Tales from the Service: A Tyrant’s Downfall

2948-01-13 – Tales from the Service: A Tyrant’s Downfall 

As most of you know, the Hypercast relay in Matusalemme went dark a little more than forty-eight hours ago following a major move by Incarnation forces in that system. Though the planet’s fate is far from certain, based on the movements reported in the last hours of the relay’s operation, it is very likely that at the time of this feed item’s ingestion, Incarnation ground forces have landed on Adimari Valis. The world’s citizens are not without hope – the largely mercenary fleet defending the system and the heavily, if hastily, fortified spaceport complex mean that the colony will almost certainly not be subjugated before Fifth Fleet elements arrive in strength. 

Though there were many predictions about the mercenary force in-system melting away before the engagement came, I’m happy to report that most of the ersatz warships and carrier conversions in the local flotilla remained in place until the loss of the relay. Even though they’re outgunned, a force of that size can certainly put the brakes on whatever the Incarnation has planned. 

Confederated civilians, mercenaries, and military personnel by the millions find themselves in Matusalemme during this period of crisis, and Confederated Congress has voted to recommend that tomorrow, 14th January on the standard calendar, is to be a day of solemnity and prayer for a positive resolution to the battles raging in the Matusalemme system and among the rugged hills of Adimari Valis. 

Jacob Borisov, along with a number of his mercenary company personnel, last checked in from the planet’s surface. As he is one of the most repeated names on this text feed and I have been happy to correspond with him in recent months, this embed team hopes he remains safe there until the Navy’s big guns arrive. 

This week’s Tales from the Service features the only confirmed Tyrant kill since the Battle of Berkant, claimed not by a cruiser or battleship, but by a specialized Navy cutter with a main battery of one plasma cannon and a crew of sixteen. That ship, the Mahseer, is commanded by Lt. Cdr. Ralph Zappa, who is currently being considered for a Centaur Cross. 

[N.T.B. - Screw safety. Mr. Borisov, if you’re down there with a bunch of ground-pounding grunts, hit those Nate bastards hard, paint your combat suit in their tech-tainted blood, and make them sorry they ever came to our side of the Gap. I wish I was down there with you, rather than cooped up doing can’t-say-exactly-what on a dreadnought that can’t seem to quite pass a post-repairs inspection.] 

 

Ralph Zappa held his breath as the Tyrant cruiser slid past in the darkness, so near to his own Mahseer that the gleam of its bluish hull-alloy would have been visible to the unaided eye. Unlike most starships, the bridge of Mahseer had no broad armor-glass viewpanels with which to test this, so he had to imagine the sinister enemy cruiser thrusting daggerlike toward the orange glow of Botterdowns. 

“Locked on, Skipper.” Kynthia Van Horn, the weapons officer aboard the small warship, switched the main three-dimensional display to a firing plot. “Optimal range for a shoot-and-scoot in fifty seconds.” 

“Where are their strike ships?” Ralph stared at the wireframe diagram of their prey, which could at any moment become their overpowering predator. Any strike craft the Tyrant launched would increase the danger of making a covert attack and getting away with it, but he worried more that the enemy ship wasn’t following its usual behavior. A Tyrant never went anywhere without sending out a few of its ubiquitous Coronachs to watch the flanks, and such ships were only too likely to blunder close enough to Mahseer to see through its ingeniously engineered impression of just another patch of void.  

Even if a swarm of Coronachs didn’t spot Mahseer right away, when it came to executing the “scoot” part of a shoot-and-scoot attack, the little ambush gunship would certainly be detected, and agile Coronachs would be very capable of chasing it down and carving its hull into new and interesting decorations for the beautification of the outer reaches of the Botterdowns system. The ship had, after all, no armor worth speaking of, and its screening systems were barely deserving of the name – its best defense was to remain unseen. True, it had a few ways of shooting back at such enemies, but none of them which Ralph wanted to bet his life on. 

Souad Stern, the navigation officer, clicked his tongue in the tense silence. “Too good to be true.” 

This echoed Ralph’s concern. Mahseer had been unlucky in its repeated attempts to kill the raiding Tyrants meandering through the Coreward Frontier seemingly at random, but no more unlucky than its half-dozen sister ships. The squadron of eight bureaucratically named Stealth Assault Cutters had made the long journey to the war-zone a few weeks after Fifth Fleet, but with the exception of Fierasfer making one unsuccessful attack on a Tyrant near Margaux in September, none of them had even so much as given the careful enemy a bad jump-scare. Nate was too careful to give a few over-armed cutters a chance at their precious cruisers, stealth fittings or otherwise. 

