2952-10-02 – Tales from the Service: A Titan’s Downfall

Nojus here. Those of you who have already read last week’s entry, which is most of you, know where this ends. A lone enemy warship, crippled in Sagittarius Gate, destroyed by overwhelming swarming attacks by Confederated strike craft and small warships.

Even this routine inevitability, though, risked the lives of thirty-something strike crew in each squadron. True, Commander Tennford’s group all seem to have made it home alive, but dozens of Magpie crews didn’t in the same day’s fighting. Rescue launches had about a fifty percent crew recovery rate, and that’s in uncontested friendly space after a battle lasting only a few hours.

True, these losses are nothing compared to the number of crew on a heavy cruiser, but we should not forget that even in these small victorious actions, Confederated spacers are losing their lives.

As the squadron formed up around him, Yoel Tennford studied the latest battle reports on the datastream from their home base. The wounded Tyrant cruiser was apparently still limping outward toward the jump limit, harried by strike craft and the occasional long-range missile volley from the few frigates which had been in range to participate. None of these could really expect to deal a killing blow to a ship that large and powerful, but they could knock out its weapons and even hamper its ability to make repairs to its drive, if they were persistent.

Yoel’s squadron, along with several others, would hopefully provide the necessary deathblow. If even a handful of their ship-killer missiles struck home, the straggling enemy cruiser would be destroyed. Short of a miracle or a surrender broadcast, the enemy ship was doomed, but an Incarnation crew never surrendered and probably didn’t believe much in miracles.

“Uriel actual, your attack vector is portside amidships.” The voice of the designated strike ops director was hoarse, as if he had been talking and shouting all day; he probably had. “Fenrir and Hermes squadrons will lead you in and keep the guns busy.”

“Acknowledged. Portside amidships.” Yoel smiled; this was a choice duty, with a high chance of scoring devastating hits. True, it was somewhat more dangerous than an end-on run, but with so many Magpies and other strike assets filling the space around the crippled ship, the danger was manageable.

Yoel would still have preferred to have let the kill go to someone else, but he could never bring himself to say that to the gunners and pilots under his command. They would take that as critical lack of aggression for a squadron commander, even if it did increase all their chances of surviving, and even if there was no real difference in the fortunes of war that would result from heroics on this particular day. The Incarnation ship was, for all intents and purposes, already dead; it was only a matter of who would deliver the coup de grace. Yoel didn’t want to have to send a message of condolences to someone’s family over a coup de grace.

As the distance to target began to decrease at an alarming rate, Yoel laid in a course that would bring his squadron around to their designated attack vector. Already the space around the Tyrant was abuzz with Confederated strike craft, and he could see two other squadrons maneuvering to start their attack runs at the margins of the sensor plot.

“Would you look at that.” Quinn Graves, the pilot of Uriel Six, whistled into his microphone. “Right amidships. Reactor-cracking territory.”

“Clear comms.” Yoel instantly regretted the snappy tension in his voice. This was as near to a routine attack run as one could get in live-fire combat, after all. He had been given plenty of reason to be nervous in the day’s first sortie, but that hadn’t rattled him near as much as this one was already doing.

Taking a few deep breaths to settle his nerves, Yoel keyed his comms again. “All right. We’ll be starting our run in about two minutes. Make your final checks, and report your status. No heroics on this one; if you’ve got any problems, take your rig home.”

Ten green wireframes on Yoel’s display winked blue and then went back to green; nobody was reporting any problems. On a second launch in the same day, this seemed farfetched; something always broke, somewhere. Yoel checked his own diagnostics, then returned his eyes to the turn timer. “Stay in formation. Gunners, keep your eyes and barrels rearward and call out any tails we pick up. There are still Coronachs out here.”

Thirty seconds later, Yoel brought his Magpie around to an intercept course with the wounded Tyrant, and the squadron maneuvered around him without a hitch. They’d never done this sort of synchronized run in a live fire situation, but they’d done it in the sims and on exercises many times, and so far they remained unmolested by the enemy. So far, they were too far out to draw fire, and by the time that changed, they would be most of the way to their launch point.

Yoel switched his comms to the operations broadcast channel. “Fenrir, Hermes, this is Uriel. we are starting our intercept run. What’s your status?”

“Right behind you, Uriel.” The sharp tenor of the Fenrir squadron commander was the first to respond. “Lose about one gee of accel and we’ll pass in front of you to clear the way.”

“One gee down, aye.” Yoel pulled his throttle back and signaled for his compatriots to do the same.

“We’re coming in from the target’s stern.” The scratchy voice must have been the Hermes commander; Yoel had never met him. Hermes was from another hangar outpost. “We’ll come around and do a diving run on your target area just after Fenrir.”

“Understood.” Yoel hoped the Hermes squadron Magpies were clear in time; he didn’t like performing hard-burn maneuvers with his rigs intermixed with another squadron. Collision chances in the black were so small as to be insignificant, but it was just another way people could die unnecessarily on this sortie.

The attack run, being at the Magpies’ maximum acceleration given their current loading, only took about ninety seconds, but those ninety seconds seemed to crawl by. Enemy light laser fire and plasma barrages started to flash through the squadron with twenty seconds to go, but the guns were inaccurate, and too few of them were devoted to dissuading the attack.

At twelve seconds until weapons launch, one of the Uriel gunships took a glancing hit and had to break off its run, but Yoel didn’t have time to pay it any mind. Its pilot and gunners were on their own for the moment. His eyes were fixed on the timer, and his finger rested on the little button that would launch both of his ship-killers. He barely even watched the view ahead; there was nothing he could do about it anyway. Doctrine was to fly as straight as possible and to maneuver as little as possible in the seconds leading up to launch, to achieve an optimal effect. How much this actually mattered for targeting accuracy of the self-guided munitions was the subject of much briefing room speculation.

Whatever the other two squadrons were doing to draw fire and suppress the surviving guns, Yoel couldn’t see any indication it was working, but now, that wasn’t his problem. They were lost in the flashing swirl of strike craft dead ahead.

The timer hit zero, and Yoel pressed the button to fire his weapons. The Magpie jerked to one side, then to the other, as both huge weapons kicked free, spun up their own miniature gravitic drives, and hurtled away. As soon as they were clear, Yoel pulled back hard on his stick, twisting his Magpie away from the target. All around him, the rest of the squadron was doing the same, but he couldn’t see anything of this but the disappearance of munitions indicators from the status panel.

“Uriel actual breaking off. Report twenty launches.” Yoel breathed a sigh of relief, then switched channels back to his compatriots. “Scatter until you’re clear of the point defense, then regroup. Call it out if you catch a tail; Fenrir and Hermes are still in the area.”

So drained was he that Yoel didn’t even remember to watch the rear cameras for impact. Whooping and cheering on the squadron channel reminded him, and he switched on the cameras just in time to see four bright yellow fireballs already fading into the darkness. Four hits was probably enough to put that monster out of commission for good.