1Run for Your life
Chapter 1: The Fall
Till"al sanuk looked at the display mounted at the front of the bridge of his great Heavy Dreadnought class warship. The display was showing the end of his people. It was not just showing the end of the empire he served. It was the end of his people. His great crystal head did not move, but a Tholian tear rolled down his face. He was not saying a word. He did not need to, but his mind was working. The mind of a high admiral should always be working. Only part of him was aware that the Lattice was almost grey with depression. It was coming from every member of his race within a few light years of where his ship currently rested.
"How could this have happened?" His optic sensors were drawn to the screen as another system was marked as falling. The Great Tholian Empire was falling to the slaves at a rate that should have been impossible.
The most trusted slaves had risen up and killed there masters, but they also were killing all of the other slave races that the Tholians had lorded over for centuries. The enemy had two massive advantages. One was the complete surprise of the attack, and the other were some of the weapons that had been used against the one-time slave masters.
Till had been able to fight off the first attack on his fleet. The Seltorians web cutters or breakers as some were now calling them, had come as a major surprise to him and his subordinate ship's Captains. It had made the mighty web casters rendered almost useless, when they were used according to doctrine the Tholian Navy had developed. The Tachyon phasers were still very useful in cutting into the hull of the hive ships.
The slave race had surprise on their side and he had lost half of that first fleet to them, even before he had found out about those web cutters. He had still "won" the battle. That is if you count that you have the only ships left in operation, when the shooting had stopped between the two groups. He had ordered a boarding party to try to recover examples of this new weapons technology. But that had only cost him the lives of his volunteers, as the slave overseers had blown themselves up instead of being captured.
He had tried to pull back to his support base as soon as he had consolidated what remained of his battle fleet, but it had already been attacked. He received the final report saying that it was about to be destroyed, before he was able to limp to it's aid. The same had been true of the next four bases that he had found over the next week.
On the day of the attack he had started with a fleet of 2 Heavy Dreadnaughts, 2 smaller Dreadnaughts, 6 Battleships, 18 Heavy Cruisers, two dozen Light Cruisers, and over 20 destroyer class ships. All of them crewed by pure Tholians. This did not count his support train and her escorts, which his fleet had been able to call on, before the attack.
After the first attack had been beaten off or survived. He only had 1 Heavy Dreadnaught, 2 Battleships, a Heavy Cruiser and one support ship that could support life when the firing had stopped. They had pulled what they could off the hulks. At first this had been rushed and many useful items had been left behind, because they did not know the magnitude of the conflict. As they found more and more wrecked hulks, Till started to understand how badly they might need some of those parts that had been left behind.
After that little realization had sunken in. He had ordered his remaining ships to spend more time at each of the battle sights they found. Soon their little fleet of damaged ships had started to slowly grow. Sometimes they could get a wreck back in some kind of operational status, and some crew would be shifted around to man them. In other times they would be found by the few other survivors of the surprise attacks. Never was it more than a pair of ships that found them. The enemy was being very thorough in hunting down the Tholian isolated survivors.
Sometimes the hobbled fleet was found by the uprising slaves. Without the element of surprise of the attack and the new "web cutters," Till had made the overconfident slaves pay for their insolence. The payback had not been all one way, and he had lost more people and ships to those renewed attacks. He had been able to claim that the enemy lost more ships and a larger amount of tonnage, but it would seem that the enemy had the ships and crews to lose.
It took him four months to find a support base, which had not been blasted into atoms. When he had made contact with the beleaguered fleet support base commander. Till did not know who was more relieved to find out someone else was alive. The base commander had been almost as relieved as Till had been at the news. It might only have been a battered and war damaged battle group. But it still was a Tholian battle group with its flagship intact. Till found out that the enemy had been targeting command ships in the opening rounds of battle. With the loss of Command and Control, the enemy had been able to roll up fleet after fleet around the galaxy.
Till tapped a side screen with a crystalline claw and new data was displayed. This one screen was not as detailed as he would have liked. It was just a textual report. By now most of the survivors were able to communicate via subspace to other groups Lattices. This had not been a good thing at first. It had allowed all of the groups to know, without a doubt, how badly that the Tholians were losing this war to the Seltorians Tribunal. Then, almost overnight, this had turned into a good thing for all of the surviving Tholians.
Each of the small groups, which were still able to defend themselves and or alive had been able to share data. One of the groups had hit upon the idea of using a wormhole generator to get around the blockade thrown up by the slaves/rebels of their outpost. This was not a new technology for the Tholians, but it was very tightly controlled by the Tholian central government. The central government that had been completely decapitated on the first days of the war.
With their own galaxy under supposed control. Some in the Tholian Empire had looked to other galaxies for expansion. The issue had been how to cross such grate voids between those massive groupings of stars. The idea also had been seen as a way to cut down on the travel time within this one galaxy. That had been the long and mid-range goals foreseen for this new technology. It had been used over the last twenty years, by the Capital District.
