Author's Preface
The way I understand Human weapons development is as follows:
Engineer: "We discovered an undesirable side effect."
Human military: "How undesirable?"
Engineer: "Catastrophically."
Human military: "…at what range?"
— Nuk High Noterari Deyunduk, after a research tour in Human space, 32 P.I.
Standing in the Gneisenau 's CIC, Sanders was ashamed. From the moment she woke up six hours ago, her only thoughts had been about herself, her ship, and her crew. She had been so caught up in her own anger and fear that she had forgotten why they were racing towards Nekoo.
Now Niobe 's fusion core was too cold to start on its own, and someone had dumped the nuclear batteries used to charge it from a cold state. A Pioneer tender was on its way to restart it or tug it back to a drydock in system.
So she and her crew, except the engineers, joined the Gneisenau 's crew until Niobe was functioning again.
And now she couldn't close her eyes anymore.
The Gneisenau and the Dunkerque had entered the Psstips system, and the googly eyes showed her the devastation the Batract fleet had caused before Chen-Buckler's fleet had reached the system and contained the threat.
"My god, the planet..." Ambassador Mekari had shown her pictures of Nekoo. It had been similar to Earth. Deep blue oceans, with three large continents. Green and the yellow of the large arid steppes dominated the planet.
Now it was covered in dust clouds, lightning erupting in the haze from static charges the orbital bombardment had caused.
Captain Abfalter stood next to her and Yurdantho.
"The Batract exited Transit and were immediately throwing rocks at us. Somehow they had managed to pull meteoroids into their Transit bubble. At 0.10c, they were hard targets to hit."
That's why they had traveled so slowly, turning a two-day trip into a two-week journey.
The clouds lifted for a short period, and Sanders could see a crater in the landscape. She estimated it was fifty to sixty kilometers in diameter.
"How many got through?"
"To our luck, only one, impacting with the force of 545 gigatons of TNT."
545 gigatons, 2,700 times the force of the Krakatoa eruption...
Abfalter continued.
"Luckily for the Psstips, they have a quite organized planetary system, deeply corrupt, but effective. The areas most impacted were evacuated quickly. Apart from the initial impact, the loss of life was minimal. Mostly because the areas hit were rural, like most of the planet."
Sanders remembered Mekari telling her that Nekoo was a mostly traditional agrarian planet. All industry had been placed in orbit or in the outer colonies.
She didn't dare to imagine what effect such an impact would have on the densely populated areas on Earth.
"Didn't the meteoroids destroy the minefields?"
"Like a shotgun blast, they ripped everything apart in their way. Drones, Nixtred Frames, half of the 2nd Fleet, and the minefield. The battle afterwards was... interesting. There are still about five thousand ships on the outskirts of the system."
Chen-Buckler had done impressive work. Without large parts of the drones and the antimatter minefield, defending the system must have been a massive task.
"I assume the Admiral is hunting them down?"
"Yes, he's leading what's left of the 2nd Fleet. His ship, the Agamemnon , was critically hit, so he took command of the Arcadia Planitia and began hunting them down. The Psstips now act as blocking forces, preventing the Batract from leaving the system. They are understandably quite interested in wiping them out."
Studying the tactical display, Sanders saw the skillful placement of the fleets.
Chen-Buckler had taken the 4th Expeditionary and folded it together with the reduced 2nd Fleet, driving the Batract towards the waiting 3rd Fleet. And every escape vector not covered by either force was taken care of by the Psstips.
"Locking a fleet inside a system, interesting strategy."
"The Admiral was afraid the Batract might inform their forces how effective the meteoroid buckshot method really is."
Yurdantho, who also studied the screen, turned.
"It's too late. The Batract had learned this from the Nuk. If they used this method here, they will undoubtedly employ it on Taishon Tar and Sol."
"Burrow and Sol."
Abfalter's correction made Sanders look up.
"The last information we got was that Taishon Tar was the target."
"There was an update from the deep-space sensor grid two days ago: the fleet had changed heading for Burrow."
Why Burrow? What was so important about that planet, that whole system? The ruins on its moon, maybe?
"Sirs, the fleets are engaging."
The shout came from one of the stations in the CIC. The layout was unfamiliar to Sanders. The ship clearly followed a different design philosophy than the Niobe , and the mix between familiar and unfamiliar made the differences stand out even more.
"On screen."
Not giving orders was also something she wasn't used to. But she didn't want to interfere with the ship's procedures.
She had watched the googly eyes stream through a holographic screen, but to her surprise, that wasn't the main screen aboard the Gneisenau .
Akin to the walls in the arboretum, the walls of the CIC changed into a 360-degree holoscreen, placing her and the CIC operators in the middle of an emerging battle.
Seeing the numerically superior Batract Hyphae fleet fleeing from the smaller allied forces was almost comical, until she saw the Nixtred Frames in action.
Out of seemingly nowhere, the fleet was surrounded by white lances streaking toward it.
As soon as the Transit bubble collapsed, hundreds of frames fired at the fleet from close range.
The enemy fleet, which presumably had already sustained a few such attacks, had their point defense prepared.
Intense red laserfire thinned out the onslaught of missiles and torpedoes.
Many torpedoes were destroyed, but then, one ship got hit.
Sanders wasn't prepared for the effect.
A blinding blue light appeared, and the ship disintegrated without an explosion. The pieces seemed to crumble by themselves, turning into an expanding cloud of plasma. A strong optical warping effect increased the feeling of strangeness.
