Don't Mess With Earth (20 page)

“Weapons control, this is Captain Kell.
Launch the bio weapons and wait for my order to launch the
others.”

Ostoro was completely horrified by what was
happening, and then shocked even more when he heard the Captain
order the bio weapons to be launched. “What are you doing? I
thought you humans had a stigma when it came to using bio
weapons!”

“
Sure, on our own people on a planet
we have to live on. None of us have ever said we wouldn’t use WMD’s
on a species on a different planet. This is to guarantee our
survival as a species, nothing more, and nothing less,” Kell said,
then turning to the guards, “wouldn’t the two of you say Ostoro has
outlived his usefulness to us?”

John and Matt looked at each other,
and then John looked at Captain Kell and responded, “Oh,
yes, sir, we think he has. What are your
orders?”

“
I liked your idea of shoving this
alien scum out the airlock, where better to do it than orbiting his
homeworld. Get to it gentlemen.” ordered Kell.

“Our pleasure, sir!” answered Matt.

“
Wait! I demand my rights, you can’t
do this to me!” screamed Ostoro as soon as John and Matt surrounded
him.

“You think you have rights? What a laugh.
You aren’t human, you have no rights,” Kell remarked, then said,
“would you two shut him up and restrain him, because otherwise
he’ll fight you tooth and nail.”

The two guards sprayed Ostoro with
a
small sleeping gas canister and he
immediately went limp. They picked him up and left the bridge,
headed for the nearest airlock. Meanwhile, one hundred massive bio
weapon bombs were launched, in strategic locations around the
planet, including in the one ocean the planet had. The weapons
contained every biochemical agent known to man that mankind had
ever been affected with and used in war, from anthrax to smallpox.
Some of the diseases included in the bio weapons had never been
known to the Ragnor, so millions died off in a matter of hours,
while the soil of the planet became contaminated enough to where
the soil could never be used again for hundreds of years. Kell then
ordered the last set of weapons to be used when she thought
sufficient time had passed for the bio weapons to be effective,
thermonuclear bombs.

As the Ragnor were panicking and
dying off from the biochemical weapons, millions of others died
instantly as fifty small in size
sixty
megaton bombs, launched from the
Reprisal
, exploded over the cities of
the planet, making the cities and its citizens disappear in an
instant. The massive explosions could be seen from orbit, along
with the shockwaves that extended to well over four hundred miles
in all directions. The fallout from the bombs went into the jet
stream, causing the climate on Ragnor to be altered from all the
radiation caused by the bombs, and whoever was left alive on the
planet not directly affected by bio weapons and nuclear weapons,
would soon be poisoned by radiation or would die off from lack of
food from the change in climate. Dark, menacing clouds began
forming over the planet and a nuclear winter occurred for the next
few years, killing off animals, plants, and even more Ragnor as the
temperatures on the planet plunged to below freezing.

Meanwhile, Ostoro woke
up
, looked around to see where he was,
realized he was in an airlock, and saw the smiling faces of his two
human guards. He knew what was about to happen next, but argued
anyway, “You can’t do this to me, I want to live!”

“
We can and are doing this to you and
your whole planet. The Ragnor are a menace to the entire galaxy,
we’re doing what has to be done. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as
my grandma used to say.” Matt said, as he touched the manual
override of the outer airlock door, the door opened, the airlock
depressurized, causing Ostoro to fly out of the airlock, dying in
less than a minute of exposure and lack of oxygen. A few minutes
later, his body burned up in the atmosphere of his homeworld. Matt
then signaled Captain Kell that Ostoro had been taken care
of.

On the bridge, Captain Kell said, “I
believe our mission is accomplished. The Ragnor threat to Earth has
been dealt with and if the
remaining Ragnor
take the bait and attack the Terrans, the Terran threat to Earth
should be over with as well. Lieutenant Woods, set course for
Earth, we’re going home.” the
Reprisal
flew off towards the Sol
System.

One of the orbiting satellites
above Ragnor automatically activated a distress
signal which was broadcast out into space for Ragnor starships to
receive and then return to port. Hours later, fifty of the closest
starships and their crews had arrived in orbit around the Ragnor
planet, shocked at the obvious devastation seen from orbit. The
flagship of the fleet, docked at the shipyard, and scanned the
docked starships and the space station. On the starships, there
were crews still alive, while on the space station, most of the
station personnel were dead. Admiral Sudano ordered, “I want a full
investigation of what happened here. I want teams to don spacesuits
and board the space station and the ships docked here, and rescue
as many of our people as possible. See if there were any
eyewitnesses to this destruction. I need volunteers to land on our
planets’ surface and find out just how much devastation occurred
and how it was done, even though we know nuclear weapons were
exploded. I want to know who did this and demand retribution for
it. Get to work people.”

Computer specialists went to work on
the ships that received the virus, and as they were purging the
virus line by line, they discovered that it was a Terran computer
virus. No eyewitnesses though had seen any Terran ship attack, in
fact, a few had said, no starship had even been seen doing any
attacking. One Ragnor who had survived on the space station,
reported a weird energy beam coming from out of nowhere, but could
give no other details. The satellites in orbit had no pertinent
data of anything happening other than an attack on the planet.
Admiral Sudano
sent an order out to the rest
of the two hundred and fifty Ragnor starships to report back to the
homeworld at once, an attack plan was going to be devised to avenge
their planet and its people.

