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.