章節 10: Chapter 5. Orange Sea. sub-chapter 1.

As soon as people got the opportunity to travel on gravpolar interstellar ships, a very strange circumstance became more and more obvious every year. People assumed that the galaxy was inhabited by millions of different intelligent species, including very ancient ones, millions and billions of years old, compared to which we are small children. But, nothing like this was found. All the xenos encountered thousands of light-years away turned out to be either savages or stuck in the early stages of space exploration. Many of them could potentially become space races, but they did not begin expansion in accordance with their social structure and traditions. Ironically, humanity, which recently went into deep space, turned out to be the oldest and most developed race in the Area. There were exceptions, but they did not affect the general rule. The star pioneers of that era found several worlds that were analogs of the famous concept of the "circum-solar sphere", or Dyson Sphere, and any attempts to contact their inhabitants ended in a fierce reluctance on the part of the inhabitants of the spheres to establish any relationship. It was as if the inhabitants of these mega-fortresses had closed themselves in and did not want to know anything that was happening outside their spheres. At the same time, xenoarchaeologists found rare traces of the presence of those most advanced space civilizations in the distant past. And mostly not on planets, but on small, lost objects anywhere- asteroids in brown dwarfs, nebulae, etc. Shortly before the Great Interstellar War, xenoarchaeologist Anton Steklov and his team found on a Venus-like planet a city of a very ancient and advanced civilization, buried for kilometers under an all-planetary lava layer. The catastrophe on this planet happened when civilization was in its prime. After that, similar "space super-Pompeii" began to be found on other similar planets. Many developed civilizations throughout the Area once upon a time, at different times, were destroyed in such a brutal way - the temperature on the planet jumped to thousands of degrees and it was covered with a solid lava field, burying the previous relief and all the buildings of intelligent beings. Scientists of the four leading space empires then argued for a long time what it was. The versions were very different - from the self-destruction of these civilizations in wars with the use of weapons that cause hypervulcanism, to the natural processes of the evolution of planets, from which the inhabitants could not escape. Anton Steklov himself and his followers put forward a theory about the existence in the past of a kind of super-civilization of liquidators who, like locusts, swept through the galaxy at different times and destroyed in this way all the civilizations encountered and traces of their presence. Then almost no one took these arguments seriously. Steklov was ridiculed, squeezed out of the official scientific community, declared a pseudo-scientist and deprived of the opportunity to assemble official expeditions. The famous xenoarchaeologist himself soon died under very strange circumstances. But his faithful followers did not give up, they were able to attract private investors and conducted another series of expeditions, as a result of which they found indisputable evidence of the existence of that very "civilization of liquidators" in the past. Alas, the scientific community did not want to get out of the usual comfort zone and continued to ignore the arguments of xenoarchaeologists. That's when a quiet and unannounced, but very large-scale work on deepening this topic unfolded, the Russian special services took up Steklov's followers closely, they later oversaw the work of finding liquidators for some time. The specialists saw a real potential threat in these "fairy tales" and decided to check it just in case. They tried to search for traces of ancient civilizations even on Venus, in the Solar System, but they did not have enough time - a war broke out between RUIR and the three empires, and everyone abruptly and for a long time was not up to archaeology. After the war, about a century later, when everyone had calmed down and decided that life was a success (for those who survived), countless armadas of unknown ships invaded the Old Area. The Great Interstellar War did not pass without a trace. All this fuss of thousands of gravpolars, randomly scurrying back and forth, attracted the attention of an ancient something. Liquidators, sleeping for the time being in inaccessible areas of space, woke up from a sharply increased, atypical for natural cosmic bodies, fussy gravitational activity, like a sleeping dog wakes up from a rustle somewhere in distant bushes… They did not enter into negotiations, did not make demands, just methodically smashed into dust everything that resembled technical buildings, turned the planets mastered by humans and developed xenos into venomous poisonous deserts. The method of devastation turned out to be both extremely simple and infinitely complex.Several dozen large aggressor ships surrounded the planet and with their super-powerful gravity generators slowed its rotation to a minimum. Because of this, the planet was losing most of its gravitational power, and before that, the magmatic layers compressed inside it by monstrous pressure were coming out. The result varied - from the rupture of the planet into fragments, after which they scattered in orbit in the form of a belt of asteroids and comets, to the flooding of the surface with a multi-kilometer layer of lava and the creation of a dense poisonous atmosphere from liberated mantle gases. The rulers and ordinary residents of the three empires panicked. Even the most powerful at that time and the military fleet of the three empires, which had grown to an incredible number and power, could not qualitatively resist the aliens. The large ships of the aggressors possessed warp technology- the folding of space, a method that at one time people could not develop for a separate ship. Enemy ships could escape from under attack at any moment, which they regularly did. They did not need braking at the system boundaries and switching to the sublight mode of travel, and could appear absolutely anywhere in space. In addition, the big ships themselves did not differ in any superpowers, and in other characteristics - weapons, protection, were not much better than human ones. But, each of them carried thousands of small aircraft, which immediately surrounded themselves with a plasma shell at the exit of the ship. They moved by simply amplifying the plasma flow in the right direction, and therefore had phenomenal, absolute maneuverability and speed up to one-third of the light. They fired plasma clots of high temperature, and if necessary, they exploded themselves no worse than a heavy space torpedo. Their favorite tactic was to surround a human spaceship, cover it with a glowing plasma shell and, shrinking inside, melt it to the core. If necessary, they exploded, leaving the ship no chance. The method of communication used by the aliens has remained unclear. They did not use gradars and gravpolar engines. The method of influencing gravity also remained unknown. Attempts to capture these ships for study failed - their self-destruction system worked flawlessly. The piles of sprayed substance that remained after the explosion were of little use. The alien ships were not invulnerable - they did not succumb to lasers and plasma, but they were quite successfully destroyed by the concentrated fire of kinetic weapons - solid-state cannons, railguns and missiles with shrapnel. The command of the combined fleet of the three powers hastily began to re-equip all warships to confront the new enemy. Huge aircraft-carrying battleships with hundreds of combat bolides, which the Alliance and its vassals were so proud of, were replaced by light and maneuverable corvettes, dotted from bow to stern with a hedgehog of solid-state railguns and short-range rocket launchers. Relatively inexpensive, numerous and often unmanned. In dense battle formations, covering each other with heavy crossfire, these new fleets stood up to defend the attacked star systems. Albeit with huge losses, but it was with such tactics that they managed to win the first victories, and for the first time repel attacks on important and densely populated systems. Fleets of large ships moved into the category of mobile repair docks, mobile supply bases and command strongholds. The inhabitants of the Three Empires recovered from the shocks of the first months and prepared for a long protracted war with the aggressors. There was an illusion of the ability to repel this terrible invasion. But, the number of enemy plasma-bolides, the almost invulnerability of carriers, and the phenomenal speed of the replenishment of their losses then put the military space fleets of the three empires, and in general, their existence in a very precarious, fragile position. The Alliance, Empire and Commonwealth, gaining local victories at certain points, lost one star sector after another in less important parts of the Old Area. The existing forces of the protso were not enough to repel the attack on all fronts, which the aggressors changed and reshaped with mocking speed. By the way, then they called the new threat briefly and ominously - Z.R. Abbreviated from the Zeta Rialis system in the 1245-922 Rialis sector, on the edge of the Area where people had the misfortune to meet the first armada of unknown aggressors for the first time.