Tales from the Service: The Firmament Strike

2951-03-01 – Tales from the Service: The Firmament Strike

As of this posting, Ashkelon is still in transit to a new area of operations; we cannot say which one for security reasons until we arrive. As such, this conclusion of the last two entries was scheduled much longer in advance than usual, with the ship expecting to be outside of Hypercast relay range for several days.

Since I wrote what will by now be last week’s post only about an hour ago, I don’t yet have anything interesting to report about the vessel which we are now assigned to.

“We’re past thirty klicks.” Beck grunted as he threw his Magpie into a tight roll to avoid a stream of plasma from the cruiser’s point defense batteries. “Two, any luck pinpointing those capacitors?”

Wynn Richards glanced over at his sensor console as he brought his own Magpie out of an evasive turn. As he did, he heard the rattling hum of the quad-mounted railgun ball-turrets behind him. That probably meant at least one group of enemy interceptors had managed to catch up. “Negative, Lead. No heat differential. Hull’s probably too thick.”

“Best guesses it is.” Beck grumbled. “Two, target a hundred meters forward of my aim point. Three, a hundred aft.”

Wynn checked the spherical tactical plot at the center of his display for red pips, and quickly spotted the trio of Coronach Interceptors who his gunners were firing at. “Company already? Didn’t think these guys would get here fast enough.”

“They’re straight from the beast’s belly.” Sullivan, one of the gunners, didn’t bother to stop firing to reply, and the railguns’ EM fields made his comms pickup crackle and hiss. “Must’ve been in the hangar fueling up when we came out of TR-XE.”

“And they’re damned good.” Iwai, the other gunner, sounded nervous. “Should have nailed that last one.”

“You don’t have to nail them, just keep them at a distance.” Wynn hoped the pilots of those interceptors weren’t Immortals, but there was always that possibility. Nearly every vessel in the Incarnation fleet seemed to carry a handful of these cybernetic super-men, and they were perhaps the most formidable pilots to have ever flown. Fortunately, they were bound by the limitations of their equipment, the same as anyone – a Coronach was fast and agile but not durable, and its weapons were only effective at the closest range.

“Aim point set.” Beck called. “Arming.”

Wynn called up the munitions bay controls, opened the bay’s sliding door, and tapped the “arm” switch. “Arming, Lead.” Behind him, in the weapons bay between the gun stations, a little robotic arm started mechanically arming the warhead of each of his three guided anti-ship torpedoes. These weapons, larger, slower, and more potent than missiles, were equipped with all manner of clever technology intended to foil both point defense and shear-screening systems, but they still needed to be carried close to the target by something much faster.

Nine torpedoes was a fairly pathetic salvo, all things considered. If it weren’t for the fact that the Nate cruiser probably had its jump capacitors fully charged, they could expect to do little real damage to a ship that big. As Wynn set his aim point on the hull, he couldn’t shake the sense that even if the cruiser was vulnerable, their nine tiny pinpricks, winnowed by defensive fire, wouldn’t make any difference.

“Arming. Range of weapons release?” Kariuki’s voice was strained, and Wynn briefly hoped that his own voice didn’t sound quite like that.

“Make it about ten klicks.”

Beck wasn’t taking any chances with the torpedoes; they were making a very close approach. Assuming they survived that long, there wouldn’t be much for the enemy gunners to do about the weapons.

Just as Wynn was approaching to form back up on Beck’s tail, his systems wailed the alarm that meant an enemy fire control targeting lock. Beck broke one direction, and Wynn the other, just in time to avoid a withering volley of plasma that would have given them no escape even a half-second later. As they got closer, the targeting system’s job got easier, and the approach became far more dangerous.

Wynn maneuvered wildly until the wailing faded, ignoring the cries of alarm from his gunners and the red that began to push in from the edges of his vision as he exceeded the gee-rating of the Magpie’s gravitics. As far as he was concerned, if the flight crew was still alive to complain about bruises at the end of a mission, he’d done his job properly.

The range indicator read only twelve klicks by the time Wynn thought to glance at it once more. The flight of three Magpies had once again been scattered widely, but the interceptors were nowhere to be seen, likely chased away by the same batteries that had come so close to killing Beck’s ship and Wynn’s.

