Break it apart. Smash it. Then allow the little parts all fight each other. Take the bits you want, use stealth tech to take out any who look like they are organising, then... then... Er... Iām being evil again aināt I? I must stop doing that. Sorry.
Just becose you are " bad guy " dus not make you bad guy .
No, embrace what you are, and do it well!
I'm talking the penny-stock option. At a cheap enough price point, almost anything can be a worthwhile investment. Look at Alaska. At the time it was bought, it had almost no value, but with investment and exploration, it provided an excellent return. If you can buy out sectors for cheap, it only takes a few prosperous worlds to pay for the lot, and then you basically got everything for free.
Better with one big enemy you can control than a multitude of possible enemies that might do what ever.
What do you mean, evil? We all know that humanity is the only one deserving of the stars, as proven by our god emperor! DEATH TO THE XENON SCUM
The chinese solution to the Mongolian problem. It works well until it doesn't
(Edit) Sorry, forgot it was a post made more than one year ago
Or, you know, make the populace have this idea of "freedom", supply them with weppenz, and let them topple themselves and we can afterwards make "an offer they can't refuse"...
Ehh... The track record of that has been very mixed. If it works, it's cheap. If it fails, it may cost a fortune just to get back to square one.
Isn't a similar strategy to this partly what lead to the formation of al-Qaeda?
Yep.
The US literally made banana republics, the coke problem, Saddam, and bin laden.
By pretending to be the good guys. Embracing the bad guy side means you pave it and send your guys to start from scratch without resistance or local culture to integrate.
When it works. We DID that. Or tried. Everyone should know about agent orange and napalm in Vietnam. They're still there. We literally were the Bad Guys. Hurt so many of our own and their people. oof.
Agent orange just deffoliates. What I mean is you donāt send troops, you send nukes.
"Just defoliates..." is not the term I'd use for thousands of Vietnamese and a near equal number of vets being slowly poisoned over their lifetimes. And still so. But, making a parking lot, is a fair point. If you're just going to embrace the tyrannical route anyway.
It's not evil if it is a self-defence. ;)
Pre emptive self defence
Between this story and the post 'the barrier' I got an idea for an interesting kind of passive defense megastructure. An 'Oort Swarm' trillions of cold matte black steel javelins in overlapping orbits around a system able to punch through anything not sufficiently shield and completely undetectable. The only way in or out would be through temporary windows in the swarm that would open and close at various intervals as the overlapping shells of javelins shift around eachother.
Just yeet a big rock at it that makes it stop being abarrier and what ever is on the other side gets a big steel javelin rain.
Gravitic perturbations from just a couple of light years away are enough to disturb cometary bodies and send them into the inner system, some of those were extinction level size Even ignoring enemy action doing the same on purpose, by crowding that space with stationary kill missiles, any shift, or even accident will turn those missiles from stationary to potentially relativistic. All it takes is as previously stated just fling rocks yourself. Or swing a gravitationally massive object somewhat close, and wait for the inevitable clearing as orbits decay and wander apart
With a bigger budget you could have eliptical orbits with the combined perigees forming the enclosing spherical region, this would both increase the velocity of the projectiles and mean any perturbations in the spherical region could only throw them further out as opposed to into a dangerous inner orbit. I'm not imagining a solid wall here so much as a region a few thousand km thick with enough spikes passing through it as to make any attempt at passage unacceptably risky, the sheer number and velocity of projectiles would prevent the clearing of any permament lane outside of those pre-planned into the initial projectile orbits.
This plan forgets how incredibly vast space actually is. The outer shell of a solar system is so incredibly vast that it would be more than rare that any two of your spikes would ever be in visible range of each other, even with trillions of them.
I did say megastructure, something comparable to a dyson sphere in terms of scale of construction.
They shouldāve sent an in-spectre to inspect the human military capabilities (the pun came to mind)
*Very visible war ship appears in the sky* āit canāt be that easyā It was that easy
/u/SpacePaladin15 has posted 8 other stories, including: * [Mutually Assured Destruction](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/lny3nc/mutually_assured_destruction/) * [Human Thrill-Seeking](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/llntmm/human_thrillseeking/) * [Someone to Love](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/lk1wzc/someone_to_love/) * [You'll Never Take Us Alive](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/lis97l/youll_never_take_us_alive/) * [Humans Fight Fire](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/lhckfi/humans_fight_fire/) * [It Was Just a Prank](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/lf9utk/it_was_just_a_prank/) * [The Gods of Creation](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/lesi6d/the_gods_of_creation/) * [The Human Word 'Sacrifice'](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/ld15ys/the_human_word_sacrifice/) This comment was automatically generated by `Waffle v.4.5.0 'Cinnamon Roll'`. [Message the mods](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FHFY&subject=WaffleBot|lpmdjm&message=If%20you%20have%20problems%20with%20updatemebot,%20contact%20Watchful1.%20We%20do%20not%20maintain%20it.) if you have any issues with Waffle.
