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Homeworld Return - blackjack
:: 05/05/01 ::
Chapter 1
3,000 years ago on Hiigara…
Everywhere on the ground there was chaos, utter chaos as civilians milled about, mixed with the military personnel who were trying to herd them onto the transports. Dust from the liftoff of shuttles obscured the vision of all, adding to the confusion, while fighters cut overhead and caused men carrying heavy bundles to drop them and mothers to shield their youngsters with useless bits of cloak and shawl. Above them all, the night sky was in a chaos all its own, fighters too small to see twisting, diving, and impaling each other with beam weapons and mass drivers. Bright flashes lit up the night sky, and with every single one the officers who had the time to look up knew that the Taiidan were one step closer to Hiigara.
Shubari Calor Ga'artred was one of these men, the brave few warriors who found themselves staring up at the sky with panic surrounding them and silently wishing that they could be up there, fighting in Hiigara's last stand. All of them knew that the battle was futile, fought only to save the lives of hundreds of civilians for every man who died in orbit, but many looked upon it as the most glorious and important battle ever fought, men who thought that perhaps, by some miracle or act of Sagaukk, the United Hiigaran fleet might pull through victorious. But these were the fools, the dreamers, that were so stupid as to not even consider the thousands of Taiidani vessels hovering at the edge of the system, waiting to pounce should they be needed. Their only chance was with the Council, if only they would stop debating it…
Calor found himself snapped out of his reverie by a small child running into the back of his legs. The young girl was crying, he saw, thrown to the ground by the impact with the crowd milling around her and threatening to crush her small frail body. Tears streaked her dusty face as she whimpered noiselessly, all sound that she might have made drowned out by the panicking masses.
He picked the child up without hesitation, cradling her in his arms and gently wiping away a dirty tear. "There there, hush, little one..." he whispered as he looked about for the girl's parents. Seeing none that might be heading back to grab the young girl, he spotted the nearest transport and shoved his way through the agitated crowd toward the boarding ramp.
"Papa!" the child in his arms screamed out, and Calor was so startled that he nearly fell from the side of the ramp, with an assist by the section of the pushy crowd who was trying to scramble up the ramp and onto the already overcrowded ship. Looking towards where the girl's thin arms stretched, he saw a mass of grimy hair atop a dirty face bob up and down, trying to shove through a wall of shoving men on the ramp. The man was shouting something that Calor could not hear over the infernal din.
He made his way through the mass of rushing people, hurriedly trying to clamber onto the great ship, and bursting through the semicircle of loudly arguing men he moved toward the father of the little girl. "Papa," she cried again, this time softer, more calmly. The man came up to Calor and took the youngster from his arms, ducking his head and muttering his thanks. Then he disappeared into the crowd and Calor was left alone again, an island in a huge sea of chaos, glancing up at the sky once more. Then with a sigh and a shudder, he turned back to the panicked, grimy mass that was the people of Hiigara.
* * *
High in orbit, above the skies of the world that had one been a glorious empire's head, the last vestiges of the Hiigaran Republic Defense Force fought valiantly to save the world below. The rectangular shape of a Carrier detonated in a huge ball of superheated plasma as a wing of Taiidani bombers strafed it. As the wave of craft turned toward their next target, another Hiigaran ship, a tiny fighter, destroyed one of their number with a string of high-caliber rounds. The fighter was in turn cut down by one of the martyred bomber's vengeful escorts. Kilometers away, a pair of Destroyers were locked in a slugging match, both flaming as they poured stream after stream of bullets and ion beams at each other. Just as it looked as if the Hiigaran ship was going to become the loser of the duel, a group of Hiigaran assault corvettes tore the enemy ship apart and cruised away. The remaining Destroyer turned and thrust away from the floating halves of the Taiidan ship, one battle won among countless losses.
Calor watched all this on the massive tri-D display, still clad in his grimy uniform, ignoring the background chatter of the command aides on every military comm channel.
"Copy that, H-R-F-D one-six-oh-one, pursue and destroy…"
"Break off, A-19 wing, break off immediately!"