They had launched special surveying ships. Each one had been the size of three Magma class Dreadnoughts. They had only worked because they had given over everything within the hull to the new engine and labs. There was very little room for crew or for even weapons. Even then, the ships could only be use once. From what Till understood, each of the great ships had to be almost completely rebuilt from the hull out after it had returned from each mission. Even the high admirals had not been told everything about those missions. That did not mean, that some information had not leaked out. Only they were short on clear details.
Some of the dwindling survivors had latched onto this faint hope offered by this technology. Each of the little groups were slapping together their own wormhole generator out of whatever they could find at hand. The largest of the groups were not just going to send a test ship. They were going to try to send everyone and everything in those hold outs to a new location. Or at least that was what they hoped that they could do.
Till had asked the local base commander if this was an option for them. He had not been surprised to find out that this was not viable for them. This was just a small outpost, and that was probably the reason that it had survived the first few waves of the attack. There had been more important targets, which the enemy needed to take care of. So far it had been able to live on, only because of the slowly drying up stream of survivors. The small group of Tholian civilians did not have the skills or the equipment to make something on that scale, to shift a whole star and Dyson sphere. None of the other slave races had been allowed into this system and could not help with this project. Till had not been happy to send them to another system to wait for the war to end. He had a feeling that they would not live much longer after the Tholians had been killed off.
After the first few reports had come in about the wormhole generator. He was okay with this news. It was not the failures that were disturbing. It was the partial successes that were devastating. Some of the more arrogant or maybe just the more desperate had done the first test on a larger scale. If the wormhole failed? It was just a waist of energy and maybe some equipment, that would need to be replaced. A partial success would leave a sphere, at best, with a massive hole in the Dyson sphere's outer hull. A few of them had just been crushed into neutrons. He had seen the image transmitted back from a holdout system, which the whole Dyson's sphere had been crushed like it had been touched by one of the claws of the gods. The surviving fleet had launched an attack on the blockade soon after that test. Without support of the holdout base, the fleet was filled of crews just waiting to die in broken down ships. They had died, but the attacking Tholian ships had taken a huge bite out of the Seltorians fleets before they had died. The outer layer of remote defense sites and the few remaining ships would keep the rest of the onetime slaves from knowing that they were blockading a dead system.
Till had almost stopped reviewing those reports, after that one report. Then the nearest holdout system had sent and update. This one outpost had the luck of having a visiting small fleet from the Capital District close by, and it had contained a few very smart rocks. One of those smart rocks had worked out a way to use the power provided by the whole star system, and he came up with the idea of using two large ships of the fleet as a kind of sighting system. They were able to make and test, on small scale, a generator. The package had survived the ordeal and had made it to the newest and farthest galaxy any Tholian had ever recorded to have visited. The locals had called it the Milky Way. By now that one holdout group had launched three and recovered three recon packages. They were going to use this data, to find a "landing area". They sent this data and the thousands of pages of data on the move to make the next upscale test.
This one holdout had been sending updates to each of the other holdouts, as they succeeded or failed in each step or sub step of this project. It was hope that even if this group failed? They would generate more data that might help one of the other holdouts succeed in escaping from this galaxy. Till had no idea if this was helpful or not, but it did seem to keep a lot of the population focused on doing something other than dying. Till was getting the impression that the group was getting ready for the first major operational use of a wormhole device outside of the Central District.
Till was brought back to the actions of his body by a soft clicking sound coming from his Communication officer. Till tilted his sharp pointed head and lifted a crystal claw. "Yes, junior officer Fet'soal?"
Tholians did not have different sexes to propagate, but the lower ranked officer was due to divide or cleave soon, along with half his crew. The Tholians had made sure that each ship had a population that was ready to split for the last thousand years. Sometimes that had been a bad thing, when those splits were forced to have the new additions made into a lower skilled asset, all to make the numbers balanced within a ship. This junior officer was not low skilled. Till was expecting it to be a ships commander, soon. That was until the uprising of the slaves. Now who knew what the future might hold.
"Sir! Manager Fallal'ki is returning your com's request."
Till kept his optics focused on the younger officer for a few clicks more. "Thank you, junior officer. Please put it threw to my command saddle." Even as he was speaking. The green gem flickered for his attention. He pushed it with the tip of his right arm. "Manager. Thank you for returning my request. I trust you know why I sent it?"
The head of the local support fleet base gave a double click, which was like a human sigh. "Yes High Admiral. At least this time, I have good news. The repair workshop was able to take some of the data from the latest update. They refined it some, and then used almost a full cycle on the subspace transmitter to talk to that other holdout. They think they can use the data to make a smaller and shorter ranged wormhole generator. They think they might be able to use that larger transport and make what they have started to call a "Tactical Wormhole Generator." I think, that they think. That name makes it sound more threatening, somehow. I will send you the technical data as soon as they send it to me."
Till did a single long click and was thinking about what he had been told. He could hear something on the other person's clicks. It was the tone, and it did not sound good. Was he about to cool himself? They were losing a dozen souls a week to loss of hope. They had taken to cooling themselves, out of fits of depression. "Thank you Manager. I would like to see this data. Maybe we can use it to escape and make it to a larger holdout."
The Manager visibly changed colors as he processed what the senior military commander had said. "Yes! You are right. I will make sure you have the data as fast as they can get it together in something like understandable syntax."