Further Extra Special Bonus Preview Time!

So, good news: my writing mojo has returned! Bad news: not in time to get an extra chapter under the hood for this week! Good news? You get to see the second half of the (still unfinished) space combat fic! 

Content Warning: The Terran half of this continues to be military sci-fi logistics wank with a mild dash of feralism.

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“Conn, Sensors, P3 is no longer occluded by P5,” the call rang out. “Fourteen minutes until occlusion by P5C.”

“Packett, ride shotgun,” Lucian said, nodding to his third officer. “I want to know about anything more substantial than a mouse fart in the vicinity of P3.”

“Aye, sir.” The lanky Martian slung herself along the guiderail with the practiced ease of a born spacer, effortlessly stopping just behind the sensor station and curling above the strapped-in operator to watch the waterfall display. A few moments and a handful of quick words later, she hurled herself back to Lucian’s side. “No joy, sir. Optical spectrography confirms tracer material in orbit around P3, but it might be leavings from the battle earlier. Direct optical will take another couple of minutes, but there’s no sign of debris against the planetary disc.”

“Very good, Lieutenant,” Lucian said impassively. “Stand by.” With a stylus, he began working sums on the reactive surface of the repeater display. On a planet’s surface, you measure twice and cut once, his old mentor at the academy had said. In space, you measure thrice before, and twice after — a bit of wisdom Lucian had always tried to live up to, and one that had saved his life and his ship on more than one occasion. He circled the product of his sums and shook his head.

“You don’t think we whiffed?” Caulfield said, leaning over him.

“No, no we were dead on,” Lucian said. “Which lends some credence to what we seemed to see in the battle, and what I’ve been hearing from other captains — whatever the hell the plants are making their ships out of doesn’t seem to give a damn about a KKV-100 moving at two-fifths of light.”

“Maybe we’d have better luck with the ‘50s?” he suggested. “They can get up point-six.”

“But roughly the same joules-on-target,” Lucian countered. “Especially if the things just bounce when they hit. Kinetics might be a go-no entirely.”

Caulfield grinned. “Well, we’ve still got the Jormungandrs. Why don’t we take a crack at it with them? I don’t care how tough their hulls are, nothing’s going to laugh off something going point-nine-nine.”

Lucian wasn’t entirely sure he believed that Caulfield had just said that, much less with that amount of anticipation in his voice. “The Jormungandr is a strategic weapon, Russ. It’s not designed to hit something that small with that much relative velocity. We’d be lucky to hit P3 from here, let alone the ship — and if we hit P3 with one of those things, given how fissile-rich it is, we’d probably start multiple natural criticalities across the planet.”

“Fair point, I suppose,” he admitted. “Damn. Always wanted to see one of those go off.”

Lucien raised an eyebrow. Caulfield wasn’t supposed to know about the damned things before his briefing for this post, so ‘always wanted’ was a hell of a suspicious statement. Then again, Admiral Caulfield had more than once blabbed about a shiny new weapons program among his fellow officers — why would it be any different with his favored son? “Let’s not get too excited about stuff like that,” he said. “The things have only been field tested a couple of times, and only once in the field of battle.” If using the things on a band of rioting convicts without any space presence constituted battle, anyway, which in Lucien’s opinion it did not. The Jormungandr, never mind the military ethics of their use, was an asinine boondoggle, and he had always resented that Enceladus had been given two of the things — as far as he was concerned, they were dead weight he wasn’t allowed to jettison. “That’s a last resort option, and I’d question even that. I think we’d have better luck with DPMs and graser lances.”

“Get us up close and personal, huh?”

“I don’t think they plan on giving us a choice. By now they probably assume we’re in a Molniya around P5 — they just don’t know where. Sensors, any sign of active EM scanning?”

“Negative, Conn, no change in ambient EM profile!”

“Maybe they’re not as smart as you give ‘em credit for,” Caulfield said.

“Never assume the enemy is less intelligent than you are, Russ,” Lucien said, tapping his stylus on the repeater. “They just don’t want to flush us yet. Their MO is capture, not destruction — they want us alive and relatively intact. That means the last thing they want us to do is bolt. We have the advantage there, as far as they’re concerned. You have to think like the enemy, Russ, get in their head. They want us, stars only know why but they want us, so, if you’re them, and you’re hunting a stealthed ship trying to needle them from a distance, what do you do?”

