“Shields collapsing!”

The orbital’s control station shook just as the report left the shield tech’s mouth.

‘We’re doomed.’ Governor Katrina Polk realized, her callused hands holding the armrests of her seat in a death grip.

Their railguns —those whose rails still hadn’t melted from overuse— were running out of slugs to fire at the pirates. What few missiles remained on-board were trapped by collapsed silos and wrecked, shoddily-built auto-loaders. Even their trusty laser banks were dying out, capacitors built by the lowest of low builders either shutting down or catching fire after constant wear and tear.

And now their shields were gone.

“S-Status on the pirate ships?” She said, trying and failing to keep her voice steady. She was an administrator, for fuck’s sake, not a naval officer!

“Down to half their original number, but they won’t stop firing!” Her operations officer, an ex-mercenary she’d managed to hire out of retirement, banged her fist against the plasteel surface of her console. “The two biggest freighters are still operational, though one’s shields are flickering.”

“Focus fire on that one!” Katrina shouted in desperation. “We need to—”

RRRRRRR

The control room rumbled and groaned, then a crushing noise came from beyond the sealed bulkheads of the chamber.

“I-I can’t…fuck!” The weapons officer, a woman, no, a girl…a girl no older than twenty shouted.

“What happened?!” Katrina demanded, errors popping up on her own screens.

“We just lost half our railguns! The entire western arm is cut off, I’m getting nothing!” She shouted, madly typing away at her keyboard.

As the people around her voiced their panic and frustrations, Katrina felt the weight of the colony on her shoulders grow bigger and bigger.

Without its shields the station had a single armor belt of iridium-steel alloy between its vulnerable internals and the pirates’ weapons. No station meant no defenses and few chances at independence —economic or otherwise—. If these pirates didn’t capture them, some other raving fleet would.

‘Should I surrender now? Maybe…maybe their terms won’t be so bad.’ The governor thought, though deep inside she knew the pirates’ words and actions would be worlds apart.

She might very well be signing the entire colony’s passage into generational slavery; with any luck her grandchildren might escape, though if the stories held any truth in them she, like every other leader in the colony of twenty thousand, would be dead the moment those pirates stepped foot on colony grounds.

‘I don’t want to die…’

“New contact!” The sensor operator exclaimed, and Katrine turned her gazed towards him just in time to witness his face contort in an expression of pure horror.

‘What fresh hell just came upon us?’

“New contacts, many contacts! Counting three, five, nine…fifteen contacts!” The man exclaimed, color draining from his face “Sweet nova, they’re right on top of us!”

+++

In ten years of war, James had witnessed many things, most horrible.

Once he’d seen a Vogdti battleship, its bridge and steering shot to hell, ram into a multi-megaton asteroid at a measurable percentage of the speed of light. The impact had momentarily paused an ongoing battle as each fleet’s sensors were blinded by the emissions. Another time, one of the duchy’s own cruisers had been hit by a forgotten missile-mine while undergoing underway refueling. Both the tanker and the warship itself had gone up in flames, while the closest ship —an aged frigate— had its sensors slagged by the thermal emissions.

War made for the strangest images, from rogue bomber-drones firing on friendly ships to orbital stations collapsing into their planet’s atmosphere, firing their weapons at full capacity even as atmospheric drag cooked the crews alive.

Yet not once in his entire life had he heard of, let alone commanded, a fleet that had jumped directly into the crossfire of an ongoing battle. But life was a series of first times, and James very much intended to keep living.

“All ships to maximum shields, bring up your point defenses and jam these bastards to hell!” He ordered, eager to react before the enemy could. But who were these people? “Sensors, what the hell did we jump into?!”

Data streamed into the holo-table, but not as fast as the staccato rhythm of the sensor officer’s report.

“I’ve got an orbital, three hundred kilotons, on starboard side. I’ve got two active bogeys on the port side, estimate civilian hulls retrofitted for combat. Three more bogeys of similar profile, dead in the water, around them.”

“What do you see, Mike?” James demanded of the ops officer, who sat laser focused on the holographic map.

“Nothing identifiable, the hulls are not in our database and we have no reads on their weapons or sensors. I see nothing military; the retrofitted hulls aren’t up to even mercenary standards and the station is equipped like a planetary defense orbital.”

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“A pirate raid.” James surmised, his shoulders feeling measurably lighter.

“Most likely.” Mike nodded, his expression unreadable as usual.

“Alright, let’s mop them up.” James let out a sigh, though he was careful not to underestimate so-called ‘home-brew’ warships. Many a Vogdti warship had been destroyed by a rebel-made IED while flying through captured Akrites space. “Get CIC to designate those pirates and the orbital as tangos one, two and three, respectively.”

Punching in the appropriate code on his console, he shot out orders to his fleet.

“Cruisers and above, take out the pirate warships designate Tango One and Tango Two. All other warships, defend our civilians. Civilian vessels, all power to shields and stay put.”

Curt acknowledgments returned almost immediately from his captains, who’d likely come to the same conclusions he had. No daft man ever made it to ship command in the Akritan Navy.

Before his warships could fire a single shot, the suspected pirates opened fire with lasers and missiles. Their tactical icons went from pink (suspected enemy) to bright red (confirmed enemy) instantly. His warships’ point defenses spurred to life, laser clusters and even a handful of kinetic CIWS batteries slagging the sluggish missiles. At these ranges, the birds barely had time to launch out of their tubes before point defenses turned them into expanding clouds of gas.

