Method of communication
Dreadfull bucaneer de’Zork faced a dilemma. His ships stood just a few hundred light seconds from his price, a neutron star mining station. That station mined the densest and most expensive material in the universe. Just a cubic centimeter of Space Pasta could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams and they were mining cubic meters per week.
There was a small issue though. Two actually.
First was, that the station belonged directly to United Terra. Not even some human corporate, it was a governmental research station.
The second issue was a minuscule freighter-class ship. And it didn’t even need to have insignias or the blue and green on white color-coding so typical for UT ships. No, It looked like an early human experiment from their age of space conquest. A cargo tubus with long wings and a cocpit on front, with detachable tank and extra rocket engines. The only thing that differentiated it from the museum exhibit on display at the embassy of Nullum 5, was a clearly observable alcubierre ring encircling the entire ship.
The second issue worried him much more. It was very clearly a Terran ship belonging to a Terran.
Except mining vessels (and even there only to some extent), Terran ships were, what some ship builders called, design ships. They were sleek, simplistic, functional, and utterly beautiful. They reminded human yachts and planes from the twenty first century. Their hulls were white and smooth. Greebles like lights, shields and antennas were placed with an obsession of a galaxy class painter. And those greebles were rare, beauty enhancing flaws, simmilar to dimples on a face of human actress.
Even a simple Terran military frigate outshone any diplomatic vessel or industry leader’s yacht. This meant that surplus Terran vessels were highly sought after among the galaxy’s finest. But their glamour was almost always bastardized due to their common and - given the human history - an unbelievably absurd flaw.
Even the most powerful Terran military vessels vere very poorly armed for their class. They still had the best shields in the galaxy and extremely powerfull motors, but weaponry… you could find some simple blasters that had to be seemlesly integrated into the ship’s surface. Maybe there was a railgun or a rocket silo hidden somewhere inside the hull. But that was mostly it. It always seemed to him, that for humans, weaponry was only an afterthought. Not like on the two Nikhura class battleships or the Der-mur, his notorious Viz-Insurg class Dreadnaught - all of them visibly armed to the teeth. Just projectile of his railgun was bigger than the entire Terran ship that hailed him.
And just to be sure, he thought, this ship wasn't even that beautiful. It looked like it was fished out of some scrapyard and repaired with a human “duct-tape”.
That's why he was so sure it was human. No one else would fly with this old and ugly piece of junk.
“Commander. They’ve deployed messenger light-probes.” Said his intel officer.
Ah yes, notorious human caution. Whenever they felt in danger, human ships immediately deployed message drones; a wildly outdated technology for interstellar communication. Yes, regular radiovawes couldn’t travel faster than light. Which would be a problem, if it wasn’t for sub-dimensional signal. But for some reason, United Terra always rejected this technology. Instead they’ve build vast networks out of these FTL probes. And every Human ship carried them. A surprising amount of them, in fact.
“Their leader is on the comms channel, commander,” said communications officer.
de’Zork slightly nodded with one of his fins and started the holoprojector.
“I am comander de’Zork.”
This name usually struck fear to the hearts of even the most hardened commanders. But not this time.
“Yeah, I know,” said the oponent with a smirk.
“I’m captain Douggie Adams of the UTS Enterprise. You should leave.”
de’Zork stood gobsmacked. Captains words were delivered with a care-free, matter-of-fact tone. It was a long time when he’d last seen such self-confidence. But there was something else in captain’s voice. Was it… an excitement?
The issue he had before, fully emerged. Nobody ever seen Terran ships at fight. Not for the lack of trying. At the start, many pirates attacked their underequipped vessels. Even some shorter-tempered nations send punitive fleets to their space for some minuscule grieavance… and all of them vanished without a trace. Not only that. Terran ships always returned or delivered without a scratch. At least he never seen or heard about a Terran wreck out in the wild.
No. Instead, he heard legends. Like the one about UTS Ahsoka - a terran frigate - and it’s exchange with a nearby policing fleet:
“This is captain (what was her name… ah doesn’t matter), UTS Ahsoka, broadcasting on all channels. There was a level 30 Bacchus scale dimensional tear and an eldritch-class monster.”
“This is Anosian Royal fleet guard. We have your location and we’re on our way. Just hold on, we are three parsecs away.”
“Ehm, no rush. This ain’t exactly an emergency broadcast. More of an… annex claim… so to speak?”
“Anosian royal fleet to UTS Ahsoka: can you repeat that?”
“I mean… its head is full of minerals. I believe Jupiter Mining Corp would love to keep it.”
Obviously, the royal fleet came. But they only found this relativly small terran ship - unscratched and with full shield - next to a moon-sized head of an out-of-space monster. Head, which was clearly torn off with the utmost ferocity. Oh… and one nearby planet was ripped apart.
