2954-06-24 – Tales from the Service: Scouts and their Prey
“We’re getting some diffuse signal scatter, Captain.” Manuel Rio announced behind Captain Adele Van Daal. “Looks like tight beam reflection fragments.”
That, of course, was the proverbial other shoe. If Krisbeak was picking up the scatter of tight beam signals traffic bouncing off hulls, the recipient was close indeed, and if they hadn’t detected that recipient yet by other means... Adele winced. “All commands, all stations, go to condition one. Get the screens up and warm your point defense. We’ve got company and it’s close.”
The lights dimmed a bit, as every third illumination panel aboard the ship switched to red-orange condition one lighting. The tense but calm chatter on the ship’s comms channels switched over in an instant to the frenetic, clipped callouts of battle stations being brought online. Fortunately, everyone was already near their battle-stations; everything was ready in seconds.
“Mr. Rio, Get me a fix on that scatter if you can.” Adele scanned the display, wondering where she’d put ambushers, if she had advance knowledge of the arrival and loose insertion point of an enemy squadron. With the pointer on her wristcuff, she drew a loose oval in the display roughly behind her force. “Get every active sensor we have sweeping this sector.”
“Aye.” Rio bent to his task. A moment later, the eyes of nearly twenty warships of varying sizes were fixed on an area of space thought previously to be empty. Sure enough, within seconds, gray pips began to appear there, designating objects picked up on normal sensors, which had no drive signatures.
“Get me IDs.” Adele highlighted the closest, which was well inside the range of most shipboard weapons. “Gunnery, put railshot on this one.” Though the least impactful of the ship’s long-range weapons, the massed railguns on its flanks had the greatest magazine depth, and if the object was really an enemy ship, firing them would goad it into activating its screens and drive to evade, making identification easier.
“Batteries three and six locking on.” Commander Vishin, the weapons officer, remarked, his voice carried halfway along the ship from his post to the combat information center by the comms system. “Fire.”
Adele felt the distant rattling hum of sixteen quad-railgun mounts each discharging hundreds of slugs per second through the soles of her feet. After two seconds, the sound stopped. The target would see the telltale flash of the white-hot ferroceramic projectiles in a moment, and then...
“Drive signature.” Rio called out, just as the gray pip turned orange. “Military-grade acceleration profile. It’s a Tyrant all right. Moving away.”
“All ships, engage.” Adele hesitated. “Pursue but remain in wide support formation. Watch for strike-scale raiders. Reserve missiles for now, he’s well within cannon range.”
As her ship turned gracefully to pursue, she watched its holographic likeness do the same, lips pursed. Why was it alone? Even if several of the other objects sensors had detected were also enemy cruisers just like it, they were a lot farther away, and still had not revealed their nature in an attempt to reach their isolated comrade. Her squaron was more than a match for one of the type, especially if they were already at close range before the shooting started.
For Nate to set a trap like this and then to bungle it, though, didn’t seem right. The Incarnation made mistakes, sure, but they were usually calculated gambles, not simple miscommunications. They knew well enough that a scouting squadron wouldn’t pass up a chance to take a lone Tyrant apart.
Perhaps they had been given no clear idea where Krisbeak was going to appear at the system jump-limit, and had spread their ambushing forces too thin, but even that explanation suggested uncharacteristic incompetence.
The possibility that this was a trap occurred to her, of course, Nate spent a lot of time and energy trying to trap Seventh Fleet’s scouting squadrons. Even if they annihilated half the squadron and sent the survivors limping back to Sagittarius Gate in disarray, the loss of a baited capital ship in exchange seemed a poor trade.
As the railgun rattle began again, joined a moment later by the dull rhythmic thump of smart-cannons and the occasional snap-whine of Krisbeak’s powerful axial phasebeam discharging, Adele tried to put all of that out of her mind. The target was going out into the black anyway, closer to the point of safe jump initiation, so pursuing couldn’t be risky, but that itself made her more suspicious than anything. Bait would always need to seem safe, otherwise it would never get bitten.
Rio seemed to recognize his superior’s concern. “You think there’s more to this, Skipper?” He had to rais his voice a little over the distant sound of weapons fire on the ship’s exterior.
“He’s returning fire. High-power beams.” Commander Firth, on the bridge, called out. “All helms, evade.”
“Screen intercept, port bow!” Someone called out. “High-wattage beam. Defenses holding.”
“Nice shot, Poliparkov, you just tagged him with your axial. Looks like his screens took it.”
How could this be a trap? Krisbeak and its supporting destroyers were at their most dangerous in a stern chase, where they could bring their axial weaponry to bear on the enemy, and the short-burst acceleration advantage afforded to them by being smaller, lighter vessels was at its greatest. If this was a trap, it would have to spring soon, or there wouldn’t be anything left of that Tyrant before it closed, and Adele’s flotilla could still scatter and run.
“Hull strike.” Someone called out. “Someone just hit him aft starboard.”
“Confirmed.” Vishin, despite the excitement of the moment, was calm and reserved, as always. “Captain Van Daal, if his screens are already failing to intercept-”
“I hear you, Commander.” Adele nodded. If this was a trap, there was still time to eat the bait. “Prepare a volley from all launch cells. Let’s finish this quickly.”
Within seconds, every green symbol in the display flashed blue, then back to green, indicating that they had missiles armed in the cells and slaved to Krisbeak’s targeting data. A volley from every hull was nearly two hundred missiles, most of them the lighter standard fast missiles, but almost twenty of the heavier, devastating Navy ship-killers. With its screens already being saturated by cannon, railshot, and beam, the Tyrant would need to rely on its laser point-defense systems to intercept them – and there was no way it could handle so many, all at once.
“Launch. Arm and reserve.” Adele clenched her fists behind her back.
A blossom of yellow traces appeared in the display, all arcing toward the target on various courses intended to converge at the same moment. They didn’t have far to go; the range was incredibly short for missile combat.
Adele frowned as the deadly yellow blossom began to fold in on itself, converging on the single blood-red pip. “Why haven’t they launched anything?” She asked, mostly to herself. Tyrants had missile launch systems, too, though intelligence reports suggested they didn’t have many reloads for each launcher. Still, in a life or death situation like this, why wasn’t it putting out everything it had?
The missiles converged. A rapid series of little white sparks flashed in the display to indicate the loss of contact with each one as it was intercepted by point defense, electronically disabled, or otherwise destroyed. A very few of the sparks flashed blue, indicating the missile reporting itself going into the final plunge, the microseconds of hard burn toward the target hull. The red pip vanished in this sea of white and blue fire. Few starships of any size could survive a volley like that, at this range. Certainly none could endure it unscathed.
The flashes vanished. The red indicator was still there, glaring at Adele like an accusing, vengeful eye.
Obviously, the wisdom of attacking an enemy ship sent to dangle alone as bait is debatable, but Captain Van Daal can be forgiven for aggression, given what the portion of her account published last week suggests about her role models in fleet service. Caution is the doctrinal watchword of the modern scout formation, but she seems to style herself as attempting to prove herself worthy of the mantle laid down by the old guard of the fleet’s cruiser forces, figures known for their aggression in almost any circumstance.
That this aggression got most of those commanders and a good number of their subordinates killed does not seem to faze her, though it certainly fazed the Admiralty.
