The Grays by D L Harrison

Author:D L Harrison [Harrison, D L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2019-12-16T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine - Interlude

Twenty minutes ago…

High Leader Tellus was nervous. The last six days they’d almost lost eight thousand worlds, and all they had to show for it was destroying nine thousand ships. Given the pressures, he’d approved a plan to split the fleets further, but refused to assign any more ships away from the core world defense.

If it worked, they’d destroy almost a hundred thousand enemy ships in one operation. Unfortunately, that was just one tenth of the enemy ships, but the greater progress might shut up some of his critics. Normally they’d be far too scared to speak out, but given the enemy was destroying close to two thousand worlds every other day, they were probably more afraid of that than him. It was total chance on what worlds would be targeted next.

The Admiral in the room with him looked far too nervous for his comfort.

The first six fleets to near the FTL line went as planned. It was hardly ideal, he’d have preferred to ambush all of them at once, but the human fleets weren’t arriving at the FTL lines in perfect timing, and it was what it was. The rest of the Earth’s fleets were much closer together in timing.

Then everything seemed to go wrong, as the remaining fleets arrived to find out the humans had launched their dreaded shielded missiles. He winced, as just short of six hundred thousand ships were absolutely massacred by billions of energy beams.

He frowned, “Why didn’t they do that earlier?”

The admiral said, “I don’t know. Presumably they were okay with the blood being traded, until we changed tactics. You have to admit, they’d have lost less than three percent of their fleet using our old tactic in exchange for fifty thousand settled worlds. They had to have had that plan ready to go, if we changed tactics first. I suppose they didn’t change, in the hopes we wouldn’t either.”

He grunted, “They’re still not eradicating the worlds?”

The admiral nodded, “Not in the first three waves, our scouts have verified after they left. We’ll have to wait and see for this round. So far they’ve just removed all the cities, space infrastructure, and technology on the surface. Any who evacuate the cities or live outside of them survive.”

He shook his head, “A lot more will die anyway, we haven’t had to hunt or farm for ourselves in over a hundred millennia.”

The admiral nodded reluctantly in agreement.

The admiral said, “Fleets of five hundred are starting to arrive at other worlds. Perhaps they’ll simply start launching missiles before reaching a light second from FTL from now on…” he trailed off in alarm.

Tellus frowned, “What is it?”

The admiral said, “Six fleets of one hundred thousand ship fleets, just arrived. One fleet each at the core worlds. It seems they had more plans ready than simply launching missiles. The fleets are responding per orders.”

Tellus’s thoughts were furious, and frightened, until the obvious occurred almost a minute later.

“No! Stop them! It’s a trap, they aren’t that stupid.”

The

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