TRNS AMAZON, GRUCCUD (21,000 LS)
POV: Kiara Agarwal, Terran Republic Navy (Rank: Commander)
“Set general quarters for blink transition!”
“General quarters! General quarters! All hands, battle stations. Transit forward and up on starboard side, down and aft port side, secure loose items for compensator-free maneuvers!”
“SWO, bridge. Unknown gravidar contacts. Resolving. Approx two light hours distance.”
“CIC, request Automation Level Two to Three.”
“Bridge, level three granted. Keep the Woodpeckers warm and deploy two EW drones.”
Aware of the chaos around her, Captain Kiara Agarwal patiently waited the zero point six seconds it took the ship computers to autonomously adapt to the Gruccud system as they reappeared in normal space. Hundreds of gravidar targets updated from their estimated positions to their actual, observed positions on the bridge screens. At general quarters, the Amazon used its idle processing power to continuously acquire positive firing solutions on all identified hostiles in the system, of which there appeared to be many.
“Any unexpected changes?”
“No, Captain. Looks like they’re all still there and unaware,” her executive officer, Musa, replied, pointing at the three hundred missile destroyers the enemy left behind to keep Grionc’s Sixth Fleet bottled in, stationed in static orbits near the system limit. “Should we give the Puppers a hand here?”
Kiara brought up her standing orders and the now much more relaxed rules of engagement on her console screen. “We won’t make it back to Sol in time, will we?”
“It… seems unlikely we will, ma’am. If they proceed in a straight line at maximum speed, and assuming the most the Mississippi and Squadrons 9 and 10 can do is delay the invasion by a week — we’re more than two behind.”
Kiara made up her mind. “Let’s cut their legs out from under them, then.” She carefully inspected her battlemap. “These Bun ships are in stable orbits,” she observed.
“Probably saving fuel, just here to contain Sixth Fleet for the long haul,” Musa speculated.
“Can the Puppers hear me?” Kiara asked.
“The enemy jammers are still active… but we’re close enough now if we boost our power high enough, they should be able to hear us. But the enemy ships jamming us: they might notice something is up.”
“Hm… I don’t want to go too loud yet in case the enemy can hear us too…” she contemplated.
“What about the Malgeir? They have our missiles. If we somehow get them to cold launch them at the enemy fleet, we can link up and coordinate from here, right?” Musa suggested.
“Can we remote override and launch missiles from Sixth Fleet’s external racks from here?”
A display tallied the available assets in Sixth Fleet. “Of missiles that receive in FTL, they’re out of Thunderbirds. Only twenty-four Kestrels remaining.”
“You think they’ll get the message and follow up with the Pigeons if I launch them all?”
“Only one way to find out, Captain.”
“I’ll take it. And if they don’t…” She shrugged. “We can always secure laser comm them. It’ll just take a few hours. The risk is small. Where are those enemy jammers?”
“Six of them near us, all missile destroyers.” The six red targets appeared locked on the bridge main screens as the deployed drones and the Amazon’s delicate nose sensors triangulated their positions.
“Okay, get the computer to calculate target prioritization on the enemy fleet. I want another six good targets.”
“That’s going to be tricky. We have no intelligence on any of these ships,” he warned. “But… based on accumulated radio traffic, we’ve identified two slightly more important nodes. Might be squadron command ships. Low confidence on those estimates though; they are using proxy repeaters like the Resistance does.”
“Of course they are… Alright, pick another four at random then and launch two of those Kestrels at each target. If we’re lucky, Grionc will know what we’re up to.”
“Remote launching their missiles now… One failed launch. Twenty-three inbound.”
She looked over at his screen in concern. “Failed launch? What’s wrong?”
Musa frowned at the screen as the computer worked. “Something with pylon misalignment. Hang on, remote diagnostics is resetting its ejection sequence… okay, that one is out too. Updating their flight profiles so they arrive at the same time.”
“ETA?” she asked.
“Six hundred seconds’ burn, then unguided flight. They’ll arrive in… about 120 hours, with minimal fuel for terminal maneuvers.”
“We’ll be here in emissions control for a while, huh? Put us behind some hard cover and break out the ice cream.”
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MNS OENGRO, GRUCCUD-4 (3,000 KM)
POV: Grionc, Malgeir Federation Navy (Rank: High Fleet Commander)
“High Fleet Commander! High Fleet Commander!”
Someone shook Grionc awake from her nap in her command chair. She realized she must have dozed off again.
“Hmmm?” she asked, shaking sleep from her brain with a quick shiver. “Did the enemy change orbits?”
“No, High Fleet Commander,” Vastae reported. “Squadron leader Loenda is reporting that some of the Terran missiles mounted to the outside of her ships suddenly disappeared.”
“What?” she asked, fully awake now. “Disappeared? How? Who stole them?! I’ll have their fur made into a coat for—”
“It appears they launched away from the fleet, and our sensors lost track of them after a few seconds,” Vastae said, still reading from his console. “They are the new stealth ones. The ones we were supposed to save for Amelia when she got here.”
