Category: Story Post

“Order Wallace to break off immediately. They don’t have a thick enough skin, and we can’t afford to lose them to a fighter strike. They’re also slower than us, so if we cut them loose, we can make sure the enemy SDs won’t catch up.” The woman continued to prowl around the edges of the holo tank, eyes glinting from the shifting gleam of reds, greens and blues. “The HAVOCs will make one pass, then join the carrier for immediate withdrawal to Hyperion Hive. We’ve still got some time before their fighters catch up to us. Let’s put it to productive use and get as close to the people they’re trying so hard to protect as we can. Pass the word to Captain Fung that he is to begin preparations to escort the final refugee convoy out to the hyper limit.” “Commodore…” “We’ve lost this one, James. We were never going to get all of their battleships and now with those dreads and their fighter support incoming, they can batter down Priorii’s OWPs. We’ll do what we can, but if we stand… we’ll be destroyed.” She felt sick. We’re supposed to give our lives for the safety of the civilians, not the other way around. “Continue the advance to the enemy’s formation. We’ll force them to keep their attention on us rather than Wallace. I’m betting that they’ll choose us.”

Radio signals propagated at the speed of light, the one limitation of interstellar communication. Contact with outer-system outposts and ships could take hours for a single message and reply and sensors were equally limited, relaying information progressively more outdated to their viewers the further away one was from the object of interest. Hyperspace sensors were the one exception to this rule, which was all well and good for detecting incoming or outgoing vessels moving at supralight speeds, but less so for picking up station-keeping vessels. In simpler terms, this meant that none of the Lefu ships should have had the capability to detect Commodore Archer’s Red Team before they burst into reality two hundred million kilometers behind the aliens’ battle-wall. Natalya leaned forwards in her chair, a forelock of her blood-red hair falling down her scalp, and her blue-green eyes were intent, almost eager. All right, you bastards. Let’s play.

The Scouting Vessel prowled the edges of the Enemy system, listening to the trickle of data coming from the recon drones it had seeded throughout the orbitals. It had watched the Enemy fleet’s arrival two days ago, watched them cluster about the target planet and ferry thousands of the groundside Enemy to what they doubtless perceived to be safety. The Scouting Vessel could have wreaked severe damage on those transports, particularly the last groups where the Enemy had been calling their warships back together. There was no temptation to do so, however. It was not their function and despite however many casualties they could inflict, they would themselves be hunted down and destroyed. It would not be a military victory so much as pointless butchery, anyways. Delicate sensor vanes almost seemed to quiver in anticipation as the brightspace wave of the approaching Fleet elements drew closer. Wait… what was that?

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?