With the decision to take Abigail’s job made, all that remained was to take on supplies, board the new crew, and interview their last potential crewmate. There was a bit of a delay due to needing to wait for Abigail to wrap up the last of her own preparations first, as she had requested to be present for the event. A day passed as Miliam and Aoibhe accepted orders of food and other consumables and stored them in the cargo bay or staged them in their final destinations around the ship.
Miliam was a bit surprised to find the food came in refrigerated crates, but that was beside the point.
Just before the twins and Engineer were set to arrive, Abigail came aboard with the weapons officer candidate she had referred to them. They met in the lounge, with Aoibhe and Miliam on one side of the table and Abigail on the other with her friend.
“Miliam, Aoibhe, meet Tessa Smith. Tessa, this is the captain, Miliam, and this is Aoibhe, her pilot and second in command,” Abigail introduced once everyone was seated. Miliam looked the woman over and was a bit surprised at what she saw.
Tessa was just slightly taller than Miliam, and yet, she shared many features with Aoibhe. She was a flaming, green eyed, pale skinned ginger, though the shade of her hair tended closer to red than Aoibhe’s orange, and more pertinently, she had pointed ears like a fay. Her build was lean and wiry, but not thin and gangly like that of a fay. Tessa’s face was accented with makeup that sharpened the lines of her face, giving her a striking appearance, and her dress was selected to complement her hair and eyes.
“Heyo! Nice to meet you, I’m Tessa. My friends call me Tessa. Hear you need someone to shoot stuff!”
Miliam looked between Tessa and Aoibhe in confusion, trying to figure out what the hell she was looking at. A miniature fay? And half-fay-half-human? They were both technically human, so that was possible, right? Aoibhe sensed her question and answered without having to be asked.
“She’s an elf,” the pilot whispered into Miliam’s ear. Miliam strained to remember Aoibhe’s exact phrasing when they first met- something about preferring to be called fay. She hadn’t said elves weren’t real, right?
“Why didn’t you say elves were something else?”
“They are not,” Abigail answered instead. “An elf is merely a fay raised in heavy gravity. You may recall that I mentioned the alterations made to fay were minimal? This is the result; as the changes were largely environmental as opposed to genetic, they may be reversed the same way.”
“Yeppers! They used to call us half-fay, but that got kinda confusing when we met humans and actual half-fay became a thing. So now we’re elves. Not half-elves, even if it’s cooler. I’m technically a half-elf though. Because dad was from Canada. Which I think is a country, not a planet, but I never asked. Wait, do countries still exist? There aren’t any where I come from but I hear Earth is a little weird about some stuff.”
Miliam reeled back a bit by the babbling coming from Tessa’s mouth, who seemed happier to have something to talk about than offended at the talk about her pedigree. The elf hadn’t actually taken a single breath in that entire spiel, and she’d said it all so quickly Miliam thought she might have a career as a rapper if this didn’t work out.
“Tessa, you are straying rather far from the topic at hand. Might I advise you to present your credentials?” Abigail interrupted, steering the woman back on track. Now Miliam understood why she had wanted to be present for this.
“I have credentials?” Tessa asked, cocking her head in confusion. Abigail sighed heavily.
“Your diploma, Tessa, and your ratings on starship weapons.”
“Oh, right. I graduated military academy top of my class in practical exercises!” Miliam was momentarily impressed. “Or I would have. If I graduated. Which I didn’t, because I failed the written tests. All of them. But I did get certified on, uh, every single starship grade weapon. I can shoot lasers, lances, railguns, missiles, all of it. I also have this!”
Suddenly Tessa was holding a katar. It looked like it was meant to be mounted like a gauntlet, leaving the hand free, but the elf was just holding it in her hand. Miliam hadn’t even seen her pull it out; it was like her hand just appeared, already holding the damned thing.
“Why would you draw that in an interview?” Abigail hissed, snatching the weapon from Tessa’s hand. “My apologies, I believed she had slightly more sense than that.”
