Recommended Listening:
Danse Macabre
SS Big Bertha
Hope System, Sector R-11
January 5, 3300
The bohabs’ black armor drank light; the razor edges and metal studs that picked out lines along it gleamed. Blort cowered, hands clutching his console, the control wands of his display lying on the floor where they’d rolled into the corner. The Scumdogians grinned, proud and cocky. He wasn’t sure what their plan was, but he could guess it was going perfectly. And that the big cylindrical casing with writing in Klavonoid Arabic was involved.
“Is the package hooked up?”
“Yeah. Boom, motherfuckers...”
“Boss says we can pull out.”
“We bringing the crew with us?”
“Sure. We’ll find something for them to do.”
Blort had sized up his options pretty quick when the pirates boarded his ship and barged onto the bridge while it was loading its cargo of lunar ore. He didn’t like pirates, especially foreign pirates out to make things even worse in Hope. So quietly, sneakily, he’d decided to at least do a little about it.
They’d been watching him, but not very closely as long as he
seemed to be bringing up the right files for them to steal or take advantage of. So to set up his little goodbye present, he couldn’t talk to the machines, he couldn’t use the normal interface at all without them seeing and burning his brains out. But the raiders hadn’t known about the flexible filmkeys he’d built into the side of the console last year, when the wand sensors had broken down on him. And his panicked clutch placed the fingers of his hands right over it.
Putting instructions into the comm suite without being able to see what his fingers were spelling out was... he honestly wasn’t sure he’d gotten the message right. But it was worth a try. The exact frequency didn’t matter, and spelling wouldn’t either. Just as long as the uptight rocket-jockeys spotted it.
Bohab-aided rebel forces pulled their men off the ore freighter, leaving the massive anti-planetoid bomb ticking in its hold. And on the long, low hyperwave bands, the ones most ships wouldn’t even bother to listen for, a stuttering pulse of contentless carrier wave rippled the subether...
Blort didn’t like Umerians very much either; they pushed almost as bad as Commonwealthers in this stretch of space. But they were sure good at spotting pointless details like signals on frequencies nobody used. He could at least hope their ship would get the message and do something about it. Planetary security was useless on Redrock- what the Nosers wouldn’t ignore, the Westmen would. But a Umerian cruiser
might be listening in on a funny frequency range, you never knew.
Province-class Cruiser Olympia
CIC, Communications Lobe
January 5, 3300
Some ambushes begin with screams. Or explosions. Or “oh no they saw us coming!” This one began with “That’s funny...”
“What?”
“Probably a glitch.” The comms rating glared at his display.
Once he’d gone and checked. Of the thousand-plus commissioned ships of the fleet, only eight were older than
Olympia. Four of those were ‘active-duty’ museum ships or stationary training platforms that hadn’t moved in decades. The fifth was a research vessel assigned to investigate a suspected time warp back in the 29th century- for some reason, SpaceSec still hadn’t given up on hearing back from them for some reason, after over three hundred years.
Spaceman Babanguida had been booted over to the ancient cruiser just in time for
Olympia’s centennial. A hundred years of software updates, patches, revisions, virii, antibody-codes, and probably evil ancestral software ghosts out for revenge on the shades of long-dead programmers. Half the time it amazed him that signals section could get anything out of the cruiser’s sensor suite but dancing purple elephants and marmalade skies.
He was beginning to envy the guys caught in the time warp.
The diminutive petty officer peered around his shoulder. “A glitch? Wh- oh. Down in the astrophysical bands.”
Babanguida turned his head to look at her from a close distance. “It seems to be coming off that slowboat, the ore freighter inbound from the L4 point.”
She took a deep breath. “Use a directional antenna. Look at the freighter, look away. See if the signal goes away.”
“Right... sorry, PO.”
“Long, boring shift, it happens.”
He tried it- turned the antenna onto the sublight cargo ship and got the same meaningless beeps and whoops. Turned away to point in interstellar space- nothing but a faint crackle. Pointed at the local star- big loud crackle.
