Chapter 44

Narval star system, outer system.

High orbit over Narval-8.

Sarah looked at the holograms around her dreamily. The spectacle of the gas giant's rings around them was beautiful, to say the least. Borderline hypnotizing even. She would have had a better view in the observation deck at the front of the ship, but right now she wanted some privacy, and she didn't want to monopolize the deck for herself, although she knew her crew would leave it to her if she asked. Or she could just seal the access hatches, but that was hardly polite or necessary.

She startled as her implants pinged her, and immediately accepted the communication request.

Elteria's hologram appeared instantly in her office, smiling widely.

"We have a customer!"

*****

"The ship that just arrived is the one we classified Q-Longway, the covert battle carrier. It is making a beeline for the main world as we speak at a very respectable and inconspicuous 50gs of acceleration. What is less respectable is this." Another icon became highlighted on the system display in the middle of the office. "Which is the gunship they dropped off as soon as they were out of sensor range of the hyperspace beacon."

"What is it doing?" Asked Seria, and Sarah shrugged as she looked at the group assembled in her office. Once more Hector, Turral, Elteria and Seria were assembled there to discuss their strategy. She'd have objected to the newbie's presence, but sometimes she had a fresh perspective the others simply didn't have. Besides, her presence was calming.

"It's shadowing the freighter, and it's running dark. Well, as dark as a grav-drive can get anyway. My guess is that it's there to provide fire support in case the freighter gets jumped before it can scramble it's other gunships. Sort of like a drone carrier's patrol group." Everyone nodded around the room. "In any case, if this behavior is standard for them, it definitely takes the Q-Longways out of our hit list. Onboard gunships were already a huge deal breaker, but one online and away? There are too many ways it could go wrong."

"Right." Said Hector. "Besides, the bigger the ship, the more time it would take for the nanotech to do its work."

Sarah winced, but nodded.

"That too. Elteria will continue monitoring the ship to see any other unexpected behavior, and gather as much data as possible. Old Joe's scans appear to be correct so far, but I'd still like to be able to corroborate them as much as possible. As for you, I want you to run drills about boarding these ships, and the countermeasures they might have in place. Be as vicious as you like, because these bastards don't seem to hold anything back either. This includes you Turral, as much as I'd like to think this will go swimmingly, I fear your engineers will get a piece of the action as well. Hopefully not on our ship, but..." Sarah shrugged. "We'll have to approach with our shields down if nothing else, so if they hit us it will hurt. They probably won't penetrate our armor, but a lot of our systems are outside our armor anyway."

"Right." Turral shrugged. "I have a few ideas, especially as to how they would booby-trap their ships. I'll get a list of what Elteria and Hector can counter, and what would necessitate a direct engineering intervention."

"Excellent. Hector?"

"I've already been running boarding and bomb defusal drills, but I'll also include some ship sabotage one. It might not serve any purpose, but we might be able to buy the engineers time if we know what to wreck in advance to throw a wrench in their plans."

"Good. Very good. Alright then, dismissed!"

*****

Sarah calmly took a sip of her hot chocolate as Elteria appeared on her desk.

"Another ship?"

"Nope. Rather another...oddity in the system."

Sarah's eyebrow rose. They'd been there over a week already, carefully observing the coming and goings of the TRF's freighters. They'd even seen one of the Q-Wayfarers, and decided to let it pass in favor of confirming Old Joe's scan data.

They might as well not have bothered. It was almost painful how much better the data Old Joe had provided was. Granted, there were some minor differences -no two ships were exactly alike after all-, but otherwise everything checked out.

"Ah. What kind?"

"This kind." Elteria gestured, and a hologram of the inner system appeared. The hologram then zoomed...on the star?

"What...That's the solar array constellation right?"

"Yep. Mostly cheap mirrors reflecting sunlight into more expensive mirrors, repeat until you throw everything at a giant processing station that turns it into power and beams it to the rest of the star system. Simple, cost effective, and completely devoid of interest, right?"

