1I do not own this intellectual property, but it was eating me not to write it. I did not have a beta reader or a tech reviewer on this project. I also have not played the game for about 15 years.
Chapter 6: Home Coming?
Till was sitting in a house, and it was a real Tholian house. It was something that he never thought that he would do again. The Tholian Holdfast was a small Dyson sphere, but even one of those can hold a lot of people, and Tholians liked a population density that would drive most other races crazy. Every person in his little fleet had been given a place, a normal place, to live after a few hours of processing. Most of that had been medical, but not all of it. Tholians tended to breed for a certain job. If that job was not available, it caused an individual to become distressed. It would take some time for everyone he brought to this galaxy to settle in.
The Leadership Council that had been set up had finally taken a break. Till had been grilled by both the non-military types and what everyone, outside of the Tholians, was known as the Neo-Tholian's military commander. The other Hight Admiral was the local military leader, and Till was not going to try for the job. He was tired and wanted a break from command. He had commanded without break for long enough, that he wanted to take a few months away from that level of stress. The images of what had happened to his people were still very fresh in his mind. Now it looked like he was about to be thrown into another major war. Want they were calling "The General War" was taking its last gasps, but something was moving on the edge that the Tholians had noticed.
Till already had a few points of friction, with this group. He could not understand why they were trying to avoid contact with the local races. He wanted to trade with them. He had to keep from snapping a civilian's legs off, when they did not seem to get the hint that the "old" enemy was coming. And that they were going to outnumber the Tholians when they got here.
He had been thanked and "rewarded" for his quick thinking on bringing the damaged enemy light cruiser class ship along with the rest of his fleet. The updated shield cracker and web breaker technologies would be very helpful to the rest of the Hold Fast threw any new war. The Battle Group had fought many battles with the Enemy on the way to this place, but they had not been able to capture a single enemy ship. Till had pointed out about each enemy ship having a suicide command, when he was told of this story. The few scientists that he had carried, had also been a help to a number of different projects. But the local Holdfast had taken years to hatch whole groups of that caste, after they had landed. The new blood would soon start to improve the larger group of scientists with their old and very well understood knowledge.
The tactical wormhole generator might prove to be useful, if they could work out the time delay that was a side effect. This local branch of the Tholian race had an obsession with time travel and other dimensions as a rule. Till was thinking that they were borderline in hysterics about the subject. When he asked what was to become of his fleet? He had been both disappointed and shocked at the information. While his little fleet had been on the way to the Holdfast, after being found. This subject had been decided, without input from Till. After all of the individuals had been checked out, and given some down time. They were to start recycling the ships and whatever cargos they might still be carrying in their hulls.
Another item that was pointed out, was that the additions of the four support and yardships along with the bays in the starbase would almost add a quarter to the yard space that the Hold Fast had. The Holdfast could build only small ships in the yards they had. The Battle Squadron was helping their knowledge base in building or modifying those support yards for large ship construction.
Between them, their crews, and the staff that the battle group had carried in some of those cargo ships. They would quickly have a marked impact on the rest of the local defense force. When it was reported he had recovered two command modules for capital ships? The Navy commander had almost vibrated out of his shell. It would seem that the major stumbling block on expanding their fleet with major warships, was making new command modules. Till had no idea what would become of those two hull parts. If he had known that they were going to be in such high demand? He would have ordered the yard and support ships to make more on the trip, while they were traveling. It was not like those crews had been overloaded with work on most of the trip.
Till had not heard recycling when they were talking about his command. He had heard the word scrapping. The locals had enough small warships under their command. They could even make more of them, at a fast rate. It made more sense, to them, to reduce the new ships to spare parts. They were going to start with the venerable little destroyer escort. She had been just launched back into space after being repaired in the starbase. She had made the last month of space travel on her own power. It would be followed by the remaining Patrol craft sized vessels, that had made it on the long trip. That did not seem right to him, but the Holdfast and the Military commander had agreed to this plan. He did not have to like this plan, but he had to follow it. That is unless he wanted to try to take over as the commander for all of the Holdfast defense units.
While the smaller craft were being dismantled every ship that was a cruiser or larger was going to go into a repair and refit cycle. The Destroyers would be held back and kept as they were, until they decided if it was worth keeping them. Thanks to the experience of working on the battle squadron's ships, most of the hard work was done on the planning side. All of the Particle cannons would be replaced with powerful local tech made disruptors. Those weapons would fit in those existing housings with very little in the way of modifications needing to be done. The Plasma weapons would be replaced with what was called photon torpedoes. It was hoped that shield breaker technology would be added later on.
