The Nation of the Free

On Route to the Free-Confederacy Trade Route

Francis watched the tactical plot with some sorrow as their convoy slowly but steadily made its way out system to where they could enter the Trade Route linking the Confederacy to The Nation of the Free. Three days in total spent in the chaotic orbit before they set off towards the snake pit that was Hornraisers Confederacy. He had spent a vast majority of that time with Kamya, longtime friend and distant lover. He sometimes wished that their nations were allies to make life a bit easier, but the two nations had such fundamentally different viewpoints it wasn't exactly unsurprising that Callisas and The Nation of the Free were on distantly friendly terms.

So he sat in the command chair as the convoy pulled out system, farther than was necessary for their hyperdrives to actually let them go FTL. Trades Routes were an anomaly of space as no one was quite sure how they worked. Hyperdrives themselves were a bit of a mystery too. Oh people understood, roughly, how they worked. A hyperdrive 'grabbed' the fabric of reality and sent a ship 'flying over it', many of Francis's Naval College teachers had compared it to skipping a stone over water, with smoother stones (aka military-grade drives) doing better times than rough stones (civilian-grade). A military drive could of course pull its power to match a civilian but a civilian could not boost their power to match military grade due to hardware quality differences. But for the part, hyperdrives were vastly unknown, with a good chunk of the reasoning being the people who discovered the drive had been speed maniacs who had barely had a grasp on science and to top it off they had been paranoid about people stealing the idea so they had jealousy guarded it and only sold hyperdrives at high cost with no backups of the science or drive designs.

Then the Old Sol AI had attacked and wiped their station from the universe, killing anyone who may have understood the principles behind the FTL drives they used. Of course there were people out there studying the drives, hyper, and how they worked, but if anything groundbreaking had come about they hadn't shared it.

Trades Routes were a whole different beast though, as no one in Old Sol, to anyone's knowledge, had known of them. Focused 'lanes' that catapulted ships forward much faster than normal hyper jumps, they cut travel times drastically for long distances. There were only four of the things, and The Nation of the Free anchored the end of two of them. The Solarian-Free Route was far distant on the opposite side of the star system, ending at around a light hour outside the ice belt of the system and the Free-Confederacy Route which started 10 light hours distant from the ice belt.

And to enter a Trade Route, you had to do it in a certain area of real space, so one could not go from one to the other without a brief transition back into reality.

They were almost to the transition point when an urgent beeping from the tactical station caught his attention. He looked over at the station as the young woman went to work and the enlisted around her began to murmur in surprise. Francis got up and quietly walked over to look over tactical's shoulder. "I assume we are not under attack by the lack of an immediate report, so Lieutenant Commander, what is it?"

The tactical officer startled and looked up at her captain. "Sorry Sir, we just don't know what to make of it." She tapped her ear and the barely visible earbud there. "The other tactical officers and I were discussing it."

"So what is it?" He asked.

"Here," she summoned a somewhat large hologram and presented it to him. In it it showed a very dense and large cluster of contacts that had just jumped in, most which carried a tag that labeled them as belonging to Novu Sol. Although... "that is an extremely tight formation to be jumping in with civilian ships." He pointed out, reaching into the hologram to zoom in on the contacts. The cluster seemed to be something like a tightly-packed sphere, an outer layer of smaller warships, destroyers and lighter cruisers, with the civilian ships, looked like mostly cargo carriers, layered in behind them with at least four battlecruisers between them, all Atmosphere class ships. Most civilians didn't have the training or the ship quality to jump in that tight formation, even the ships he escorted had ample space between them with the cruisers loosely ringed around them. "Do you think those are Q-ships?"

The officer shook her head. "Novu Sol has never been coy about its armament, it has been around," she queried the databases. "Around 150 years since they last used a Q-ship design in any form and I won't discount the idea that the Intel Office missed something but we would have heard if they were going on a more cloaked effort to thin the Confed's pirates. Maybe they are Navy Reserve crews." She paused as she pressed her finger to her ear to listen to something one of the other tactical officers was saying. "Tensi is saying the formation looks like a blocking formation."

"Like they are trying to hide something in it?" Francis nodded and squinted at the hologram. "That makes sense, but what? Can you get a good read on what's behind them?"

