Untold Stories of a Galaxy - Kysaek: The Beginning

In the cold vacuum of space, the positions and ratios were much clearer and together with the ships of High Council Havoc, Radiat Services and a few companies Kysaek didn’t recognise, the PGI fleet had taken up a sort of diamond formation. 30 ships were deployed by these companies together and four 500 metre cruisers made up the core of the fleet, accompanied by the rather defenceless large transports that PGI had used to bring its army to Trayden and protected by gunships that were less than 40 metres long and whose striking power was directed against much smaller targets. Behind the cruisers was a carrier ship, a vehicle that normally carried a lot of drones, as well as attack and interceptors. The bulk of the fleet, on the edges and outer lines of the diamond, was made up of corvettes, frigates and destroyers and by design it was a motley fleet, but many ships had one thing in common - their main weapons were at the front, on the bow.

This was not unusual, because in space the doctrine of so-called one-dimensional warfare was generally followed. Although space was of course three-dimensional and there was no real front, rear, top or bottom, the so-called 1D doctrine meant that there was only one direction of attack and most warships were designed for this, which also had to do with the available energy reserves of a ship. Only escort ships had weapons that could be turned in various directions without changing the ship’s direction of flight. However, these were extremely vulnerable and susceptible to attack without the protection of other ships.

The same applied in the upcoming battle. The fleet opposing PGI consisted of many more insignificant companies, which united in a cluster and initially chose an arc-shaped front line as their formation. They had only one heavy cruiser of Hishek design, but a lot of destroyers and four carrier ships. This fleet comprised 39 ships and split into several small flotillas. However, they were inferior in terms of direct firepower, despite their superior numbers, and because a frontal attack would have been too risky and costly an undertaking, they first sent the majority of their drones and interceptors straight through the centre. Their plan was probably to first clear a path for the attack fighters, whose armament was directed against ships, and to do this the presence of PGI’s now-launched interceptors and combat drones had to be significantly reduced.

Closer to the PGI fleet, the two swarms clashed, with the PGI machines showing their numerical inferiority! They tried to let the enemy interceptors fly between them and the manoeuvre succeeded with only minor initial losses. Their enemies were now very close to the PGI frigates and destroyers, which used their light defence guns, especially hyper MGs, against the enemy fighters.

The interceptors of the small companies had to make a quick U-turn, but their opponents had already started to do the same and so they now found themselves encircled between the PGI ships and fighters. For the encircled ships, this created a loss-making group that they first had to bring under control. Nevertheless, the mixed groups had successfully pinned down their enemies’ interceptors at one point.

Meanwhile, the remaining PGI ships focussed on the flotillas, which were split in several directions and began to circle around them. That was the advantage of the many small companies, because lacking the same affiliation, they flew in sometimes unpredictable formations. On the other hand, all it took was one mistake, a destroyer that was too weak or unauthorised action, and the small companies would be vulnerable, as they were now.

Some destroyers of the insignificant ones broke out of the lurking encirclement on one side and moved into an open attack position to attack with missiles. However, their missiles were vulnerable at this long range and were intercepted by the oncoming missiles and light massed guns of the PGI frigates and destroyers.

At the same time, the PGI cruisers calmly turned their primary massed guns on the enemy, first destroying one of the destroyers with two clean hits before firing on the evading targets and starting a skirmish between all the fleets.

On Trayden, everything was long past skirmishing, and whether at the complex or in its vicinity, fighting was taking place almost everywhere.

In the west, above and on the sea, the new medical corporation Signu and the Mink Corporation, a construction giant and unofficial slave trader, were at war. It was not clear who was on whose side, but Signu had previously attempted a landing on the beach and the Mink Corporation had wiped out the heavy bots and foot troops on the unprotected, flat area with air strikes. Since then, the companies had been fighting each other and while Signu claimed dominance with its boats and small ships on the water, the Mink Corporation boarded several of the medical company’s land cruisers. In this situation, it was hardly to be expected that one of these sides would make a significant intervention in the fighting at the complex.

