Tales from the Service: Gabriel's Dutchman

2947-10-01 – Tales from the Service: Gabriel’s Dutchman

The war is getting really interesting, and Duncan has agreed to let me directly publish more stories to this feed (though he still insists on mangling my text in the service of his too-dry editorial standards). He told me not to spend much time discussing the events elsewhere on the Coreward and Sagittarius Frontiers since Saint-Lô left Maribel, but the two attacks at Margaux and the loss of contact with remote Kistler Junction do not seem to be raids, just as the attack at Berkant was not a proper raid.

The Incarnation thinks it has the advantage – I personally don’t think so, but it’s possible – and Captain Liao thinks they’re hoping to make the Fifth Fleet look like a bunch of fools until some political nincompoop up and gives them what they want.

Trouble is, hell if anyone knows what they want – the prisoners taken by the Navy think they’re fighting to save humanity from extinction, the damned fools. Hardly a position that can be distilled into actionable demands – far as they see it, we’re either with them and surrender without any more fighting, or against them and due for destruction to preserve the species.

This week’s entry is another anecdote told by Source Gabriel, (as before, identified in this piece only as such) a captured Incarnation strike pilot who has been at least partly cooperative with Naval Intelligence interrogators. Evidently, the chip-brains in Nate command had at one point the utterly mad idea of snatching as worthless and boring a place as Deana’s Rock – the very hind end of the Frontier – and it’s apparently all it took was an apparent Dutchman sighting to scare them away from the misfortune of holding it.

We haven't seen Dutchmen in the Reach (credibly, anyway) in nearly 200 years - maybe they're more common in Sagittarius?

[Editor’s Note: Deana’s Rock is a touchy subject for Nojus – I tried to get him to tone down his scorn, but he wouldn’t budge, and we all know nobody on this ship can budge him if he digs his heels in. I’ll try to tease the story out of him later. Also keep in mind that this occurred at least a few weeks before Source Gabriel’s final mission (Tales from the Service: Source Gabriel) -D.L.C.]

The order to change course fed directly into Gabriel’s brain through his implants, and the sleek Coronach moved to follow the new heading even before he had registered the change, staying in pristine but rapidly-flowing formation behind the flight leader. Precision formation flying in tiny, nimble ships with nearly identical drive signatures was the Coronach’s best defense; like a school of fish, a squadron of the little interceptors made it difficult for attackers to identify single targets.

Of course, a course change not on the flight plan indicated trouble, and Gabriel immediately began to parse the flow of network traffic through which any pilot’s mind tumbled. The squadron leader had received an encrypted update from the mothership’s flight control system, and though Gabriel himself couldn’t decode it, he knew how to query its contents.

“Lead, what is the nature of our new orders?” Gabriel sent over the radio, though his mouth never moved inside his helmet.

In his augmented vision, the lead Coronach blinked to indicate successful reception. A moment later, Flight Leader Yasin’s reply arrived, read out for Gabriel’s auditory nerves. “Strange mass detected on our new heading. We’re checking it out.” Yasin, unlike many squadron commanders, did not lord his position over his subordinates. His squadron was the best – Immortal-only units excepted, if such things were more than rumor – and he knew any of his pilots were qualified to be flight leader of any lesser squadron.

The other pilots on the circuit blinked their silent acknowledgement in the augmented vision of Coronach flying, and shortly a spherical search area appeared ahead. The stars usually didn’t show from the cockpit, but inside the circular area ahead, the system let them show, in case the target object occluded any stars. Gabriel didn’t see anything, and as far as his light ship’s sensors and external cameras knew, the search area was just another patch of hard vaccuum.

As the squadron’s three sections separated to fly their parts of the helical search pattern prescribed by the computer, Tashi’s Coronach blinked to Gabriel’s left. “What do you think about the news from the home sector this morning?”

Gabriel could almost hear Yasin roll his eyes. Tashi had, as usual, waited until the section was alone on the short-range chatter circuit before bringing up uncomfortable topics. “It’s a rumor, Tashi. Nothing more.”