“Uh…huh. So the bottom line is that she knows what she’s doing?” Miliam asked, addressing the question to Abigail rather than Tessa, whose judgement was rather in question at the moment. They were interrupted, though, by voices from the hallway.
“Look at the time! I told you Min-ji, we should have set the alarm earlier!”
“We’re ten minutes early…”
“But what if something unexpected happened and they left without us!?”
“…I’ll go get the twins squared away, cap’n, this one’s all yours,” Aoibhe said, taking the opportunity to escape the nonsense while she could. Miliam looked at her with betrayal in her eyes, but the attempt at guilt tripping rolled off the pilot harmlessly.
“They just need to be shown to their room, right? I’d be happy to take care of that.”
“Nay, crew decisions are the captain’s responsibility. This one is all yours. Have fun!” Aoibhe waved as she ducked out of the lounge, unable to hear Miliam’s internal groans.
“Oh! Are those two part of the crew too? They sound exactly the same! Is that a coincidence or are they twins? I met a pair of twins once, but they weren’t very much alike. They weren’t even the same gender!”
“…before we get further distracted, yes, Tessa does know what she is doing, difficult as it may be to believe. In my experience her inability to focus is an asset under the proper circumstances. Her mind simply runs too rapidly for everyday tasks, and yet, under a situation in which many variables need be considered, she excels,” Abigail explained, presenting Tessa’s readily apparent scatterbrain as a bonus.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“It’s not that hard. I mean there’s only so many ways a missile can move. Or a ship. And there’s a person behind all that ECM so it’s just a matter of guessing what the most likely method is. Then you’ve just gotta plot in the right contingencies and organize a firing pattern that puts ‘em right where you want ‘em!” Tessa declared, though most of it went over Miliam’s head. She was currently at the stage where she knew a bit about what a captain did, but not a whole lot of the terminology, and she was still only just getting into what she needed to know about all the other jobs on the ship.
“It would probably help if I could just see her in action…” Miliam mused aloud, torn between taking Tessa’s obvious confidence at face value and rejecting her as a liability. Waiting for another candidate would cost them, though. Using the automated targeting systems was an option, but Aoibhe didn’t have much confidence in them, Miliam knew.
“We certainly could, if you would not mind my interference. May I set up a simulation?” Abigail proposed, an idea Miliam was glad to latch onto.
“Sure! Uh…where do we need to go for that?”
“I believe this model of ship should have a station in the missile bay we could use. Lead the way, if you would.”
Miliam took the pair upstairs and to the room in question. It hadn’t really been remodeled since they couldn’t afford a new launcher, but it was in good enough shape to host a weapons officer on point defense duty. Just as Abigail said, in addition to the station near the missile launcher’s internal mechanisms, another was positioned against the wall the room shared with the hallway, presumably for controlling the lasers.
Abigail took a seat and powered on the console while Tessa wandered over to the missile launcher and began babbling about it. Miliam mostly tuned it out, but she noticed that, despite the system’s age, Tessa seemed to be familiar with its specifications. She took that to be a good sign in regards to the woman’s competency. Tessa seemed happy to talk, even with no one listening, so Miliam watched what Abigail was doing instead, noting that the scholar wasn’t going easy on her acquaintance- she appeared to be setting up a simulation at the highest possible difficulty, with no handicaps.
“Tessa, the simulation is configured. Please demonstrate your capabilities,” Abigail announced, standing up from her seat. Tessa didn’t seem to care that she’d been interrupted mid-sentence and turned.
“Right, sure, on it! Let’s see what we’ve got…oh, that’s a toughie. I don’t think I’ve done this one before. Did you customize it? Crap, it’s starting, let me just plug my grimoire in…”
As the timer hit zero, Tessa fell silent, and Miliam watched intently as the simulation began. She didn’t understand the interface, or even fully understand the controls, but if she hadn’t seen Abigail set it up, she’d have thought the sim was on a low difficulty. For the first time Tessa fell completely silent without anyone else filling the silence. Her eyes darted from screen to screen, absorbing information Miliam didn’t even comprehend faster than she could read, and her hands raced across the controls, changing settings and parameters for each individual laser emitter as the situation evolved.