Man I wonder else what this spacepaladin guys has posted, seems like a real up-and-comerā¦
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Do they know about humans then?
Clearly they have some knowledge, they referred to it as Terran space, and hearing a human voice over the comms. They also want to invade earth, so presumably they know its inhabited by intelligent life. I'd guess whilst they've met human diplomats and civilians, and maybe some soldiers, they've never met this particular military force, maybe special forces? Or a home guard kitted out with prototype tech?
/report:humans:invisibility hacks or godmode
>At first, the legends did not convince many people. The word of criminals and peasants was not exactly reliable, especially when they were making far-fetched claims. That all changed when **our government sent three military reconnaissance ships to scout out a potential conquest of Earth. And they just vanished.** >Word leaked out to the press of the failed operation, and suddenly, those ghost stories had a lot more credibility among spacefarers. Smugglers, merchants and slave transports alike began to avoid the Sol system, for fear that they too would disappear. Taking a longer route increased expenditure on fuel, but it beat being snatched up by the spirits. >I was not one of the believers though. Ghosts didnāt exist and religion was a hoax, as far as I was concerned. These tales had to be exaggerated, little more than the results of trauma and overactive imaginations. After mulling it over, I guessed that the Terrans had set up some sort of mine field in their systems. >I shared my hypothesis with the other generals. I suggested we proceed with the invasion, and simply deploy drones ahead of our fleet to activate any traps. After a brief discussion, they unanimously agreed to my plan and selected me to head the mission. It had been my idea, after all. If I were one of those generals, I'd say: "Of course it's a trick, but that doesn't change the fact that we have no intel about human military capabilities beyond the fact that they have something that can make 3 recon ships disappear and a bunch of scary ghost stories." "Your hypothesis is plausible, but it hasn't been tested yet. We send scouts out for a reason, dammit! We need to send another scout and figure out a way to get observation or recordings of an attack back. If we can't even get a glimpse of their weapons, perhaps we should scout a system where we have more information more solid than campfire tales."
How did they get through the shields tho?
Anti-matter weaponry. The general mentions that they're the only thing that can break their shields, but that most armies don't use them bc they're too expensive to manufacture. But guess who spends an unreal amount of money on weapons. That's right, humanity!
Thanks,the cost was my one question, and I was wondering if it was just money,or a weapon they have no concept of
1) Want alien spaceship. 2) alien spaceship has anti-matter pre-requisite. 3) So anyway, this is what we found on the ship. Darpa reports anti-matter expenditures were pretty much on target.
Hahaha, this was nice. :) Thank you!
Dude that was so cool
This is a great story I enjoyed reading this Great job wordsmith
SubscribeMe!
Been following your series since it started and just finished the rest of your catalog. Just wanted to say thanks and glad your writing awesome stories
Wow, thank you for reading all of my stories! Glad you like them, and hope you continue to enjoy down the road š
Can't wait to hear this one on YouTube! You're in my personal top 5 Sci-Fi authors of all time.
Really liking your writing. Still working my way through the "Why humans avoid war" stuff but so far really great stuff. Keep up the good work.
!subscribeme
you know the subscribe bot is like...right there, right?
This os easier for me.
Can I please use this story for my Youtube Channel, I am just getting started.
damn.
!N
Stealthy bois! I wonder if any of the aliens once had the concept of stealth but 'outgrew' it because they could never build anything that would fool their own advanced sensors?
Imagine the letter of marque being brought back?. Golden age of piracy in spave!. I'll probably name my ship No Such Ship Exist.
Wordsmith: "Mind you, this was the Empireās flagship, designed to withstand the direct hit of a nuclear missile." My Internal Monologue: 'Well that's just adorable.'
Dude, i had such a mind\*uck a moment ago. I was like : didn't I read it a year ago ? And this story is literally a year old. How the duck did I even found this ????
MOAR!!
Out of curiosity, is there any particular reason why this one is pinned on your profile?
Is this the sequel to WHAW
Loved this one.
Exelente historia exelente redacciĆ³n!!