Much as I probably shouldn't visit the plot bunny breeding pens this month (you guys keep giving me ideas! for different fics!), I thought I'd give you a look at what I've managed thus far for the nameless little tale I'm trying to hammer out.
"How far do we have to go?" called the commander from her chair.
"Two thousand kilometers," replied the navigator, half-way across the smoke-filled compartment. "Two-fifty seconds at the current deceleration. We'll be below maximum jump velocity in two-thirty, jump engines ready in two-sixty!"
"All suits!" ordered the Flight Ops officer. "Make sure you're docked in two hundred seconds."
There was a crackle of responses over the ship-to-suit bands as the handful of defenders diverted just enough attention to respond from their primary mission of keeping the cruiser intact for those critical minutes.
Another wave of missiles hammered at the rakish ship and the bridge compartment shook as one of the explosions took off a radar array mounted nearby. A second later, the suit responsible exploded as a green beam of energy from one of the Tzimisce's own mobile suits blasted straight through it.
There were only three friendly suits out there - out of the five GINN that had been aboard at the beginning of the engagement, three had been destroyed and only one survivor from the Tzimisce's sister ship Lasombra's suits. The Lasombra had taken engine damage in the initial attack and, limping, had turned on their pursuers to give the other Musai-class ship a chance at escape. More than an hour had passed since they saw the flash of the plasma reactors losing containment and tearing the Lasombra apart.
Two more of the enemy mobile suits dashed in, discharging their missile loads before closing in with their cannon. The Lasombra's only survivor dived in, literally sweeping the missiles of one suit aside with it's shield as his beam rifle picked off the other volley. Then his green-trimmed suit writhed under the explosive shells of the suits. One of the Tzimisce's violet-trimmed suits was there suddenly however, and it's larger beam cannon tore one of the suits apart in catastrophic overkill as the anti-shipping weapon wasted it's energies on light-weight mobile suit.
The other suit's pilot saw that discretion was the better part of valor and his suit went through the familiar folding that converted it into a sleek aerospace fighter before zooming away to regroup for another attack.
"What's the threat assessment?" the Tzimisce's commander asked, and then grimaced when it became clear that radar officer was in no condition to reply. Ignoring a dozen safety regulations, the commander unstrapped and crossed the compartment in a single bound to check the readouts for herself.
"Unless they've gotten a lot faster, there's only one more squadron of that can reach us before we jump," she concluded. The odds looked bad - the enemy squadron was made up of an even dozen suits - but more than a few such squadrons had already been driven back by the handful of hardened veterans.
"Just once more wave," the Flight Ops officer promised the weary pilots. "We're almost home."
"Get them docked," the commander ordered. "They can fight from there and we can jump the minute we reach the point. For that matter, Nav! Bring us around one-eighty. Let's remind them that we still have fangs."
There was a mutter of approval from the rest of the bridge crew and the commander dragged the Gunnery officer's corpse aside to let her take over the controls of the two remaining beam cannon mounted along the front of the Tzimisce's spine. The cruiser's steering thrusters fired and she spun easily on her axis as the three suits closed in and then used magnetic clamps to secure themselves against the hull.
The enemy squadron reached maximum range and then both turrets fired, only a fraction behind one of the anchored suits and three of the attacking mobile suits vanished into fireballs. A moment later and the green bolts of beam rifle fire were reaching out to target the wave of incoming missiles as point defense began to track and fire.
A wave of fire flowed towards the Tzimisce as missile after missile exploded. For a moment it looked as if none would make it, but against all odds, a single warhead came close enough to trigger it's proximity trigger and send hurricane of shrapnel into the rear of the bridge. The commander's empty chair was shattered by the impacts and a shard of the hull decapitated the Flight Ops officer. Two of the medics trying to tend to the dying radar officer died with her as they failed to close their helmets before the air rushed out of the compartment, leaving only a handful of stations manned.
"We're in the zone!" shouted the navigator. "Jump engines still charging!"
More missiles rushed in, including three from the assault carrier closing in behind what was left of the tattered enemy mobile suit squadron, closer and closer, some dying under the point defense fire and others from weapons less suited to that precision work, as they fought for those precious ten seconds that they needed.
The Navigator was wiser than to simply report readiness and the instant her indicator went from amber to green, he mashed the button to trigger the jump engines. For a split second, the Tzimisce was haloed in white and then it was gone, leaving the five surviving missiles to detonate meaninglessly, light years away from it.
.oOo.