“Get me the squadron leader.”
Loenda’s face appeared on her screen almost immediately. “High Fleet Commander, we’ve just completed a full external pylon count. We’ve lost twenty-four of our missiles.”
“Wait… twenty-four—” Grionc noticed.
“It’s all the newer model ones. The Kestrels we were supposed to save for the admiral when she arrived. Is it possible that the thinking machines on the missiles just decided to launch themselves?”
Grionc thought for a moment. With the Terrans and their technology, anything was possible. But based on the approximate positions of their ships from when the last jammer gap the enemy opened up— Grionc shook her ears. “No, I think the Amazon is in the system with us. I think Kiara fired them.”
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“Then why aren’t they burning through the jamming to talk to us?” Loenda demanded. “They said if they get into this system…”
Grionc contemplated the problem for a minute. “Maybe they’re too close to the enemy ships and are afraid of detection?”
“What about laser comms?” Loenda asked.
“Maybe they’re in a hurry and don’t want to wait for the speed of light. I think if they launched these missiles — the enemy isn’t guaranteed to be sitting still like that forever. The more important thing here is what we plan on doing,” Grionc slowly said her thought out loud.
Loenda didn’t take two seconds to arrive at her recommendation. “We should launch too. Launch everything we have at the Grass Eaters. Make them pay—”
“Whoa, hold your horses for a second—”
“Horses?”
Grionc hastily corrected herself. “Never mind that. If we launch everything, we’ll ruin the fun surprise the Amazon has planned for the enemy.”
“Just our Pigeons then? We can launch them in their emissions control mode.”
“That should be fine,” Grionc agreed as she began entering the numbers manually into her console, not looking forward to the additional math she was going to have to do now.
She wished Speinfoent were here.
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TRNS AMAZON, GRUCCUD (20,900 LS)
POV: Kiara Agarwal, Terran Republic Navy (Rank: Commander)
“Launches! We have launches from Sixth Fleet on gravidar!” Musa exclaimed. “The Pigeons… in emissions control mode. Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Told you,” Kiara looked at him smugly. “I’m getting a feel for these Puppers.”
“Yes, Captain. That’s why they pay you the big bucks.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, our mouth-watering O-6 pay. How many missiles have they fired?”
“Just about all the Pigeons they have on their ships, Captain. A little over six hundred.”
“Well, that should be enough for this fleet unless they move. ETA?”
“The Pigeons are still burning. We should cease our Kestrel missiles’ burn early and have them reignite their engines later when we find out how long they decided to burn them for,” he suggested.
“Do it.”
The Kestrel missiles stopped burning, gliding towards the unaware Znosian fleet. Meanwhile, the follow-up wave of Pigeon missiles continued their acceleration. After a few minutes, the Pigeons went ballistic too.
“Alright, we got their flight profile. Not the best, but far from the worst. Adjusting the Kestrels’ flight profile to match… re-igniting engines. New ETA, 150 hours.”
“Great. I’ll clear my schedule.”
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MNS OENGRO, GRUCCUD-4 (3,000 KM)
POV: Grionc, Malgeir Federation Navy (Rank: High Fleet Commander)
The no-nonsense voice of the Terran captain transmitted through the ship’s speakers. “— And if you did launch the Pigeons five hours ago by the time you received this message, good job, and you may safely disregard the rest of this message. Amazon, out.”
“That was a good guess, High Fleet Commander,” Vastae commented to the smug Grionc. “How did you know it was them and that was their plan?”
“Like I keep telling you, Vastae. I’m getting a feel for our Grass Eater friends.”
“I guess that’s why they pay you the big bucks,” Vastae said.
Grionc sighed and complained, “Unfortunately not. The Terrans have all kinds of new rules on our fleet’s financial expenditures. I can’t even withdraw funds from our general funds without filling out at least three different forms!”
He tilted his head. “If that’s what it takes to win wars, I guess we’ll just have to learn to fill out more of their forms.”
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TRNS MISSISSIPPI, CAERIO (24,000 LS)
POV: Amelia Waters, Terran Republic Navy (Rank: Admiral)
Amelia stared unblinkingly at the battlemap as she watched the Amazon under Kiara begin its silent engagement against the three hundred Znosian ships besieging Gruccud. Light hours apart, space battles tended to take place in slow motion. Over many hours and days… before they were decided in milliseconds by the computers that controlled the pieces on both sides.
She switched her screen over to where the Mississippi was: Caerio, an unremarkable transit system… six blinks from Datsot, four from Gruccud. The enemy would have to make transit here. And from what the Copproe sent over in its last jammer gap burst just a couple days earlier, the massed enemy fleet was in the system beyond, burning hard towards where she was…
Amelia glanced at her notifications. Still nothing.
The enemy should be making a move right about now — the tiny Malgeir scout ship just needed to find a way to transmit their blink vector to her.
Speunirtio hadn’t let her down yet.
