The Battle of the Corridor, Part One - The Hunt for Red October

December 488 I.C., Odin

Mittermeyer’s outpost, a shipbuilding facility, was in a starsystem that even the most astute students of Imperial geography probably couldn’t pinpoint on a map. Though the system was on a major trading route within the Empire, it was barely populated— fewer than fifty thousand people lived in the bases scattered throughout the system, and more than ten thousand of those were under Mittermeyer’s command. Once, this star had supported rocky, terrestrial planets— some of which might have even been suitable for life— but the actions of some rogue object flying through the system had torn them apart eons ago. At least, that was what Mittermeyer had been told about the scattered asteroid field that surrounded the star, which was picked through for bountiful exposed ore of many different varieties. The bulk of the mining was done with great machines of Phezzani design. Mittermeyer could sometimes see them, on the scopes, departing or returning to the processing bases off in the distance. His outpost had little to do with that industry, aside from making use of the refined metals produced.

If Mittermeyer had cared at all about engineering, he might have been proud to be in charge of his docks. While this was not the largest shipbuilding port in the Empire (it was the fourth largest), it was by far the most technically advanced, and was focused on producing the first round of ships for each class, and some ships that would be the sole members of their class. The vessels that left here were the finest that the Empire could produce.

The docks stretched out in great spokes from a central asteroid, and each line of ships went so far that the individual details of the vessels were indistinguishable. The facility could comfortably berth about two thousand ships— an entire small fleet, if it was needed to bring that many in for a complete overhaul— but right now the docks held about three quarters of that. Of those, five hundred were ships already in service that were undergoing minor refit work— paused due to the civil war. The remaining thousand were new construction in varying stages. Perhaps a quarter of those were completely finished and either undergoing testing or ready to be shipped out— delivery was another thing that had been paused. The rest were still fully under construction, and ranged from being nothing but the empty skeletal frames of the ships, to having their internal wiring and computers installed, to simply waiting on furniture to be delivered. Most of the work had ground to a standstill since the Kaiser’s death— Mittermeyer kept the production running as long as he could, but there was a limit to what could be accomplished without a constant delivery of material. So the majority of the ships sat quiescent in the docks, waiting out the end of the civil war.

The proudest pair of these ships were the new experimental designs, still nameless, which were fully operational, and— before the outbreak of madness— had been sitting in port as beautiful showpieces, waiting for a chance to demonstrate their operational capacities to the fleet admirals and the Kaiser, so that entire production runs of their classes could be started up. As display pieces, they were painted extraordinary colors, and if it weren’t for their visible gunports, they could be mistaken for a noble’s oversized pleasure vessels to an untrained eye.

Although Mittermeyer would have said he had no interest in the workings of these ships, and (before the civil war) would sigh heavily at the technical and administrative work it would take to transition these experimental builds into a program of record, he couldn’t deny that the pair of ships was a sight to behold. They sat next to each other in the very first docking spaces outside the station, so that they could be seen from the observational windows. They glowed under the station’s lights. When he had arrived to take command of the base, the first had already been painted a gleaming white, but he had been given a chance to pick the color of the second. He was tempted to pair white with black, but since these were meant to be seen against the darkness of space, he chose an incredible crimson.

Although the colors of the ships gave them an air of excitement that the standard classes of battleships in the Imperial fleet lacked, even if they had been the same gunmetal grey as all the rest, they still would have appeared sleek and new. Spacefaring vessels had little need for aerodynamics, but still the hulls of these two ships curved gracefully, like ancient boats, or the wings of birds. The two ships were, quite possibly, the fastest ships in the Imperial fleet— though the red one was faster by a fraction.

Mittermeyer leaned against the railing of the observation deck, looked past his reflection in the huge windows, and thought about how he was about to steal them.

The trouble was this: Mittermeyer needed to urgently get to the other side of Iserlohn Fortress.His wife had told him this in code in her most recent letter— it spoke plainly about the last time he had been in battle, and where he had met Yang after that. Reuenthal or Lieutenant Kircheis must have told her what to write.