Red lights ignited across a dozen command boards as a point of light appeared within the holographic representation of that roughly spherical zone that humanity called a jump point. That colour was enough to send Admiral Rau le Creuset leaping from the couch he was napping on to the desk that held his communications panel. Fortunately, it was not enough to have several automatic systems start firing off the beam weapons of the hundreds of expendable buoys that ringed the jump point.
"What the devil's happening!" Rau demanded.
The face under the uniform cap in his display paled. "Sir, one of our pickets just jumped in, heavily damaged. She's transmitting an invasion warning."
Rau grimaced. Ships on picket duty operated in pairs. If only one had returned then the other quite simply couldn't and ships of any kind were in short supply. The only thing harder to lay hands on these days was replacement crew in fact and he would be down one of those as well.
"Understood. I'm on my way to the bridge. Get the picket's commander on the line in two minutes and activate defense plan alpha-delta seven."
Without any further comment, he cut off the communication with a vicious slap of the panel and shoved his feet into the dress boots of his uniform, snagging the long jacket from the back of the door. It had only been a month since he'd been assigned out here and it was sooner than he had hoped that his command would be put to the test.
The Greater Etiyoke cluster had always been a difficult region for the Confederacy, for it had been the industrial heartlands of the old Alliance Worlds and one of the most heavily militarized regions. When the Alliance fell, the successor states that would later form the Confederacy had dismembered the cluster to prevent anyone from obtaining it's impressive economic might and channel it towards further wars of aggression.
But generation after generation of Etiyokeans had remembered that their combined strength had been sufficient to bring many of the Forty-Two Systems to their knees and the local militias and governments had consumed a disproportionate amount of the Confederacy's limited attention over the first century and a half of it's existence. On that record, perhaps more attention should have been paid when those rumblings died away, for that had signified only the quiet before the storm.
As the standard year 2751 drew to a close, the Confederacy had been consumed with the excitement of the Christian religious festivals, the two hundredth anniversary celebrations of the signing of the Articles of Federation and the celebration of the New Year. In ten star systems, a wave of assassinations and small unit combat swept almost unnoticed through the upper echelons of government. Even as the Confederacy's second century closed, almost a quarter of it seceded and as the new year dawned, a United Government was declared for the Greater Etiyoke Cluster.
The Confederacy Defense Militias had been called upon to put down the rebellion, only to discover that the jump points were guarded by fleets significantly larger than intelligence had suggested and equipped with weapons that had definitely not been drawn from the armories of the militias from Etiyoke. The result had typically been disaster as vessels emerged blindly into killing zones. Rau le Creuset himself had made the first step towards his current rank when he inherited command of the damaged Chivvay-class Heavy Cruiser Gettysburk he was navigating and managed to plot a hasty jump back in time to warn off the remains of the overconfident Iayuvian militias. Out of the thirty ships that had jumped into Etiyokean space, only the Gettysburk and a lone Musai had escaped and on the other routes, casualties had been even worse.
With the local militias devastated, the Etiyokeans had pushed forward an offensive before reinforcements from more distant systems could arrive. The Lesser Etiyoke Cluster had been fortunate enough to have reinforcements arrive in time and the lone jump point leading between the two clusters had seen the Etiyokean forces take losses almost as severe as they had inflicted weeks before. Ezoe had done less well and by seizing the key border systems, Etiyoke forced the defenses to be spread thin to guard several more and drained the reserves even more heavily to contain them there.
Finally, in the Iayuvi cluster, the battle had raged back and forth as the militias had been pushed back from the jump point but not allowed the Etiyoke squadrons to push through the vital connection to the two jump points leading into the rest of the cluster - most importantly, to Terra. Finally, a large force of Militia ships had transited from the Zjevlovecoe system and the defenders had welcomed their allies... until those very ships suddenly switched their IDs and opened fire on them.
The ships had come from Etiyoke's militias, now absorbed into what had become the Unity Government Enforcers, and their betrayal had broken the back of the defenses. Ironically, the lack of a strong central command had been all that saved the militia fleet, as individual ships and squadrons scattered and fled, the confusion made it impossible for the Enforcers to be sure if there was a counterattack underway until the handful of ships Rau had been able to hold together were already firing.
There had been little time, for if Zjevlovecoe had fallen then Terra itself was threatened, but Rau's crew had abandoned the Gettysburk moments before the automatic controls sent it ramming into one of the Enforcer's two Gwazine-class battleships and under the cover of his mobile suits they boarded the second and overwhelmed the crew of the other, retaking it for the Confederacy and racing back to the Terra jump point and thence to Alpha Iayuvi when the Terran government abruptly declared their neutrality.
