2954-06-17 – Tales from the Service: The Scouts Ahead
Offensive movement appears to be ongoing on the Sagittarius Frontier, but this embed team is not read into the plans that are now in motion. I have left multiple entries of this account of forward scouting operations in the queue at Sagittarius Gate in the event that this action takes us out of Hypercast relay range for more than a week (as it very likely will).
The events described took place early this year, in January or early February, though it landed in my inbox only lately. Likely this is due to operational security concerns, though obviously enemy intelligence knows our ships were poking their noses into an enemy-held system at the time already.
Captian Adele Van Daal gripped one wrist tightly with the other hand behind her back as the display in front of her began to light up with pips. All of them were orange, of course, since they weren’t definite hostiles, but she already knew. That knowledge was one of the few luxuries afforded to a scout group commader. She had complete certainty throughout her patrol that everything but the tight cluster of green indicators in the center of the display was an enemy ship.
Most of them, of course, were bound to be haulers and transports, not warships. System 33 on their patrol route, G5623770, was far off on the left of the front line and significantly behind the enemy frontier, but not so far that anyone could hope it lay on the other side of Incarnation home space. Still, even if one ship in ten visible from that mass was a combat unit, her command was outnumbered three to one.
“Well Captain, we found it.” Lieutenant Manuel Rio, Adele’s assistant in the ship’s combat information center, stared awed at the screen. “The proper hornet’s nest.”
“Seems so, Mr. Rio.” Adele remained motionless, and said nothing else. There was nothing else to do, for the moment. Their arrival could not be unnoticed, but until they had some indication of which ships were the greatest threats, there was no point in setting a course. No, they would sit still until the enemy made the first move, then, as usual, evade at the system margin until the star-drives on the destroyers and frigates in her squadron had recharged, then random-walk a few jumps out and regroup at the pre-arranged fallback point.
In the meantime, every sensor on every hull was trained in-system, marking the orbits of planets, the murmur of comms traffic, the courses of ships, and the heat-signatures of industrial installations. As long as any ship in the squadron made it home, that data would go into Seventh Fleet’s intelligence database, which would be used to press the war toward its inevitable end.
The waiting had been the hardest part when Adele had commanded her first forward war patrol, but that had been nearly three years ago. This was her thirteenth patrol, and spacers’ superstitions about that number aside, she counted each one luckier than the last, as long as it ended back at Sagittarius Gate. There had been close calls where enemy forces had nearly trapped her squadron, like the one the year before, when she’d lost the frigate Zehra MacReady, but that was the risk of scouting patrols.
Her own ship, the crown jewel of the squadron, was a potent fighting ship, but it was one that rarely fired its weapons except in gunnery practice and in its own frantic defense. The offensive firepower of a light cruiser like Krisbeak, though considerable especially when it was supported by smaller ships, was wielded by higher command as a threat, not as a direct weapons platform. Like the cavalry of Old Earth, light cruiser-based formations searched for enemy strong points, and exploitable enemy weaknesses, forcing considerable defense at every point and harassing unprotected supply lines.
That was the theory, anyway. Incarnation supply convoys were rarely discovered. They had some early warning mechanism which Naval Intelligence had not yet countered; even when a route was discovered, most of the expected convoys simply never appeared to be attacked. That left light-cruiser commanders in the scavenger role, roaming the outer reaches of the front, probing defenses, and picking off stragglers withdrawing from larger engagements.
Adele had heard that it had been different in the old days. When she’d been a cadet, in the peace-time navy of the early 2940s, everyone wanted to be in fleet scouting formations, as they were seen as the units which got to do the most daring deeds, to take the most risks, and earn the most glory. Even before the war, however, something had changed. The independent, far-roaming, autonomous light-cruiser squadrons of the fleets were reined in, given timetables, narrow rules of engagement, and strict policy checklists. Those who complained, were banished to commands on the frontiers, far from the glamorous demilitarized-zone patrols on the Hegemony border.
Of course, it had been these disgraced and disgruntled frontier units which had borne the first blows of the war. Many of the hotheaded commanders who’d made a name for themselves in the pirate-hunts and the Brushfire War in the thirties and early forties had vanished into the maelstrom, their ships and lives consumed by the tide of an unlooked-for conflict. Many of them had been Adele’s adolescent heroes.
By the time Adele had earned command rank herself and posted for a transfer to the Seventh, that old guard was gone. Even Bosch, the light-cruiser hero of the Brushfire and miraculous survivor of the early onslaught, had been promoted up to a heavy cruiser, a ship designed to operate in the fleet’s main body with the battlewagons. The forward commands were filled mainly by junior captains now, ambitious risk-takers all, but not of the same caliber as the previous generation. The glamor of light cruisers had vanished into the void between the stars. It was the battle-line, now, the plodding titans, and their grim, silver-haired captains, that the eyes of the Reach rested on.
Adele’s eye fell on a quartet of pips which had already begun to change course since her squadron’s arrival. “We’ve got at least one formation of Tyrants.” The big Incarnation warships, something like heavy cruisers, tended to operate in squadrons of four, which maximized the benefits of their distributed screening arrangement.
“Aye. Marking it.” Rio nodded, his hands dancing on the console in front of him. In a moment, the quartet began to blink red. Somewhere on the hull, one of Krisbeak’s electronic eyes would be wheeling around to get a visual of that group, looking for the long arrowhead-shape of the enemy warships. “That group is too far in-system to get to us before we can jump again.”
“Likely so.” Adele nodded, then tapped a control on her wristcuff. “Squadron, prepare evasive scatter. Initiate on my command.”
It didn’t even gall her anymore that her main job was to order retreats. She knew the math; the enemy had to post enough strength in any system it controlled to repel an unexpected scouting squadron, otherwise, her squadron could quite easily wreck the system’s infrastructure before a nearby garrison could scramble to respond. If Nate was prepared, there wasn’t much to gain in fighting him.
