Tales from the Service: Sagittarian Silence Broken

2948-02-25 – Tales from the Service: Sagittarian Silence Broken

Marty wasn’t alone.

For several exultant seconds, this simple fact, demonstrated on every functional display on the bridge, paralyzed him with both joy and horror. He had been alone ever since Terence Morey had been attacked by a swarm of mysterious strike-craft analogues deep in the Sagittarius Frontier, killing the other ten members of its crew – the chronometric system insisted that it had been a year, though Marty still suspected this was in error.

Directly ahead, just beyond the nameless system’s jump limit, a host of vessels – broadcasting proper, verified Confederated Navy FFI codes – maneuvered to recover whatever formation they had been in prior to their star drive jump. Almost all the vessels were warships that dwarfed a little colonial pathfinder like Morey, but smaller vessels swarmed protectively around the big cruisers and destroyers, preparing for an attack at any moment.

“Good.” Marty glanced at the status board, where vast sections of Morey were shown only as dim grey outlines. Out there, in the evacuated crew cabins, the builder-drone hangar, the mess, and the recreation module, the corpses of his ten crewmates bore silent testimony to the suddenness with which the seeming peace of the Sagittarius Frontier could be broken.

All at once, alarms began wailing all across the bridge. Marty poked at the command station’s small control panel and dismissed several of them, but the ship – designed for a bridge crew of four – seemed to mock its lone operator with a cascade of information no single man could make sense of.

Marty hopped out of the chair at the command console and darted between the other three stations, trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the crippled ship this time. He found that the loudest two seemed to come from the helm station, and specifically from the navcomputer, which Marty – hired on as the assistant builder-drone technician – had never been trained to use.

Fortunately, at least one of the alarms – the collision alarm – was rather self-explanatory. One of the ships in the just-arrived armada evidently had set a collision course with Terence Morey. That, Marty knew, was something the navcomputer would fix on its own, it just preferred very much for a human member of the crew to choose a new course. The other was something called a noncombatant exclusion zone alert – Marty had never seen that one before, and didn’t see any easy way to fix it.

Hopping to the comms board, Marty noticed that the next alarm was for an incoming comms channel. It hadn’t occurred to him until that moment that the big fleet cruisers or their attendants had noticed him. The thought of talking to someone after so long threatened to paralyze him once more, but Marty screwed the board’s earpiece into his ear before he could second-guess this decision.

“Repeat, you have thirty seconds to comply.” A gruff voice was barking impatiently. “Spike your drive immediately or be fired upon.”

Fired upon? Marty clawed the earpiece out of his ear in alarm. He hadn’t considered the possibility that the Navy would be hostile. It had been almost eighteen months since Morey had left Maribel on its mission – what could have happened in that time for Navy squadrons to start firing on civilian contractors? Should he turn the ship around and make a run for the in-system and try to escape, or spike his drive as they suggested? They were people after all – people Marty didn’t know, each of them with their fingers poised over an unbelievable array of weapons controls. If he did as they said, anything might happen.

Another channel lit up on the comms board. Hesitantly, Marty picked up the earpiece again and switched to the new channel.

“Terence Morey, power down your drive.” This voice, though demanding the same thing, did it in a far calmer way. “We see your damaged condition and are equipped to affect repairs.”

Marty’s heart soared at the kindly tone and promised assistance. Would they really repair Morey? “Powering down engines.” Marty replied before tearing out the earpiece and diving toward the helm console. Only after he was halfway through the command entry did he realize he hadn’t transmitted his reply.

At last, he finished entering the commands to power down the gravitic drive, and Morey entered a ballistic drift. As soon as he had confirmation, Marty hurried back to the comms station. This time, he remembered to select a channel and press the “transmit” button.

“Drive is spiked.” Marty had often talked to himself in the past year, but now that he was talking to someone, he was horrified at how cracked and high-pitched his voice sounded.