That particular idiocy had at least served to keep the mother world from being bombarded, or even occupied, but the fighting over the other worlds had lasted for months. Rau and the Confederate had been one of the few bright spots of the Confederacy's record in the war, so far, and he was flung into combat over Mars and then for the Jupiter colonies, exacting a heavy toll before being driven back and out of the Solar system, buying time for the rest of the Confederacy to organize its resources.
And now, as a newly-minted Admiral, without even time to break the habit of answering his telephone as 'Commodore le Creuset', he had been placed in command of the defenses for Alpha Iayuvi.
It was an important role. The three systems that gave the cluster it's name were among the oldest of the Forty-Two Worlds, having been colonized in the first decades after the discovery of jump points. If they were to fall then nothing but a rump of the cluster would remain in the hands of the Confederacy, which would carry a potentially disastrous impact upon both morale and on economic might. However, resources were slim. He could be spared only his own Confederate, the Dolos-class heavy carrier Enterprise and a mix of Chivvay and Musai-class cruisers. Together, the ships could field roughly two hundred mobile suits and there were also emplaced defenses - a network of sensor and weapon buoys around the jump point, backed by two asteroid bases hastily converted to house an additional fifty mobile suits.
It would have to suffice.
The bridge was a large, open room that located the commander's seat rather regally at the back, with the work stations around the edge of a sizeable (for a space ship) open square of deck that allowed for a number of staff to stand around at the commander's presence. One of the changes that Rau had made was to have a large holodisplay set up in the centre, so that he had a large tactical display to work with.
No sooner had he entered the room than the display created a smaller window facing his command chair and displayed the worried face of Commander Talia Gladys behind the visor of a spacesuit helmet. Rau viewed her with mixed feelings. On the one hand, she was a capable officer but she also owed at least part of her rank to political connections. It was an odd prejudice to have in the Militias - given that the Militias owed their direct allegiances firstly to the various Families and only then to the Confederacy - but Rau had his doubts about Talia' Dullindal patrons. That family occupied a moderate stance and Gilbert Dullindal, while objectively a capable executive of his own world was one of the leaders amongst the small faction that had indicated that they would be favorably inclined towards a peace agreement even if it left Greater Etiyoke to go it's own way.
On the other hand, Talia Gladys was the commander of the Tzimisce, which suggested that the Lasombra had come to grief out in the Zjevlovecoe system. It was a pity, but if there was any ship in his small fleet that Rau would be dry-eyed about losing, the Lasombra might be it. Not for any crime of the ship, but because of one of the crew.
"Commander," he greeted her, settling into his seat. "What's going on across there?"
Talia sighed. "They're on their way here, sir. We got jumped by a carrier's worth of those transforming mobile suits and saw the carrier at long range. It was one of their assault jobs - best guess is that they wanted to punch out the picket so that they could jump without you receiving a warning. Since we made it back..."
"They'll either abandon the operation or push ahead before we can call in support," he said. "Agreed and a very good job on your part, Commander. How are your people?"
"Too many lost, sir. The sickbay took a hit early on and at least a third of the ship is depressurized. We can move and fight, but we're a long way from business as usual. Probably need a dockyard at some point. And the Lasombra's a complete loss - we saw her reactor go. They got their suits off first but only one of them lasted to get back with us."
Rau hid a grimace at the news. It wouldn't do to show regret at anyone's survival, but if only one pilot had survived then he could guess quite easily who it would have been. "Let me guess, Flight Lieutenant la Flaga made it back?" At her nod, he raised one eyebrow. "The man's definitely a survivor."
"Alright Commander. I can't offer you a dockyard at the moment, but move yourself over to Jachin Due. They'll be glad of all the close support that you can offer if the Enforcers do come through and Having a few veterans with them should stiffen up the suit squadrons there."
The Commander looked like she was going to point out the old truism that you can't stiffen spit with ball bearings, but refrained. He understood her feelings - the squadrons at Boaz and Jachin Due were made up almost entirely of novices right out of flight training and operating older suits. Not any older than the GINN's that had operated with the pickets, but significantly inferior to the CGUE suits on the Enterprise or the newer GuAIZs that hadn't even reached the frontlines yet. Still, some of the pilots would probably turn out well, if they survived long enough.
.oOo.
