Category: Science Fiction

Gold Four, known as Glaive to its four-man (and one woman) crew, was a member of the 211th, the HAVOC carrier squadron assigned to the Willam Wallace and was in the thick of it now. Traditionally, each BCV had 10 squadrons of 16 HAVOCs, two of which were the CHAVOC and its deputy, each flying an 80-ship wing. This meant that a HAVOC strike force could divide its attention to some degree without losing vital command and control functions. Currently, the 211th was putting that theory to the test.

“What are our losses?” Castlewick asked. A former serviceman himself, he’d toured aboard the Dominant during the war with the League until an Empty battleship’s broadside ripped both his legs off at the knees. By the time the replacements had grown in and his physical therapy was complete, the war was over. Johanen answered the Foundationist’s question.“Militarily, we’ve lost all of TF 93 and every orbital and groundside asset in those systems. Civilian; we don’t know. Tebrinnin and Unicorn Alpha were nuked from orbit, but at last report all other civilian installations were intact. We have no idea if that’s still true. Worst-case estimates put the death toll up to twenty-four million.”

Foraker shook off his woolgathering, returning to the task at hand. “Have you heard anything about what’s happening further into the Reaches?” Natalya frowned, the gesture causing an ever-impudent lock of deep red hair to slip out from under her beret. “I’ve heard rumours about losing contact with several star systems, but nothing outside of your original missive, sir.” Her patron nodded. “Ah. It’s a bit more complex than that, actually.” He nodded towards an aide. “Play the Resolute footage, please.” A sudden brittleness touched Archer’s expression as something cold sunk its way into her gut. Resolute was one of the battlecruisers assigned to TF 93. Timothy Malfinch was her captain; they’d served their midshipman tours together. One of the wall-screens shifted from a 2D display of the space around Hyperion Prime to grainy footage from a battlecruiser’s recon drone. Telemetry scrolled past the right side of the screen in ghostly red letters. “This clip is from the data Resolute uplinked to her hyper drone before she went Code Black,” Foraker commented, confirming Natalya’s worst fears. Code Black was a warship’s death knell, a failsafe transmission that indicated its complete destruction. “Included in the data recovered were the Code Blacks of the entirety of the forces available to Rear Admiral Hernandez at Unicorn Set.”

“Here they come,” someone whispered as the data resolved itself onto Mahan’s holo tank. Hernadez rubbed the five o’clock shadow on his chin. Twenty-one capital ships; two squadrons of seven... cruisers? light cruisers? each and one final group of battlecruisers. At least, he assumed that they were battlecruisers; they were larger than Concordat BCs, but too small to be dreadnoughts. Battleships, then?

The Commanders of the Strike Fleet element were not altogether pleased; they would have liked to at least scout the Enemy Base before launching an attack upon it. They had no idea of the forces currently there, their location in-system, state of readiness, amount of non-military shipping or how best to deploy as a result. However, they did understand the need for urgency, but haste would do them very little good if the Enemy were able to escape and warn their own Command Structure. Well. There was nothing to be done for it. In less than a day, they would be upon the Enemy once more, hopefully before they were prepared. Still, even if they were, they didn’t have anything that could slow down, much less defeat, the Strike Fleet element.

“Contact. We have an incoming hyper wake.” Captain Mahfuj al-Imad frowned at the unexpected comment. “Bearing?” he demanded of his sensor operator. “Coming down the corridor, sir.” The destroyer’s skipper leaned forward in his chair, momentarily confused. The next dispatch boat from Unicorn Set wasn’t due for another two days, the Hadley-Wright scouting force wasn’t excpected back for another three months and there was nothing on the shipping schedule for the next week. You could say a lot about the Empties, but they kept accurate timetables. Of course, they didn’t have as many ships to keep track of as the Concord did. Still, it wasn’t impossible for something to have slipped through the cracks and arrive unannounced – naturally expecting Mahfuj and his small squadron to run them through customs as quickly as possible.