Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
HMS Caledonia, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.
Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač
The mad thought that was first and foremost in Martina’s mind was that Caledonia’s general alarm should have sounded more… serious. She was on a starship for crying out loud, and the fact that said starship was on fire in a major way really warranted more than an almost-quiet ‘da-da-da-da-da-da’ warble.
This was not a situation for a cartoon cop-car noise. There were gouts of flame shooting out of the air vents, powered systems shutting off all around as their surge protectors cut in, and the hull was singing as the heat stretched and expanded it. Caledonia was groaning like a wounded whale. This was a situation demanding loud, harsh tones with a deep backbone, something that really advertised the importance of prompt action.
The reason this particular unreasonable train of thought was occupying her attention was that it was helping her cope with the fact that she was stuck in a pressurized tube of air thousands of lightyears from home which was currently on fire.
She really, really did not want to burn to death out here. Suffocating on smoke, depressurization and electrocution were all options as well, and this was not a fact calculated to help her stay calm. Focusing on the stupid little thing that the alarm was completely wrong helped her ignore the bigger problems.
Maybe that was the point.
Everybody on board was a firefighter. Nobody was allowed to serve in any capacity on Caledonia without that training. Martina was armed with a pair of “fireball” extinguishers, red balls that were to be thrown into the heart of any nearby flames, which would burn through their casing and allow the pressurized mix of inert gas and flame-retardant foam within to burst, smothering the flame instantly. They worked well, and between her and the teams with a hose and some more conventional extinguishers, they were battling the flames back out of their station.
She tried very hard indeed not to think too hard about the fact that the ventilation duct in the ceiling was glowing like barbecue coals. It was part of a long list of things she was not thinking about, including the fact that Caledonia’s capacitors contained enough stored energy that if they discharged uncontrollably then everybody on board would be dead in an instant. Whether they died from gigavolts of energy arcing uncontrollably between the bulkheads like the ultimate bug-zapper, or from the whole cap array detonating with all the violence of a nuke… well, that would be academic.
Not thinking about that one was made very difficult every time the lights flickered. So instead she focused on the little things, like doing her job, or that fucking alarm.
There was a cry of “Left side!” From Petty officer Taylor. Why was immediately obvious – sparking electrical apparatus, one of the power lockers feeding into the hangar’s huge forcefield arrays. As a team they made it safe, shutting off the power to that locker, making sure it wasn’t burning, ensuring the pressure doors were all sealed and that their section was completely free of flames.
The last of the fire was contained by closing the life support vent. The air inside would still be superheated, and the air in starboard bay was going to be stale, smoky and hot for a long time
They were in the middle of tentatively relaxing when there was what distinctly sounded like an explosion somewhere else on board the ship and the lights flickered again.
“Still here…” Somebody muttered, then flinched as the brace alarm sounded. That one was everything the fire alarm was not – urgent, loud and intimidating.
“They’re dumping the cap!” Somebody else yelled. As one they sprang for the wall. There were rails at waist and ankle height – one for holding, one for hooking their toes under. Most of them made it.
Martina didn’t.
The lights dropped out, and gravity went with it. Martina wasn’t secured yet – her last footstep towards the wall carried her forwards, but it also launched her. Off-balance and disoriented in the brief dark, she bounced painfully off the wall. Worse, her trajectory on the rebound was carrying her right towards that same glowing duct the flames had been belching from just seconds before.
The emergency lights came up; she twisted to try and grab the bar; Her fingertips missed by a millimeter.
“Nononono no…!”
She didn’t mean to scream – there was just no way not to. She heard and felt herself sizzle before she bounced off the superheated conduit and floated back across the deck, flailing madly at the horrible pain right down her back.
“Shit!”
“Help her for fuck’s sake!”
“I’ve got you!”
A strong hand caught her wrist and pulled to safety. She was in so much blinding pain that her rescuer needed to guide her hands to the hold bar and help her tuck her feet under the rail, but she was able to hold on.
The gravity came back on at a fraction of its former strength, and Martina sank to the deck, shaking.
People were all around her in a heartbeat.
“Medical team to starboard flight deck!”
“Get some water on her!”
A shockingly cold load of water was dumped down her back, soaking into her clothing immediately. It helped, a little.
“Kovač! Kovač! Come on, you okay?”
She was able to open her eyes at least, and make eye contact. One of Rebar’s suit techs, Miller, was crouched next to her. Behind his breathing gear, she could see that he was wide-eyed with concern.
