(BSN Shinokage, Nuevo Edo System)
The most frustrating part of knowing that you might have a Hunt of X’thari coming for you is that you didn’t know when or where they’d be coming from. As near as we could tell, the scout that had been destroyed had probably used their Anchor Drive to arrive well outside the system, and then took a stealth approach in. That wasn’t too hard to figure out, honestly, since it is about the same thing my ships had done several times during the war.
Figuring that out did nothing to improve our odds of detecting a Scout ship in stealth mode before they did something like attack a freighter. The only reason we knew the freighter was being attacked, and were able to get there in time to stop the X’thari before everyone was killed was because a Nomad was able to circumvent the damaged communications array. The attack had been swift, brutal, and ruthlessly efficient. I did not like our odds of catching a stealth ship in the act again.
Oh sure, there were active sensors that could be used to detect stealthed ships, but those were a double-edged sword. They either had limited range, or they got a return on everything in the system, and I do mean EVERYTHING. Worse, they worked on friend and foe alike, lighting up your own stealth ships. And the icing on the cake? If your enemy had the right sensors, they’d get the return, too, so you were basically screaming where you and all your ships were. That was, as some would say, a Bad Thing™.
Fortunately, a Hunt or larger group of X’thari acted differently from their scouts. Sure, they could be stealthy when they wanted to, but they were more like a pack of brawlers. Experienced warriors, and working extremely well together, with nasty pack tactics, but brawlers all the same. The Hunter-Scout’s role was to be an unseen shadow, finding prey and reporting back. The Hunt’s role was to trap their prey and drive them to ground for the kill. That was why the Hunt usually appeared by the Gateway, allowing them to cut off ships from escaping the system that way.
That gave us an edge, since we knew where to expect them, and could prepare defenses. However, that didn’t make this a slam dunk. We didn’t know what size Hunt we’d be facing, and there was a 1 in 4 chance that they’d come in from some other area, especially if they believed a Prey group was waiting for them to show up. So we couldn’t neglect defenses for the rest of the system.
More importantly, though, was time. We didn’t know if the Hunt would be here in days, weeks, or even months. No one knew how far away their nearest group was, or how quickly they’d pull together a Hunt to attack us. We just knew that an attack was coming. There was no way to keep our forces on high alert for weeks on end. That would push crews to the breaking point before the battle even started.
Fortunately, if there was one thing the Navy was good for, it was teaching a sailor the value of ‘hurry up and wait’, and how to deal with it. Oh, I’m sure the other branches had it just as bad, in different ways, but there was usually something else out there to distract them. Air Force had their comfy bases. Army and Marines would at least have animals and the like when they were out deployed away from a base, and enemy action as a more regular thing (so much easier for terrorists to get to you in a land convoy than on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean). Navy? You had whatever diversions you could find on the ship, or there was a whole lot of blue water between you and civilization.
We quickly worked to have additional defense platforms put in place around the gate, and also shoved a couple on the most likely lines towards the system, including the way the scout ship had come in. I personally made sure there was a platform at the site of the old surveillance satellite, just to make sure anyone coming to check on it would get a face full of missile.
Other than that, we just had to keep rotating crews around so no one got too comfortable or too stressed. Plenty of shore leave helped with that, as there was no shortage of eager people on the planet below hoping to help people ‘destress’. The only other thing we really did was make sure to step up production of ships.
The ship production is something we went back and forth on a bit. The Nuevo Edoans wanted big ships like the Smerti or a superdreadnought like the Nightforge was before refit. I convinced them that, in the short term, they were better off with the gunboats, assassins, and the various fighters that we were building for them. They were cheaper, took fewer crewmembers to train up, and they were more useful for a single-world defense. There was a reason why I used them as the backbone of my fleet.
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Of course, that wasn’t the only problems we had to deal with. No, it would be far too simple if the world just gave me one damn problem at a time. The integration of the new settlers to Nuevo Edo was… troubled, at best. The men were not used to living in a female-dominated society, and the women were unfamiliar with men who didn’t treat them as automatic superiors. That caused more than a few problems as men started buying homes, starting businesses, and in general trying to make a life for themselves on this new world.
What did that have to do with me? Since I was a guy (most of the time, the Nuevo Edoans didn’t know about my shapeshifting, so I was able to go incognito a few times), and the owner of the largest new business on the planet, the newcomers looked to me for help in dealing with the locals, especially since it was my people who blasted the ‘Demons’ from the sky, which gave me some credit with the local population. But every week or so saw the arrival of another couple freighters with colonists and trade goods for the planet, and when freighters left, they often had women from Nuevo Edo who were going off to see the stars.
