(CNS Luvon Gilrie, Amazon System)
Captain Zylna looked up from her desk in the small quarters afforded her as Captain of the Gilrie as the door chimed. It was more space than the average crewman had, certainly, but no one would mistake it for luxury. She sent the signal to open the door, revealing Lieutenant Daelen and her XO, Lieutenant Tanyl Leoven. She nodded to both of them, and motioned to the two folding chairs in the small space. It was ‘cozy’, but this was the Captain’s space, which meant they could talk plainly here, without the burden of rank. Both men took the offered seats, and the bottles that bore the mark of a local brewer.
“Gentlemen. I trust the crew has recovered from their bout of shore leave? I was worried when I didn’t see any calls for us to pick up sailors or marines from the local authorities.”
Leoven laughed. “I was wondering that myself. There’s always at least one sailor that gets a little too drunk and ‘overzealous’, and ends up in the care of Shore Patrol. I had half a mind to call down to the infirmary, and see if there was an epidemic running through the crew that I didn’t know about.”
Daelen snorted in response to that, and took a swig from his bottle before saying, “Well, the way I heard it from my boys, the fact that the whole place was mostly women looking for… companionship and eager to actually buy Marines drinks instead of the other way around meant that any male on the crew was promptly whisked away from the bar the moment they were inebriated enough to pick a partner, and they was enough choice that no one went home disappointed. Free beer and easy women make for very happy Marines. Happy Marines don’t cause trouble, because then someone will come to make them very unhappy. Same for your sailors, I expect.”
Leoven nodded. “True enough. The few women in the crew, though, apparently were not pleased with their lack of prospects while on leave.”
Zylna smiled, remembering some of her adventures on shore leave, back before she was a Captain. “Even if the girl has no intention of going home with someone, it feels nice to be fawned over, you know? Makes her feel wanted and special, when most of the time we have to be tough to get the respect of our crews.”
Her XO nodded. “Yes, I heard the same as I came across Ensign Hunt as she was leaving one of the bars. She was drunk enough that she didn’t recognize who she was talking to until I’d gotten her back to the shuttle. She just saw the Navy uniform, and that I was a man.”
Zylna raised an eyebrow. “Anything I should be concerned about?”
“No, just the same things any sailor who has been drinking and striking out all night might say if a female shipmate was helping them back to the shuttle. I asked Doctor Ivesly to impress on her the dangers of overindulging. Officially, I am not aware of any incident that happened.”
Daelen leaned forward, and said, “And what about you, Captain? Did you enjoy your tour of the Black Star facilities before we left?”
“Not much to enjoy, to be honest. The things they’ve done with the Nightforge are incredible, but in the end it is still a mobile shipyard. The tour of the X’thari carrier was very informative, or it would have been if I was fluent in scientific minutiae. The most interesting thing was watching the yardies begin construction on a new ship. The person I asked said it was going to be the new flagship for the Nuevo Edo Navy once it was finished. They were calling it the Wrath of Susanoo. Apparently, it was named after an old Earth god of the sea and storms.”
Leoven shrugged. “A cruiser like the Reapers the Black Stars have would definitely be an improvement over an assassin, but calling it the ‘Wrath’ of anything, much less a storm god, seems presumptuous.”
“Oh, it won’t be a cruiser. Black Star has apparently decided to start trying their hand at building battleships.”
Daelen winced. “The Senate is just going to LOVE that news.”
Zylna shook her head. “I doubt Admiral Mollen actually cares that much about what the Senate thinks. The intel department agrees with my assessment that he’s attempting to make himself a figure that one cannot ignore, but actually attempting to take him on forcefully will leave you so bloody that even if you win, you’ll be open to fresh assaults. And since it is impossible to permanently kill a Nomad without doing things that calls down Exterminatus orders, he’s banking on the fact that, soon, he will be too dangerous for people to simply try and push him around.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“So if that’s the case, why are we on this mission, basically being welcomed spies in his organization?”
Zylna looked over to her XO, and answered, “Because he wants to prove that he can be a good neighbor to those who work with him, but a terror to those who move against him. Intel says he did the same thing with Dimiya’s underworld, except he was less diplomatic about it. The pirate hub in the Badlands was destroyed, along with several other installations, just because those groups had not told the pirates that attacking Black Star was a bad idea.”
Leoven nodded. “So, he makes himself stronger, and discourages those who might be against him from taking direct action. Not bad, not bad at all.”
Zylna grinned. “Any way, now that we’re through the gate, we’ve got ‘skills testing’ with the Shadowdancer. They want to test us and see how good we are with the new ship.”
Daelen nodded. “My team has already been doing sim battles against Black Star teams for squad-level combat. It has been an interesting experience. Their Black Star Marines are every bit an experienced military unit, and those fights have been some good ones. But against the tactical teams from the Assassins? It is like pitting marines against commandos. We can win if we pin them down, but they are slippery as hell, and ruthless. We’ve won as many as we’ve lost, but it was always a blowout either way. Not the even fights we had with the Marines.”