How did words go again? She tried to say anything, but what came out was a kind of childish cry instead as her clothing weighed agonisingly against the burn.
“Okay. It’s okay. If it hurts that means it’s only partial.” Miller reassured her.
Martina shut her eyes again and took a few deep breaths, as much as her fire mask would let her. “God dammit that doesn’t help…” she managed.
“Hey, that’s good too! Talking is good.” Miller sounded thoroughly relieved.
“Gotta get the burnt clothes off, Kovač.” Somebody else said.
Martina put her head down and nodded by way of assent. Removing burnt clothing was part of their burn treatment training. She’d never foreseen being on the receiving end, but…
She felt the safety blade rip downwards from her collar, opening the back of her clothing from neck to knee. The tug of the wet cloth and her wound’s exposure to the hot, dry air of the ship combined so that the pain came right back, just as intense as before. All she could do was kneel there, gripping the bar so tight she’d swear it was creaking, and cry.
“Shh, it’s okay, it’s okay, let’s get some more water on this…”
More blessedly cold water was poured down her back, and somebody put a foil blanket round her. The frigid liquid damped the pain, but now she was shivering and cold into the bargain.
“How… how bad is it?” She asked, once she felt able.
“You’ve got a small full-thickness patch, but it’s mostly just blisters.” Miller assessed. ”You okay?”
“This really, really, really fucking hurts…” Martina didn’t like how the last word came out as a sob. She wasn’t a little girl fuckdammit, she was one of the SOR’s senior non-commissioned officers. Crying over pain was beneath her.
If only the rest of her would listen to that thought.
“You’re holding together great.” Miller told her, reading her mind and gently prying her hand off the bar so he could hold it. Even through their thick firefighting gloves, the reassuring squeeze helped.
There was a bustling noise from nearby – medics and a litter. “Okay. Burn. Mechanism?”
“Contact with hot metal. She fell into it when the gravity went.” Miller reported.
“Sergeant, are you okay?”
Martina knew that he’d want to hear her voice so he could assess her for a burn on her vocal cords, so she made an effort to speak rather than just shake her head. “I’ll be honest.” She managed. “I’m not great.”
“Okay, let’s get you moved… Here we go…”
Gently hands helped her onto the litter. Somehow she managed to avoid vocalizing more than a kind of shocked inhalation when another flare of agony rippled down her back.
“Okay, okay… You’re doing great.”
Martina found something about that assertion funny. Maybe it was the adrenaline, maybe it was that or keep crying like a little girl. “Yaaay… aargh.”
She wound up in the recovery position on the litter, draped under the blanket. One of the medics shone a light in her face quickly, and apparently found nothing alarming. There was a hoist, and she was up and being carried.
“Attagirl. Let’s get you to the doctor.”
“Has the ship stopped being on fire yet?” Martina asked “That seems kinda important.”
“Yeah, it’s out.” Somebody replied.
“Cool…Great.”
The trip to the hospital was just across the beam of the ship – not far at all. She wasn’t alone, though most of the wounded coming in were walking, or at least leaning on their buddies.
“Triage!”
“What’ve we got?”
“Contact burn. Partial thickness with blistering about nine percent TBSA, and a coin-sized patch of full-thickness. No inhalation.”
“Put her over there. Sergeant?”
Martina looked up as best she could as one of the doctors knelt by her. “It’ll be a few minutes before we can take a proper look at you.” He said, pulling a white stick out of its sterile packaging. “Until then, this is pain relief. Open wide.”
Martina nodded and complied, and the doctor inserted it under her tongue.
“There we go. Are you comfortable?”
“Aw goow aw am gowwa ber.” Martina replied, as best she could with a stick under her tongue. Maybe it was the adrenaline, but the sound of her own voice made her giggle. “Whank’ur.”
The doctor gave her a nod and stood up, leaving her to wait.
Really, all they needed to do was give her the pain relief. There were some doses of Crue-D left over in their locker in the starboard hangar, all dosed for mild workout and exhaustion among the Operators – adjusting for her own much lesser weight, each one was a more than adequate dose to fix her burns.
She was just reflecting on her good fortune in having access to that stuff when there was shouting from the doorway and a new litter arrived. This one had a man on it, supine, intubated and groaning like a zombie. His face was-
Martina shut her eyes. The poor bastard deserved not to be stared at, though what she’d seen suggested that was exactly what he was in for, for the rest of his life.