Receiving that letter from his wife, even if she hadn’t known exactly what she had been talking about, stirred up a terrible feeling of guilt. His reunion with Yang, and later Reuenthal, at Cahokia and Iserlohn had been a blissful dream for Mittermeyer. One in which he had kept his wife firmly from his mind.

The anticipation of going to help Yang now had somehow broken through Mittermeyer’s malaise of indecision. He penned a reply letter to Eva without stopping to think about what he was writing in it. He made two promises: to help Yang, and to tell her the truth. Saying that he would do something led him to believe that it was all possible, that he would do it, no matter what it took.

Of course, it was an insane proposition to get to the other side of Iserlohn. The rebels, with thousands and thousands of ships, had never managed it, no matter how many times they tried. And while Mittermeyer might have a tiny fleet’s worth of ships, he did not have loyal crew to run them. He was sure that he had been given this position solely because Fleet Admiral Muckenburger considered it harmless— even if every man on the base was loyal to him, he wouldn’t have crew enough to staff the empty ships in port.

The subordinates he trusted had already gone throughout the base and selected people who might be suitable crews. He had been assured that they could staff two ships, at least— though they would be as understaffed as a ship could get.

No one was going to stop Mittermeyer from leaving— while most of the crew of the station weren’t loyal to him personally, he doubted that any of them cared enough about the outcome of the civil war to stage any kind of real resistance. Even still, Mittermeyer’s plans had the pretext of taking the two ships out for routine testing. Since construction had been paused on most things, testing had become the only work of the day for weeks. Most people in the station knew it was approaching make-work, but they didn’t complain much.

Lights flickered in the little docking tunnels that connected the two ships to the station: people loading supplies. This wasn’t even covert.

Mittermeyer wasn’t taking much with him. The clothes on his back, and anything he could carry in a day bag was all. He checked the time again. They would leave in less than five hours.

The only decision that remained to be made was a simple one: which ship would he travel on? The red ship was faster, but the white ship was better armored. He gravitated towards the faster ship, but after thinking it over, he rejected it. He was moving on Yang’s plan, and Yang would tell him to take the safer ship.

He could picture exactly what Yang would say: “The thing about relying on speed is that if you slow down for even a second, you’ve lost your advantage.”

“Then I won’t slow down,” he might say as a rejoinder.

But Yang would sigh and look at him with concern— and so Mittermeyer chose the white ship.

He stood at the window and looked at the pair for a while more— it was the last he would see of the outside of the white one until he was back in port— and then straightened his back and marched away.

Since Mittermeyer thought that there was absolutely no chance of getting through the Iserlohn corridor alive, this left only one route as an option. Phezzan, and sneaking around through the Alliance the long way, would have to do. Although there were many problems with this plan, as they grew closer to the entrance to the Phezzan corridor, the most pressing of them was that they did not have navigation information to get through.

Phezzan made all ships passing through the corridor pay to receive up-to-date routes, and even if the Imperial government had some way of obtaining these, it was a secret that was not casually shared with the guidance computers of Mittermeyer’s stolen ships.

He kept turning the question over in his head on their journey. Ideally, he would contact Yang’s spy on Phezzan, and hope that he would be able to provide a route to Mittermeyer without being detected by the Alliance.

If the whole plan had been thought out ahead of time, this might have worked. If Yang had been the one coordinating it, if he had left real instructions with his spy, and a secret way that they could communicate. But he hadn’t. There was no way for Mittermeyer to contact the spy alone, no way to know that the spy was actually loyal, and no way to keep their communications secret. So, even if that was the option he would have preferred in a perfect universe, he rejected it.

That left a waiting game. Merchant ships contacted Phezzan and received their routes. If Mittermeyer lay in wait for a merchant ship, or a ship full of refugees headed for Phezzan (and eventually the Alliance), he could then either capture and board the ship, and use it to travel freely through the corridor, or he would follow it in.

