Jessica carried a mug of fresh coffee with her onto the flag bridge, sippy-cup lid already in place in case things went sideways and they were suddenly in combat without sufficient warning. That was always a risk when invading someone else’s star system blind.
Enej and Casey were already at their posts, waiting carefully and digesting whatever tidbits of data were available. There was never much data in JumpSpace, just predictions of where everyone was and when they would land.
Jessica was taking this one extremely slow. She would only get one chance to surprise those bastards. And she owed them a great deal, for St. Legier.
She took her spot at the command table, the third point of the triangle. Marcelle was off to one side where Jessica could see her out of the corner of one eye without turning far. Waiting patiently, as always.
The projection in the middle of her table was expanded to a huge scale, compared to normal for operations and maneuvering for battle. They would drop out of JumpSpace at an extreme distance, instead of the normal distance everybody else preferred. Just barely inside the heliopause for Trusski’s star, a little under one hundred AU out. Beyond a theoretical Kuiper Belt, if this star had one, but well inside any Oort Cloud-analog that might be there.
Jessica’s team would end up doing most of the survey work for this entire sector of space, which was frightening, in and of itself. Not even Fribourg had come this far out.
But, as Emmerich had told her privately, Fribourg had a tendency to gather up big attack fleets and launch themselves at Samara, hoping to damage or destroy enough material, and that damnable Ural Starbase, to eventually force Buran back across the M’Hanii Gulf.
Theoretically, a tide could grind a cliff face down, given enough time. But Buran kept building their breakwater farther out to sea.
Hopefully, if any spies had warned Buran that she was coming, they had reinforced Samara, as usual, and were smugly waiting for her to bash her forehead against that impossible anvil.
“Time?” Jessica asked simply.
“Eight minutes to emergence, Fleet Centurion,” Casey said precisely. “All hands are at battle stations. Command Centurion Jež has the bridge of Auberon. Senior Centurion Vanek has Tactical. Flight Wing is ready to launch.”
“Put me through to da Vinci,” Jessica ordered, more on a whim than anything. They had already gone over it all, several times.
Still, this would be the first time for Ainsley to lead the wing into a true battle, if they had to fight one, and Jessica’s first time without Jouster out there.
Jessica was amazed at how much that simple change had impacted all her maneuver plans. The man had been insane, but the best pilot anybody knew.
“Flight Wing,” da Vinci’s growl filled the room.
“You’re on general comm, Ainsley,” Jessica replied quietly.
“Gotcha,” the woman pilot answered, taking some of the edge off her voice. “All seats are hot and ready for crash launch. Merman should have everyone live on II Augusta. Boomerang, Grendel, and Black Prince on 406 all know the party plan.”
“And you?” Jessica asked, knowing that da Vinci hadn’t taken this promotion out of anything except a sense of duty.
Too much like growing up, although the woman was still apparently maintaining a very quiet, successful, low-key relationship with Yan, which spoke well of those two introverts.
“Guns would be nice,” da Vinci replied. “If this is a long-term gig, you’ll need a new scout, because I’m going to have to transfer over to the artillery.”
“Acknowledged, da Vinci,” Jessica agreed. “Make some recommendations to Denis tomorrow. It’s his ship. I’m just the flag officer you haul around.”
“As if,” da Vinci snorted, but remained otherwise quiet.
Jessica cut the line and looked around. Morale was good. People were focused on their tasks. Shortly, the new war would begin.
Or perhaps the new front would open. Fribourg had apparently been quietly at war with Buran for nearly two generations, but the galactic geography, the distances, were so great that Aquitaine had never heard anything.
It hadn’t helped that Ladaux had been losing their own war until very recently.
“All hands, one minute to emergence,” Denis’s voice carried from all speakers.
Jessica checked her harness, made sure her coffee mug was secured and the flip-lid down, and took a deep breath.
There were no plans here. No elaborate gaming out all the options, like she had done at Thuringwell. The team would probably choke on their tongues in surprise if she told them the truth, but Jessica had settled for a dozen basic fleet maneuvers she could invoke, rather than the thousands of options normally at her fingertips.
Yan Bedrov and that damned training sim against a single foe who could pull impossible jumps and hammer you from a surprise flank.
Still, she had two Expeditionary Cruisers with a monumental amount of ready firepower, in the hands of two of the most dangerous command centurions Jessica knew. Forty-five fighter craft of the new design, slightly heavier on the E-2 strike versions than the C-1 knife-fighters. Gunships and surprise.
And the audacity of her team. To sneak deep into enemy territory and set up a supply base in the deepest darkness.
Emergence.
Jessica wasn’t sure if she was growing more sensitive to it as she got older, or her nerves were just so keyed up today. Normally, it was like sliding into a bathtub of warm water. Today, it was the cold-water pool after a sauna, a snap that ran down her spine like electricity.