“Nobody would dare lie about matters the Inner Presence. What if there’s something to it? What if His visage really did react to news of our successes?” She trusted Yasin, Gabriel, and Azurra – trusted them more than Gabriel thought was healthy. He’d heard hushed rumors of people, co-opted by security systems, unwillingly turning in their own lovers, siblings, and children.

“If it’s true, it is proof we are the destined agents of humanity, and these weaklings must fall.” Azurra, always the most orthodox pilot in the section, might have been quoting out of the old, tattered texts preserved through the Schism.

“Of course they’ll fall. Half their systems are defended only by pathetic mercenaries. What I mean is-”

“Heads up!” Yasin put an end to the chatter. “On my datastream.”

Gabriel saw it instantly as the flight leader’s data gushed into his systems on a tight-beam transmission. The instruments usually used to track drive-wakes in the void had picked up a tiny ripple in the cosmic fabric – weak, but wide and constant, like ripples emanating outward from a tiny waterfall.

Gabriel, whose implants had somewhat better technical analysis algorithms, drank in the data, and let his implants digest it. “Not a drive-wake. Central source, low system-relative velocity, no visual. I have no ID, lead, but it’s small.”

“Keep processing. We’re going in close.”

The four Coronachs turned in unison as Flight Leader Yasin set a new course to fly closely past the ripple’s source. The other two flights, only labeled pinpricks in the distance, continued their search patterns; a tiny object didn’t match what the strike-director system had reported.

When the view ahead changed, filling with a red-shaded bulk, it did so in an instant. Gabriel’s head was filled with the screeching of a collision alarm designed specifically to trigger a response even in an unconscious pilot. Reflexively, he took manual control, flicked the Coronach end-over-end, and kicked the drive to maximum. If Azurra’s formation-holding was off by even two meters, this maneuver would cause his ship and hers to collide head-on, but he knew his section’s formation-holding was impeccable, even if they were forced to do it without the implant-driven automatic.

The automatic interlock kicked back in and Gabriel returned to a position beside Yasin, who’d picked a new course skimming along the length of the object which had appeared. Azurra and Tashi soon returned to formation as well.

Azurra broke the section’s silence first. “Son of Sapience, look at that.”

On the augmented-reality seen through his ship’s sensors, the object he’d nearly run into was a titanic unknown – bigger than a cruiser by half, obviously artificial but equally obviously not the work of the pathetic Confederated Navy. It lacked a spatial drive signature or emissions indicative of any large powerplant, but up close, what had seemed to be a ripple in the cosmic fabric now showed its true nature – not a mere ripple, the ship was entirely wrapped in a twist of space-time, so only the tiniest ripple showed outside. The tight flyby course set by Yasin had apparently found the tiny aperture of the spatial fold.

“Still no identification.” Gabriel started calculating the power requirements of that system, but even a conservative estimate put it far beyond the powerplant output of an entire squadron of Incarnation cruisers. That the object – the ship – had no measurable heat or particle emissions was more sinister than a ship lit from stem to stern, all viewports blazing – the fold in which the ship was tucked was proof it had power, and probably a crew which didn’t appreciate being spied on.

“Lost our mothership transponder signal.” Tashi observed, apparently not understanding what she was seeing. “Did they leave us behind?”

“Negative.” Gabriel sent her a copy of his in-progress mathematics, hoping she had enough software to interpret it. In case she didn’t, he struggled to come up with an analogy for the situation. “They’re sewing a pocket in space-time.”

Yasin highlighted a feature on the hull ahead, and though Gabriel couldn’t be sure, it looked a lot like a weapon emplacement. It was far bigger than the prow-mounted bombardment laser on their own mothership. As he looked, he began to pick out other features indicative that he was looking at a warship.

Yasin, evidently, had seen enough. He charted a new course for a broad sweep out from the hull and back on the vector which they had come in on.

“Wait.” Tashi called out, highlighting something on the hull ahead. “Visual-spectrum light source.”