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MNS COPPROE, SPIVAUXU (16,000 LS)
POV: Speunirtio, Malgeir Federation Navy (Rank: Gamma Leader)
“The Grass Eater destroyer squadron that split off from their main fleet is still burning to intercept our path,” Plecta reported nervously. “They’ve improved their acceleration by another five percent.”
Captain Speunirtio acknowledged it with a short nod. “They must have dumped mass to chase us down. Re-calculate a safe evade course.”
Recalculating… Done.
“New course entered…” Plecta stared at the screen, watching as their digital intelligence calculated the safety cone, which shrank further every second. “Should we—”
Speunirtio shook his ears. “Keep the sensors pointed at the target fuel ship. It’s about to blink to the next system any time now.”
Target ETA to clear blink limit: 30 seconds.
The warning klaxons on the bridge made a loud noise, and new priority alerts began appearing on his console.
“Enemy missile destroyers are now radar locking us,” Plecta reported, her voice up half an octave from stress.
Their magic alien tablet chimed again.
It’s a distraction or bluff. You are safe to ignore it. Relatively safe. For now.
Speunirtio kept his voice steady. “They don’t have the range. They’re just trying to distract us. Keep the front hermisphere sensors on target.”
The alarms went off, and the radar console was a flurry of yellow.
“Enemies have launched on us, Captain! Vampires! Twenty vampires incoming!”
Still a bluff. Probability of hit is under point one percent. Keep your eyes on the objective.
Speunirtio didn’t budge from his seat. “Electronic warfare, prepare the Raven-2 countermeasures for deployment if and when those incoming missiles go pitbull.”
He’d never personally seen a pitbull himself, but the pictures he had seen… they resembled a couple of officers he had in the point defense section. He wasn’t sure what they had to do with missile technology, but he wasn’t one to deviate from proper Sixth Fleet terminology now.
“Yes, Captain!”
“And nav, keep those sensors pointed. I don’t want us to miss a thing.”
Right on cue, the enemy fleet blinked almost at once — except the destroyer squadron still trying to vector towards them with their slower acceleration. The Copproe’s sensor computers suddenly became a lot more responsive as thousands of relevant targets disappeared out of its view.
“Did we catch—”
Plecta inspected her console, then let out a triumphant yell. “We got their blink-out vector!”
“Nav, burn us away from those missiles,” he ordered calmly.
The Copproe pivoted and activated its powerful engines, boosting it away from the incoming missile swarm. They each ran out of fuel, well outside the effective range of even the Copproe’s advanced missile payload and drifted uselessly into the dark.
The bridge crew collectively breathed a sigh of relief.
“Our job’s not done yet,” Speunirtio cautioned. “Are we still jammed?”
“Yes, sir. At least one of those destroyers must have a jammer onboard,” Plecta speculated.
“Arm the wild weasels and prepare the transmission.”
“This is our last set of anti-radiation missiles, Captain.”
“Then we better hope that the Terrans are ready on the other side. Prepare to attack!”
“Launch parameters set! Preset launch in twenty minutes.”
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TRNS MISSISSIPPI, CAERIO (24,000 LS)
POV: Amelia Waters, Terran Republic Navy (Rank: Admiral)
“Admiral, we have the Copproe!” Chuck’s voice appeared in her headset.
“Get the blink vector! Get it now before—”
“Got it, Admiral. Entering intercepting blink course. Activating engine in two minutes!”
The Mississippi’s computers calculated the midpoint between the target vector transmitted by the Malgeir scout ship, added a small margin, and its blink engines warmed up, preparing to activate.
“Good. Get the blink disruption field ready. We’ll only have a few hours when we drop out. I don’t like these margins…”
“Yes, ma’am,” Chuck replied tersely, busy getting his crew ready for the Sphinx intercept.
“Is the Copproe still live on FTL?” Amelia asked.
“Yes, Admiral. Enemy jammer net still down; there must be some kind of a startup delay. Connecting them to you—”
The image of Speunirtio appeared on screen, his mouth panting, his snout dripping with liquid, and his eyes wrinkling with exhaustion. “Terran Fleet Command— Terran Admiral, did you get the numbers we sent?” he asked urgently.
“Yes, Captain, we are on our way. Good work. Relay my compliments to your crew.”
Speunirtio nodded his thanks wordlessly and sighed. He leaned back into his command chair, closing his eyes.
In an instant, Amelia read his mixed expressions. She’d gotten very good at this from years of watching Malgeir commanders in battle; the resignation and understanding in their faces as they bravely faced the end. “Are you going to be able to get out of there safely, Captain?”
Speunirtio appeared to hesitate for a second and replied in a much quieter voice, “No, I don’t think so, Terran Admiral. We’re out of blink fuel, and these enemy destroyers are now stuck on us like bugs on Soerru butt, and they’ve got two of them guarding the only gas giant in this system. We can’t stop anywhere to refuel. This might be it for us, but we’ll delay as long as possible and take as many of them out of the fight as we can.”
Amelia stared at him, her mind balancing her years of watching thousands of good Malgeir spacers sacrificing themselves for nothing against her own rationality.
She made up her mind as the blink engine spun up.