“Well, they love those tentacles of theirs,” he replied. “I expect they want to sniff us out without us knowing, then just blink in the way they do right on top of us.”

Lucien nodded. “But relative velocity is on our side there too for most of our orbit. If they jump straight from P3 to us, we’ll be moving so fast relative to them that we’ll be gone before they can spear us.” They’d seen several ships taken that way, imaged them from the outer system using interferometry. It wasn’t an easy thing to watch. “And if they try to do a gravity assist, or come in hot local and burn to match velocity, we’ll have time to jump.” He chuckled. “This assumes they can’t just magically alter their vector and inertia on a whim, of course. If they can, advantage goes to them.”

If they could, he thought but did not say, humanity was probably fucked. Those were the kinds of thoughts one kept to oneself when at war.

<hr>

There were quite a few more Affini in the command relay lounge than there had been an hour ago, but then, a hundred-kilogram mass ricocheting off the hull at relativistic velocity had a way of causing concern. Most were focused on specific tasks, clustered around the central displays to coordinate between departments as damage control teams checked and rechecked the section of hull plating that had absorbed the impact. None of the kinetic interceptors the Terrans had bothered to sling their way during the battle earlier had done any real harm, but with the sheer number of xenos being cared for aboard Tillandsia, no one was going to rest on assumptions.

Nephra and Indi were seated on their bench, out of the way of the scrum — Nephra, because she wanted space to think and to observe the entire spread of displays, and Indi because she didn’t want Jillian to get underfoot. The little Terran, a bit more sober now than before, was playing a game of some kind on her own adorable little tablet, leaning up against Indi. A few of Indi’s vines coiled around her, both to keep her close and to give her some absent-minded affection while she assisted Nephra.

“Still nothing on the optical scan,” she said, affecting a sigh and looking up from her screen. “But we haven’t detected any hypermetric shock fronts either.”

“Which means they’re still out there,” Nephra agreed. “Their drives are too dirty and loud to jump without us seeing it like a supernova from here. And even the longest-period orbit they could have put themselves in would have given them a look at us by now….hmmm…”

“Quite the conundrum, isn’t it?” Nepha’s vines froze as she heard the Captain’s voice from just to her left — how had she missed em coming in, let alone getting so close?

“Captain!” she said, flowing up to her feet. “Uhm, I have a full report of the ongoing situation I can–“

“Calm down, Nephra,” Andoa said, “I’d never dream of taking this chase away from you. It’s one little Terran ship, and you know what you’re doing. I just wanted to pop in, watch for a bit, and make sure you have everything you need.”

“Er… thank you, Captain,” Nephra said. “I think I have everything I need for the moment, though this is a very evasive little Terran. They’re using what is, for them, fairly advanced stealth technology, which I’m sorry to say at this distance, combined with their commander’s apparent cautious nature, is surprisingly effective.”

“Mmmm, a squirmy one,” Andoa said, nodding. “Usually, Fleet lets the scout and recon vessels have those.” E grinned, a very good mimicry of the human gesture. “Floret Support Services may not be the most glorious job, but it’s certainly the most rewarding. That’s why it took me so long to get down here, actually — I was just breaking a particularly wild one.”

“Oh?” Nephra immediately perked up. She’d studied the same lesson plans about Terrans everyone else had, of course, but the opportunity to talk shop with an expert like Andoa wasn’t something one passed up. “More of the sensory overload methodology?”

“It works wonders, Nephra, trust me. These little cuties– May I?“ e said to Indi, and after a silent nod from her reached down and scritched Jillian behind the ears. The xeno made an excited sort of purring noise and leaned into the touch. “These little cuties have a nervous system that practically insists on interpreting virtually any sensation as erotic, as long as if you give it the proper context.”

“Well, if she picks out a particularly feral floret of her own, maybe she can come to you for some pointers,” Indi said, squeezing Jillian possessively. “Little Jillian here I barely had to do anything for. A good hot meal, a little affection, a xenodrug cocktail or three, and she’s as pliant as you could ask.”

“Noooo,” Jillian murmured, giggling, “you’re the pliants, Mistress, humans are mammals~”

“And wordplay?” Andoa said, laughing. “Oh, too precious, too precious by half. So, what’s the plan for the little sneak out there, hm?” e added, coiling a vine around Nephra.