However, the same could not be said of the advancing wave in the mountainous north! Synthetic Automatica Productions, or SAP for short, the forefather of many bot series and one of the largest manufacturers of mechanical servants in the galaxy, was about to unleash a veritable plague on the horizon. The scanners revealed that 90 per cent of all their troops were machines and they had many container transport ships with them, but instead of the unwieldy cargo units, dozens of inactive combat drones hung from the racks of each transporter and were dropped like a metal rain shower. Halfway to the edges of the mountains, they came to life in freefall and rose back into the sky as a co-directed stream over the rocky grounds.

Against this surge of drones, PGI flew with their reinforcements and their rampages greeted the uninvited guests with disruptor missiles. As blue, electric clouds, the explosive devices detonated on the highly sensitive military sensors, causing many to crash, but that didn’t stop the enemy machinery. There were simply far too many targets for their losses to be significant, and with their hyper MGs and lasers, the combat drones mercilessly overran the first line of PGI’s air units, forcing the rest of the Toben contingent to take evasive manoeuvres and let their tinny foes head straight for all the land cruisers, which had also armed their multiple guns with disruptor rounds and set up a kill zone in front of them. Not one of the drones that came within range made it anywhere near close enough to attack the land cruisers. They had to break off their attack with a sharp turn to the right, but their superiority remained and they put PGI under enormous pressure. However, the steel in the sky was not the only thing burning, melting and disintegrating.

It was the same with the wall of the complex and the surfaces of the metal protective wall glowed bright red everywhere and the largely liquefied solid material began to bubble away in lumps. But PGI didn’t wait for the mass to finally disintegrate on its own and blasted holes in the weakened sections. “Kill them all!” it echoed, and the soldiers charged into the dusty fog of the previous explosions with loud battle cries and a steady march.

In this opaque veil, however, the horror was waiting and after the furious discharge of a Rampage, its mighty paw followed. It crushed a PGI soldier and the beast emerged from the fog with a thunderous roar, crushing everything with ease despite the massive plasma hail.

At every hole, the PGI invaders were immediately attacked and the Runners in particular threw themselves against their opponents, pushing through the destroyed wall passage like water from a dam in which a hole had just been blown.

The armed PGI troops on their side tried to contain the aggressive outflow by all means and succeeded, but they disregarded the upper sections! Most of the iron masks there had already been taken out, but runners had long since climbed up and were standing on the wall or crawling headfirst down the wall, pouncing on the unsuspecting soldiers from every angle.

They were slain and strangled, retreating to the edge of the energy shield in places, and had it not been for the arrival of the first reinforcements from the bot army, the PGI soldiers would have lost the ground they had gained inside the barrier! The bots were more robust, however, as they couldn’t be robbed of air to breathe or otherwise easily injured. The agile runners needed much more effort to smash them with their bare fists or damage them at all and so the situation was reversed and the dark tide was pushed back by the grey avalanche.

“How far are you, Doctor?” Kysaek asked over the radio frequency. She was far behind the front line, on an outside jetty of a warehouse. “PGI is getting serious now!”

“It’s not a luxury ship!” replied Wolfgang, stressed. “But most people are just getting on the last container! What’s left are the few who can’t fit in, everyone who’s still fighting outside, you and me! It’s going to be pretty cramped in the hold of your ship!”

“And the prisoners PGI executives?”

“I told you I don’t want to put them on the container ship because I don’t want to risk people’s lives! They wanted you, so get them out of the offence wing! You have full access to everything.”

“Yes, but if a breach isn’t made soon, nobody will get out of here anyway!”

“That was your ingenious plan!”

“It will work!” replied Kysaek confidently. SAP had already weakened PGI’s air superiority considerably, even if it had not yet been defeated, and that, like the presence in space, was crucial for success.

When the final, incoming party appeared on the hill to the south, however, the objective of the battle was overshadowed. Moon 17, an excellent manufacturer of defence systems, lined up side by side with PGI and relied almost exclusively on vehicles in the troops it had brought with it. Blusters in the air, hovertanks on the ground, a bit of infantry and a lot of bipedal combat runners.