Since this was the only real option, when they reached the mouth of the Phezzan corridor, they stationed themselves outside of it, and waited. They swept the area with their active radar, hoping to catch any unlucky vessel that might stray into their net. But although they sat there for nearly a week none came.

Perhaps it was just bad luck, or bad timing. As the civil war dragged on, merchant traffic through the corridor probably had grown less and less frequent. Who knew how long he might have to wait for a ship to wander through.

And a grim thought crossed Mittermeyer’s mind as he grew more and more impatient: there was no guarantee that he would even see any ship that passed. Military hardware, especially that on his advanced ships, was very good, but detecting a single ship in space, unless it was broadcasting wildly (which no sane ship would be doing now), was like finding a needle in a haystack. The idea that he had been sitting and letting time and opportunity slip through his fingers made him anxious and jumpy. He wanted to get moving, and he went over his options again and again, trying to find some way to get through the corridor unnoticed.

As he could see it, there was only one thing that remained for him to do. He didn’t like it, though it felt like what Yang would do, which made Mittermeyer linger over it, and come back to it— and even think about it in the first place.

Mittermeyer had brought two ships with him— two of the finest ships in the Imperial fleet. Even one of them would be a prize, something that a defector might be quite happy to steal to turn over to the Alliance, in exchange for safety, or a position, or any kind of reward on the opposite side of the galaxy. It was the kind of defection that a low-ranked officer might try, in an attempt to get ahead in life— even if it was ahead in a foreign country. If Mittermeyer had the crew of the red ship pretend to defect, send a message to Phezzan asking for a route through to the Alliance, they would surely say yes to that. It was their policy, to let people through. And in a time of turmoil in the Empire, they were hardly likely to think that it was a trap.

So, one ship would go ahead, follow the given route through the corridor, and be met with some Alliance ships waiting to pick them up. The other ship would follow at a safe distance, using the same route, and would therefore be able to safely sneak into Alliance territory unnoticed.

Mittermeyer brought the captain of the red ship over and discussed the plan with him. Captain Cauer was an older man and, like Mittermeyer, trained as an engineer. He had been working in the shipyards his entire career, and, unlike Mittermeyer, loved it. Mittermeyer had asked him to come in the first place because he knew the two experimental ships better than most others— he had been intimately involved in their construction and testing. It didn’t hurt that they had gotten along well, though Mittermeyer suspected that half the reason Cauer had agreed to come was to make sure nothing happened to his precious ships.

He saluted Mittermeyer when he came in, then went pale as a sheet when Mittermeyer described what he wanted him to do.

“Give her up to the rebels?” he asked. “They’ll take her apart, sir.”

“If you judge it’s safe, you can make a break for it, back through the corridor. You’re fast enough that I don’t think they’d be able to catch you.”

“If they even send three ships to pick us up, they’d be able to shoot us down before we got out of range. There’s only so much concentrated fire the shields can take. I don’t think it’s feasible to say we’ll be able to run away.”

“Well, if you do see the chance, please take it. I’m not exactly thrilled to be delivering the rebels the best we have. But I don’t have much other choice. We can’t keep waiting around here— I need to get to the other side of Iserlohn.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you think you can do this, Captain Cauer?” Mittermeyer asked. He leaned forward, elbows on his desk, and stared at the man’s watery blue eyes. “You can refuse— I can send someone else.”

“I’ll do it, sir,” he said, though it was with an air of resignation. “I should scuttle her, once you’re through.”

“No point in that,” Mittermeyer said. “It would be a shame to destroy a ship like that. If you can’t get away— take the rewards the rebels give you. When all this is over, come back through Phezzan. I’ll vouch for you, and any of your men.”

“You presume a lot, sir.”

“That I’ll be alive, after all of this?”

“I’ve never been in real battle, sir— I’ve been very lucky working where I have. I don’t know if I could believe that I’ll come out of anything safely. At least not enough to make promises that I intend to keep.” Unspoken was the shared knowledge that no one had fought Iserlohn Fortress and won yet.