The projection came live as signals got processed. Every ship was as dark as they could run, relying on passive scanners so that nobody closer in to the star realized they were hosting burglars. If everything went well, tight-beam lasers would begin to establish a usable comm network shortly, but for right now, it was just Auberon trusting luck and the combat wing: VI Ferrata, VI Victrix, II Augusta, CA-264, CE-401, CE-402, CE-403, CS-404, CM-405, and CP-406, plus GSC Ballard.
Pitifully feeble, to take on an entire star empire run by a Sentient computer system. More than enough to overwhelm the sort of patrol forces she expected in a forgotten corner like Trusski.
Stars representing the rest of the squadron began to populate a secondary, minimum-range, projection. This hop had been short, so everyone was pretty accurate for time lag and spacing. VI Victrix at the van. VI Ferrata at the rear. Auberon behind II Augusta in the middle. Six corvettes in a long, three-dimensional, hexagonal shape when viewed from the side, escorting from the front, back, top and bottom, where all the broadsides would range best. Maybe she could entice some unwary Buran commander to attempt her flank, wherein every one of her warships could roll suddenly and bring the entire squadron’s firepower to bear.
Ballard and CP-406 well off to port and starboard, respectively. With CS-405, Jessica’s scout-equipped corvette, up front, all three vessels began to cast their extra-sensitive noses to the wind.
Nothing.
Jessica knew that dwarf planets and iceballs would start to show up on the projection soon, as the scans identified them against the background noise, making the next jump that much safer. An Oort cloud was never dense enough to kick a ship out of jump, but it frequently played merry hell with terminal navigation, especially when you were trying to land so close to it, instead of blasting right past it. Deeper into the star system to get to the warm worlds.
But they were alone, as near as she could tell. Fribourg’s navigation notes suggested that Buran tended to put their scanner network at around ten to fifteen AU from the star. Somewhere around the orbit of forgotten Saturn, back in the lost home system, still used as baseline for so much of a star system’s scale.
And, while Buran tended to come into a system from the ecliptic north, and Fribourg on the system plane, Jessica had brought the group in at a declination of -63 degrees. Just to find the quietest hiding spot in the cupboard. It had apparently worked, as nobody suddenly lit them up with scanners or guns.
Ballard had the best scanners, so she was tasked with mapping Trusski’s orbital traffic. Difficult from here, but not impossible, and Jessica was in no hurry. CP-406 and CS-405 were watching the close neighborhood.
After ten minutes, the chances began to look better that they had picked the lock on the front door. They could never completely relax, not with sharks that could appear out of the darkness with no warning, but the team didn’t need Jessica looking over their shoulder while they worked. It was already fraught enough out here.
Jessica grabbed her mug, detached her harness, and opened a line to the bridge.
“Jež here,” Denis said, glancing up into the camera from whatever screen he had been focused on.
“You have the flag, Denis,” she said. “Annihilate anybody that gets close enough to scan us. But be prepared to run like hell if you need to. We won’t win this thing on this pass, but we could lose it today.”
“Roger that,” and he was gone.
Jessica nodded to Marcelle and her flag centurions. Enej and Casey would remain, but their jobs would be taking notes at this point, unless something went horribly wrong.
And Jessica would only be two doors away if that happened.
A day of sneaking. Scouting. Laying the groundwork for future endeavors, future missions.
Jessica wasn’t sure how to classify it, but she probably didn’t need to. They had succeeded. Space was empty and quiescent, this far away from any star, if you made no noise. She had spent the day comfortable and cozy in her cabin, waiting.
CS-405 had located an iceball in the darkness, a dwarf planet that appeared to be an even mix of slush and rock, big enough that the entire squadron could lurk in its shadow, relative to Trusski. As long as emissions were kept at a strict minimum, none of the other scanners, the ones with sufficient parallax, should have any reason to look this direction.
Trusski itself was humble to look at from space. Moirrey’s homeworld, Ramsey in Lincolnshire, had more orbital hardware, and Lincolnshire’s capital world was a poor place, compared to anywhere in Aquitaine. Trusski had one station in orbit that looked big enough to be a shipping warehouse, but not a major industrial facility. Weather and communication satellites, broadcasting navigation warnings to anyone that would listen. The familiar constellation of three beacons marking the poles and equator.
Jessica had even read today’s forecast for Taymyr, the capital city. Gray and hazy this morning, warming from fourteen degrees all the way up to perhaps twenty, once the sun burned the clouds off. Rather idyllic, but beside the point.
Jessica felt like a Visigoth, hiding at the edge of the woods, preparing to swoop down and pillage some unsuspecting town. At least Thuringwell had maintained some level of military defenses, though pitiful, the result of a cheap duke. Trusski appeared to have nothing more than a pair of rescue cutters, on call but unmanned, in case of an emergency aboard on orbiting ship. All the other scans and logs suggested nothing else.