Of course, Ralph knew, it might be about to turn around. The efforts of the whole squadron and its service tender, a force of nearly two hundred officers and crew draining who-knew-how-many millions of credits from the Navy’s war chest, might be validated in an instant when Van Horn’s timer ran to zero. If Mahseer slagged a Tyrant and got away clean, its sixteen-person crew would be heroes back at Maribel, and perhaps in the Core Worlds as well. 

Still, something was bothering him. They had been on station first, and the Tyrant had appeared soon after, almost on top of them and on a path through can’t-miss range. That sort of chance didn’t appear every day. “Give me a passive visual light sweep.” 

“Thirty seconds.” 

One of the other bridge officers huddled at their stations sent the commands to the ship’s sensor clusters to pan across the starfield in all directions, looking for signs of trouble. The results came back in seconds. “Nothing - no, wait. I’ve got something. The Tyrant is venting debris, skipper. It’s already damaged.” 

Ralph sat up in his chair. “Debris?” 

“Aye. At least three gas vents from its hull, along with particulate.” 

“Drive to maximum stealthy acceleration. Keep the nose pointed at them, but widen the distance.” Ralph had seen a similar tactic used once to detect stealthy pirate ships. Smart-dust particles dispersed into local space could not be fooled by any sort of stealth rig. If the Tyrant was doing something similar, his crew would be dead If Mahseer’s hull picked up even one smart-dust mote. The enemy knew or suspected his ship was nearby, and was trying to smoke him out. 

Van Horn turned around in dismay at the order. “But optimal range will-” 

“Stand by to fire.” Ralph snapped at her. He didn’t like being harsh with his crew, but he suspected he knew what the Tyrant was up to, and didn’t want to be caught in it. The hum of the drive began to rattle the deck, and Ralph’s command chair with it. 

“Optimal firing distance in three... two... one...” Van Horn turned around again, finger on the button. “Now.” 

“Hold. We’ll fire a little outside optimum.” This was hardly ideal; the farther outside optimum range the target was, the more chance it had to evade what would be fired in its direction. “Helm, prepare to scoot as soon as we fire.” 

“Ready.” Stern had his hands on the controls, ready to perform evasive action; there was little else to do to be ready. Mahseer was still outside the system’s gravitational shadow; it could make a safe jump as soon as its capacitors were charged. Of course, the same capacitors used for the ship’s archaic Xiou-Edwards star drive were also needed to fire the ship’s laughably oversized centerline cannon, a nasty close-range plasma weapon of a sort usually not seen on ships smaller than a cruiser.  

The shot couldn’t be delayed any longer. “Fire.” Ralph slammed a fist on the armrest of his chair. 

Kynthia Van Horn pressed the final key on her console without even turning back toward it. The bridge lights dimmed and the entire ship bucked and shrieked as if a vengeful demon had taken hold of it, but it was over in a second, and the lights returned. As soon as they did, the navigator’s hands flew over his console, and the ship wheeled under full engine power. There was no point in stealth anymore. 

“On target in two seconds...” Van Horn trailed off, watching her display. “We have a hit. I’m seeing major debris expulsion on the target.” 

The bridge crew cheered, but only for a second before returning to their duties. They weren’t out of the woods yet. 

“Time to jump?” Ralph watched the tactical display. There were still no Coronachs speeding after his ship, but the freshly wounded cruiser might still have weapons capable of slagging the little cutter as it fled. 

“Ninety seconds.” 

“Update.” Van Horn sounded surprised. “Target’s hull is breaking up. Major reactor breach.” 

Ralph sat back, amazed. “We did it. Ladies and gentlemen, we actually killed a Tyrant.” 

 

Details

Tales from the Service: A Casualty of War

2948-01-21 – Tales from the Service: A Casualty of War 

This week, I am going to publish a text-only message sent to our audience feedback mailbox unedited, uncredited, and without any direct commentary or analysis, as requested by the sender. 

Myranda Howe’s crew gave her a proper deep-space burial while en-route to Matusalemme on January 16. She died of her wounds after fighting a fire on the hangar deck of the fast carrier River Plate.  

