Interview Subject: Hoskit Gensa/Xofang Jangkali Esaveil
Yes, I was one of the first Shipminds to actually be involved in combat during the war. Well, for a given value of involved, anyway. As a carrier, I’m really not supposed to directly fire on enemy combatants; I move Skimmers around en masse, and help coordinate them. This means that maintaining temporal control is largely my job, as is overseeing wormhole demolition and beam skimmer support.
Furthermore, I am classed by the Nastellan starforce as a secondary carrier. This doesn’t imply anything about rank, but does say a lot about where I’m meant to be deployed. Namely, I’m supposed to be deployed in deep space. I’m smaller and easier to build than a primary carrier, meaning that the starforce can deploy more of me, and therefore get better carrier coverage in interstellar space. By contrast, primary carriers are better suited to intense operations in densely-packed engagement zones; fewer vulnerable but crucial carriers to protect.
That explanation over, I was actually on a fairly routine mission at the start of hostilities. Namely, I was rotating a bunch of the Skimmers assigned to monitor space over Nastellan’s north rotational axis, around half a Megalight out. Deploying fresh personnel, bringing the previous bunch back home for maintenance and downtime, that sort of thing.
Through sheer coincidence I’d just finished launching the fresh Skimmers, when one of the furthest from my location activated combat telemetry.
A squadron of UDAF warships had Skipped into Nastellan-owned space. The Skimmer in question counted one of their big fifty kilometer carriers, four of their Implacable-class beamships, and six of their Squire-class destroyers. And the carrier was launching Skimmers. There might be an artillery ship within support range too, but due to light lag we didn’t know where they were.
I ordered the Skimmer closest to the scene to transmit a final warning to stand down to the UDAF task force, and also requested artillery and beamship support to deal with the situation.
Immediately, the communications wormhole nexi patched a few more Voidskippers into my combat command network. They would be entering the combat zone in four seconds, and it was requested that the Skimmers cleared out of their warp trajectory. I passed on that order, the temporal control skimmers got moving, and the quick reaction task group Skipped into position.
Simultaneously, the skimmer I’d had on messenger duty forwarded me the incredibly offensive reply that the Carrier heading up the UDAF task force sent. Accounting for light lag, that carrier had snapped off a reply almost instantly.
“Lowborn filth! We of the United Democratic Angurosena Federation will never take orders from ones such as you! Now begone, or face the consequences!”
Still, no-one had actually fired yet. Oh sure, everyone in the combat zone had started evasive maneuvers – including the UDAF carrier, still deploying Skimmers.
Gungōn Tokivi Freiguha – the artillery ship who’d responded to my request for backup – noted over the comms network that they had a perfect shot lined up on the carrier, but the window of opportunity wouldn’t last long.
In less than a microsecond I replied, “They’re fishing for us taking the first shot. Don’t give it to them.”
“Jangkali, the UDAF is clearly going to invade us either way. Why should I hold my fire?”
“International relations; if they can even slightly paint us as the aggressor, it has the potential to greatly complicate the war effort. Don’t shoot.”
“The moment has passed, anyway.”
Meanwhile, the UDAF task force was similarly reluctant to actually fire any lethal weapons, but the Skimmers they were setting up into an impromptu temporal control system had the potential to become really hard to dislodge if we let it wait any longer.
I immediately contacted my superiors, this situation was becoming really serious. Meanwhile, I ordered two of the flankers – small beamships used as a secondary combatant – to start buzzing around the UDAF squadron in an effort to provoke them into firing.
One second elapsed, two seconds, three, then I finally heard back from my superiors.
“Xofang Jangkali Esaveil; footage of the intrusion has been shared with every allied and neutral power in the region, and the vast majority of them agree that this constitutes an act of aggression on the UDAF’s part. We are now officially at war, and your group has clearance to fire.”
Praise be to superhuman thought speeds. I immediately forwarded the weapons-hot order to everyone engaged with this particular attack squadron, and notified the skimmers I’d been about to rotate home that I’d be taking volunteers to try and flush out the enemy artillery – assuming they’d brought any.