She looked at him and grinned. “Antenna’s fine, it’s still there, maybe not a ghost after all.”
“That’s the thing, though, there’s nothing but a pulsed carrier wave. Not that you’d get much bandwidth at those wavelengths, but...”
“Not even-”
He pulled up a sidebar. “See that spectrum?”
“Yeah.”
“It pulses on and off a few times a second... but they aren’t telling us anything.”
“Assume it’s not a glitch, what else could it be?”
That was fair, as an exercise- it wasn’t like comms had anything else to do. He thought it over for a minute. “I- no way.
No way.”
“What?”
“Look at that regularity. I’m probably imagining things, but could it the pulses be binary? Shorts and longs? Stupid way to send a message-”
“There could be reasons. Aaaand... always three blanks then five variable lengths.”
“Yeah. GALSCII.”
“Set it up and look it over.”
He did. At least the wobbly expert systems were good for that much- “It’s... repeating. Let me see, what’s a start point that makes sense... um.”
The petty officer took her best guess at what that endless repeating message said. “RVN... AVAY... HVGE... BOMB... That’s it, I’m calling the bridge.”
USS Olympia
Command Bridge
Will Citrin wasn’t the perfect man, not the very model of a Type Four Citizen some ways. The New Technocratic Man probably wouldn’t have gotten this punch-drunk old brawler of a ship anyhow. But he did his job, he loved his ship, and no one would ever accuse him of being slow to react in a crisis.
They certainly wouldn’t say it afterwards.
“Fireship. Sound general quarters. Laser to the ships we came in with, message follows: ‘All shipping, scatter toward low planetary orbit immediately, then hold station on the night side.’ Hyperwave to the locals- their capital, orbit control, and defense centers. Whatever their space raid protocol is, get them doing it. Nav, I want five hundred kilometer standoff from that freighter before they cross the noon line. Guns, warm up the forward pressors. Helm, get ready to redline.”
Olympia stirred, slid past orbital installations. Communication and weather satellites blurred past. The cruiser weaved slightly to keep from catching them in the fringes of her drive field. Citrin checked the plot, shook his head. Nothing populated came to mind, so it didn’t matter.
“Helm, straight on- leave the property damage to me.”
“Pressors locked, sir.”
From this far out? Not bad. “Push back- yaw plus point eight five, engines to maximum burn. Guns, any engines you can get at? Shoot to disable.”
A faint hiss of coolant echoed along the corridors;
Olympia’s flanking laser grids probed along the hull of the local ore freighter, flashing here and there to burn out engine pods. The bulk carrier’s crudely programmed autopilot seized up under asymmetric thrust and the steady push of the warship’s beams of force. The great mass of rock and metal spun until its own drives, welded firmly ‘on,’ began throwing their power back toward the planet. Thrown off course, the heavy vessel began to recede.
“Not a standard type, sir, no confirmation on the control room.”
“Right.” Citrin paused for half a beat.
When precision fails, blow things to pieces. Guns, stand by to fire a spread from the aft tubes, as you bear. Wide angle- saturation pattern. Helm, stand by to roll plus one point seven, pitch plus point six, then maximum burn away from the freighter. Engineering, overcharge power to the aft ventral shields.”
“Yes, sir.” The helmswoman echoed back the commands.
He gave them a moment to set things up, then rapped out the word. “Mark.”
Slower than her little sisters,
Olympia took time to make a quarter turn, more time to angle away and bring her drives to their peak acceleration. The great archaeocruiser gained kilometers on the wreck as seconds passed. It receded into the distance; the ship shivered slightly as the aft torpedo tubes kicked their salvo of twelve back towards the ore freighter.
They might have damaged the bomb, if they’d hit and penetrated the great piles of rocks located in its holds to find it. Might have ruined it, reduced its power to a fizzle.
Might have done, if they'd made it before the raiders detonated the bomb.
Breezy, arrogant armchair commanders may assure each other that blast is a meaningless idea in vacuum. That even a short standoff distance will save hulls from even the mightiest plausible bombs.
