Exofuture Wiki

This page is read only. You can view the source, but not change it. Ask your administrator if you think this is wrong.
====== Story: Breaking the Line ======

**Genevieve system, Keefe's Nebula**\\
**December 4404**\\
**Galactic Defence League battlegroup 16**
 
The fleet recon pickets found them at 08:15:23 DCT: a scatter of bright energy signatures over Genevieve IV. Word spread around the fleet in minutes – corpers spotted.
 
Aboard the dreadnought //MacAllan//, Admiral Wainwright set forth his plans to a conference of ship's captains. The battlegroup would form a screen in jump-space, and drop with rounds already halfway down the rails. Standard procedure for an initiative engagement, really. They'd clean the opposition up in the first volley. With the element of surprise on the League's side, they could even take their time laying in a firing solution before dropping.
 
Engagement time was set for 10:30:00. As the battlegroup changed course for Genevieve IV, gun and hangar deck crews went about their work, preparing every weapon and fighter in the fleet for the coming battle.
 
**Genevieve IV**\\
**Superbattleship //Morgan's Spiral//**
 
“Contacts multiple, long range, hostile transponders!”\\
Armoured panels were already sliding into place across the bridge's windows as the operations officer called out the sighting. Holographic displays snapped on, replacing the true-light starfield with a tactical representation.\\
Commander Veyris spun her chair to face forward. A contact icon appeared with a ship count: forty enemy ships, give or take a couple. She grimaced, and flicked open a channel to the flagship.\\
“//Halligan//, //Morgan's Spiral//. We've picked up a hostile force in jump-space. Putting it up on the battlenet now. Estimate -” a glance at the display “- ten minutes to arrival. I'm scrambling my fighters, but there's no way I can hold them solo. I'm going to cold-launch a missile cloud and fall back before they get here.”\\
At the other end of the line, Force Commander Greys sighed heavily.\\
“Copy that, //Morgan's Spiral//. Damn, I thought we'd have more time to recover after the landings. Alert the other ships, I need to put together a plan.”\\
Veyris switched the channel to broadcast mode.
 
**Thirteen minutes later**\\
**Superbattleship //Morgan's Spiral//**
 
Veyris set down her coffee with trembling hands. On the main display, an intimidating spread of contact icons indicated the enemy fleet – just sitting there in jump-space. Her cold-launched missiles sat comfortingly close to one of the projected entry points, although one maybe-kill out of 46 hostiles wasn't all that comforting.\\
On the ops channel, //Bishop Island//'s Edgington broke the tense silence.
“I sure wish these fellas would just fackin' commit, ay?”\\
Nervous laughter echoed from the other commanders. Geoff Hawkins on //Take That Back// said something in response that got a more lively round of applause.
 
Then the contacts disappeared. Veyris held her breath.
 
11,000 kilometres away, a sudden flash signalled her missiles' detonation.\\
A split second later, the display filled with red.
 
**Battlegroup 16**
 
Wainwright's plan started smooth as an acid-polished diamond. The jump-in went perfectly, the grey-green armoured behemoths of the League fleet slamming themselves into reality with the kind of satisfying punch only a coordinated capital ship jump can deliver to your gut. The firing solutions were dead on. 46 massive tungsten lance rounds blew out the debris seals on his fleet's main batteries and arced soundlessly towards the blue ships in the distance. One frigate jumped into some kind of minefield, but the explosives only disabled one of its engines.
 
Swarms of fighters blasted out of their launch racks and formed up around the fleet in anticipation of incoming fire. Lasers and particle beams annihilated a few before the dreadnoughts' jammers reduced the enemy AIs to visual targeting. Then the waiting game began, as the first volley raced outwards and heavy machinery cycled the next into the lances.
 
Impact was brief, but violent. Missile hits blew a few rounds off target, but most found their mark on ships barely starting to move. A cloud of glowing fragments replaced the blue warships in Wainwright's telescopic camera view.
The League captains congratulated each other on a first strike well-delivered, and waited to see if anything else would need obliterating.
 
**Superbattleship //Morgan's Spiral//**
 
Veyris eased her grip on her chair's arms and leaned forwards. The ship's hull creaked as it settled, but the damage control officers assured her Greys' plan had worked – the shields had held.\\
She switched her desk display to an aft camera.
 
//Redruth// lazily rolled itself starboard, out of //Morgan's Spiral//'s wake. Behind it, //Miskovsky// rolled to port, and still further aft a group of attack cruisers spread out to the top and bottom.\\
Twenty kilometres away on each side, other “stacks” of rebel warships were dispersing too. //Take That Back// accelerated out from behind //Halligan//'s weapons rings, the powerful lights Hawkins liked to have bolted to its bow armour flickering to life. //Bishop Island// followed it out into clear space, a missile cloud already out of the tubes and streaking outwards.
 
Greys cleared the ops channel with an understated cough.\\
“All ships, //Halligan//. Launch EWAR pods and first wave missiles. Stack headers, rotate out your shield generators. I want your jumps ready to execute as soon as they fire again.”\\
A chorus of affirmative responses rang out over the net.\\
Veyris signalled the fire control station with a wave, and //Morgan's Spiral//'s missiles thundered out of their tubes and into the black.
 
