The History of FLEET (page 2)
|
On the fateful night Mohaborad was destroyed, goes the more rational version of FLEETs history, with a single sweep of His hand, the Adversary had delegated the task of silencing the Board's mountain headquarters to Moloch, Captain of the Legions of the Damned, who had in turn smiled at the ingenuity of Mankind and produced a thoroughly human weapon for the purpose – the HARM. A volley of infernal missiles had smashed every broadcasting antennae minutes before the Damned were unleashed like a horrific burning tidal wave on the innocents below, ensuring the poor brave souls who'd volunteered to run escort for Dave and Margaret that night couldn't be recalled. What he hadn't counted upon, however, were the satellites. Speculation had made use of satellites long before the Funky Horror, and some unnamed technician, for reasons sadly lost to history, had been reviewing material on the rapidly-deteriorating situation when the volley first hit. Boardies like to think whoever it was had spotted the trap and was attempting a warning, since that makes them feel better too. But whatever his reasons, the entire network was in the middle of wide-scale, complex analysis when, all of a sudden, Speculation went violently off-air. The simple little computer in the satellite directly overhead couldn't handle that. It crashed. And it crashed hard, freezing into a loop that spewed the semi-corrupt contents of it's rudimentary RAM across the spectrum, ranging from half the UHF channels to faster-than-light gravcomms. In the moments before the little tin can's powerplant melted down, it was singing out signals in spectra even the Board hadn't taught it to. In the final few seconds, the unit's gravcomm was making distortions strong enough to be felt down the gravitational incline, in the realm others called "hyperspace". Where it rammed straight into the bowshockwave of the DSN battlecruiser Insidious, and triggered the catastrophic misjump that gave birth to FLEET.
Commodore Robert Kilgore already had a reputation back home for pushing the limits of his equipment, and on this occasion he'd rammed his ship right up against the edge of survivable hyper, at dangerously fast speeds that left no time to react. When the grav wave hit his ship, it knocked the vessel end over end like a smack from the hand of God. It was an accident the ship had no right to survive, but survive it did, appearing in a blaze of FTL energies in the middle of the Solar System, sending out a ripple that, Bob's crew like to say, they must've heard in Hell. The Netherworld's awareness of their arrival aside, the lost ship spent several days limping for the only inhabited world in the system to ask for directions, and discovered the battered remnants of the Urbalon low-orbit station's fighter squadron, all but wiped out in the Battle of Mohaborad barely a week previous, making a sortie to meet them. Rudimentary first contact with the Board followed, and the both organisations came to know each other as the DSN vessel attempted to repair it's drives...a task that failed utterly, as Earth had nothing remotely resembling the right equipment. Navigation proved impossible, and the Insidious grimly settled in for a long haul...which the Board welcomed with open arms. Initially, the vengeance-seeking Boardies threw themselves into "Bob. Just Bob..."'s command style with aplomb, orchestrating a brutal trail of revenge killings on the locals and fifth-columnists who'd betrayed Mohaborad's existence. Once the wave of blood died down, though, the Commodore rapidly began to lose friends as cooler heads came to power in High Command. The backlash rapidly worsened until the situation became so tense fighting seemed imminent. Then the Admiral arrived. |