Just as she pointed out the spot, a network of blazing blue-white lines burst forth from it, spidering across the whole hull of the hidden ship. The sensors automatically prevented any of the pilots from being blinded, and the light let the Coronachs’ telescopes see better the shadowy hull they’d been overflying. Stepped structures protruded at odd angles from the hull like grown crystals, some of them pocked and scarred by decades – maybe centuries – of superficial impacts. A pair of jutting, jawlike structures at the bow could only be weapons – weapons big enough, Gabriel thought distractedly, to vaporize entire capital ships. Nothing about the ship’s design could have been devised by human minds, but to the human sense of aesthetics, it was a beautiful ship, an apex predator lurking in ambush.

Gabriel watched the datastreams in awe. “Power to the fold pocket is falling. They’re coming out!”

“We’re getting out.” Yasin engaged the new course, and the four-ship formation flipped end-over-end in unison and scurried away from the hull toward their point of entry just as the pocket collapsed. Space seemed to wheel around the confused Coronach’s sensors, and Gabriel knew that if he had been able to see the stars, they would have spun madly as they reverted to their proper places.

“What is that light?” Azurra, little else to do but hope the four strike-ships were beneath notice, turned her attention back toward the great ship.

Gabriel spun his view backwards as well, drinking in the datastreams from all four Coronachs. “They’re folding the fabric again.”

Yasin made a few adjustments to the course, and sent out orders to the other two sections, which had reasonably panicked when the towering ship appeared. “Is it going to vanish again?”

“I think it’s a drive, but it’s-“

Gabriel never finished the thought, even though his thoughts were being transmitted directly. The spiderwebbed network of light along the ship’s vast hull pulsed once, then it went out from bow to stern – and where it went out, the ship vanished along with it.

“Weak reading from earlier is gone.” Yasin confirmed.

When the recall order arrived from the strike coordinator a moment later, it surprised none of the pilots. The cruiser’s command crew had seen the ship, and they knew any territory such behemoths lurked in was no place for the Incarnation to tread – not yet.

Details

Editor's Loudspeaker: Berkant Action Report

2947-09-29 – Editor's Loudspeaker: Berkant Action Report 

We are all alive, and we have little but the heavy armor-hull of Saint-Lô to thank for that. The Incarnation force must have rigged the system’s HyperCast Relay with explosives; as soon as we’d committed to the fight, it exploded spectacularly, cutting us off from Fifth Fleet headquarters and causing quite a stir there. Saint-Lô’s logistics train fortunately included a relay constructor ship, and after the battle, it hurried forward to restore our connection (and that of the rest of the system) to the HyperCast network. 

Nojus and I spoke with Captain Liao shortly after the Incarnation force retreated toward the jump limit. I’ll admit I was still quite shaken by what occurred, and Nojus took the lead in this conference, at which the ship’s Naval Intelligence representative was also present. The pair of Navy officers were clear – they wanted us to make sure that we had a message for our audience ready the moment we were reconnected to the rest of the Reach, and they wanted to make sure that message was direct and did not try to conceal the outcome. 

The Battle of Berkant – Overview 

Note: I am not a military writer. Nojus sat with two volunteers from the junior command staff on Saint-Lô to draft this account; I merely edited it to meet Cosmic Background’s editorial standards. 

As Captain Liao suspected (see Tales from the Service: The Siege of Berkant), the Incarnation ships in the system had set up a trap for the superior Saint-Lô squadron. One of their Tyrant cruisers sat in the open at the planet’s Lagrange 3 with its drive idling, while the other four stealthily moved to get between us and that ship, invisible to our SDD instruments and too far from the solar primary to reflect much light. Several strike wings deployed on our probable approach vectors, though the analysts are still not quite sure why; they played no part in the action. 

As the squadron accelerated toward the bait ship, it maneuvered to flee, encouraging the fast destroyers and light cruisers in the Navy van to race ahead of the main formation. The distance between them and Saint-Lô had become so wide by the time these ships passed the ambushers that when the other four Tyrants opened fire on the passing van at close range, the battleship’s big guns were too far away to be much help. By the time Liao’s first shots thundered past the four ships, two destroyers (Elioud Jackson and Roswitha Van Barle) and the light cruiser Notaro Sentinel were already lost. 