“I hope my intent to keep it is enough for you,” Mittermeyer said. “It’s unfortunately all I have to give.”

“It is.”

Mittermeyer nodded. “I’m sorry to have taken you from a post you enjoy.”

“Most people do not have the luxury of choosing their posts.” He smiled for the first time. “You didn’t— I should point out that you’re glad to be out in the universe, instead of safe at a desk job.”

Mittermeyer smiled ruefully. “I hoped it wasn’t so obvious.”

“I’m afraid you are a fairly direct man, sir. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s not hard to see.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“May I request that you try not to destroy this ship too, sir?”

Mittermeyer laughed. “I’ll certainly do my best.”

“Out of curiosity— if you do win, what will you do with her?” Cauer asked.

“Well—” Mittermeyer hadn’t thought that far in the future. “If we win, it might be nice for the Kaiserin to reward the conqueror of Iserlohn with a flagship. Commodore von Leigh— the one who wrote this plan— has never had a ship of his own.”

“You won’t try to keep her, sir?”

“Oh, no,” Mittermeyer said. “I don’t think I’d like a flagship that stands out too much. And besides, Duke Braunschweig personally dislikes me— there wouldn’t be any hope of me getting her, even if I begged, which I have no interest in doing.”

“Why in Odin’s name are you working for him then, sir?”

“I— well— it’s a long story, Captain. I’m not really doing it for him.”

“I see.”

“I see I’m not making a very compelling case for why you should give your life’s work over to the rebels for me,” Mittermeyer said.

“No, I understand,” Cauer replied. “I’ll do it. At the very least, it means that one of the two won’t be shot down, by the Thor Hammer or anything else.”

Mittermeyer and the crew of the white ship waited outside the Phezzan corridor, waiting for the red ship to pass through. Once the route had been transmitted from Phezzan to the red ship, and from there to Mittermeyer, it was a matter of patience. It was not a short journey from one end of the corridor to the other, and Mittermeyer wanted to be very sure that by the time he passed through, all the rebel ships on the other end were long gone. Of course, once the red ship left, there was no communication between them, so Mittermeyer had to hope that they made it safely.

After several days of waiting, they set off. The only difficulty with the route was that it took them very close to Phezzan itself, and Mittermeyer did not want to be detected passing through the starsystem. In the hopes of avoiding being seen, before they entered the starsystem, they dropped to sub-luminal speeds. Then Mittermeyer ordered the ship to accelerate, still sub-light, until they were going as fast as the ship could take. Once at that speed, he ordered power to be cut to the engines, and they drifted through the Phezzani system, hoping that their cool, unused engines would not make them show up on even advanced detectors within the system, and if they did, to look like a passing piece of rock. It was a risky maneuver, but the only one that they had at their disposal.

That was a long and tense trip— it took days of sub-light travel to get out of the system, and the crew’s eyes were fixed on their instruments the whole time, straining to see if they were being lit up by some Phezzani radar, searching them out. Mittermeyer hardly slept, hardly left his command chair. He would only leave the bridge when he felt his eyes slipping involuntarily shut, and he would go spent some fraction of an hour in a tank bed, just until he was awake enough to resume his watch.

At least it was an interesting trip through Phezzan’s starsystem. The planet was constantly broadcasting radio signals of all types out into space. Since Mittermeyer was traveling below light speed, they could pick all this up. Most of it was boring traffic chatter, but a lot of it was news, and Mittermeyer listened during his every waking second.

Phezzan’s economy seemed to be in dire straits from the Empire’s civil war. This shouldn’t have been surprising, considering how they hadn’t seen a single ship pass between Phezzan and the Empire while they were waiting, when in normal times Mittermeyer supposed there were maybe hundreds of ships a day that made the trip. Much of the chatter was in the Alliance language, and Mittermeyer found one of his crew who had studied the tongue enough to tell him what they were talking about.