"I'm doing my best Captain, but that formation is awfully tight." She turned her gaze up to him. "Could I drop a sensor drone?"

"No, we don't want to piss them off." Francis rubbed his chin as he studied the data, more information popping up on the ships as he watched. "Just keep a close eye on it," he waved away the hologram and sat back down in the command chair. He had barely sunk back into the chair when a surprised gasp from the tactical officer made him look back over at her. "Dump it here." He commanded.

"Sir..." she said slowly, "one of the merchants had to adjust their position and we got a peek..." she sounded stunned and Francis couldn't blame her.

"A battleship." Francis said, not quite able to keep the awe out of his voice as the crew around the bridge murmured to each other in shock. Battleships were big, rare, hulking beasts of ships that were so expensive to build and maintain there were only four battleships in existence and all of them belonged to Novu Sol. From the last intelligence download, three were deep in Novu space doing the usual flag showing tours to all the colonies and the last had been in the TriStar System to help them train. "Commander, which one is it?" Since there were only four battleships in existence, being able to tell them apart was child's play. Every ship might start out the same, but wear, tear, and upgrades rendered the four battleships very different from each other.

She stayed silent as she looked into her database, trying to match the ship that was here to the records on hand. After a couple of minutes she turned to face her captain. "It's a tentative marker, but I believe this is Liberty."

"The one that was in the TriStar Systems?" He asked, his interest in the battleship fading as something else about the data in front of him poked at his awareness. Something was not quite right about what he was looking at.

"Yes Sir." She highlighted the shape of the Liberty behind its cover of other ships. "I don't believe the battleships have ever officially left Novu Sol space before, well," she shrugged, "Technically they have when this one went to the TriStar Systems, but we all know that's just a technicality at this point. The TriStars are pretty much officially theirs at this point."

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"What?" Francis looked up at the tactical officer who seemed a bit surprised.

"I was just saying that the TriStar Systems are pretty much already a part of Novu Sol, so the battleship 'leaving' their space is a technicality rather than an actual noteworthy event. Was that observation out of line Sir?" She asked softly.

"No Commander..." Francis tapped the data and highlighted a couple of the ships, a few small cruisers and destroyers. They had name tags, which was extremely odd. Unlike battleships, where there were only four to keep track of, cruisers and destroyers were so numerous even the data storage capabilities of most ships would be stretched to breaking in trying to keep track of every ship name in the universe. So unless the ship was actively in communication with them and had given a name, there was no reason those ships would have names pinned to them. "The named ships, Pavone? Usignolo? Colibrì? Isn't that the TriLingua?"

"It is." She frowned.

"Commander Jasai." He looked over at the XO, bent over the operations station as they worked with the people there. "Novu Sol doesn't name their ships in anything other than Novu Solarian, right?"

"Yes Sir." Jasai straightened. "These ships were identified out of our databases as 'former allies.' Not because we have an IFF or any transmission tags from them. Our intelligence still has enough contacts in TriStar space to apparently nail down the names of the ships of the new-built cruisers and Novu destroyers the TriStar Navy is now using."

"That is an integrated, and well trained formation." Francis said. "There is no way they did that by accident, what are they doing out here with a battleship?"

"Educated guess Sir?" Jasai asked as they came over to stand beside the command chair to look down at the data with their captain. "I think that they are doing what The Admiral likes to do, just with more armor to back them up."

"So a training trip into the Confederacy to shoot up anything that threatens their shipping and allows them to practice with real weapons in a place that isn't there own system?" Francis popped the data off the screens around him and into a 3D hologram, spinning the representation of the formation in front of him as it slowly moved towards the transition point for the Free-Confederacy Trade Route. "But the TriStar Navy is still tiny, three of their cruisers and seven of their destroyers? That's..." He cut himself off as a thought struck him and when he looked up at Jasai, his XO looked grim.

Jasai leaned in closer, pitching their voice low so no one else could hear. "Imagine what influence a Novu Fleet could have if most of their navy left on a long 'training mission.'"

Francis felt queasy as he looked at the TriStar Naval ships, all of them tightly tucked into the formation like they belonged there, like they were already a part of the Novu Navy. There was nothing he could do about it, just write a report of his thoughts and forward it to the Intelligence Office. Did those TriStar people realize what this was? Did they see the changes that Novu Sol had forced upon them? Maybe they did, and thought it really was for the best.