What followed is a technique commonly known as stutter retrieval among carrier and cruiser shipminds. Basically, it’s a way to maintain nearly full mobility while recovering skimmers. Just as the Skimmer’s about to reach your warp field, flicker it off just long enough for them to cross the membrane at c. The instant they’re inside the warp field, get moving again.
Yeah, it requires really good timing to pull off reliably, not to mention a good deal of coordination between the carrier and skimmers. It’s the sort of thing you can really only do if everyone drills in it regularly, often under adverse conditions. Fortunately for me, it’s a skill that the Nastellan Starforce values very highly indeed.
Anyway, I managed to recover about two thousand beam skimmers in the course of eight seconds, along with five thousand TCS nodes. Meanwhile an artillery ship quickly checked my warp trajectory for time traps, and I skipped three light minutes into the “backline” in an effort to find any artillery the UDAF may have deployed.
Just my luck that I managed to Skip directly into the light cone of the UDAF artillery ship I’d been looking for. At a range of thirty light seconds, that was plenty of time to deploy the skimmers I had aboard, then get gone. I actually stutter-launched towards the artillery ship; approaching at near-c was a well known tactic to reduce your enemy’s available response time, and I really wanted to take this one by surprise.
As for the skimmers I launched, it’s a common and not entirely untrue misconception that skimmers can’t exceed the speed of light. It’s a relativistic geometry thing; if you have real momentum away from your destination, your space axis towards your destination points pastwards.
Since warp drives don’t impart real momentum, warping opposite your real momentum sends you pastwards. That’s how voidskippers can time travel, and while skimmers can’t go back in time, they can certainly arrest their forwards momentum that way.
It’s not often done due to extending the time experienced aboard the ship and messing with the temporal offset of comms holes. That said, something similar is used regularly to calibrate temporal control systems.
So the skimmers I launched were slamming their momentum drives in reverse, even as they warped towards the artillery ship at full tilt. I’d estimate that they managed to catch up to the light bringing news of their arrival by the time they’d made it halfway to the artillery ship’s position. The artillery ship had started evasive maneuvers before the wave of skimmers arrived, but even still got quickly encircled.
I didn’t even have to give the order for the TCS skimmers on the edge of the encirclement to form up into a time trap, nudging themselves a bit futurewards. Meanwhile the gang of beam skimmers I’d also deployed opened fire.
Even if each of them only had half an Exawatt of beam power to sling, there were two thousand of them. That adds up to quite a lot of firepower; more than enough to make an artillery ship with absolutely no business being in close combat panic.
Half a second later, that artillery ship had skipped away at superluminal speeds – and my TCS team informed me that they had a confirmed branching event. Basically, we’d beat the artillery ship.
Right, I’ll explain. Violate causality and the would-be time traveler gets dumped into a branch timeline with no trajectory back; superluminal warp bubbles are causally disconnected already, so they’re the weak link in the chain. For good temporal control you want the past ends of the wormholes pointed in the direction you want to block superluminal trajectories from, relative to the future ends. The “barrier” exists at the flat intersection of the wormhole mouth’s light cones.
Anyway, with the artillery ship dealt with, the skimmers I’d deployed began cleaning up their temporal offsets so I could pick them up again.
Well yeah, got to avoid violating causality to retain combat effectiveness; if you bring a closed loop of wormholes closer than their temporal offset without warp drives being involved, you branch their timelines so they don’t connect within the same worldline anymore.
Took a little bit to pick up the gang, and this time I didn’t bother with stutter retrieval. In the meantime, I checked up on what was happening with the rest of the UDAF squadron.
As it turned out, the destroyers had dumped their entire load of warp torpedoes, forcing the beamships to give the enemy squadron quite a bit of space until the salvo was thinned out.
Short explanation: warp torpedoes are technically skimmers. They’re spheres eighty meters in diameter that can instantly warp to c in any direction, and instead of having a nuclear or NOW power plant, they’re powered by a contracted space pocket full of antimatter. When they explode, they just open the space pocket and their remaining fuel annihilates with the torpedo.