It seemed that if Phezzan’s economy quivered, the Alliance’s came down like a house of cards. The Alliance merchants coming into the system to do business with Phezzan were complaining to each other about the shockwaves that were tearing their businesses apart.

It was strange to think that the Alliance was somehow intimately tied to the Empire, since it proclaimed its independence as much as at could. It was funny to think that, although the Empire was certainly suffering during the civil war, all its feudal lands, operating independently and with only a tenuous connection to the galactic economy, were continuing life much as they had been before. The Alliance, all its planets deeply tied in with Phezzani accounting, was in a much worse shape.

Phezzan was the bridge between them— and it certainly benefited Phezzan to be that way. He almost wondered if Phezzan was putting the Alliance at a disadvantage deliberately, to stop them from being able to bring all their resources to bear against Iserlohn Fortress while the Empire was weak. After all, if the Alliance was able to take advantage of this situation, Phezzan would lose its role in the galaxy.

Mittermeyer had never known much about the way that trade flowed through the galaxy, and less about the Alliance’s mysterious economy, but he was fascinated to listen to the chatter. It kept the many hours he stayed awake on the bridge interesting. Listening to this news absorbed all of his attention, and most of his restless energy.

He knew this wasn’t the way he should be operating— he should be saving his energy for everything ahead— but he couldn’t tear himself away. The strangeness of the trip invigorated him, and knowing what lay ahead even more so. The idea of fighting side by side with Yang, for the first time, made him twitchy with anticipation. If anyone else had been the one to claim they would conquer Iserlohn, Mittermeyer would have laughed at them, but he had complete trust in Yang— and was anxious to contribute to the victory. It was dangerous to think of victory before he had even arrived at the battlefield, but it was all Mittermeyer could think about

Once out of Phezzan’s starsystem itself, the journey became more perilous. Alliance military ships would not be allowed within the Phezzan corridor, so the exit to the corridor was the first place that they could expect to meet resistance.

Both ends of the corridor had wide mouths, openings light-minutes wide, that made it theoretically possible for a ship to sneak through without being detected. But, of course, the Alliance did not want traffic passing into their borders that they couldn’t control or didn’t know about— Phezzanis were one thing, smugglers were another— so there were detection arrays stationed throughout the wide mouth, and surely ships that were stationed not far away, that would stay around to respond to any intrusion.

Mittermeyer consulted with his crew to see if there was a chance that they could use the same trick they had flown through the Phezzani system with. The answer was no, or at least it seemed too dangerous to attempt. A starsystem like Phezzan had an abundance of natural debris that was tossed around by the star’s gravity, making a chunk of rock about the size of a Mittermeyer’s ship not an unusual thing to detect. Additionally, although Phezzani technology was very good, they had no standing space fleet that they could send out against any ships they detected— it was forbidden by their Imperial charter. So there was less incentive for them to monitor every inch of space. The Alliance, on the other hand, had a detection net that they put to good use.

It seemed likely that they would be caught, passing through. So the only thing that they could do was to try to direct attention away from themselves. As part of the supplies that Mittermeyer had ordered loaded onto the white ship, he had taken the entire base’s store of decoys— both those that had still been stocked on ships that were in base for repair, and those that were used for testing targeting systems on their new built ships. It seemed like they might come in handy, since a single ship traveling alone might want to appear less solitary.

Mittermeyer ordered the decoys to be sent out of the mouth of the corridor with them. It was a false trail of several hundred ghost ships, each spewing in a different direction into the Alliance. The white ship slipped among them, heading on its own course.

It was obvious to anyone looking that the decoys were decoys— they couldn’t move except in a straight line, and could not go to super-luminal speeds. But even so, with one ship among hundreds of ghosts, pretending to be one of them, Mittermeyer hoped that it would take some time for the Alliance to realize exactly which ship was his. Some of the decoys could obviously be disregarded— those that shot off in meaningless directions— and Mittermeyer tried to make it look like his ship was among their number, not heading into the Alliance at all, simply skirting along the edge of navigable territory towards the Iserlohn corridor.