Maybe it was the stick in her mouth, maybe it was the sudden dose of perspective… but all of a sudden her own pain seemed very small and far away.
Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
HMS Caledonia, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.
Chief Michael Andow
The air probably tasted of smoke, ozone and burnt material, some proportion of which was almost certainly human flesh. Chief Andow wouldn’t know – he was on bottled oxygen, as were the rest of his team. That air was mostly argon and carbon monoxide anyway: Trying to breath it would have killed them, and hurt the whole time they were dying.
Still. They were alive.
Reactor section chiefs on a military starship were an exclusive breed: there were only a total of eight, and all of them had the kind of academic education previously found only in scientific agencies like NASA and CERN. Andow and his counterpart on HMS Myrmidon in particular had to occupy the very top of that select group because their charges, unlike the six V-Class destroyers, were hybrids: advanced alien ships that had been gutted and extensively refitted with human equipment. Very little remained of the original systems and what few there were had to interface with human hardware that used none of the same standards and protocols.
Their lives were dominated by laws and equations, the most important of which was ancient: Newton’s second law of motion, Force is equal to Mass times Acceleration.
HMS Caledonia had a mass of approximately nine million kilograms. She was equipped with hyper-efficient, alien-made “kinetic” thrusters, that could translate electrical energy almost directly into kinetic energy via quantum-mechanical processes so arcane and so completely unintuitive to human sensibilities that all of the Jet Propulsion Lab’s devoted efforts had made little headway on understanding exactly how they worked.
But, ultra-advanced, impenetrable almost-magic engines still had to deal with realities like F=MA, and to get any kind of a respectable A out of an M that large, required an enormous F. Cally, between the Atlassian strength of her spinal, structural “keel” and a reinforcing series of internal forcefields, was well-equipped to handle that force…which just left the question of energy.
Thermodynamics dictated that increasing the kinetic energy of an object by any amount required, at a minimum, the insertion of a slightly larger amount of energy. This was governed by another classic Newtonian equation: Kinetic Energy is equal to half the mass of the object times the square of its velocity. Given a mass of nine million kilograms, adding a stately ten meters per second to the ship every second demanded roughly four hundred and fifty megawatts.
Accounting for inefficiency, loss and power to necessary systems such as, say, life support, Cally’s three reactors – bleeding-edge fusion things that had been purely speculative in the pre-Contact world – between them produced just about enough to let her pull three Gs if power was diverted from non-essential systems.
Allied strategic intelligence had surmised from what they could glean of Dominion, Alliance and Hunter vessels that this was perfectly adequate for a competitive warship, but of course what was really desired was an edge. Say, double or triple that rate of acceleration when needed.
Hence the ultracapacitors. These were human-built, and while the technology had been derived from alien salvage, this time its principles were well understood and had even been refined upon.
Much of the ship’s spare space and cargo capacity had been given over to them, and to the immense power buses that could shunt gigawatts of power and then some (there was a certain movie quote that was forbidden on Chief Andow’s deck on pain of Motivation) to the kinetic thrusters, the warp engine, and the forcefield emitters on the hull as the CIC and the Bridge demanded.
And all of that was without accounting for waste heat and inefficiency. The energies involved in waste heat alone were somewhere in the same general order as one of the war-ending nukes of 1945, every half an hour.
Caledonia, in short, was a finely-tuned and high-strung Frankensteinian terror whose engineering team wrestled daily with a seething electrical demon that wanted nothing more than to lash out, burn through its surroundings, destroy lives and scorch whatever it could touch.
There was a reason that literally everybody on board pulled double-duty as a fireman. If not, they might have been lost with all hands today. Things had run that close.
There was a sickened sound from Able Seaman Wilkes. “Uuurgh, fuck. I think I just found Kendrick.”
Andow grimaced inside his mask. “You’re sure it’s Kendrick?”
There was a note of barely-restrained nauseous hysteria in Wilkes’ voice. “He looks a bit different right now, chief.”
Andow could imagine. He still had vivid memories of the first time he’d seen a half-burned corpse. “Okay, go get some clear air, sort yourself out.” He told the young man, not unkindly. Last thing they needed right now was Wilkes vomiting inside his mask.
“Yes chief.”
“That leaves two.”