He had just gotten used to the idea that anything smaller than a capital ship, will be removed from the active battle line. Then he was told that along with the smaller warships 3/4ths of the civilian ships would also be taken apart, as the yard space opened for them to be cut apart. When Till has asked why? He was told two things. One was that The Holdfast does not trade with outsiders. And the other was that the Tugs would not be scrapped. It would seem that the locals had an idea about using tugs as a type of warship. Now that the Tholian Navy had a few Tugs to work with. They would be doing the same, as the local races. Till had no idea about armored Tugs, but he was willing to spend the time looking at them. Then he dropped his own bombshell on the council. He was tired of inferring about the coming threat.
"Why are you making the same mistakes, which caused the fall? The Seltorians are coming, and they will outnumber us. They might need a long supply chain, but they will have a whole galaxy to support them. You know the one we used to call home. We need all the help we can get, if we do not want to be wiped out."
This statement had caused a shimmer in the Lattice so great, that the meeting had to be wrapped up before any more major issues were worked out. After that Till had more or less been sidelined as the power players of the Holdfast Collective try to deal with the waves, that the new fleet and Till had caused to the Holdfast and the rest of the local area. What most of the larger powers considered a regional power, just had their fleet grown by 3 capital ships and another dozen major warships. The Orion's had made lots of money with the selling of this information to the rest of the quadrant in a very short amount of time. Every ambassador to the Holdfast and some groups that did not have ambassadors were sending questions to the council any way that they could. This was affecting the harmony of the Holdfast and they only could come up with one way to balance it. It was one they did not like, but by now the council had grown use to the human word compromise.
Till is given command of a sector of space, that was not far from the Holdfast, but it was closer to the Federation. He would be in command of any interaction, on a tactical level, with any aliens that he felt could help in his mission. It was hoped that his presence and attitude would better help the Holdfast there. Any Tholian, and there were many that were having problems settling in with the rest of the Holdfast, could ask to be sent to that location.
Manager Fallal"ki would be taking over some section of the Dyson sphere, and would not be joining Till. This seemed to make the manager very happy, and it might give him a path for a position of power on the council. He was of the mental type that like the old ways, that the Holdfast was clinging to. This was going to be a test case, now that the Tholians had a set of plans on how to build, arm, and armor a fleet base. They might start to push out an outer layer of defense outposts, mainly focused at the Klingons.
It was two months later and Till could not help but hum aloud. He was sitting on the command center of his great warship. The council could not find a way to take it from him, so he still walked its corridors. They had just arrived at his new home, and soon to be command. This star system did not hold any M class planets or planets that Tholians could live on without needing a lot of hard to find life support equipment. Tholians had no problem doing that for a long length of time, but it was not healthy for them.
That did not mean that it was a useless system. It had 4 stars that orbited very close together, and that had left a massive amount of rubble to mine. Many important ores had been found over the years, but the Holdfast did not have the right equipment or personnel that could do the job. Plus, the Holdfast would need to keep a large enough number of warships there just to keep any other groups from taking it away from them. That is until now.
The Modified Starbase would be the core defense, besides Till's own dreadnought. He also had two light cruisers, six destroyers and any smaller warships that would be based out of that area in the future. He also would have one of the yardships and three of the remaining freighters, which he had brought with him. The Starbase and Yardship would act as a nodal system of support for the whole Tholian Fleet. Now with two threats from outside of this galaxy being accepted to be real threats to the rest of the Tholians. This was deemed a good use of their limited resources.
The secondary goal for this mission, was making new command modules for Capital ships. They might be able to make three to maybe four of those completed devices a year. It would depend on what was found in this system, and how much time the two repair areas were used to support the Holdfast on other missions. Till had been given a blank slate on how he was going to use this area, besides those two goals. Till intended to do whatever it might take to protect all Tholians.
First thing after the starbase had been positioned, and the local group of stars was scouted heavily by his little fleet. They would start detaching the two super tugs from the old fleet base. They would be staying under Till's command, thanks to the oversight of the council. They just knew that the Starbase could self-deploy. They had not looked at how, it had become that way. While the yardship would first help with this task, and then it worked on repairing the first of the freed tugs. The two tugs would then move large rocks closer to the fleet base. Those would start to be both mined for anything useful, and they would be used as anchor points for defensive webs. After the base was set up with an adequate defenses. The real work would start.