The runners were called Mecha Marauders or MM’s, were without arms and about the size of a Blockade Breaker. Between their legs was the windowless cockpit, an angular, long metal snout that looked like it had been made by a Hishek and on their shoulders they carried a narrow missile battery and a twin laser. What characterised the MM, however, was its universal off-road capability. With their spring-loaded legs, the heavy machines jumped off the hills from a standing start as high as a small family house and landed undamaged on the uneven ground below. They easily took off at a sprint that had nothing to hide from the speed of a ground vehicle, and like a pack of predators on the hunt, the steel bipeds raced towards the village ruins.

Things were really not looking good for the defenders of the complex, and that was still an optimistic forecast! The mecha marauders would have been small enough to slip through the open shield passage and technically skilled enough to scale walls! They approached the rearmost ranks of PGI bots and tanks.

Suddenly, however, there was an explosion at the southern PGI gun emplacement! One of their turrets had been hit by a Mond 17 hovertank, just as the rest of the turrets there were now being hit. The tanks swiftly took out gun after gun and the modest infantry even secured some of the turrets.

On the battlefield, the Mecha Marauders stabbed the PGI hovertanks in the back from afar, firing their small missile salvos and then hopping onto the still intact armoured fighting vehicles, completely nullifying their offensive and defensive power. With their red double lasers, the MMs then not only cut through the tubes and hulls of the tanks, but also pulverised the staggered bot formations. The lasers needed cooling periods though, so the mecha marauders opened their mouths and a screeching roar rumbled out of them, revealing their hidden heavy triple magnet MGs in their maws.

From the hills, the Moon 17 tanks and captured turrets opened fire on the ruins as their rampages both supported the Mecha Marauders and veered towards the main PGI base, destroying the jamming tower in the process. It was a real shooting match for them and PGI were now paying the price for their massed force, and not just in the south or at the base, as Moon 17 used the captured missile turrets elsewhere. They sent the missiles over the energy shield of the complex, where PGI and SAP were now engaged in an air battle at eye level - at least until the captured missiles arrived and caught a good proportion of PGI’s land cruisers.

In space, the insignificant fleet lost another destroyer during its orbit, ship number eight, and PGI had only lost two corvettes so far. Skarg’s group simply kept going and continued to exploit its defence formation, but the war in space demanded a quick change and new strategies from time to time. This is where PGI and its forced allies failed.

The insignificant companies finally gained space supremacy with their interceptors, while PGI relied on its cannon boats for defence. Although the interceptors were manoeuvrable, they could not advance to the cruisers without more. So how were the less agile attack fighters of the insignificant fleet, which were now deployed with the remaining interceptors from one side, supposed to manage this? The answer was - not at all. It was not at all the ambition of the insignificant fleet to reach the core. Their interceptors drew the attacks from the outer defence ring and the attack fighters had a clear path. They sent out their disruptor torpedoes and fired a mix of plasma and normal missiles directly behind them.

The shields of the targeted corvettes and destroyers could not withstand the concentrated disruptor hail! Their hulls were melted by the plasma and torn open by the missiles, which was the ships’ death sentence. They were ablaze within seconds and bursts of explosions erupted from inside them before the attack fighters finished them off.

Now there was a huge gap in PGI’s defences and the insignificant fleet went on the attack with its own destroyers and corvettes. They spread out generously in space and utilised their mobility, which was a problem for the slower rate of fire of the PGI cruisers. The attack rate of the Unimportant, on the other hand, was much higher and although their weapons were weaker, they had the advantage. The weak defences of the PGI gunboats didn’t stand a chance even against light massed guns.

With the PGI corvettes and destroyers disappearing into the gap, there were now no ships that could efficiently stop the space missiles being fired and the attack fighters were still there. Each gunship taken out gave them more room to fly in the rear of the outer defence ring that PGI was desperately trying to regroup, but it was too late!

The PGI fleet fell to the domino effect and the first cruiser suffered immense damage from missiles that slipped through its shields with their energy converters. Its barrier then felt the force of the Hishek heavy cruiser, from the ranks of the Unimportant, and at that point it was final - in space, there was nothing left for PGI to win.

The battle at the complex didn’t look much better for the company. With the loss of several PGI land cruisers, drone squadrons from SAP broke through to the complex and, like Moon 17, the probes were able to thin out the amassed bot troops and armour on the eastern front considerably.