Andow glanced at the XO. Lieutenant-Commander McDaniel looked just as pale and grim behind her mask as Wilkes must be feeling, but she was composed. She turned aside to let Wilkes pass, then inspected the twisted thing that had once been one of Andow’s team.
It helped to think of it as an object, rather than dwell too much on the vibrant, intelligent engineer who had once lived in it.
“Evans and Patel would have been further back, near the safety locker.” Andow observed.
”Here’s hoping.” McDaniel commented. “I assume this bank’s a write-off?”
“Not necessarily.” Andow ran a practiced eye over the damage. “In fact it looks a lot worse than it is – the insulating foam held up well enough. I wouldn’t trust anything aft of… here,” He gestured towards the fifth rack of capacitors, “But everything forward of that should be okay, once we’ve cleaned it up and checked it’s safe.”
“So we’ve got some cap.”
“Enough to limp home, ma’am. Once we’re able to charge it.”
Wilkes returned with a bit of colour in his cheeks and a determined look in his eye. Andow gave him a nod.
They picked their way past the unfortunate Kendrick’s remains, and Andow just had to exhale relief when he saw a happy green light shining bright through the smoke haze. At least one person had made it inside the safety locker.
He knocked on its solid door, and got two strong knocks back.
The panel next to the station – sturdy and almost antique technology built robust enough to survive practically anything – crackled. ”Chief? That you?”
Patel. That was a real relief – the whole reactor team’s morale would have taken a gut-punch if ‘their girl’ had been harmed, backwards and slightly sexist though that maybe was. Old instincts died hard, after all.
“Sure is.” He told her, warmly. “Evans in there with you?”
”He’s a bit scorched, but we’re okay. Did Kendrick-? He was right next to it when it…”
“I’m afraid not.” Andow gave a respectful moment of silence. “Air masks on, hooky.” he told her, using the slang for a leading rate.
“Yes, chief.”
There was a pause, then three bangs on the door, and Andow hauled the wheel over to unseal the emergency station.
Patel wasn’t entirely unscathed herself, having obviously only escaped a painful burn thanks to her white anti-flash hood, which was sporting a large black patch where some extreme heat had licked across it. Evans hadn’t been so lucky – his own anti-flash gear had plainly spared him the worst of it, but his sleeve was so badly scorched that even its flame-resistant fabric had burned through, and behind his flash hood his eyes were pinched and pained.
Wilkes escorted the wounded able seaman away for medical treatment.
“What happened?” Andow asked.
“I really don’t know, chief.” Patel shook her head. “Daily inspection was going just fine and then… Bang!” She wiped soot off the monitor at her workstation, but it was melted and scorched beyond any hope of function. “It happened while we were testing rack eight. Is the rest of the ship okay?”
“She will be.” Andow promised. “But we’ve got bigger problems.”
”How big?”
“We had to dump the cap.”
The whole team knew what that meant. It meant that every relay and power cable in the whole grid would need safety-checking, but more than that, everyone in engineering was acutely aware of the current charge level of the cap at all times. At the point of crisis, it had been something like 95%.
An emergency discharging of all of that energy into space via the forcefields would have looked like a nuke going off. A big nuke. There was simply no way to stealthily get rid of that kind of energy quickly.
“So… the locals know we’re here.” Patel surmised.
McDaniel, who’d been recording her account for later analysis, nodded and tucked her tablet away under her armpit. ”Oh yes.” She agreed. ”They know.”
Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
Heavy System Picket Utopian Aspiration, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.
Fleetmaster Xkk’rtnnk A’vkrnkt’k
“No, director, I can categorically rule out Hunters.” Xkk’ restrained the urge to give a derisive snort. If he even suspected Hunters, the odd ship he was considering would already be an expanding sphere of debris. The construction was all wrong and in any case Hunters relied on the very best in active cloak technology, whereas this ship seemed to have been altered after its construction to instead rely on passive means that reduced its sensor signature by a frankly astonishing degree.
Even at only a few kilometers distance, even though it was attempting no maneuver and was drifting listlessly in its orbit, the sensors of every ship in his fleet were having a hard time keeping a solid lock. That was not a Hunter approach to ship design. The Hunters either wanted you to know they were there, or they did not. If they did, you knew. If not, you did not.
Nor was it a Celzi tactic. Nor a known Dominion one.
That left only a few possibilities, all of which were awkward, and one of which was downright worrying.
”Well, who does that ship belong to, then?”