The calm-voice returned a moment later. “Morey, we confirm. Slave your helm to our coordinator, and we’ll bring you in to dock with Arrowhawk for repairs.”

Marty frowned. He wasn’t sure how to do that, and would need to consult the manuals in the archive. “Give me a moment to do that. You see, we’re a bit short-staffed over here…”

Terence Morey returned from the Sagittarius Frontier a few days ago, limping into Maribel orbit with five people aboard. Martin Westland, her only surviving original crewman, brought the ship in with the help of four crewmen from the Arrowhawk scouting force, which commandeered the ship after repairing it in order to bring reports and data streams related to this scout squadron’s situation in Sagittarius. In addition to Arrowhawk’s original squadron, Captain Bosch seems to have gathered together a number of civilian vessels found in the region, and managed to keep his ships going by pillaging the supply reserves of a few incomplete orbital habitats.

Evidently, there are enough Tyrants in the region that Bosch was avoiding combat; his ships have only limited missile stocks, and his reports state that he wanted to reserve them for an engagement that would be meaningful to the final war effort.

Of course, Morey departed the lost squadron only six weeks after contact with Sagittarius was finally lost – Bosch’s reports do state that he has no confidence in the long-term survivability of his force. There is some hope the squadron survives today, but I think that this possibility is remote at best.

Despite the likelihood that Bosch is dead or captured at this point, Naval Intelligence has published large sections of the report data to the datasphere. It seems Bosch is trying to do in Sagittarius what Incarnation ships in the Coreward Frontier have been so successfully doing – disrupting supply routes and industry. Incarnation bases seem to have sprung up on several worlds previously surveyed for Confederated colonization, and Bosch had by the date of his dispatch already struck one of these outposts, and had plans to attack more. While probably not having the same impact on their war effort as their attacks have on ours, Bosch is almost certainly diverting forces which otherwise would make the job of defending the Frontier settlements even harder.

Details

Tales from the Service: A Spacer's Hell

2948-02-18 – Tales from the Service: A Spacer's Hell

Though the skirmishing in Matusalemme continues this week, and there are many stories of action and close scrapes with the enemy in that system, the Cosmic Background embed team always try to bring something interesting to the audience with Tales from the Service, something they wouldn’t necessarily see in the usual vidcast programming our organization and others provide. Others will cover the moves and countermoves as the Navy tries to wrest control of the system back from the Incarnation – in the meantime, the team here aboard Saint-Lô has been busy verifying a few other stories sent to us since the fighting there kicked off.

This week, all throughout the Frontier, colonies have been beefing up their ground-side defenses while the Navy installs orbital systems on the most likely targets. With the Frontier Defense Army shipping its first troops – mainly construction units, with combat troops still being trained – to the worlds nearest Adimari Valis, preparing to make the Incarnation’s next move far easier to counter. Many of these advanced detachments have been sent to the Frontier’s most valuable worlds, but some find themselves in the strangest of places. Raya Frank’s engineering team found its way to Mudiwa, the closest inhabited system to Matusalemme. The fertile world is beautiful and, unfortunately for Raya, its ecology is not completely explored even by the few thousand settlers who live there. To a born and raised spacer like her, used to the clean, sterile corridors of stations and starships, Mudiwa is perhaps among most unpleasant places imaginable, and though what she experienced would be no serious hardship to Nojus, it resulted in her resigning from the FDA as soon as the mission was over.

“Something’s coming!” Raya shook Gulbrind’s shoulder urgently – at least, she tried to. His huge, heavy arm didn’t move at all.

“Raya, go back to sleep.” It was Ishita, across the shell-tent, who she had awakened. “You remember the ecology brief.”

Raya did, and that knowledge did not comfort her in the least. Mudiwa’s large, slow-moving grazers shook the earth as they plodded through the arboreal nightmare beyond the tent’s sealed door, oblivious to the presence of humans. One might step on the shelter at any moment, crushing the three FDA engineers inside quite easily. Perhaps Gulbrind’s iron bones and sturdy quills might inconvenience such a behemoth, but only briefly.