Few of these know what modern demolitions are truly capable of, at the high end. And what a high end! For this was no mere thermofusion bunkerbuster, no paltry anti-boulder. This was a bomb formerly made by the Sultanate of Klavostan, to the most exacting standards of the Planoforming Corps. A bomb meant for dispersing unwanted planetoids.
In the absence of planetoids to destroy, the device settled for lashing everything on that side of Redrock’s planetary space. Fiery, hellish light seared across an entire hemisphere, Great swathes of plains ignited, dry ground cover like tinder needing only a moment to flash into flame. Vast chains of mountains suffered swift, invisible, radioactive poisoning, less armored by the planetary atmosphere. Cities survived, bunkers endured.
Originally meant to deliver a mighty, obliterating pulse to the altiplano missile fields of the Neustrian defense net, the fireship detonated farther out, higher up. Armored facilities weathered the attack with only modest damage. Batteries and flash-warded sensors probed skyward on automatic control, their operators still scrambling to work out what was going on.
So many megameters closer in,
Olympia vibrated, hull belling under the blow of some impossible, astrophysical giant. Built to stand up under concentrated beam fire and Shepponuclear bombardment, her brittle, weary old frames still had the margin of safety to take one last shot.
The ship’s lightly armored outer hull heated, crumpled, tore under differential shock. Force-screen generators run far past their limits failed, shorted back into the power grid, wrenched from their moorings and torn open.
Her shock-isolated command bridge weathered the storm; shipboard computer networks on the
Provinces were archaic, but at least as redundant and rugged as on the newer ships of the fleet. Damage reports flowed to him.
“Ventral surface damage... countermissile cells are... down.”
“Shields are offline, breakers blew and we’re having trouble with the backups.”
“Dorsal drive pods are red- trying to rebalance the drive.”
“Auxiliaries?”
“Still working.” Not that that would do them much good- just enough acceleration for orbit changes, not for the kind of mobility they’d need if-
when- the followup attack came on.
When. The old cruiser didn’t have a lot of drone bays for her considerable tonnage, and all but a few of the little robotic sensor/jammer packages were so much half-slagged junk after the blast swept over them. What was left of his sensor suites could still make out the motley swarm of light attack ships charging round the limb of Redrock’s larger moon.
Citrin gave more orders, set up a maneuver on
Olympia’s limping auxiliary drive and remaining thrusters. He prepared damage control teams, fired off messages to the planet and to squadron command. They accelerated in closer, and he gave orders to weaponeers: “Guns, ripple forward torpedoes into the lead wave, wide dispersion. Main battery, point targeting, fire to cripple.”
With his sensors damaged, that was a forlorn hope. Torpedoes had to find the enemy on their own, without guidance from the mothership. Electron beams panned across space, trying to walk onto targets they could barely find, the gunners hoping for lucky strikes that would tell them without doubt where their targets were in the attackers’ haze of jamming. Walls of nuclear flame swept the attack ships, damaging a few- possibly wrecking one or two. The raiders’ attack ships swooped around and by the old cruiser, giant bundles of pumped-beam projectors riddling her plating. The slab-sided core hull shuddered too, now...
Some missiles from the planetary batteries rose after them. Citrin wasn't sure they'd be able to tell
Olympia from the enemy. It probably wouldn't matter.
Corsair-J ELINT cutter CG-84930 “All Ears”
Outskirts of Hope System, Watching Planet Redrock
January 6, 3300
Twinned hyperwave distress beacon, both from the capital of the Neustrian Entente and from the Umerian cruiser visiting the planet,
Arguably, it was too late to do anything- except gather data. A task which the Corsair-J’s array of passive sensors were quite good at, even at a distance of several light hours.
Who knew? Maybe the skipper would order
Oahu and her squadron in to intervene.
“Crosscheck drones are deployed; we can triangulate.”
“Do you think we have the distance right?”
