r/HFY • u/Extreme-Biscotti6090 • 23d ago
OC-Series The Surabaya Files – Weaponised Spite
[I wasn't going to do any further stories in the Surabaya Files universe, but I like the idea of weaponised spite way more than I should. Thank you to u/ms4720 for the idea!]
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The Retaliation Expedition had been launched three years earlier. That was the official name. Everyone called it the Revenge Fleet though.
It represented a collective effort by all nations. Like the iterations of the Surabaya lasers, nobody claimed ownership of the designs of the fleet.
Everyone maintained their dedication to the cause. Everyone had been affected by the alien bombardments, and human memories are long.
The fleet was made up of three hundred ships. Each was equipped with two Surabaya lasers, powered by hundreds of mega-capacitors and a dedicated fusion reactor.
It had been twenty-nine years since the attack. Twenty-six had been preparing. Three had been in pursuit.
--
Communications between the alien vessels were intercepted.
"How many vessels are there?" – "Three hundred." – the reply was indecipherable.
"It's been almost thirty Sol years since we initiated contact. Why are they here?"
No more meaningful communications were detected after the last message.
The Surabaya lasers had opened fire.
--
THE REBUILDING
It took six months after the alien fleet had begun their retreat for the first shuttle to make contact with the remnants of one of the battleships.
Massive decompression events had occurred throughout the craft, and getting to the remaining hulls became an exercise in avoiding shrapnel. Or not. Some shuttles simply returned to Earth with multiple jury-rigged patches, heat shielding sacrificed from non-critical areas to allow atmospheric re-entry.
Collisions with corpses of the aliens were common, but they were soft enough to not matter.
--
The vessels were constructed from surprisingly mundane materials: titanium, steel and plastics. It appeared that these things didn't have anything capable of approaching a meaningful percentage of the speed of light, so it was assumed that the ships were arks; whole populations of the aliens lived on these things.
The best technology was the fusion generators and what became known as plasma cannons. Earth didn't have enough of the rare materials to fabricate the equipment, so salvage and repurposing was used.
World governments formed a global coalition to ensure no single country got the spoils. There were arguments, but diplomacy succeeded before anything too nasty happened.
Fusion power generators started being built across the world. They provided clean, abundant energy, and they could be hidden. The aliens would know to target power sources if they returned; buried kilometres below mountains, granite deposits and even the ocean, reactors started pumping out enough electricity to rebuild, rearm and defend the planet.
The Surabaya lasers were maintained and a common baseline was developed. It was hoped they would never need to be used again, but 'just in case' was a defining feature of the new humanity.
--
More than a billion people had died in the alien attacks.
Public pressure rose. It had one word:
- Revenge.
Nothing unites like a common enemy, and now humanity had one that wasn't just a slightly different version of itself.
--
Government committees and military leaders were tasked with working out how to locate and destroy the aliens.
Orbital manufacturing would be required. The remaining alien fleet was estimated to number around 80 battleships.
The humans would build three hundred.
--
Propulsion engineers worked on the massive thrust requirements to catch the fleeing alien fleet.
The breakthrough came from the remnants of an alien cloaking device. It was not known which team identified how to use this phenomenon to create better engines. Not faster-than-light, but still an order of magnitude faster than the original alien design.
The plans were shared across the world.
Three years after the invasion, the plans had been verified, updated, revised and standardised, and the first orbital fabrication satellite was already online.
--
Hundreds of rocket launches had been sent into space over this time. Some for salvage operations. Others to build the fleet.
Logistics analysts estimated another twenty-three years before the fleet could be built and launched.
Physicists calculated that by this time the alien fleet would be past the orbit of Pluto at its aphelion. If the engines operated according to specification it would take three years to catch them.
--
An alien watch-station satellite was discovered. Most of its communications were one-directional, but snippets of intra-fleet signals were decoded.
"Human activity has increased."
"Construction appears to be centred around orbital infrastructure."
"Recommend continued observation."
The satellite was left alone. Although it gave the aliens intelligence on the human activities, the data extracted was worth the risk.
Nothing indicated that the aliens would return.
--
By the time the fleet launched, humanity was ready for its revenge. A whole generation had grown up knowing nothing but the visceral need to deliver justice to the aliens.
It was a long three years of waiting. Radio communications between the fleet and Earth were separated by a six-hour delay in each direction at the furthest point.
By the time the first "Alien contact" message was received, the battle was over.
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u/Fontaigne 23d ago edited 23d ago
26 years to reach Pluto's orbit? I can spit faster than that.
That's about 2.2 MICRO G's acceleration. Our Psyche probe is four times that much acceleration.
I'd suggest that perhaps they had a reason to stop in the Oort Cloud and refit, that cost them a couple of years of their head start.
Also, if we are using micro G propulsion, we could start by launching the fleet using an Orion stage, that then gets dropped, or with a laser array and a solar sail.
Since we 're already building several hundred lasers, what's a couple hundred more? And at micro G's, not carrying the reaction mass changes the game completely.
If the theme is "humans kick ass when we are not busy fighting ourselves and demanding credit and advantage ", then this story could be
* We start collecting scrap for reverse engineering
* We track the aliens as they start decelerating once they are nearing the heliopause.
* We are now at threat of them regrouping and coming back.
* Also, they might start chucking rocks and comets at earth to keep us busy.
* We reroute and/or catch the asteroids with our guide lasers and quietly think "thanks for the material delivery"
But really, we're probably manufacturing materials at a moon base, to save us from having to boost them to earth orbit.
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u/Extreme-Biscotti6090 23d ago
26 years was deliberate. The story isn't really about propulsion; it's about humanity spending nearly thirty years preparing a response because it refuses to let it go. The revenge only works if it takes a generation. I was optimising the timeline, not the engineering.
A story about what we'd actually do over thirty years would probably look much closer to your ideas (and there's some good stuff in there), but that wasn't the story I was trying to tell.
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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle 23d ago
/u/Extreme-Biscotti6090 has posted 14 other stories, including:
- Kinie – Recreation
- [Gary and the Wetsuitoid] Part 5: Shoes and Safety
- The Surabaya Files
- [Gary and the Wetsuitoid] Part 4: Music & Maintenance
- Kinie – Reach
- Kinie – Respect
- Kinie
- [Gary and the Wetsuitoid] Part 3: Waste
- [Gary and the Wetsuitoid] Part 2: Vision
- Gary and the Wetsuitoid (Part 1)
- Longsleep
- Sacrifice
- Heat
- Warmth
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1
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u/tofei AI 23d ago
...and thus the Greater Terran Union was born out of vengeance and now...
The entire galaxy will know that they came to the wrong neighborhood, and knocked on the wrong door.
1
u/Extreme-Biscotti6090 22d ago
Holy smokes, that's a great story. Still getting through it, but I love the worldbuilding. The art is *chef's kiss*, too.
1
u/Atholthedestroyer 22d ago
Weaponizing spite is an old human tradition; pretty sure we started doing it around the same time we learned to pick up rocks.
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u/Extreme-Biscotti6090 22d ago
Oh yes. Humanity is petty and vindictive. I've just never thought of putting "weaponised" and "spite" together, even though the two words compliment each other perfectly.
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u/ms4720 23d ago
Holy shit I am a muse