Perfection’s Planetary Director had good reason to be nervous – his predecessor had ‘ceded’ the position to him in the aftermath of an attack by the so-called ‘Human Disaster’ that had caused massive disruption, and Director Luz’s position was maintained on the promise to Perfection’s citizens and (more importantly) its corporations alike that the security and protection of the system would take top priority.
“I refuse to speculate ahead of my evidence.” Xkk’ told him, pointedly using a Corti turn of phrase. “You will know as soon as I have something conclusive to report. A’vkrnkt’k out.”
He’d catch some minor trouble for so readily dismissing the being who was supposed to be his superior, but today was not the day to worry about that.
Today was a day to worry why the system defence grid’s sensors had abruptly and without warning detected an enormous burst of microwave radiation in high orbit above the fifth planet’s eleventh moon, at the precise co-ordinates now occupied by a ship that matched no known pattern or shipyard and which seemed to be operating on the bare minimum of emergency power, if it was operating at all.
Being a Rrrrtktktkp’ch came with some physical advantages, chief among them being four arms and the hand-eye co-ordination to use all of them dexterously and comfortably at the same time.
Interacting with two datascreens simultaneously was a perfectly routine trick that most children of his species learned early on in life and never let go of. So, with his left hands he processed reports from the fleet and the opinions and thoughts of the shipmasters serving beneath him, and with the others he assessed the state of his own ship.
The strange ship wasn’t responding to hails. Xkk’ could hardly blame it – if he was any judge they had suffered a bad fire on board. Plenty of the tell-tale signs were there, not least was a small but noticeable increase in the local gas density – vented atmosphere. Not the ideal way to rescue a section, but undoubtedly effective.
The aftermath of that would be taking stock of the wounded and dead, a thorough assessment of ship’s systems to ensure that the fire wouldn’t spring up again the second they relaxed, and preliminary repair work. Fires were serious.
One of his datascreens flagged some new data for his information, and Xkk’ bowed his head upon reading it – a gesture of resignation and trepidation. It was strong supporting evidence for his ‘downright worrying’ scenario.
Humans had been spotted on Perfection.
Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
HMS Caledonia, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.
Chief Michael Andow
Seeing Captain Bathini without his trademark turban was a sure sign of things having gone badly tits-up in the recent past, and things looked set to remain that way for the foreseeable future. They were still at quarters, and anti-flash gear was a great equaliser that brought Sikh, Christian and atheist alike together under a thick layer of Nomex.
It also made the captain’s expression unreadable as he listened. McDaniel’s tally of the wounded – about a third of the crew were suffering from an assortment of injuries in the form of burns, heat exhaustion and smoke inhalation, plus one Able Seaman who’d managed to concuss himself scrambling up the stairs. Petty Officer Kendrick had been the only fatality thus far, but there was a badly injured leading rate in the infirmary with an unhappy prognosis even assuming he survived.
Still: the list was a much shorter one than it could have been. There had been a hairy moment on C deck aft where, if not for the vacuum lockers and an emergency vent, they might have lost ten ratings and the MCM. Andow knew that Bathini would have hated himself for doing so, but if it was a choice between eleven men or the whole crew, everybody on board knew that the captain wouldn’t have had the luxury of hesitation in blowing them all into space…
No matter. Whether by luck or skill, it hadn’t come to that.
The butcher’s bill on Cally herself was worse, all things considered. Capacitor bank one was a write-off, as was bank five. Bank two, where the fire had started, could possibly be restored to one-quarter capacity. Banks three and four had both been badly ravaged. All three of the fusion reactors were offline pending inspection, but at least they’d been designed to restart at sea – each one carried a permanent charge sufficient to hopefully reactivate its own fusion, once it was declared safe.
Six out of every ten of the WiTChES emitters were definitely fried, and the remaining forty percent needed inspection. The entire surge protection system needed safety-testing and replacement of the ablative components that had done their job by being destroyed.
Then there was the scorched life support system, possible heat damage and warping of bulkheads and pressure walls, possible damage to literally every computer on the ship, and nobody knew how a kinetic thruster might respond to the kind of power surges they’d suffered, assuming the thrusters had even taken a jolt, which wasn’t clear.
Fortunately, diagnostics on the warp and jump engines had both returned a clean bill of health.
Bathini listened to the report without interruption until Andow had finished.
“How did it start?” He asked.
“I don’t know, sir,” Andow conceded. “It started in bank two, rack eight. As for how and why… the damage to the rack’s so extensive that we may just never know. It’s so badly burned and melted that the damning evidence is probably destroyed.”