“We have to, everything looks fine over there in sublight. Keep reeling in the subspace take.”
“Not much to record- bands are quiet. I think they’re relying on EM.”
“Do it anyway.”
“I see engine signature.”
“Wait, what?”
“Oh come on, you know they covered this in training. Look at the particle scatter.”
“...I’m an idiot.”
“That’s ‘I’m an idiot,
sir. Heh. It’s all right. Anyway...”
“So what’s Citrin doing there?”
They found out.
“That... was a
big bomb.”
“Do you know if the Hopers have- no, they couldn’t afford a planetary shield. Theater over the cities?”
“Hope so. That, or some curst good gene-fixers.”
“Look there. Attack ships, lightweight- corvette tonnage- error bars pretty high, though, they might be bigger than they look. You see any ordnance?”
“I think we’d see drive flares if they launched. Probably not... I think that wave of lower-acceleration stuff may be fighterweight, mind. All a blur- decent ECM.”
“That’s a lot of them, even so.”
“Yeah, I think we’re looking at some kind of invasion. Probably aimed at the Neustrians.”
“Out of our league.”
“Looks like we’re going to owe them some payback. I’m pretty sure that’s what’s left of
Olympia going in, and we’d have heard from her by now if the ship was still in-system.”
“Damn it...” The clock ticked on.
“Those might be torpedo warheads. Lots of sidescatter.”
“I can’t get a fix on the attack boats.”
“Leave it for signal analysis.”
“Some of them are curving round the planet to pick up the convoy.”
“Look at spectroscopy- they’re shooting something into
Olympia en passant.”
“You and your damn chess metaphors, Fred.”
“Knock it off, you two.”
“Counterfire, that’s got to be reflected Cherenkov we’re seeing.”
“What’s it doing to them downrange?”
“Dunno.”
Minutes passed. The crew of
All Ears logged, analyzed, speculated, observed.
“...Tell me that’s not the fuel bunkers letting go.”
“I’m sorry, Tom.”
“
Damn it.”
“Looks like a couple of the merchant ships got out. They had fewer ships to chase with than targets.”
“Yeah. Check out the spectrum on that drive flare running out to galactic north. I’m guessing Crab heavy haulers. They’re faster than they look with empty holds.”
“At least there’s
someone we can talk to about what happened back there.”
“Crabs.”
“Better than nothing.”
Conductor-class Light Cruiser Pioneer
Sector T-11, HQ Antispinward Convoy Command
January 9, 3300
Rear Admiral Elizabeth Deatherage sat very, very still as the giant allied crab finished repeating his story.
“So yer ship told us ta make for tha night side of tha fuckin’ planet. Then tha muthafuckin’ bomb went off an’ fried our fuckin’ CB, but we saw those fuckin’ boats come round from tha fuckin’ backside of tha fuckin’ moon. So I wasn’t gonna fuck with that, especially with tha fuckin’ warehouse blown up so we couldn’t pick up tha fuckin’ cargo on account of it being fuckin’ vaporized. You got the rest from tha logs.”
“I... see. Thank you for your cooperation, captain. You’ll be compensated for your time, of course.”
“T’anks.”
After an exchange of traditional giant crab pleasantries, the captain departed. The door slid shut, and the slow, ratcheting growl began.
Having the Browncoats- and the perfidious Scumdogs- steal a battlecruiser out from under her nose... she knew it had killed her career. Now she was stuck playing den mother to the Technocracy’s interests- usually disreputable grifters, half way to Browncoats themselves, trying to secure absurd, unconscionable profits from the disorganized peoples of this unclaimed region. Half a dozen sectors full of fools, madmen, grifters, space clowns, gypsy caravans. And other things, stranger, stupider things that defied normal description.
She knew
they had been involved in this. Somehow, she just knew. But she wasn’t entirely without resources- a few more cruisers and frigates, a host of small craft and tenders, some transports and troops. A lot of favors to call in from the locals. A few big, menacing hammers to wave at them too.
Admiral Deatherage would have her revenge.