Prey III.III

Topir System, Aboard ARTS Helena

Jim straightened his uniform before pressing the door chime to Admiral Davie’s office. “It’s Lt. Wexler Ma’am.”

The door opened with a hiss, revealing the admiral typing at her desk holo console. He made to salute, but the admiral dismissed it with a wave and motioned to the chair opposite her own, eyes not leaving her console.

“Apologies, lieutenant,” she said, finally looking up from her holo-screen. “What do you have for me?”

She looked better rested than the last time Jim had seen her. Her eyes were sharp, and her dress uniform was immaculate, with none of the vulnerability she had displayed earlier.

“I have the technical report on the Rashan you requested Ma’am,” Jim retrieved his holo-tablet from under his arm and offered it to the admiral.

“Let’s have a look lieutenant.” Davies took the proffered tablet and began scrolling through the report, pursing her lips as she did so.

Jim’s palms felt sweaty, and he wiped them on his uniform pants as the admiral digested his report. This was the first real task the admiral had given him, and he hoped he hadn’t screwed it up.

Minutes ticked by as the admiral read through the pages, and Jim became increasingly nervous. Why wasn’t she saying anything? He opened his mouth to explain his analysis of the Rashan skirmisher craft compared to the fleet’s Bearcats and Tigercats, but Admiral Davies just held a finger up to silence him and continued to read.

Eventually, she reached the end of the report, reading over Jim’s conclusions and recommendations. The recommendations were the part that Jim was most nervous about, as the admiral hadn’t asked for Jim to offer an opinion, only for analysis.

“Bold of you to include specific recommendations, lieutenant. I don’t believe I asked you to tell me how the ARTS navy should operate.”

Jim’s heart fell.

“The Bearcat and Tigercat fighter designs have served the Associated Republics of Terra Navy for the past eighty years. They helped win the second Vorshan war and every conflict after that. Do you really believe that they aren’t the right tool for the job?” The Admiral’s eyes narrowed at Jim.

“No Admiral,” Jim surprised himself. “They’re not.” He took a deep breath and continued. “The Bearcat and Tigercat fighter’s were designed to originally fight Vorshan drones. Drones that are quick, but lightly armored, deployed in numbers comparable to our fighter wings, and possess only forward facing weaponry. The Rashan skirmisher craft we encountered, however, are slow, heavily armored, and deployed in much larger numbers than the Vorshan drone ships. What’s more, their gimballed laser turret erases much of our fighter’s maneuverability advantages, outranges their primary cannon, and hits harder than the Vorshan’s particle beams, which are only forward facing.” He took a breath. “What we found in after-action analysis and pilot interviews is that when engaging from missile range, our fighters had a distinct advantage, but when they closed to cannon range, the Tigercat and Bearcat were less effective.

“What we need, Admiral, are fighter craft that are more heavily armored than the Bearcat and Tigercat, that can engage more hostiles before having to re-arm, that can survive multiple hits from the Rashan’s laser turrets, and that can also take on the larger combatants that the Rashan field along with their fighters, their destroyers, and cruisers.”

Jim stifled a sigh. Well, there goes my career, lecturing a Fleet Admiral.

“Good work lieutenant,” the admiral said. “For what it’s worth, I agree with your analysis. We’ve been fighting the Vorshan for so long that we’ve neglected to prepare for other threats.”

The admiral smiled at him as relief washed over his face. “Never be afraid to speak your mind with me lieutenant, as long as it’s in private. In my career, I’ve found it much easier when I don’t have to come up with all of the bright ideas myself. Mind you that won’t stop me from taking credit for them.”

“Yes Ma’am,” Jim smiled back. “Admiral’s prerogative.”

She laughed. “Quick learner, too! Now let’s go see if we can talk some sense into the League fleet before they try and abandon the system.”

The squadron spread out in pairs over millions of kilometers, patrolling the space around Helena’s battlegroup in all three dimensions. A few million kilometers away from the human and Dreeden ships, the remains of the League of Species fleet floated in the void. It was a shadow of its former might, hundreds of dreadnoughts and battleships reduced to a fraction of that number.

Most of the attrition hadn’t come from the battle with Rashan, but instead from ships abandoning the fleet to return to their species homeworlds and repair their damaged vessels. Quet had wondered why they couldn’t make the repairs somewhere closer, but it turned out that every League species had their own designs, equipment, and standards. Ships, for the most part, needed to be repaired in the systems where they were built. The rest of the League fleet watched the Human and Dreeden ships warily, waiting on instructions from the Assemblage on whether to fight or ally with the predator species that had saved them a few weeks before.

The rumors that Quet heard spoke of heated meetings between Admiral Davies and the remnants of the League fleet. This system, Topir, was the closest inhabited system to Meruk, where the League fleet had been beaten so severely. Davies had pleaded with the Arkone admiral that commanded the fleet in Nuryaw’s absence to evacuate the tens of millions of sentients that lived in the Topir system, but the Arokone admiral had refused. The League didn’t believe that the Rashan would follow.

Quet knew better. The Rashan had tasted blood at Meruk, and they would be looking for more.

She tried to stretch in the coffin, shaking her limbs that had begun to stiffen up. Mentally, she triggered a low dose of stims into the air recycler connected to her flight-suit. Dreeden didn’t share the almost supernatural endurance of humans, and Dreeden pilots relied on non-habit forming stims to keep them alert during long missions. The ship doctors claimed that the stims were harmless, but they still made Quet’s skin itch.

“This is boooring Bug,” Jester complained. “It’s been two weeks. If the Rashan were going to follow us to Topir, they would have done it by now.”

“Don’t tempt fate,” Quet replied. “I’ll take boring over a furball any day, and you should too.” She checked their flight path. “We’ll be done soon. Looks like we have two minutes before our next course correction, then the next burn will take us back to the Helena.”

Quet plotted in the next burn to her nav computer and sat back to wait for the Bearcat’s thrusters to kick in. Jester wasn’t wrong, combat space patrol was boring. It meant long periods of merely sitting in the coffin, coasting along without thrust along predetermined vectors while keeping a close eye on the fighter’s sensors for anything out of the ordinary.

She was watching the timer countdown for her next course correction when her energy sensors pinged hard.

“Whoah!” Jester said, “I think I have a sensor malfunction Bug.”

“No, I see it too,” she mentally turned down the sensitivity on her scanners so that the screen wasn’t just a sea of blazing white. “Fuck you for tempting fate, Jester.”She flipped off the auto-pilot with a mental nudge and oriented the Bearcat toward the energy spike with a puff of thrusters.

“Hyperspace emergence, squadron form up on me,” her squadron leader’s laconic voice came over the comms.

“Roger Archer, Jester, and Bug forming up.” Quet’s gut turned to ice as Rashan dreadnaughts blinked into existence, exiting hyperspace in violent bursts of light. Ten, twenty… she lost count as they flashed in, and had to rely on her flight computer to keep track. She felt light-headed as more and more emerged into the system. Eighty. Ninety. Over a hundred dreadnaughts.

The battleships followed, and then the cruisers and destroyers. So many ships that they overlapped on Quest’s screen, thousands of vessels spanning millions of kilometers.

“You’re right bug,” Jester’s voice was deadly serious for once. “I should have kept my damn mouth shut.”