A Deregger empire decides to attack the Alliance and the CRC using every weapon they have at their disposal. They were determined to force the Alliance to start seeing things their way for once. They learn the hard way why that's a BAD idea. -- Lessons
War has changed. For one thing, it's a lot rarer. The field of defense has expanded itself to the point where offense is rendered next to moot. Nevertheless, there are those who insist on ignoring that fact. The Deregger's Empire of Libertaria saw the Alliance as a swollen, slow behemoth ripe and ready for plunder.
They saw them as weak because they hadn't fought any wars for centuries. The best could hope for was the scattered police of the CRC and the highly dubious Pax Humanis. The latter of the two had to have clearances in order to be used.
Clearances meant red tape. In a realm that large, red tape meant that the clearances could be tied up for a very long time. They might not even see Pax Humanis before all the criminals who committed the acts were long dead.
Famous last thoughts.
Libertaria picked a large thoroughfare station. One of the ones that were a bottleneck for Galactic Commerce. It made perfect strategic sense. The most abundant kind of ship stopping at Bidawie Station were unarmed freight truckers, heavy and slow. They had orders to keep their cargoes intact. The station was also unarmed. Easy pickings.
They could have a choke-hold on the Alliance in less than a day.
They would learn that 'unarmed' does not mean 'helpless'.
The first barrage, a mass impact of meteoric iron bullets, were snapped up by the collective Hungry Caterpillar systems of both ship and station. The same thing happened to the nukes they sent next.
Plasma fire was merely passively soaked up by the storm ablation systems. After all, why waste free energy?
One of the Libertarian Dreadnaughts tried to ram the station. The rest of them got to watch that dreadnaught get aggressively consumed by the Hungry Caterpillar.
Witness testimony described it aptly as a, "C'thuloid nightmare made mechanical reality." A team of Caterpillar grapples immobilised the Dreadnaught as smaller ones literally bit chunks out of the vessel.
The unlucky Dereggers on board were conveyed directly to Alliance-mandated habitats with no avenue for escape. The fact that these habitats were made out of the material harvested from the Dreadnaught was just adding insult to injury.
Libertaria never surrendered. Too bad for them.
Attempting to board through unoccupied airlocks was a lesson in futility. Deregger crewmen wasted tool after tool on the effort of breaching the hull, and only encountered quick-setting expansion foam for all their hard work.
They ran out of air, one by one. If they could not make it back to their ship, the Hungry Caterpillar snatched them up for yet another impound cell.
There was a reason why war was all but extinct in the Alliance. Every single weapon imagined for space battle was also rendered moot by its matching defense.
In the end, the Libertarian Dreadnaughts were towed into drydock. They had run out of fuel, out of food, and out of water. They were fast running out of air. Literally at the mercy of the civilisation they thought weak and defenseless.
Their leader had sensibly stayed within the relative safety of Libertaria space, but that was all right.
Pax Humanis would be visiting very shortly.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / fredmantel]
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