Till knew that the supply of warp crystals he had handed over to the council, would be used up in less than two years. He wanted to find more, and they should be here. How much? Now that was anyone's guess, but he also might be able to trade for them. It took only a few months before the first free trader found Till and his growing operations. The energy use was something that could not be easily hidden, and Till had not even tried. Now that Till knew more about Tholian Silk and why it was wanted so badly. He had made an effort to collect it from his people, and not let the council know about it. Between some of the excess ores and the silk. The trader had left the area very happy.
It would not take long until more and more ships were stopping by this part of space. Traffic was so heavy, that one of the outlying rocks that was being mined had an M class habitat fitted into a larger section of her tunnels. It would become the center of trade for this area of space, and it was another reason that the Klingons were upset. This influx of capital, weapons and other benefits helped Till complete his secondary rolls. He was shipping back to the Holdfast new Phasers, Disruptors, photon launchers by the ship load and drone technology was starting to flow to the Holdfast. When the first two new command modules were delivered. He was regaled with praising clicks. His little trading area also became a center of spying by the other powers in this part of space. The humans could not understand Tholian speech patterns, but they called the area New West Berlin. Even with all of these spies. They never realized how this area was supporting the whole Holdfast military space fleet. They could only see Webs and a few rocks being cut up.
Till was reviewing the latest threat. Reports were starting to come in of missing ships. A whole fleet of ISC warships had gone missing a few days ago. He was trying to keep his feelings from making it into the local Lattice, but he did not think he was succeeding. His contemplation was interrupted by the comms station.
"Sir! A message from the Holdfast! It's a general alert. "The Great War has started. Be prepared for an attack by both old and new enemies."
Till looked over to his command staff. "We know that the high council had foreseen this, and we have been preparing for it. We knew that the beasts from Andromeda would keep going, even after the ISC came forward. I want all ships on alert and all weapons powered and shields ready to come up, at the first sign of trouble. I want the Y188 to be known as the year the Tholian fleet regained its honor." Till stopped talking and looked over and up to three different tri screens. "I think it's time to turn A78 around. Let's show others that we have a small auto repair yard open, if they have the parts. Make sure Spackle is tied into the defensive net of the Fleet Base."
Till had to keep his inner voice quiet. They had been working on the wormhole generator that he had brought along, but it had not been turned into anything useful to fight with. There were just too many bugs in devices like that. One was the odd way that it made Tholians want to cleave when they were within a few thousand KMs of the device for any long length of time. The other major bug turned out to be a bit more helpful, than increasing the Tholian population.
The device had let them "see" into different dimensions. One thing that seemed to be a constant was that the group from Andromeda, would launch a massive war in this galaxy. It had taken only a few more "looks" to get the Holdfast moving in a way that would prepare them for another major war. It was not all smooth sailing as the humans would say, but they got more focused on that threat and not the Klingons or other local races.
Tholians loved to use asteroids to build in. While most outside races had just thought A78 was just another rock, which had been mined out and used as an anchor point for a massive expanse of Tholian energy webs. Now they would see what had been facing away from them and hidden from view behind the walls made of Tholian Webs. Over the next few hours. The rock known as A78 was slowly spun around, and a great circular maul that was an auto shipyard big enough to hold a Federation heavy cruiser with a little room to spare could be seen by the outside universe.
Thanks to a now rapidly growing population. The Tholians were able to start to help the Grand Alliance to hunt down the marauders from Andromeda. No one, but the Holdfast would know how many lives this preparation would save. The Holdfast could not be everywhere, but they would lend their firepower and modified shield crackers in the attacks. Till small repair yard would soon be filled with ships. Support ships from all of the races, to include the Klingons would be in orbit nearby. There would be raids into this system launched to take out this support node, but they would fail. Till had used all of his combat experience to turn this part of space into a massive death trap for any attackers. When the war was over, it still would be a Tholian support base. And it would be were the first warnings of the Seltorians would be heard.
The End….For Now.
Notes:
Why did the TWG not work after the fleet arrived in the Milky Way? The TWG needed a few hundred tons of Left handed crystal lattices Dilithium crystals to work as designed. Due the orbit of the Milky Way around the super massive black hole. All of the Dilithium crystals have a right handed crystal lattices. They still work for warp drives but nothing more advanced. When the TWG crossed the energy barrier? It shorted out the device.