Nevertheless, other PGI units had long since made it into the inner courtyard of the defence and were steadily advancing. “They just won’t give up!” shouted Kysaek as she activated the semi-barriers at every possible point. She and her men had actually been on their way to the penal wing, but despite the lost space battle, or perhaps because of it, storm and emergency landing pods were raining down from the sky. However, the emergency landing pods smashed against the energy shield because they usually had no energy converters and the assault pods were targeted and fired upon by the complex’s defence cannons. There were so many of them, however, that some pods slipped through the defence net and landed near the shield energy conductor.

“Look out!” shouted Tavis. “They’ve got Strikers!” The danger he warned of were special missile launchers carried by the PGI troops. They were long and portable, designed to destroy rigid structures and extremely heavily armoured vehicles, but their recoil was so powerful that an attached support frame had to anchor itself in the firmest possible ground before firing.

“Then you know what has priority!” Kysaek replied, because she was aware that a single missile from the Strikers, enriched with extremely powerful particles, would literally tear the sensitive energy conductor apart. The other defenders of the complex, who were fighting alongside her and her comrades-in-arms against the scattered PGI units, knew this too, and it wasn’t an easy fight! Kysaek had fought too often against scoundrels and disorganised groups in recent months, but PGI’s soldiers were simply a different calibre and pushed her to her limits.

Quite a few defenders of the complex lost their lives in this battle and Tavis, and even Thais, had to use all their skills to survive. This was not like Cipi, where the Talin could ambush a small unit and rage freely with their powerful prismatics. Thais used her powers as best she could, but her opponents relied more heavily on the help of Null Fields. This was a form of anti-matter, usually as a limited charge in armoured gauntlets, and its power could negate prismatic energy to nothing and zero.

Tavis never seemed to have fought in such dimensions either. Although he lurked for every opportunity against the Striker bearers, the Palanian could hardly get in a shot because of the vigilant opponents and sought less and less direct confrontation with the ordinary troops and played hide and seek. However, he did not do this out of cowardice, as Tavis may not have been a professional soldier, but he had his methods and one of them was called technique. He didn’t necessarily have to kill the Striker gunners - the Palanian just had to disable their weapons and with the help of his vortex cuff, he could do that. Strikers had simple targeting and command systems, and Tavis targeted them with his cuff to overload them electrically. In this way, he rendered a good portion of the dangerous weapons useless!

Nevertheless, the rest of the enemy units also had to disappear and that was entirely in Vorrn’s favour! He had the least trouble and savoured the battle to the full. “Hahaha! Don’t die so quickly!” he laughed. Not that he was like a berserker running bluntly into an open knife, but from time to time Vorrn was quite offensive, proving the considerable speed of his species. Regardless of his equipment and the enemy fire, he ran swiftly along an outer section of pillars. A small group of PGI soldiers had entrenched themselves behind a semi-barrier, but Vorrn skirted the barrier and leapt towards his enemies behind their now useless cover. Those who were knocked down directly by the Hishek could count themselves lucky, as his jagged-tipped tail slash was so powerful that the PGI soldiers hit died on impact, their bones cracking loudly. Vorrn’s mechanical arm was not used as a firearm here, but for striking, and with the blade extended, he stabbed courageously as a firearm.

“Stop!” pleaded a female PGI soldier desperately, tearing her helmet off her head. She was human. “Please don’t! I’m a woman after all!”

“Good for you,” Vorrn replied irrelevantly and stomped on the female soldier’s face.

“You’ll pay for that!” threatened a new line of PGI soldiers, all gathered in a heap.

Vorrn, however, was protected by the Semi Barrier against their attacks and used one of the neutron grenades in a most unusual way. Hishek’s arms were not suited for throwing, so he armed the bomb with his hands and put it in his mouth. He reached out as far as he could with his head and threw the grenade very unerringly at the group.

The blinding explosion was short but devastating. “Watch ou-!” shouted a PGI soldier before he and his comrades were swallowed up by a piercing white circle of light three metres in diameter. Only the muzzle of a rifle in the air and half the fallen leg of an enemy were left where the group had been standing and now there was a gaping hole in the ground.