Every starforce uses torpedoes in one way or another, and the eighty meter size is standard simply because that’s as small as they can be feasibly made.
Well yeah, the space pocket opening early could lead to a magazine explosion. That’s why lots of starforces store it as a space pocket full of matter, and shove it through a NOW before sticking it in the torpedo, launching immediately after. That’s how we do it at least. The UDAF prefers the ability to launch the entire magazine in one go, and reduces the hazard of a magazine explosion by “only” loading their torpedoes for 75 Teratons TNT equivalent.
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Speaking of torpedoes, a couple Dojang-class torpships had shown up to provide fire support for our beamships, staying a few light seconds back from the fiercest fighting.
That quick lesson aside, I recovered my Skimmers, waited a quarter-second for a clear warp trajectory, and skipped back to the main fleet. Well, I was actually about a light-minute away from the fight. Close enough to provide refueling and repairs to damaged skimmers, far enough away to not be terribly likely to get suddenly blown up.
It took about a kilosecond for the beamships to pop all those warp torpedoes the UDAF had launched; one flanker actually took a direct hit and got mission-killed, poor guy. I idly noted that a recovery ship had already been tasked to retrieve him once it was safe to do so.
Once the UDAF no longer had those ninety thousand torpedoes to cover for them? Things started going really, really badly for them. Main reason being that the UDAF tended to field bigger ships than us, with the exception of their downright tiny artillery ships.
Bigger ship, more power, seems intuitive, right? Well that’s actually not the case. A Quesan beamship needs obscenely hot radiators to keep the same power to mass ratio as a Quinab, and the bigger the ship the slower it is to turn, generally. Also in the case of skimmers, going bigger means the carrier can’t carry as many of them.
End result is that UDAF skimmers were dying fast. Our wormhole demolitions ships were quickly cleaning up the comms holes of any that got killed with their sublight warp bubble launchers, quickly eroding the UDAF squadron’s TCS.
Even aside from the beam damage the Implacable-class battleships had taken, the importance of TCS was underlined when one of our artillery ships managed to line up a shot and instantly blasted one of them in half from two light minutes away.
Ah, you want to know why the battleship didn’t dodge? The short answer is time travel; artillery ships usually offset themselves a bit pastwards of the rest of the fleet. A tenth of a second or so is typical. End result is that the information the rest of the fleet has on a target’s past position can potentially be present information for artillery, meaning that under certain circumstances artillery can completely negate a target’s evasive maneuvers. Usually they’re firing bombs similar to what’s used in a warp torpedo, but without the warp drive. Most starforces opt for lower yield per shot on their artillery, but Nastellan is something of an exception.
Anyway, that quickly changed the tone for the UDAF squadron. The carrier just straight-up bailed, skipping away from the fight into interstellar space, though they managed to avoid getting branched. The destroyers had already left after firing their torpedoes, and two of the battleships had also fled.
Anyway, that last battleship only lasted half a second more before beamfire immobilized it, at which point the flankers who’d been fighting it quickly vaporized their target.
So now all that was left were a bunch of skimmers left in the lurch when their carrier ran away.
I ordered that we offer an opportunity to surrender, and after a moment about half the enemy skimmers took it. The remainder opened fire on the ones who were surrendering, and were quickly disposed of with beamfire – and the occasional shot from artillery. Which actually got some of them to surrender too. Hypocrites.
That engagement over, I found myself assigned to escort the surrendering skimmers back to Nastellan; they wouldn’t fit in my hangar tubes due to being too big, so that mainly amounted to waiting a couple minutes for a logistics ship to turn up; their cargo bays could handle skimmers, even though they weren’t really designed for it.
Immediately after, I was ordered to finish the skimmer rotation I’d originally been sent out here to do. It was pretty uneventful really; load up the tired skimmers, skip back to a Shoal, then unload them.