As the remaining light ships scattered to escape the close-range fire of the Tyrants, Saint-Lô formed up in close order with the heavy cruisers Razorwing and Ellistown Kite. One battleship and two heavy cruisers still outgunning the four heavy cruisers in the enemy force, Captain Liao maneuvered to bring the Tyrants into ideal heavy-gunnery and missile salvo range. 

The Incarnation ships formed up, too. The four ships adopted a close-order tetrahedral formation and moved toward us, shrugging off several accurate salvos from the kinetic batteries of the Navy heavies to make a close-range, high delta-V pass. Previous encounters with this type of warship have (as mentioned in his space) revealed comparatively ineffective screening systems, but in this case their screening fields shrugged off heavy weapons with ease, allowing them to approach the Navy core formation without suffering any major damage. 

The Tyrants’ relatively light long-range fire did little to the Navy’s big warships, but their numerous short-range energy weapons quickly overwhelmed the screening fields on Ellistown Kite when they came into range. The cruiser faltered and fell out of the action, bleeding atmosphere from a hundred hull breaches, and the Incarnation ships switched their fire to Saint-Lô as they came within two thousand kilometers of the battlewagon. Though the remaining Navy ships managed to punch their concentrated fire trough the lead Tyrant’s screens and land shred its armored hull with point-blank gunnery, Saint-Lô endured a full minute under murderous beam and plasma fire from the other three. Screens overwhelmed, the battleship lost most of its sensor clusters, fire control instruments, and comms antenna spines, making it all but impossible to fire accurately at the departing Incarnation cruisers.  

The three undamaged ships and the bait ship made for the jump limit at full speed, leaving their one damaged compatriot to fend for itself. The crippled Tyrant focused its fire on the crippled Ellistown Kite, carving the helpless ship to pieces even as Razorwing and the surviving lighter ships did the same to it. 

Results 

The battle in this system was an unmitigated disaster. For the loss of one heavy-cruiser analogue, a relatively modest Incarnation force that came to Berkant destroyed a heavy cruiser, a light cruiser and two destroyers, in addition to causing severe but not fatal damage to Saint-Lô and another destroyer. Two fire support frigates and the heavy cruiser Razorwing suffered light damage. All told, Confederated Navy fatalities exceed 450, with nearly a thousand non-fatal injuries.

The behavior of the screening fields of the Incarnation ships is still being analyzed, but Captain Liao thinks this is the tactic for which their parabolic, outward-facing screening projectors were designed; the tight equidistant formation essentially allowed each of the four Tyrants to be screened heavily by the other three ships. Operating in groups, Tyrant-type cruisers have demonstrated the ability to close with Confederated Navy battlewagons and engage these much bigger ships effectively. 

Incarnation Coronach strike-craft played little part in the battle, but the Navy's Magpies were almost equally irrelevant; some enemy strike ships were used as pickets and a few small strike engagements took place as Fifth Fleet gunships tried to break through to the Tyrants as they closed with Saint-Lô, but the Incarnation force largely won a battle against a superior force using only eighty percent of its heavy ships and none of its highly capable - indeed, probably far superior - strike assets. Captian Liao is convinced this is because the enemy commander was toying with him, but the other analysts I’ve asked suggest that the enemy commander had more practical reasons for this decision. 

To be sure, the Confederated Worlds retains control of the Berkant system, but the Incarnation didn’t bring support forces to hold the system. They attacked Berkant – a system barely twelve ly from Maribel - to draw Fifth Fleet ships into a battle. They got the battle they were looking for on their own terms, and the result should be sobering to anyone on the Coreward Frontier. 

Details

2947-09-24 – Tales from the Service: A Rendezvous Reconnoitered

Naval dispatches indicate that the HyperCast relay in Berkant orbit was destroyed during the battle, but information about the action in that system has yet to be released. Given that Duncan and Nojus are outside the reach of the Hypercast network, this week’s entry is one of the pieces Duncan prepared some time ago but could not post. 