He remebered it verbatim. Almost.
But that was just a legend. Yeah, there was a simmilar station under control of a human corporation. But there were simplier solutions than that it was work of one medium ship.
For example, he believed that united Terra has huge fleets of very powerfull ships full of experimental tech hidden somewhere in their home star system. Fleets that are always on standby and capable of travel anywhere in few hours or days.
Phyraxis neutron star was a fringe star system. They were far from Human homeworld. They should have plenty of time to plunder before the Gaian answer will arrive.
“I am afraid, I can not do that,” announced de’Zork with his his dreadfull, shark like smile.
“Yeah, thought so.” said captain Adams with a tired face. To support this facade, he also supported his head with one hand.
“Leat me at least tell you, that you are in a territorial space of United Terran Federation and any and all hostilities, including your currently armed weapons, will be penalized with a decisive force in accordance with article seven of Uranus treaty. Paragarph three, specifically. It would be greatly appreciated, if you could disarm your weapons.”
de’Zork had to admit, that this human was funny.
Here he was, completely unarmed, in some kind of “shuttle”, threathening to dreadnaught and two warships.
“You should turn your ship away and run, human,” said commander calmly. He was proud for his low kill-count and he always gave any roadblock enough space to roll away.
“Are those your last words?” asked captain defetiously.
“Maybe at this point, you should think about yours,” tried de’Zork once again.
Captain stood silent for a moment, that for commander seemed like a small eternity.
“No, thank you,” said opposing comander finally with a satisfied smile and flipped some out-of-view switches.
“Very well,” said de’Zark calmly and turned his head to his officers.
“Send fire-at-will commands to the others. Officer Kli’klu, aim the Neosled railgun and fire at-“
He was quickly interrupted. The unarmed Terran ship fired a small short laser beam. It was in fact so short, that if he blinked, he would miss it entirely. It shouldn’t make any harm to any of his enormous ships. But his battleship… it wasn’t even explosion. It just vanished in light.
“What just…”
He stared, as the shuttle fired another quick beam at his other warship. It disappeared the same way.
Then he saw two things almost simlutaneously. On a star map, the planet closest to the neutron star, planet directly behind him, cracked into small pieces and left its predicted orbit. And on a close-up view of the enemy ship, he noticed that two identified messenger light-probes were missing. And that the third now opened its warp drive and was quickly charging up. It aimed directly at his ship.
He finally figured it out. To his grief, too late. He also realized that he is not the first and he will definetly not be the last.
What will happen, when you crash into a larger mass in a speed higher than light? Of course. Every ship commander knew that.
All of those missing weapons on Terran ships, their dependence on an old school comms…
Probe finished its charge and went FTL. It hit the Dreadnaught’s shield at the speed of 400c.
Physics didn’t know, what to do with it. Shield’s barier - technically a mass - hit with other, technically higher than infinite mass, was accellerated to just about the same level and before it could even think about changing itself to a pure outburst of energy, it hit the dreadnaught’s hull. The cycle repeated multiple milions of times. Some matter got a chance to escape from this impossible mess in the form of light. Most of it wasn’t that lucky. It was completely de-atomized and send through the mostly open space - where once a planet was - out of the star system. And yeah. Some pieces of the planet in question were hit for the third time and cracked into even finer debris.
Captain flipped repurposed analog switches, deactivated the other probes and send them back to his bay. He also smirked at the now static screen of his 300 years old vintage lcd.
“You should really stop humming that old tune, whenever you fire light-probes.” said his first officer and his girlfriend.
“But space opera is such a classic!” He whined in a fake outcry.
She rolled her eyes over.
“Whatever…”
Then she re-flipped one of the swiches.
“Hey leave one of those probes out. I want to get their bounty.”
He smiled at her.
“This is why I love you, Amy-Lee.”
She didn’t even raised her eybrows while she was almost fully focused on sending the bounty memo to the probe.
“I aprecciate the effort, really. But could you sometimes say it outside of fucking or killing bogeys?”
He noded and made a small mental note to himself. But he also leaned to her and kissed her on a cheek. Then he patiently waited.
“All done.”
Amelia pinged a last button on the screen and the probe quickly left the system on a beam of light.
“Cool. Let’s head back.”
There was satisfied silence for a while. Well... almost - They’ve had a stereo system that silently played some old school rock.
“Don’t you think we are a bit cheating?” Amelia pronounced a thought she struggled for a moment.
“Hey, those noble ultra smart aliens had 40 centuries to figure that out on their own. Don’t let some Gaian Ape to prove them otherwise,” he said with a smile.
She chuckled and let that thought out of her mind, while the shuttle silently went for a quick jump back to neutron star they were hired to protect.