1115 hours, June 26th, 2673; the Skate

The light show from the two engaging fleets was enough to bring Murphy out onto the hull of the Skate. He could not see much, but the explosions were visible, even if he could not see the results of each exchange. The show was mostly between two groups of lights moving toward each other, with bright explosions in between them. He knew his fellow sailors were dying, and it brought back memories from the war and the friends and comrades he had lost.

Several stars were still moving toward the boat—at least, that was what he thought. They had not moved much in their positions relative to the sun, but they had spread out more. He could see twelve stars now without the aid of binoculars, and he could only assume they were small craft, fighters, or shuttles. Well, we can’t do anything to stop them, even if they are NTF forces.

He could still warn the Clearwater fleet, if it was the fleet out there. After discussions with Lieutenant Sinkovich, they had worked out a plan. They still had the third message beacon. They could not fire it because of the tumbling of the boat, but it was still fully functional inside its tube. Sinkovich had worked with some of the underutilized enlisted personnel and had opened the hull hatch for the message beacon’s tube, exposing about a third of it outside the hull of the boat.

Murphy spent the time doing what commanding officers did best; he supervised. He waited and he watched as he stood guard. He probably should have done his waiting inside, but he was doing something, even if it was the job best done by one of his subordinates. It did relieve Lieutenant Sinkovich from having to supervise, and she was in the thick of things. She helped the enlisted crew members pull the rocket free, and she had gone after the service panel with the tools herself.

“We have it open, sir.”

“Power it on, and let’s see what we have, Lieutenant.” There was a chance that the message beacon had been damaged by the power surge that had knocked out the batteries on the boat. Sinkovich’s hands reached into the service panel, and she turned the master key from Remote to Standby and further to On. The small twenty-centimetre screen flashed on, and text started to scroll across the surface as the computer ran through its Power-On Self-Test.

“POST complete, sir. The beacon is empty.”

Murphy cursed. He was hoping the data they had been streaming to it from the main computer was still intact, but it looked like the storage had been wiped, and they had no way to load it, with the main computer not powered by the secondary power bus.

“Very well, Lieutenant. Activate the transmitter test program.”

The message beacons were designed to be deployed from a planet as well as from onboard a space-going vessel. The designers had built in a fair amount of self-tests to help with maintenance. One of those tests was to test the transmitter to make sure it was tuned and ready.

Lieutenant Sinkovich worked with the small keyboard inside the service hatch. The buttons were not well placed, and she could not let her fingers work over them by instinct. Instead, she had to look and press each one individually and carefully. The gloves she wore robbed her of touch, and they were much bigger than the small keys.

“Why did they design this thing with a QWERTY keyboard?” she complained to herself under her breath.

“Because they knew you specifically, Lieutenant, would hate it,” Murphy commented. Surprised, the signals officer could not keep back her laugh at the joke from her commanding officer.

“I’ll have a word with the designers later, sir. I have the transmitter test active. It has random characters in it right now, but I do have the option to change them. We have only half a K in this test.”

“We’ll have to be brief then. Let’s get started.”

* * *

1130 hours, June 26th, 2673: the flag bridge of the TRFS Glasgow

Anna was doing her best to keep track of all the communications going on around the fleet. It was chaos. The pirate fleet had surprised them with that initial volley of anti-fighter missiles and then the second one. There had been so many of them that the Terrace interceptors had been overwhelmed, but they had fought hard, and the space ways were clear of enemy fighters now.

The torpedo boat squadron had launched and initially ran forward at one G, which was 2.5 G relative to the rest of the fleet. That was until they were ordered to their maximum acceleration by the fleet tactical officer to make their torpedo run. The squadron did not prove to be very effective as they let loose their first salvo of thirty-two torpedoes when the pirate fleet launched their interceptor and light anti-ship missiles at the boats. The arsenal ship in the middle of the raider fleet launched another salvo of interceptor missiles at the torpedoes, followed by a second from its seemingly limitless supply of missiles. Each torpedo had around thirty interceptors targeted on them.

