It was the dark of the moon on the 6th of June as the battle group gathered just past Luna, a fact that went unlost on Admiral Simineaux as she stood at command in DN 63, the newest and greatest flagship of the Gian fleet.
"Breaker, breaker, Pig Pen you out there?"
Vice Admiral Donaldson's deep gravelly voice responded, "Ten-four, Rubber Duck. Mercy sakes alive, looks like we've got ourselves a convoy!"
The hailing tones played across Space Battle Group One as Admiral Simineaux's clear soprano voice played across every speaker on every ship of the battle group.
"Today we bring to the Lucian's the war that they started with their invasion of Earth five years ago. We have lost many friends, family members, and one time foes, to their total disregard for our lives. During this though we have managed to reverse engineer much of their technology and now we bring war to their home-world.
We bring them war on a scale they will not expect, on a human scale. We bring them weapons resurrected from our own past because they cannot deflect them, and fittingly they have been attached to ships both named and modeled after their predecessors as well.
You each have your assignments, your orders are clear, coms will be kept as quiet as possible after the jump to prevent our enemy from working out our plans.
Remember unlike our enemy, we do not attack civilians unless they attack us. As for the enemy soldiers, politicians, and bureaucrats, they are to be given no quarter except their emperor who is to be made an example of and we all know how.
We will make the wormhole jump in ninety seconds, when we exit if all the math is correct we should be in low Lucinian orbit. This has been chosen to give us the advantage and scare the Hell out of their planetary defenses.
Remember to not get gung ho and let Mighty Mo punch a hole and drop her depth charges before we begin the assault. We need the EMPs to do their job before we put boots on the ground!
Now ladies if everyone is done eating their crayons, let's show these bastards what war really is!"
With her last word spoken, the wormhole opened and she patted her characteristic lucky rubber duck sitting on the con, grabbed the great wheel and steered DN-63 into the absolute blackness of the fabric of space itself.
In the sky above Lucien a dark rift opens where due to the three suns darkness had never been seen outdoors before. The rift created a total eclipse as it passed between Lucien and one of its stars. Panic erupted as the citizens had never seen this type of darkness before and they ran from the streets to hide from it in their homes. A brave few stayed outside watching the rift as the bulbous bow of DN-63 began to appear from it. Slowly the USS Missouri emerged from the rift and even before it had fully emerged it began dropping depth charges. The charges detonated 40 miles above the surface of Lucian and as they did civilian electronics began falling off line. Communicators, computers, their version of television, all were fried by the electromagnetic pulse, all became useless in a darkness flash that absorbed all light within its blast radius that was near absolute, because the scientists of Earth had worked out how to build a nuclear weapon of dark matter. At just over three thousand feet long, and over 400 feet wide, dreadnought 63 was four times the size of her World War Two predecessor right up to her sixty-four inch rail guns and she was the absolute largest object to ever enter the Lucian sky at least until CSF-68 began to emerge behind her.
Carrier Space Ferring 68, properly called the USS Nimitz affectionately nicknamed "Pig Pen" for her cargo of 450 A-50 Warthogs. At nearly a mile long and almost a quarter mile wide the Nimitz blocked the sun on his own, creating a solar eclipse wherever it flew.
The planetary defense system was speechless at the sight of the two ships but the battle group just kept emerging from the rift. Behind the Nimitz was the Yamato, the Bismark, the Suffolk, the Los Angeles, the Vistock, the Tolstoy, the Monitor, the Meramec, hundreds of supply ships, hundreds of ground assault ships, a thousand C-130SF cargo haulers each loaded with twenty A21 Abrahms tanks and other gear. Trailing in behind and covering the rear guard was the USS West Virginia. Built in the Eastern Kentucky space yard, crewed by only Appalachians from Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and a few counties of western Virginia. The West Virginia wasn't even commissioned yet, but the people that built her didn't care and crewed her themselves. She was a corvette amongst destroyers, and her crew was redneck through and through. Essentially a pirated ship filled with combat veterans who knew how to improvise and that included everything right down to their mech suits, calling their captain No Beard the first, and flying the Jolly Roger.
The fleet began to disperse as the Lucian's watched in something akin to watching Armageddon unfold. Never in their history had the Lucian's seen interplanetary battle on their own home world and now here was a fleet bringing just that and to add to it bringing music from Earth as well. The ships all had been fit with sound systems befitting heavy metal concerts and all were synced to play the same music at the same time.
"Over hill, over dale, we will hit the dusty trail…" was the first alien music ever heard by the Lucians and it was quickly followed by The Colonel Bogey March, each major nation of Earth had contributed military music to the playlist and as the depth charges were done doing their job Welcome To My Nightmare began to play as a thousand AH-200 Apache helicopters took flight from the various carriers.