“It spread fast from there.” McDaniel observed. There was no accusation in her tone, but there was a query.
“Cally’s built-in fire containment was dependent on that pixy dust foam.” Andow explained. He shuffled his feet awkwardly – he loved Caledonia, and saying anything negative about her just felt wrong, but he had a duty to the truth. “Too dependent on it. All of our refits and modifications helped – they’re probably the reason we only lost one man – but the alien structure and systems just weren’t sensibly designed in the first place.”
“You’d think interstellar civilisations would figure out basic fire safety…” Bathini mused. Andow felt he had to speak up in Cally’s defence now.
“In fairness, sir, if we were using the alien-made fire suppression foam, the fire would have been under control in seconds.” He pointed out.
“And we’d all be running around eating each other’s faces off.” McDaniel said.
“There is that, er, slight downside, yes.” Andow conceded.
“Are we going to need drydock time?” Bathini asked.
“Undoubtedly, sir.”
“Then the question of how to properly harden the ship against this happening again can wait. For now, you need to work your magic, chief. How soon can we be ready for jump?”
“…Three days.” Andow replied. The figure was probably a slight overestimate, but he had learned to be pessimistic when estimating these things. That way you were either a miracle-worker, or never had to explain why it was taking longer than promised.
“That’s a long time to be sitting here with a curious alien fleet poking at us, chief.” McDaniel observed.
“Ma’am, the only difference between a capacitor and a bomb is how controlled the energy release is.” Andow said. “Any one of the caps in our racks could sink us. And the capacitors are just the first of the systems we need to safety-test before we can recharge and jump out. We can be thorough, or we can, er, explode.”
“Let’s hope then that commodore Caruthers and the fleet get here before I’m forced to resort to talking.” The captain grumbled. He had an infamous disliking for diplomacy. “At least the message buoy worked… Go on, chief. You have work to do.”
“Yes, sir.”
Andow nodded to his captain and the XO, and got out of there.
All things considered, he’d take half-busted and potentially explosive gigawatt power systems over wrangling with officers any day.
Date Point 10y4m1w3d AV
Heavy System Picket Utopian Aspiration, Perfection System, The Core Worlds.
Fleetmaster Xkk’rtnnk A’vkrnkt’k
The fleet had spread out in a close-range formation, offering maximum sensor resolution on the crippled ship, along with accurate firing solutions that offered no hope of evasive maneuvers. A solid and orthodox formation. One that should have made the fleetmaster feel confident.
It didn’t.
“The Capitol Station footage?” His Corti technician was already calling up the information, but as always with Corti she was taking the request with chilly grace. “As you wish fleetmaster, but may I ask why?”
“Not the footage, the sensor records.” Xkk’ clarified. “From the point when the human fleet arrived.”
“Done.”
The information arrived instantly.
There was depressingly little of it. Gravimetric sensors had suggested from gross mass alone that there were four classes of ship in the human fleet. Beyond that basic datum, the only information they had in detail pertained to the smallest and lightest class, a strike craft about twice the mass of a conventional starfighter which seemed to be capable of flinging itself through a combat volume at unheard-of accelerations, easily winning the kinetic energy advantage over its adversaries.
This ship in front of him, however, was a perfect match for the estimated mass of the two largest ships in the human fleet.
He called up a simulation of the battle and focused on the tiny human force. The first hint of its arrival had been a salvo of firepower that apparently travelled at warp. Against the sheer scale of the swarm-of-swarms that salvo had achieved little, but it had seeded the intervening space between the swarm and the human fleet with gravity spikes, keeping the Hunters at arms’ length.
That extreme range was unorthodox all by itself. At such distances, the slightest maneuver by anything capable of a warship’s acceleration profile would completely ruin a firing solution, and so extreme-range kinetic bombardment was reserved for ambushing fleets at anchor or relative-stationary large objects such as station. After which the fleet would then close to medium engagement range to press the advantage on a depleted and shocked foe.
The humans of course had invented their starship doctrine from new principles. Using warp fields on their weaponry eliminated the need to deflect when shooting at a moving target, and thus made long-range combat perfectly viable for them.
Sensor records from anything other than gravimetric sources were patchy at best, but the mass didn’t lie – the two ships matching their damaged mystery’s tonnage had remained at the rear of the human formation, in what was apparently a supporting role, while the two smaller classes – the smaller and more numerous of which may actually have been unmanned platforms of some kind, though that was unclear – formed the leading wave.
