Captain Tiaman Tau was a great fat jolly fellow. Some happy defect in his otherwise aristocratic character led to him being generous and gregarious, and as a consequence, all around beloved by most of those who met him, including his ship's crew.
His ship was Pride's Fulcrum: a contemporary vessel with an Ancient gate core, that allowed her to instantly travel between the stars. She was then a cruiser-fief of the Congress of Andor, but Tau's family had held the ship's command for a thousand generations: for longer than there had been Congress even.
“We were pirates once,” he told his dinner guests, with a happy gleam shining through the narrow slits of his drooping eyelids. He had served Gold's mellow-infused aromatic wine with dinner, and the frothy swizzle had gone to his head, his toes, and everything in between.
“Surely not,” came the expected replies. Tau had over a dozen guests at his table: civilian passengers and senior officers, dressed in finery and smelling of heady perfumes. They were all disbelieving, but entirely convivial. Some of the officers smirked knowingly; they knew this tale from many another dinner, and looked forward to its raunchy end.
The captain paused to relish in his moment. He loved the prestige and pageantry of his position: the wealth on and around his table, the richness of the food he had served, the deference in the happy, expectant faces of his audience, and even the burnished gold of his epaulets. What a joy it was to be the great man!
“It's true. The Taus were ruthless marauders,” the captain began his family tale in a gruff, mockingly belligerent tone. Behind him, a sound-powered telephone warbled morosely, and his steward answered it curtly. “We used to sack planets from Heckart to Antiporee. In the year naught six, my great, great- well, many greats, great grandmother-”
“Bridge sir,” the steward interrupted the captain.
Tau excused himself, picked up the receiver, and after listening briefly, ordered: “Sound us to quarters.”
The senior officers were on their feet, napkins on the table and already heading for the hatch when the alarm began to sound. Captain Tau dithered to offer assurances to his civilian guests, urging them to desserts and more wine. He then made his own exit. Two young women in elegant evening gowns followed him from his suite, wanting to know what was happening.
“It seems your notions about Evolution were right,” he told them. “They have a cruiser at Ar Suft. They're slinging out of orbit now and moving to intercept us.”
Tau's two trailing guests received his news with the slightest frowns, but otherwise kept their consternation to themselves.
The taller of the two was Li Luna: a modest beauty and something of a shameless flirt; she made very little distinction between a genuine sexual advance and passing the time. Her carefree interactions with Pride's officer cadre had caused some discomfort aboard the ship but she was in no way malicious as she went about breaking hearts. Her kindly ways ensured that she had remained well liked by most, and the resentments she caused were usually redirected towards perceived rivals.
Truanna Sky was nearly a perfect opposite to the other woman. She was dark where Li was fair, short where she was tall, and she was a frigid rock to Li's soft warmth. She was almost universally despised for her aggressive, unfiltered way of speaking. She didn't brag about her inherent superiority exactly, but she didn't much want any interlocutor to doubt it either. It didn't help that she really was superior in some ways: being exceptionally intelligent and morally unassailable.
Though a man of sanguine temperament, Captain Tau felt some resentment to their presence at his heels. In a way, he worked for them. It seemed ludicrous to Tau, but there was no getting around the facts. Their destination was his. Their safety was his responsibility. Their convenience was his pleasure. Luna had been issued the Warrant of Envoy, and as such, was the agent of the Executive Council of the Congress of Andor. She had all the powers of a unified Council: spoke with their voice, acted with their will, and at an age that might fairly be called tender. There was some politicking involved, Tau knew. The Luna family was one of the ancient rocks around which the Congress had first formed, but still, he marveled that the Council had bestowed its powers upon a baby.
Not that her powers were without limit. Like the Council, Li Luna's authority only went so far, and Tau's orders had been carefully worded so as not to prostrate him before any youthful impulsiveness. He gave some thought to dismissing the two young women before reaching the bridge but resisted the brutish impulse; Luna had a right to be there, and by extension, her friend.
At the great metal doors, the marine sentries saluted the captain and his officers, and the whole party entered the bridge. Tau barely had time to glance at his tactical table before a junior officer brought him a data slate.
“Text message from the Evolution cruiser sir,” he said.
“Read it out loud Jemmy,” Tau ordered.
“Sir,” the ensign replied officiously before complying. He hesitated, puffed himself up, and read the message in a formal, inhuman tone. “To Congress of Andor cruiser: Ar Suft has been annexed by Evolution in accordance with applicable law and treaty. You are ordered to respect lawful claim, turn back, and gate from system immediately.