From what Miliam did understand, the scenario placed the Astrum Vitae in defense of a freighter that was under attack from multiple directions. The enemy ships were positioned at the light-second line, which, while giving Tessa more time to react, also gave the enemy time to fire multiple volleys before the first would arrive.
Some of them fired their missiles in groups, giving Tessa a constant stream of incoming targets to deal with, while others timed theirs so that their entire supply lit off their drives at once to saturate the Astrum Vitae’s defenses.
“Electronic countermeasures are offline and barriers are set to default. The only countermeasure she was granted was an active wave drive to prevent translocation missiles from appearing within detonation range,” Abigail explained for Miliam’s benefit. Having heard that, Miliam noticed icons vanishing and reappearing closer to the Astrum Vitae’s location that must have been the missiles in question- and even though they couldn’t enter range instantly, they were skipping a vast amount of space.
It didn’t make a difference. Tessa was identifying the translocation missiles before they could accelerate and prioritizing them, shooting them out of the void before they could maneuver. Missiles travelling the long way were boxed in by multiple emitters working together. The first few took the most shots, but as the simulation progressed, Tessa apparently worked out their evasion protocols and predicted them, using two shots to trick the missiles into the path of a third.
A light second was the minimum for proper fire control but it also meant laser weapons reached their targets almost instantly. Even the furthest missiles were in range from the get-go. As soon as Tessa had the programming figured out she began picking off some of the missiles in the furthest clusters, thinning them out for later while the bulk of her targeting went towards destroying more immediate threats.
Even then it was clear that Abigail had over tuned the scenario on purpose. Tessa’s skills must have been phenomenal to last as long as she did, but eventually missiles began getting through. The ones that did were spaced out, giving the corvette and freighter’s barriers some time to recover between hits, but damage outpaced regeneration. Despite her efforts in reducing the volume of the saturation strikes, there were enough missiles remaining to entirely overwhelm Tessa’s defenses, and both ships were ultimately destroyed.
“…was that winnable?” Miliam asked as the final results were displayed, showing statistics she didn’t have a reference for.
“It was not,” Abigail said simply. “She was outnumbered many times over by dedicated missile destroyers.”
There were no other weapons in play. The scenario was unrealistic in that way; even Miliam understood that lances and railguns would have made the battle much shorter, and not in Tessa’s favor. But it did demonstrate fairly well that, if nothing else, Tessa was capable of taking a corvette, already a dedicated anti-missile platform, and multiply its effectiveness several times over…as long as one could put up with endless yapping for the ninety-nine percent of time spent outside of combat.
“She’s hired,” Miliam said with a sigh.
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Void Combat: Missiles
While the effectiveness of point defenses and barriers have made missiles significantly less effective, quantity continues to have a quality all its own. Their prevalence in combat doctrine varies by navy. One valid strategy is to use primary weapons to whittle down an opponent’s screening elements before overwhelming the capital ships with missiles, but it is also possible to deploy so many missiles an enemy fleet cannot possibly stop them all, at the cost of having fewer alternatives to resort to after that first strike.
Missiles are usually guided platforms with a warhead, which is typically some type of bomb-pumped laser. They can be fired at any range, even far beyond the light-second line, but control degrades at greater distances, making missiles more susceptible to enemy countermeasures. Due to their ability to deliver a high-powered punch at close range, only a small percentage of missiles needs to make it through to cause serious damage, but without the support of other weapons to strain enemy barriers, simultaneous strikes are needed.
A less common variety of missile is the translocation missile, which teleports itself directly to their target using power provided by the host ship’s capacitors. Wave drives and other gravity-altering countermeasures can reduce the effectiveness of these missiles, and each one requires a mage to activate its drive manually, but when properly utilized they can catch the enemy off guard.