LAST MOMENT ENTRY GO!
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From his starship, phased-cloaked in low-orbit over Earth, the last true Admiral of the Federation Starfleet stared in awestruck horror.
Around him, space burned.
The invaders had swept past the outer defenses, making inter-system jumps from each planet to the next as soon as defenses had been crushed. Their utter lack of any apparent care for planetary installations had been confusing at first, before their motives had been understood. Especially confused had been the Earth Federation scientists, who upon examination of the first captured probes and vessels had believed them to be some new strain of Borg, reaching out for vengeance from beyond the Delta Quadrant.
Now more was known – the modular nature of their ships’ equipment, allowing them to radically reconfigure for new tactics while using the same hulls; their complete ignorance of advanced AIs having been traced to some past encounter with a strange, Borg-like foe. Other things remained confusing or not understood at all. What still mystified even the most enlightened of Federation scientists, however, were the paradoxes of their intelligence – or lack thereof.
Recordings from vessels escaped from the early skirmishes showed dozens of hostiles firing in unison at Federation cruisers, the combined fire instantly gutting even the stalwart Galaxys and advanced Sovereigns. There was also no doubt about their competence outside of battle: Reports from cloaked Romulan Warbirds had testified to how quickly a network of pre-prepared starbases had sprung up in captured territory, fed by a seemingly endless supply of enormous freighters carrying goods from whatever dark corner of the universe these people had come.
At the same time, however, they also seemed inexperienced verging on childish. Fleet vessels regularly collided with each other without care, relying on the beneficence of force fields to keep them from collapsing under the pressures of inertia and mass. No demand of surrender had ever been sent, with early Federation offers of cooperation and peace replied to with an overwhelming tide of crude messages and demeaning suggestions; hostile vessels regularly eschewed any tactically-beneficial formation to instead form clusters vaguely mimicking genitelia before turning into battle.
And so the Admiral watched, with a mix of awe and disgust, as his defenses were wiped aside: The lines of cruisers vanishing in bright flashes of warheads and the stabbing lances of laser fire, the small Klingon reinforcement wing – all that remained of their goodwill force, shattered from months of continuous combat – diving again and again towards the hostile battlegroups before darting away under their own micro-warps. Nearer to his own position, a cluster of the enemy’s largest vessels – gargantuan behemoths kilometers long, larger than any Federation dreadnought ever constructed – had gleefully skipped beyond his committed defense fleet and was now systematically gutting one orbital defense station and starbase after another. How could something so violent, so disorganized, he wondered silently, build something so huge, and in such number? They were not like the Borg, he knew – the borg had a kind of grand elegance to their disorganization. Whatever these conquerors were, they flipped between diligence and complete disorder so suddenly they were as likely to turn their weapons on each other as conquer a system.
Looking back out, he saw the familiar shimmering spheres of the enemy’s antiwarp fields springing up. The Klingons were trapped now, he saw – as were his own forces. It would all be over soon. Opening a communications line one final time, he screamed out a frantic question into the void: “WHAT DO YOU WANT?!”
The void remained silent for a moment, before it came back, inexplicable and mocking:
“gfgfgfgfgfgfm8m8m8m8m8m8o7o7o7o7o7o7”
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Topic: The 600-series Crossover Fiction Comedy Contest! (Read 4894 times)