(Flag Bridge, CNV Tribute of Gold, Grimshield’s Bane System)
Admiral Dhurdroda Ironbelt was anxious. As commander of the Consortium Navy’s Seventh Fleet, and senior commander of the Consortium Navy on the scene, she was nominally the commander of the entire task force that was gathering, because of how the Treaty of Helbizore was worded. The Treaty was designed to end a threat to all life in the galaxy. As such, someone had the great idea to write into the treaty that the senior commander from the nation currently threatened by the Harvester was in overall command. All well and good. However, there were five different star nations and one mercenary company represented in the task force, and she knew quite well that, while she was the senior in terms of length of service, all that service had been against pirates or the occasional skirmish with the Terran Empire. Against the X’thari, even the Nomad mercenary leader had more battle experience than her.
Nomads. They were changing the very fabric of the universe everywhere they went, or so it seemed. It wasn’t a change she was entirely comfortable with, because these Nomads would sometimes disappear for hours or days at a time, and yet they were able to get information from across the galaxy, even across factions. Anywhere a Nomad was, there was a potential leak in information, and a potential intelligence source, and they were spread across all factions, and all walks of life. The ramifications were mind-boggling!
“Admiral, we have incoming warp signatures, multiple vectors.”
Ironbelt forced her voice to remain calm. They were expecting ships, after all. It might not be the worst-case scenario. “Coldana?”
“Negative. The tracks look to be from the Malvenad Sector and Dagon Gateway! Getting IFF signals from Fifth Fleet now, coming from Malvenad. The ships from Dagon are identifying… it is the Ihm Imperium! Their Second Great Armada has arrived!”
Admiral Ironbelt let out a breath she didn’t realize she had been holding. Reinforcements, not the X’thari making an early run on Grimshield’s Bane. That was fortunate. The addition of Fifth Fleet and the Second Great Armada, along with the Imperial Navy’s Ninth Fleet meant that the only forces that hadn’t arrived were the Kul’tiran First Fleet, and the Fourth Group of the Black Star Navy. It still wouldn’t be enough, if the X’thari came unexpectedly.
Fortunately, everyone had already been given the tactical data that the civilian ships which escaped Coldana were able to bring out. With this, they were able to start making preliminary guesses about the Harvester’s defenses. So far, the analysts had confirmed the judgement of Admiral Fullstout, indicating that the Harvester possessed layered shields, allowing for it to take an extreme amount of punishment before being wounded. A conventional attack would almost certainly fail, even if they had ten times the number of ships promised for the fight. The fate of the Harvester seen in the last X’thari war must have been due to the fact that Captain Pyrrhus of the INS Heraclea was able to blow his ship’s reactor inside the Harvester’s maw, so it did not have to deal with the shields or whatever armor made up that thing’s hide.
Hopefully, all the ships would arrive in time so that they could have a true planning session, and figure out how to drive off this threat without sacrificing all these fleets to allow a dreadnought to fly down the Harvester’s throat like last time. But before they could get a plan, they needed to get a read on how much time they had. They needed eyes on Coldana so that they could know when the Swarm set off. Problem was, only six ships had been able to escape Coldana the first time, and none of them had tried using conventional drives to do so. Any ships she sent would almost certainly be destroyed long before they got to Coldana, much less sighted the Harvester.
She looked at her tactical plot, her eyes coming to rest on the area where the Black Star Navy was resting in orbit, visible only because they had active IFF signatures. Black Star ships were some of the ones that were used in bringing back combat data. It was possible…
“Comms, put me through to the Ama-no-Murakumo, and see if Admiral Mollen has time to talk.”
(Flag Bridge, BSN Gugnir, Grimshield’s Bane System)
Slave-Commodore Hirata Konomi was well aware of the ‘tensions’ that existed between the Black Star Company and the Kul’tiran Navy. After all, the Admiral had wrecked three of their warships with a light freighter, and hadn’t taken a scratch doing so. He had then taken the survivors prisoner, and ransomed them back to Kul’tiras for an obscene amount of money, doing so in so public a manner that they couldn’t help but lose face, which had caused them to lose several security contracts, and had given rise to piracy in the area, which was how Fourth Group’s home port of Madrigal Base became part of Black Star’s growing portfolio. Given that history, it was impossible for her to not know the history between their factions.
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So, it was something of an awkward situation when the Fourth Group of the Black Star Navy exited the Dagon Gateway, so they could rendezvous with the gathering fleet, only for the Gateway to open again just behind them, forcing them to expedite their fleet maneuvers to clear the lane. That the newcomers were the Kul’tiran Navy’s First Fleet only made things more ‘interesting’, as the Admiral would put it. Thankfully, the Admiral was not actually on board her Gugnir, or things would have been beyond awkward, with the First Fleet being commanded by the Kul’tiran’s Lord Tandred Proudmoore, the brother of the commander that the Admiral had humiliated. She hoped to be very far away if those two ever met face to face.
Fortunately, the Kul’tirans were at least professional enough to allow the past to stay the past while the larger picture was at stake, and agreed to travel in concert with Fourth Group. They even did it with the bare minimum of posturing, as well, despite having a three to one advantage in the number of ships. Of course, the Black Star Navy had made its name by punching above its weight class, so those numbers meant that it was almost a fair fight. Almost. And if Fourth Group used Starbolts, then the fight was just downright unfair.
