I bolted out of bed as the klaxon screamed its high-pitched wail. I just barely managed not to faceplant on the cold, unforgiving decking before scrambling like a madman out of my room and onto the bridge. Sam was right behind me. "What's going on?" I practically yelled toward the ship's controls, where one of the screens displayed X-Talia standing with her back to me, hands behind her in some vague impression of a naval fleet commander. The klaxon stopped as Sam fumbled into the room behind me, the lock closing automatically.
"Incoming ships. We've been found," X-Talia said, her voice calm and betraying no emotion.
I glanced back at Sam, her nude form moving frantically to collect the soft suits from their locker. "How’d they find us?" I asked, because it seemed like the obvious question. Space was vast, and our path through the asteroid fields around Azore was more ballistic than anything. The small gravitational distortions caused by course corrections and randomized alterations should have been barely detectable. Then again, it was entirely possible that our half-finished frame had an EM leak. Even a small amount of electromagnetic radiation would broadcast our location in the asteroid field like a glow stick in a dark, empty cargo container. Speaking of glow sticks, X-Talia’s processors kicked off a lot of heat—perhaps that gave a hint to how we were located. I took the proffered soft suit from Sam and managed to shove myself into it before she got hers over her ever-darkening skin. For a moment, I was glad I didn’t have a tail. Humans were not meant to have tails. I then flopped into my seat and looked over the data X-Talia had arrayed for me.
There were two ships approaching from “up,” with “up” being defined by the plane and spin direction of the Azore’s ring. I glared at the console. "Two ships?"
X-Talia nodded. "They’re almost in range to fire missiles."
I frowned again. "It’s a trap."
"Are you sure?" X-Talia asked.
I nodded. "90%."
"What makes you think it’s a trap?" Sam asked as she finally got her suit fully on.
I noted that X-Talia didn’t seem surprised. She had probably come to the same conclusion I had. "There are two ships coming at us with not a very high relative velocity. That implies they stumbled across us, but by now, they ought to know we’re perfectly willing to take on a couple of ships. We have a track record of winning those engagements."
Now Sam was glaring at the advancing vessels. "How long until they start shooting?"
X-Talia put a timer up on the screen: 12 minutes.
"Assuming they expect us to charge, let’s try diverting toward an asteroid. X-Talia, can you launch a couple of drones and some missiles the moment we’re out of sight and kill the relative velocity?"
X-Talia nodded. "Which drones should we use?"
I thought about it for a moment. "Let’s test out the little unidirectional stealth drones. All of them, and quadruple the number of missiles you think we need for those two."
"Sure," X-Talia said, cocking an eyebrow.
"Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do," I began.
Carefully, we started dropping drones from their bay underneath us, hiding their existence from the two ships we could see. X-Talia directed our random course changes to bring a large asteroid between us and the enemy, all while still making it appear as though they hadn’t been detected yet. The counter ticked down to the point where they could fire their missiles, though X-Talia was fairly certain the larger patrol boat had a spinal-mounted railgun capable of firing kinetic projectiles.
The moment we disappeared behind the asteroid, we acted. X-Talia took the ship into a dive relative to our incoming enemies, essentially turning tail and running. The missiles fired their burn to keep the asteroid between the oncoming ships and themselves, with a couple of our drones making similar maneuvers. Others continued floating forward, keeping their single detection deflectors pointed toward the enemy vessels. X-Talia tracked a projectile that would have hit us if we hadn’t changed course. The larger of the two ships did indeed have a railgun. I imagined the enemy captain cursing as he realized he hadn’t managed to take us by surprise. The encounter timer ran out, and the enemy ships launched their missiles.
The unidirectional stealth drones were based on the design of the ship of the bounty hunter that had chased us across half our home sector. The deflector plates, held on spindly arms in front of them, blocked any electromagnetic, gravitational, or heat signatures. It wasn’t a perfect system. The angle of the plates deflected radar fairly well, but lidar systems could pick up and track the objects without issue. That said, those systems would see the unidirectional stealth drones as nothing more than unremarkable chunks of rock among all the others in the asteroid field. As long as the drones didn’t change velocity and the enemy ships were sufficiently busy with more immediate threats, the drones would be ignored.
Our point-defense cannons fired at the incoming missiles and the ships behind them. Our new vessel certainly had a different feel when it came to combat. No longer were we frantically trying to keep targeting reticles on oncoming missile trajectories or altering course in random directions to avoid projectiles. Technically, we were still doing this, but the machine precision of X-Talia’s legion of processors and the fact that we had shields made our retreat feel more like a lazy stroll.
“Four. There.” X-Talia said, pointing to the screen to her left. It displayed two other targets that had been previously unseen, proving that this was an ambush. Hopefully a hastily implemented one.