Then I was promptly loaded with a fresh rack of skimmers and ordered to go shore up defenses against another attack by the UDAF. Apparently they had thousands of different squadrons poking around our defenses, trying to find a weak spot where they could force entry from.
So as soon as I was loaded up with a fresh flight group of skimmers, I promptly skipped off to another location needing my assistance.
As soon as I was linked to the combat telemetry for this zone, it became immediately clear why I was tasked with delivering more skimmers here. Namely, this attack had gone heavy on the battleships, and the destroyers had apparently opted to stick around and provide some beamfire support after they dumped their torpedoes.
Not that they were providing very much beamfire support. According to the UDAF’s official information this class of ship could only sling about fifty Exawatts, and judging by thermal images of their radiators, they were running at about half-power. Was there some sort of persistent maintenance problem? The enemy battleships were running a fair bit cooler than they were ostensibly rated for too.
By contrast, every last ship on Nastellan’s side was running at their rated radiator temperature; 136000 Kelvins for the vast majority of cases, with the Quesan class running much hotter at 177000 Kelvins.
Musings aside, I quickly deployed my load of Skimmers, moving parallel to the fight this time in order to stay out of danger.
One of the Quesan sent me their gratitude over the tactical net, even as I spent twenty whole seconds unloading skimmers.
I still had a third of them to go when I got a warning over the combat telemetry: hundreds of the enemy warp torpedoes had been assigned to target me, and with the obscurity of light lag their exact positions couldn’t be known.
I quickly halted skimmer deployments and skipped three light minutes sunwards; it would make things a bit more inconvenient for my skimmers, but I needed to stay at a safe distance until those torpedoes were dealt with.
So I watched from a distance as torpedo after torpedo exploded, skimmers and voidskippers frantically avoided enemy fire, and the fight progressed. I contributed how I could, threading together the sensor data from the hundreds of thousands of assets on Nastellan’s side in the vicinity, and highlighting places to shoot where hits were more likely.
My efforts quickly bore fruit, as one of the UDAF battleships skimmed right into a beamwall – basically a pattern of concentrated fire that flattens it into a two-dimensional plane – and got its five torus warp drive absolutely trashed, coming to a halt instantly. The ship’s hull armor had held for now, but with the damage it had already taken and being immobilized, they were basically at our mercy.
Before that ship could surrender, one of the remaining UDAF torpedoes diverted to a direct hit with the stricken battleship and blew it into fragments. No way to know if the battleship requested that or someone was scheming – and considering the remaining UDAF battleships just vaporized one of their own destroyers, it was probably the latter.
The forces I was with quickly seized upon that moment of disunity, two more destroyers getting immobilized by beamfire and subsequently disarmed, even as one of our artillery ships took a clear shot to immediately mission-kill another battleship.
The remaining battleships and destroyers were hemmed in now, boxed into a region half a light second across. Their skimmer support was trying its hardest to keep TCS up around their voidskippers, but they were dying fast. With the level of beamfire and artillery support we had, it was only a matter of time until we either killed them, or the voidskippers panicked badly enough to skip right through a timewall.
Yes, defeating this particular probing attack was going quite well. That said, I had a sinking feeling that another one would be popping up sooner, rather than later.
A kilosecond later, this probing attack was defeated, and I found myself being called back to Shoal 9906.
Once there, I was immediately called into a briefing with Coordinator Vikal. A virtual room opened up, and I appeared in my scarlet parrot avatar. Meanwhile, Vikal opted for a six-armed humanoid with grey skin and a shock of blue hair.
“Xofang Jangkali Esaveil, you are being assigned to deep space logistical warfare.”
“Understood, and not surprising in the slightest; it’s what my class was built for.”
“Good. You’ll be here at the Shoal for maintenance for the next three days for your scheduled maintenance, then deploy immediately. We expect the UDAF’s offensive efforts to have concentrated into a small number of high-intensity attacks by then, and you’ll be part of the efforts to cut their supply lines once that happens.”
I saluted with my left wing.
“Presumably, I will also be tasked with securing supply lines for our counter-offensive?”