Now, if only the damn X’thari would get here so we could get past the waiting part.
(INS Triumphant, Alpha Centauri System)
Empress Merida was less than pleased with the amount of time it took to prepare to go and see what that intriguing Nomad had done in this ‘Nuevo Edo’ system, but for some reason there were a lot of people who were none too eager for the Empress of the Terran Empire to be going off to another arm of the galaxy. Even though the Alpha Centauri gate meant that it would only take her a few days to return if something happened back home, there were worries. Well, the worries were more about what would happen to her in the middle of nowhere, so the Empress agreed to take a superdreadnought and its escorts.
Naturally, the ship she chose was her beloved Triumphant. As she walked the halls of the ship she still had to fight to keep from thinking of as hers, she considered what had been said about the Nuevo Edoans. They’d apparently been dropped off in the middle of nowhere after getting caught in the wake of some ship that was far superior to anything they had, even now. Could they have accidentally run into the civilization that created the Gateways? And what would that mean for the rest of the universe?
Lucio appeared at her side as they headed for the docking bay. She had to put in an appearance at Fleet Base Bagthara on her way through the system, even if she didn’t care for the ridiculous pomp and ceremony that always accompanied such things. It was a necessary part of being Empress, however. One had to keep the morale of the people in mind, or discontent would spread, and then all kinds of trouble started popping up, trouble that they couldn’t afford with the Fleet still reeling from the war.
The logistics network that had existed before the civil war had been shattered. Building the new transfer stations to handle transshipping and making everything more efficient than individual ships running a circuit of stops was not challenging, but it was inconvenient. Few of the transfer stations were in places with true shipyards, so there was some expense and trouble getting the new stations out to their homes and setting them up. Once they had gone live, however, the economy picked up by 48% from immediate postwar levels, though it was still not to the point where things had been before the war. Still, with the civilians happy because the Empire’s trade was flowing again, she needed to think of the Navy’s morale. And while everyone hated state visits, she knew that the enlisted DID appreciate when they got to show off.
Lucio whispered softly to her side, so that his words could be for her ears alone. Oh, the guards who were with her no doubt heard, since they had enhanced hearing with their helmets, but they could be trusted for discretion. “Empress, it would seem that your second favorite Nomad has landed in a bit of trouble over in Nuevo Edo.”
Merida raised an eye brow at Lucio, and smiled. “Second favorite, Lucio? And prey tell me, who is my favorite?”
Lucio played at being hurt, but everyone could see it was an act. “Oh, my Empress, how you wound me! How could it be that your favorite Nomad is any other than me, Lucio?”
Merida permitted herself to giggle at her friend’s antics. She needed people like Lucio around her, people who weren’t wrapped up in the pageantry of her being the Empress of the Terran Empire. The Nomads, she thought, had a way of keeping her grounded, at least the few she’d met personally. She knew that there were many officials who did not care for the self-important attitudes many showed, nor the lack of respect that most showed people who had ‘earned’ it.
Smiling, she shook her head to clear those thoughts away. “So, what is it that our Nomad friend has done now?”
Lucio nodded, returning to ‘business’, now that the Empress was no longer in the mood he’d sensed earlier. “Well, it appears that the defense forces he’s placed in Nuevo Edo have uncovered a X’thari Hunter-Scout and one of their Sentinel probes. Both were destroyed, though it seems the Hunter-Scout was actually destroyed while it was attempting to capture a freighter in the Nuevo Edo system.”
Empress Merida frowned, as she called upon her training and knowledge from being a superdreadnought captain. “If a Sentinel was there, then we must assume that they already have some idea of the forces already in the system. So a Hunter-Scout was dispatched to see what was going on, and if the system had worthy prey… and then they destroyed the Hunter-Scout. They are expecting at least a Hunt to show up, aren’t they?”
Lucio nodded, and said, “According to our friend, the chances of a Hunt showing are almost 100%. There is a significant chance of a Full Hunt showing up, instead. Given what our spies have told us of the strength he took to Nuevo Edo, he should be able to handle a Full Hunt. There was even something like a 20% chance that they may see a True Hunt.”
Merida nodded her head thoughtfully. “With the number of ships he has, he could still savage a True Hunt, if he managed to get the drop on them, but there is no way that they’d be able to survive it unless they were able to inflict enough casualties fast enough that they could make the Hunt fracture into groups.”
Making her decision, she said, in her ‘Empress’ voice, “Then let Us get this visit over with quickly, so We can pay off some of Our debts to that man in battle with the X’thari.”