Normally, the wide datasphere would not remark on the passing of a single crew tech second class in a war zone, but Myranda, a twenty-two-year-old volunteer from Pericles at Herakles IV, deserves to be known by the public whom she took an oath to defend. She was the great-granddaughter of Antonio Howe, the most decorated non-officer of the Terran-Rattanai War.  

In the action which earned him the third nebula pin for his Centaur Cross, Antonio Howe is credited with saving the crew of Filip Romilly from annihilation when, faced with the order to abandon ship, he encouraged his gun-deck crew to stay at their stations in order to fight off a wing of Rattanai strike ships intent on picking off the launches and escape-pods. Somehow, they drove off the attack, and he led his crew to an escape pod, losing only one of the seven-man gun crew in the quickly-disintegrating ship. Shortly after they got away, the dying ship broke apart completely – they had escaped by mere seconds. 

To Myranda, the many stories of her ancestor’s heroism might have seemed to be fantastic bedtime stories. He died when she was ten years old, too young to really understand why he never had the scars on his face reduced with nanomedicine, or why he always left the room when someone turned on a war holo-drama. 

Later, of course, Myranda did understand. When she enlisted at age seventeen with her parents’ blessing, she tried to get a posting as a point defense gunner, just like Antonio.  

Though she was a fair hand at the deadly dance of railshot versus incoming strike-ships and missiles, she proved far more skilled as a systems tech, and found herself assigned to her first posting’s atmospherics maintenance crew, with an alert posting to damage control.  

A lesser spacer might have grumbled or schemed to work her way onto a gun-battery crew, but not Myranda Howe. She threw herself into the work, cheerfully attacking each faulty carbon-scrubber and clogged nanofilter with the sort of bright enthusiasm which most people reserve for their favorite hobby. In damage control drills, she was tireless and decisive, putting the less energetic members of her damage-control team to shame. Only her closest confidants knew that she had such big shoes to fill – and that, in quiet moments, she was terrified she could never be the sort of hero that her great-grandfather was. 

Off-duty, Myranda was a member of River Plate’s chapel choir and the singer for the Tin-Can Surprise, the ship’s unauthorized neo-Centaurite musical quintet, whose practice and performances the senior officers did their best to pretend not to notice. In singing either the racy lyrics of Centaurite classic tunes or the solemn, grand hymns of the choirbook, she always stole the show. 

On the fifteenth of January of this year, a gunship re-entering the hangar just before a star-drive hop missed its docking cradle, tumbling onto one side and catching fire. Its three-person crew still trapped inside, damage control rushed to contain the blaze enough for them to escape alive. One of the first crew on-scene was Myranda Howe, who was not on duty but who had been walking a Tin-Can Surprise bandmate to the pilots’ ready-room. Armed with a thermo-foam sprayer and with a helmet completing her uniform’s emergency pressure-seal, she ran into the blaze with five others. 

Though the hangar techs began venting oxygen out of the damaged hangar cell, it was too late. The explosion tearing the strike launch’s starboard sponson off was probably the result of an overheated thruster-fuel reservoir, but even this was enough to toss the brave damage control personnel some distance. Though four of them were only bruised, one suffered a series of broken bones. Myranda, closest to the explosion, suffered nine shrapnel wounds to her torso and several more to her limbs. 

Myranda clung to life for seven hours after being pulled out of the hangar and rushed to the ship’s medical bay. Heavily sedated as the medical staff operated on her badly mangled body, she never regained consciousness, dying just after midnight ship-time on the sixteenth. In her final hours, she was surrounded by her closest compatriots. Her brief funeral ceremony was attended by almost the entire River Plate crew, with ship’s chaplain Father Sheeran, who knew Myranda quite well, delivering the eulogy.  

The crew of the gunship survived the crash. The thermo-foam sprayed onto the wrecked launch by the damage control team absorbed enough heat from the fires that they were able to free themselves with only minor injuries. The wrecked gunship was safely jettisoned without major damage to the hangar or further loss of life.  

The actions of the damage-control team of the fifteenth of January might never earn official commendation, but those who knew her are comforted by the fact that when a crisis loomed, Myranda Howe had been the same kind of hero as the man whose shadow she had walked. 

