Content s Introduction 6 Part One — The Laguna Wars The Nightmare Begins 8 The Forgotten Fleet 16 The First Clash 21 A Mysterious Liquid 25 A Clue 30 The Breakout 35 A Desperate Race 42 The Defence of Terra 45 The Final Victory? 54 Part Two - Conquest of Space The Nimrodian Club 57 The Duel of Sisuphos Three 63 The Great Rebellion 64 Colonization: 72 Incident 1 Incident 2 The Pirate World 80 The Hunters of Asterion 90 The Terran Trade Authority The TTA, formerly the World Trade Authority, was founded in 1999 AD as a subsidiary of the World Council, and charged with the task of administering global trading. Four years later the Commercial Technology Division of the World Community Research Council, together with its extensive manufacturing complex, was absorbed into the corporate structure. During the long years of the Proxima Wars, the TTA was made responsible for military ordnance and manufacturing, most of which was accomplished through their own facilities. Following the formation of the Terran Federation in 2070 AD, the Authority became the central administrative body of the Federation as well as the main federal manufacturing center. Subsidiary Offices and Institutions The Federal Law Enforcement Authority. The Institute of Astronautics. The Institute of Medical Sciences. Interstellar Trade Directory and Data Control. Public Office of Information. The Research Council. The Settlement Welfare Service. Traffic Control and Customs. Introduction The conquest of space was never an easy undertaking and Mother Earth, as though reluctant to let her children escape her influence, placed obstacles in the way which made the enterprise a difficult and costly one. The very force which retained the atmospheric envelope upon which life depended, also formed a barrier requiring enormous energy to penetrate. Beyond this lay an inconceivable vastness entirely antagonistic to our life- form, forcing Man to rely on the efficiency of machines to recreate on a tiny scale, those conditions vital to his survival. Despite these deterrents, Man gradually edged his way into space: first to Earth's lunar companion, then to Mars and its own moons — Phobos and Deimos — turning their lonely desolation to his own ends. Industry developed there and they became home for thousands, an increasing number of whom had never set foot on the planet which would always remain their spiritual birthplace. As the years passed the expansion accelerated and the men of Terra travelled and worked throughout the Solar System in machines that were increasingly efficient. But peril was ever-present and the smallest error or frailty could end in disaster. During these early years the dangers faced were all a direct result of the uncompromising nature of space itself, but the discovery that we were not alone in the Galaxy led to further problems and penalties. Our encounter with the inhabited systems of Alpha and Proxima Centauri - our nearest stellar neighbors — led eventually to the awful devastation of the Proxima Wars. The actual course of this prolonged and desperate struggle Acknowledgements The Publishers would like to thank Young Artists and the Sarah Brown agency for their assistance in the preparation of this book. has been recorded elsewhere and is outside the scope of this book, but the impetus it gave to the evolution of spaceflight was immeasurable, offering Man a freedom of movement among the stars which had been inconceivable a generation earlier. By the end of the twenty-first century the first of many settler ships were carrying the pioneers of the Terran Federation to found colonies on the new worlds explored by the survey ships of the Terran Trade Authority. Man was rapidly becoming a truly interstellar being, seeding himself among the stars and filling the black vacuum with his ships. As the web of his trade routes expanded and his restlessness pushed ships deeper into the Galaxy, so the inevitability of further contact with other sentient beings increased — and with it the risk of further clashes between alien cultures. The design and development of military craft that had begun in earnest with the Proxima Wars was continued as a result, both to support the advance into distant systems and to defend the Federation when the time arose. Battle fleets were maintained and renewed as technology advanced providing the means to construct ever more efficient, ever more deadly ships. But a huge war machine cannot be kept in peak readiness forever when there is no enemy to threaten the steady and remorseless march of colonial expansion. Imperceptibly, efficiency and precision are eroded, and caution is replaced by complacency. As had been anticipated, other inhabited systems were found but in every case where the occupants demonstrated intelligence, their levels of development were always inferior to that represented by the Terran Federation and served to reinforce the growing ambition and arrogance of its leaders. As often happens in this kind of situation, fate intervened and disaster struck in the form of the unexpected and catastrophic war with the Laguna system. The Terran Federation found itself confronted by a powerful and determined adversary with weapons at its disposal which threatened the very existence of the sprawling giant which had grown from one planet circling an insignificant yellow star near the outer edge of the Galaxy. The story of this epic struggle between two alien and proud civilizations with immense power at their command and the survival of their species as the goal represents the greater part of this book. Each of the crucial stages in this battle of the Titans and the events which shaped them are described here. Earth and the Terran Federation came closer to extinction than at any other time in its history and the battles that took place in the dark and silent wastes of space were fought with a ferocity that only sheer desperation can bring about. But although the war with Laguna must inevitably occupy the greater part of any history of Man's battles with the unknown, this period saw many smaller conflicts and confrontations of individual significance. The trials and tribulations of colonization have challenged the determination and ingenuity of men throughout history, but the struggle to survive in strange and often hostile surroundings has never been more terrible than on virgin worlds deep in space. The horror faced by the settlers of Drakon's Folly was by no means unique in its nightmare quality, and is therefore representative of the hardships suffered in dozens of isolated solar systems around the perimeter of known space. Similarly, the fight of order and justice against chaos and rebellion is a story as old as Man himself and his exodus to the stars only broadened the battleground. In a civilization as dispersed as that of the Federation, the enforcement of law required a special breed of men to police settlements light years from anywhere and maintain the security of the spacelanes and trade routes. Too often their lonely vigils and deadly skirmishes with pirates and villains went unrecorded. The accounts included here are not isolated incidents but are part of an unceasing war, and for every hero returning triumphant there are many whose bodies spin like bizarre meteorites through the emptiness. The maintenance of order in an interstellar civilization requires a degree of control which to many is in itself undesirable, and the nearer one approaches the administrative center of such a society, the more rigid its constraints. It was inevitable that one day someone would attempt to overthrow the leaders of the Federation and suitable contingency plans were constantly under review. But when that day came the reactions so carefully formulated proved almost entirely inadequate. Here then is a record of some of the most significant battles fought in the history of Earthmen, covering a broad spectrum of human conflict and passions. The same qualities of enterprise and endeavour, courage and determination that both pushed Man into a new era and created some of his greatest obstacles are all to be found in this record of Great Space Battles. Part One-The Laguna Wars The Nightmare Begins When the giant Colonial VIII ship Venturer lifted off from Miami in May 2219 its occupants and Terra Control looked forward to an uneventful though long voyage. The crew settled in for the seven months of unvarying routine that lay before them - 24 hours a day for 200 days, with only meaningless, imprisoned rest days to dent the monotony. Laguna 9, their destination, promised the 400-odd colonists aboard a safe, though necessarily hard start as its first inhabitants. The survey carried out some months earlier, though brief, had established that gravitational, climatic and atmospheric conditions would not prove themselves beyond adaptation by modern technology, while the constituent elements of the planet's surface contained minerals sufficiently valuable on Terra to justify their exploitation. As for life, the survey teams had detected no signs other than of rudimentary plant formations. As the days and weeks passed, the daily transmissions received from the ship indicated nothing unusual: a temporary breakdown of the water condensers, soon repaired; two uncomplicated pregnancies among colonists; a death. Two days before going into pre-setdown orbit, in the middle of the lengthy preparations for arrival, something rather more unusual happened. In the middle of an otherwise uneventful watch the 3rd o...
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