The Excalibur Alternative

Humanity's last battle, he thought grimly, was also going to be one of its shortest.

"Execute Alpha One!"

Acknowledgments came back to him, and he felt an indescribable, bittersweet pride in the men and women under his command as his fleet's formation changed. It flowed into the new alignment crisply, quickly... almost as if the humans crewing its ships didn't know that their resistance was absolutely futile.

It was an unorthodox formation: a column of starships, like a huge yet slender spear shaft, headed by two dozen of Mugabi's heaviest capital ships. Those ships blocked the fire of any of their consorts, which ought to have made it totally unacceptable. But Quentin Mugabi had no illusions about his ability to fight anything which might have been called a "battle," and so he'd chosen a disposition oriented towards achieving only one thing. Any conventional formation would have been automatically doomed to destruction without landing a single hit on the enemy, but this one put the bulk of his units into the protective shadow of the battleships leading his column. None of those battleships would survive more than one or two hits, three at the most, from Galactic weapons, but if the rest of the fleet could close quickly enough while they were absorbing their death blows, one or two of their consorts might actually live to get into range of their own weapons and land at least one solid hit of their own.

It wasn't much, but it was the only thing Mugabi could offer his crews, his home world, and his species, and he tried not to weep for the sacrifical gallantry of his perso

"Enemy has locked on," Tracking a

Mugabi didn't even look away from the plot. There was no more point in acknowledging the report than there would have been in pretending that his fleet could survive nine minutes of Galactic fire from three dozen Ogres.

He watched the time to engagement readout spin downward on the main plot, and to his own surprise, he realized his muscles were relaxing, not tensing, as the timer whirled towards zero. Perhaps it was relief, a corner of his mind thought almost calmly. Relief that he and all of his crews were about to die and so would not have to witness the destruction of the planet they were sworn to defend.

"Entering enemy missile range in two min—"

Tracking's report chopped off in mid-syllable as the plot changed abruptly.

Mugabi's eyes flared wide as the impossible icons flashed into existence. The Galactics' stealth technology was enormously superior to anything humanity had ever possessed. ONI knew that it was, that the existence of that technology helped to explain how the Federation had been able to smother the Solar System with listening posts and automated spies for at least seventy years before the human race became even peripherally aware of its existence. But Lach'heranu hadn't bothered with stealth. Not against something as primitive and unsophisticated as the sca

But it had just become evident that someone in the universe had a stealth technology which was superior even to that of the Federation. That was the only possible explanation for how nine unknown warships could possibly have made their way into attack range of Lach'heranu's squadron completely undetected.

And they had been undetected. That was obvious the instant they opened fire, for the Federation's superdreadnoughts were taken totally by surprise. All of their defensive and sensor systems had been directed towards their contemptible human victims, and their point defense fire was late, thin, and ineffectual as the unknowns' first missile broadsides went smashing home.

They were fast, those missiles, Mugabi thought numbly. The Solarian Navy's missiles had a maximum velocity of sixty percent of light-speed, and that was possible only because ONI had managed to steal the design for their drives from the Federation's dead archives. The Galactics' own current design, a mere twelve hundred years old, had a maximum velocity of seventy-five percent of light-speed. But the missiles slamming into the shields of Lach'heranu's superdreadnoughts were moving at over ninety percent of light-speed, and even from here, Mugabi could tell that the incoming birds were equipped with ECM systems at least two or three generations ahead of anything in the Federation's arsenal.

"Who the Hell—?"

Discipline cut off the incredulous exclamation, but Mugabi never even noticed as he watched the bright, terrible suns of antimatter warheads rip and tear at Lach'heranu's shields. The yield figures on those explosions were much higher than they ought to have been—higher than the Galactics' own weapons could have produced—and their victims' shields burned like tinder under their fury. Even if he'd noticed the highly unprofessional outburst, though, he could scarcely have complained about it, since it summed up his own feelings so perfectly. Who the Hell were they? And where the Hell had they come from? And—

"Attention, Admiral Mugabi!"

Mugabi's eyes were already as wide as they could get, but they tried to glaze over as the unknown voice, speaking English with an accent he'd never heard before, sounded in his earbug. The only way it could have gotten there was for the unknowns to have invaded Terra's communications net through at least a dozen levels of encryption and security firewalls that should have held up even a Galactic AI for a minimum of fifteen minutes.

"Break off, Admiral Mugabi!" the unknown voice snapped in his ear. "Leave them to us!"

Even as the voice spoke, another salvo of those terrible missiles crashed into Lach'heranu's ships, and the Solarian Navy watched in disbelief as it saw something no mortal eye had seen in over sixty-two thousand years.

A Federation superdreadnought blew up.

One moment it was there, well over a billion tons of warship, with a crew of over three thousand. The next instant, it was an expanding ball of plasma, and a jubilant bellow of savage satisfaction went up from the officers on Terra's flag deck. Mugabi's voice was a part of that bellow, but then he shook his head like a punch-drunk fighter and wrenched himself back out of the exultation raging about him. His command was only minutes short of the Federation warships' engagement envelope, and if there was one thing in the universe he knew, it was that his ships had no business at all between those warring leviathans.

"All units, execute evasion vector Echo Niner! Execute Echo Niner immediately!" he barked.

Acknowledgments streamed back as maneuvering officers fought free of their own hypnotic fascination with their tactical plots, and Mugabi's fleet broke away from the death ride it had embraced just a handful of minutes before. A part of the admiral's mind monitored the frantic breakaway maneuver, but almost absently, for he was unable to tear his eyes from the plot as the outnumbered attackers ripped into Lach'heranu's fleet like ravening demons.

He had never imagined anything like it. Those weren't warships. They were something else entirely, something that took combat power to a whole new level. As his sensors collected more and more data, his disbelief only grew. There were only nine of the newcomers against thirty-five Ogres, and everyone knew—not just the Federation, but ONI, as well—that the Ogre-class was the most powerful warship that had ever been built. They were invincible. Nothing had ever been able to stand up to one of them.

But the unknowns weren't "standing up" to them; they were tearing them apart.