Tales from the Service: The Strike at Håkøya

2954-04-29 – Tales from the Service: The Strike at Håkøya 

There can be no doubt at this stage that the result of the Second Battle of Håkøya has had a favorable outcome. Moderate fighting in that system continues as of the time of this posting, but reports from Fifth Fleet indicate that the main body of enemy forces was confronted and routed in the orbital space above the planet on the twenty-fourth and the twenty-fifth.  

Though few enemy heavy vessels appear to have actually been destroyed, battle damage forced enough of them to withdraw that the remainder was placed at too great a disadvantage to continue the defense of the system.  

This is probably not news to most of you, being as it is some days old as of this posting. The imminent recovery of Håkøya is excellent news, of course, but many war observers are expressing concern at the rather inconclusive nature of the battle, and the apparently large number of enemy fleet assets which were able to withdraw to fight another day. 

A warning chime sounded in Ansa Harper’s ears, pulling her out of her light catnap. Sleeping any way in a Puma cockpit took a small frame little bit of skill, but Ansa, having both, and trusting her autopilot, always tried to catch a few minutes on long time-on-target approaches. The computer or the comm would wake her if there was anything to pay attention to, but there never was. 

Naps in the approach and return to base autopilot runs weren’t uncommon; they weren’t even against regulations as long as one was prepared for rude awakening at any moment. Lead could always pump his volume in any pilot’s ears if he wasn’t getting the answers he needed, but the Puma’s sensors and helm were operating as an extension of Commander Ghadavi’s rig for those parts of a mission anyway. Ansa, and the rest of the squadron, were effectively passengers, until contact with the enemy anyway. 

Now, of course, the target was coming up, and it was time to get her bearings once more. The squadron formation hadn’t changed in the last hour, and the comms channels were silent, even the direct line to Six; most likely, he’d been reading something, since he regularly complained about the cramped cockpit not letting him stretch his legs out. 

Ahead, the gas giant occupied a third of Ansa’s view, and the target moon was already visible. The squadron had begun its deceleration from cruise, so it could do more than slash past the body at incredible speed.  

As their briefing before launch had suggested, the place ahead was a hornet’s nest of frenzied activity, most of it seeming focused on escape. Small craft were darting away in all directions in ones and twos, and a pair of lumbering haulers were struggling to break orbit, their predicted courses suggesting flight toward the inner system. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of organized defense, but that didn’t mean much. Incarnation forces caught at a disadvantage had a nasty habit of pretending to be weaker than they actually were, hoping to goad their Confederated opponents into making a costly mistake. 

“Would you look at that target rich environment.” Six muttered. “We’ll be out here all day cleaning all that up.” 

“Probably.” Ansa ran a quick systems check; everything was operating at peak efficiency. She could still see the light scorch-mark left on her wing by a laser strike from the picket if she craned her head to the left, but that seemed only cosmetic. “We’ll do this by the book. Nothing fancy, Six. We’ll both have plenty to claim when we’re done.” 

“I know, I know.” 

“All units, be advised. Command has placed priority on those haulers.” Lead’s gravelly voice broke in. “Three and I will take the first one. Five and Seven, target the second. All weapons free. Target their engines. Nine, Eleven, try to cut off that lead group of shuttles heading in-system.” 

“Juicy.” Six remarked dryly. “Been a while since we’ve gotten to fire ship-killers.” 

“Let’s make them count.” Ansa sighed; each Puma only had room for a single ship-killer torpedo in its weapons bay, as well as a much smaller smart-seeker for use against other strike craft. The bulky ship-killers were devastating, but unwieldly; it was very easy to waste them, if one was not careful. 

A chirp announced that Lead had released Ansa’s helm control back to her, and she quickly punched in an intercept course for the second hauler, helpfully identified for her as a blinking red crosshair on the holo-plot, matched by another such symbol on her HUD, though the vessel was still too far away to see. The ship was a blocky, ungainly thing, in the usual style of Incarnation logistics assets. According to the intelligence briefings on the type, they’d stolen the design, and even the shipyards, from the Kyaroh on the far side of Incarnation space, and devoted all their own shipyards to warship production. They were, simply speaking, lumbering, fragile vessels, but they required only small crews and were cheap to operate. 