His notes indicate that this story was sent in as a response to Tales from the Service: A Stowaway Saboteur some time ago. The submitter, Loretta B., is a mercenary pilot operating off the ersatz carrier Shammuramat, on contract with the Navy to patrol the outer Nye Norge systems. She found evidence there that the Incarnation is using civilian Confederated Worlds ships (crewed either by their own or by native Ladeonists) to covertly surveil the Frontier. These ships may also be the vehicle for agents like the Paz of the Stowaway Saboteur account; her nanotechnological weaponry seems beyond the capability of native Ladeonist insurgents. 

This story would have been posted immediately to the text feed, but Naval Intelligence held it up for several weeks, whereupon it went into Duncan’s steadily growing backlog of ready-to-use entries. The attack on Håkøya forecast by Loretta in her attached message never materialized, but that should not be a strike against her credibility – the enemy likely saw the arrival of the huge cruiser force based there and decided to raid softer targets in the Nye Norge. 

Loretta keyed the gunship’s personnel hatch as soon as the hangar pressurization alarm chimed, and unhooked her restraints from her flight suit. Normally, she would wait for the ship’s three gunners to squeeze out of their swivel-stabilized turret stations aft of the cockpit before she disembarked, but the flight she’d just completed had been a rare solo run. Already, the cameras and sensors that had been mounted in place of most of the Kosseler Gryphon’s armament had begun downloading their sizable recordings to the carrier’s datasphere for analysis, but she had seen plenty herself, and would need a few stiff drinks to soothe her nerves. 

“Clean run, boss.” One of the mechanics hurrying up to the ship on the hangar deck gave Loretta a friendly slap on the shoulder as she walked by.  

Normally, she was all smiles after a successful field operation, but this time, the stressful stealth run had left her wrung out in a way lethal combat never could. For six hours, she’d drifted powerless through the weapons range of three titanic Incarnation cruisers, protected only by the hope – accurate as it turned out – that their sensor technology was not much more capable than that of the Confederated Navy. 

Even so, an active sensor sweep by a paranoid officer on any of the three ships would have found her out immediately, and no amount of fancy flying would have saved her from concentrated point defense fire from three cruisers. Her ship had been outfitted to evade detection by civilian sensor suites, not military-grade systems. Loretta had sweated through every second of the flyby, not knowing whether it would be her last. 

Loretta staggered into the lift and punched the deck level of the pilots’ lounge. When the miners at the Axelson Industries outpost had tipped her crew off to the suspicious activities of a small-time freight hauler, she had been as eager as the other pilots to snoop on the ship as it meandered through the outer system. Everyone had hoped to find opportunistic pirates a long way from home, or a smuggler laden with contraband to earn the crew a prize-taking bonus from the Navy.  

Loretta’s ship had been hastily modified for a surveillance mission, and she had left the hangar in good spirits, chasing the suspicious hauler into the shadow of a moon only to find three towering enemy cruisers lurking there once it was too late to back out of the silent flyby. 

The lift doors opened, and Loretta all but rushed to the bar in the lounge, punching in an order for imitation rum even before she sat down. Two of the other people in the compartment – one of her own gunners and another pilot – tried to start a round of applause, but one look at her face was enough to still this good cheer. 

The rum arrived and Loretta downed it in one gulp, despite a metallic odor suggesting that the lounge’s beverage synthesizer machine was on the fritz again.  

As soon as she’d clapped the empty cup back onto the table and had begun to consider a second, one of the other pilots got up from one of the gaming tables and took the stool to her right. “Hell of a run, Loretta.” 

“That’s damned right, Jem. Hell of a run.” Loretta told the bar to send her another drink, then turned to look at her fellow pilot. Jem Williams flew an antiquated Kestrel interceptor which would have been a better choice for the mission, had it not been for the age of its computer systems. The passive surveillance modules had overloaded the dodgy, thirty-year-old datasystems of the single-seat Kestrel, so  the hangar crew had mounted it in the gun mounts of her Gryphon instead – and nobody flew Loretta’s ship except Loretta herself. “Next one’s all yours.” 

