The history of sea power is largely, though by no means solely, a narrative of contests between nations, of mutual rivalries, of violence frequently culminating in war. The profound influence of sea commerce upon the wealth and strength of countries was clearly seen long before the true principles which governed its growth and prosperity were detected. To secure to one's own people a disproportionate share of such benefits, every effort was made to exclude others, either by the peaceful legislative methods of monopoly or prohibitory regulations, or, when these failed, by direct violence. The clash of interests, the angry feelings roused by conflicting attempts thus to appropriate the larger share, if not the whole, of the advantages of commerce, and of distant unsettled commercial regions, led to wars. On the other hand, wars arising from other causes have been greatly modified in their conduct and issue by the control of the sea. Therefore the history of sea power, while embracing in its broad sweep all that tends to make a people great upon the sea or by the sea, is largely a military history.

“The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783”.

Alfred Thayer Mahan, Boston, 1893 CE

It is quite academically ironic that Alfred Mahan in his seminal work never actually provided a definition of his term “Sea Power”, and as such has led generations of historians and scholars to construct their own contextual definitions of the enigmatic term. This definition is no less collegiate, but it adheres to a consensus application of current-year presuppositions and realities. Replace “Sea” with “Space” and much of his afore-cited descant rings true. The astrophysical existence of high-efficiency lanes of Light Way travel has created certain routes of travel which, due to the Smithsonian dogma of the unseen hands of commerce and capitalism, have become one of several foci of interstellar development, but also interstellar conflict. No other region since the collapse of the Verge Federation, has been as politically important, diplomatically pivotal, or as military hotly contested as the so-called “Corinthian Corridor”.

“By Sea or by Space: A Retrospective Analysis of Alfred T. Mahan’s Thesis in the Context of the Royal Navy’s Operational Strategies of the Late 29th Century”.

Marquess Alastair Carlisle of Sélincourt, Adm. of the White RN, Persephone, 2875 CE

“She’s making a break for it, Captain, she’s pulling away at nine hundred km/s and climbing!”

Podporucznik Annetta Czachor reported from her operations officer’s station on the bridge of the Nova Polonian Republican Navy Ship Józef Sowiński, and Komandor podporucznik Stefania Hauser cursed under her breath, low enough so her bridge staff wouldn’t hear, but emphatically enough to underscore her anger.

“Fine,” she said as she stood up from her command chair on its small dais, “two can play that game. Mr Klimek, spool up our comms laser array and give the Grover Armitage a final warning. Tell her that we are empowered by the Interstellar Defence Act of Nova Polonia’s constitution and the Genève Convention of the Law of the Stars, to employ up to extreme measures to enforce compliance to Nova Polonian laws and rights in our own stellar territory.”

“Aye aye, Ma’am,” the young signals officer replied before adjusting his headset to relay a variation of what his captain had said in slightly halting English. Kmdr Por. Hauser sat down in her command chair again, her hands balling into fists on the armrests. The NPRNS Józef Sowiński was not a large warship, barely above the weight classification in normal G to be designated a small destroyer, and in the Royal Navy or the Alliance Space Navy it would likely have been called a frigate. Her bridge had a crew of twelve, and the total complement was just over one-eighty officers and enlisted, and while the small man-of-war was practically unarmoured, she did sport a neat little broadside of ten ten-inch railguns, and two torpedo launchers. The Generał class of destroyers were small and cramped, with low “spaceboard” and absolutely terrible operational range, but that was by design since Nova Polonia had no need for warships that could operate outside the Vistula System, the white dwarf gravity well which was host to the world of Nova Polonia herself.

“Ms Czachor,” Hauser said after a short silence while looking at the electronic ghost of the AMS Grover Armitage trying to gain distance from the Polonian warship, “give me an update on the full system-wide tactical situation. What ships are within a light-minute radius, and can you tell me their nationalities, if you please.”

“Aye Ma’am, just give me a few seconds to adjust my scopes.”

By “scopes” the youthful operations officer meant Józef Sowiński’s extremely powerful Auroran STARDAC2 Integrated Sensor Pulse Suite, which could be found on the brand new Royal Navy warships currently being commissioned. The suites were bought as individual stand-alone plug-and-install systems under licence from Aurorans at quite exorbitant prices, much more expensive than the Royal Navy itself paid since they constructed their ship hulls around them. But money was rarely a problem for the Polonians, their geographic location in the middle of the Corinthian Corridor made their system a natural port of call for merchant shipping from both the ISA and the Royal Union.

“Tracking contacts within a sixty light-second envelope, waiting for telemetry now,” Ppor. Czachor reported and settled down for a two minute wait, allowing the gravpulse waves to reach the radius of the bubble and await the signals’ return back again.

