Tales from the Service: The Anomaly in the Clouds

2952-10-23 – Tales from the Service: The Anomaly in the Clouds

Though I recorded some other interviews while I was away, I don’t want to overload the feed with this relatively dry, informative material.

While we have been out in Sagittarius, a few interesting things have happened back in the Coreward Frontier worthy of mention. The raid at Adimari Valis has been well covered in other media outlets, obviously, but the arrival of Flit Diver at Maribel the day before the raid was announced in the media seems to have been largely overlooked.

For those of you who do not know, the Flit Diver is a carrier of the Rahl Hegemony Navy. While no formal pact appears to exist between the Confederated Worlds and the Hegemony stabilizing the border region until this conflict is ended, even a token force sent to the Maribel defense zone seems a gesture of goodwill indicative that such negotiations are ongoing. We at Cosmic Background get very little message traffic out of Hegemony space, though we are certain we have many readers and viewers there.

Apparently, the Flit Diver’s pilots had a bit of an interesting experience on the way across the Reach; their course took them close to the edge of the Brushfire Nebula, where they claim to have seen something quite spectacular.

[N.T.B. – This gesture of supposed goodwill is also an excuse to rotate Hegemony squadrons through a combat zone; trust the Hegemon to never let an opportunity to season his forces go to waste.]

Stefan Giunta adjusted the settings of his interceptor’s onboard radar, trying to find a combination where the artifacts along the left margins of the display disappeared. The Cavalier was a relatively new machine, having just been introduced the year before, and he still hadn’t flown one with a properly automated radar rig. He didn’t mind; the techs would work out the bugs eventually, and in the meantime, it was the fastest and most nimble strike rig in the Hegemony fleet, with enough firepower to make quick work of anything it managed to run down.

“Lead, I’m having sensor trouble. Anyone else picking up anything in that cloud?” Stefan bit back the word “again” automatically; he didn’t want the squadron comms log to suggest he was dissatisfied with the quality of his machine, and thus risk being reassigned to a squadron flying the older, far less glamorous Cuirassier. Stefan had flown Cuirassiers for the first four years of his service career, and while they were a capable machine, they would feel slow and cumbersome next to the Cavalier.

“Nothing on my plot.” Commander Daniel Jansson, the squadron leader, replied in an instant. “Anyone else?”

“Just some radar artifacts.” Elliott Clemens’s voice was full of grumpy exasperation that fortunately the transcript would be unable to record. “The radar is so sensitive it picks up denser areas of the nebula.”

“Probably nothing, but why don’t you both go check it out anyway.”

“Aye, Commander.” Stefan switched to a direct channel with the other pilot. “Clemens, you’re ahead of me, so why don’t you lead.”

“Acknowledged.” Clemens split from the formation and banked toward the extending arm of the nebula, and Stefan followed. The purple and orange haze of a nearby active area of the Brushfire Nebula soon filled his forward view, hiding all but the brightest stars. Few people lived in or around the nebula, partly because the area was not suitable for planet formation, and partly because high concentrations of phased-Epsilon and phased-Rho particles posed a risk to starships with standard phased-matter condensing reactors. Dense nebula clouds could even interfere with strike craft operations.

Fortunately, their squadron’s forward patrol, and their mothership’s course generally, were not intending to go into the Brushfire; they merely needed to skirt it until they reached the edge of Memoire de Paix. A more direct route to their destination through the Silver Strand was of course quite out of the question; it would violate treaties if Hegemony military forces passed openly through that region, and no-one had been able to arrange it even on a solidarity mission.

Though they didn’t intend to go through the nebula, its many far-spreading and poorly mapped arms moved, in astronomical terms, relatively fast. Theoretically, a pirate band – this was one sort of inhabitant the Brushfire always seemed to have plenty of – could use its greater knowledge of this shifting condition to set up ambushes on passing ships, thus requiring the Diver to send out forward patrols to clear each jump zone. Pirates attacking a fully escorted light carrier seemed farfetched to Stefan, even if brigands from that very nebula had battled Confederated cruiser squadrons on almost equal terms not yet fifteen years before. The Confederated military was soft and risk-averse; pirates knew that the same wasn’t true of the Hegemony Navy.