“Watch out! One of them wants to shoot!” warned Thais. One of the last PGI soldiers had set up one of the intact Strikers and Talin tried to prevent it from firing. In the meantime, however, she was wielding an assault rifle because her prismatics had been blocked too often by the zero fields and she managed the golden hit at the last second! “... that was too close!” she gasped, but she had rejoiced too soon!

Two more enemies appeared at the Striker and one forced Talin to take cover while the other took aim. “Aimed and fired!” said the shooter.

Tavis appeared opposite. “Forget it!” the Palanian replied and blew a charge of plasma into the gunner’s head, but he still pulled the trigger!

With a dark red cloud behind it, the missile hurtled across the courtyard. “I’ll try to stop it!” said Thais, who was now drawing on her prismatic powers again and was suddenly being restrained by such energies on her arms.

“Not today!” said the remaining member of the two-man squad. He cast prismatics and caught Tavis as well, while Thais tried to break free, but the soldier held his ground.

The Striker projectile flew inexorably in the direction of the energy conductor when a prismatic shell suddenly appeared in front of the missile! As if the projectile had flown into a safety net, the soft energy fabric expanded further and further, so much so that it only took a whiff to tear the net and touch the conductor.

“What bastard did that?” the PGI soldier cursed.

The answer was Kysaek! Unnoticed, she had snuck up and with her right arm outstretched, mobilised every ounce of strength she could muster for her prismatics. “Can’t ... not! Too strong ... Too long!” she panted agonisedly. She curled her fingers, fearing that her limbs would break at any moment. Every muscle in Kysaek’s body was exhausted and sweat ran down her face, which she finally freed from the helmet. She felt as if she had to stop a cruiser’s missile. The veins in her eyeballs were blood red and a line of her lifeblood was oozing from her left eye

The PGI soldier didn’t wait for Kysaek to collapse, however, and threw his current targets to the ground before gathering his strength for his new target. “Little Hu-!” All at once, his head burst from a gunshot.

Vorrn was his executioner and Thais and Tavis got back to their feet, but Kysaek could take no more. “Damn ... it!” she groaned and collapsed.

The missile still had powerful tinder and tore the prismatic net apart. It hit the energy conductor and although the projectile was so small, there was an abnormally powerful explosion. Everything within a hundred metres of the tower was engulfed in a dark red blaze, like a diabolical miniature atomic explosion, and the shockwave continued to unleash its power for hundreds of metres beyond that.

The complex’s protective shield failed and disintegrated into insignificant particles and shreds. A blue snowfall heralded disaster. But it wasn’t PGI’s air force that seized the moment and attacked Test Site Nine. SAP’s drones began with the targeted destruction of all defence cannons and fired on everything else in the complex. Buildings, defenders, attackers - SAP was fighting for itself!

“What the hell just happened?” Wolfgang asked angrily over the radio frequency.

Thais lifted the weakened Kysaek on both her shoulders and walked with Tavis to a protective side alcove. “The shield is destroyed and SAP is attacking us!” the Palanian replied. “They were never on our side”

“I knew it! You can’t trust any of these bastards! Then we have to leave now!”

“This is very dangerous! Space seems clear, but the air here isn’t quite yet!”

“That was Dorothy’s plan! So carry it out now! This is our only chance!”

“He’s right!” Thais agreed. “We have to try.”

But there was one more part of the plan, Tavis reminded them. “And the prisoners PGI heads?”

" ... too risky. We can’t do that anymore.”

“Kysaek won’t be happy about that when she wakes up again.”

“She’ll be glad to wake up at all. Come on,” Thais said, but it wasn’t an order, more a hint. With the jamming tower gone, Talin was able to send the agreed signal to SIM Jupiter 33 much more easily and took the first opportunity to retreat to the hangar with Tavis and Vorrn.

SAP had not done themselves any favours with their hasty attack, however, as PGI’s air units were not yet defeated and launched a counterattack that cost their enemies a lot of their mechanical troops. In doing so, Skarg’s company actually helped the defenders of the plant involuntarily.

But there was no end to the trouble and a new, insistent alarm echoed through the complex. “What’s that now?” Vorrn murmured.

“It certainly doesn’t sound good,” added Tavis.