Wynn straightened out his course, only to be forced into a wheeling spiral by another concentration of battery fire. “Be advised, weaponry release in about twenty seconds.” The gunners, far closer to the munitions bay than he was, would feel the shock of three torpedoes being kicked out of the bay, and it wouldn’t do for them to think they’d been hit, or worse, to spot the weapons and reflexively start shooting them.

“About damned time.” Iwai clicked his tongue. “Those Coronachs will be back any minute, and they’ll bring friends this time.”

Wynn set the controls to release automatically the moment the Magpie past Beck’s proscribed ten kilometers, just in time to be forced to evade once more. This time, he evaded toward the cruiser, not away from it. “No point trying for a simultaneous release, Lead.”

“Agreed, Two. Take your shot. We’re right behind you.”

 Wynn watched the distance indicator slip down in fits and starts as he juked around masses of white-hot plasma, until finally it became a four-digit number in meters. This lasted only a moment before he was forced away again, but that moment was long enough for the Magpie to fire its payload out into space.

Even as Wynn peeled away, he imagined the three tumbling torpedoes orienting themselves toward where they’d last been told to find a target, then lighting their chemical-reaction drive units. Unlike missiles, which any decent set of gravimetric sensors could pick up, chemical reaction drives were easy to miss on most sensors, especially in the thick of an ongoing battle. True, those boosters had limited fuel, but with only ten klicks to travel, it would be more than enough.

Within seconds, the Incarnation cruiser’s gunners recognized the threat, and almost all the batteries switched to saturating the approach vector of Wynn’s torpedoes. He heard Beck shout in triumph as he got close enough to launch himself, and a shrill laugh from Kariuki as she did the same.

The three distinct flashes of brilliant white visible on the rear cameras a few moments later told Wynn that all his weapons had detonated, though he lacked any way of knowing if any had hit home.

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Tales from the Service: The Firmament Dive

2951-03-01 – Tales from the Service: The Firmament Dive

Lieutenant Wynn Richards closed in on Beck’s Magpie until the other vessel was visible directly ahead. Though they all had their exterior lights disabled, Wynn could still make out the sleek, swept-back outline of the engine housing and turret-tipped wing sponsons against the distant stars.

Ahead of Lead, the sinister spearhead of an Incarnation cruiser loomed seemingly close enough to touch, though it was still hundreds of kilometers away. Its pulse-beam emitters spat death toward an unseen target off to one side, the beams visible only as a stream of faint sparkling motes where the beams annihilated dust and battle debris along their path.

“Interceptors are starting to vector in.” Kariuki, the pilot of Three, sounded shaken, and Wynn wondered if she’d weathered the TR-XE jaunt worse than he had. Short-ranged faster-than-light travel was a risky and imprecise business at the best of times, and the middle of a battle was far from the best of times. Normally, the Confederated Navy avoided use of such machines on combat units, but they’d authorized a trial-run of three gunships equipped with off-the-shelf mercenary-grade TR-XE technology this time. So far, that trial was going suspiciously well.

“They’re minutes out. Watch out for battery fire.” Beck changed course and cranked up his drive to maximum acceleration. Wynn and Kariuki, following close behind, did the same. “Our target is the ventral forward hull. If intel is right, that’s where their star drive capacitors are.”

Wynn turned to the haphazardly-installed control board to his left and disengaged the switches that fed power to the TR-XE module below the cockpit. The capacitors, drained by the jaunt, were dead weight now, but no provision had been made to jettison the bulky equipment.

By the same token, a similar, but much larger, bank of capacitors was needed to charge the star drive of any large vessel, and those capacitors were as much liability while fully charged as those aboard a diminutive Magpie gunship. The Incarnation vessels engaged in the battle hadn’t planned for a fight; they’d been ambushed while preparing for a jump out to another system. If the timing of their attack was right, those capacitors were still mostly full, and thus incredibly vulnerable. There was no safe way to discharge such a large electric potential aboard a starship, certainly not quickly.

A warning alert beeped, calling Wynn’s attention back to the middle of his console. “Fire control is attempting a lock.”