Raya had been born in a can-city orbiting Jupiter, and had not seen the surface of any living world except heavily populated Earth until she was twenty. In a moment of what she later regarded as temporary insanity, she had stepped away from a comfortable job overseeing the construction of orbital spaceports for new colonies to join the Frontier Defense Infantry, and in another moment of spectacularly bad luck, she had pulled an assignment to the shrieking, fetid hellscape of Mudiwa, a planet she hadn’t even heard of until that assignment. Close to fallen Adimari Valis, the world

Her two team-members, of course, thought very differently. Gulbrind thought the world’s complex ecology merely interesting, but Ishita somehow managed against all odds to fall in love with many of the hideous specimens that thundered, scurried, darted, and fluttered among the huge trees. They seemed to treat the week-long trek to mark the best sites for defensive anti-orbital batteries around the muddy little colony outpost as a bucolic vacation rather than an unpleasant but necessary part of the war effort.

Of course, the war wasn’t personal for either of them, not yet. Raya’s uncle had been working on a Xenarch dig-site on Adimari Valis, and had not made it off-planet before the invading counterhumans had stopped the evacuation. She didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. Would he would return at the next family holiday, grinning and telling a new story of Frontier close-scrapes, or would his corpse never be found, laser-charred and left to rot among the sun-baked rocks of the Adimarian uplands?

Another thundering footfall, like the one which had awakened Raya, shook the shell-tent. The treetrunk-legged beast was, Raya decided, no more than ten meters away, and getting closer. Again, she tried to shake Gulbrind awake.

“Hells and sunfire, Raya.” Ishita threw back her thin bedroll covers and sat up in the dimly lit shelter. “We’re not going to get stepped on.”

She had been assured this many times during the previous few days, but still didn’t believe it. “You don’t know that for sure. Those things have braincases smaller than my palm. The tent probably looks like a boulder to them.”

“Go out and look if you want.” Ishita picked up the team’s lone bolt rifle, checked its safety and battery, and handed it to Raya. “But if you let any of those damn stirgerays into the tent-”

“I know, I know.” Raya shrugged the weapon’s strap over her shoulder, then carefully unlatched the door, which rolled up under its own spring tension. Hopping over the lip, she quickly pressed it back into place until the latch clicked once more, certain that none of the hated nocturnal bloodsuckers had gotten inside the shelter.

Another footfall crashed through the underbrush, and though it didn’t sound quite so close this time, Raya still spun around and brought the bolt rifle up. The weapon made a bright flash and would at least sting and scare the big native herbivores. Standard ferroceramic railgun slugs from their usual sidearms would hurt them more – enough to make the beasts angry, but unfortunately not quite enough to kill them.

Something moved in the shadows, something large enough for its silhouette to pass behind several trees. Raya stepped forward, not willing to risk a light, but also not able to see which end of the beast was the head. If it was heading away, she knew, it was best to leave it alone – but if it was coming closer, the bolt rifle could dissuade it from blundering into the team’s shelter.

Raya was convinced the stupid brutes had just enough neurons to be malicious. They had not gone a night yet without having several of them wander nearby, shaking the ground and making sleep difficult. It was as if they knew that the team’s mission would mean an invasion of their grazing range by large machines constructing hardened weapons installations and roads connecting them to the landing pads outside the colony town. Only by accidentally crushing the surveyors into the leaf-litter could they postpone this rendezvous with Terran industry.

The glint of beady eyes in a thick-necked, beak-mouthed head peeked out of the shadows, and Raya drew a bead with the bolt rifle. The big beast was facing toward her, though it was no longer moving. Its dull gaze seemed locked on the engineer and her weapon.

“Go away, you stupid animal.” Raya whispered over the stock of the energy gun. She didn’t want to shoot it, though that was more because she didn’t know which way it would flee from the flash and stinging pain of an artificial bolt of lightning.