Oddly, as he came out of his turn on Clemens’s tail, Stefan saw that the radar artifacts in the nearest section of nebula hadn’t gone away. Normally, this sort of interference was resolved when the more capable forward-facing sensors were brought to bear on the problem.

“Still seeing it.” Clemens made a small course adjustment, and Stefan mirrored it. “You think maybe there is something in there?”

“Several somethings is more likely.” Stefan again tried to adjust his radar to clarify the plot, again without result. “But that’s a dense gas pocket, probably holding together under its own gravity. Visual sighting in there is going to be impossible.”

“No reactor signatures, nothing on infrared.” Clemens sent a proposed course to Stefan’s display. “Let’s do a close circuit. If we don’t pick anything up on thermal, there’s nothing to see.”

“Lead on.” Stefan moved the course from his display to his autopilot, then turned to the sensor controls. Even with the unreliable hardware on the Cavalier, if there were pirates hiding in there, he was about to know it.

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Tales from the Service: The Incarnation Home Front, Part 2

2952-10-16 – Tales from the Service: The Incarnation Home Front, Part 2 

This is the remainder of the interview with Naval Intelligence lieutenant Kirsten Reid, whose first portion was posted last week. I have no further comment on this, except to speculate in hindsight that the names of the two worlds we discussed are very similar. Perhaps they are neighboring worlds, or even two planets in the same star system – that would explain the seemingly strange practice of shipping raw materials and food between them. I did not ask this at the time, unfortunately. 

D.L.C. - Duncan Chaudhri – Junior editor and wartime field reporter for Cosmic Background.

K.R.R. - Lieutenant Kirsten R. Reid is a Naval Intelligence senior analyst assigned to Seventh Fleet. Recently, she has been at Hausen’s World, the site of Operation HELLESPONT, examining the wealth of Incarnation intelligence left in the supply depot captured there. 

[D.L.C.] What about their planets? You say we have some idea of what life is like on them? 

[K.R.R.] Some of them, yes. There is one world that seems to be the home of many of troops in the garrison of Hausen’s World which we know most about; its name seems to be Prospero. It is most likely the closest of the Incarnation worlds to Sagittarius Gate but that distinction may be largely academic, a matter of a few tens of light years difference. 

[D.L.C.] Let me guess: it has a large, urban population? Heavily urbanized settlements have traditionally been the main source of Ladeonist sentiment in the Reach. 

[K.R.R.] We thought so too, and there is at least one major city on the planet’s surface, a fairly sizable metropolis called Kannagh’s Prospect. Strangely, though, analysis of the mail we intercepted suggested the garrison troops were drawn mainly from smaller settlements in the hinterland, not from the city itself. The only mail sender or receiver we can positively say had relations in the city was the second in command of the base. 

[D.L.C.] Strange. That would suggest that most of the population- 

[K.R.R.] Is distributed throughout the smaller settlements? Possibly, but more likely this garrison was selected specifically from the small communities. We aren’t sure why. 

[D.L.C.] Well, at least we must know a lot about life in these smaller towns on the planet. 

[K.R.R.] What we know is extensive but leaves gaps. We know that the average size of one of these communities seems to be about three hundred, and that they are by and large young places, with few elderly citizens, for example, and family structure is, despite Ladeonist tendencies in Reach cells, fairly strong. 

[D.L.C.] Well, perhaps the Incarnation centralizes elderly citizens in the cities, leading to the disparity. 

[K.R.R.]  We considered that but it doesn’t really fit the other facts. None of the garrison or the fleet in the system seemed to be sending anything to elderly parents or grandparents in the city for example. 

[D.L.C.] What about day to day life in these communities? 