The Mark 15 torpedoes’ own defenses were overwhelmed. They were not on a surprise attack, and the enemy fleet knew exactly when they were coming. Any torpedo that could get through the storm of interceptor missiles was easy to pick off with the heavier point defense armaments that the pirate fleet mounted.

The torpedo boats ran back to the protection of the Clearwater fleet, losing a quarter of the squadron as they dodged and defended against the missiles targeted at them.

“What the hell is Robertson doing?” the admiral demanded of her tactical officer.

“I don’t know, Admiral. Standard torpedo boat doctrine says for them to try to flank the fleet where it isn’t as heavily defended and to only run in when they’re detected, not make a frontal mass assault. Whatever they have in the centre of the fleet is knocking back the effectiveness of our missiles.”

“I know that. We need to take it out.”

After the torpedo boats started to run back to the protection of the fleet, the raiders performed their own rollover and started to decelerate in a manoeuver to pull them away from the fleet. They had only been accelerating at one G till they made their first attacks on the fleet. The Clearwater fleet was constantly decelerating at 1.5 G to bring their velocity down to zero relative to the asteroid belt. Now the pirates had turned tail and were pushing their engines to 1.5 G to ensure that the two fleets would not come into effective gun range.

So far the exchange had not gone well for the admiral’s first battle. She had lost two of her frigates, and had claimed at most a handful of the pirates’ light system defense craft. The Terrace missiles were more effective than the pirates’, but the sheer bulk of the interceptor missiles made it almost impossible for the Terrace ship killers to get close to a worthy prize.

They had full sightings on the pirate ships now; they were all converted merchant ships or system defense craft, so they would not have much in the way of armour to hold off the heavy anti-ship rail guns that the gunship squadron carried. If she could get one of her gunships within range, it would tear the entire fleet apart, and she had twelve of them under Commodore Brown’s command. She debated constantly if she should give the commodore free rein to destroy the opposing fleet.

An incoming message light started to flash on Anna’s console. A message beacon was reporting to the fleet, but there should not have been any. She brought the message up on the screen and was shocked to find it was only text, no data or voice. She shouted for joy when she saw the first line and the routing instructions.

FROM: TBC-473

PRIATE FLEET IS A DECOY. NTF HAS CLOAKED INVASION FLEET, NEAR 473. 473 WS BREAKING FROM NTF WHEN FRIGATE DESTROYED GENERATOR. MAIN COMPTUER POWERED DOWN INTEL PROBABLY LOST. NTF HAS WORLD DESTORYER, AT LEAST 1 REGIMENT OF TROUPS, WATCH FOR THEM TO SNEAK BEHIND CF TO INVADE CLEARWATER WHILE CF IS DISTRACTED. 473 TUMBLING UNKNOWN ORIENTATION OF NTF FLEET, BUT COUNTER-ORBIT OF RAIDER FLEET

CREW CASUALTIES 10 DEAD 4 WONDED. REQUEST RESCUE.

- MURPHY

“What is it, Lieutenant?” White asked Anna from her console.

“TBC-four-seventy-three is alive, and they’re sending messages to us,” she said simply. “I need to forward this to the admiral.”

The admiral was debating whether to roll the fleet and pursue the pirates now that they had started to run. Perhaps they were low on interceptor missiles, and even that one ship in the middle had been rationing her interceptor missiles for the past few minutes. The incoming message light started to flash on her console, and she hit the Receive button automatically. She cursed loudly as she read it and looked at the large tactical display before her.

If she pressed on to eliminate the raiders, she would leave Clearwater open to be invaded. If the message was true, then she had a bigger threat coming up behind her. She looked at it and realized she did not have much choice.

“Order the fleet to withdraw; we have to cover the egress point to Clearwater. All ships to their maximum acceleration.”

The orders went out, and a call came from Commodore Brown. She knew she had to take it but delayed accepting it.

“What’s going on, Admiral? Why are we retreating?”

“TBC-four-seventy-three got a message to us. There’s potentially a cloaked NTF fleet trying to slip behind us to get to Clearwater. We can’t risk losing the system.”