The moment dragged on, and Raya realized at length that the big herbivore, frozen and wary, wasn’t actually staring at her. With a sinking feeling of dread, she lowered the rifle and turned slowly around.

Looming over the shelter, Raya saw a pair of eyes, much larger and gleaming dull yellow in the pale starlight, rise above the stiff but only too thin walls of the tent. The beast’s head rose further, until a long maw filled with intermeshing teeth, slightly open and dripping with whitish saliva, also came into view. The beast was smaller than the big herbivore, but not by very much, and certainly far larger than the trio’s quadwalker.

The ecological briefing had mentioned that the big herbivores had predators of course, but the specimens they had warned about were carnivorous flora, not ambulatory hunters. Whatever the toothy head belonged to, Raya knew, would not be any more injured by the beam rifle than its prey. Her only hope of survival was the fact that tastier prey stood only thirty meters away.

The predator and the herbivore stared at each other in silence for many long seconds, each ignoring the human completely. Raya dared not move, lest that call the predator’s attention or spook the prey – neither would bode well for her own survival.

“Raya, what are you doing out there?” Ishita fumbled at the door latch inside the shell-tent. “This is ridiculous.”

“Shut up, Ish.” Raya hissed, glancing at the tent. “There’s something…”

When she looked up, the yellow-eyed predator’s head had vanished. Whirling, Raya looked at the herbivore – its dark eyes stared warily at, and past, the shelter, but it was clear that it, too had lost track of its hunter.

Raya darted to the door and forced her way inside, nearly knocking Ishita to the ground. Closing the latch with trembling hands, she dove into her own bedroll, hugging the bolt rifle. Neither the tent nor the bed would protect her if the local predator returned, and she knew it – but she knew something else. She was safe from the big, toothy predator simply because she was insignificant - too small for it to waste energy on.

“What’s wrong, Raya?” Ishita tried and failed to pry the weapon from Raya.

Raya shook her head and hugged the gun tighter. “I hate this place. I hate it so much.”

Details

Tales from the Service: A Surprise Strike

2948-02-11 – Tales from the Service: A Surprise Strike

Though skirmishing continues in Matusalemme, it seems that the enemy holds the inner system for the moment. Oddly, they seem content to leave the Navy’s new HyperCast relay in the system alone; perhaps they suspect the relatively light force defending the installation is a trap. For all we know back here, it might well be.

The nearly-depopulated spaceport capitol of Adimari Valis is in Incarnation hands, and while I’m certain the scattered armed forces on the ground are still holding out in the planet’s notoriously rugged terrain, there seems no realistic way of reaching them in time. Short of the whole Fifth Fleet going in to take the system back to save perhaps ten thousand holdouts, it seems their best bet is to lie low and subsist as best they can. The Incarnation can only hold the system as long as the bulk of its cruiser force remains on station there, after all – in a few months, they’ll likely be forced to withdraw. Those brave souls on the ground there will be, in the meantime, in our prayers.

This week’s entry was sent in by Lieutenant Frans Salvi, a strike pilot engaged in the fighting in Matusalemme. In the deadly strike-wing sparring between his Magpie squadron and Incarnation Coronachs, losses have been quite heavy on the Confederated Navy side. The objective for the Navy strike pilots has been the stream of boxy, sluggish logistics haulers which the Incarnation fleet is shuttling to and from Adimari Valis under escort, carrying troops, weapons, and machinery to reinforce their groundside detachment. Obviously, the Incarnation is doing its best to protect these vulnerable assets, as the fleet at Matusalemme is at the end of a long supply line stretching back to the Sagittarius Arm.

[N.T.B. - The tactic described here has been used sufficiently many times in Matusalemme in the last few weeks that Naval Intelligence expects the Incarnation has figured it out by now.]