[K.R.R.] Civilians in these communities are generally tradesmen focused on the agricultural industry. It seems strange that the industry needs so much labor – after all, references to agricultural automation equipment are fairly common in letters from Prospero to the troops here – so we have to assume this planet is a food exporter to the rest of Incarnation space; it’s the only thing that makes sense for that much of an investment in agriculture. Most likely, that means the city is a concentration of packing facilities intended for turning these products into long-shelf-life items that can be shipped to other worlds, but even this does not make sense. Where are the people sending messages to their relatives who work in factories? Why not also draw troops from these people? 

[D.L.C.] Perhaps the factory workers are implanted with specialized equipment that disagrees with the military implants. That doesn’t explain the lack of message traffic between the groups though. 

[K.R.R.] That... Almost works, actually. Not quite, but almost. I hadn’t thought of that. 

[D.L.C.] What’s the climate of this Prospero like? 

[K.R.R.] Prospero seems to swing wildly between long, hot, arid summers, and shorter, brutally cold seasons. That indicates a highly elliptical orbit. Most likely the rainy seasons that make the place such a good farming world are in the narrow “spring” and “fall” between hot and cold, but we don’t have direct sources for this yet. What we do know is that keeping most crops alive requires careful consideration for irrigation and careful management of planting and harvest dates; the farmers of this world often have harvests planned out to the day and hour, a level of precision we’d never need on any world in the Reach. They also seem to use far more genetically altered crops than we use, which probably leads to increasing need for precise harvesting; that sort of artificial organism can be pretty unstable. 

[D.L.C.] That probably explains the Bitter- 

[K.R.R.] The Bitter Harvest story? Yes, I remember that one. How someone back in Farthing’s Chain got ahold of Incarnation farming equipment, I’m still not quite sure, but what that story portrays is consistent with what we know, if you factor in increased instability due to a strange environment. I’m still not sure why plants would explode, but that could always be an exaggeration to help hide your source’s real identity. 

[D.L.C.] What is the standard of living like there? 

[K.R.R.] It’s not too far off what a colonist on one of the outer Coreward Frontier worlds might expect. It’s spartan, but with all the basic comforts met; the central authority maintains very standardized schools and vocational programs in all the communities, so most of these conscripts had plenty of shared experiences even if they grew up scattered across a whole planet. All the communities had shops and meeting houses, but we don’t see many references to taverns or to any sort of hospitality business, suggesting that travel over long distances might be restricted. The government probably maintains checkpoints on the major roads to track movement, but again we have no direct source for that. 

[D.L.C.] This isn’t a fresh colony, though – this is a relatively high population planet. Why would people be living like first- or second-generation colonists when obviously they aren’t? 

[K.R.R.] I don’t know. None of them seemed to question it; that’s just the lives they lived before they were assigned to military training. And it certainly does not seem to have been a bad upbringing, in the whole. Perhaps by forcing them to live in a simulated colonization environment, the Incarnation is trying to raise them to be tough and not too reliant on creature comforts, which would be good traits for military conscripts needed for garrison and second line duty. 

[D.L.C.] Horrific to think that someone might engineer an entire planet to have standardized early life experiences so they are useful for particular tasks. But I will admit the idea sounds very Ladeonist. 

[K.R.R.] Unfortunately so. We have much less about other worlds, but this engineering does seem to be a consistent policy. There's one called Paradiso, for example, which seems to be a super-habitable environment like Makaharwa or Håkøya, where we see shared experiences of very different sorts mentioned in their message traffic. Paradiso natives – of which we have only a few examples in the captured traffic – seem to have outdoorsy upbringings, with very small houses but communities spread out through large, jungle-like areas, and forestry being a dominant industry. 

[D.L.C.] Forestry? You think they have a planet exporting wood in bulk? What for? 

[K.R.R.] No idea. Perhaps it is to build the houses on other worlds like Prospero. After all, we have no indication that Prospero has any trees to speak of, at least not anything native. 

[D.L.C.] Shipping building materials and food between planets sounds horrendously inefficient. How does their economy work? 

