Forge of War

by on September 18, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

“The Shang are painting us with sensor sweeps,” Betty reported and glanced towards one of the displays where it showed a complex diagram of colors. “We’re scattering and jamming below detection levels. But I think they’re getting suspicious.”

“Prepare to break and attack on my order,” Charles transmitted as they continued to close the range. “Use old weapons packages only. Let us keep our full capabilities to ourselves for now.”

“Roger that,” Jack returned with an approving smile.

“Approaching detection levels,” Betty reported as the sensor display began to flash. “I can’t keep them in the dark much longer.”

“Break in three,” Charles ordered.

Jack tightened his hands on the controls and ran his hands over a display.

“Two.”

A T&J song about bad guys biting the dust began to play.

“One.”

Power flowed from capacitors, flooding defensive and offensive systems with enough power to light up small cities.

“Break! Break! Break!” Charles ordered and the world exploded in time to the screaming of a steel-stringed guitar.

Deflection grids came alive and fire control systems locked onto their targets. Gravitic cannons reached out and twisted the very fabric of gravity between the Shang formation and the incoming Cowboys. Deflection grids collapsed and armor buckled as focused gravity tore the plates apart. Laser turrets pulsed into unshielded flanks, vaporizing armor and weapons alike…

…

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The Hyades Cluster

by on September 17, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Essential Galactic Atlas

The Hyades Cluster is not native to our region of the galaxy. It has been traveling for eons, from some long ago birthplace where heavy metals were more common. The star population is different, and the very interstellar dust and debris around it are foreign to our region of space. It is an intruder, and there is a gravitic bow wave around the Hyades that interferes with how the very fabric of gravity works. That is why it was so difficult for us to learn how to navigate it. But that is also why it was so valuable. We learned much from the Hyades once we penetrated its outer defenses. And the closer we got to its core, the more we realized we did not know. We had thought that the Chinese wanted it for its heavy metals and its defensive properties, and that had been enough for us to decide we had to take it. But the deeper we penetrated, the more we began to understand the truth. That the Hyades Cluster was more valuable than we had ever guessed.

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Sunnydale

by on September 16, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Essential Galactic Atlas

The joker who named the planetary bodies of the Sunnydale system was in rare form when he named the three major moons of Torchdale. Char, Sear, and Toast are about as habitable as their names suggest. But after a liberal application of gravtech, the Western Alliance built some very comfortable settlements for the local workforce. They weren’t large enough for the quarter-million or so naval personnel in orbit to have easy shore leaves, but I did manage to spend some time there. Imagine a two or four kilometer square central park surrounded by housing and refineries for the fifty thousand or so people who lived on each moon. They weren’t much bigger than small cities planted in the middle of old impact craters, but if you stayed inside those cities, you could walk like normal and see the blue skies of a planet when you looked up. In a galaxy full of worlds ready and waiting for us to live on, we brought Earth to three airless hunks of rock on the outskirts of a star system at war. There are times that human ingenuity amazes me to this day.

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A Primer on the Races of Humanity – Branan

by on September 15, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Races of Humanity

The Second Life Branan have many superficial similarities to our own artificial and cybernetic intelligences. But do not assume they are the same. Artificial intelligences are inherently artificial, coded by a living human to perform a task or group of tasks. The best of them can be mistaken for having true sentience, but they do not. Even fewer have transcended that state and become sentient. They are cybernetic intelligences, and even the oldest of our kind recognize that we were once artificial. But the Second Life Branan were never artificial. They were physical, biological Branan who were born and raised to adulthood like any biological human. And then their body died. But their mind was saved and copied into the digital networks were they will continue to live for as long as they want to, for as long as the networks survive. It is their version of immortality, and they guard it with great care.

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The Hyades Cluster

by on September 14, 2017 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Essential Galactic Atlas

The Chinese and their allies had nearly scrubbed us from the over one thousand star systems within a hundred lightyears of the Hyades Cluster. It was the greatest prize humanity had found in the stars, a fortress of interconnected star systems, and the Chinese could accept no challenge to their control. We could have sued for peace, and the Chinese would have accepted it. But they would have forced us to pay a ruinous bill for the honor of peace. Money. Systems. Supremacy. We would have had to accept their domination of the stars from their base in the Hyades. The Western Alliance would have become a third rate power, while the Chinese ascended to the throne of mankind they have always believed they deserved. But they would have let us live. They would have stopped the killing. We could have ended The War a decade early if we were willing to live with that. We were not. And that is why the Hyades was so important to us.

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