So. This was a support vessel of some kind. Coupled with the breathtakingly quick action of a strike force of four deathworlders on Perfection who had landed, engaged in a brief pursuit through a marketplace, and then departed on a ship registered to a private Corti captain…
Oh dear.
He hailed the damaged vessel personally. The time was long past for delicate probing with queries of concern and offers of aid. “Attention unidentified human vessel.” He announced. Every member of the bridge crew went stiff and still, listening. “You are in violation of Article Seven of the Dominion Charter. You are required by law to make contact by any means possible indicating your surrender to system authorities, whereupon your crew will be detained and your ship confiscated. Failure to comply will be considered a hostile act and you will be fired upon.”
He was still calculating how long of an interval to give them with which to respond when the reply came through. The footage he received suggested that the air on board that ship was still hazy and thick in the aftermath of a fire, and the white hood that the figure on screen was wearing could only be protective gear. All that was visible of the human, in fact, were two dark brown eyes which seemed to focus critically on him even through a camera. It felt uncomfortably like the being he was addressing was identifying weak spots to attack.
“Attention Dominion fleet. As non-signatories of the Dominion Charter, we neither recognise nor agree to be bound by its authority. Our ship is in distress and we thank you for your concern, but repairs are in hand. We will not comply with your order to surrender, and any hostile action taken against us will be treated as an act of war.” It recited, tersely. The translator decided that this specimen was male.
“I am Fleetmaster Xkk’rtnnk A’vkrnkt’k.” Xkk’ identified himself. “To whom am I speaking?”
The translator automatically found an equivalent to the rank that the human named. “[Shipmaster] Bathini.” He replied.
“Shipmaster, your species are automatic associate members of the Dominion by dint of your status as a sapient spacefaring civilization.” Xkk’ reminded him. “The Charter is automatically binding to all species.”
“We do not recognise the validity of a legal system which enforces laws that have not been consented to.” Bathini replied. “I repeat; we will not comply with your demand to surrender. Our ship is not capable of taking hostile action, and our destruction would constitute murder.”
“Listen here-” Xkk’ began, but the human cut comms.
A Vzk’tk comms tech raised a hand. “Fleetmaster?”
Xkk’ turned. “Prepare to fire a warning volley. Repeat our ultimatum.”
“Sir!” The comms tech insisted, urgently. “There is a fleet coming in at rapid warp!”
Xkk’ turned to his operations screen. Sure enough, there was a bow wave of distorted spacetime coming in. The gross mass of the incoming fleet was not high, but its velocity was unbelievable – either every one of them was armed with a Corti sealed drive, or they had immense power plants relative to their mass.
“General quarters!” He announced. “Fleet to starburst away from the human ship at best speed, holding at maximum optimal range.”
The fleet spread out like a firework going off, pulse-warping in straight lines directly away from the stricken human ship and coming to relative stop again as a spherical shell, some ten kilometers thick with a five hundred kilometer radius.
The approaching fleet slowed… and stopped nearly half a million kilometers away. Far outside of the effective range of any gun in Xkk’s fleet.
The information he’d gleaned from Capitol Station came to the forefront of the Fleetmaster’s mind. With their warp-capable weapons, the humans would not feel any disadvantage from the range at all, and already the five ships that had snapped back into the battlespace’s inertial frame of reference were multiplying. Seven ships became forty-three almost as soon as they were sub-luminal. six motherships, one support vessel of nigh-identical tonnage to the damaged one, and thirty-six child ships.
Not a one of them was easy to get a lock on. Their icons in his overlay were blinking, meaning that they represented only the probable location of a ship, to within a margin of error of some fifty kilometers. Useless for targeting purposes.
“Withdraw four-fifths of the fleet.” He commanded. “Half to rally on the far side of that moon, the other half to enter an orbit at warp and await further instructions.”
Fourteen of the human ships – two motherships and twelve child-ships – vanished off his overlay. A dim, grey icon suggested where they were likely to be if they drifted along their last known vector. These too were blinking, worthless.
That seemed to end the opening moves for now. With the human fleet unassailable and the bulk of his own fleet withdrawn to safety but ready to return at a moment’s notice, Xkk’ could breathe a little more easily and consider his next move.
“…Hail their fleetmaster.” He ordered.