The hangers of a Musai-class cruiser such as the Tzimisce are located not far below the bridge, so it took Talia only a short while to reach the large compartment. It was open to space as the doors at the back had been opened to admit the incoming mobile suits, but that was no surprise for the large hanger was only very rarely pressurized.
The Tzimisce's own mobile suits had already landed and being moved into their docked locations at the front of the hanger, leaving only a relatively narrow space for the last suit to land. Talia held her breath as the damaged GINN entered the hanged carefully and a slight shock went through the deck as it settled onto the catapult. The surviving Techs rushed forwards to secure it and the large doors began to fold open.
All the suits had taken damage she realised - Miguel Aiman's was missing an arm, which must have limited it's ability to handle the heavy beam cannon it carried, and Heine Westenfluss's suit was so scorched and blackened that it was hard to make out the original colour scheme. The last GINN was the worst off, with one leg reduced to an immobile stump and the rear thrusters torn halfway. She was surprised that it had managed to make it back to the hanger.
When the suit's hatch opened, a broad shouldered figure in a violet-trimmed flight suit emerged. This would be the mysterious Flight Lieutenant that the Admiral thought had a knack for survival. There had been a hint of dislike in that comment and she wondered what lay behind it. Gliding along the gantry, she gestured for the three pilots to go down the ship into the general crew quarters rather than up into the pilot's ready rooms which had been opened to space by the same impact that had done such damage to the bridge.
The two Flight Officers were still in their teens, she remembered as she followed them down to one of the still pressurized sections of the ship, but La Flaga had sounded like an older man over the radio. This was confirmed once they were safe to remove their helmets - he was five or six years older than the other pilots, with a handsome face not covered by the half-mask that was fashionable in some parts of the Confederacy and slightly tousled blond hair.
"Welcome to the Tzimisce, Lieutenant," she told him. "Sorry about the Lasombra."
"She was a good ship," he said with grim resignment and she guessed that he had been in the Militias since before the war. That was the reaction of a seasoned soldier, few and far between these days.
"And welcome back to the two of you," she added to Miguel and Heine. "Although you won't be here long, I'm afraid. Probably not long enough to even get out of those flight suits."
"We're being reassigned?" Miguel exclaimed. "What for."
"You may not have noticed, Flight Officer," Talia observed testily, "But my ship is just a little broken at the moment. We'll be deployed in close support of the Jachin Due forward base until there's time for repairs and the three of you are going to be joining their mobile suit detachment. Most of their pilots are right out of the flight school so they'll need the benefits of your experience." Her face softened. "The pilots quarters took some damage in the fight but you've got an hour or so to salvage what you can before you leave."
The youngsters saluted promptly before departing upwards again. Heine halted in the door. "Commander?"
"Mr. Westenfluss?"
"I'd just like to say that it's been an honor to serve aboard the Tzimisce, ma'am. I hope to have the chance again."
Talia nodded. "You've done very well, Mr Westenfluss. And if you're available for my flight group in the future, I'll be glad to have you aboard."
Flight Lieutenant Mu La Flaga smiled thinly at the exchange. After almost six years in service, he knew how the Confederacy Defense Militia really worked and recongised the offer and it's acceptance. It was more the rule than the exception for officers to form cotories of junior officers, promoting their careers in return for their junior's support and loyalty. It also allowed officers to pool their connections within the Confederacy to obtain the best possible supplies and assignments.
In this case, Commander Gladys had obtained the support of the Westenfluss should it be necessary in future, and would probably get a good flight officer for her next command if they could arrange the assignment. For his part, Heine would have a mentor, and likely a shot at Flight Lieutenancy earlier than would normally have been the case, as well as the protection of a patron favored by the Dullindal family. It was hard for him to criticise - he knew his own career would not have done so well had he not had the La Flaga name to fall back upon and a mentor in the late Admiral Halliburton, but objectively, he had to worry about how it divided the Militias against themselves.
"I imagine you don't have much in the way of kit, Lieutenant," Talia asked him, breaking him out of his reverie.
"Nothing I'm not carrying," he said, spreading his hands illustratively. Since all he was wearing was the standard flightsuit, unencumbered by even a survival pack, that meant he probably didn't have anything more than whatever he wore beneath it - not even a uniform.
"Well, I think some of our supply rooms survived," Talia advised the man. "We should at least be able to provide some of the basics. Go requisition yourself a couple of uniforms before you leave - they'll not do anyone any good here and you can't wander around in a flight suit forever."