Frans Salvi had no way of knowing whether his squadron was still there, drifting in a loose cloud in the empty space outside his canopy. His Magpie was drifting without power, even its atmospherics disabled to minimize waste heat radiating off the hull. Breathing only with the aid of his flight suit’s own reserve oxygen, he could only watch the timer on his wrist display tick down toward the calculated time of intercept.

Most likely, when his little ship came alive, it would find itself in yet another patch of empty Matusalemme space, surrounded by nothing but the stellar wind and the other Magpies in the squadron. Launched from their mothership’s hangar cradles during a high-gee maneuver, the squadron had been cleverly catapulted onto a pre-calculated flight path across the system, timed carefully to intercept a convoy of two Incarnation haulers heading for the jump limit at the far edge of the system. Unfortunately, with all the Magpies shut down, there was no way to know if the maneuver had put them on the right course, or if the Incarnation convoy had divined the purpose of the wild maneuvers of one of the Confederated Navy cruisers skulking around the system and altered course. All Frans could do was watch the timer on his wrist, exchange sparse conversation with his gunners, and prepare to start up the ship on schedule.

“Bet you we’re on target.” Kosuke Ragno, the portside gunner, said for perhaps the fifteenth time.

“Hells, Rags, would you stop saying that?” Zahir Stevens, lazing in the starboard gunnery harness, had long since lost patience with the repeated assertion. “Nobody’s taking your bet.”

By the numbers, Frans knew he should have taken Ragno’s bet the first time he’d offered it. It seemed an easy way to earn quick credits, or a few drinks at his gunner’s expense. Still, he held his silence. The computer had put their chances of being on target below thirty percent in the pre-mission briefing, but something about the crushing jolt of their launch had felt inexplicably correct. “Fifty seconds to start-up. Run final checks back there. No telling what broke in seventeen hours without heat.”

As the two gunners began powering up the tiny power cells that gave life to their consoles and diagnostic equipment, he switched on a trickle of power from the main batteries to start his own sequence. The Magpies for the strike had been modified for the mission, but not enough to rob him of the familiarity of Jenny Red’s usual character. His ship had seen its three crew through the war safely so far, and it would, he knew, bring him home once more, no matter what surrounded her when the power-up sequence started the flow of sensor data.

“Green board here, Lieutenant.” Stevens reported.

Ragno finished his checks a moment later. “I’ve got a few warnings, but nothing serious.”

“Cockpit board is clear.” Frans switched off the battery power to the diagnostic system, and his console once again went dark. There were only six seconds left. “Start-up in five.”

The timer hit zero, and Franz yanked the master start switch. With a whine trailing off into a high-pitched hum, the little ship’s reactor began to burn, and power flooded through all systems. Normally, a Magpie took almost ten minutes to complete a cold start, but the techs had rigged Jenny Red and the rest of the squadron for a crash start. The process would take only a few seconds, but it would, he was assured, put several missions worth of wear on most of the systems.

Almost immediately, data began flooding into the console displays before they had finished warming up from the chilly equilibrium of interplanetary space. “Contact.” Frans was almost more surprised at his own surprise than the data flooding in. “Less than a hundred klicks. Damn, they pulled it off. One Tyrant leading a pair of haulers. No strike in sight.”

Ragno whooped into the intercom, and Frans winced at the noise. The control column appeared out of the center console, and he grabbed it, tapping the thrusters to spin the Magpie in place. The ship’s tiny A-grav axis was the only system which the techs couldn’t speed up – it would take more than a minute to finish coming online, jump-started by a disposable battery bolted under the gunship’s belly. Until then, he had to be careful not to accelerate or decelerate too fast, lest he turn himself and the gunners into smears of organic paste soaked into their crash-harnesses.

As the strike ship turned, the distortion halos of a trio of gigantic gravitic drives warped the background stars. “Target acquired. Talos units, report status and form up.”

The squadron’s nine other gunships, coming online at almost the same instant, appeared on the status panel, each showing some variation of not-quite-full operational effectiveness. Still, the squadron had come through well enough, and they had caught Nate napping. There wasn’t time to pause and make repairs to cold-damaged or vacuum-welded components.

