by Alfred Bekker
In the 23rd century, Polyxxonia is a metal used in the construction of spaceships. POLYXXONIA is also the name of a spaceship.
*
About thirty starships had gathered at the edge of the Tridor system and taken up a battle formation, as was customary with the units of the Space Army Corps. The light cruisers and destroyers formed the flanks, while the larger and more heavily armed heavy cruisers were on the inside of the formation. In the center, two Dreadnought-class battleships lined up their space guns. The fleet awaited their far superior enemy, a formation of over forty warships of the bird-like Qriid. A breakthrough by this space armada would have been a catastrophe for humanity. If the warlike aliens were victorious here, they would be able to penetrate deep into the core area of the Federation of Human Worlds.
But the defenders could not count on reinforcements... The Qriid ships approached and immediately went on the attack. Several traser beams hit the first destroyer in the engine section. The spaceship turned into a ball of embers for seconds, which finally went out, leaving only a few pieces of radiation-contaminated debris behind...
*
Commander Rena Sunfrost swallowed. The 32-year-old's tension was clearly visible. Her finely cut face, framed by short black hair, betrayed full concentration. Her eyes were fixed on the large panoramic screen, whose three-D effects provided an amazingly lifelike image of the spatial conditions.
The light of the red giant shimmered dully. A shadow painted itself on the edge of the glowing disk and slowly moved along the sun's equator. It was a gas giant with five times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting its central star in an extremely narrow orbit.
In the foreground, the space battle raged between the superior Qriid fleet and the units of the Space Army Corps of the Human World Alliance.
The bird-like spacecraft slowed down. The flare of the counter thrusters was clearly visible and made it easier to locate them visually. Due to their high speed on reaching the Tridor system, the Qriid ships would otherwise have raced towards their opponents at almost fifty percent of the speed of light. The probability of collisions was negligible. They would probably have simply raced past the Space Army Corps ships or even through their formation. However, this was more in line with the Space Army Corps' weaponry-based tactics, and the bird-like creatures would have been easy prey for the defenders' guns.
But the Qriid knew very well how to fight a space battle. They were shrewd tacticians and, f