“A lot of gibberish follows sir,” the ensign added in a more casual way. “Signals security thinks it was a hacking attempt piggy-backing on the transmission.”
“Of course it was,” the captain agreed. “Evolution can't even say hello without slipping a finger up your ass.” It was why his ship used sound-powered telephones in place of wireless communicators, along with a thousand other backwards, antiquated devices. Critical systems had to be physically isolated from outside tampering; there was no beating the cyborgs on their own turf.
Tau focused his attention on his tactical table: an informational nexus tied into his ship's most immediately important systems. Various scans were pumping its screen full of information about the star system in which they had just arrived: orbiting bodies, gravity wells, gaseous fields and solar winds -anything and everything that could possibly impact the safety and navigation of his ship. He focused almost exclusively on the readouts of the Evolution cruiser.
“She's a big old barky,” Tau declared solemnly.
“Too big for us,” his first lieutenant agreed morosely. There was no honor to be had from glorious battle that day: just ignominious retreat.
Sky, reading their faces and voices, knew exactly what order was about to be issued. “Captain,” she said. “You can't retreat. It's imperative that we land on that planet.”
“My ship is priceless madam,” Tau replied. His congeniality was gone, the speaker had become an avatar of terrible unflinching authority. “Irreplaceable. Even if I didn't have clear orders to the effect, I would never risk her gate core in an engagement of such unequal force.”
“What will you risk?” Sky asked.
The young woman had had no intention whatsoever of implying that the captain was a coward, but that was the unhappy effect of her words and tone, and there were frowns all around: lips curled in disgust, heads shaking. Li gently put a restraining hand on Sky's wrist.
“In fulfilling my duty,” Tau said softly, “I will risk everything, up to, but not including my honor, or my ship.”
“Then please sir,” Li pleaded, “do everything you possibly can to get us onto that planet.”
“We can't fight that cruiser,” the fifth lieutenant said angrily. “She'll pound us to scrap before we've so much as scratched her armor, and if we try -we might as well just hand them our gate core gift wrapped. I don't like it any more than you do captain, but retreat is the only option.”
“If your ...mission... is that important we can come back with reinforcements to force the issue,” the first lieutenant chimed in.
Tau had been staring levelly at Luna. Like him, she had been transformed by the occasion. Gone was her vapid girlishness: ditto the twinkle of lusty mischief in her blue eyes. She was cool as ice and regal as a warrior queen. For the first time, he saw her as something more than an empty-headed, likable young slut. Without so much as speaking a word, an entire conversation passed between them.
“We run,” the captain declared. “But first, we'll endeavor to get our passengers onto the planet. You understand I can't answer for your safety? The odds are likely you'll die out there in the next hour.”
The women exchanged a look and nodded to Tau.
Stolen story; please report.
“You have...” the captain glanced at his tactical table. “Ten minutes to get who and what you need. Report to the main hangar. Mr. Hoth, Miss Goren, ready number three cutter for a cold launch under fire. Crew and shore party to be made up of volunteers. Make sure everybody understands the risks. Volunteers only Major. They won't need any reluctant heroes down there.”
“All marines are volunteers sir,” Major Goren said dryly.
Tau hated that kind of talk from the brute, dictatorial major, but there wasn't much he could do about it. He could only give his orders to Goren; the details of their execution were hers.
“Please, have them bring civilian clothing,” Luna said. “Given the situation we might be better off infiltrating the civilian population rather than arriving like a raiding party.”
“Have them pack a change of civilian clothing,” Tau agreed. “And I want to speak to the cutter ensign before they cast off.” He then dismissed his sixth lieutenant and marine commander with a jerk of the head.
“Another message from Evolution sir,” Jemmy announced.
“Read it,” the captain barked.
“Honor treaty and law, or be destroyed,” the ensign declared, and his young voice quavered and cracked from excitement.
“Honor is it? Signal back Jemmy. Tell those cyborg turds 'Honor is all!' Helm, bring us about, full burn, go right at 'em!”
The captain hadn't formally taken over the conning of his ship, and his order was repeated by the young woman who retained the duty. The chief hand at the helm: a pragmatic old space dog, didn't wait for her however, but leering gleefully, pushed and pulled his levers the moment Tau had finished his command. There was a lurch in the stomachs of all on board: a quirk of the inertia inhibitors, which otherwise eliminated any internal indication that the ship had accelerated.