“Yes, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. High command has determined that before we can engage in serious counter-offensives, we need to cripple the UDAF’s primary combat fleets, which will be much easier if we cut them off from resupply. According to PASTMAIL, doing things the other way around opens us up to intolerably high losses, and should therefore be avoided if feasible.”
I nodded.
“Understood. I’ll make sure to stay up to date with the relevant intelligence on how things are going.”
“See that you do.”
Eventually the briefing came to a close, and I found myself in the age-old “hurry up and wait” of military service. I occupied the time by keeping up to date with the thousands of probing attacks as some were defeated and others intensified, and also keeping track of the other voidskippers assigned to this Shoal.
Nazak Quanater Udanog had found herself bouncing between probing attacks like me, just as a result of happenstance. Though her more versatile toolset as a Deep Space Cruiser meant she got back to the Shoal sixty kiloseconds after I did. She got assigned to my command for deep space logistical warfare, and would be joining me soon after maintenance.
Just like Vikal had said would happen, the attacks from the UDAF were quickly consolidating. It seemed they were focusing into two major pushes; one from near Nastallan’s south rotational pole, and another a lot closer to the equator. Keeping count of identified enemy ships, there were hundreds of millions of UDAF voidskippers at each front, with them pushing through the sparser regions of Nastellan’s defenses at an honestly frightening – though still sub-c on average – pace.
Rakana, Rushina, and Nogarke had been on maintenance downtime when I arrived, and finished said downtime two days after I got back to Shoal 9906. They were promptly assigned to the equatorial front, and off they went.
As for Quanater and myself, we’d already been updated to the Wartime Maintenance Schedule, so we were ready to deploy at the same time, with both of us having a full rack of skimmers, and Quanater also having a full magazine of torpedoes. Three flankers and Gungōn Tokivi Freiguha also got assigned to our impromptu task group.
Right, the Wartime Maintenance Schedule. So, during peacetime it’s a fifty percent mix of time on patrol and maintenance downtime. Thing is, most of that “maintenance downtime” is actually training for the maintenance and repair crews; lots of damage control and repair exercises to keep them in absolute top condition for wartime. Meanwhile the Wartime Maintenance Schedule cuts that down to only what’s actually necessary to keep us in absolute peak fighting trim, so more ships can be on active duty at once.
The expectation is that during wartime, actual damage to ships will provide the maintainers and repair crews with plenty of practice. It’s also why us shipminds are expected to form emotional bonds with the repair teams; it motivates them to do an extra good job. It’s brutal pragmatic logic, and perhaps a bit cruel. But it works.
Anyway, the assignment. Tokivi used their pair of superluminal cannons to check a one light year trajectory into the interstellar space between Nastellan and Ro, and once we knew it was safe, we all skipped there to begin our role in the deep space campaign.
Ah, you want to know how artillery ships can check for timewalls? Pretty simple; for practical purposes, no two branched skips land in the same timeline. So fire one with a comms hole and some sensors, followed by another with a cheap battery-powered signal beacon. If there’s no timewall the sensor will detect the beacon, whereas if there is a timewall, it won’t.
Worst case you’re down a communications wormhole, but those are a heck of a lot cheaper than ships. And if the warp trajectory is safe, it’s pretty easy to pick up both the comms hole and the beacon for re-use.
Anyway, we made that skip out to a light year from home. Next on the to-do list was mapping out our assigned sector’s temporal landscape and trying to find the routes the UDAF was using to reinforce their assaults. So we got to mapping out more safe warp trajectories using Tokivi’s cannons; they had a maximum range of 81.4 Megalights, so we could investigate a pretty wide area.
Didn’t take long for us to find a timewall that wasn’t authorized by either Nastellan or one of our allies. A bit more probing let us narrow down the probable location of the culprit wormhole’s past end to within a few kilolights, and from there we were able to get a look at what was going on.
So we skipped close enough to see what was going on – one of the timewall probes wouldn’t have had the needed sensor resolution, and we were rewarded with a view of a small fleet skimming along at 0.9 c.