[K.R.R.] We aren’t completely sure, but if they are shipping such raw materials around, it suggests that manufacturing facilities are distributed relatively equally across their worlds, at least across a group of worlds. As to efficiency... Well, we’ve done some simulations, and can’t see how it would be anything but morbidly wasteful. 

[D.L.C.] And yet, they field hundreds, of highly advanced warships that put most Reach shipbuilders to shame. They have to have a smaller population than the Confederated Worlds, and with an economy that backwards, it seems impossible. 

[K.R.R.] The full economics of the situation are not yet clear. Surely we are missing components of their economic plan that would make it all make sense. 

[D.L.C.] Perhaps their warships are stolen? 

[K.R.R.] They seem to use similar technology to Grand Journey vessels, but there’s no indication they simply stole the ships, and every indication they’re building them. We do see new ships show up in engagements fairly regularly, as an example. You can always tell the smooth gravitic signature of a ship that’s fresh out of the yards within the last few months from one that’s just been reassigned from elsewhere. 

[D.L.C.] Pity. If they were working off a stolen stockpile that would suggest the war would end quickly in our favor. 

[K.R.R.] Wishful thinking, I’m afraid. And I am also afraid I’m running out of time for this discussion. 

[D.L.C.] I appreciate your coming to discuss this for the audience, Kirsten. Hopefully when you have those missing pieces that explain the strange oddities of Incarnation life, we can sit down and talk about it again. How our foes live is very interesting to me, and I think also to my audience. 

[K.R.R.] Duncan, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you. And if I am cleared to discuss further developments with the media, I assure you I will be in touch. 

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Tales from the Service: The Incarnation Home Front

2952-10-09 – Tales from the Service: The Incarnation Home Front 

Duncan here. I am back to Ashkelon after having conducted a few interviews. One of them, with Captain Samuel Bosch of the heavy cruiser Raymond Spruance (who needs no introduction in this space) you either have already seen by time of posting or will shortly see on the main vidcast program, so I will not discuss it here except to note that this embed team expected Bosch to ride out the rest of the war in a desk posting, and are pleasantly surprised to see him back in action commanding a Seventh Fleet capital warship. 

The interview relevant to today’s feed item is the one I did with Naval Intelligence lieutenant Kirsten Reid, lately come from investigating what was left of the Incarnation depot on Hausen’s World. Colonel Reid sat down with me for a rare one-on-one interview to discuss what we know of Incarnation civilian life based on the findings at Hausen’s and elsewhere. Nojus, obviously, was back on Ashkelon maintaining the feed item, as I did not know initially when I would be back. 

Because of its length, I will be splitting this interview across two weeks’ text feed items. 

D.L.C. - Duncan Chaudhri – Junior editor and wartime field reporter for Cosmic Background 

K.R.R. - Lieutenant Kirsten R. Reid is a Naval Intelligence senior analyst assigned to Seventh Fleet. Recently, she has been at Hausen’s World, the site of Operation HELLESPONT, examining the wealth of Incarnation intelligence left in the supply depot captured there. 

[D.L.C.] Lieutenant Reid, it is a pleasure. I don’t think we’ve met before. 

[K.R.R.] We have not met, though I already feel like I know you, Mr. Chaudhri. I have been reading your text feed for nearly four years. I saw you at one of Admiral Abarca’s press events late last year, but I did not get a chance to speak to you then. 

[D.L.C.] Lieutenant, I am flattered. Surely in your line of work there’s far more interesting reading material to keep you busy than our feed. 

[K.R.R.] I think you have a rather romantic idea of what we do in Naval Intelligence. Most of what we work with really is terrifyingly dull reading, and the stories you publish are anything but. 

[D.L.C.] Thank you again, but I must say I am not here for an endorsement to use in our advertising, Lieutenant. I’m here- 

[K.R.R.] Call me Kirsten, please. I was a civilian analyst before the war, and those stuffy titles don’t fit me very well. 