Details

Tales from the Service: Outsiders to War

2948-01-28 – Tales from the Service: Outsiders to War

We are expecting news about the ongoing Battle of Matusalemme at any moment. Though the system’s Hypercast Relay has been destroyed by the Incarnation, the Fifth Fleet has rigged a fleet communications system back to command here at Maribel. Though the press pool is not privy to the nature of this system, it seems so far reliable and not subject to attack. 

Last week’s entry in this space resulted in a significant amount of datasphere traffic and a number of questions, but to respect the wishes of the sender, I cannot comment on it in any great detail. River Plate is a secondary unit supporting the forces currently attempting to engage the enemy in Matusalemme; when the battle there is over, perhaps the person who sent it in will agree to engage with the datasphere audience. 

This week, in lieu of any interesting data from the battle-front, Nojus and I thought we’d take a moment to discuss the odd interest certain non-Confederate xenosapients have taken in the war’s progress. There are a few Rattanai and Atro’me in the Confederated Fifth Fleet, but the experiences of these individuals are going to be similar to that of their human crew-mates. What we thought this audience would be interested in was a summary of the behavior (or suspected behavior) of the Angels and other species that keep themselves separate from the Reach’s culture and datasphere. For this special, I will present the facts, and then Nojus will provide analysis. 

The Angels 

There have been several confirmed Angel sightings during the period of hostilities, though all but two of them (including Tales from the Inbox: Angels in Sagittarius) occurred before loss of contact with the Confederated vessels and civilians on the far side of the Sagittarius Gap. On the far side of the Gap, the behavior of the Angels has been erratic and difficult to interpret, with small groups of their signature strike-analogue vessels appearing and disappearing almost at random, zipping through systems on apparent high-speed snooping passes which often terminate early with the ships vanishing without a trace, perhaps into some poorly-understood form of star-drive jump. When contacted, the Angels respond to humans as they always have on our side of the Gap, suggesting they are at least in communication with the Angels who operate in the region of Sol. 

The two sightings in the Coreward Frontier regions of Meriwether and Nye Norge are a bit stranger, and one of them is still under Naval Intelligence media embargo. The one we can talk about is similar to a few unconfirmed sightings from before the start of hostilities – a colonial outpost reported being visited by a trio of towering Angels who appeared out of the wilderness on foot, deposited a blanket-wrapped bundle on the ground in full view of the awestruck settlers who ran to meet them, then silently turned and departed. On inspection, the bundle contained an unconscious human child of perhaps three years’ age, as well as a collection of small trinkets and a Confederated Worlds credit-stub carrying a sizable sum. 

[N.T.B. - Having seen several data payloads of this sort of encounter, I suspect they are looking for something – a lost comrade, perhaps. I have a hunch the Angels spotted on the far side of the Gap are some of the same Angels who’ve been lurking in the dark around the Core Worlds for centuries. Hells if I know how they managed to lose someone or something on the other side of the Gap – this might be the first time they’ve lost anything at all.  

As for the foundling, I have heard almost a dozen such stories over the years. Settler legends insist that such youths are destined to live great and significant lives, though I can’t say I buy that.] 

The Reachers 

In addition to the encounter with a small Navy task force previously featured here (Tales from the Service: A Reacher's Request), there have been several Reacher sightings on the Coreward Frontier since hostilities began. Though their usual mode of interaction with humans is purely mercantile, the Reachers have on several occasions declined to rendezvous with nearby Confederated vessels for purposes of trade, citing more pressing business. This is the first time they have been observed to do this in a well-documented encounter; usually the Reachers are very eager to barter.  

There were no Reacher sightings on the far side of the Gap before the chain of Hypercast relays to Sagittarius was cut. It is not known if the endurance of their vessels allows them to travel that far before needing to resupply.

[N.T.B. - Though no vessel of Reacher make has ever been seen twice, there can be little doubt there are at least several Reacher vessels in the Coreward Frontier, and that they are not making any particular effort to hide from Confederated eyes (or presumably the Incarnation). The pressing business cited might refer to searching for the Grand Journey which they mentioned to Mus’ad Balos. My personal speculation is that this is the name for the faction of Reachers who ply the far side of the Gap, and that the Incarnation dealt harshly with them, to the point of commandeering one or more of their vessels.  

What makes me think we’re missing something big here is that Nate would attack the Reachers at all. They don't care about any of our mad ideas, counterhumansim included, and probably would have happily sold Nate everything they had about the Confederated Navy for the right price.] 