The second drink arrived, and Jem snatched it from Loretta. “You’re not trained for scout work, but you did good work out there today.” He might have downed it himself, but he seemed to think better of it once he caught a whiff of its metallic broken-synthesizer odor.  

The instant of hesitation was enough for Loretta to take it back, though not without sloshing almost a third of the precious alcohol out of the cup. Unlike him, she didn’t hesitate. How could he understand how powerless she’d been for all those hours? He was used to flying in something that had been custom modified to outrun most purpose-built racers. He would never understand how many times she had died in her mind, watching the glittering laser-lenses on three Tyrants for the first glow of a shot which would vaporize her ship. 

“Odd they’re hiding. Shammuramat is no threat to even one of them.” Jem, who had obviously heard Loretta’s trembling radio report on her return flight, seemed oblivious to how shaken his associate still was. “Must not be anything in this system worth blowing up.” 

“There isn't.” Loretta shrugged. The Navy didn’t think the outer Nye Norge systems were worth seriously protecting, so the enemy passing through the area silently was no surprise. “They’ve got bigger targets and don’t want to raise the alarm.” 

“Somewhere that hauler just visited.” Jem agreed, punching in his own drink. 

“The Axelson station boss told us where the hauler had just come from, Jem.” She turned to face the other pilot for the first time. “It was in the briefing, remember?” 

“Was it?” Jem, like most mercenary pilots, took pride in his ability to tune out briefings and still get the job done. 

“Sure was. Their last stop was the planet you want to retire to, after this is over.” 

“Damn.” Jem’s drink arrived, and this time he downed it without noticing the odor. “Now I remember. They’d come from Håkøya.”

Details

Tales from the Service: The Siege of Berkant

2947-09-17 – Tales from the Service: The Siege of Berkant 

I was expecting Saint-Lô to travel for many days before emerging at the edge of a destination system, but we made only three jumps – twenty-two hours total travel time. This being the case, and seeing that we were within only a few light-minutes of the local HyperCast relay station, I hurriedly cancelled the automatic-post story I’d prepared for our time in the dark. With the captain’s permission, I spent some time sitting as an observer in the Combat Information Center. 

The fact that the relay is still active is strange, but I’m not about to miss the opportunity to do what I came aboard this ship to do – namely, cover the war effort. You would think that an aggressor planning to stay in-system for a sustained assault would slag the thing to prevent Fifth Fleet high command from gaining intelligence about their actions in the clear, but the Incarnation left it alone for at least two full days. 

As the title of this feed item implies, our short trip took us to Berkant, a rather underpopulated but biologically fertile Frontier world which has graced this feed before, most notably as the site of several stories about Faye and Junia (not real names) and their odd xenosapient friend Sapphire. 

Captain Liao watched as the system resolved in his combat information center’s room-scale holo-display. In the middle, directly above the floor projector lens, the system’s white-dwarf primary shone brighter than the overhead lighting, with the faint dotted lines of the three planets’ orbits extending halfway to the outer walls of the vast compartment. The first planet of the system was a “hot Jupiter” hell-sphere of tortured clouds and burning cyclones, and the third a frozen ice-ball in a steeply elliptical orbit, but the second – the world Berkant from which the system derived its name – carried life, including two million citizens of the Confederated Worlds. 

Reports were still coming in from the situation around the life-bearing world, but Liao already could see the outlines of the situation. Sparkling shards of debris in three distinct rings had been identified around the planet, and he knew better than to hope that even one of them was the result of disaster befalling one of the five Tyrant cruisers which had been reported in the system. Other than a single aging destroyer and a mercenary strike carrier, Berkant had been defenseless when the Incarnation had showed up with plans to stay. 

“We are in contact with groundside system authority.” The comms chief’s voice carried into CIC though she was two hundred meters away at the forward communications annex. “Transmission delay, twenty-nine minutes one way. They confirm that Olvir Zdrakov was destroyed in orbit after a short exchange. The merc carrier launched its birds and then left orbit. They lost tracking on its drive signature a few hours later.” 