“MOVE!” Wolfgang demanded over the radio frequency. “The scanners have registered a missile with a neutron signature from the north and it will be there in a few minutes! SAP will wipe out everything!”

“They don’t seem to have believed the bluff,” Vorrn realised. “They were really just waiting for the weapons and the energy shield to disappear and chaos to break out.”

Who believed what or what they were waiting for was now irrelevant. Now it was retreat or die and the huge hangar of the complex was already wide open. Apart from the aforementioned container ship, which was already hovering, and a few bolt droppers, there was nothing airworthy left here. Wolfgang and a few dozen of the workers and defenders had already gathered at a docking bay, while the hangar’s last defence cannons held off the occasional attacker. Out of their range, however, two SAP land cruisers advanced into the escape route, but this was not to last.

From the west, the Jupiter rushed in and destroyed the planetary ships with its massed guns. “You’re too slow!” said Dios over the radio frequency. “Launch now!” As the container ship moved out of the hangar at a moderate speed, the Jupiter slipped between the descending land cruiser debris and, because the hangar was so large, the broad-winged ship had no trouble making a skilful turning manoeuvre to land just in front of the anxiously waiting workers.

“Warning!” announced an automatic, digital male voice over the hall intercoms. “One minute and thirty seconds to impact, repeat, one minute and thirty seconds to impact!”

“Now everyone stay calm!” demanded Wolfgang as the Jupiter extended its ramp. “We’ll all fit in there and we’ll all get out! Get in there one by one!” Everyone hurried, but no one was overrun or trampled and the sixty or so survivors fitted into the ship with a little tummy tuck. Only Thais, Tavis, Kysaek and Vorrn were still missing for the scientist and they were on their way. “Now get going!”

“45 seconds to impact,” reported the digital voice.

“If the bomb doesn’t kill us, the stress will!” said Tavis when he and the others were finally inside the ship.

“Hold on tight, everyone!” Dios warned and took off with the Jupiter. She had no trouble catching up with the much more sluggish container ship, and she did so in good time! SAP drones were about to fall into the flank of the defenceless container ship, but Dios knew how to prevent this. She cleared some of the attackers out of the way with the Jupiter’s Hyper MGs and resorted to an unconventional method for the rest. The Sororanian headed for the weaker drones and turned the ship round on itself once. She hit the drones with the ship’s wings. “20 seconds until the bomb is there!”

Before that, however, the container ship was hit from below out of nowhere and lost one of the now flaming containers! With all the planes and bombs, everyone had forgotten one thing - the sea!

A group of battleships from the Signu medical group fired their guns at the fleeing container ship and hit it again. First the hull was damaged near the engines and then another container was damaged in the next attack.

The panicked screams of the many hundreds of workers rang out from inside the containers and the Jupiter turned round at “You bastards! Stop it!” said Dios and sank one of the sloops, but the attackers didn’t need to launch any new attacks because they had done it!

The damage to the container ship was enough and spread rapidly as it slowly plunged towards the sea.

“We have to do something!” Dios lamented.

“...there’s nothing more we can do!” Kuren denied realistically.

The container ship that had been hit was lost, and in the back of the Jupiter, the bomb reached its target. The rest of the PGI’s fury had long since fled, like everything that could fly in a hurry, and there were no more defence cannons at the complex. Nothing could stop the neutron missile when it blew up where the energy conductor had previously stood. The sight-robbing, spherical explosion didn’t spread out in a flash like normal detonations, but it was thorough and cleaned everything it touched. The buildings, walls, trees, bots, soldiers, stones, simply everything disintegrated and the devouring shock wave that preceded it did not even spare the water and the container ship that had crash-landed.

The Jupiter had no choice but to gain speed and height as quickly as possible. For the first time, Kysaek’s crew had beaten PGI and still lost. The neutron wave had wiped out all evidence, from the technology to the high-ranking prisoners, and could still be seen from space as a brightly shining dot in the middle of the blue ocean of Trayden. This paradise had nothing left to fight for and the Jupiter waited for no further betrayal - it flew far away from the debris field of the space battle and disappeared into the cool blackness of space with the red streak of an interval phase flight.