The light was subtly wrong, Jessica decided. About half a notch too dark for her preferences. It gave the bridge an ominous cast that just unsettled her.
Probably by design, she decided after a moment of thought. Keep everyone just a shade off center. She checked her control boards once more and looked around, pulling her sleeves down for the umpteenth time.
Jessica hadn’t worn one of her old black and green command centurion tunics in years, and this one was tight in the torso. She decided that maybe she hadn’t spent enough time in the gym and the pool, or on the dojo floor. Time to shave off those last three kilos she’d never gotten around to.
And maybe two more after that. Get back down to her original Academy graduating mass, two decades on.
This was not her lovely flag bridge on Auberon, all round with the big display in the center of the conference table. It was instead long and shaped like an arrowhead with the very tip chopped off blunt where a display screen showed Ladaux’s horizon turning below them.
RAN VI Ferrata. Meaning Iron-clad. Trust an outsider like Yan to out-Roman a culture that had consciously shaped itself after one of the greatest cultures in history, naming the first Expeditionary Cruiser after one of Rome’s most famous legions, rather than using the normal naming schema for a ship in the battlecruiser class.
Of course, Jessica wasn’t sure that the battlecruiser designation fit, either. Yan had called it a pocket dreadnought, among other things, including fire-breathing dragon. An all-big-gun, fast, super-heavy cruiser with only energy weapons, against a foe that specialized in some sort of power absorption system, rather than the traditional ship’s shields everyone else used.
Jessica shook her head and focused. She knew he was out there, lurking. In that, she had an advantage over the average ambush those bastards sprang. And she knew she was facing what Fribourg called a Mako. All of Buran’s ship classes were named after terrestrial sharks. Makos were pure, energy-weapon-based, heavy cruisers, unlike the new type that had bombed St. Legier, the missile-and-bomb-armed variant called a Roughshark.
She knew looking for it would be a waste of time. Even this deep in a gravity well, the damned thing could blink on old-fashioned JumpDrives, like an electron hopping from one valence shell to the next. You could do that when your ship was Sentient. It was just a massive math problem to navigate across the gravity well.
Jessica would have thought it impossible for a human to accomplish, until she met the Twins: Asra and Saša Binici. Neon Pink and Rocket Frog. Two of Queen Jessica’s best pilots, trained by Pops Nakamura to do the impossible.
No, it was just patience and planning, two things Jessica also excelled at.
“Tactical,” she called to the young man who was her First Officer today. “Confirm all batteries are cleared and charged.”
The man looked at the two officers facing him across a small area on her right. Gunnery and Defense Centurions with serious faces. Quick words flowed back and forth.
“Confirmed, Command Centurion,” the man called back less than a second later. “Bubble gun is holding a charge in the tube. Type-1-Pulse are set for incoming missiles and fighters. Type-3-Tuned are charged. Two are set for long range, the rest for close work. Both Type-4’s are cleared and charged.”
“Pilot, bring us up five and accelerate a touch,” Jessica ordered. “Make him chase us a little.”
The waiting was the most frustrating part. Dark space around her and a thief in the night.
Only this one was holding a knife and measuring her kidneys, rather than trying to flee.
“Contact,” the science officer yelled across the space. “Ship just appeared off our port bow.”
“Engage,” Jessica ordered.
She had already briefed her new crew, but this wasn’t the team she had spent years building.
Honing.
Denis would have been a half-breath ahead of her, giving the order, and even that would have been too long. Aleksander and Nina would have opened fire as soon as Giroux made a sound, confident that nobody innocent was going to just appear on their sensors.
Because they made very little sound themselves, each weapon was coded to a tone so the bridge crew could identify them as they fired. The Music of War, some wag had called it, once upon an epoch ago.
The defensive array, a series of Type-1-Pulse beams on the flank, chirped like an angry squirrel as they fired. The Type-3 beams were lower, individual notes down a half octave or so as they joined the symphony. VI Ferrata didn’t have primaries, but the Type-4 beam sounded like a truck horn, angry and compelling. Jessica appreciated the penetrating nature of the sound, but she would have had them redone as something more like a tuba after this.
Less likely to induce headaches.
“Pilot, shut down and execute your roll,” Jessica ordered over the rising din.
The Expeditionary Cruiser had been designed, in part, for Alber’ d’Maine to fly into battle. High-Energy-Turns, pivoting an entire warship on an axis to bring weapons to bear at a target that thought he was safely behind you.
The Mako unleashed his mauler, the weapon called a Mag-Shear that went through standard shields like a knife through warm butter. The Expeditionary Cruiser had very light shields for a ship this size, basically what a normal, smaller heavy cruiser would array, relying instead, in part, on insulation and physical armor plating on the outer hull itself to protect them.
Everything lit up at once as the Mako’s Pulse beams and Flicker beams ripped into VI Ferrata’s hull like a school of piranha. Smoke and sparks filled the bridge and it sounded like Surtur, the bringer of fire himself, was trying to beat the door down with an axe.
And then darkness.
Jessica had made sure she was strapped in, which was good, since they lost gravplates and she found herself pushing upwards against the seat belt.
Emergency lights came on in places, showing one crew member floating helplessly in space across the way, cursing like the sailor he was.
“All hands, stand down,” a voice cut through the noise and smoke. “This exercise is complete.”
“Damn it,” Jessica said, grinding her teeth together to keep the longer string of profanities inside her head. These people didn’t need to see her rage.
“Lights up, please,” Yan Bedrov’s voice was easier to hear now, as people quieted. “Bring the gravplates to five percent until our little bird lands safely.”
That brought a round of laughter as the blushing man dropped. Hopefully, his belt had broken in the excitement, and he hadn’t just forgotten to attach it.