"Damage control teams en route, hang in there…"
"Shit, we've lost contact, sir…"
He turned away from the tiny holographic ships and surveyed the interior of the command bunker. The rows of displays with an aide sitting at nearly every one gave the place a sense of order that did not reflect the chaos aboveground. The massive numbers of red blips, out-massing the friendly signatures by at least tenfold on every screen showed that the HRDF was losing this battle, and losing it fast. Why had the Deihari not ordered evacuation yet?
The blue dots of the civilian shuttles, cruising out slowly from the green globe of a simulated Hiigara, surrounded the sphere completely in a network of light orbital shuttles to heavy intersystem freighters converted to carry passengers. The transport effort was straining military and commercial transport networks to the limit as every available ship was quickly loaded with the dirty masses and ordered to lift off with barely so much as a pre-flight checklist run-through. The massive hyperspace-capable supply ships waited for them at the edge of the system, on the opposite edge from where the Taiidani attack was streaming in. The transports gradually made their way to the convoy, some falling prey to honorless Taiidani fighter strafing runs which the poorly armed freighters could not possibly defend themselves against. More than a quarter of the ships heading outsystem had fallen prey to such attacks. The civilians of the remaining craft were hastily loaded onto the massive rectangular ships, which were organized into loose convoys and sent out into the galaxy in the hopes that at least one of them might find a world which could support life and begin anew, away from the Taiidani, possibly to return one day and retake the world whose fight to save was quickly being lost.
Already, Calor saw, two convoys had been dispatched, the Chre convoy and the Khar convoy. That meant that the Khar-Tobaa, the ship that he knew to be carrying his family, had already made it safely out of the dying system. Calor knew that he would be unable to rejoin them now, but at least they might live. Maybe his descendants would be the ones that would retake Hiigara. If they survived the long, hard journey ahead of them…
He tore his thoughts away from his wife and back to the tactical grid, only in time to see an icon depicting a Cruiser fade and fall towards the planet below. The ship had been lost - one less Hiigaran vessel standing in the way of a total Taiidan conquest of Calor's world. He kept a hopeful eye on the next organized convoy, the Taak convoy, and silently thanked the gods as the convoy's signatures changed to indicate that they were in the process of hyperspacing out. But he felt an immediate wave of horror as similar signatures - these ones enemy - hyperspaced directly into the center of the largest cluster of rim-bound transport craft. He watched, as he realized everyone else was doing, as transport after transport fell to the Taiidani pigs, and with each one a hundred or more civilians died. As the slaughter continued, he felt the tears welling up in his eyes, knowing that there was nothing he could do to help the defenseless men, women, and children, as one by one their ships detonated and scattered their atoms across space.
Finally the horror ended, though the final result was no better than the actual event had been. Small clouds of debris lay scattered amidst the Taiidani ships as they silently hyperspaced out and reappeared in the middle of another field of transports. One ship fell, then another, and Calor slowly closed his eyes, not wanting to watch as the massacre was repeated. At last, the Taiidani hyperspaced out yet again - headed for another group of defenseless civilians, Calor was sure - but before they could reemerge from hyperspace another set of signatures began cropping up all over the system. Calor felt a surge of hope as he watched the massive vessels emerge, and relief as the wide-band transmission reached all of the warring ships. The battle paused as everyone stopped to listen.
"This is the Galactic Council," the voice on the transmission boomed. Calor recognized it as that of the T-Mat representative. "Taiidani, cease your fighting. No more Hiigarans will be slaughtered today. Power down all weapons systems, both Hiigarans and Taiidan, and allow all transports to exit the system immediately. Failure to comply will result in Council ships opening fire. Hiigarans, evacuate the system immediately. We are deeply regretful, but your world now belongs to the Taiidani."
A single Taiidani Destroyer failed to follow the instructions, and attempted to open fire on a now-disarmed Hiigaran frigate. Instantly and without a word, a web of ion beams from several massive ships of various designs, including a T-Mat vessel, cut the craft down before it could do any further damage. Obviously convinced by the Council's show of force, the signatures of the enemy ships changed to indicate that their weapons had been powered down.
The battle for Hiigara was over, Calor realized with a burst of relief. But another realization quickly struck him, one that crushed him instantly.
The Hiigaran people had lost.
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