Chapter Thirty-Nine - NOVA Wargamming

“You want to do a what?” Day asked.

Night sent a bit of frustration over their connection. “A wargame. Come on, all you’re doing here is securing cargo, and Nova agreed to play the other guys for us. She uses an entirely different computational system than us, she’s leagues ahead for a station AI. She’ll make it tougher and less predictable than anything we run ourselves.”

“Does she even have the processing power to run a full simulation like that?” Day asked.

“I’m letting her use a few cores here and there,” Night said. “Just while we’re close enough.”

“And how will we account for the transmission-delay?”

“You know that Accord ships have crews, we can just think of the delay as what normally happens when you have organics at the controls of something,” Night said.

Day considered it. It wouldn’t take too much of her attention, and she could continue working on securing the Junker Nine for transport to Ceres while they played. And... Night seemed eager. “Alright, fine, but you’ll have to convince Twilight yourself.”

A few minutes later, Day found herself in... her own simulated hull, stationed next to a simulated Ceres in a simulated Sol system. The position of the planets suggested that this was around the time they estimated the next Accord fleet to arrive.

“Alright,” Night transmitted. “Nova is controlling a standard Accord fleet that just entered FLT... here. Our win condition is the destruction of all of their ships. Hers is, obviously, destroying us, or discovering Ceres and hitting that.”

“Got it,” Twilight said.

Time in the simulation was moving forwards far, far faster than in reality, with a full day taking up just under half and hour of real-time. It meant that even with the advantages of being in a simulation, Day found her hull a tiny bit sluggish to control. Combat would actually be difficult.

“What’s the plan?” she asked. Her long-ranged scans were already picking up a standard Accord fleet. One cruiser, one frigate, two destroyers, two logistics ships, and a six corvettes. They were outnumbered and outgunned already.

“This is,” Night said.

She transmitted the location of several stealth drones, the torpedo-launching models that they’d built. There were seventy-two of them, and all of them were on ballistic courses that would have them criss-crossing through the space the Accord fleet would be moving through.

“Let’s split them up first,” Twilight said.

“Like last time?” Day asked.

“We have a few mines that can make some noise,” Twilight said. “Maybe a fake distress beacon?”

With that, they started to fly.

All three of them took a slow, stealthy approach towards the large mine they had in Jovian orbit, a mine which started transmitting a garbled distress call.

The Accord fleet, predictably, split apart. One destroyer, three corvettes and a single logistics ship all heading to the mine while the rest continued inwards towards the inner planets.

Two in-game days after the split, just as the smaller fleet started their deceleration burn to get into Jovian orbit, their stealth drones struck.

The first volley came from three drones who had adjusted their trajectories to come in danger-close to the larger Accord fleet. They all cold-launched three torpedoes each, and all nine torpedoes fired up at once and rushed in towards the Accord fleet.

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The response was rapid, the destroyer and frigate’s longer ranged point-defence taking out three torpedoes long before they were in range.

Then the EMP-equipped torpedoes went off, and the Accord point defence started to rake the air where they thought the others would be.

It was too little, too late. Four torpedoes detonated with Casaba-howitzer warheads, sending lumps of molten lead firing at an appreciable percent of C right into the side of two of the Accord ships.

The cruiser shimmered bizarrely, and the round rammed into the outer edge of its hull, shearing off a few plates and scoring the armour while also simply deleting one of the ship’s heavy particle cannons.

The other three howitzers rammed into the frigate.

Day felt an upwelling of elation as the ship detonated spectacularly. Clearly they’d struck something important within its infrastructure.

Then the stealth drones, still on a ballistic course, and still silent as Twilight, snuck into danger-close of the fleet and unleashed their missile swarms.

They were slagged within milliseconds of firing, but some of those missiles still made it. There was less than a hundred kilometres between them and the ships they targeted, not enough for the discombobulated Accord fleet to notice and take out.

Two corvettes were struck--though neither were taken out of the fight--as well as the frigate’s hulk, and one missile went off close enough to the destroyer that it was pelted with fragments.

Only one kill, but clearly a lot of damage.

That was from three of their drones.

They had dozens more on approach.

The rest of that fleet’s flight towards the inner planets was filled with heavy sensor pings as they tried to detect--often successfully--the remaining stealth drones. That didn’t stop the drones from taking out another corvette, and Day imagined that a real crew would be sweating metaphorical bullets as they flew into a system where a torpedo could come out of anywhere.

But then, the smaller fleet had reached the mine, and they had slowed down to inspect it. It was her turn to act.

Day gave up on any pretence of stealth as she fired up her drive and accelerated like mad from around the back of the asteroid with their mine.

At the same time, Twilight, in a much softer, quieter approach, peaked out from the other side and immediately opened up with her twin particle cannons. And, also at the same time, a dozen pods set on the surface of the asteroid popped open. They were freshly printed and installed there, courtesy of Night. Each pod disgorged ten missiles in a rapid-fire swarm, every one of them screaming a hellish ECM dirge of incoming death.

One of the corvettes disappeared in a ball of nuclear fire, another got cored by one of Twilight’s shots, but the other escaped with nothing more than a scrape.

Day locked onto the destroyer and fired, her single particle cannon round... bounced off of a strange shimmering shield.

“What?” she asked. But in that same moment, she was launching her torpedoes as quickly as they’d exit their tubes, and the empty void of space became a mess of hot laser fire as both sides traded point-blank shots with their point-defence.

She had to discover what that shield had been, she thought as she was raked by laser fire.

***