Of course, the whole point of a training exercise like this was to knock all the bad habits out of people in controlled circumstances.
“Good,” Yan continued, rising effortlessly from his station in a rear corner as Jessica turned her head to look. “Gravplates to standard.”
Air systems had already gone into overload to suck out the fake smoke and ozone from the air as the lights came back on.
Yan was holding a clipboard in one hand, taking notes. He reminded her of Navin the Black, Jessica’s long-time Security Centurion who did everything on paper first, and only entered it into a system later. Jessica did the same thing.
Notes on paper were personal, until she chose to commit them to eternity.
“Good news,” Yan said as he strode close.
Jessica tried not to snarl at the man in frustration.
First Lord Kasum was here as well. He had been manning the Science station. His voice had called the encounter.
“How could that be good?” Jessica was exasperated.
“You just got the second highest score of anybody going through this training exercise,” he smiled evilly at her. “Forty percent.”
Ouch. Everyone else had been even lower?
“Who has first place?” she asked, naturally competitive, especially in her field of expertise, combat maneuvering.
“Me,” he grinned as he leaned on the side of her chair.
“You cheated,” she fired back. “You wrote the scenario.”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “I only programmed it. It runs itself along a very sophisticated decision matrix, once you fire it up.”
“So how do you beat it?” another voice joined in.
Petia Naoumov. First Centurion, Home Fleet. Previously seated quietly in a rear corner, watching. And learning. A tall woman with long, black hair and Japanese ancestry. Jessica’s boss. Everybody’s boss as senior flag officer serving, answering only to the First Lord himself. And the person most likely to replace that man when he retired.
Yan grinned. He looked almost like a weasel spying a lame chicken.
“You people are fantastic tacticians,” he said, encompassing Petia, Nils, Jessica, and the rest of the bridge crew with one hand. “But you have never been pirates. And never had to out-think them.”
“Pirates?” Nils asked, coming up to form the fourth side of the diamond.
“Correct, First Lord,” Yan replied. “You think in Cartesian space. Maneuver to optimum position for your shields and guns. Overwhelm the other guy when he finds himself out of position and facing the wrong way.”
“So what’s the answer to Buran?” Jessica asked, knowing that Yan wasn’t just showing off. Although there was an element of that, as well, this pirate from the galactic fringes getting to show up the rich cousins.
“We pirates never want to kill the other guy, Your Majesty,” he replied with a sardonic look. “Why bother going to all the effort? No, we want to sneak up on him, disable the bastard, and steal all his stuff. You had the right idea at St. Legier when you suckered that Roughshark in by flying Kali-ma too far off the Blackbird’s flank, putting us out of close escort. You have to think like a pirate here, as well. He’ll do the same thing. At least until he learns better.”
“And that would be?” Petia’s tone was getting frosty, so she was probably right at the edge of her patience.
Yan could be something of a showman, but he had just spent six months nose-down in every bit of technical intelligence available on the topic of Buran. It made him much wordier than normal.
“The bubble gun is an obvious solution,” Yan said. “Once they figure out it’s there, you’ll never see another centerline pass from the rear. They’ll come right over the front of you at full speed, just like at St. Legier. Maybe cross your T, if they can time it right. Seriously, Kigali would have seen the solution immediately. Gator roll the bastard.”
“Gator roll?” Jessica asked. “Seriously?”
“He went down your port flank at high speed,” Yan said, ticking off things on his scoring sheet. “All the point defense systems got five rounds off with a very high hit ratio. The Type-3’s each fired twice. The Type-4 on that side fired once. The bubble gun would have come to bear eventually, but he would have hopped himself somewhere else by then, so that shot would have been wasted, as well as the flip on the gyros.”
“And?” Nils chimed in with an edge.
In his day, he had been the top-rated battle commander in the fleet, a mantle he had handed off to Jessica some time ago.
“You shot at him with exactly half your beam weapons,” Yan said, losing the easy grin and getting grim finally. Nasty. “Half. Everything I built has at least a 190 degree hemisphere of fire. That’s on purpose. You roll your skull or your belly at him, and everything, everything on this ship except the bubble gun can hit the bastard, especially at jousting range. I promise you he’ll feel that, especially the fours. The oversized gyros are so you can snap over a roll faster than he can dodge, not to spin lengthwise. d’Maine will pull some crazy shit, but that goes without saying. I’ve seen the reports on Second Thuringwell.”
Jessica nodded. They were still working out how to fight a new way. Command a new way. Engage an opponent they had never encountered, never even heard of, other than from her and Yan.
“So why do I even have two, puny missile launchers, if there is barely space for them?” she asked. “What? Sixteen rounds?”
Again, that pirate smile.
“Twelve, and it’s even worse than that,” Yan replied. “The tubes and the rails are set to Imperial standards, not Republic. Nothing around here will fit. The Emperor and the Grand Admiral will supply us housings with fuel, but no warheads. Those are for whatever Moirrey comes up with.”
It made a rude, and weird sort of sense. At least as much as anything did, when you threw out everything and started over with a blank screen.
She could see Robbie taking VI Ferrata into battle easy enough. And Alber’ in the sister ship, VI Victrix, Victorious. Jessica would be a sitting duck, even in a Star Controller.
She turned to Nils.
“Three corvettes won’t cut it,” she said. “Not for Auberon. We won’t have the sort of close-in firepower that the Expeditionary vessels have.”
“Yeah,” Yan said. “I talked to Senator Horvat about that over lunch the other day.”
You did what?
“He agreed,” Yan continued. “Need a full ring of coverage to protect the big girl.”
“I see,” Jessica said. “Six, like we currently have with the destroyers?”
“Close,” Yan replied. “Seven, with a CP added in. Oh, and he suggested an Expeditionary Carrier.”