Gravpulse wasn’t technically as fast as true FTL, even despite dipping into the Light Way, since it was actually harder for non-physical objects which did not have the ability to increase force of acceleration of their own mass in the relative topsy-turvy that was the Light Way, nor was gravpulse true gravitational waves in a relativistic sense. Therefore the only force gravitic pulses generated was a very miniscule amount of native Lorentz energy, just enough to penetrate “down” into the Light Way sub-dimensional layer, so was limited to a mere 0.99∞ c. When a warship’s sensor suite was engaged, her LIDAR would constantly fire in direct lines from her numerous LIDAR sensor arrays, and while lasers travelled at exactly 1 c, meaning it took exactly two seconds for a laser to travel to a target one light second away (close to three hundred k-clicks), register contact, and return to its sensor array pickups. But LIDAR had to be aimed in a certain direction, whereas gravpulse was more akin to an ever expanding wave of gravitational electromagnetic radiation that registered either mass that changed the gravitational backdrop of the vicinity, or substantial changes in radiation or heat, and its inherent Lorentz force ensured it was simultaneously both in realspace and in the Lightway, existing in a relativistic dual spacetime continuum. The limitations of sensor technology was the ability to register pulse pickups after a certain range, since when active gravpulses were shot out constantly, after a certain range the feedback was simply looped out of the system because the return would start to threaten data overload and the simple fact that a warship would simply have moved away from its original position. What made the STARDAC2 so powerful was in essence solving same issues but on a nano-level; the STARDAC2’s Smart Artificial Intelligence was so intensively miniaturised that movement of data between its internal system parts was so short that transfer speeds allowed for substantial either dump of data or reallocation to memory banks, or to other systems like battle space analysis SAI’s, ably helped by internal laser systems that had ranges of only a few nanometres, but closely staggered. In addition, the STARDAC2 could leave behind non-physical “buoys” in form of directed comms-laser bursts that were timed to intercept returning gravpulses based on the ship’s current speed. The STARDAC2 was the very cutting edge of naval sensor technology, as far as Kmdr Por. Hauser was aware no other sensor in the galaxy was as powerful, as precise, or as capable at long-range.

After the two minutes and change was up, Hauser looked at Czachor again, hiking one black eyebrow up in expectation.

“Tracking shows twenty-three contacts within one light-minute radius, Ma’am,” the operations officer said, adjusting the collar of her navy blue uniform, “nine are Nova Polonian Merchant Marine, three fly Trojan signatures, ten are Alliance Merchant Navy, one Corinthian and one Maltese.”

“And how far away from Gdynia Station are we?” Hauser had turned to direct the question at her astrogation officer, Porucznik Artur Lasmanis who had already predicted that the captain would want a precise update.

“We’re at the moment thirty-seven point three-eight million kilometres away from Gdynia, call it close to two point one light-minutes. With our current speed of three-thousand seven hundred km/s, it would take roughly thirty-six and a half hours to return to station.”

“Yeah, well,” Hauser said with an accompanying casual waving gesture towards the holographic plot on their cramped bridge, “that’s just our speed, not our acceleration; we can quickly increase to over eight thousand km/s before counterforce distance becomes an issue. The skipper of the AMS Grover Armitage must be a special kind of stupid if he thinks he can run away from a destroyer. Has he sent anything back, Mr Klimek?”

The communications officer turned in his swivel crash-action chair and shook his head.

“Nope, Ma’am, but he surely received the message, because I sent it over open channels, just to be sure that any of the other Alliance Indiamen didn’t come jumping to his defence.”

“Good lad,” Hauser said and flashed a brief smile of approval to the junior officer.

“Let’s play back what the scans showed before the good skipper of the Armitage pissed his pants and ran. Ms Czachor?”

“Ma’am, given that Armitage is a closed-hull freighter, we couldn’t get a good reading of what her internal cargo spaces held, but when scanned her she immediately increased her acceleration, despite our having stated our intentions as per protocol.”

“So is she a smuggler, or simply stupid?” Tactical officer Porucznik Joakim Krauze suggested in a tone that implied he didn’t actually believe his own words.

“Whatever the skipper and/or the crew are,” Hauser said in a serious tone, “they’re not complying with our orders within Polonian space, and that in of itself is a crime, regardless of her actual cargo. Should the Armitage be found to carry contraband, then so much the better. It would mean that instead of simply revoking the captain’s permission to carry cargo in Polonian territory, they would be fined and imprisoned as well. And if we’re able to give an Alliance shipping line a nasty slap on the wrist, well, then that would just make my week. Mr Chau, see if you can’t get us up alongside the Armitage. Once that’s accomplished, I would like your gunners to fire a blank round across her bow, Mr Krauze.”