“This should only take one good hit.” Ansa glanced at the tactical plot, guessing what other units might be in position to protect the hauler by the time they reached it. “Keep your helm slaved and focus on getting a clean lock-on. I’ll do the fancy flying.” 

“Aye.” This was a fairly routine procedure, when it wasn’t likely to come to a close-in fight with the Pumas’ prow cannons on the way to the target. Ansa would have liked to deal the blow herself, but it was Six’s turn to get the first shot in, and in any case, she’d get an assist on anything he bagged. As an added bonus, focusing on the temperamental ship-killer's lock on system would keep Six quiet, and permit Ansa to devote her attention to watching for potential surprises. There always seemed to be surprises. 

A moment after the squadron broke formation to pursue its various targets, the first surprise arrived. “Be advised.” Lead announced. “The computer just positively identified at least one Coronach escorting the lead shuttles. Expect them to hide around soft targets and jump you as you make your attack runs.” 

“You worry about the weapon launch, Six. Let me worry about the opfor.” Ansa switched her sensors to directional-identify mode, sending waves of radar pulses ahead. So far, the computer identified the handful of small craft around her target as repair tenders. This was not entirely comforting; the Incarnation’s rare, heavily armed Jericho strike bomber was about the same size as such vessels, and she didn’t want to fly into a surprise fan of phase-beams. Coronachs too, being tiny, could easily be hiding behind the hauler, waiting to strike. 

“We’ll come in from behind.” Ansa altered their course to sweep around to the aft quarter of the hauler. “Expect some fancy dodging as we get close. You’re free to launch when you’ve got a good lock.” 

“Aye, Five.” Six replied nervously. Going in slaved might be routine, but Ansa needn’t imagine the apprehension he felt; his life was in her hands now. For all the advantages of sharing the workload, that wasn’t something Puma pilots were ever comfortable with. “Warming up my torpedo now.” 

Details

Tales from the Service: The Mission at Håkøya

2954-04-22 – Tales from the Service: The Mission at Håkøya 

It took three more passes to disable the cutter, though even then it wasn’t totally destroyed, only badly holed and without engine power. Everything resembling a comms antenna on its hull was broken, so its time furiously transmitting intelligence rearwards was over anyway. 

“Think there’s anyone still alive on that thing, Five?” Six asked, as the pair finally set course for the rendezvous. Most of the squadron was already there. 

“Probably.” Ansa Harper didn’t care one way or another. She was at peace with the idea that war meant killing people – a great number of them maybe before the rest stopped fighting back – but it was unwise to be either too eager to shed blood or too hesitant about it. Milliseconds stood between life and death, and both passions could lead to one passing from one to the other most unexpectedly. 

“Think Fleet will send someone for them?” 

“Eventually.” Intelligence briefings constantly stressed what was provided via prisoner interrogations, so more fodder for that pipeline certainly held some amount of value upstairs. 

Six had nothing else to say for the moment, so Ansa scanned the tactical plot, looking for any changes she had missed while they were attacking the picket cutter. The destroyer squadron had formed up into a close mutual support formation and was accelerating on an oblique course. She didn’t know the squadron’s full mission, but she did know her squadron’s role well enough. The Pumas, designed and normally used as close escorts for troopships, were being let off the leash today. Their small size, high acceleration, and heavy cannon armament made them excellent escort fighters, but it was about to prove just as useful in a tactical offensive. 

Ansa and Traverse reached the rest of their squadron at the same time as Eleven and Twelve, the last to launch and from the destroyer on the far side of the formation. 

“Report ready-op.” Commander Ghadavi called out gruffly as soon as the stragglers were in formation. “Slave nav systems.” 

Ansa waited for the green light to appear on the nav panel, then flipped the switch below it. “Five, ready-op.” 