Soon every population center had Apache helicopters patrolling them and dropping broadcast pillars throughout them. As the pillars hit ground they dug in, and opened up revealing a very loud public address system that began broadcasting in Lucian between each song.
"People of Lucian, you are hereby under mandatory lockdown. Any person caught outdoors will be considered a combatant and subject to termination. You are forbidden to leave whatever structure you are currently in until we instruct you otherwise. Any attempt to engage with the Gian military will be met swiftly and violently. STAY WHERE YOU ARE!”
The Lucians had never been restricted before within their collective memory, and now here they were trapped where they were and had no idea for how long. Would it be minutes, hours, days, or would they never be free again. Who were these aliens? What did they want? Most knew the capitol was involved in collecting humans from Earth for workers so they could collect fresh resources that society so desperately needed, but these could not be humans because they are too backwards to do this because the holoscreen broadcasters told them so.
Meanwhile back on the bridge of the Missouri Admiral Simineaux was watching a holographic display of the world below as bright points of light quickly went off as each depth charge detonated and shut off more and more data nodes on the planet below. She felt lucky they emerged at just the right height to start dropping munitions as opposed to having to carefully descend through the Lucian atmosphere to an appropriate depth. Yes the math had been slightly off but it was to their favor and gave her reason to smile. As the planet went dark of data she nodded to General Bear and with a tap on his tablet he gave the silent order for the Apaches to take flight. Within minutes the pillars were in place and city’s were being patrolled from the air.
“Pig Pen, show ‘em what happens when pigs fly.”
The Warthogs began launching from Pig Pen at insane speeds as the rail gun catapults hurled them off the flight deck at almost the speed of sound. Soon the above ground Lucian command centers were experiencing the devastation of lead poisoning from the barrage of bullets raining down on them and their coms were taken out by target locked Hellfire missiles. What Warthogs were not engaging with command centers were on their way to the Lucian capitol.
With the Warthogs closing in on the capitol small fighter ships began launching from unseen openings and to match these the INJ Hosho began launching her pilots of the Divine wind, pilots thoroughly trained in aerial combat in Earth’s higher gravity and thicker atmosphere, two things that gave them a great advantage now. There bullets and Sidewinder missiles dropped Lucian fighters as fast as the fighters could launch, at least until Mighty Mo rolled over, locked onto the fighter’s launch tunnels and opened fire with her big guns.
Sixty-four inch shells are a big deal no matter what planet you are on and when they are made of a blend of tungsten, and synthetic diamond, carrying small amounts of antimatter, and coated in lead they penetrate deep into fortified tunnels dealing out death and destruction as they go deeper and deeper into the ground.
Admiral Simineaux kept a close eye on the hologram though as she watched the battle below but also watched for enemy ships coming in from above. She knew her fleet could maintain being in atmosphere, but she also knew that the Lucian fleet could not. Still she had to watch though because they could drop munitions from above. Her only saving thought was to wonder if the Lucian’s would be opposed to that due to the risk of killing their own on the surface below, be it from a miss or dropping one of her fleet’s ships upon a city.
As war waged in the air above Lucian the ground forces began deploying and the C-130’s began their strafing runs across the planet as the battle tanks were parachuted to the ground. What Lucian’s were not already holed up quickly took cover as none had ever seen such a vehicle before. The tanks took up patrolling at street level escorting the infantrymen in their mech suits as door to door, shop to shop they began patrolling.
“Command, this is Bravo-six. We have a daycare center at coordinates zero-zero.”
“Confirmed and mapped Bravo-six.”
The reason for the door to door was just this, to physically put eyes on daycare centers, schools, hospitals, places of worship, all places that were off limits to target acquisition systems. The reports rolled in fast a school here, a daycare there, a prison now and then, but no hospitals, not that command expected to find any as none of the Lucian prisoners ever gave an affirmative response of their existence upon interrogation. The Lucian physiology baffled Gian medicine for a while and the Lucian's were no help as apparently if they got sick they were just expected to die. An expectation that the humans could not wrap their heads around as even the simplest and easiest to treat ailments had the captured Lucian's preparing for their own impending death.
Overall the Lucian's didn't have much in the line of infantry on their home-world and what they did have was far undermatched for the Gian forces. Very quickly the defenses of Lucian fell and in a week the planet was locked down and secured. With no direction from their home-world, random ships of the Lucian fleet began to return, but they were all met and quickly disabled by the INJ Yamato and the Bismark
The capitol was the problem as the politicians, bureaucrats, aids, and their king were all pretty well dug in. With most of the forces dealing with keeping civilians fed and corralled there just weren’t enough troops to send into the labyrinth of tunnels in and around the capitol. It left command with one option as they needed ground combat veterans to deal with something this tricky.
