Hornraiser’s Confederacy

SanxingC Star System

TNS Swiftsure

Commander Daniel Clark looked up from the book he had just opened as the admittance chime on his office door sounded. He sighed, he should have known better than to expect his free time to stay free.

He brought up the security camera feed and saw Harrington standing there, data pad tablet under an arm.

“Enter!” He called and the hatch slid open for his executive officer. Clark motioned to one of the seats across the desk from him. “Jessica, may I ask what brings you to my office just as I was about to start a new book?”

“More work.” She said dryly as she sat down. “Anyways, as your XO, it’s my sworn duty to make sure you don’t burn through your book collection too fast.”

Clark gave a small snort of laughter. “Thank you Jessica for your valiant sacrifice, but unless there’s a Novu War Fleet out there, I doubt the sacrifice was necessary.” He sat back, crossing his arms. “So what exact work did you bring me?”

She laid the tablet on his desk and pushed it over to him. “Some discipline issues.”

He picked up the pad and thumbed it on, beginning to read the reports. “Any of these in particular I should be reading?”

“The most recent one is the one I wanted to bring your attention to.” Harrington reached over and swiped the reports away until it was on one dated from yesterday.

Clark looked up at Jessica. “Lieutenant Sharpe? What is he up to?”

“Is ‘being a bastard’ too crude a description Sir?”

He arched a silent eyebrow at her and she pinched the bridge of her nose.

“A few days ago, Master Chief Summers came to me. She said she was hearing rumors of plans to find Sharpe in a dark passage and beat the living hell out of him. I of course asked why, given that such things are illegal and a great way to end up in the brig.” Harrington said. “She said he was being a petty tyrant to the enlisted, both on and off shift. I, at first, tried to corroborate what she said by watching him, but he was always proper as pie when I was around. I finally caught some of his actions during his bridge watch yesterday. I told Sharpe I was going down to engineering to check up on the inspections they were having down there.”

Clark was frowning at the tablet, reading the report. “You saw through the bridge’s cameras to see him trying to bully Ensign June into doing an active sensor sweep for him. She refused, rightfully so.”

The Swiftsure was currently running on silent, having deployed a few sensor probes in the star system, watching for any signs of activity from Novu Sol. An active sweep would be disastrous for their stealth.

“So,” Harrington concluded. “I read him the riot act. Still I don’t know if I’d let him lead even the slowest shift again until he shapes up.”

“I’ll look into straightening him out. Who else is on this roster of yours?” He had begun to thumb back through the reports when a sudden alert popped up on his terminal, a call from the bridge.

“This is Clark, speak.”

“Sir, please come to the bridge...” It was Ensign June, she sounded unsure, “A Novu Sol battlecruiser just came out of hyper and is heading towards the transition point for the Trade Route.”

“Why do you sound like you don’t understand it then Ensign?” He asked.

“It's showing up as friendly. Not neutral.”

Clark looked over at Harrington in surprise. “I’ll be up in a moment Ensign, do not do anything unless the ship is in danger.”

“Yes Commander.”

As soon he closed the com link to the bridge Harrington let out a breath she’d been holding. “The Admiral? What is she doing here?”

“I don’t know.” He quickly and efficiently slotted the tablets into the desk, put the book away on his bookshelf to keep it safe and paused to look at his XO. “The IO has had no bead on her at all this last year and even with her wealth there’s no way someone wouldn’t blab about the short quiet blonde women hanging around their world. Novu Sol had made her infamous, there isn’t a planet out there that hasn’t heard about her so how could she have been hiding here?”

“Well whatever she was doing, let's go see what she’s up to now.”

As Daniel strode onto the bridge to the relief of Ensign June he quickly sat down in his command chair she left and began to pull up more information on his screens.

"Talk to me."

"Sir, the Ionosphere appeared in the system about two minutes ago on the opposite side of the star system." The rating that had been manning the tactical sensors while June ran the watch said. "The ship isn't broadcasting any ID and came at a time when traffic is supposed to be very slow."