On the Ragnor planet, scientists in
suits designed to protect them from everything but the massive
radiation emanating from the cities, were investigating what had
happened. They discovered chemicals and diseases not known on their
planet, which caused plant and animal life to die off quickly, and
the Ragnor themselves to die slow and very painful deaths. The
scientists estimated that it would take at least a century before
the nuclear winter dissipated, while the soil would be contaminated
for even longer and not able to grow anything for the foreseeable
future. The r
emaining thousand or so Ragnor
who had survived on the planet, were euthanized because of the
diseases they now carried or because of irreversible radiation
sickness, putting them out of their misery. The remaining ten
thousand Ragnor on the one colony world were told they could never
return to the homeworld and those who were left of the species were
to re-populate as soon as possible and as rapidly as they possibly
were able to do.

The Ragnor military also grudgingly
admired the Terrans, because they never thought the Terrans had
this kind of mean streak or had the temerity to go this far to get
rid of an enemy, but Admiral Sudano told his troops to focus and
see that the Terrans were the enemy. On his flagship, after
watching the video taken of the devastation on the surface of his
home planet, Sudano laid out his plans, “We can not let this
travesty stand. We will attack the Terrans with the full force of
our military, no hiding behind cloaks this time. We are going to go
directly to Terra and do to them what they’ve done to us. No
species in this galaxy will intimidate us into giving up and dying
just because they want us to. We will finish this war once and for
all!”

The Minister of
Planetary Defense rushed into Terran President Homers’ office,
looking more than a little frightened, and said, “Mr. President,
I’ve received a report that three hundred starships are approaching
the solar system, they appear to have weapons on standby mode. The
military isn’t sure, but they think it’s the Ragnor,”

“
Three hundred starships that are
standing by to fire their weapons? Are they sure it’s the
Ragnor?”

“
Yes, we’re most definitely sure it’s
the Ragnor, starship configurations are the same from intelligence
reports we’ve gotten of the uncloaked ships. We’ve always had to
deal with our ships being attacked by cloaked ships, so why they’re
coming here without being cloaked is a mystery. I’m sure we’ll find
out, sir.”

“How many weapons capable military
starships do we have available?” asked the President.

“
We have one hundred in system, most
of which are either in dry dock getting upgrades or the crews are
back on Terra for rest and relaxation. We have another fifty
exploring the galaxy, none of which are close enough to get here in
time. We do have our satellite defense system, but it has never
been tested in battle conditions. Our planetary based weapons are
currently being readied as we speak. We’ll take as many of the
Ragnor down as possible before we’re taken down ourselves,
sir.”

“
Issue a Condition Red alert
throughout the planet, get everyone back on their ships, and the
ships that
currently do have crews, order
them to meet the enemy and attack. I’m going to find out if any of
our allies can help us or if they know the reasoning for this
unprovoked attack. Also, have you spoken with the Mars Observation
Post and asked them of their situation?”

“
We have tried to contact them, but,
there has been no answer now for more than eight months. We fear
they and Earth may have been attacked by the Ragnor from what we
know of our current situation,” answered the Minister.

“
That is really unfortunate; the
people of Earth were really coming along technologically for the
past sixty years.
Everyone was hoping they’d
be able to meet us on nearly equal footing and be partners in a new
space age. Well, anyway, I will not hold you up any longer; get our
planetary defenses up to full capacity, and I will see if I can’t
contact any allies.”

Ten minutes later,
sixty Terran starships left dock and headed for the oncoming
Ragnor fleet, which were still millions of miles from Terra. The
Ragnor met the Terrans with a heavy exchange of weapons fire, the
Terrans with mostly atomic based weapons, because energy weapons
drained a lot of power from the Terran power supply on the ships,
while the Ragnor had mainly energy based weapons that used up
little of their power supplies. The crews of the other Terran ships
managed to get aboard their ships twenty minutes into the battle
and flew out to meet the enemy. Even though the Terrans were
outnumbered three to one, they put up a tremendous fight for
survival. Ten heavily damaged Terran ships, after the commanders of
the ships ordered everyone on board left alive to abandon ship,
managed to make a heading directly for the enemy ships, taking out
ten Ragnor ships in a kamikaze style desperation move. The ships
blew up, creating massive fireballs with large pieces of shrapnel
causing damage to other ships that were near the explosions. Two
hours later in a large, but rather short battle, eighty Ragnor
ships were destroyed or heavily damaged, while the entire Terran
fleet was annihilated, and survivors were in escape pods waiting to
be rescued, if ever.

The Ragnor fleet approached
Terra
, attacking the satellite defense
system, which was shielded, but not battle tested. The satellites
that were equipped with weapons launched their nuclear weapons at
the Ragnor and some were equipped with energy weapons, but those
only caused minimal damage to the enemy starships. The Ragnor
easily brought down the satellite defense grid in less than thirty
minutes with the satellites’ weak shielding, began orbiting Terra,
and what was about to be an orbital bombardment of the planet first
before any troops were sent to the surface. The EM pulse cannons on
the surface, which were newly acquired and experimental technology
for the Terrans, opened up on the orbiting starships, followed by
nuclear tipped missiles from the ground. The EM pulses managed to
fry the systems of twenty of the ships, which left them defenseless
to the nuclear missiles, which destroyed those ships, and the
remaining pieces of the ships burned up in the atmosphere. The
other Ragnor ships bombarded all the missile and cannon sites until
they were smoking holes in the ground.

As the Ragnor began bombarding the
cities of Terra, Admiral Sudano contacted President Homer, who
appeared on the ships’ monitor looking disheveled
, somewhat dirty, and very stressed-out, since he was told
that he was getting no help any time soon from any of the other
species who had a grudge against the Ragnor, “This is Admiral
Sudano of the Ragnor Fleet. We have your planet surrounded, your
ships are destroyed, and your cities are on the verge of
disappearing from your world. We demand your immediate and
unconditional surrender.”

“
Considering I have no other option
and the fact that you wiped out most of our military assets, then I
surrender all of Terra to the Ragnor. What does your government
demand of us now?”