“Six, ready-op.” Traverse, already having his nav system slaved to Ansa’s, didn’t need to do anything; the network automatically transferred control over his own Puma to Lead. 

The rest of the squadron reported in over the next few seconds. When they had all confirmed their readiness, Ghadavi called up maximum aceleration. The whole squadron smoothly pulled away from the destroyers, angling for a gas giant on the near side of the system, only a few light minutes from the resolution area. 

“Think we caught them with their pants down?” Four asked on the squadron net. 

“With all those pickets strung out there?” Six scoffed. “Not likely. Command better get this raid done and get us home before the big Ts find us.” 

“Gravitic spike.” Nine barked. “Behind us! It’s an ambush!” 

“The mission continues.” Lead growled. “We expected company.” 

“We did?” 

Ansa glanced at the tactical plot. They were still only a few light seconds from the resolution area, so it didn’t take long for someone’s IFF system to ping the newcomers and share the results on the fleet network. She switched her comms back to the direct line with Six. “What did I tell you?” She allowed herself a thin smirk. “I spy with my little eye, something called Maribel.” 

Maribel, the newest and most powerful member of Fifth Fleet’s core battle group, was indeed responding on the network. Over the next few seconds, five other battleships joined it. 

“Stars around.” Six gasped. “This really is the big one.” 

“And we’ve got a job to do.” Ansa reminded her wingman. “We might get a moment to sit back and watch the big boys slug it out later.” 

Job to do or no, their course wouldn’t get them much of anywhere for nearly an hour and a half. Ansa settled back, took a sip of water, and tried to remember what Håkøya space was like. There were only two gas giants in the outer part of the star system, as she recalled, and both of them were home to extensive mining installations. Their target, identified only as a facility on a small airless moon, was probably one of these, repurposed for military use, but she couldn’t think of what it was doing to earn a visit from a whole Puma squadron. 

The facility wasn’t the only target, of course. Their charter included destruction of any space vessels near the target facility, and priority targeting of any vessels attempting to flee the installation. They hadn’t been told why, but apparently somebody at that facility had really pissed off Command. Whoever it was, Ansa hoped he really deserved it. 

As of this posting, we are receiving reports that the fleet action in the Håkøya system is going well – Fifth Fleet seems to be in control of all bodies in the outer system, after a few inconclusive skirmishes with Incarnation forces. Those forces, whose strength is not known except presumably to those officers on the scene, have retreated back into orbit over Håkøya itself, where presumably they have some fixed defenses as well as fleet facilities. 

[N.T.B.] Whether Fifth Fleet can break this defense is not clear, but I would wager they can. The account we’ve been providing during these tense weeks suggests Confederated forces benefitted from good intelligence on the situation in Håkøya before launching this attack, and if fleet command did not think they could retake the place, they wouldn’t have gone in with the battlewagons. 

Details

Tales from the Service: The First Strike at Håkøya

2954-04-15 – Tales from the Service: The First Strike at Håkøya 

Still waiting on definitive news from Fifth Fleet. Reports are coming in of engagements, but it doesn’t sound like anything conclusive has happened. It seems they’re content to sit out a multi-week campaign in enemy battlespace, waiting for a ripe opportunity. 

This suggests to me the enemy force there is still fairly strong; if it were week, the campaign would have been over by now. 

When the burst of acceleration faded, Ansa Harper ’s controls unlocked and the weapons systems automatically began warming up. She brought her heading toward the pre-assigned rendezvous point, sensors searching for targets. So far, nothing had been cross-linked from Von Bismarck, but the destroyer had had only a few seconds more time to search itself. 

A quiet beep announced the arrival of a second Puma on the squadron net, as the ship launched Talon Six behind Ansa. Already her course and the ship’s were diverging, and Six had to turn through more than fifteen degrees of arc and go to maximum acceleration to form up behind her. 

“Resolution area is clear.” The cool voice of the flotilla commander announced. “Proceed with your assigned objectives.” 