“Going evasive.” Beck barely waited to finish speaking before he pulled his Magpie into a tight roll and banked off to one side. Wynn went another way, and Kariuki a third, weaving and juking nearly at random to prolong the lock-on as long as possible. Incarnation fire control computers were good, but they were highly automated, with very few gunners operating a large number of guns. When presented with several widely distributed, small, evasive targets, they could sometimes struggle to prioritize.

“Point defense is firing.”

Wynn glanced at the spherical plot, where short-lived streams of plasma arced outward from the fast-tracking weapons on the Tyrant’s flank. “Looks like a random pattern. How lucky are we feeling?”

“Not lucky enough to win the plot on this run.” Kariuki laughed in the usual overly-tense way she did when the shooting started. “Following you down, Lead.”

Down, of course, meant the target. By convention that supposedly dated back to the earliest days of pilots soaring above Old Earth and dropping explosives on surface-bound targets, whenever a pilot targeted a less-mobile enemy with an attack run, that enemy was always “down” even when there was no gravity well to define any particular “down.”

As the only three Magpies in a wide, otherwise empty stretch of void with no interceptors to trouble them, the trio had no need of formation flying and no trouble evading target locks while they closed the distance with the Incarnation ship. Only when the range had shrunk to barely thirty kilometers, Wynn knew, would their evasive task become particularly hard. Short of taking a lucky shot from one of nearly a hundred randomly-firing plasma turrets, they’d all reach that distance before the targeting system could get and hold a lock on them.

That close, he knew, things would really begin to get interesting.

As of this posting, Ashkelon is in transit to a new area of operations; we cannot say which one for security reasons until we arrive. As such, this continuation of last week’s entry was scheduled much longer in advance than usual, with the ship expecting to be outside of Hypercast relay range for several days.

Our quarters aboard ship are quite spacious compared to what we had previously; while no luxury liner, Ashkelon’s greater size and smaller crew compliment than older battleships certainly does result in everyone enjoying more room to stretch out. The accommodations for most personnel are more comparable to those aboard patrol cruisers than aboard battle line units. No doubt this is a feature intended to improve morale on long cruises out of port, but we appreciate it all the same.

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Tales from the Service: The Firmament Melee

2951-03-01 – Tales from the Service: The Firmament Melee

Operation Firmament. By now you’ve already heard this name; by now Ashton and all your other favorite datasphere personalities have discussed its importance in great detail since Fifth Fleet announced the battle to the media six days ago. This, it seems, is our first unequivocal victory of this already years-long war. Most of Maribel seems to have not stopped celebrating it.

Perhaps you, too, have seen the vid-log snippets which have been bouncing around: the glinting hulls of the cruisers reflecting the light of their salvos, the massive flashing swirl of a strike-craft brawl between a dozen squadrons on either side, and the spectacular explosion of one of the Incarnation tyrants certainly make good vidcast content.

I have talked to some spacers who were there, and the victory is perhaps not as glorious as we might prefer to think. It is, however, no longer the place of this embed team to discuss the operations of Fifth Fleet. As of the twenty-third of February, when we came aboard the Ashkelon, we have been detached from that fleet organization entirely, along with the rest of the ship’s complement. As such, most of my usual official channels into Fifth Fleet’s upper command hierarchy have been cut for the moment.

Ashkelon is perhaps the newest capital unit in the Confederated Navy, having just finished its shakedown late last year, and I am struck by how much larger than Saint-Lô it is. The ship was, I hear, only assigned to Fifth Fleet long enough to play its bit role in Operation Firmament alongside its sister Maribel, and it, with us aboard, is soon to depart on a new assignment as of this writing.

The ship’s skipper is one captain Arik Mendoza. I fear he is far less content with our presence than Captain Liao was; he is young for a battleship captain, and likely eager to see the action denied his crew during Fortitude.

The spherical tac-plot projected above the gunship’s center console quickly became a useless tangle of swirling, multicolored blips, akin to a recently-shaken jar of Earth fireflies, and Lieutenant Wynn Richards kept his eyes on the flashing, sparking expanse of space directly ahead, and at the glittering, stylus-sized spearpoint in the middle of that view. Several more such sinister shapes dotted the void, forming three distinct clusters, each group surrounded by stabbing weapons fire and blossoming explosions.