Our ship had eyes on the incoming vessels and was able to send the information to the missiles. Four of our own flying death tubes activated before the enemy managed to come within two kilometers of the asteroid. They erupted outward and then veered straight for the vessels, two on each ship. Unfortunately, the gunboat managed to target and take out both missiles before they reached its shields. The smaller, unshielded ship wasn’t so lucky. End of the world, this was not. X-Talia was doing an adequate job of keeping ahead of the kinetic projectile paths of the enemy’s railgun. As the gunboat launched another two missiles at our ship, two of the unidirectional stealth drones released their swarms of micro-missiles. The gunboat never really had a chance. The micro-missiles might have had less yield and couldn’t match the delta-V change of their larger counterparts, but they more than made up for it in quantity. A line of the small explosives burrowed through the gunboat’s shields and into what had once been one of its point-defense cannons. There was a brief explosion of gas, which caused the gunboat to veer off to the side as its power went out.
Two other vessels were coming in from behind. Missiles first became four, then six, and then eight, but I wasn’t too concerned. Even Sam seemed fairly confident in our ability to survive this encounter, as indicated by the way she reclined in her seat. Then the ship jerked.
“What was that?” I asked, the question leaving my mouth in the microsecond before I had the answer. X-Talia was just starting to open her mouth to tell me there was another ship. This one in front of us, not behind. And it was big.
“Verify that it's not Maximus’ ship,” I practically yelled.
“It’s not,” X-Talia replied, while Sam vocally yelled her displeasure at the surprise vessel.
“Launch all missiles. Half out and forward, half inert and mostly in a line. Pick an intercept point. Ramming speed!”
X-Talia stared at me for a moment before nodding. Her calm response of, “Aye, Captain. Ramming speed,” was at odds with Sam’s slightly more hysterical, “Ramming speed?!”
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I quickly added the command, “Don’t actually hit them,” just in case X-Talia misunderstood my intent. There was a second nod before she replied, “Missiles away.”
The ship in front of us was belching missiles; four at a time. Whatever law dictated that missile launchers came in pairs must also dictate that larger ships continue to have an even number of launchers. This thing was big, likely a large freighter of some sort. I highly doubted it was a former military vessel, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Sentinel Mercenary Group had packed it full of nasty surprises.
The ship shuddered again. Shield indicators on a three-dimensional graphic of the hull showed we had taken another glancing hit to the port-side dorsal shields. I was about to ask X-Talia why we’d been hit when the information on another screen clicked into place for me. X-Talia was doing her best to avoid a truly large number of high-velocity projectiles. Our point-defense cannons continued firing at their missiles. Their point-defense cannons continued firing at ours. Both our shields flared as smaller anti-missile projectiles impacted, barely reducing our forward shield strength.
The larger vessel started trying to evade sporadically. I was momentarily at a loss; it clearly wasn’t having trouble with the missiles we had sent at it until I remembered we were currently trying to ram the thing, missiles be damned. We didn’t have any kinetic weapons on this ship besides the point-defense cannons, but in space, anything large and moving was a kinetic weapon.
The larger ship dodged. We changed course to meet its new course. Its movements became more sporadic as X-Talia managed to stay on target. I gripped the armrests of my chair. Off to the right, Sam made a whimper, but I didn’t remove my eyes from the screens as I braced for impact. In the briefest blink of an eye, the enemy ship was in front of us, then alongside us, and then behind us. I suddenly found I could breathe again. It would take time for the larger ship to change course to chase after us, but it didn’t matter. The larger ship had been too focused on avoiding our apparent head-on collision attempt to notice the missiles igniting behind us. Just as we passed by, our little surprise was on its way.
Every ship I had seen thus far had missile launch tubes that loaded missiles from inside the ship and shot them out. We avoided this entirely. Our missiles lived in small pods on the outside of the vessel. The actuators that released them gave them a small, barely noticeable nudge or a reasonable push. Depending on the situation. They didn’t launch from their mountings as fast as a regular missile launch system, but nor were we limited to launching them two at a time.
Split seconds after we passed the enemy vessel, the first missile slammed into its starboard anterior shield. The second hit the same spot, causing the shield to fail. The third slammed into the hull plating, leaving a gap for the fourth to enter the interior of the vessel and tear it apart.
As always, I was disappointed by the lack of fireworks, but it was one more ship down and quite a large one at that. The remainder of the missiles were diverted in time so we could reacquire them. There was only one vessel out there. Our unidirectional stealth drones managed to eliminate one of the vessels long before it reached the destruction of its larger counterpart.
“What about the last one?” Sam asked.
“He’s running,” X-Talia said unhappily. I wasn’t too concerned. We didn’t have many weapons on board to fight the guy.
X-Talia was bringing us around in an attempt to collect our much larger prize.
“There’s probably more,” Sam said, breaking the seal on her soft-suit helmet and taking a breath of fresher air.
“What’s the damage?” I asked.
X-Talia turned her gaze to me. “Two of the port-side PDCs are slagged, the front dorsal graviter is running at 20% efficiency, and I’m afraid I might have scratched the paint.”
With that said, she turned her gaze to Sam. “I don’t see any other vessels, but I didn’t see these ones to start with.”
“Do we need sensor drones or something?” Sam asked.