Seven joined the net a moment later, but, needing to link up with his own wingman, he turned to follow Von Bismarck until Eight got clear. A Puma caught in the open by itself was at a severe disadvantage, as its single pilot would be overworked flying defensively and also trying to get its weapons into line. Doctrine stated that they joined up in twos for mutual support, and the twos joined up into sections of four rigs, which cooperated with each other in squadrons of three sections to achieve operational objectives. That way, nobody had to face the enemy alone. 

“Well, Five.” Six, who with a hard deck underneath him bore the ignominious name of Timothy Traverse, used the wingman channel, so Ansa knew she was about to hear something rather ridiculous. The man was a bit of a chatterbox on comms, “What do you think we’re in for?” 

“This is the big one, Six.” Ansa replied. She normally let Six prattle on, but didn’t encourage. Talking seemed to keep him calm, but it did grate on her nerves a fair bit. 

“You say that every op.” 

“And I’m either proven right or relieved to be wrong when we’re all back safe. Keep those sensors on scream. If I bet right this time, we’re going into the nest.” 

“You really think this is Håkøya? God, I hope not. Right into the meat grinder itself, and without the big guns.” 

Ansa sighed. There had been no sign of any of the battlewagons on the jumps into this operation, but that didn’t mean they weren’t coming along. Fifth Fleet was under no need to move all as one unit, especially for such short distances. “You’ll know I’m right when you see them on the net.” 

“Sure.” 

Just then, insistent beeping announced the arrival on the sensor model of enemy contacts. These were a scattering of small chevrons at a long distance away, likely detected by the powerful sensors on the big fleet destroyers, but it still brought things into sharp focus. 

Ansa glanced at the geometry visible in the sensor plot. “Picket cutters.” She sighed. They had been expected, sure enough. Pickets weren’t a threat even to a destroyer squadron, of course, but they were certainly already transmitting force reports back to whatever lay in-system. 

“Looks like we’ve got one sitting overwatch over our rendezvous area.” Six highlighted the offending spacecraft. “If we wait for the whole squadron, it’s going to be taking potshots the whole time.” 

“Shame.” Ansa switched her targeting system over to strafing mode; Pumas carried limited stores, so the best tactic against larger thin-skinned vessels was to get in close and peck them apart with the nose gun. “We’d better go see to that.” 

After dashing off a quick update on the squadron net alerting the others of the problem and indicating that she and Six were going to try to solve it, Ansa turned her Puma onto an intercept course. The picket wasn’t trying to evade, which wasn’t too strange; Incarnation crews regularly chose to sacrifice themselves to delay an attack, or to gather as much sensor data as possible for their fellows. Sometimes it was a trap, too, but Ansa doubted that this time. This was just one cutter in a broad picket net stretched across the probable approach angles from Maribel. 

As they accelerated in close, a few flashes of desultory defensive laser fire impacted Ansa’s shear-screens. It was impossible to dodge light laser fire like that, of course, but it was also highly unlikely to do any real damage, even if it snuck through the shear-screens. Pumas had a reflective hull coating that could handle low-wattage laser strikes. 

The cutter, its main “weapon” being its sensors, had little else to answer the charging interceptors, however. They pulled off just outside its shear-screens. Ansa didn’t need to pull the trigger; the pass was so quick she’d have missed anyway. The computer pumped out three quick shots with the nose cannon as they passed, and Six’s did the same. 

“No damage.” Six, whose sensors were already pinging aft, announced. “Might take a few passes.” 

“Let’s try to wrap this up.” Ansa entered another strafing pass, this one angled to rake the little cutter bow to stern. “We’ve got a lot of work to do today.” 

Details

Tales from the Service: The Spearpoint at Håkøya

2954-04-08 – Tales from the Service: The Spearpoint at Håkøya 

Ansa Harper’s palms itched as the jump timer on her console ticked down. She had nothing to do, of course; her Puma interceptor was clamped into the breech-end of Von Bismarck’s short launch tunnel, immobile until the jump completed and the hangar controller sent her hurtling out into the void. 