Even with all this deception, Mittermeyer knew they would be found. The only question was when.

It didn’t take long, three days, until their instruments picked up the telltale sign of ships approaching. As soon as they knew that the Alliance was on their tail, Mittermeyer abandoned all subtlety, and instead pushed the ship as fast as it could go. They had a headstart on the trailing Alliance ships, though it was a narrow one. Mittermeyer wished that he was in the red ship instead of the white one, so that they could increase their lead as much as possible, but there was no sense in wasting time on wishing. He just insisted that the white ship be sent to its absolute limit, straining the engines, using any amount of fuel and not caring about saving it in the least.

They ran through the edge of the galaxy’s arm, at every moment wondering when they would encounter ships ahead of them, as well as those chasing behind. The Iserlohn corridor was always full of Alliance ships— Mittermeyer knew that very well from his time on patrol. He could use that to his advantage, too. He knew their usual routes fairly well.

Since it was no longer a game of being undetected, Mittermeyer ran the white ship directly into one of these well traveled routes, joining one of the lanes where the Alliance usually approached Iserlohn, rather than their tracks returning to their own territory. It was a risk— he didn’t want to run headfirst into an Alliance patrol, but he did want to bait one.

After all, now that he was on this side of Iserlohn, he had no way of coordinating with Yang on the other end. He needed some way to signal to Yang that he could proceed with his plan. Getting Iserlohn Fortress to send out their fleet to counteract Alliance activity in the corridor would be about the best signal Mittermeyer could engineer.

As they raced through the corridor, the number of ships behind them swelled. Although the operator manning the detection system was panicked when he gave his news, Mittermeyer was glad. A whole patrol fleet behind them was significantly better than one ahead of them— it was exactly what he had hoped to achieve.

As they grew closer to Iserlohn, he still had a little bit of a lead on the Alliance ships, at least enough of one that he could cash it out in one last move. Mittermeyer redirected his ship off to the side of the corridor, then turned off his engines. Dropping out of faster-than-light travel killed his momentum entirely. He was dead in space, not moving at all. Although it was almost suicidal, losing his positional advantage like that, he needed to in order to contact the fortress. He couldn’t signal them when moving faster than light.

He sent out a distress call, on the same frequencies that he had used when he had been patrolling the corridor. He spoofed his own ship’s identification, using the callsign of a ship that had formerly been in his own patrol fleet, and was still attached to Iserlohn somewhere. There was a greater than even chance that that ship, and whatever fleet it was in now, was out on patrol elsewhere in the corridor. Iserlohn’s security when it came to checking the actual identification of ships’ messages tended to be far too lax— he doubted anyone would notice the signal was falsified.

His false distress message to the fortress indicated that the patrol had run into a full rebel invasion fleet, and had been nearly wiped out, except for his ship, running back towards the fortress to warn them. Mittermeyer ended the message with a last cry for help, then sent out a single remaining decoy ahead of himself.

He hoped that the Alliance ships behind him would continue to chase the single decoy, which looked like it stayed moving sub-light in order to receive messages from Iserlohn itself. His message to the fortress had at least been encrypted so that the Alliance ships couldn’t understand it, and they probably thought he was communicating with Iserlohn about whatever his “real” business in the corridor was.

He hoped that his ship, completely dead in space, not moving, not broadcasting, would be invisible. The singular decoy swapped out for his own ship was a good trick— the Alliance fleet passed by Mittermeyer without noticing him at all.

As soon as they had passed, Mittermeyer engaged his engines again. They were right near the splitting point, where the main trunk of the Iserlohn corridor diverged. One slender arm reached back, in the direction of the Alliance, towards Cahokia. Mittermeyer ran there, as fast as he could go. There would be a fleet waiting for him to take command in that starsystem, while behind him, Iserlohn Fortress sent out her fleet to deal with an Alliance invasion.