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.
CIC's estimates scrolled up the side of Mugabi's plot, and all his years of experience in naval service insisted that those estimates had to be wrong. Each of those nine ships was fifty percent larger than an Ogre-class. Fifty percent. And despite that, they were at least twenty-five percent faster and far more maneuverable. More preposterous still, their firepower and energy signatures, now that they had emerged from whatever unreasonably efficient stealth technology had hidden their approach, indicated that they were at least six times as powerful, on a ton-for-ton basis, as anything the Federation had ever built.
It was flatly impossible, but those nine ships had Lach'heranu's entire squadron outnumbered by better than two-to-one.
It was a short, vicious, ugly battle. One which lasted only a very little longer than the one Lach'heranu had planned upon... but had a very different outcome. Even in a straight, standup fight in which both sides had known what was coming, the Federation squadron would have been doomed. Taken by surprise in the deep-space equivalent of a point-blank ambush, Lach'heranu and her ships had no chance at all. Two of the unknown attackers were lightly damaged; none of Lach'heranu's superdreadnoughts survived the engagement. A handful of her cruisers tried to break away and run for it, but three of the unknowns loped off after them, overtaking them with absurd ease, and blew them out of existence long before they could get beyond Sol's phase limit and go to FTL drive. Mugabi had no idea if Lach'heranu or any of her ship commanders had attempted to surrender, but if they had, no one on the other side had been interested in allowing them to.
The Solarian Navy floated in space, stunned spectators to the carnage which dwarfed any battle it had ever imagined, and Mugabi knew that every single crewman aboard every single ship was wondering exactly the same thing.
And then the repeater plot reconfigured itself into a communications screen once more, without any input from any member of Terra's crew, and an alien, saurian face looked out of it.
Mugabi felt his jaw try to drop yet again as he recognized the face, or at least the species to which its owner belonged. So far as he knew, no human had ever managed to communicate with the species the Federation called the Ternaui, but ONI was very familiar with them. Everyone knew that the Ternaui were the most loyal, utterly reliable bodyguards any of the Galactics could hope for. The xenologists' best guess was that the Ternaui were telepaths, and that the Federation had devised a technique which allowed it to "program" them for complete obedience and loyalty. Whether that was true or not, humanity had been given ample proof of the effectiveness of a Ternaui bodyguard, and there was no question that the species was mute.
Which made what happened next as impossible as everything else that had happened in the last half hour.
"Good afternoon, Admiral Mugabi," the Ternaui said. His—or "its," Mugabi supposed, if it happened to be one of the neuters—mouth never moved at all, but its obviously artificial voice was as melodious and expressive as any human voice the admiral had ever heard, and its strangely beautiful silver eyes with their inky-black, vertical pupils seemed to look straight into his own. "We apologize for the abrupt nature of our intervention... and for the fact that it was impossible for us to alert you to our presence earlier. We realize that what has just happened must be extremely confusing, although, we hope, not unwelcome."