2952-09-25 – Tales from the Service: A Maimed Titan

Yoel Tennford led his pilots and gunners down the narrow corridor from the ready room to the armored hangar hatch. Every face was grim, but determined; their Magpie gunships were all freshly rearmed and loaded with all the biggest and most potent ship-killing munitions. They had been out on six sorties in less than five standard days, but this one was the big one. They were going to kill a Tyrant.

The target, an unlucky straggler from a recent raid, was limping its way out toward the jump limit, and in a few hours it would be in a position to make good its escape. Normally, Incarnation cruisers who came to raid Sagittarius Gate were careful not to put themselves in danger of damage that would compromise their mobility; even heavily damaged raiders retired at full speed and escaped alive.

Eventually, though, one of the bastards had to get unlucky. In trading fire with the outer line of defensive installations, one of the quartet of cruisers had taken a heavy torpedo amidships on the starboard side. Even with the formation’s overlapping shear-screens, the torpedo had blasted a hole nearly eighty meters long and twenty deep in the cruiser’s hull. Something that had gone out with the debris had been important to the big warship’s gravitic drive, and it had fallen out of formation, drive operating at barely half of its normal acceleration.

Strike formations from the various fortress installations had been harrying the cripple for hours, but most of them had done little damage; they had all been launched before the situation developed, as patrols and harassers, not as ship killers. They had been carrying smaller munitions for general work. Yoel and his squadron had been out there earlier that day, trying to keep the raiders’ swarm of Coronachs from hitting anything important. Now, they were going out once more, to take care of business.

Command had selected eight squadrons from the various fortresses and vessels in the Sagittarius Gate system to go for the kill, and another dozen-odd squadrons would keep the Coronachs off them and suppress the cruiser’s still-formidable suite of point defense weapons. Two frigates and a light carrier from Seventh Fleet which had happened to be in the right place at the right time were also going to get involved, but if things went to plan, they’d mostly be there to sift through the debris and vaporize anything that was still trying to fight back. Under normal circumstances, this wasn’t a force that would be able to destroy any heavy cruiser, much less the capable Incarnation Tyrant type, but the sluggish speed of their foe and the fact that it had been abandoned by its formation all but ensured its death.

The armored hatch hissed open, and Yoel led the way onto the hangar deck. Eleven Magpies waited there on the pads for eleven crews, each one with a pair of oversized cigar-shaped payloads slung under its stubby wings. They had trained to carry and use ship-killers, of course, but had never actually used them in combat.

In most of the raids, skirmishes, and battles in the defense of Sagittarius Gate, it had been up to Seventh Fleet ships to deal the killing blow to those few enemy ships that had met their end. This time, though, most of Seventh Fleet was away; the fortress units had repelled the raid more or less alone, and so the glory of the kill was theirs.

Personally, Yoel would have preferred to let the glory and the danger go to others, but he knew his crews would be dismayed if they learned they had been passed over for the opportunity to complete such a high-profile mission. He could only hope that all eleven Magpies would make it back to the hangar in a few hours.

As the crews approached, the hangar techs hurriedly removed their leads and hoses from each rig and hung a ladder on the brackets beside the hatch. Yoel’s Magpie, a command model with an expanded computer and comms suite, was parked nearest the entrance, but he lingered at the top of the ladder for a long time after his gunners were aboard, watching the other crews board their rigs. Farther off, he spotted the base’s pair of recovery shuttles warming up, but these would not be launching with his squadron.

Flashing a thumbs-up gesture toward the hangar controller’s station, Yoel ducked inside and clambered to the cockpit at the nose. Already the reactor hummed with latent power, and most of the flight systems were online, but he did a few quick checks as he buckled himself in.

When his restraints were secured, Yoel pulled on his helmet and extended the microphone. “Uriel Actual showing a green board. Requesting launch clearance.”

“Green board up here, Uriel.” The controller replied. “Clearance granted. You are first in line for the launch run.” With a series of clicks and thumps, the clamps holding the Magpie’s landing skids released.

“Clearance acknowledged.” Yoel flicked the switch to change over to the squadron comms-net, and his status board filled with green wire-frames for the other ten Magpies. “Uriel squadron, launch when ready.”

With that, Yoel activated the thrusters to gently lift the craft from its landing pad, then maneuvered it into line with the launch tube at one end of the hangar. A strike craft’s best defense was raw velocity, and the base’s hangar was equipped to send its compliment into battle well defended indeed, with a launch rail nearly two kilometers long.

Twin arms from the launch system latched into the Magpie’s hull and pulled it gently into the cradle whose inertial isolation supplemented its onboard gravitics. Without the cradle, Yoel and his gunners would be turned to pink jelly with the force of acceleration, to say nothing of the damage to the Magpie itself. Despite having launched this way nearly a hundred times, Yoel gripped his seat and squeezed his eyes.

It was over in just a few seconds, of course, with only the barest whisper of acceleration tugging Yoel backwards into his seat. The Magpie erupted out of the launcher at a terrifying velocity, already hurtling toward its target.

“Launch successful.” Yoel grabbed the controls and flicked the switches to arm the rig’s weapons, knowing that a few straggling enemy Coronachs were probably still prowling around. “Proceeding to target. We’ll form up en route.”

Nojus here. Duncan is out for the next week or so doing interviews, so you’re stuck with me through next episode.

Though a raid at Sagittarius Gate last week was hardly big news, the fact that it claimed an enemy cruiser destroyed and at least one damaged without Seventh Fleet capital units being engaged is unusual. Normally, the enemy tries to raid when the fleet is out on operations (training or otherwise), and though they’re not always successful in this, they know not to press their luck when they find the battlewagons are home.

The defenses are growing so sophisticated, however, that only the largest raid forces now have much of a chance of doing real damage, and a raid in such force is a big risk to an enemy fleet that’s replacing its losses slower than ours.