X-Talia tilted her head. “You know, some type of picket ship or something would not be a bad idea.”
As X-Talia sent out the salvage drones to start picking apart our large kill and preparing it for transport before anyone else showed up, Sam left the bridge to get cleaned up and put on some clothing. I found myself sitting alone on the bridge, considering options.
“They ambushed us,” I said, not to anyone in particular, though I knew X-Talia was always listening. Her blue-and-white avatar popped up on one of the screens and looked at me with a question in her eyes, probably wondering what my point was.
“Do you think we should step up our game?” I asked.
X-Talia tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean be more proactive. Instead of searching the asteroid fields for pirates or mercenaries, can we take the fight to them?”
“Not on a small ship scale,” X-Talia replied.
I nodded in agreement. The slow-paced fighting common to small ships didn’t favor us. We were very much a "try to hide and try to ambush" type.
“Psychological warfare,” I muttered, though it was only a half-formed idea. “Can we ambush them?”
“We don’t know where they’re going to be,” X-Talia said, rehashing an old argument.
“What about asking the miners to point out where the pirates are?”
She shrugged. “They wouldn’t know, and if someone admitted to knowing, it would either be a trap or a scam.”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly what?”
“We keep asking until one of the miners says they know where the pirates are. That’s clearly the point where the mercs want to ambush us. Then we sneak up behind them and ambush them.”
X-Talia crossed her arms and tilted her head. Her expression said she was thinking. “How does that work into psychological warfare?”
“Ambush the ambushers,” I said. “Then, to whoever gets away, send some tight-beam encrypted message that’s not too hard to decrypt. Something simple like, ‘Thanks for the heads-up.’ Send it to every ship and get them paranoid about each other.”
X-Talia thought about it.
“Not as a small ship.” I added in an after thought.
X-Talia’s blue-eyed gaze shot back to me. “What?”
“You said we can’t attack them on their own turf in the form of a small ship,” I replied. I shifted in my seat, trying to form my thoughts into something coherent. “What if we started treating things like a naval engagement?”
X-Talia stared at me for a moment, then grinned. It was a cruel and bloodthirsty expression, and I swear for just the slightest moment, the blue of her eyes became red.
***
Notes: I just want to comment on how tech in a given setting affects various things. The easiest way to destroy an object in space is to hurl a projectile at it. A missile sent out at a single percent of light speed, (2,997,924 m/s) or (6,706,166 m/h). The missile doesn't even need to explode. It just needs some sensors and RCS to stay on target. The issue is target identification. In this specific setting, the main reason nobody fights like this is due to the relatively slow acceleration of ships. The Rocinante from ‘The Expanse’ could run circles around even the fastest currier ship in my setting. Albeit the ride for my gravity based ships are far more comfortable and do not use a reaction mass that needs to be refilled.
The acceleration limit is due primarily to Paizo Publishing’s Starfinder. The original version of this story was supposed to be a game and I was going to rely heavily on the ship building guide for that system. I think 12 hexes were the fastest engines. I decided to use that as Gravs, the gravitational pull produced by the ship’s grave core and emitteres. Time to reach 1% C at 12Gs = 25,492.55 seconds, or 7 hours… Lining up an attack run on a specific location can take days depending on distance needed to travel. Distance between Earth and Mars at closest approach = 33.9 million miles. Time need to travel that at 1% C = 5 hours.
Another Tech based limitation is the inability for most space faring ships to land on a planet. Somewhere in this story Grant mentions maybe getting a shuttle that can do planetary flight. In some ways, he is incorrect. Any ship that uses artificial gravity for “propulsion” can land and take off from a planet. The problem is the amount of planet you take with you when you leave. There is no Anti-Gravity. Taking off from a planet pulls a large amount of anything not nailed down with you. Dirt, rocks, atmosphere, etc.
Another note: I dictate a chapter and use a transcription service to convert voice to text. What I get is a giant hard to deal with block of text. Example below.
"One new line. I bolted out of the bed as the Klaxon screamed, period. It's high pitched wail stumbling through the sheets. I just barely managed not to face plant on the cold, unforgiving decking before scrambling like a madman. Out of my room and onto the bridge, period. Sam right behind me. New line, quote, What's going on? question mark unquote. I practically yelled towards the ship's controls where one of the screens displayed X-Talia standing with her back to me. Hands behind her in some type of vague impression of a naval fleet commander. The Klaxon stopped as Sam fumbled into the room behind me. The lock closing automatically behind us. New line quote incoming ships we've been found. Unquote, Aixtelius said, her voice calm and betraying no emotion. New line. I glanced back at Sam. Her nude form moving frantically to collect the soft suits from their locker. New line quote how they find us question mark, unquote. I asked because it seemed like the obvious question period. The space was vast period and our path through the asteroid fields around Rick's Jovian planet was more ballistic than anything, period. The small amount of gravitational distortions caused by coarse corrections and the randomized alterations should have been barely detectable.
I then use ChatGPT to convert it to something workable. I have caught ChatGPT altering some things on occasion. This bugs me.