.oOo.
It was slightly more than an hour later that the three mobile suits, somewhat patched up but still a long way from being fully operational, stepped out of the hanger one at a time (the catapults were out of action and would be for at least another couple of days) and flew slowly across the kilometre or so of empty space that seperated the Tzimisce from the looming mass of Jachin Due.
The asteroid had been tunnelled out during a mining operation centuries ago, and then the tunnels had been dug into storage and facilities for freelance asteroid miners ever since. It had taken almost a month for tugs to bring it out to the jump point, but the thick rock would provide a good layer of defense against most weapons, protecting the hanger bays buried deep inside. A sliding door covered one of the old mining shafts and once the three suits entered, it closed behind them. Three more doors shielded the interior of the asteroid where a dock once used by small one-man prospecting skiffs now held almost thirty GINNs.
Techs with lighted batons steered the new arrivals towards berths near the back were repair gear was being prepared. Obviously, getting their suits up and running would be an immediate priority for the base. From the look of the paintsprayer, they'd also be getting repainted at the same time.
A slight woman with close-cropped black hair was standing just inside the airlock once they had disembarked from their suits and entered the base itself. All three men saluted as they saw that her red uniform jacket had the single silver star of a Commander on both epalettes. "Welcome to Jachin Due," she told them, returning the salute. "I'm Commander Noin, the flight group's commanding officer. Or chief babysitter, as it sometimes comes down to."
"Flight Lieutenant La Flaga," Mu replied. "Pleased to be aboard. Should I ask about the babies?"
Noin grimaced. "They're not as bad as pilots go," she explained. "But the average age of pilot in our flight group is seventeen, and that's with the handful of experienced pilots pulling the average up."
Mu winced. Twenty-odd teenagers convinced of their own immortality and with all the confidence of a pilot who'd never seen combat... it sounded quite nerve-wraking.
"They're really scraping the barrel," muttered Miguel from his lofty status as an eighteen year old and ace.
"I'll expect you to be an example to them, Flight Officer Aiman," Noin replied. "I'd offer to keep you together, but frankly, I need to spread your experience as widely as possible. With the three of you, we have thirty mobile suits. I'm going to shuffle that into six teams of five and put one of you into each group." She pulled out a clipboard. "Mr. Aiman will be in Team Gold under Lieutenant Matthews. He's got seniority but no actual combat experience, and he's smart enough to listen to advice. Mr Westenfluss, you get to play nursemaid to Team Orange under Lieutenant Olor. She's not senior at all I'm afraid, but she is connected so try to be nice while you're in the base. If she gets out of line outside, take over. That's a direct order from me and I'll back you to the hilt."
Heine gulped. That was a legal order - barely - but it was not one that any officer in the Militias wanted to hear. The Families had long memories for slights and if he wound up ousting Lieutenant Olor then there was every chance of a feud breaking out between the two families.
Noin, for her part, smiled thinly as she saw the hint drop in. "The pilot quarters are seperated by team," she said. "You shouldn't have any difficulty finding them. Here," she passed each of them a sheet of paper from the clipboard. "Room numbers for each Team and the briefing room. Go meet your people and get some sleep. The best guess is that we have at least a few more hours before the Etiyokeans can concentrate their assault force."
"So what burden do I receive, Commander?" Mu asked once the boys were out of sight around a corner. "I notice that you didn't want to name names around the others."
"They'll hear soon enough," Noin replied drily. "Team Violet is made up of pilots with the highest connections."
"Council?" Mu asked.
"Committee," she confessed.
The blond was severely tempted to start beating his head against the wall. Flying with pilots connected to the Confederacy Council would be awkward enough. When they were connected to members of the Militias Command Committee, things would be about a hundred times worse. "Who?" he asked faintly.
"Joule, Amalfi, Elsmann and Zala."
Mu buried his face in one gloved hand. Patrick Zala was currently the deputy chairman of the Committee, and Ezra Joule would probably replace him if Zala managed to unseat the incumbent chairman during the next elections. That made keeping his squad alive and out of enemy hands into an almost national priority. "I'm trying to imagine how things could get worse, and right now I'm running short on options," he admitted.
"Well, at least we have a little warning," Noin pointed out. "Every minute they don't attack is a little readier that we are."
"That's assuming they don't blindside us again," Mu pointed out. "We still don't know how they managed to get into Zjevlovecoe without going through Okireul. We had the jump point from Nyiiureul locked solid and that's the only route between the clusters. If they manage to blindside us again, well, we could lose the whole front."