Admiral Simineaux entered the bridge, and gave the order to communications to bring up the West Virgina on a secure channel. “Captain No Beard, your crew willing to take on a bunch of snakes in their den?”
Captain No Beard’s clear alto voice came in response, “Absolutely sure beats sitting here sharpening bayonets and chains. Just give the order and the place.”
“Consider the order given, place the capitol, time is at your will.”
With her last words spoken the West Virginia began to descend then kicked up her engines as she pushed West to the capitol. In an hour Captain No Beard was setting the ship down in the central plaza and fifty ragtag makeshift soldiers in mech suits began disembarking. Behind the mech unit came the foot soldiers, some with long beards long grayed by age, some missing eyes, or limbs, all in bib overalls, all carrying shotguns, and AR-15’s, improvised grenades were carried in buckets, and surplus backpacks were on each. They looked quite the site with their own personal hunting hounds tagging along, a couple of service dogs, and one guy dressed like a Druid, his white robes billowing with the breeze and his four black Maincoon cats flanking his sides. Captain No Beard led the way herself carrying her bayoneted shotgun in her hands as her Marine Corps saber jiggled on one hip and her 50 caliber revolver sat snug on her other. Like the others two bandoliers of shotgun shells wrapped around her torso as she slung her pack onto her back. With only a wave she lead her troops into the blown open capitol and as they entered the darkness they each turned on their muzzle lights.
The mech unit was flanking and moving debris as the hounds tracked the scent through the building until the Maincoons lit onto a scent and darted off to one side with their owner in hot pursuit of them. Everyone waited motionless until they could see three flashes from his muzzle light and then they followed. What they found was a tunnel that had been mostly sealed with debris from the Warthogs blowing the place up and soon the mech units were clearing a new path.
Beyond the opening were heavy wooden doors that had been closed and secured from the other side giving them the first sign they were indeed on the right path. The team that had been digging made a call out and suddenly a chainsaw came roaring to life as a different mech driver walked up. The three foot blade of the saw sliced through the doors with ease but the mech units would never fit in the tunnel beyond. With another wave No Beard again led the way into the new tunnel.
It felt like the troop had walked five miles before there was any sign of life down in the tunnel when suddenly they began finding doors with markings they didn’t understand. The doors didn’t take much to force open and inside they found what to the troops looked like hotel rooms. Some rooms were empty, some were soon devoid of life, other’s had obviously been used but were empty. The marched on down the tunnel checking every room they came to and once it was cleared they’d move along again. What they didn’t expect to find though was a cafeteria at the end but the Lucian’s inside obviously did expect them. The crew ducked to the sides mounted their ear protection and the improvised grenades were distributed at will causing quite the commotion in the room beyond. After six grenades, captain No Beard removed her ear protection and listened, but all she heard were wails and screams from beyond. The troop entered the room again but this time it was on their terms. Lucian weapons were gathered into a pile at the other end where another door exited the cafeteria and an explosive charge was set. Exiting the room again they detonated the charge destroying both the weapons and the doors. No one dared look at the carnage in the room as all had seen war before, all were instead focused on the new exit. Beyond was a dining room, not fancy but functional and obviously not intended for the common folk. Beyond the dining room were more hotel rooms each having a politician within albeit temporarily. At the very end of the corridor was a single door built of heavy metal with no handle on the outside but a fine set of markings on the outside. Another explosive charge and the door crumbled. The next room was larger but standing in Lucian Royal attire was their king preparing to unalive himself. His weapon was quickly shot out of his hand. He began to charge but was met with the but of a shotgun to his face. Knocked off his feet he was quickly hogtied with a drag line from his shoulders that four humans grabbed and began dragging him back through the wreckage they had just made.
“Rubber Duck this is No Beard, target acquired and en-route back to the surface.”
“Rodger No Beard, Duck out.”
As the Crew of the West Virginia drags the King up to the surface never minding debris or how much he struggles Admiral Simineaux is calling all of the Lucian’s to the streets where jumbo screens had been set up to give them information. A media crew has been assembled in the capitol plaza just out of the West Virginia’s shadow and have adjusted their systems to broadcast to both the Gian video systems and the Lucian military systems and everything goes live to all Lucian’s. The crew drags the king up to the scaffold and toss the king face up as they drop the neck guide into place.
“People of Lucian, this is Gian Admiral Simineaux. We the people of Gia have found your king to be guilty of initiating war and causing billions of deaths on our homeworld, men, women, children, have all been slaughtered by the whim of this tyrant king. By order of the leadership of Gia King Lucian the Ninety-fifth is hereby sentenced to death immediately and publicly.”
With the last word spoken the heavy blade of the guillotine drops and a moment later so does the king’s head, and thus ending the war.
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