Makaharwans 

The most celebrated xenosapient species encountered on the Coreward Frontier itself, the inhabitants of the Chromatic World, not being natively capable of space travel, have not participated in or been affected by the war to date. I made a few inquiries to the chief of the Makaharwa scientific mission this week, and was informed that while Makaharwans of all ages have listened attentively to stories about the war told by Confederate missionaries and scientists, this is not different than the way they react to any story that has been translated into their language.  

While they grasp the concept of space travel rather well, I was informed that most of the members of the research team doubt the clever avian-sapients quite believe the stories. Their own legends are obviously exaggerated, and most likely the Makaharwans think their human interlocutors are exaggerating their stories as well. 

[N.T.B. - I still haven’t had the luck to visit Makaharwa... Maybe when this is all over, I will. I hope and pray the Incarnation leaves them alone; the Makaharwans could easily vanish into the rocky uplands in which they nest, suffering no hardship, and leaving the Incarnation in control of whatever land they wished to take, but the process of levering a strong Incarnation garrison off that beautiful world would inevitably cause destruction on a scale they are almost certainly not prepared to face.] 

Cold Refuge 

Though Cold Refuge is on the far side of the Confederated Worlds from the Coreward Frontier, several of its automated mercantile haulers have meandered their way into the areas threatened by Incarnation raids. According to Naval Intelligence, four Cold Refuge haulers are operational in the Frontier, and they have been making a habit of visiting systems only days after an Incarnation cruiser raid. 

[N.T.B. - Most likely, the Guardian of Cold Refuge, who is at least partially connected to the datasphere, is seeking to learn more about the conflict, which is the first since the Brushfire War, and thus its first opportunity to observe Confederated fleets as an un-engaged observer. This just goes to show how information is more valuable than hulls – especially when one can send semi-autonomous spies which, if not destroyed, more than pay for themselves hauling bulk goods from system to system.  

It might also be a public-relations move; with all the disruptions caused by the raids, most of the Frontier colonists probably don’t mind the help moving supplies and goods from place to place.] 

The Grand Journey 

We know little about this variety of xenosapient except that it was mentioned to Navy personnel by Reachers. Naval Intelligence parsed the recording of Mus’ad Balos’s conversation with the Reachers hundreds of times, and were happy to tell me they think based on this analysis that the Grand Journey is not a single species, but instead a cross-species identity held together by bonds of common beliefs. 

The Reachers believe that the Incarnation operates captured Grand Journey vessels, and while it’s not clear what variety of starship this refers to (perhaps the blocky, unwieldly transports they brought to Matusalemme a few weeks ago), it is expected by Naval Intelligence that they were appropriated by force. 

[N.T.B. - Odd that a multi-species coalition could exist in Frontier space without anyone knowing about them until now. Perhaps, given their name and association with the Reachers, we’re looking at a nomadic society, one far less focused on trade and more self-sufficient. Someone is going to have to pay the damned Reachers a fortune to learn more, and I bet that’s why they slipped Balos that tidbit. They might have showed up in front of those destroyers just to let the Navy to know they had information to sell.] 

New Xenosapients

Other than the Grand Journey, there have been at least three sightings of unknown spacecraft in the conflict zone. Two of these have been covered on this feed before (Tales from the Service: Gabriel's Dutchman and Tales from the Inbox: Indigenous Immolation), but the third is more recent, and does not seem related to either of the previous two. 

In an odd data snippet captured by a Navy cruiser heading to Berkant some weeks after the battle there, a cluster of small (none greater than three meters in length) self-powered objects are seen circling curiously around the vessel just after its arrival at the edge of the star system. A spooked gun-battery commander opened fire on them, and though the guns don’t seem to have hit anything, they encouraged the tiny vessels to scatter in all directions, and the cruiser soon lost track of them. 

[N.T.B. - I don’t think I could say anything about the previously published items on this feed which the audience has not already speculated since they were published. As for the recent sighting, sapient or no, the objects probably weren’t spacecraft. Though cloudsprites have never been observed outside dense nebular clouds as far as I know, that story lines up with what I've heard about them. Most likely these aren’t sapients at all – if they are similar to cloudsprites, they’re not even really alive.] 