Without waiting for the squadron to coalesce, Frans nudged the throttle forward. Even a tiny percentage of maximum thrust crushed him back into his restraints at several gees, so he pulsed the main drive in fitful bursts to begin to match velocity with the convoy, ignoring the creaking restraints and aching in his joints that accompanied each burst. In a few minutes, the cruiser in the lead would scramble Coronachs – every second counted.

As the A-grav axis warmed up, he could push the throttle more and more before he felt the acceleration. Soon, he was rushing toward the trailing vessel of the convoy at a reassuringly terrifying speed more appropriate to strike-craft combat. “Odd Talos units target the leading hauler, even units target the one behind.” Being Talos One, he adjusted course to the forward vessel. The ungainly cargo and personnel carriers were nothing like the sleek, elegant cruiser which protected them – they looked crude and misshapen. “Arm hullbreakers.”

The even group, arrowing toward the nearer, trailing hauler, reached their target first. A series of “Munitions Away” notice-cards appeared on the status board, and the smart-glass view-panel highlighted the course and location of each of the big, slow hullbreaker missiles along with the vessels that launched them. A few scattered point defense lasers stitched the darkness, chasing the Magpies and their missiles, but at least one hullbreaker got through. A moment later, accompanied by the staccato flash of low-yield fission warhead, the ship simply came apart, its internal hull structures glowing furiously.

Frans tore his attention away from the wreck. Stevens had already armed Jenny Red’s lone hullbreaker, and the launch button glowed on the side of the control column. The second vessel, having gathered data from the demise of the first, would be better at picking off the vulnerable munitions. “Hold missiles on the first pass.” He sent. “Work over their point defense.”

“Talos lead, Coronachs incoming!”

There wasn’t time to check which pilot had sent the alert. A full cruiser full of Coronachs was more than ten Magpies could handle. “Scratch previous order. Dump hullbreakers at optimum range and let’s get out of here.”

The remaining gunships reached launch range and launched their payloads. Frans held his a second longer, then touched the launch button, and he felt Jenny Red lurch as the big missile lumbered away. The gunners fired streams of railshot ahead of it, though this had little chance of intercepting any point defense beams. As soon as he had verified the missile’s lock-on, Frans pulled away. The Coronachs would chase them for some distance, but a Magpie’s railguns could fire in any direction, the fragile Incarnation interceptors had no long-range weapon to counter with. A stern chase was, in fact, the only engagement in which the Magpie had a clear advantage over the Coronach, even when wildly outnumbered. After a few minutes of chase to dissuade another attack, they would return to their hangars.

“No joy, Lieutenant.” Ragno’s voice seemed all scowl, and it persuaded Frans to look at the tactical sensor display. Sure enough, the second hauler proceeded serenely onward, apparently undamaged. Its point defense had swatted all five hullbreakers.

“Next time, Rags.” Frans assured his crew-mate, staring at a rear-facing camera display, in which the hauler’s distortion halo still glowed. “He’ll come back loaded to the gills, and we’ll be here waiting for him.”

Details

Tales from the Service: A Knife in the Back

2948-02-04 – Tales from the Service:

I’m sure all of you are already familiar with the Navy’s data (what has been released at any rate) about the engagement in Matusalemme, contesting the colony of Adimari Valis. Obviously, the news isn’t good. Though the Incarnation force in the area lacks any ships on the scale of our battleship units (its battle line is composed of between fifteen and twenty Tyrant heavy cruisers), it seems to have driven off a mixed Fifth Fleet detachment centered around the dreadnoughts Hercules and Pericles with only minor losses.

Losses for the Fifth Fleet were not so heavy, as a percentage of forces engaged, as they were at the Battle of Berkant, but this Battle of Bodrogi still resulted in significant damage to both of the big battlewagons engaged, in addition to the total loss of two heavy cruisers, Mannerheim and Okayinka. Losses to the lighter fleet units was limited, except that a heavy toll was taken from strike squadrons.