[D.L.C.] Kirsten. We had planned to talk about some of what data from Hausen’s World has revealed about life on the Incarnation home worlds. 

[K.R.R.] That is what we discussed, and I brought a few documents that I am cleared to share with your publication that will expand on what we talk about here. 

[D.L.C.] It is good that this was cleared for release. I’ve had something of a variable experiences with the Naval Intelligence clearance process, as you probably know if you’re a regular reader. 

[K.R.R.] Of course. Fortunately, this is a collection that has no bearing on the military situation but which I think your readers will find quite interesting. We have collected a little bit of data on what the Nate home worlds are like from devices captured on other worlds, including a few rare video recordings, but the Hausen’s depot seems to have been a mail stop for messages and packages being taken back from the Incarnation fleet to their home worlds. Unfortunately, they are careful to conceal the coordinates of the worlds themselves, even from their own rank and file, but we know quite a bit now about those worlds. 

[D.L.C.] I suppose if we’re reading mail sent by their service personnel back to their loved ones at home, that would make sense. They don’t use a Hypercast relay chain to send data to and from their fleet, of course, otherwise we would have found some of their Hypercast nodes already. 

[K.R.R.] That is correct. Incarnation technology is very capable of creating a Hypercast relay network, but they do not do so. They seem to consider the network a vulnerability, and employ a system of what amounts to high-capacity mail courier vessels to move data and small parcels around their space in a relatively regular manner. We have never captured one of these courier ships, but they seem to be a civilian government rather than a military institution, with the fleet having no control over their movements. 

[D.L.C.] That is strange to hear, but I suppose I’m used to the fleet mail system and Hypercast relay network, both run and maintained by the military. 

[K.R.R.] Yes, it is strange how weak their Naval institution seems to be. We are used to the Confederated government being somewhat subsidiary to the Naval authorities, and the Rahl Hegemony’s leaders being military leaders first and civil leaders second, but that was not the way of governments before the Terran-Rattanai War. The Incarnation, being descended from a Ladeonist schismatic group from that period, seems to have organized itself more along the lines of a civil government with a military arm. As far as we can tell, not even the Immortals program or the Inquisition, both of which have featured in your text feed, are military institutions. They’re initiatives of the civil government, created to infiltrate and control the Naval forces at a relatively low level. 

[D.L.C.] They don’t trust their own fleet? 

[K.R.R.] Their leaders keep the fleet on a very tight leash. They trust them to fight the war, but grand strategy is coming all the way from the top. 

[D.L.C.] Very interesting. Who is at the top? 

[K.R.R.] A single dictator with the title The Incarnate. They don’t ever use his or her name directly, but supposedly everything comes down from a single person, probably a person whose brain is implanted extensively to take some of the load, like they do to their senior officers. 

[D.L.C.] I shudder to think of what horrors such a leader might do to himself to maintain power. 

[K.R.R.] At least as much as he’s doing to the Immortals. Fortunately, it seems that the universal implantation thing we see in their military forces does not extend to the civil population – based on stills and video we captured on Hausen’s, it's only overseers, law enforcement, and government officials who get implants, mostly. The bulk of the population is unmodified, or at least, is not visibly modified with that characteristic temple implant you see on captured Incarnation personnel. The lower on the totem pole one is, the less they are implanted. 

[D.L.C.] Interesting. I suppose that makes sense. Implanting tens of billions would be hideously expensive. 

[K.R.R.] To say nothing of the percentage that would die from unforeseen complications of the procedure. Perhaps one in five hundred by our analysis of the technology. Even with as many as they do implant, the death toll must be grim. 

[D.L.C.] I can imagine, not that I want to. And all those people live in fear of implanted and augmented law enforcement? 

[K.R.R.] Their system is not really based on fear, as far as we can tell. Military personnel seem unafraid to speak their minds to their families back home, and if there is any censorship of their negative opinions of the progress of the war, it is done back there, and in a way that the personnel censored do not suffer for it. There is some rule by force – we have hints that the Inquisition is also responsible for hunting down any opposition to the Incarnation’s program – but most people are on board with the ideas, if not precisely the individual steps, of the regime. 