“But your orders are going to have the fleet strung out in a long line. Our light ships will get there well before our capital ships.”

“I know, but we need to block the egress point. We have no choice, Commodore. TBC-four-seventy-three reports a world destroyer.”

Now it was Brown’s turn to curse. He did not get through his long list of curses before he was interrupted.

“Large amounts of sensor contacts, counter orbit of us. Missiles inbound!”

“Commodore, we don’t have time to argue,” she said and cut the link between the two ships.

“Space fighter control, order the launch of the rest of our interceptors. Get them covering that side.” The missile plots were calculated; they would intercept the fleet in fifteen minutes.

The distances between the fleets were vast, but the Clearwater fleet was now between two groups of enemies. The majority of the fighters and point defense vessels were at the front of the fleet, to hold off the raiders. Now Admiral Hirlay ordered her reserve fighters to cover the rear. They would not get into position in time, and that left the rear flank mostly unguarded.

The capital ships still had heavy shields, and heavy point defense armaments of their own. Their defense software was up-to-date, and they had missiles that had been updated and replaced since the war. The incoming missiles were obsolete, and most of them were defeated, but those that were left kept coming, and for the first time in her navy career, the admiral knew what it was like to face a barrage of missiles with no clear sign of superiority. She could only watch helplessly as the missiles kept coming. The distance between the intercepted missiles and the Glasgow was steadily decreasing. She could only watch the interception range drop down, like a countdown, till it reached zero.

An explosion tore through the flag bridge, sending shrapnel through all the exposed personnel. Admiral Hirlay’s last thoughts were of her family back home, who had convinced her that command of the Clearwater fleet would be good for her career and good for their position.

The emergency lighting on the bridge turned on as the power was cut, showing the devastation of what had happened. None of the command staff around the tactical chart were alive. Those in the cordoned-off areas were safe. The command ship had taken a hit that damaged all the fleet control antennas, and there was no feeling of gravity. The ship was drifting in space.

The ship continued to rock and quake as more anti-ship missiles hit it. The large ship shuddered at each hit to its armour. The bridge and CIC were likewise hit, killing the officers who commanded the vessel and leaving the ship without direction. The orders had been given to the fleet, and it was still breaking up, trying to maintain the last orders of the dead admiral.

Anna and her two signals officers were intact and unhurt. The door between them and the rest of the flag bridge had protected them. Anna took a few moments to realize that the pounding on the hull had stopped.

“We’re drifting,” she said and unstrapped herself from her seat. The other two occupants of the compartment also unstrapped themselves, and the three examined the door. Strangely the inward opening door was not hard to open.

“Oh my—” White’s voice trailed off as she looked at the destruction. There were globules of blood floating and spinning above the bodies. Smoke was flowing from one of the power connectors.

Anna looked around in an almost detached way. She had seen combat before, and she was running on adrenalin. Something was wrong, but she could not put her finger on it. She looked around the compartment.

“There are no holes…,” she said.

“There’s plenty of holes, Anna,” White said.

“I don’t mean in the equipment, Lieutenant,” she said firmly with a touch more formality. “I mean in the walls and the hull.” She had never seen destruction on a ship like this. Bodies in pieces, blood forming globules in the air, smoke clouding the vision. Every other time she had seen a scene like this, it was stark and clear, which meant…

She reached up and opened her visor.

“LT, don’t!” White rushed over to stop Anna.

“There’s atmosphere here. We didn’t get hit by anything that holed the hull,” she said and then almost vomited. Even though she was floating, she bent over at the waist and got her nausea under control before she pulled the visor of her helmet back into place. That was stupid, Ms. Li, she thought to herself.

The door to the sensor compartment opened, and the three signals officers turned around, glad that they were not the only ones alive. Anna sighed to herself. She was the senior officer here. The men manning the sensor compartments were junior lieutenants and enlisted personnel.

“You lot stay here,” she ordered. “Lieutenant White, see if you can get power working at the compartments again, and get communications and fleet sensors working. I’m going to see if I can get to the bridge.” She walked over to the hatch out of the flag bridge before they could make any objections and left.