“Standby all batteries,” Hoth continued. “Black mat to primary and secondary guns, starburst to the tertiary. And pass the word for the bosun.”
There was a flurry of frenetic activity as the captain's orders were carried out: a surge that soon after receded. The relative speed of the vessels, the distance involved, and the range of the various armaments of both, meant that there could be no commencement of any real action for some minutes still to come. Silence, tension, military discipline and excitement all mixed in a strange cocktail of emotions on the bridge.
All ears were soon vainly trained on the conversation between the captain and bosun at the tactical table. What were they talking about in hushed tones? Why the bosun? He was a glorified janitor, whose dominion encompassed all those things that didn't fall under the purview of more prestigious, coveted positions, like the Master of Ordnance and Ship's Engineer: plumbing, ducting, lighting -the dirty and gritty necessities of sustaining life on board. What did the captain want with him? Why was he grinning like a lunatic?
“I'll stake my life on her hull sir,” the bosun, Slade, was heard to declare emphatically.
The captain's steward trespassed closer than anyone else dared, close enough to offer the captain a tot of vapor, to help counteract the swizzle of dinner. He reported his findings to a marine sentry on his way out the door, and his word eagerly spread as rumor around the bridge. “We're going to clubhaul 'ol girl.”
The rumor was hardly to be believed by the officers, until the captain's conference with the bosun expanded to include the Engineer and Waymaster. The latter, was a frail old man, with a mind better suited to the graceful mathematical calculations of efficient travel than the perturbation and uncertainties of military maneuvers; he looked justifiably horrified when Tau told him what he planned to do. When prompted however, he revealed that he already had the calculations formulated; he only need to plug in the variables. He had been a young man once, and like most young sailors, he had often fantasized about such outrageous stunts as Pride's Fulcrum projecting an artificial gravity well, around which to slingshot herself, like daring captains of frigates and corvettes had sometimes been known to do. He and the captain compared figures, and smiled at each other complacently when their math agreed.
The order was given, and it was received with some nervous giggles, and more than a few frowns of consternation; very few of his officers and hands could keep their composure. Tau was handed a telephone with the words: “number three cutter sir.”
“Who am I speaking to?”
“Ensign Kitteler sir.”
“Thank you for volunteering Kitteler; you honor the ship. How many are going with you?”
“We have a full house: cutter crew and twenty nine passengers, mostly potatoes, plus the Envoys and their party,” the ensign said. By potatoes he meant marines: so called for their brown uniforms and for their undeniably being better suited to burial in the ground than carried aboard ships with proper folk. The marines similarly called the ship's hands blueberries: their uniforms being more colorful, and they were reckoned to be just as soft, tart and harmless.
“Very good. Listen Kitteler: you're going to launch dark and quiet. At my command, you're to immediately roll out of the hangar, and with maneuvering thrusters only, you'll push off from the ship as hard as you can. But keep your main drive cool. If that Evolution cruiser spots you, you're going to be in for a bad day.”
“Understood sir,” and the doubt and fear in his voice was unmistakable now.
“We'll aim you right at the sun, so just drift calm and quiet until the corona masks you, then come online and make for the planet however you think best. We'll do our best to keep the buggers' attention. Understood?”
“Understood sir,” the young man repeated himself. He was still nervous, but with the captain's directions complete and understood, his confidence grew a little.
“Light's speed Kitteler.”
“Safe return captain.”
Tau slammed the receiver back into its cradle. The ensign's obvious youth and fear had plucked at his heart's strings: a paternal kind of distress that had to be channeled into anger if he wasn't to be seen wringing his hands. Sensing his mood, his first lieutenant, an old battle ax named GeeWan, came to stand beside him. She said nothing, but silently presented herself as a willing receptacle of Tau's concerns.
“Stars around us,” he sighed, and looked around his bridge. “When did everyone get so young?”
“When we got old.”
Tau laughed from his belly. He had a good laugh: the kind to lift the spirits of anyone who heard it. It was a wonderful source of comfort to everyone on the bridge. “Balls Gee, I think you're right.”
“I'm always right.”
Tau looked at his tactical table and tried not to worry about the rapidly closing distance: failed.
“You know Kitteler?” he asked her.
“The ensign? Yes. I served on his mother's frigate when I was a snotling.”
“He stands to inherit?”
“Yes.”
“Why did Hoth pick him?”
