Conquests of a Supervillain, Prologue (Patreon)

Oh, yes, folks. We're into the last part of the revamped Frozen Soul trilogy, Conquests of a Supervillain. Also, War Stories will be heading to Amazon soon, as will SCI Stories 4.

Prologue – Invasion Force

The Silexians knew war.

They were a warrior race, descended from proud warriors that had fought each other in rival clans from the time they first developed sentience. Over time, they had gained unity, becoming a true warrior people, rather than a collection of warrior clans, but they had always been warriors. Out of all the races in the Rithenalese Empire, they were the most warlike, and the most proficient at war. Only the Rithenalese themselves could match them, and, even then, it was only thanks to their superior technology and industry, which helped to cover the gap in skills between their ‘soldiers’ and the Silexian warriors.

The Silexians knew war. And, so, one of the first concepts they’d tackled, once they began expanding to other worlds, was the proper way to invade a planet. Sure, you could simply load warriors, weapons, vehicles, and supplies into transports, and send them alongside the fleet, and for centuries that was what they had done. But that meant you had ships full of critical personnel and supplies that then had to be guarded as they passed through what might be enemy space. That pulled away needed ships from the space battles that were required to break an enemy fleet and secure a beachhead upon the enemy world.

It was also detrimental to the readiness of the warriors. On a planet, they could drill, they could train. On a ship, their options were limited. A transport might take weeks, or even months to make planetfall after being launched. All the while the warriors were sitting idle, left to their own devices in close quarters. It was a recipe for disaster.

Modern Silexian strategy had moved away from the idea of troop transports. Oh, they certainly had troops on warships. After all, ship-to-ship boarding actions were something one had to plan against, and a warship might need to send a detachment to the ground for some reason. However, they did not carry full invasion forces with them anymore.

Considering the current war, that was clearly a good thing, for these ‘humans’ had sent forces to harass the fleet the entire way to their home world. Taking on full warships with a handful of fighters, converted freighters, and a single stolen corvette, with the aid of a lot of trickery. A fleet train with a full invasion force would have been a liability, if the invasion force even survived the initial attacks. The troop transports would have been wiped out in the nuclear minefield, or picked off one by one during the stalking predator attacks.

No, the Silexians knew war. Though they had never faced an opponent like the humans, they had recognized the danger, and prepared for it. There were not enough troops on the remaining ships to launch a full invasion of the planet. There were, however, enough to force several small beachheads, with fleet support.

The initial onslaught of the ragtag defenders had been weathered. Little ships, purpose built instead of reconfigured freighters, had launched those fearsome negative matter weapons against them. They had weathered the attack, with some losses, and inflicted losses upon the humans, destroying three of twenty craft that had been unable to escape retribution.

Now, the fleet had taken up position in orbit of the human home world, and unleashed their forces. Sixty shuttles descended from the fleet, with six hundred fighters escorting them. They moved to six points around the globe, one each on the six populated continents, so that they could spread their influence as widely as possible. So long as they controlled the orbitals, they could decimate any attempt at pushing back the beachheads before it was too late. This was the first part of the strategy the Silexians had come up with for making war on other planets.

Once on the ground, Silexian warriors slaughtered the local opposition, while the shuttles were unloaded, and the Transfer Gates established. The Transfer Gates were a revolutionary technology when they had been first discovered. Point to point teleportation, across interstellar distances, was the stuff of fiction, up to that point. But the Silexians, along with their Garthax slaves, had discovered the key, with quantum entanglement.

The result was a structure too massive and delicate to be used aboard ship, but which could be deployed from a ship and set up on the surface of a hostile world. Once the pylons were in place, and the power supplies set up, the Transfer Gate linked with the matching unit upon Silex 4, their primary military world, allowing two-way communication and transportation between the worlds.

This was how the Silexians invaded a world. They did not need massive numbers of slow, vulnerable troop transports, that would allow the enemy a soft target that could rip the throat out of an invasion before it properly began. They did not need to leave warriors idle, pent up for weeks in metal walls before they could be unleashed upon the enemy. They simply needed to land troops, and use the cover of the fleet to hold the position long enough for the technicians to complete the work, and set up their Transfer Gate. Once done, the reinforcements would pour through, unstoppable!

The humans must have realized the danger, or they had simply been alert after the efforts it took to eliminate the Kratuan infestation that had attempted to make itself at home on the world in the first stages of the war, for they threw themselves at the Silexian beachheads. But fleet support blasted down from the skies, allowing the warriors to hold until the Gates were completed. And then, the Silexian invasion of Earth began.

But the humans weren’t going to give up without a fight.