"That mustn't happen," Noin said flatly. "The political situation's looking pretty shaky as it is. If we take another major defeat it might not be Zala or Clyne in the Chairman's seat come the election. If we get some whacko pacifist, then this war's over and it'll be the Alliance all over again."
Mu sighed. "Well hell, I guess we'll have to win then."
"And if we need a miracle," Noin suggested, a slight grin crossing her face. "We have you and Rau le Creuset here, that's doubly lucky."
She spent much of the next few hours wondering at the shadow that crossed his face at her wisecrack.
.oOo.
With the surprise lost, all that the Enforcers could do was either abandon their attack or proceed anyway. In the grand tradition of gamblers anyway, they put all their chips on the table and less than eight hours after the Tzimisce's arrival, six of their Daedalus-class Assault Carriers jumped in rapid succession.
The problem with attacking through a jump point is that you're attacking blindly, without sure knowledge of what the defenses will be, while the defenders know that any attack will have to come through a relatively limited space. The best hope is that the defenders cannot know exactly when that attack will come through and it is not and never had been possible to keep defenses at full readiness at all times.
Without surprise, the Enforcers knew that they would face defenses readied for them. But they also knew that wars are not won without risk. Six assault carriers was a formidable force to lead them through: each was sixty-percent larger than the Enterprise and carried sixty-percent more suits, albeit the smaller and more fragile models that the factories of Greater Etiyoke were turning out in such numbers. They lacked the formidable energy armament of the smaller ship, but then again, there were six of them and all of the almost one thousand suits they carried were the variable fighters that had proven so useful against the larger Confederacy mobile suits so far.
All they needed was to win some space for the fleet carriers to emerge and sheer numbers could carry the day.
But in victory or defeat, this battle could not but cost them. Primed for the arrival, it took less than a second for the weapon buoys to open fire. Four seconds later they were gone, the cheap beam weapons destroying themselves as they each fired only one shot. Defense plan Alpha-Delta Seven dealt with just such a rapid transit and in accordance with its directives a quarter of the buoys had targetted each of the first four ships to transit. Assault Carriers were tough ships... but not that tough.
As the First Battle of Alpha Iayuvi reached it's sixth second, thousands of Enforcer personnel died in the silvery balls of plasma fire that had been their ships. But the ships had jumped with their catapults primed for rapid launch and more than a third of their suits had already been away before death arrived. So too, the survivors of the first wave were launching rapidly, and a sprinkling of red lights fanned out from the jump point in Rau's holodisplay. Rather too many for his liking were headed for the nearer of the two fortresses, Boaz.
For a moment, the young Admiral hesitated, pondering amendments to his plans. But there was little time and he dared not add confusion to the concern amongst his crews. The odds had been cut and less than six hundred variable fighters threatened his two hundred and fifty mobile suits and the ships that supported them. The Assault Carriers, he ignored. There would be no more transits into the system until the Enforcers knew that nothing was in place to threaten their precious fleet carriers. Assault Carriers, for all their expense, were designed to be expended breaking through warp points. Fleet Carriers were not.
No, until one of those Assault Carriers returned to call in a second wave, the battle was down only to them.
The deck beneath him shuddered as the Confederate's engines fired and it led the ranked squadrons of cruisers deeper towards the jump point and away from Boaz. The two bases were on their own - only by pushing close enough to underline the threat he posed, could he force the Enforcers to break off. And the only way to do that was to survive the hundreds of variable fighters threatening to engluf his command in entirety.
The lights of beam cannon began to stab across the blackness of space.
.oOo.
On Jachin Due, there had been little time for the new arrivals to grow acquainted with their comrades. Exhausted by the running battle in the Zjevlovecoe system, they desperately needed to sleep before the invaders arrived and all three were asleep when sirens and red lamps banished any hope of further rest.
"They're attacking?" Nicol Amalfi exclaimed in surprise from the desk at the side of the small barracks that housed the five pilots of Team Violet. He was a slender, green-haired youth, almost fragile in appearance. "But they don't have surprise."
"Perhaps they were counting on us thinking they wouldn't without that," the slightly older boy brooding by the window muttered, lifting the helmet that lay beside him. Athrun Zala had his father's coloring, but it remained to be seen if he would grow into the same powerful build.
The only one of them not already in a flightsuit was Mu, who skinned into his with ruthless speed, barely flinching even at the sanitary fittings. "Perhaps you should be getting to your suits?" he suggested gently and the four pilots jumped to obey, Yzak Joule smirking at the perceived rebuke to Athrun.