Hirata banished those thoughts from her head. Killing Kul’tirans wasn’t on the menu at the moment, which was probably for the best. They were coming up on Grimshield’s Bane, now, and she needed to finish up her calculations based on the combat data that had been sent out about the Swarm and the Harvester. The Admiral had asked for both her and Fifth Group’s Slave-Commodore Icebrand to come up with an initial battle plan, given the estimated fleet strength they figured the joint fleet would have. There would be precious little time for simulations and wargaming once the fleet joined up, so it was best to already have potential plans worked up so that the planning meeting could work on melding them into a coherent operational guide.
From what she saw, the sensors said that the Harvester had multiple layers of shields, each of which was at least at superdreadnought strength. This was actually more formidable than a simple planetary fortress shield, as any conventional attack would be doomed to fail. By the time you beat down the third or fourth shield layer, the first would be working on regenerating, while the lower shield layers would still be untouched! The only reason Firebringer did any damage was because it massively overpowered multiple shield layers at once. Unfortunately, they were limited by the number of shuttles they could modify in time for the battle.
Hmm. Disabling the safeties would require a lot of work. The things were buried damn near in the middle of the hyperdrive engines, after all, and for good reason. Any accidental failure on the part of the safety would likely disable the engine entirely, and the position made it impossible to sabotage without significant maintenance time. There was a potential work-around, but it involved sabotaging your sensors by deliberately feeding false data to them, almost the reverse of how the Tarpits worked. That was an even worse idea than sabotaging the safeties on the hyperdrive, since those sensors were the only things that let you aim a kamikaze run at distances where the light bouncing off the enemy’s hull was already ten or twenty minutes old by the time it reached you, if not more!
Of course, if they could get enough Starbolts to bear… Slave-Commodore Hirata nodded to herself as she reviewed her plan. It was bare bones, but it was a start. Hopefully the rest of the combined fleet would either have something better, or would be able to refine her plan somehow. There was, after all, the little problem of getting past the thousands of ships protecting the Harvester to make their attack run.
(Flag Bridge, BSN Ama-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugi, Grimshield’s Bane System)
“Master, Fourth Group just arrived in system along with the Kul’tirans.”
I nodded to Slave-Captain Virstina. Fourth Group was right on time. They had had the longest transit time of any of my ships, having had to reach a Gateway before they could transit to this sector, they had made it in two and a half weeks after I had given the call.
“Contact the Gugnir, and welcome them to the fight. Have their group form up with First and Fifth groups, and try to make it look good. We have five professional navies out there, watching us.”
“Orders received and acknowledged, Master. Fourth group is joining the fleet formation. Slave-Commodore Hirata is transmitting her proposed action plan to the flag.”
I smiled. It had taken some work, but all of the Black Star Navy was acting like as professional a navy as anyone could ask for without a couple centuries of history and tradition to guide and inspire them. I looked at the high points of Hirata’s planned attack. It was a working idea, but needed polish. She was, after all, running off the public data of the assigned fleets, not any bonuses they might have picked up here and there.
Still, the majority of her plan matched my own, and that of Fifth Group’s Slave-Commodore Balmit Icebrand, one of the few Gauz in the Navy. Essentially, the plan boiled down to finding a way for the Black Star ships to get past the X’thari vessels, and unleash as many Starbolts as we possibly could before we got wiped from the face of the galaxy. The scale of the X’thari forces made the whole thing a likely suicide mission if we just charged in. We would need some kind of diversion. Not just in the system itself, but something to force a hole in the patrols no doubt lying in stealth on the system approaches, waiting for relief forces, like they had been for Tenth Fleet. Given the data, Raven concluded that the reason systems went dark when the Harvester was coming was because the X’thari were trying to keep someone from doing what we planned to do, coming in while the Harvester was weak and perhaps even helpless, eating a planet and unable to defend itself. We needed a way to get in without being reduced to scrap.
Hmm. I checked the ‘guild chat’ for the Black Star Company. Both the Company and the Navy had their own ‘guild chat’ channel, with every Nomad in the company assigned to one or both of them, allowing for quick transfer of information, internally, so long as Nomads were involved. The newly designated Starhunter-class Scout Ships that made up the Heartseeker and her sisters had left Nuevo Edo after a conversation with Admiral Ironbelt. They needed real-time information on Coldana, if they could get it, and that meant the Starhunters. Currently, they were coasting into the Coldana system on ballistic trajectories, well, well above the ecliptic. It was possible for fleets to maneuver to come in on ballistic as well, but without the X’thari drives, it would be a matter of a week or more to get to a place where they could set up the ballistic run, and another week to cruise in. All the while, they would have no way of escape if noticed too soon. Not to mention the lingering fact that, the longer they took to launch the attack proper, the more likely it was that the Harvester would finish with Coldana, and move on, spoiling the maneuver entirely. It was what some might call an untenable situation.
Hopefully, the Starhunters would be able to give them some information they could use.