So The Admiral was banking less on her scaring people than she was leaning on Novu Sol's reputation and fewer eyes to call her out.

"Any sign of other activity?" Clark asked.

"No Sir. The last ship we saw was a passenger liner coming through the Trade Route and almost immediately reenter hyper. If there are others here, they are staying extremely quiet." June still sounded nervous. "Should I call up Lieutenant Whitmore?"

"No, you have this under control." Clark assured her. "We are here to watch, not fight."

And so they watched as the Ionosphere trekked across the star system in silence. It shouldn't have been a nerve-wracking experience but for some reason Clark couldn't pin down, as The Admiral's ship crawled ever closer to the entrance of the Trade Route, he felt restless and uneasy. He had told his crews to notify him if they saw Novu Sol ships and all the time they had been here they had seen nothing except freighters and the occasional messenger ship.

It seemed that The Admiral must be as paranoid as he was nervous, as Ionosphere began to bring up her shields and the ship began to twist to present the best weapons profile towards the Trade Route 'entrance'. He itched to order an active pulse in the area but that would give away his ship and he knew Captain Emmet would skin him alive if he did that unnecessarily.

The Ionosphere was just about to leave the gravity well of SanxingC when a bunch of contacts lit up. They had been lying in wait just beyond the gravity well, the Trade Route ‘exit/entrance’ area was large enough that even the presence of four battlecruisers and four light cruisers had been easy for incoming traffic to miss. They must have been there a while as when Swiftsure had crept in there had been no sign at all that they had arrived, not a ghost or stray energy signature to be seen.

So they had a ringside seat to the circus. The Ionosphere braked hard, shields flaring up to full strength as the Atmosphere-class battlecruiser lashed out with a spread of missiles at the battlecruiser closest to her. The Novu vessel easily knocked them down with the help of the light cruisers and began to crowd in on the Ionosphere. Then from below and behind The Admiral’s ship, two more battlecruisers, two cruisers and three destroyers lit up as well. They were much farther behind the lone battlecruiser they were there to take down but now Ionosphere was fairly effectively trapped. The Admiral would have to pass in range of the guns of at least one of the groups in order to make a beeline for a clear space for her to go into hyper. If she heavily engaged either group, the other would come blazing in to support them and if she tried to just blast through that meant taking serious damage at the expense of escaping.

As Clark studied the battle, missiles blazing out to shroud the Ionosphere in a halo of nuclear fire, he couldn’t help but notice something. It wasn’t a perfect trap, no trap really could be with humans involved, but there was a way out, by angling straight up away from the ecliptic of the star system and pulling some very stressful Gs, The Admiral could pull out and still make it to the Trade Route with the battlecruisers dogging at her heels. The Admiral could do it, she was brilliant like that but something was missing. The battlecruisers being here en masse to kill The Admiral was almost expected and as he watched he saw Ionosphere take a hard missile hit to her port side as she twisted the ship around impossibly fast to point into that narrow opening he’d identified he wondered.

“Ensign…” Clark said slowly. “How many cruisers and destroyers are we missing?”

June was startled by the question, but quickly began to pull up data and after a minute she said, “Around ten destroyers and four other cruisers, including the TriStar ships that were with them when they came out here.” She hesitated. “And the battleship Sir.”

Clark’s voice was stone as he watched the Ionosphere accelerating hard towards the Trade Route. “It's not missing Ensign.”

Before she had a chance to ask, a bright flare of light and energy washed over the sensors to the startled yelp of the young officer.

The battleship Liberty had just burst out of hyper so close to the redline of the gravity well the ship’s hull was actually glowing visually from the energy still clinging stubbornly to it's armor. A dangerous move and one that was going to cost the battleship in the future but might pay dividends now. Ionosphere had been charging right into Liberty’s grasp and with the battlecruisers arrayed how they were, trying to turn and run away meant exposing the vulnerable engines to the firepower of a battleship which would shred the battlecruiser given a few shots on a bad day.