Did these people not realize there was a war on?
Jessica pinched the bridge of her nose and took a deep breath. She still had another eight minutes before her meeting with the command centurions, but she didn’t expect the extra time to change anything.
Trusski was either as civilian a world as had ever existed, or the deepest, most cunning trap she had ever encountered. She would bet on the former.
2218 Svati Prime. November 13, 392. The day before the infamous Jessica Keller had etched their previously-unknown names into the history books.
First paving stone on The Long Raid.
A peaceful system, politely ignored as a military target because both Fribourg and Aquitaine had maintained the Cahllepp Frontier as a quiet border. Right up until the day Nils Kasum told her to light that frontier on fire. M’Hanii was behind her, as galactic navigation went. Samara somewhere out front, closer to St. Legier, the breakwater thrust out into the sea against the raging storm that was Emmerich Wachturm’s wrath.
Jessica rose from her comfy chair, slipped her feet into her shoes, and crossed the hallway to the flag bridge.
Enej and Casey were at their regular stations. The other points of her flag triangle.
Yan Bedrov was here too, seated near Marcelle off to one side, rather than down in the library or engineering, as was his usual wont. Jessica needed his expertise for this. He smiled as she entered, and raised his mug of coffee in salute. Obviously, Marcelle approved of the man enough to make him coffee. Nobody else was allowed to touch her tools.
A few moments after Jessica came Torsten Wald, dressed in the blues he would normally have worn on his own bridge, had the world turned out differently. Jessica wondered what sort of man Torsten might have become. She doubted it would be anything like the one who took a jumpseat next to Marcelle opposite Yan. This one had learned to relax in ways she never saw in senior Imperial officers.
He smiled back at her and took a deep breath, the moment weighing upon them all.
Faces were coming up live on the projection as Jessica took her seat. Probably pinged by Enej or Casey the moment the door opened. Her people were good at anticipating, executing.
Freelancing a war went against everything she had spent a career doing, but it was the right thing here. Play the tune by ear, letting local circumstances dictate needs.
Tango, where someone else took the lead, rather than Valse d’Glaive, where she pushed. Hopefully, the gods, and Emmerich, would appreciate the irony.
“Yan, Torsten, join me here please,” Jessica said. “I’ll want your expertise for this as well.”
So then, let us tango.
She found Denis among those projected and he grinned as they made eye contact. Of all of them, he was probably the one that knew her best.
Kigali. Always with a breezy smile close at hand, but today he looked like a stern patriarch from a vid. The man still didn’t think the other corvette commanders were up to his standards, but, then again, was anybody but Alber’?
d’Maine. The serenity of a Kodiak at rest. Prepared to unleash the berserker, but constrained, for now. He was likely hoping for another battle like Second Thuringwell, itself a martial epic for the ages.
One by one, she studied the others.
Calm anticipation.
They had spent a year planning for this, and a lifetime preparing. Today, she would probably disappoint those who had not spent enough time studying her campaigns.
Strategic offense, tactical defense. Force your opponent to react, then pick the ground where he has to come to you to fight. Uphill, in the rain and mud.
Agincourt, hopefully, rather than Thermopylae or the Pons Sublicius.
She nodded at Enej, and he projected the local system for the five of them. Aboard the other vessels, they would see the same, albeit on a smaller scale. Each of them, however, only needed to solve one piece of the puzzle.
One inhabited planet, with a larger moon and a smaller one, neither big enough to be anything more than a spot to land and perhaps conduct some science, both lacking atmosphere. Ballard had detected no motion on either.
“Good morning,” Jessica began. “I haven’t seen anything here to suggest a defensive fortification worth mentioning. What they do have is a petit maritime rescue force, none of which appear to have even as much firepower as one of our fighter craft.”
She paused and let that sink in. Probably, the rest were just as surprised as she had been. A few would be offended at that prospect, but they were already like that.
“With that in mind, I’m planning to leave the cruisers out here,” Jessica continued. “Drop down and say hello with just Auberon and the corvettes. We can’t really isolate a system like this unless we work really hard at it, and I don’t want the squadron strung out all over the system when someone finally comes to show us the door. Plus, we didn’t bring Fourth Saxon with us this time, so I’m only planning on leaving a small security force on the ground, purely for diplomatic purposes. This won’t be our base of operations, as Whughy’s team is handling that, but I want this to be the place where they have to come out to fight us. I plan to make them chase us all over the sector, just like we did to the Red Admiral, back in the day. Questions?”
“Demonstrations?” Command Centurion Maikop asked from the bridge of CE-403.