Zylna smiled at her fellow officers. “Well, our job is a bit more challenging. We are going to hunt and ‘kill’ Shadowdancer without getting killed ourselves.”
Leoven frowned at that. “How are we supposed to hunt a stealth ship? They’re damn near invisible to passive sensors unless we happen to get lucky and they block a star’s light from us, and going active would reveal our position, long before we found Shadowdancer.”
Zylna leaned forward. “Well, I had a thought about that. But we’ll need the help of the shuttle pilots to make it work.” Now that she had their attention, she said, “Here’s what we’re going to do…”
(BSS Starlight Raven, Amazon System)
Space combat involved a lot of waiting. That wasn’t so different from when I was in the Navy, but it got a lot harder to wait when you weren’t even an official part of the exercises going on. Since I wasn’t going to just sit back and do NOTHING while I was waiting for the exercise to begin, and I couldn’t just haul one of the girls into my cabin for a quickie, since the exercise was coming up and I was ostensibly in charge of it all as a referee, I decided to amuse myself with ideas for how we could make better use of the Amazon world, now that the technological base of the planet had been consumed.
Naturally, if they wanted any of the resources on the planet, they would have to find a way to cleanse them of nanites before they got to any tech we wanted to keep. Oh sure, the shields of our ships could be modulated to the frequency of the ‘fence’ used to block Greenwave, but that only kept nanites away as long as the shield was up. If you opened a hole in the shield to pull in resources, or brought nanite-infected resources inside the shield, then you killed yourself.
Killing the nanites was easy, if you didn’t care whether the thing the nanites was on was dead and glowing from the radiation. But anything you nuked so badly would be useless for most tasks until it wasn’t so radioactive. So even ores and gems wouldn’t be worth the hassle to pull out of the Amazon planet. Otherwise, it was a case of ‘wait until the nanites run out of power’. That’d probably be sometime in a few decades. And that just wasn’t going to work. Unfortunately, the anti-tech weapon had been designed to resist tech-based measures…
Wait, what if it wasn’t pure tech, but part organic? If we could make it so that something made technorganically could resist, maybe even eat Greenwave, we could set up collectors, and then… Yeah, that would work, if we could figure it out, but the mass wouldn’t just disappear. Could we turn it into something? And that still didn’t solve the problem of collecting resources outside the barrier, unless we went with some kind of organic collector? Yeah, sending those thoughts to the tech heads and scientists, let them play around with those questions.
“Captain, I believe the exercise is beginning.”
Raven’s voice brought me out of my thoughts on how to properly exploit the riches of a world filled with tech-killing nanites with mad science, and into the present. Both Shadowdancer and the Luvon Gilrie had disappeared from our normal sensors over almost two hours ago, as they maneuvered to starting positions. The Gilrie was on their first test against a stealth ship that knew how to evade detection. So how would the Confederates try and even the odds?
“Tachyon pulse detected, coordinates marked. Identifying… source is shuttle Gilrie 1. Momentary contacts on screen, lost now.”
A tachyon pulse was the space version of sending out a sonar ping to look for submarines. And like a sonar pulse, it did not care one way or the other about who was a friend or foe. Worse, it would show literally everything in the system, which made quick analysis difficult in battle, unless you happened to be in a nearly empty section of space like we were here…
I smiled to myself. It would appear that the Confederates chose a captain who thought she could duel Shadowdancer and win. The shuttle was exposed, but the letter of the exercise had nothing against it. A moment’s exposure wasn’t enough to give Shadowdancer firing solutions, but the same was true of the Gilrie. They would need to have multiple pulses, so that they could track targets in real time, or they’d need to get a lot closer, so that they could launch weapons fast and the enemy couldn’t evade. So why tip their hand now?
“Another tachyon pulse, new location. Designate shuttle Gilrie 2.”
Ahh, now it was making a little more sense. Two pulses, offset of each other in position, could triangulate the position and course of Shadowdancer. It was a good tactic, but how did it get past the fact that the enemy could triangulate their position as well when the next pulses came?
I double-checked the numbers on the brief fix we’d gotten on the two ships. About a light-minute apart? But wait a minute, what was this? “Raven, analysis on highlighted section of tachyon sensors.”
“Analyzing. It appears that several small objects have been jettisoned into space in the area of the shuttles. Tentative identification is a missile, currently inactive.”
“Oh, you clever girl. She plans to use the pulses to guide a missile spread activating in areas of ‘dead’ space. It will definitely cause a few pants to turn brown on Shadowdancer. Raven, have you confirmed that the missiles are training rounds?”
“Affirmative. The Gilrie sent us a tightburst message once the first pulse went off. The missiles are set to standard training packages.”
That was fine, then. Training rounds wouldn’t do any actual damage to the ships, and if they weren’t destroyed, they could be recovered and refueled. No sense wasting money out here.
And that’s when things went crazy.