[D.L.C.] They’re all Ladeonists, then? Not just the leaders and the military? 

[K.R.R.] Incarnation civilians have been educated by Ladeonist ideologues for at least four generations. It is the culture, and there seem to be few dissidents. They see themselves, as Ladeonist cells in the Reach do, as doomed to do their part as part of a great collective effort to save the human race from extinction, and though they do not always agree with the steps being taken, they generally trust that those at the top know better what is needed than they do. 

[D.L.C.] That is not particularly encouraging to think about, when it comes to what happens after the war. 

[K.R.R.] We have thought of that, yes. I can’t speak to any optimistic conclusions of that thought. 

[D.L.C.] What about their planets? You say we have some idea of what life is like on them? 

 

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Tales from the Service: A Titan’s Downfall

2952-10-02 – Tales from the Service: A Titan’s Downfall

Nojus here. Those of you who have already read last week’s entry, which is most of you, know where this ends. A lone enemy warship, crippled in Sagittarius Gate, destroyed by overwhelming swarming attacks by Confederated strike craft and small warships.

Even this routine inevitability, though, risked the lives of thirty-something strike crew in each squadron. True, Commander Tennford’s group all seem to have made it home alive, but dozens of Magpie crews didn’t in the same day’s fighting. Rescue launches had about a fifty percent crew recovery rate, and that’s in uncontested friendly space after a battle lasting only a few hours.

True, these losses are nothing compared to the number of crew on a heavy cruiser, but we should not forget that even in these small victorious actions, Confederated spacers are losing their lives.

As the squadron formed up around him, Yoel Tennford studied the latest battle reports on the datastream from their home base. The wounded Tyrant cruiser was apparently still limping outward toward the jump limit, harried by strike craft and the occasional long-range missile volley from the few frigates which had been in range to participate. None of these could really expect to deal a killing blow to a ship that large and powerful, but they could knock out its weapons and even hamper its ability to make repairs to its drive, if they were persistent.

Yoel’s squadron, along with several others, would hopefully provide the necessary deathblow. If even a handful of their ship-killer missiles struck home, the straggling enemy cruiser would be destroyed. Short of a miracle or a surrender broadcast, the enemy ship was doomed, but an Incarnation crew never surrendered and probably didn’t believe much in miracles.

“Uriel actual, your attack vector is portside amidships.” The voice of the designated strike ops director was hoarse, as if he had been talking and shouting all day; he probably had. “Fenrir and Hermes squadrons will lead you in and keep the guns busy.”

“Acknowledged. Portside amidships.” Yoel smiled; this was a choice duty, with a high chance of scoring devastating hits. True, it was somewhat more dangerous than an end-on run, but with so many Magpies and other strike assets filling the space around the crippled ship, the danger was manageable.

Yoel would still have preferred to have let the kill go to someone else, but he could never bring himself to say that to the gunners and pilots under his command. They would take that as critical lack of aggression for a squadron commander, even if it did increase all their chances of surviving, and even if there was no real difference in the fortunes of war that would result from heroics on this particular day. The Incarnation ship was, for all intents and purposes, already dead; it was only a matter of who would deliver the coup de grace. Yoel didn’t want to have to send a message of condolences to someone’s family over a coup de grace.

As the distance to target began to decrease at an alarming rate, Yoel laid in a course that would bring his squadron around to their designated attack vector. Already the space around the Tyrant was abuzz with Confederated strike craft, and he could see two other squadrons maneuvering to start their attack runs at the margins of the sensor plot.

“Would you look at that.” Quinn Graves, the pilot of Uriel Six, whistled into his microphone. “Right amidships. Reactor-cracking territory.”

“Clear comms.” Yoel instantly regretted the snappy tension in his voice. This was as near to a routine attack run as one could get in live-fire combat, after all. He had been given plenty of reason to be nervous in the day’s first sortie, but that hadn’t rattled him near as much as this one was already doing.