Francis always liked to think that if Novu Sol had accepted the Callisas Empire for training, he would have seen what they did and stopped it, but back when Their Majesty had first applied he had been barely a glint in his mother's eye. By the time he had joined, he had been only a week into his first year at the Naval College when The Admiral had walked into the classroom and changed the Callisas Navy forever.

The tiny nation stood no chance against Novu Sol, they always got their way in the end, and this was just another way for Novu Sol to do its dirty work.

"Orders from Captain Emmet." Coms said. "She said that we are to stay well clear of the Novu Sol formation and slow down our progress towards the transition point to let them go first. We say nothing to them, we will pretend like we didn't notice they are hiding a battleship under the curtains."

"Acknowledge receipt of order. We will do as we are told." Francis said, his gaze held on the TriStar System ships.

"Poor bastards." Jasai whispered.

"Aye," Francis's voice was equally quiet. "Poor bastards indeed."

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Free-Confederacy Trade Route Transition Point

TSS Pavone

"There is no way they didn't see us." Commander Aminta Caccia pointed out to the holographic forms of all the other commanding officers sitting at the holographic conference. Since no one couldn't talk to even ships you jumped in formation with in hyper, they were using the transition point to hold a conference about what they were doing once they reached the Confederacy.

Novu Sol hadn't expected other warships to be here, their own intelligence saying the window they were going to jump in should have been clear. The Callisas Naval ships were unexpected, and might ruin the surprise.

"Commander." Admiral Dimitry Tobin, the flag officer in charge of the formation and the man flying his flag from Liberty, said from the head of the table. "Look at what they are doing."

Caccia studied the vectors and speeds of the Callisas formation before she bowed her head in embarrassment. "They are pulling back on their speed and letting us go first, so by the time we exit the Trade Route they won't have time to have warned everyone of our arrival because we are going to be there first."

Tobin nodded. "Exactly. It's not exactly a big wrinkle in the plan, but them knowing Liberty is here is hardly a bad thing. We are going out to 'thin the herds', so to speak, of pirates that are currently eating our shipping alive out here, and if we can startle someone into staying on the straight and narrow by the mere thought that a battleship is out here, then it makes our job easier. Remember people," he tapped a stylus on the table. "I want you all to come back alive, I don't want to tell my husband about how many people I lost out here. Sometimes the pirates are very well armed for their job, as the TriStar people know all too well."

Caccia flinched at the reminder of the attack on her nation but nodded along with everyone else.

"I have initial deployment plans for where we all are going and how we are going to protect our shipping and some who are going to run ambushes in high value target systems. If you need anything before we split, send the requests to my ship before we hit the transition point and I can have the resources allocated by the time we exit the Trade Route." Admiral Tobin looked around. "Any questions?"

One of the battlecruiser captains made a motion with her hand to gather attention. "Admiral, what do we do with prisoners?"

"Standard procedure, shoot pirates, dump the bodies, they want to take on this life, they pay the full price for it." Tobin's voice was grim. "Anyone claiming to be privateers or acting on orders is much the same, I have very little patience for the corrupt politicos out here. If you think they are genuine you can turn them back over to the locals, but just realize the more we shoot, the less likely someone is to think it's a lucrative job. Any pirate ship you seize is to be blown after you extract the data from its computers and search it for any cargo."

Caccia shivered. It was part of her job, but she never had expected to be this far from home, confronted with the possibility that she would actually have to act on her navy's orders to shoot pirates and dump the bodies out the airlocks. Pirates deserved it, but the thought still made her feel unsettled.

"Anything else?" Tobin asked. When no one responded he smiled and stood. "Then I will see you all in Hornrasier's Confederacy. I hope you all enjoy the hyperspace downtime as we will be very busy once we get there."

As the various ship COs began to vanish from the conference, Caccia looked over the representation of the Callisas ships again as they changed their vector oh-so-slightly to make sure they were behind the joint Novu-TriStar formation. No doubt trying to get a better look at Liberty, she sighed and signed off of the conference as well. She had work to do, and it wasn't going to get done while she dallied here.