Mu shook his head as he followed them out of the room, sealing up his flightsuit as he walked. Was I ever that bad? he asked himself. The sad thing was that he probably had been, back when he was a teenager. It had taken several hard knocks for him to get over the after-effects of adolesence and he suspected that these youngsters were about to have just such a collision with reality in the form of a murthering great battle.
In the docks, the mobile suits of Team Blue were already vanishing into the catapults. On the far side of the cavern from the entrance passage, the catapults were set to launch five suits at once, allowing the docks to empty in rapid succession. Commander Noin's Team Red were moving to launch the moment the catapults were clear and Mu could see Miguel Aiman's suit leaving the gantry to join the rest of Team Gold.
The techs had worked wonders in the little time that they had had, Mu noted as he moved quickly along the gantrys to his own GINN. There was still sign of damage, but all the necessary systems were operational and if the paint was lacking in a few places, at least the violet trim had been reapplied.
"Right then, boys," he ordered. "Get your crates moving and in line for the catapults. And make sure you're at one hundred percent ready status before you get on the catapult. Once you're on it there's no time for you to back off and get a spare ammo pack or the like. Check in."
"Yzak Joule, ready," snapped the teenager.
"Elsmann ready," his buddy added, his suit carrying the Team's heavy beam cannon.
"Athrun Zala, ready."
"Nicol Amalfi, ready."
"Mu La Flaga," the blond finished. "Flight Control, Violet Leader. My Team is ready to launch."
There was a crackle on the radio and then an unfamiliar voice replied: "Okay, Violet Leader. You are clear to launch after Team Green."
That left Team Orange last in line, Mu noted as only one of the suits from that team was out of the maintenance racks. From the look of the blackened armor, it was Heine Westenfluss who was waiting for the rest of his squad and he didn't envy the boy having to deal with a lieutenant who had let her squad get that slack.
Team Green vanished as the catapult hurled them out into space and Team Gold stepped into their places. Mu let the boys take up their positions behind the yellow-trimmed GINNs (calling them Team Yellow would have been... indiplomatic, so standard nomeclature was Gold instead and a few Militias even paid for gold paint) and then filled the open slot himself, noting that it left him right behind Miguel. The new arm was noticiably better polished that the original that still held the heavy beam weapon that Miguel favored.
Then Team Gold diminished rapidly into the distance and it was time from Team Violet to step up.
As a child, Mu had never liked roller-coasters. As a pilot, he did not enjoy catapult launches. The flood of adrenaline as he was suddenly accelerated to high velocities took away all control of his suit for the seconds before leaving the catapult and he rationalised that it was the inability to maneuver that rubbed him the wrong way, although it was probably more the way that it made him feel like he was going to throw up. This time was no better than it ever was, but it was over quickly and the five mobile suits soared away from Jachin Due into space that was brightly lit by fiery explosions and the brilliant beams of energy that were causing some of the former.
"Holy shit," Dearka Elsmann muttered under his breath.
"Keep it together, kid," Mu ordered automatically. "Form up on me, some of those fighters are headed our way." The four young pilots moved their suits around into a textbook formation and started to actually put their training to use figuring out what was going on rather than just looking at the pretty lights.
"Violet Leader, Red Leader," Noin ordered over the radio. We have sixty, six-zero, incoming VFs. We're going out to meet them. You'll be backing my team, Orange backs Gold and the others get to play reserve."
"Will comply," Mu replied and vectored towards Noin's flight path, the rest of his team following like dutiful ducklings behind their mother. He switched his radio back to the Team channel. "Okay, I don't know what the academy tells you about Variable Fighters, so here's the straight dope. They're smaller, and more agile, than our suits and fighter-mode they're a lot faster. As suits they're slower and they haven't upgraded to proper beam weapons yet, just small point defense lasers on the heads. Their cannon can hurt our suits if they get a good hit in, but they aren't up to a one-shot-kill. Their missiles can kill you right out, but they're mostly for anti-ship and base work. It takes a damn good pilot to get the best out of them but they don't have any more of those than we do right now. Don't try to tail them, just take what shots you can and try not to let them get behind you - explosive shells can fuck your thrusters up and then you're a sitting duck."
He frowned in thought. "And Dearka, watch where your shooting - your beam cannon will shoot right through one of them so try not to frag a friendly suit behind one of them: it may sound far-fetched but I've seen it happen before."