“You don't approve?”
“Somebody with no prospects should have gone,” Tau said firmly. “Somebody who needs the chance to earn a promotion.”
“I'll talk to Hoth later.”
With that, Tau's supply of casual banter dried up. He found himself gritting his teeth as the distance closed and the clock counted down. “Master of Ordnance, I want salvos of starburst,” he eventually declared. “Rippling fire, keep them squinting.”
“Let's put on a show,” chuckled the Ordnance Officer.
And so, Pride's Fulcrum began firing from her tertiary batteries. Small mass accelerators burped forth pyrotechnic rounds at a fraction of the speed of light, and so built a screen of nearly continuous, blinding light, in order to obfuscate their headlong charge.
“Very pretty,” Tau said. “All batteries to fire at will Ordnance Master,” and as the old gunnery officer relayed this command to his hundreds of hands at their various gun and torpedo stations, Tau called out: “Scan, have they launched strike craft yet?”
“I don't think so sir,” the ensign replied unhappily; her scopes were just as blinded by the light screen as the enemy was.
“They're waiting to see which way we turn,” Tau said. Then he turned to Wan and told her softly to send Kitteler on his way. She returned to her captain's side to report the cutter's departure, just before they began to feel the first rumblings of return fire: the clatter of shrapnel from fragmenting deflections against the hull, the shuddering of recoil as direct hits were absorbed by Fulcrum's aegis.
“Are we ready bosun?”
“Aye, ready sir,” Slade told his captain cheerfully.
“All hands to prepare for loss of gravity. Helm, to submit to the Waymaster's table. Whenever you're ready Mr. Ubuntu.”
And so Pride's Fulcrum began her turn. It was a turn Evolution had been expecting. Whatever the bluster of the Congress captain, Evolution knew that no commander of a gate-capable ship would throw away his priceless vessel on so hopeless a charge, whatever their warcries about honor. Flight was the only logical choice, and within the confines of that choice, Tau had had only two viable options.
The first had been an immediate reversal of direction and thrust: a long deceleration, combating his forward momentum, followed eventually by re-acceleration and a straight-line flight with the Evolution ship hot on his heels. The second choice had been deemed the most likely from the beginning, even before Tau had seemingly committed to it: a long and drifting arc of space flight called wearing. It put the pursuing vessel at an energy disadvantage. The quarry could continue drifting on their previous axis, even as they began to accelerate on a new heading, while the pursuer had to combat their own momentum in order to close the distance.
Through a momentary lapse in the light screen, the Evolution cruiser saw the Congress ship dip her helm, and she did likewise, turning wider to cut the smaller ship off in her flight. She launched strike craft as she did so: drones, that while smaller than their parent ship, nevertheless had the firepower to threaten Pride's Fulcrum and so force her to keep on a straight course. Without such strike craft, the Evolution cruiser would be locked in a losing battle of maneuvers with her quarry, in which she would be forced to constantly turn in wider and wider arcs in order to cut off the other ship's ever-changing line of retreat.
Only, Pride's Fulcrum did not wear. Using the Ancient technology of her gravity generator, she projected a planet-dense gravity field off her starboard bow. It was too short range to muck up the orbits of true planetary bodies in the system, but it was more than enough to pull the ship into a turn far tighter than the Evolution cruiser had expected. Fulcrum banked right, and kept turning until her bow was facing what had been on her left, and now, with the gravity well fizzling into nothing, she was going even faster than she had been before, on the exact opposite heading from what the Evolution cruiser had been expecting.
Tau stood impassively at his table as his ship groaned all around him. Fulcrum was a sturdy old girl, but she was old, and he hadn't been nearly so certain of her holding together as the bosun. As the noise quieted; he saw that their escape was a certainty. The Evolution cutter couldn't possibly come back around, and its skipper knew it. He ordered a ceasefire of the starburst rounds, so that the Evolution ship could clearly see his vessel's backside, and properly admire the view. His bridge crew cheered like maniacs at this colorful order.
Then the scanning station reported that their enemy had given up on pursuit entirely. The cruiser was recalling its strike craft and had begun to leisurely wallow back to her station in orbit. It was apparently oblivious to the presence of the cutter breaking atmosphere on the far side. The information was relayed as a ship-wide announcement, and the whole crew cheered.
“It may not be a victory in the classical sense,” Tau told his first lieutenant, wearing a complacent smile. “But damned if it doesn't feel just as good.”