Technically, nobody except the skipper and the navigator were supposed to know where they were going, but Ansa had a fairly good idea. They had made two or three jumps so far, but she’d noticed that the stars visible from the destroyer’s ventral observation deck hadn’t changed much the whole time. There was only one target close enough to Maribel worth any serious attention. 

The operation was odd in several respects besides the choice of targets. Normally, the hangar on a fleet destroyer carried a flight of four Magpie gunships, with barely enough room for a few utility launches hanging as ready-spares. For this operation, Von Bismarck and its two sisters Richelieu and Rodney had sidelined their shared squadron and taken aboard Ansa’s Puma squadron, MLI-71, freshly rotated into the theater from a billet in Sixth Fleet. They weren’t trained to operate in independent four-ship sections, but given that the three ships they’d been assigned to were all jumping into action together, re-training had been limited to familiarization with the compact launch systems of a Montpelier-class fleet destroyer. 

While the first wave of any strike being filled out with light cruisers and destroyers was fairly normal, the briefing had indicated the first wave also included two light carriers, normally not front-line battle units. The mission assigned to these vessels was not disclosed.  

Though the briefing hadn’t included it, presumably Fifth Fleet’s core formation of six (seven, if they had the old Calais out of the yard in time) battleships and their panoply of support vessels were also joining this operation, if Ansa had guessed the target correctly. Their force alone was too big for this to be a mere diversionary raid. No, this was either a strike and hold on a soft target, or this was the big one for all the marbles. 

Ansa had place her bet on it being the big one with Von Bismarck’s crew bookie the prior shift, so either she was going to be right or she was going to be a fair sight poorer when she got back. There was also the possibility she wouldn’t make it back, but she preferred not to think about that option. The pilots who dwelled on it too much tended to be the ones who took it. 

“Jump sequence in thirty seconds.” The smooth, cultured voice of Von Bismarck’s computer announced. “Remain at battle stations.” 

Most likely, there would be no combat directly out of the jump, but it was possible. Fleets had run into their opposite numbers out at the edge of system jump shadows at least a handful of times in the history of space travel, however vast the area of space involved might seem. Regardless of the presence or absence of Incarnation ships in their arrival zone, though, the destroyer and its fellows were going to pump out their strike assets. It probably wouldn’t come to shooting for several hours after that. 

“Fifteen seconds.” The computer announced again. This time, a buzz on the comms channel accompanied the words, indicating that a klaxon had sounded on the ship’s intercom. 

“Launch rails are armed. Godspeed, Talon Five.” The hangar ops chief sounded nervous. 

“See you in a few, control.” Ansa didn’t blame the man for his uneasiness. He had at least as much a chance of buying the plot on this one as she did, if it was the big move everyone thought it was, and he had a lot less to do to try to prevent it. 

“Three. Two One. Initiation.” The ship’s computer intoned. 

Ansa didn’t feel anything when Von Bismarck passed through the spatial resonance fold created by its Himura drive, but then, she almost never felt anything during a star drive jump. Her Puma’s computer flicked to a different mode, and then a burst of acceleration no amount of inertial isolation could totally mitigate pressed her back into the crash padding. 

 

As some of you probably have heard, there is action this week back on the Coreward Frontier, with Fifth fleet going on the offensive in a major way. The media is calling this the Return to Håkøya, but it is probably more proper to call it the Second Battle of Håkøya. There seems to be little decisive news to report on that front, but this account came in from the first day of the fighting (which featured mainly skirmishing and maneuver).  

I am... to be honest, not entirely certain how it got through, but then, I am not certain how any of the news we get from this campaign is reaching us. Theoretically, Håkøya doesn’t have an active Hypercast relay station (which was disabled during the fighting when the system was occupied and hasn’t been online since). There’s definitely some sort of relay that’s giving us updates hours old rather than days, and personnel aboard fleet vessels seem to be able to send and recieve messages fairly quickly, but nobody has been forthcoming about how this works. Perhaps the fleet towed a temporary relay into the system, but if so, it’s not in range of comms systems on the planet’s surface. 

Details
  • You are here:  
  • Home
  • Tales from the Inbox