Taking a few deep breaths to settle his nerves, Yoel keyed his comms again. “All right. We’ll be starting our run in about two minutes. Make your final checks, and report your status. No heroics on this one; if you’ve got any problems, take your rig home.”

Ten green wireframes on Yoel’s display winked blue and then went back to green; nobody was reporting any problems. On a second launch in the same day, this seemed farfetched; something always broke, somewhere. Yoel checked his own diagnostics, then returned his eyes to the turn timer. “Stay in formation. Gunners, keep your eyes and barrels rearward and call out any tails we pick up. There are still Coronachs out here.”

Thirty seconds later, Yoel brought his Magpie around to an intercept course with the wounded Tyrant, and the squadron maneuvered around him without a hitch. They’d never done this sort of synchronized run in a live fire situation, but they’d done it in the sims and on exercises many times, and so far they remained unmolested by the enemy. So far, they were too far out to draw fire, and by the time that changed, they would be most of the way to their launch point.

Yoel switched his comms to the operations broadcast channel. “Fenrir, Hermes, this is Uriel. we are starting our intercept run. What’s your status?”

“Right behind you, Uriel.” The sharp tenor of the Fenrir squadron commander was the first to respond. “Lose about one gee of accel and we’ll pass in front of you to clear the way.”

“One gee down, aye.” Yoel pulled his throttle back and signaled for his compatriots to do the same.

“We’re coming in from the target’s stern.” The scratchy voice must have been the Hermes commander; Yoel had never met him. Hermes was from another hangar outpost. “We’ll come around and do a diving run on your target area just after Fenrir.”

“Understood.” Yoel hoped the Hermes squadron Magpies were clear in time; he didn’t like performing hard-burn maneuvers with his rigs intermixed with another squadron. Collision chances in the black were so small as to be insignificant, but it was just another way people could die unnecessarily on this sortie.

The attack run, being at the Magpies’ maximum acceleration given their current loading, only took about ninety seconds, but those ninety seconds seemed to crawl by. Enemy light laser fire and plasma barrages started to flash through the squadron with twenty seconds to go, but the guns were inaccurate, and too few of them were devoted to dissuading the attack.

At twelve seconds until weapons launch, one of the Uriel gunships took a glancing hit and had to break off its run, but Yoel didn’t have time to pay it any mind. Its pilot and gunners were on their own for the moment. His eyes were fixed on the timer, and his finger rested on the little button that would launch both of his ship-killers. He barely even watched the view ahead; there was nothing he could do about it anyway. Doctrine was to fly as straight as possible and to maneuver as little as possible in the seconds leading up to launch, to achieve an optimal effect. How much this actually mattered for targeting accuracy of the self-guided munitions was the subject of much briefing room speculation.

Whatever the other two squadrons were doing to draw fire and suppress the surviving guns, Yoel couldn’t see any indication it was working, but now, that wasn’t his problem. They were lost in the flashing swirl of strike craft dead ahead.

The timer hit zero, and Yoel pressed the button to fire his weapons. The Magpie jerked to one side, then to the other, as both huge weapons kicked free, spun up their own miniature gravitic drives, and hurtled away. As soon as they were clear, Yoel pulled back hard on his stick, twisting his Magpie away from the target. All around him, the rest of the squadron was doing the same, but he couldn’t see anything of this but the disappearance of munitions indicators from the status panel.

“Uriel actual breaking off. Report twenty launches.” Yoel breathed a sigh of relief, then switched channels back to his compatriots. “Scatter until you’re clear of the point defense, then regroup. Call it out if you catch a tail; Fenrir and Hermes are still in the area.”

So drained was he that Yoel didn’t even remember to watch the rear cameras for impact. Whooping and cheering on the squadron channel reminded him, and he switched on the cameras just in time to see four bright yellow fireballs already fading into the darkness. Four hits was probably enough to put that monster out of commission for good.

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