The Vanguard’s Hymn began singing, secondary batteries surging into rapid-fire mode in order to put mass downrange as fast as possible. The deck rumbled lightly as enemy railgun slugs struck their armor belt; there was no dodging at this range.

“Damage report.” James demanded.

“Frigate Stormcrusher and destroyer Forever Salvation report light damage on their port broadsides. Combat effectiveness intact.”

Then one of the pirate warships winked out.

“Splash one bandit.” Michael muttered.

The armed freighter was now an expanding ball of gas and sand grain-sized debris. A direct hit to its power plant, breaching the fusion bottle’s containment and vaporizing the hull with the power of a small star.

The second bandit was already nigh-crippled, stripped of its armament and propulsion, and…

Detonation.

Another direct hit to the power plant: the second pirate ship was now a handful of space dust and a smattering of gasses.

“Aye, sir.” Michael nodded, punching in the comm codes for the damage control center on-board. Akrites marines served double duty as both void infantry and auxiliary crew, handling shipboard battle damage while the proper sailors fought the ship.

“And get me a line to that orbital, as soon as possible.”

+++

‘What in the stars did I just witness?’ Governor Katrina thought, staring her sensor screen.

A massacre, there was no better word to describe the shivering display of military power. One moment, the pirates ships were pummeling her station without mercy. Her shields were down, weapons inoperable and morale at catastrophic lows. The next thing she knew, an entire battlefleet had jumped straight into the crossfire.

The pirates had reacted in the worst way possible, firing on the mystery fleet. Within seconds Polaris’ unexpected protectors had returned the gesture tenfold. Lasers, kinetic PDCs and, most curious of all, coilguns had been fired at the pirates by the new arrivals. Needless to say, the raiders had been pummeled into oblivion.

Of course, after dealing with the pirates her mysterious benefactors had turned to the orbital and the colony planet-side. Their communications protocols were straightforward albeit unusual.

“Governor, I’m being instructed to patch you through to the commanding officer of the fleet.” Her comms officer said, reading through the information on her console.

Katrina nearly flinched, but managed to keep her composure. “Very well. On my screen.”

“Patching you through.” The officer warned, just as her console’s main screen lit up.

The man on the other side of the transmission was unmistakably young. His hair shined a golden blond, and his face was unblemished and untouched by the passage of time.

‘Is this really their CO?’ She wondered

Then she noticed his eyes. She saw that familiar thousand-yard stare of a man who’d ordered men into battle and death. She’d seen that stare in the Mercenary Guilds, from captains whose ships had arrived beaten, burnt and nearly destroyed. Men and women who’d succumbed to means best left untold to survive.

‘Just who are these people?’

“This is Duke James Akrites. Whom do I have the pleasure of conversing with?”

His accent was regal, yet lacking in the fruity frivolities of the Core World’s one-percenters. A strange combination, but hardly out of place in a naval setting. War tended to grind away at frivolities and facades, as she’d so terribly experienced.

A duke, though? That was entirely out of place. What the hell was an actual noble, and a high-ranking one if she wasn’t mistaken, doing in bum-fuck nowhere? Those types tended to become statesmen and diplomats…though there were cases of ambitious people quite literally buying a commission from their homeworld’s navy.

“Greetings, Duke Akrites.” Katrina replied. “I am Katrina Polk, governor of the colony-planet of Polaris.”

“It’s good to meet you, Governor.” The duke smiled apologetically. “I am terribly sorry for rushing, but could you please send us whatever astrographic data you have, as well as any recent news you might have about the greater area?”

“I…can.” Katrina replied. Questions could come later; now she had to get into the good graces of the armada orbiting her colony.

Turning to her comms officer, she said. “Send them every map and survey we’ve got, and all the news we’ve received this year. You’ve got five minutes.”

“Right away, ma’am.”

Returning to face the Duke, Katrina smiled weakly. “My communications officer is preparing the data packet as we’re speaking, it shouldn’t take more than five or ten minutes.”

The young noble nodded. “Thank you. We are experiencing some…navigation problems.” He shrugged. “On to more pertinent matters. I suppose those two ships we just splashed were pirates or raiders of some sort?”

“You are correct.” Katrina nodded. “With the Hegemony and the Republic focusing more of their navy to their borders, policing patrols in the fringe have been…sporadic, and mercenary contracts are more expensive than ever. These…scum, they are taking advantage of that.”

She noticed that the Duke seemed rather….confused? Alarmed?

‘Did his fleet just come out of the unexplored regions?’ She wondered, looking at the meager data they had on all the ships.

She blinked. This was…wow. Star-shit, this Duke was either the richest bounty hunter in the sector or the luckiest scavenger in the universe. That was a mobile fuel refinery! They had an entire antimatter refinery just for themselves.

Those were usually only held by state navies, and incredibly expensive to build. Last she heard, the Republic had spent some ten to twelve billion aurum on procuring just one of the fuckers. Compared to that, a fully armed system defense corvette was two to three hundred million!

The Duke nodded, and Katrina blinked as she held back the urge to drool at all the ships in his fleet.

“I see. One less pirate is at least one more life saved, I’m glad we were of some help.”

Silence reigned for several awkward seconds until Katrina took the lead with a bow. “I would like to thank you for saving us, Duke Akrites. We are…in your debt. If there’s anything we can do, we would be glad to do so.”

“You’re welcome, Governor. For now, we will maintain orbit above…Polaris while we deal with some technical issues.”

“Of course, stay as long as you like.” Katrina nodded. A friendly armada stationed above her colony for free? She couldn’t possibly ask for better protection.