Somewhere behind him, the two rapid-fire quad-railgun turrets projecting from the Magpie gunship’s sides were shaking the whole ship with their tooth-jarring rattle. Probably, Sullivan and Iwai each had a somewhat less cluttered, and thus somewhat more useful, view of the battlespace than Wynn did, and they were firing away at any target of opportunity without regards to the bigger picture visible from up front. No doubt they’d be alarmed if they knew what their section of three gunships had just been ordered to do, and Wynn certainly wasn’t going to alarm them unnecessarily. After all, if they were going to die, it would be suddenly, and there would be little for the gunners to do about it they weren’t already doing.

Flipping up the cover over one of the few non-dynamic controls in the entire cockpit, Wynn hovered his finger over a series of colored buttons. His was one of a few dozen Magpies modified before the battle with some decidedly non-standard hardware, and it was this hardware which the wires trailing out from the hard-panel and secured along the corner of the console eventually connected. “Two is ready, Lead.”

“Three, ready.”

“Slave to my helm.” Raman Beck, the section leader, instructed. Wynn held down a white button until its associated light came on, then tapped the green button next to it and released the controls with his other hand as the computer began taking commands from Beck’s controls.

“Sullivan, Iwai, check your restraints.” Wynn called into his onboard comms circuit. Most likely a secure harness and crash-padded station wouldn’t help them much if the new hardware went awry or if they ran into stray fire from one of the half-dozen intense sub-engagements whirling nearby, but it was the only hint he dared offer them.

“Arm TR-XE.” Beck called out.

Wynn pressed a yellow button until its associated light began to blink, and the hum of the gunship’s little reactor changed tenor as the TR-XE module haphazardly installed below the cockpit began to draw electricity into its capacitors. He dared not think about what would happen to him if a single piece of shrapnel or a single railgun slug happened to pierce those capacitors, barely half a meter below his chair as they were.

As the power indicators on the unit crept up toward maximum, Beck made a few tiny course adjustments. For the moment, the trio of ships was not being harassed by any of the two hundred or so enemy Coronach interceptors which more than a hundred Magpies and at least thirty Pumas were dueling in all directions, and Wynn hoped that six steady streams of railshot toward the nearest enemy units would dissuade anyone from trying to change this. They’d already fought their way into, then out of, one swirling melee in the last hour, and someone in Command had decided that the strike-craft engagement was going well enough to try a few dirty tricks.

Without warning, a damaged Magpie tore out of one of the nearest swirling engagements and thundered directly across the electronically locked paths of Wynn, Beck, and Lazarov. Behind it, a pair of sleek Coronachs closed in to finish off their wounded prey. Without thinking, Wynn disengaged the helm-slave and rolled to give both his gunners a clear shot at the Coronachs. Their fire, combined with that of one of Beck’s gunners, convinced the Coronachs to break off, and the damaged Magpie limped off to brave the long trek back to its mothership alone.

Without waiting for Beck’s order, Wynn re-slaved his helm to the lead ship. No doubt he’d get an earful for his hasty decision in the post-action briefing, but if it gave another crew even a tiny chance to make it home, he’d be content to endure Beck’s browbeating.

A moment after he did, the TR-XE system chimed its full-charge alert, and Beck flipped the master switch on his own console, changing the indicator lights from yellow to amber. “Engaging in five seconds.” Beck announced. “Four. Three. Two. One.”

Wynn tensed as the countdown reached zero, and his commander pressed another button. At once, the stored charge below him in the TR-XE module crackled along high-voltage conduits into a series of folder nodes, and the view ahead vanished into a coruscating swirl of blue and violet energy, turning a black more perfect than any void in its center.

Wynn flinched, but by the time his muscles reacted, the Magpie had already flown into the swirling vortex, and out the other side. The momentary feeling of being twisted in several directions that didn’t normally exist was gone even before his hands once again grabbed the control stick.