"Right. Every system has one of those." Hell, even Sepia had one, that was how universal these things were. The only problem posed by them was that they had to restrict the orbits of the collection mirrors in very industrialized systems, otherwise they could absorb so much light it could compromise the climate of the habitable worlds. It could also pose some traffic control issues, but that was why the power beams were only directed at installations on a fixed, predictable orbit. "Not exactly surprising they have one as well. Do they have more capacity than they should?"

"A bit, but that could easily be explained by wanting some backups, or an ongoing expansion. No. These are the anomalies." A series of new symbols appeared, and Sarah leaned forward. "I couldn't even find them on passives until the system defence force did some kind of test ping, and they answered. Then I had to scan for solar interference, and even then they were a pain in the ass to find."

"What am I looking at?"

"Defense platforms, about the size of a frigate. Solar powered ones."

Sarah froze.

"Shit. Defensive Dyson swarm?"

"Not even remotely that bad, but something in that spirit yeah." Defensive Dyson swarms were the gigantic arrays of platforms and mirrors that defended some of the Alterian Directorate's Core Worlds. Except that instead of a handful of frigate sized defense platforms, there were literally thousands of dreadnought sized battle stations, backed up by millions of other fortresses, all powered by an array of mirrors so extensive it noticeably dimmed the star. "I can't tell much from there, except that they appear to be basically built around a single gun from their structure, and they're completely dark. Not even just good emission control, these things straight up don't seem to have any active reactors onboard, probably just a few low profile capacitor banks for station-keeping, with the occasional burst from the solar array to recharge them. If I'd have to take a guess on what they're for? They would align on low power and get scan data from the system Defense Force, and attempt to snipe anything the ships couldn't handle." The AI shrugged. "They're not very useful if the attacking force knows they're there, even some light dodging would make it impractical, as aiming would be a pain at any kind of distance." Sarah nodded. Light might be instantaneous, but even the slightest bit of deviation off target at those kind of distances would make a shot miss widely, and even the Dominion Navy's best tracking systems had their limits, to say nothing of what those cheap platforms would be able to mount. "But as a surprise knock out punch? It would wipe out a Dominion light cruiser squadron, easily."

Sarah winced.

"So basically, enough firepower to stand off a small Dominion fleet for a few days as they destroy the mirror array...for what?"

"Evacuate everyone? The TRF must have a crap ton of qualified people on that hellworld. If nothing else we know they don't have infinite manpower, otherwise they wouldn't bother co-opting local insurrections. They have to have a limit on qualified fanatics they can convince to sign up. Maybe take some of the datacores and some of the more precious hardware with them. There's always a couple of freighters in orbit of the Hellworld, that's a lot of high value gear and people saved if they can buy a few hours of breathing room."

"Honestly given our previous...encounters with them I would expect them to just nuke it all."

"Oh I'm fairly sure they would. But they seem to be pragmatic if nothing else. What we've seen in Arion was a cost effective solution. They were basically furnishing rebellions with critical ship components, probably some advanced shipyard systems, and letting them shoulder the rest. They're limited in resources, although I have no idea what the bottleneck is exactly." The AI shrugged. "So I'd say they would try to evac as many people and hardware as possible, and then nuke everything."

Sarah winced.

"That's still a lot of people killed."

"Oh yeah. Millions, most probably. But that hasn't seemed to matter to them before."

"If they're all their own people, it might." Sarah sighed. "Well, at least that info might save us."

Elteria frowned.

"Why? We're not even planning to go near the inner system. And when going dark there's now way they'll be able to target us!"

"No. But how much do you want to bet that the reason their incoming freighters are always on the same vector is because one of those solar stations is in position to shoot them down if necessary?"

The AI suddenly looked a lot more green than she had a second ago.

"That's-"

"Not even close in term of insanity and paranoia compared to planting nukes on their allies' space habitats."

"...Fair enough." Elteria shook her head. "And you know what's horrible about this?"

"Shoot."