Yurdantho's shout next to her broke the hypnotic grip the torpedo's effect had on her.
"By the Old Ones, what was that?"
Yurdantho stood, his inner eyelids fluttering. Another torpedo hit. This time two ships were closer together. Again the struck ship disintegrated in the blink of an eye, but so did every part of the neighboring ship inside the strange warping bubble. Half of the ship was ripped away, folding in on itself while getting torn apart until nothing but plasma was left.
"Shear Wave Horizon Charges, something new our engineers came up with after studying the Nixtred Frames' secondary attack mode," Abfalter whispered. "A frightening weapon, I have to add."
Yurdantho gasped as he watched the plasma clouds disperse when the frames began their second attack mode: going into Transit and intentionally collapsing the field a fraction of a second later, turning themselves into all kinds of radiation and charged particles, hitting the Batract from all sides.
His beak still open, Yurdantho turned and stared at Sanders.
"Your people play with weapons and forces I'm not sure mortals should play with."
Sanders, still trying to reconstruct the torpedoes' effects in her mind, agreed.
The Nuk then barked out a laugh that made the other officers turn their heads.
"But I can't imagine the Batract's last thought as the ship under their cursed tails disappeared. I love you Humans, every time something new."
That was unexpected.
"What are Shear Wave…?" Sanders had never heard of such a weapon.
"Shear Wave Horizon Charges. The torpedo creates a Transit shear wave without the Transit bubble. Basically a rotating gravity sink with intense tidal forces. The same forces that warp space for our A-Drives."
Yurdantho shook his head. "You can't have anything without turning it into weapons, not even your drives. Wonderful."
Something about the Burrow situation bothered Sanders.
Why hadn't they picked up on the newest deep-space sensor grid data, and why Burrow?
The first one could be simple sabotage, like with the scrubbers. But then the question became even more pressing… Why? Why sabotage my access to the deep-space sensor grid?
She looked up, trying to find the ship's sensor station.
After spotting a promising station, she walked over.
"Is this sensors?"
The lieutenant manning the station almost jumped up, trying to salute. She put her hand on his shoulder to press him back.
"Just do your work, Lieutenant. I'm just asking."
It was a curse. Crews not working on a flagship had problems dealing with an admiral standing behind them.
As if I'm a bad omen.
Then she remembered how she had called Admiral Donnager when she was just a lieutenant… Sauron's Eye .
"Yes, ma'am… Sir?" The lieutenant changed color with astonishing speed.
"Sir is fine. Tell me, how exactly does the downlink from the deep-space grid work?"
The lieutenant blinked a few times, then began to rattle off the facts.
"The deep-space grid is designed to operate on p-p links. Each of the thousands of satellites has eight links to its nearest neighbors. The network can be extended by simply adding satellites and linking them on the fly. Data gets shared across the network freely and stored in specialized system nodes. From there, data can be downloaded by every passing ship, either by direct p-p link or conventional radio."
"Slow down, Lieutenant. This isn't a test. So… can we upload data to the nodes?"
The lieutenant thought about it for a second.
"Well, yes and no. We can upload data to the node, but to what effect? It doesn't get pushed into the grid, to prevent malicious code from being sent to the sensor satellites. Only the Sol Node can do so."
So Earth could have sent orders to the fleets over the grid. Why didn't they?
"Where's the Sol Node?"
"Errm, Titan, Sir."
Titan again. What a nice single point of failure…
She patted the man on the shoulder.
"Good work, Lieutenant."
Now I need an engineer and a coder. Her men were still on Niobe , so she had to take what Gneisenau had to offer.
Captain Abfalter had noticed her speaking to his officer and walked past the station in the universal officer's walk that said, Ignore me, I'm just walking by.
Don't worry, Captain, I'm not taking your ship, for now.
Curiosity got the better of the captain as he asked.
"Anything important?"
"Yes, Captain, I'm just trying to find a way to contact anything outside the Nekoo system."
That got a reaction. Every officer and crewman turned towards Sanders and Abfalter. The communications blackout and the sabotage on Niobe had captured the crew's imagination. Rumors spread far and wide, from an unforeseen attack on Earth to the Oligarchy reemerging.
Sanders was sure it wasn't the former, but the recent intelligence reports made her fear the latter.
Abfalter's mustache twitched up and down, a nervous gesture Sanders had seen a few times already.
"Well, Admiral, I guess the Gneisenau has a mission. Comms, inform fleet command. Admiral, your orders?"
Did he just volunteer command of his ship? Why?
"Where's the Node here in system?"
Abfalter checked his dataslate. Positions of sensor nodes were top secret, and since Sanders wasn't originally part of the system's defense fleet, she had no access to the data.
We're separating critical intelligence only to place every fucking link at the same point of failure. One decision was made by the military, the other by cent-counting bureaucrats.
Abfalter's eyebrows rose in surprise.
"The Node is placed about a thousand kilometers away from the position where we found the Niobe ."
What a coincidence… wait…
A suspicion she had the whole time crept back up.
"Captain, you said you were sent to search for us. Were we at the place we dropped from Transit?"
Abfalter shook his head, the grooves on his forehead getting deeper and deeper as he seemingly tried to understand her questions.
"No, Niobe was found roughly an AU from dropout position. Didn't you order the movement?"
"No, I ordered the fleet to hold position."
She had to sit. Why did the saboteur move the ship… The Node.
"Captain, how fast can we reach the Node?"