“Two is clear.” Wynn looked down at his tactical plot, which was now distinctly less populated and more comprehensible, even if only two pips within were the blue-green of friendly units. With their helms slaved and their starting formation so tight, the trio of gunships had emerged from their jaunt through a fold in the fabric of space-time barely a thousand kilometers from each other, rather than the tens of thousands one might have expected otherwise. “Forming up. What’s next, Lead?”

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Tales from the Inbox: The Progeny of a Nuisance 

 2951-02-22 – Tales from the Inbox: The Progeny of a Nuisance  

Nojus here again. You guessed it – we’re still in temporary quarters on Martikainen, and most of our vidcast equipment is still in its crates. This time, at least, we have a date certain for transfer, which happens to match the date of this feed item’s scheduled ingest. By the time you’re reading this, we’re probably already stretching out in our assigned quarters aboard the vessel which Duncan and I both hope will be our home for the remainder of the war. 

Naval Intelligence has cleared us to report generally on the rumors that Fifth Fleet outriders smashed up a group of Incarnation ships somewhere in the vicinity of Maribel. We have no clear idea where this battle took place or what strength it was fought in on either side, but it certainly didn't hapen here in the Maribel system itself. Hopefully when the details come out we won’t learn that it’s another Trond-Arud. 

As the little Nuisance argued with Donovan in hushed tones at the other end of the umbilical about the logistics of searching a ship’s trash compaction press for remains, a thought occurred to Svetlana Cremonesi. Obviously, she hadn’t thrown anything alive into the compactor aboard her Tycho Spike, not even a Nuisance, so such a search could only serve to make her departure even later, but all it would really take to prove the creature was lying about kidnapping would be to produce the fellow Nuisance it had named. 

“Donovan.” Svetlana made sure to use enough volume to cut the hushed discussion short. “You issue comms to the Nuisances, don’t you?” 

“Er, sometimes. When a Yixhari-” 

Svetlana dismissed his explanation with a wave. “Ask your data system if you’ve issued one to this Wsir-Virh.” 

Donovan muttered a few instructions into his wristcuff, then cupped one ear to his comms earpiece to listen to the reply. “We don’t seem to even have a Yixhari by that name registered.” 

“So then.” Svetlana stepped toward the Nuisance. “Who is Wsir-Virh?” 

This time, it stood its ground. “Is on ship.” 

“Not where. Who.” 

Before it could answer again, one of the constables returned from within Tycho Spike. “We’ve swept the crew deck, Captain, and found nothing. Do we have permission to search the cargo bay?” 

Svetlana shrugged and jabbed a finger at the control on her cuff which would unlock the access-way leading down to her ship’s pressurized cargo bay. “There’s sensitive stuff in some of those crates. Break a cargo seal, and you’re the bastard paying for it.” 

The constable nodded stiffly, already seeming ill at ease with the search. “We’ll be careful.” With that, he tromped off to gather his two associates and proceed down into the cargo section. 

When Svetlana turned back toward the Nuisance to follow up on the unanswered question, the little creature wasn’t where it had been. Donovan was facing the station side of the umbilical, hand to his mouth as he dictated follow-up queries about this mystery Wsir-Virh. 

Svetlana spun around, and realized there was only one place the Nuisance could have gone. “Damnation, Donovan, you weren’t watching it!” 

“Eh?” The Survey officer turned around, confused. 

“It’s on my ship. I warned it. I warned you.” Svetanla jabbed a finger at Donovan. “It was just waiting for me to turn my back, and-” She stopped, then smiled and opened her ship’s intercom. “Constables, the Nuisance has boarded my ship. If you find it before I do, apprehend it. I wish to pursue slander, trespassing, piracy, and endangerment charges.” 

Donovan cut his comms channel, a frown on his face. “Captain, what are you-” 

“What I said I would the first damned time.” Svetlana undid the safety clasp on her holstered pistol and drew it. “Repel boarders.” 

With Donovan’s stream of incoherent protesters following her every step, Svetlana strode aboard Tycho Spike and sealed the umbilical with a command override. At each pressure bulkhead, she stopped and sealed hatchways usually permitted to stand open, and at each compartment, she left Donovan and his babbling at the door while she carefully swept the space for any sign of the Nuisance. Once she was satisfied with each space, she sealed it off, and quietly set the atmospheric system to evacuate each cleared compartment and corridor section just to be certain. 