Though some datasphere commentators have decided to use the results of the battle to stoke fear among their audience, I will point out that there are some bright points in this mess. The Incarnation is still incapable of destroying a Confederated battlewagon, which indicates that they will have trouble dealing with the heavy orbital defense installations present at some of the more populous Frontier worlds like Maribel and Håkøya. The Confederated fleet was not driven from the system entirely, and skirmishes between light units continue until the moment of this writing as Confederated Magpies and Palmettos attempt to reach the big, lumbering troop and supply carriers in orbit over Adimari Valis, intercepted by Coronach squadrons. With both mercenary and Confederated forces buying the colony several weeks, almost eighty percent of the planet’s population was evacuated before a single Incarnation boot touched the dusty ground.

The strangest bit of the battle, and the snippet which the Navy has given us access to relate to the audience in this week’s Tales from the Service, is the loss of the cruiser Carl Gustaf Mannerheim – it was not lost to enemy gunfire.

Captain Chinwe Abel threw himself into one of the crash-padded restraint chairs in Carl Gustaf Mannerheim’s combat intelligence center as the salvo of missiles bored in on his ship, feeling the automatic restraints snake over his torso to hold him in place.

Somewhere beyond the vast bulk of the cruiser, railguns chattered out cones of white-hot rail slugs into the path of the incoming ordinance, and the point defense system, seizing control of every multipurpose laser that could be brought to bear, was ready to slag the projectiles with coherent light. The ship’s screening projectors had absorbed a few hits, but they were still functioning at near peak efficiency, and the helm was already dialed in for last-second evasive maneuvers to throw off the aim of the missiles’ shaped fission warheads. Mannerheim’s protective trio of point defense frigates threw up their own clouds of railshot and spat clusters of countermissiles, but they could only do so much.

The timer ticked down to one second, and the world around Captain Abel was wrenched in several directions and spun on its head. Even with the inertial isolation of the ship’s A-grav axis, he felt at least six effective gees alternately crush him into the padding and hurl him against the restraints.

Two new alarms began to wail as the restraints slithered back into the chair, but Abel knew the moment his feet were back on the deck that his ship had escaped serious damage. The subtle hum of the ship’s drive was still there, strong and healthy, and there was no distant roar of a massive pressure-hull breach. “What’s our status?” He called, knowing the damage-control chief would be ready with the answer.

“Screens took the worst of it, Captain. We lost some hull plating and fire control to two light railgun batteries.” Chief Nathans responded, the calm in his gruff voice reassuring Abel more than the content of his report.

The minor miracle didn’t conceal the fact that things were not going well in Matusalemme. The fleet detachment sent to chase away the Incarnation had tried to soften the enemy cruisers up with long range missile and heavy railgun fire, but the faster enemy ships had closed the distance with only two of their nearly twenty ships forced to drop out of formation.

The odds, favorable at long range, should have still been even in a general melee, but somehow the damnable Nate crews were able to keep their mutually supporting screening projectors aligned on each other even through close-range maneuvers. The whole formation seemed to maneuver as one graceful unit, rather than two dozen hulls each a hundred klicks from its neighbors. By comparison, the heavy cruisers and dreadnoughts at the core of the Confederated formation seemed clumsy and fractured. Already, Okayinka was faltering and Vespacian was falling out of line with damage to its main drive.

The big sibling battlewagons, though taking at least as much punishment, were faring a bit better – Hercules was trading fire to its own advantage with the nearest Tyrant, and Pericles had forced away a ship closing in to finish off Vespacian, riddling it along its length with its heavy rail-cannon.

“Gunnery, concentrate on Hercules’s target.” Abel drew a ring around the insubstantial mote in the three-dimensional display. The battleship, designed for long-range combat, didn’t have very many close-range weapons, but Mannerheim was another story. Shortly, the ship’s heavy plasma cannons locked onto the target.