“Well, I have a few ideas, Captain,” Nephra said, “but if it’s alright with you, I think I’d like to let my student have first crack at it.”

“What, me?” Indi said, jerking upright suddenly in a very Terran way. “But I– Nephra, I’m just a trainee, I’m not even done with my Tactical Studies rotation, and you want me to make decisions about an actual rescue situation?”

“I do, in fact,” Nephra said. “So take a moment, think over our position, and tell me what you think is the best solution.”

Flattening her foliage in dismay, Indi did as she was told. A moment of focus and a few commands tapped into her tablet, and she looked up again. “Well… we know the target modified their trajectory in such a way that they’re in a long-period orbit around the fifth planet, but we can’t pick them out and it’s possible they’ve made further adjustments we couldn’t see, so…I think I’d want a new perspective.” She called up a plot of the system and pointed. “So I’d move the ship here, to the sixth planet, and see what they’re doing when they think we can’t see them. Sooner or later they have to vent all that heat they’re building up.”

“Mmm.” Nephra nodded thoughtfully. “And when would you want to move the ship?”

“Well, as soon as possible, I think,” Indi replied. “We don’t know when they might vent or maneuver again, and if we wait too long we might miss it.”

“A fair point,” Nephra said. “But I think we should wait exactly seven minutes. Can you tell me why?”

Indi looked puzzled, and began examining her tablet, calling up numerous displays and poring over them. “Oh! Because by then, we’ll be eclipsed relative to the fifth planet!” she said after a moment’s thought. “We’ll use their own trick against them!”

Nephra nodded, her foliage all but standing on end in delight — she’d had trainees who would have taken far longer to work that out. “Exactly. That will give us a minimum of thirty-eight minutes during which they cannot know that we’ve moved — and, during which, if they’ve been tracking our orbit, they’ll assume that we can’t see them regardless of where they are in their orbit.”

“I like it!” Andoa said, clasping eir mossy hands, eir vines intertwining just a little. “So, what comes next?”

Indi fidgeted nervously. “Uhm… make an announcement to secure for combat hyperspace transit, halt shuttle traffic… we should probably retract our radiators, too, shouldn’t we? Just for a little bit, to make it a little harder for them to spot us?” She fervently hoped she wasn’t leaving anything out.

“Good thinking,” Nephra said. “Now, let’s go see if we can’t spot this clever Terran.”

<hr>

Lucien watched the heat sink saturation slowly creep higher, the radiators at minimum extension unable to keep pace with the reactor as it idled at military readiness. Here, with P3 in eclipse, it was safe to run at a higher temperature — it enabled him to maintain a defensive posture that he was certain he was going to need sooner rather than later. The last battle had been one of cold logic, trajectories, and distance; the next, if he wasn’t completely wrong, would be a thing of reaction time and sheer nerve.

“Still nothing,” Caulfield muttered. He’d kept quiet for the first three hours of the combat watch, but after that he’d begun grumbling privately. “I’m starting to think the weeds are a bit more cowardly than I thought.”

“Fleet tenders don’t turn on a dime,” Lucien said. “Besides, if I’m right, we can expect trouble sometime in the next ten to fifteen minutes.”

“Is this where you reveal your secret weed-whispering powers?” Caulfield replied, grinning.

“Nothing so cinematic. It’s just that we’re approaching apoaps. If I wanted to make an interplanetary jump to close with an outsystem target, I’d do it when my target’s orbital velocity is at its lowest.” How a man made it to XO of a starship without understanding something that basic, Lucien had no idea, but he kept that to himself.

“Hn. Good point. You think they’ve got our vector, then?”

“At this point, I’m certain of it. They’ve had plenty of time to crunch the numbers and watch for transits. It’s not as if we have a full night-side transit relative to P3, after all. Two orbits ought to be more than sufficient, even with all the junk floating in the lower ring system. Which means they’re waiting. And if they’re waiting, they’re waiting for the right moment to come after us.”

“And then we’ve got ‘em,” he said, nodding.

“If we’ve played our cards right.”

When the attack came, he felt nothing. His first clue that something was very wrong was the voice of Chief Petty Officer Templeman on Sensors: “Conn, Sensors, target extreme close range!”