“Aye aye, Ma’am,” the helmsman and the tactical officer replied in unison, grinning in anticipation. Stefania Hauser sat back in her captain’s chair and let her mind wander as the other officers started to coordinate between each other in preparation for the pursuit of the desperately running Alliance merchantman.

This had sadly become a commonplace occurrence in Nova Polonia recently, the amount of Alliance civilian shipping refusing customs inspections and scans increasing dramatically after the turn of the galactic relative New Year. Nova Polonia was a large shipping hub, as was obvious when noting the nationalities of the ships in just a limited radius of the Józef Sowiński. The Vistula System was almost equidistant to four major industrialised systems, Novovostok and Starfall in the Independent Systems Alliance, and Corinth and Novorosyia on the Royal Union side. Nova Polonia was also the de facto capital of the neutral Corridor (oft called the “Corinthian Corridor” by the major powers, which irked the citizens who lived there), and since the Corridor was Human Space’s busiest interstellar lane of travel due to a permanently favourable hyperspeed band in the Light Way, it made Nova Polonia obscenely rich compared to its tiny population of only sixty-five million people. Merchant vessels from the ISA, Royal Union, United Colonies of Sol, the Coma Berenices Star Federation, and the Neuhansa Sternbund plus the civilian vessels from the other systems in the Corridor as well, entered and exited the gravity well of Vistula every single hour of every single day. Over forty per cent of the Polonian work force was employed in occupations that were connected to the massive interstellar trade network somehow. Gdynia Station (constructed with money from both the ISA and the Kingdom of Aurora) was a disproportionally large station compared to the rather humble Nova Polonian merchant marine and the Nova Polonian Republican Navy, with a full-time crew of fifty-thousand and berthing places for ninety ships. But the current galactic political climate was rising rapidly, and both the Royal Union and the ISA were sending warships into neutral space, ostensibly to “fly the flag” as the Aurorans put it, to “maintain order” in the words of the Alliants.

“AMS Grover Armitage is slowing down, Ma’am,” Podporucznik Czachor said loudly, ripping Hauser out from her musings.

“Aw, I didn’t get to fire a warning shot,” Krauze complained, and a few of the other officers chuckled.

“I have a very irate Captain Pike for you, Ma’am,” Podporucznik Klimek said, half-turning to look at Komandor podporucznik Hauser and took off his headset before handing them out towards her.

“He’s demanding to know why we’ve delayed his transfer in this way, and is threatening to make formal complaints to the Elysian embassy in Lublin. Something to the effect of illegal use of military power against lawful shipping under the protect–”

“Well, we don’t know if he’s carrying lawful shipments unless he allows us to scan his ship and dispatch customs officers to inspect his cargo.” Hauser was angry now, this brief little chase would cost them the most of the rest of the watch, when there were so many other ships to scan and verify.

“Tell them to cut all acceleration, fire counter-thrusters and prepare for boarding by Polonian customs officials. And if he continues to give you lip, tell him to shove his protests up his ass.”

Klimek’s expression told her he would transmit her order in slightly altered language, the twenty-one year old not having grown so used to his navy and white Republican Navy uniform to be lippy to foreign skippers.

Hauser was decidedly not alone in disliking the Alliants; they were arrogant bullies who believed their unfathomable wealth and industrial might made them the natural overlords of Human Space. But she didn’t like the Royal Union much more either. The Corinthians felt the entire Corridor was somehow theirs by right of settlement and because they’d fought a war over it against the Dionysians; the Dionysians were enigmatic assholes who would shake your hand with their right and plunge a knife in your back with their left. The Maltese were good and fair business people, but you could tell they always looked down their noses as small single-star polities like Nova Polonia and Ilion-Troy, carrying themselves with an arrogance that was more felt than seen. The Aurorans were the least worst of the bunch (of the large Union nations anyway), but they came in all manner of flavours, ranging from genuinely respectful and being honest brokers, to overbearing and condescending, to simply forgetting there were smaller, independent polities out there that might not appreciate the presence of their seemingly omnipresent warships. Nova Polonia was much too small to be able to afford the choice of friends; they were forced to pay for the privilege of not making enemies, Hauser mused bitterly as the holographic model of the AMS Grover Armitage came to a stop on the plot and Krauze made a call over the tannoy for a shuttle to be prepared and the customs duty team to make ready for insertion.

Yes, she thought as her brow furrowed in thought, the most expensive commodity in the Galaxy was neutrality. A price she hoped Nova Polonia was still able to pay as the galactic relative calendar turned from March to April 2875.