The gouts of self-contained, superheated ions took only a few seconds to race to the Tyrant, and those that didn’t fizzle out in the complex spatial shear of the enemy ship’s screening fields tore up huge swaths of the big ships’ heavy plating and chewed up the machinery and men beneath. The Tyrant faltered, falling out of formation, and the next few shots from the battleship’s big cannons nearly tore it in half. Abel might have cheered, but at almost the same instant, wounded Okayinka met a similar fate.

A chirp told Captain Abel that there was an update on the fleet control band. As he examined the new orders on the display, Mannerheim trembled, its plating once again absorbing a hit. Admiral Mhasalkar  had evidently decided that his fleet could not afford to trade heavy ships on a one-for-one basis. The order was for the heavy units to withdraw back toward the jump limit, forcing the enemy to either break off pursuit, switch to engaging the lighter fleet units, or be whittled away at close range during the whole pursuit by dozens of frigates and destroyers.

Balling his hands into helplessly frustrated fists, Abel relayed the order to the helm, watching on the display as the ship’s gunners concentrated their plasma weapons on another Tyrant, doing little damage but forcing it to move out of range. As it did, the missile bays unleashed a salvo of their own, the tiny needle-icons fanning out before homing in on the retreating ship.

Abel never saw if the salvo did any damage. The CIC display flickered, then blinked out, leaving him blind in semidarkness. “Bridge, I’ve lost tactical display. What’s going on?”

There was no response. The ship’s drive still hummed, but the silence on the comms channel was deafening. Turning to one of the hard-line terminals in the compartment, Abel keyed in a new channel to the other command centers of his ship. “Comms are down and I’ve lost tactical display. Are we still on course?”

“Computer core is down!” Chief Nathans barked. “Slagged by some sort of timed incendiary. The backups too. Going to have to vent these compartments to deal with the fire.”

“Sabotage?”

“You can go all in on that bet, Captain.”

“Dammit.” Without any centralized computer system, every part of the ship would revert to manual control. The ad-hoc datasphere created by the crew’s various smaller digital devices might barely be enough to limp away, but without computer coordination, the point defense system couldn’t possibly swat incoming missiles, and evasive action was all but impossible.

Finally, someone on the bridge patched themselves in. “I’m reading laser strikes on the screens. We’re at the back of the line. Frigates are doing their best, but-”

At that moment, the reassuring hum of the main drive faltered. “Main drive losing power!” Someone shrieked.

Captain Abel cursed under his breath. His ship had just received a full atmospheric system overhaul at Håkøya – dozens of Navy and civilian techs had swarmed through every part of the ship, clambering into crawlspaces and suiting up to ramble through the unpressurized portions of her hull. Evidently, the fast-growing Naval outpost in that system did not have the same tight security as the Core Worlds installations. “Any prayer of getting acceleration back?”

“Not in time.” The damage control chief sounded as heartbroken as his captain felt.

Abel took a deep breath, then, in light of the dozen-odd Tyrant cruisers bearing down on his stricken ship, gave the order no starship captain ever relished. “All hands, abandon ship. Repeat, abandon ship immediately.”

If the computer had been functioning, it would have blared out this order in every compartment, but without it, Abel knew he had to rely on his crew to carry that message to any compartment not yet connected to the ad-hoc datasphere. Even so, there would inevitably be some left behind.

There was one more unpleasant task to perform before he ran for the launch bay or the escape-pod banks with everyone else. Producing a data-key lanyard from his pocket, Abel plugged it into the terminal in the command center. Its screen lit up with a very simple interface which could issue only one command. “Chief, I’m arming for self-destruct.”

“Confirmed from here. Make it ten minutes.”

Abel keyed in the indicated time, then winced as he pressed the red button on the terminal’s face. There was no fanfare to the act of instructing his ship to scuttle itself – the computer, though not responsible for self-destruct itself, would have been responsible for the screeching self-destruct alarm. “It’s done, Chief. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

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