Lieutenant Donovan, whose imprecations likely kept him from realizing that Svetlana was depressurizing her ship room by room behind herself, continued to follow, as if something he said might undo what his halfwit charge had already set into motion. She knew not to expect him to try anything desperate - such a desk officer was he that he didn’t even have a sidearm, and he didn’t look the type to know what to do with one even if he had. 

When Svetlana reached the accessway down to the cargo bay, she found one of the constables standing at the threshold, seeming confused as to what he was supposed to be doing. 

“Are the other two of you down there?” She gestured with her gun down toward the cargo deck. 

“Yes, Captain.” The constable nodded, glancing nervously at Donovan’s increasingly shrill protests. Unfortunately for Survey, the station constabulary knew only too well that the Law of the Spacelanes did not tolerate hostile boarding of any ship. 

“Go get them and bring them up here.” Svetlana gestured forward. “When I get back, I’m venting the bay.” She gestured with her free hand. “Donovan, stay here.” 

“But you’re-” 

“On my own ship, where I just gave you a direct order.” Svetlana turned to fix him with only the briefest glare. 

Donovan finally fell silent and made no attempt to follow Svetlana as she went through the next bulkhead and sealed it behind herself. She cleared the next two compartments, including her own cabin, then set them both to evacuate, feeling only the briefest pang of guilt for what this would do to the Herculean jade-claw plant on her desk. The plant wouldn’t die outright in a few hours of decompression – they were popular aboard starships for a reason – but it would probably lose most of its cluster of plump, hooked leaves to bursting as the vital fluid within its thick outer skin broke through and boiled off. 

As she sealed another length of passageway, Svetlana activated the intercom once more. “Nuisance, if you come out now and go with the constables, you get to live.” She came around the corner into the ship’s cramped med-bay with her gun leading, but nothing vaguely rodent-like presented itself within that stainless-steel, antiseptic space. 

One by one, Svetlana sealed and evacuated the lounge, the cargo grapple control blister, the mess, and every other compartment as she moved forward toward command. Tycho Spike’s crew deck was long and narrow, sitting on top of its much bulkier engine and cargo spaces like a stubby dorsal fin, so she knew that nothing had gotten past her. There was, short of her command override unlocking the maintenance crawlspaces, only one way aft from where she was – if the Nuisance wasn't trying to hide down in the hold, it was just ahead in the command compartment. 

Taking a deep breath, Svetlana keyed open the door to command, gun aimed roughly where a Nuisance’s body would be if it charged out at her. 

The Nuisance was there, all right, its ear-crowned head peeking over the back of the pilot’s chair. “No trash compactor!” 

Svetlana scowled, imagining grubby Nuisance paws all over her ship’s controls. They were locked against tampering, but she’d probably spend half the outbound leg sanitizing them. “Into the corridor. Now.” 

The Nuisance’s dark eyes stared at Svetlana for a long moment, then its head disappeared. Just as she was about to issue the order again, it slid down off the chair and scuttled back into view, a bundle of dirty cloth held in its arms. 

Svetlana waved her gun at the parcel. “Drop the souvenir. I don’t care where you found it.” 

“No drop Wsir-Virh!” The Nuisance held the parcel tighter. 

Svetlana narrowed her eyes. “It’s something you nicked from my ship. Unwrap it.” 

The Nuisance hesitated, then slowly began to unwind the cloth bound around the object. After a few loops had come off, it began to squirm violently, and the Nuisance held up its prize. “Not steal.” 

At first, Svetlana didn’t know what she was looking at; it seemed to be a furry grub about the size of a small cat. When the folds of skin on the top end of the grub-like shape twitched and flicked upwards into a familiar crown-like arrangement of four ears and revealed two dark, curious eyes beneath, she understood. Tiny, plump arms detached themselves from the trunk a moment later to reach in Svetlana’s direction. “Wsir-Virh is a child. So how did it get on my ship?” 

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