“What?!” Lucien keyed his repeater to the sensor display, and there it was on optical, garish and bright and dangerously close. “Verify range and delta-v!”

A moment later, the reply came: “Two point three eight kilometers!” And then, after a moment of hesitation, a terrified: “Delta-v zero!”

“Emergency burn!” Over the course of a second, the emergency maneuvers klaxon wound up to full volume, but by then Lucien was already pinned in his seat by an immediate three gees of thrust that quickly climbed to five. “Helm! Axial rotation: dive one one seven! Emergency speed!” Calling out the command, even to the point where the mic pickup in his collar could pick it up and relay it to the appropriate station, was an almost impossible strain.

“Dive one one seven, aye,” he heard Rivers call back. Enceladus began to swing around as the pilot’s fingers dialed in the maneuver, chemical thrusters venting at full military force, but even an emergency turn that would normally throw the crew around like ragdolls was practically undetectable while the nuclear salt-water rocket was burning at maximum thrust.

The radiation alarms began to sound in the background, barely audible beneath the emergency burn klaxon. Lucien was putting his ship and his crew at no small amount of risk, turning the way he was and exposing them lengthwise to the trail of radioactive flux the engine was leaving behind, but sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander, and the most dangerous close range weapon that any ship possessed was its engine. When you pointed a constantly-detonating nuclear explosion at something, as he was pointing his engine wash at the Affini vessel, it did not tend to survive intact.

His crew could deal with a bit of radiation exposure, if it secured them the victory. Those were the kinds of decisions a captain had to make. He wasn’t about to leave it up to a quick maneuver with the engine, however. “Weps, fire Fleet One!”

<hr>

“Oh dirt, oh roots, oh frost!” Indi muttered as she tapped in commands. “No no no, stop squirming, we’re not going to hurt you! Ugh!” The little Terran vessel had done a stupendously dangerous maneuver, practically flying right through its own engine trail and exposing all the poor little Terrans aboard to dangerous levels of radiation even as it blasted even more radiation back at the Tillandsia’s cargo vines that had been moving in for the capture. “Dirt!”

“It’s alright, just keep on them. My, but they’re a quick little fish, aren’t they?” Nephra watched as details on the little ship poured in from the Tillandsia’s sensors, a high-fidelity scan revealing things about the ship that its own crew probably didn’t even know. “Look at that power plant, those capacitors…and the throughput rate on that dirty little engine of theirs!”

“Mmmm,” Andoa said, nodding as e looked over her shoulder. “I believe the Terran word for that sort of a vehicle is a ‘hot bod.’”

“I can certainly see why,” Indi grumbled. “Oh dirt!” Alarms began to sound as the Firebreak went into overdrive, intercepting attacks that it helpfully identified as standard-issue Terran bomb-pumped gamma-ray lasers and nuclear shaped charges, identifying their point of origin via neutron flux and opening appropriate apertures in space-time to negate them. “They’re attacking us!”

“Calm down,” Nephra said gently. “Even if the Firebreak was off, I doubt it’d do more than gently discolor the hull at worst. They’re not even trying to jump to get away, just burning hard. They’ve only got so much reaction mass, and they’re running through it very, very quickly. Once they exhaust it, we’ll simply relocate and continue the operation. Better that than provoking such a risky maneuver from them again. Okay?”

Indi nodded, cuddling Jillian up into her lap and squeezing her tightly. The little Terran let out a meep of protest before acquiescing and burrowing into her. “I’m sorry, I sort of panicked, didn’t I?”

“It’s alright,” Nepha said, calling up a sensor survey of the engagement. “Ahhh, those little gamma-ray lasers fueled by nuclear explosions again. You’d think they’d learn those aren’t going to penetrate even the radiation-safety layers of our hull after a while. And the same goes for these shaped nuclear charges. Honestly, if we weren’t carrying such precious cargo, I’d suggest we shift the Firebreak into jump suppression mode.”

“It might be worth considering regardless,” Andoa mused. “Though of course, we’d need to make sure the florets know there’s nothing to be afraid of if they hear a few pops and pings and such.”

“So it’s really not that dangerous?” Indi asked.