He was generally the quiet and scholarly type, compared to the others present. More like Jessica in that way. And he had obviously put some time into studying what she had done on The Long Raid. 2218 Svati Prime had been a demonstration, rather than an occupation.
What we could have done, had we chosen.
“Not unless provoked,” she replied. “There’s nothing here that qualifies as a legitimate military target, and I’m already feeling like a Visigoth, just watching them from the sky.”
That got a chuckle. They had obviously all had similar thoughts.
“Runners?” d’Maine growled.
“Assume they’ll head straight to Samara to call for help,” Jessica ordered. “Calculate minimum transit and response times, based on everything we know, and go to high alert. We’ll move off and hide. I’d like to do to them what they did to me at St. Legier. The whole reason we’re here is to spall off a chunk of their sector forces so we can isolate them. Because if they bring too much over here, I’m happy to take a run at Samara and that Starbase, and see what an Expeditionary Cruiser can do.”
Alber’s hard smile lit up the screen. Komal MacInerney had taken over as his First/Tactical Officer after Cruz Bösch died at Second Thuringwell. He had probably tasked her with exactly that scenario.
How to kill a Starbase with just an Expeditionary Cruiser. And surprise.
“Yan,” Jessica continued, turning to spike the man with her eyes. “What’s going to be the best way to engage anything that comes out, given just this force and not the cruisers?”
He paused, turning his eyes inward. Had he been born on Ladaux, she had no doubts he might have been one of the other Command Centurions here today. Although he probably would have turned out more like Moirrey and ended up in a research think tank on Anameleck Prime.
“All the corvettes should tune their Type-3 beams for short range now and leave them that way,” he offered. “Except CA-264. You’ll want one other ship that can tag someone at Primaries range, besides Auberon. At short range, the Type-3 hits like a primary, but at a shorter effective range than a Type-2. Anything past that, my granddaughter hits harder.”
The others chuckled.
“Why isn’t the Type-1-Pulse going to be sufficient for that distance?” Command Centurion Glenn asked in a thoughtful tone.
Bedrov turned deadly serious, like she had seen in his face above St. Legier, waiting for that raider to come after her aboard the Blackbird.
“One of these days, one of those bastards is going to figure out that he can drop out of jump on top of you and fire a broadside of missiles that have only begun to accelerate when they slam into your hull,” Yan said. “That’s why zu Kermode designed the Type-1-Pulse for me. Knife-fighting in starships. And next time I talk to the Grand Admiral, I’ve got another set of designs for him to build for us, to surprise that next bastard that tries it, once they get a taste of the bubble gun.”
That got another laugh.
The Reversed Field, Pinch, Plasma Implosion Generator.
The Bubble Gun.
Jessica looked forward to watching the first time a Buran warship met the highest form of Moirrey’s art. Almost as much as she looked forward to whatever else Yan had up his sleeve.
But that was a task for the two cruisers. Nobody else had a bubble gun, II Augusta replacing that weapons system with space for more fighters in her belly, and Auberon still being the antique among this force. Plus, the generators and magnetic control fields for the device were almost as big as a corvette.
Jessica made a mental note to ask Yan about a ship, destroyer-sized, give or take, that was just a bubble gun and engines. It would make a lovely siege weapon, but that was about it. Cheap to build, but capable of inflicting a staggering amount of damage on a fixed target. Say, a Starbase located at Samara, or the fabled Ninagirsu, across M’Hanii.
But what was this war, if not an effort to surprise that damnable Sentience with all the crazy things humans were willing to do, to escape his eternal control?
“Captain Wald?” Jessica asked, turning from Yan’s fierceness to Torsten’s beatific calm. “Your thoughts?”
“Buran rarely initiates,” he explained. “If you trespass, as we are about to do, they will warn you off, moving closer until somebody fires a shot at them. Then they will turn into a pack of rabid wolves, tearing and shredding anything they can get their teeth into. They also rarely attack our systems, preferring to slowly colonize empty worlds. Fribourg has never attempted to destroy such a colony from orbit, and even Thuringwell showed how difficult it can be to occupy a world with any meaningful, resentful population. I do not expect much from today but that they will take your measure and then bring enough to overwhelm you, once it becomes clear that we are an invasion force.”
Jessica nodded. She had spoken extensively with him on this topic over the last year. And other topics…but there was this war to undertake first.
“Anything else?” she continued, circling the faces until she came back to Kigali. Silence. “Set your engineers to tuning your offensive systems. In twelve hours, Auberon and escorts will go to JumpSpace and drop down on Trusski. The cruisers, including Ballard, will stay out here and watch. Be prepared to intervene on our behalf if it becomes necessary, but also understand that I have no intension of fighting a pitched battle for this system, today or tomorrow. We will draw them in, set them up, snipe them from the corners. You have your orders.”