Details

Tales from the Service: A Knife in the Back

2948-02-04 – Tales from the Service:

I’m sure all of you are already familiar with the Navy’s data (what has been released at any rate) about the engagement in Matusalemme, contesting the colony of Adimari Valis. Obviously, the news isn’t good. Though the Incarnation force in the area lacks any ships on the scale of our battleship units (its battle line is composed of between fifteen and twenty Tyrant heavy cruisers), it seems to have driven off a mixed Fifth Fleet detachment centered around the dreadnoughts Hercules and Pericles with only minor losses.

Losses for the Fifth Fleet were not so heavy, as a percentage of forces engaged, as they were at the Battle of Berkant, but this Battle of Bodrogi still resulted in significant damage to both of the big battlewagons engaged, in addition to the total loss of two heavy cruisers, Mannerheim and Okayinka. Losses to the lighter fleet units was limited, except that a heavy toll was taken from strike squadrons.

Though some datasphere commentators have decided to use the results of the battle to stoke fear among their audience, I will point out that there are some bright points in this mess. The Incarnation is still incapable of destroying a Confederated battlewagon, which indicates that they will have trouble dealing with the heavy orbital defense installations present at some of the more populous Frontier worlds like Maribel and Håkøya. The Confederated fleet was not driven from the system entirely, and skirmishes between light units continue until the moment of this writing as Confederated Magpies and Palmettos attempt to reach the big, lumbering troop and supply carriers in orbit over Adimari Valis, intercepted by Coronach squadrons. With both mercenary and Confederated forces buying the colony several weeks, almost eighty percent of the planet’s population was evacuated before a single Incarnation boot touched the dusty ground.

The strangest bit of the battle, and the snippet which the Navy has given us access to relate to the audience in this week’s Tales from the Service, is the loss of the cruiser Carl Gustaf Mannerheim – it was not lost to enemy gunfire.

Captain Chinwe Abel threw himself into one of the crash-padded restraint chairs in Carl Gustaf Mannerheim’s combat intelligence center as the salvo of missiles bored in on his ship, feeling the automatic restraints snake over his torso to hold him in place.

Somewhere beyond the vast bulk of the cruiser, railguns chattered out cones of white-hot rail slugs into the path of the incoming ordinance, and the point defense system, seizing control of every multipurpose laser that could be brought to bear, was ready to slag the projectiles with coherent light. The ship’s screening projectors had absorbed a few hits, but they were still functioning at near peak efficiency, and the helm was already dialed in for last-second evasive maneuvers to throw off the aim of the missiles’ shaped fission warheads. Mannerheim’s protective trio of point defense frigates threw up their own clouds of railshot and spat clusters of countermissiles, but they could only do so much.

The timer ticked down to one second, and the world around Captain Abel was wrenched in several directions and spun on its head. Even with the inertial isolation of the ship’s A-grav axis, he felt at least six effective gees alternately crush him into the padding and hurl him against the restraints.

Two new alarms began to wail as the restraints slithered back into the chair, but Abel knew the moment his feet were back on the deck that his ship had escaped serious damage. The subtle hum of the ship’s drive was still there, strong and healthy, and there was no distant roar of a massive pressure-hull breach. “What’s our status?” He called, knowing the damage-control chief would be ready with the answer.

“Screens took the worst of it, Captain. We lost some hull plating and fire control to two light railgun batteries.” Chief Nathans responded, the calm in his gruff voice reassuring Abel more than the content of his report.

The minor miracle didn’t conceal the fact that things were not going well in Matusalemme. The fleet detachment sent to chase away the Incarnation had tried to soften the enemy cruisers up with long range missile and heavy railgun fire, but the faster enemy ships had closed the distance with only two of their nearly twenty ships forced to drop out of formation.

The odds, favorable at long range, should have still been even in a general melee, but somehow the damnable Nate crews were able to keep their mutually supporting screening projectors aligned on each other even through close-range maneuvers. The whole formation seemed to maneuver as one graceful unit, rather than two dozen hulls each a hundred klicks from its neighbors. By comparison, the heavy cruisers and dreadnoughts at the core of the Confederated formation seemed clumsy and fractured. Already, Okayinka was faltering and Vespacian was falling out of line with damage to its main drive.

The big sibling battlewagons, though taking at least as much punishment, were faring a bit better – Hercules was trading fire to its own advantage with the nearest Tyrant, and Pericles had forced away a ship closing in to finish off Vespacian, riddling it along its length with its heavy rail-cannon.

