They Shall Not Pass (The Bicentennial War Book 2) by C.J. Carella

Author:C.J. Carella [Carella, C.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fey Dreams Productions, LLC
Published: 2019-12-11T22:00:00+00:00

Eight

Kunah System, Crab Oligarchy, 203 AFC

“You have accomplished a great deal in such short time, District Admiral Eevee-Chut,” High King-Admiral Grace-under-pressure told her Crab counterpart.

“We were highly motivated, your highness,” the commander of the Star Oligarchy’s District Armada replied. “After this system was ravaged not once but twice in the span of a handful of years, it behooved us to ensure that there would be no third time.”

Grace cocked her head to one side in her species’ gesture of agreement. The Oligarchy had never been particularly warlike, but when confronted with an existential threat, it reacted like all Starfarers did: with the full power and rage it could muster. A mobilization program that started when the Horde rampaged through Kunah and three other Crab colonies had only redoubled its efforts when the Nemeses probing attack eradicated the population in the system before withdrawing. No one doubted the implacable enemies the Horde had warned them about would return sooner or later.

The gathered forces in the system were formidable indeed. The Crabs’ reformed District Defense Fleet included three hundred vessels of war, one third of them battleships or dreadnoughts whose enormous tonnage allowed them to field the heaviest weapons and shields available. The remaining two hundred ships were mostly cruisers and battlecruisers; the formation was rather top-heavy in Grace’s opinion, but since the enemy appeared to rely on direct-energy broadsides rather than missiles or fast-attack ships, the disposition made sense. The ships’ systems were new or recently upgraded; while not as advanced as what humans fielded, they were notably improved from the state of the art during the Great Galactic War.

The Oligarchy was not alone, either. The polities linked to Kunah by its network of warp jumps had sent their own forces in a rare show of cooperation. Alliances between Starfarers were utterly dependent on the convenience of the participants; they lasted only as long as it was expedient to honor them. The reports the Americans had released after securing the surrender of the Horde had proven to be, in Eevee-Chut’s words, highly motivational. If the space nomads’ tales were to be believed – and why else would they choose a life of eternal wandering between hostile stars? – the Nemeses had wiped out every species they had come across for hundreds if not thousands of millennia. It was in everyone’s best interests that the enemy never made it past Kunah and the outgoing warp lines that led further into Starfarer space.

Grace perused her Grand Fleet’s order of battle: over two hundred combat ships all told, although only sixteen dreadnoughts and thirty battleships, with the rest evenly divided into lighter classes. Modern space warfare theories deemed frigates and even destroyers obsolete, since those ships lacked the force fields and armor necessary to survive the broadsides of enemy heavies. She agreed with those assessments and had successfully lobbied to replace at least some of those light vessels with cruisers that were larger and had higher survivability rates. Furthermore, she had been able to

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