“More dangerous to them than to us, frankly,” Andoa said, nodding. “Generating so much radioactive flux at such close ranges. Especially with that little maneuver of theirs! I’ll let the veterinary staff know to synthesize extra medications for acute radiation syndrome. By the time we capture that ship, some of the Terrans aboard are probably going to feel really awful.” The Firebreak’s alarms went off again; a second cloud of Terran weapons had just detonated, and once again it had intercepted each and every blast. “Mmmm, nice try, cutie. Probably wondering if they’d managed to saturate the Firebreak somehow.”

“It would track with their commander’s nature. They seem to want to learn something from every engagement, and they always have a contingency.” Nephra smiled. “I like this one. Far too willing to do unsafe things, but nevertheless…I appreciate the thought that clearly goes into planning them.” She plotted the ship’s new trajectory on a map of the gas giant and its many moons — their new course, after some adjustment, would take them close to one of the inner moons. “I bet they’ll try to alter their trajectory while they’re eclipsed again…so, Captain? With your permission, when they enter eclipse, I’d like to move the ship here.”

Andoa leaned in, following where her vine was pointing. “Ooooh,” e said, nodding approvingly. “I like that. Permission granted.”

<hr>

“Captain’s Log, CNS Enceladus. The second engagement resulted in a successful failure, in that while our close range attack profile did not appreciably damage the enemy vessel, it did reveal heretofore unknown information about enemy capabilities. They possess some kind of energy shield able to somehow absorb or otherwise negate directed energy weapons; sensor recordings on all wavelengths have been transcribed to the black box, which is being uploaded to the courier drone along with this log.

“I intend, once we use P5c to eclipse ourselves, to launch that drone bound for Naval Station Tango-Charlie, and then to assume a high-stealth posture and go ballistic. I believe the enemy will interpret this as Enceladus departing the system; my hopes are to gain more intel by observing the enemy vessel if possible. I intend to follow the drone within twelve hours regardless of results.” Lucien ended the recording, waited for it to transcribe itself. He was sweating, but it wasn’t from the heat this time — excess perspiration was a known side effect of the antirads the ship’s surgeon had given him once he’d handed in his dosimeter. So far, according to the doc, no one had seen a lethal dose, but a few members of the crew were probably looking at a problematic medical prognosis later in life, and virtually every single member of the crew had exceeded their annual safe exposure limit and then some. A few would probably have to be permanently grounded, or at least, they’d be permanently grounded if the Terran species wasn’t fighting for its life against an implacable alien aggressor.

“I still can’t believe you’re gonna cut and fucking run,” Caulfield growled. Ever since Lucien had told him his plan, his XO had been in a foul mood, and he somehow managed to loom angrily even in microgravity.

He sent an annoyed glance of his own back over his shoulder. “Russ, we let off enough ordnance to melt a dreadnaught at ranges where even the backwash from the primer charges should have melted their hull off. It damn near melted ours off!” The damage reports had looked pretty grim indeed — half their vantablack had been boiled away, one entire radiator array had been fused and was now useless, and the sensor ports on the starboard forward quarter had been spotty ever since their lens shields had been a millisecond too slow to close. “We are not equipped to fight that monster. The best thing we can do for the war effort is take this intel home! Smarter men than us will figure out if there’s some way to defeat that shield, and then we’ll turn the tide.”

They were not going to turn the tide. They were irretrievably fucked. All of humanity was irretrievably fucked and had been from the get-go. These things had hulls that shrugged off kinetic kill vehicles that should have punched a hole clean through them and out the other side, had shields that ate gigatons of nuclear flash energy and collimated gamma rays for lunch, and to top it off they could arbitrarily alter their vector and inertia during hyperspace transits that – as a fucking bonus! – had no appreciable jump transient.

He’d known, from that moment the enemy simply appeared on top of them at perfectly equalized velocity, that they were fucked. Enceladus’s courier drone couldn’t move through hyperspace without kicking him in the chest from kilometers off, and the Affini had jumped a nine kilometer behemoth right on top of him without so much as a tickle in his throat.

The Accord had been fools to even try to fight this war. They had never stood a chance. The best thing Lucian could do would be to get his crew home and, with any luck, give them a chance to set their affairs in order. After that, the only thing left was to hope that the reality of Affini conquest wasn’t so dire as propaganda would have them all believe.