**Battlegroup 16**
 
There was silence on the comm channels as the corper ships accelerated out of the fragment cloud. Not a single wreck lay behind them.
 
Finally, the faint voice of a junior officer on //Unity// broke in.\\
“Inbound missiles! Sir, they've launched missiles, hundreds of them!”\\
Wainwright shook off the shock.\\
“Get your fighters and point defences ready, damn it! And fire your lances!”\\
The battlegroup shuddered as one as their lances fired again. The fighter screens began to move, racing forward to intercept the incoming missiles.\\
Then, for the second time that day, an entire fleet of sensor contacts disappeared.
 
And reappeared. Behind the League line.\\
Chaos ensued throughout the fleet. Every channel was filled with people screaming orders, for ships to turn, for secondary batteries to be brought online, for the fighters to reverse their course.\\
Admiral Wainwright slammed his fist down on his desk. Every captain in the conference call flinched, visibly.
He took a deep breath.\\
“What the hell did they do? How are they behind us? Was there sensor lag? What?”\\
A cruiser captain tentatively spoke up.\\
“Sir, our initial data suggests they...performed a tactical jump.”\\
The other captains murmured in subdued agreement. Wainwright fixed the speaker with a basilisk glare.\\
“A tactical jump? You've read the research reports, haven't you? That kind of precision can't be achieved! The navigator simply cannot react fast enough.”\\
“Sir...we know they use AIs. Perhaps they let them-”\\
The admiral dismissed him with a shake of his head. “There's no time. Figure it out later. They'll be hitting us in seconds.”
 
That prediction was accurate. 2.79 seconds later, the cruiser captain's signal cut out, and Wainwright watched the hulk careen out of formation, gaping holes blasted through its armour by a close-range missile strike. //MacAllan//, heavy and slow as it was, hadn't even brought itself around to face the enemy yet, but they were already among the League ships.\\
Blue-armoured, cylindrical, and cascading particle weapon fire outwards at every angle, the corper ships burned gracefully through the line. Secondary railgun batteries lashed out at them, but point defences and shields turned the projectiles to sparks.
 
A few of the League cruisers managed to bring their lances to bear, and the rebel battleship //Ipswich Square// lost its forward section to a double-punch strike. //Redruth// tried to cover the decapitated ship as it burned away, but fell victim to the same tactic and spun away with fire venting from its breached drive arrays. //Halligan// avenged them, gutting first one League cruiser then the other with precise barrages from its powerful particle guns.
 
**Superbattleship //Morgan's Spiral//**
 
The bridge was almost disconcertingly calm. The action was out of the command crew's hands now, the outcome resting squarely on the gunnery AIs and tactical teams on the lower bridge deck. Veyris watched with a sense of serene detachment as her ship hammered another League frigate into a burning hulk.\\
Jimmy Falkirk, riding her wing in //Miskovsky//, and represented on her bridge by a seemingly-real hologram, pointed out a cruiser spinning slowly in place with a neat hole drilled through its centre, where the command pod would have been.\\
“See,” he said, “they weren't even trying to maneuver properly. They fly their ships like turrets. No wonder this is so-”\\
//MacAllan// smashed him before he could finish the sentence.\\
Proximity warnings sounded briefly as //Miskovsky//'s shattered hull scraped //Morgan's Spiral//'s aft shields. Knocked off course and without command, the battleship curved away, eventually colliding with a cruiser in a silent, fiery, entanglement.\\
Veyris stared at the space where Falkirk's hologram had been until an AI tugged at her mental sleeve.\\
“We have a problem,” it said conversationally, “in that the dreadnought that just hulled Jimmy is about to attempt to kill us, and our lateral shields aren't strong enough to pull off the same stunt Greys set up earlier.”\\
The commander looked at the projection it was showing her, with the behemoth //MacAllan// poised to unload a slug into her ship and break its spine.\\
“Oh.”\\
She thought about it a bit, trying to clear the numbness from her mind.\\
“Well, we'd better do something then, hadn't we?\\
Veyris regarded the cybernetic presence calculatingly.\\
“Perhaps we //can// replicate Greys' stunt. Tell me,” she asked it, “how fast can you be?”
 
**Dreadnought //MacAllan//**
 
Admiral Wainwright smiled in satisfaction as his primary lance's loading indicator changed from STANDBY to READY.
“Execute fire mission,” he spat. //MacAllan// lurched and thrummed with the force of firing, and Wainwright looked at the forward screen, waiting for that damn corper superbattleship to disappear in a flash.
 
And disappear it did. Just not in a nuclear flash of metal breaching shields and armour, but rather in a sort of shimmery upwards motion, the kind that tells any experienced starship-watcher that a jump has been made. Wainwright's fourth round sailed through the space where the ship had been and away into the night. The admiral stared in disbelief.
 
//Morgan's Spiral// reappeared a moment later, directly in line with //MacAllan//'s spinal lance. Wainwright looked on in horror as armour plates slid aside on the superbattleship's bow and weapons rings to unmask its guns. Caught with thirty seconds left before it could fire its main gun again, the dreadnought could do nothing but sit and hope.
 
**Superbattleship //Morgan's Spiral//**
 
A vicious grin crossed Veyris' face.
“Burn them,” she hissed, and //Morgan's Spiral// poured the fire back down the dragon's throat.
 
{{tag> story}}