Thought i'd giving this writing malarky a try...



March of the High Guard



Chapter 1



April 10th, 3108 A.D.



"Order Destroyer Squadrons 8 through 15 to advance and keep them bottled up by the node! Don't give them any breathing room!! Have the 5th and 9th Cruiser Wings to fall back on Point Bravo and regroup and let 2nd Dreadnaught lay down long range missile support against their heavies; timed-rate fire, lets not run ourselves dry."



Admiral Li barely heard the acknowledgements ringing out across the CIC of the Flagship Dreadnaught 'Ad Astra', his attention was on the floating holographic display in front of him. The battle had been underway for barely five minutes and he was still getting to grips with finding himself under attack by a completely unknown race.



After the First Contact Wars of 3012 and 3064, Terran High Guard protocol dictated a heavy defensive force backing up any exploratory survey down a newly discovered warp node or wormhole. Survey Flotilla 15 had discovered the 'Passus' warp node less than a week earlier and Command had dispatched 11th Fleet, his command, to this system immediately.



Once he had secured the immediate area with mines and the handful of defensive fortifications he had been able to bring along, he allowed Survey 15 to continue their exploration of the next system beyond the Passus node.



That had been 16 days ago and he was just starting to get worried about the fate of Survey 15 when five minutes ago a fleet of unknown vessels had punched a full warp assault in his face. Thirty six cruiser and nine battleship analogs had come screaming out of the node, rail cannons and missiles reaching out in unrestrained fury.



A small part of his mind was still frantically trying to figure out how these aliens had gottn past the Survey flotilla AND the recon scouts holding position on the other side of the node, without any of them managing to pass him an alert. Such considerations were going to have to wait for the moment, however. The aliens had slipped under his guard and were clearly trying for a knockout blow before he could counter.



Fortunately, the High Guard Fleet knew what they were about and, despite the unending boredom of 'node duty', his people had maintained a constant watch with at least a third of the minefields, defensive forts and 11th Fleet running 'hot' at any time.



These aliens may have gotten the jump on his people but the already primed mines had exploded in their faces and distracted them long enough for the ready-duty forts and ships to flush their tubes and send exawatts of plasmic energy and hyper-velocity rounds right back in their faces.



Or whatever these damned aliens have for faces.



It appeared to be working though and the alien fleet seemed to have recoiled from the blow. None of the missiles appeared to be making it to their targets, the alien point-defence flak being shockingly dense. The rail gun rounds were having minimal effect; most rounds were being deflected as expected but the enemy appeared to be very heavily armoured and it would take some time to chew through. The plasma cannons, however, seemed to catch them by surprise and whilst it was hard to hit the wildy evading enemy, the plasma bolts that did hit, appeared to hit their hull unimpeded.



They clearly lacked energy shielding!



Of course, with the amount of missile and railgun fire each of those ships was putting out, surviving long enough to put plasma on target was going to be an issue...

Chapter 1



April 21st, 3108 A.D.



In the silence of his ready room, Admiral Li slumped back in his chair and ran a weary hand across his face, feeling the rasp of his two day old stubble.



The past eleven days had been one long nightmare.



These alien invaders weren't particularly advanced. No energy weapons to speak of, low acceleration rates and piss-poor accuracy but by the Endless, they were winning from sheer numbers. Conservative estimates report that his people had killed the enemy at a 5:1 ratio in hulls! The ratio in tonnage was even better.



But if the enemy was feeling these catastrophic losses they showed no sign of it. Ship after ship poured through the warp nodes like a tidal wave of destruction, pausing only long enough to regroup before advancing under his guns once more.



11 Fleet had fought a rear guard action as stations and planets were evacuated as best as they could but the fact was that the enemy had finally pushed through the very lightly colonised fringe ofthe Empire and were practically on top of the first Core worlds and not even the Empire could evacuate upwards of a 100 million people in three days.



....





EEEK - just noticed that Steam has finished downloading ES!!!!! will continue this later!

I hope you don't mind me posting in the middle of your story, I just wanted to offer my compliments. It's rather good.

You have good touch for writing, really good work with this. I hope we see the rest of the story soon.