The Fall
My retirement did not last. A young destroyer Captain came to me at Guval Station and wanted to speak in private. He had been monitoring the positions of the three major powers fleets and he'd noticed something odd. He thought they were arranged to far out in the system, and all the ships which had been in dock had returned to their fleets. I'd never seen a configuration like that in the centuries since I'd left the Atlantic Federation Navy and come to the belt.
He had a hypothesis. The Alderson drive had been in use for at least a century by the major powers and he thought they were defending against aggression originating from outsystem. He thought they were watching the jump points. The Belt Confederation military and that of the Jovian Republic had only recently begun retrofitting ships with faster than light drives and we hadn't yet been willing to weaken our defenses by sending ships out of the system.
I was certain they weren't defending against colonies. With FTL travel only a century old it seemed unlikely that any colony could have attained a level of industrialization and technology to scare the major powers so bad. There was the possibility that they had had FTL travel for longer than they admitted to and the colonies had had much longer to develop. Or perhaps they had run into something else out there and it had scared them.
Seeing the reports got me pretty nervous. Fleets of Atlantic Federation, and Coalition, and Alliance ships were hardly protecting their own holdings. All of these fleets contained tens to hundreds of ships, from small destroyers to dreadnoughts a kilometer long. It would take a lot to scare them this bad.
I have always felt a need to take action in times of danger. It's probably whats kept me alive for so long. I couldn't just sit back. I asked to be recomissioned and the Confederation did so quickly. I captained an old Ceres class Battleship, like I had centuries before, and I kept close tabs on the young Captain and some friends of his he had aroused concern in. I planned, and they kept watch on what was going on out there.
They arrived at a jump point near Neptune, barrelling toward the sun. A giant fleet of ships unlike any I had seen. I watched the closest Atlantic Federation fleet approach in a tight aggressive posture. I saw what happened quite awhile after it actually occurred because of the distance. We picked up the light returning from a dead fleet. They had suddenly been shredded while the newcomers were still quite far out. The attackers had released some sort of chaff field, moving faster than the ships, which went undetected until it impacted the Federation ships at thousands of kilometers per second. Antennae struts and radiator fins were stripped from the bodies of the ships and some were cracked outright.
I called young Captain Cziller and we went to work immediately. We left our defensive positions and met up at a Terran Plus gravity station. We burned their communications relays and told them to surrender immediately. They agreed. We put friends on board two Hydroponics ships and spread their crews between the rest of ours. We filled our holds with supplies from the station and allowed anyone who wanted to come with us aboard. We started for Jupiter.