"The reason why few systems in the Dominion use this kind of defense is because, well, of course the platforms are vulnerable to sustained sieges, but also...that kind of system requires an AI. There are too much gravitational anomalies, and problems with long range fire to even hope to maintain that kind of defense net without one."

The captain nodded. AI were rare in the Dominion. Very rare. That they had one here to run this...wasn't good.

"The more I hear about this place, the less I'm sure we hit the jackpot."

"More like entering the lion's den?"

"Yeah, something like that." Sarah shook her head. "I swear, Soliensky is going to be coughing blood by the time the payment negotiations are done."

"I'd prefer if he coughs up the money."

Sarah chuckled.

"Fair enough. Alright. Well, keep me updated."

"Aye aye ma'am!" Elteria gave her captain a mock salute, and vanished in a shower of sparks in the middle of her hop off of the desk.

"You and your theatrics!" Called out Sarah to the air, and only heard a disembodied chuckle.

The captain shook her head at her AI's antics, before pulling up the data they had about the Hellworld.

It was almost certainly some kind of hub for the TRF. The question was, what exactly were they making here?

And if they could justify that kind of firepower to protect that, what the hell would they have covering their divinium mines?

*****

"You know, I don't even know what a tenth of this stuff is." Said Seria as she took a sip from her mug.

Sarah chuckled as she looked at the collection of memorabilia around her office.

"Honestly some days I don't either." She shook her head. "Its all...trophies, I suppose. Stuff I took from enemies, battlefields, presents from allies, anything I thought I would hang onto for memory's sake I suppose."

Seria gave the collection another look.

"I honestly dread to ask what got you some of this stuff then. Plus where would I even begin?"

Sarah chuckled again, and relaxed. The newbie was nice to be around. Besides, she had an...interesting point of view. She might not have the level of knowledge or experience the rest of her crew had, but she was curious, driven, and most importantly she wasn't afraid to ask questions.

"Wherever you want."

"Alright, then..." The armorer got up, and looked critically at the shelves of memorabilia. "How about...this!" She held a cylinder, about the size of a can of deodorizer. "Is it some kind of grenade?"

"In a way? It's a vest pocket nuke."

Seria's look was priceless as she almost dropped the cylinder by reflex, and then scrambled to grab it before it hit the floor.

"W-W-Wha-" Stammered the armorer as she stared at the cylinder she shakily held in her hands, like it was about to reach out and bite her.

Sarah couldn't help it, she started laughing out loud, before coughing and hiding a smile behind her mug as the armorer threw an accusatory glare her way.

"It's disarmed, relax. Right now it's nothing more than some inactive containment fields and some nasty gravity generators. The capacitors aren't even charged." Sarah shook her head. "Wasn't that way when we found it of course. We were protecting some High Verge big wig corpo executive trying to make a deal with some shady Near Verge individuals. Someone apparently didn't find the deal to their liking and tried to sneak this into the building. We caught them, obviously, but they had a backup plan, and well...it wasn't pretty. They might not have had a lot of ships, but High Verge tech is still a threat to us. Much more than the Dominion's Low Verge crap anyway."

"Right." Seria carefully set the cylinder back down. "So you kept it to remember that job?"

"Pretty much, yeah. There's all sorts of things in there. Guns, laser rifles, some kind of radiation grenade, I even have some sort of weird plasma sword. Six decades as a merc and you start accumulating a lot of strange stuff." Sarah shrugged. "Who knows, they might come in useful someday."

Seria gave the pocket nuke a worried glance. These weapons were, after all, tailor made for suicide bombers.

"Stars, I hope not."

"Neither do I. Now, I heard you finally got to see the battle laser! What do you think?"

"That its an abomination?"

Sarah chuckled.

"And after that?"

"Its...fascinating really. The engineering team somehow mixed-"

Sarah leaned back into her seat. She could take a few minutes to listen to the armorer rant about the marvel of her ship. And if it allowed her to avoid staring at the hologram of that damned hellworld, wondering what else the TRF had in store for them, then so much the better!