TA21

==Chapter 21 - The Armada==
LCS Tranh Truk Ngo
Landmark Class Destroyer
Clan Space
Early 3168 CE
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"...people forget what scale is, until we face something like this." Captain of the Tranh Truk Ngo said.
The Star Colonel sitting next to him on the hull was silent. Watching the stream of Dropships docking with one of the big, 'super' transport Jumpships supplied by the Free Worlds.
Mike didn't mind.  She was his prisoner after trying to disrupt the evacuation effort.  "See, each of those dropships you see? That is a modified Mammoth-Class personnel hauler. By 'modified' I mean they sank millions into expanding the life-support, then shoved cubicles not much bigger than an E-Z couch stacked floor to ceiling in concentric rings. To pack as many human beings as possible into each one."  He looked over, "There is no room for battlemechs, no room for fighters, no room for loot or goods, just human beings and enough food and support to keep them alive for the trip back to what we're hoping is going to be safety."
"You are not certain?"  She sounded dumbfounded.
"I am certain only that if we weren't doing this, those millions of people would be sentenced to die a horrible death in about six months.  Living people can make choices. Living people can rebuild somewhere else.  The radiation and debris waves will hit in six months, in four months, we won't be able to get anyone out. Because of what's happening to hyperspace as a result of the Novas.  We don't have data on how long it'll take for jump drives to even work after. So your 'strategy' of shelter-in-place was just a slower death sentence, because there won't be a biosphere to recover. The orbital period's wrong, no rain-shadows to protect your world from having the ionosphere stripped and the surface ravaged and cooked down to the mantle by what's coming..and no way to get rescue in afterward.  as it is, we're cutting it ****** close."
"We could watch this from within the hull, why are you making me sit outside with you?" she asked.
"That's because vid doesn't get it across, Celeste." Mike Nguyen stated, "Vid doesn't capture the whole view.  You're used to thinking like a warrior who sometimes goes into space to fight or to travel. This is why I was able to turn your half-ass monitor into scrap in under a minute from first engagement."
"How so?" she asked.
"Because I'm a spacer first, I visit planets if the mission requires it." he explained, "You took a warship with a damaged core and badly hacked together drives up against a crew and ship that aren't just trained for this. We live it.  What happened to Ancestral Home was as inevitable as me taking an Industrialmech with bolt-on armor up against trueborn warriors in Omnimechs.  You can bolt a damn big gun on a mining 'mech, but it doesn't have the maneuver and combat systems, and if the pilot wasn't already an ace with 'mechs?  Same thing here. You're a fighter pilot and your tactics might be fine for fighters, but you hamstrung your defense with a broken ship that doesn't maneuver or fight like a fighter...but you also fought for the wrong reasons."
"The wrong reasons?"
"When your house is burning down, you don't shoot the firemen." he told her.
"...And you are these 'firemen'?" she scoffed.
"We are as close as you will ever see in a situation like this." Mike told her.  "See, it's scale again.  We're burning through the combined fortunes of trillions of people in a dozen nations to evacuate your people from an extinction event-nobody has ever done something like this before.  Aleksandr Kerensky's entire army was less than one hundred million people, there are cities with more than that, and we're trying to save billions of people."
"But...why?" Celeste questions confusedly.
Mike sighed, "They're people." he said, "Human life is precious because it's human life.  I hated having to kill your warriors, every one of them was a human life and a bundle of potentials that will never be realized, unique, Star Colonel. You can copy the genetics, but the person inside the fleshy shell is one of a kind. Never to be repeated-and out there are millions upon millions of unique individuals. Every one of them threatened, every one of them left behind by their leaders to burn because those leaders didn't grasp what they were throwing away."
"Disasters happen." she said, "and Wars happen."
''
"Yeah, they do. My people got very good at it." he told her, "Kowloon ended up leading most of this, because we've got the experience in something almost similar enough-we kept the Quarantine that stopped a level zero contagion from wiping out the human race.  Seventeen worlds, Star Colonel, not a spit on what you have out here.  It took us seventy years to beat the damned thing at a cost of twenty billion lives.  You need to grasp the scale of that, because if we're really successful we will probably still lose more here.  on the scales, it works out to if we're really good at this we'll save eighty to ninety percent, if luck is really strong, if we don't have to stop and have a fight every time we come to save people, if we don't have to waste resources, if we can get straight to work...we'll only lose around twenty two billion people.  If your leaders had come to us openly, from the first moment they knew, we could maybe have saved MORE."
"Your passion is...almost convincing." she said, "What drives you to such extremes?"
"I have walked the surfaces of worlds that were murdered, Star Colonel. Murdered like the bastards who set this up planned to murder yours." Mike stated, "I was on the first exploration mission anti-spinward, looking for aliens. We didn't find any that were alive but we found a lot of dead places where they once were.  We found the bodies, we found the remains, the ruins, tracked radio-shells in the background of the galaxy and every planet we found was slaughtered, dead...and someone is trying to do that to you, and by extension, to us."
"An enemy? You know of an enemy?? Why did you not lead with that??"
"That's what we still don't know enough to find them." Mike stated, "We have a mission fleet tracing back the  pattern of their murders, and we have this fleet, evacuating their targets before they can succeed again.  Denying the enemy another victory so we can figure out who it is."
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