“Gunnery, concentrate on Hercules’s target.” Abel drew a ring around the insubstantial mote in the three-dimensional display. The battleship, designed for long-range combat, didn’t have very many close-range weapons, but Mannerheim was another story. Shortly, the ship’s heavy plasma cannons locked onto the target.

The gouts of self-contained, superheated ions took only a few seconds to race to the Tyrant, and those that didn’t fizzle out in the complex spatial shear of the enemy ship’s screening fields tore up huge swaths of the big ships’ heavy plating and chewed up the machinery and men beneath. The Tyrant faltered, falling out of formation, and the next few shots from the battleship’s big cannons nearly tore it in half. Abel might have cheered, but at almost the same instant, wounded Okayinka met a similar fate.

A chirp told Captain Abel that there was an update on the fleet control band. As he examined the new orders on the display, Mannerheim trembled, its plating once again absorbing a hit. Admiral Mhasalkar  had evidently decided that his fleet could not afford to trade heavy ships on a one-for-one basis. The order was for the heavy units to withdraw back toward the jump limit, forcing the enemy to either break off pursuit, switch to engaging the lighter fleet units, or be whittled away at close range during the whole pursuit by dozens of frigates and destroyers.

Balling his hands into helplessly frustrated fists, Abel relayed the order to the helm, watching on the display as the ship’s gunners concentrated their plasma weapons on another Tyrant, doing little damage but forcing it to move out of range. As it did, the missile bays unleashed a salvo of their own, the tiny needle-icons fanning out before homing in on the retreating ship.

Abel never saw if the salvo did any damage. The CIC display flickered, then blinked out, leaving him blind in semidarkness. “Bridge, I’ve lost tactical display. What’s going on?”

There was no response. The ship’s drive still hummed, but the silence on the comms channel was deafening. Turning to one of the hard-line terminals in the compartment, Abel keyed in a new channel to the other command centers of his ship. “Comms are down and I’ve lost tactical display. Are we still on course?”

“Computer core is down!” Chief Nathans barked. “Slagged by some sort of timed incendiary. The backups too. Going to have to vent these compartments to deal with the fire.”

“Sabotage?”

“You can go all in on that bet, Captain.”

“Dammit.” Without any centralized computer system, every part of the ship would revert to manual control. The ad-hoc datasphere created by the crew’s various smaller digital devices might barely be enough to limp away, but without computer coordination, the point defense system couldn’t possibly swat incoming missiles, and evasive action was all but impossible.

Finally, someone on the bridge patched themselves in. “I’m reading laser strikes on the screens. We’re at the back of the line. Frigates are doing their best, but-”

At that moment, the reassuring hum of the main drive faltered. “Main drive losing power!” Someone shrieked.

Captain Abel cursed under his breath. His ship had just received a full atmospheric system overhaul at Håkøya – dozens of Navy and civilian techs had swarmed through every part of the ship, clambering into crawlspaces and suiting up to ramble through the unpressurized portions of her hull. Evidently, the fast-growing Naval outpost in that system did not have the same tight security as the Core Worlds installations. “Any prayer of getting acceleration back?”

“Not in time.” The damage control chief sounded as heartbroken as his captain felt.

Abel took a deep breath, then, in light of the dozen-odd Tyrant cruisers bearing down on his stricken ship, gave the order no starship captain ever relished. “All hands, abandon ship. Repeat, abandon ship immediately.”

If the computer had been functioning, it would have blared out this order in every compartment, but without it, Abel knew he had to rely on his crew to carry that message to any compartment not yet connected to the ad-hoc datasphere. Even so, there would inevitably be some left behind.

There was one more unpleasant task to perform before he ran for the launch bay or the escape-pod banks with everyone else. Producing a data-key lanyard from his pocket, Abel plugged it into the terminal in the command center. Its screen lit up with a very simple interface which could issue only one command. “Chief, I’m arming for self-destruct.”

“Confirmed from here. Make it ten minutes.”

Abel keyed in the indicated time, then winced as he pressed the red button on the terminal’s face. There was no fanfare to the act of instructing his ship to scuttle itself – the computer, though not responsible for self-destruct itself, would have been responsible for the screeching self-destruct alarm. “It’s done, Chief. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

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