“Thank you, Commander.” Liao watched the hashed-blue “unknown” symbols on the asset board to his left switch to black. The two garrison ships were of dubious value to his force in any case, but the loss of perhaps one hundred twenty brave spacers still stung. “Sensors, where is Nate?” 

The sensor-systems chief had no answers, but he did his best. “Still putting the pieces together, Captain. Wherever they are, their drives are not burning.” 

Five cruisers – Nate's biggest attack force to date – didn't just vanish, and Liao knew they hadn’t had time since last being spotted in planetary orbit to reach the hyper limit. “Probably hiding in those debris rings. Any idea what those were?” 

“Planetside data payload reports them as Zdrakov, their main orbital station, and a hauler who had a very bad day. Most of the lesser infrastructure is still intact.” 

One hundred twenty was likely an underestimate as to the losses, then. Liao shook his head; the hauler and station had been defenseless. There had been no reason for the Incarnation cruisers to fire on them. “Time to planetary orbit?” 

“Fifty hours at full acceleration.” The navigator’s course already glowed on the display. 

Liao set his jaw and stared at the board, wondering where he’d put his ships, if he were in command of five fast, well-armed but poorly protected heavy cruisers. Without the sensor arrays on the station, the groundside spaceport couldn’t track the invaders – the enemy had almost thirty hours of free maneuver time during which the colonists on Berkant could detect their drive signatures, but not pinpoint their locations. Thirty hours was a long time; time enough for Nate to pick off every piece of orbital hardware, if destruction was their objective. 

“Re-entry fires on the planet.” The sensors station reported crisply. “Big chunks of the station, most likely.” 

Liao got the sense he was being watched, and not by the odd little datacast reporter shadowing him for the Berkant operation. “All ships, fit gunships for a system sweep and launch when ready.” Using the force’s fifty-odd strike gunships – a mix of Magpies and older Jackdaws – to sweep the system would reduce his offensive power, but he preferred to find the enemy before they got in close. Anyone who’d seen the intelligence reports about Incanration Tyrant cruisers knew they were apparently kittens in long-range slugfests, but fearsome combatants if their shorter-ranged energy weapons could be used up close. 

“Contact!” The defense-gunnery officer’s voice accompanied a new symbol on the board. “A flight of Coronachs just hot-started two thousand klicks ahead of Safira Sharma.” 

In the vastness of even a small planetary system like Berkant, two thousand kilometers was far closer than Liao was comfortable with. If the Tyrants had appeared at that range, the lead cruiser probably would never have known what hit it. 

“They knew we’d be coming from Maribel. Probably set them across all the probable inbound vectors in case we tried a cold approach.” Liao watched the symbols boost away on a perpendicular vector. Their pilots knew only too well that the vast force would never detach a fast warship to chase four little strike interceptors, and that Magpie gunships had no hope of catching them. “With any luck, Nate has his strike elements scattered all over the system.” Even as he said it, he knew better. Incarnation ships carried vast quantities of the tiny, agile Coronachs, each piloted by a cybernetically-tweaked counterhuman literally optimized for the job. Their commander would never disperse a significant percentage of that force on picket duty just before a battle. 

“Telescopes just made one Tyrant on station at the planetary L3.” The sensors officer almost crowed his success as the red symbol appeared on the board. 

Liao frowned. He’d just concluded that the enemy would be crazy to disperse his force. Why would one of the five cruisers operate by itself? “Just one?” 

“Confirmed, Captain. One Tyrant at Berkant Lagrange Three.” 

Captain Liao frowned. The lone cruiser was one of two things – it was either bait for a trap, or it was a challenge. Of the two, his bet was on it being a challenge. “Ignore the ship at L3. Course to planetary orbit.” 

Challenge or bait, Saint-Lô and her squadron would not be able to accept either for at least thirty hours. “Maintain alert status, but rotate crews every four hours. This is going to be a long haul.” 

Details
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