The Admiral didn’t even seem to flinch and for a moment Clark wondered if the person who had taught his navy how to fight was going to lose and he was going to witness her destruction. As the battleship opened up with a massive twenty missile salvo and energy beams began to find their marks he waited. The initial few energy beams that connected seemed to be deflected by the shield, that was good but what was The Admiral going to do?

He got his answer and he actually recoiled from the feed in shock as Ionosphere charged at Liberty, full tilt, engines blazing away to ramp her speed up to suicidal levels as she ran straight at the bulking behemoth of death right in her path.

No one had really been expecting that. The Admiral was brilliant, calm, and never where she shouldn’t be in a fight. She’d been shown to engage in risky maneuvers from time to time but this was so far outside her profile it seemed ludicrous. Was she sick? Or really this desperate? Clark was sure The Admiral was never desperate, but she never had faced down a battleship.

It seemed to mess up Liberty as well as the battleship began to scramble to present her broadside to the oncoming ship, better to take a direct ship-to-ship hit on the side where the armor was thickest and less likely to be jammed back into waiting warheads and energy weapons for firing forward. Liberty then opened up with a large barrage, seven missiles blazing out of missile launchers on her sacrificial side, shields beginning to glow stronger as the massive battleship shifted all power it had to spare to brace for the impact to come.

The Ionosphere ignored all of this, the missile defense reaching out almost as an afterthought to swat down the large missiles aimed at killing her. The site was impressive, watching the missiles explode around the rogue ship as it charged.

“What the!” someone cried.

Static sparkled across the feed as the sensors were temporarily overloaded, Clark rubbed his eyes before he hit a command on his console to replay what had just happened.

The Ionosphere had been a mere second from impact with Liberty before the engines had shifted from blue to.... Purple? Purple wasn’t a color engines were supposed to turn. Blue for normal space, red for hyper, maybe if your eyes played some tricks on you it would see a bit of purple as the engines switched modes. This wasn’t the case, the engines had a clear glowing purple color to their light; the static and energy that had blinded the sensors became clear as space twisted in a way that made his eyes faintly dance away, like he was looking at something intrinsically wrong and then, just like that, Ionosphere and The Admiral were gone.

Not without a bang apparently.

Whatever that transition to hyper had been, it had been inside the redline gravity limit of the star, Ionosphere should not have been able to make that jump without vaporizing the entire ship yet no dust cloud of the battlecruiser’s remains could be seen. Just Liberty, reeling in a strange tumble towards the Trade Route transition point, it's shield gone, engines off, weapons and sensors either dead or off and a giant gouge carved out the side it had turned to face the Ionosphere.

Clark watched, mute with both admiration and horror as the battlecruisers began to chase down their injured battleship. The cruisers and destroyers raced past the battleship to surround it in a delicate shell of protection as the battlecruisers latched on with tractors to slow the tumble and momentum imparted by the massive hit it had taken.

He looked down as a small communication window opened on one of his screens and Harrington looked out at him, her face was pale, eyes wide and he wondered if his own face looked as shocked as she was.

“We need to go.” She whispered, there was no need to do so, but maybe that was all she could muster. After all it wasn’t that they didn’t like seeing Novu Sol taken down a peg, it was that somehow, Ionosphere had managed to pull off something entirely new right in front of their eyes that managed to disable an entire battleship. What if one of the destroyers or cruisers had been in The Admiral’s way? Would it too have just been knocked around and damaged? Or would it have been vaporized completely? Was this a new weapon The Admiral had managed to buy or just something done out of desperation that had just happened to have a welcome effect of nearly killing a battleship? The sheer impossibility, the wrongness of it, stuck a cord in all of them.

Commander Daniel Clark nodded. “Helm.” He said, “I want you to start us out system, slowly, carefully.” He looked down to the frozen image of the twisted space of Ionosphere’s transition to hyper and then to the live feed of Liberty being slowed down by her battlecruiser companions. “We need to tell Emmet about this.”