"Right..." Dearka drawled, disbelievingly, but there was no time for further advice as the incoming variable fighters began to fire off volleys of missiles from below their wings, targeting the approaching mobile suits rather than the still distant fortress. Noin's squadron didn't break formation, instead shouldering their beam rifles and opening fire on the incoming targets. A moment later, the missiles were close enough for Mu to pick one off and his Team followed his example, green beams reaching out to explode the missiles before they reached Team Red.
Dearka cursed as he found that his heavy beam cannon was relatively little use for this precision work. "Save it," Mu snapped. "You've got almost enough range to hit the fighters, so deal with them!"
The younger blond's eyes widened and then he brought the cannon up and the green beam reached out and blew straight through one of the fighters. He really was a decent shot, Mu noted and then frowned as the Enforcers evened the score, a missile detonating close enough to one of Noin's pilots to cave in the side of her suit, sending shrapnel through the cockpit.
There was no time to grieve as the rest of Team Red plunged into the variable fighters and a vicious dogfight halted the advance. Team Gold entered the mix a moment later and suits on both sides began to die. The variable fighters had taken suit mode to deal with their opponents at close quarters and it became increasingly difficult for the still approaching Orange and Violet teams to pick out targets as they reached beam rifle range. Dearka was surprised to find that he actually had to break off one shot as a GINN flew across the path that his beam would have taken. He could see suddenly just how easy it would be for his beam cannon to accidentally hit one of his own side, and became far more cautious with placing his shots.
For their parts, Nicol and Athrun stayed close together, low voiced comments concentrating their shots upon the same targets. It was a good technique and they were hitting almost as often as Mu, which was more than could be said for Yzak, whose wild shooting was well nigh as much of a threat as Dearka's potent beam cannon to the Militia's mobile suits. It was with some relief that they came into close quarters and Yzak was able to stow his rifle, taking out his sword to beat back the variable fighters as they tried to swarm over Dearka. The lure of destroying one of the weapons that could seriously threaten a carrier was enough to bring them closer to the defending GINN than they would have allowed normally and Yzak snarled triumphantly as he stabbed the short blade into the lower chest of one fighter, crippling it. Then his other hand closed around the head of the much smaller suit and crushed it easily before discarding the suit for Dearka to finish with a quick shot from his cannon.
.oOo.
Several thousand miles away, Rau le Creuset was also facing a wave of Enforcers. Together with the sixty or so variable suits attacking Jachin Due, the Enforcers had detached about eighty suits to attack Boaz - a interesting number since the standard organisation for Enforcer mobile suit forces was to group five squadrons of twelve fighters into a single wing, such as that attacking Jachin Due. The reinforced wing attacking Boaz might simply be an intelligence miscue: although Boaz was larger than the other asteroid, it had a smaller force of mobile suits. If they expected a larger force, then reinforcing their attack group would be wise. But it could also indicate that specialist squadrons were attached to the wing for some nefarious purpose.
Nefariousness was a trait that Rau was more than willing to ascribe to the Unity Government. After all, they saw themselves as the successors of the Alliance, and in it's day, there had been few depths that that long deceased polity had been unwilling to sink to in order to maintain their personal power.
However, there was little he could do for either fortress at the moment. The detachment of a hundred and forty variable fighters still left him with well over three hundred fighters descending upon his fleet and there was no choice but to break through them if he was to retake the jump point. Fortunately, the numbers favored him more than anywhere else in the battle - between the one hundred and eight mobile suits aboard the Enterprise, the twenty aboard the Confederate, and the complements of the twelve remaining Musai-class ships, he was outnumbered less than two to one, and while the variable fighters might have the potential to be a match for the GINN, neither their tactics nor their technology had reached that point yet. That and twenty-odd warships should be enough to carry the day.
The volleys of missiles from the incoming variable fighters had been launched from closer than usual, and there had been more of them - a mid-range missile that hadn't been encountered before, but the GINN's had at least some practise in dealing with such a threat and most of the missiles had been destroyed before they could reach engagement ranges. Perhaps inevitably, however, some were missed. Not one had hit the Confederate, but there had been minor hits against the Ventrue, Gangrel and Setite, and a lucky hit to the starboard missile bay of the heavy cruiser Maldon Bridge, had not only taken out the missile by but triggered a sympathetic explosion in the magazines, temporarily disabling the ship's forward beam turret.
Now the fighters switched to suit mode and penetrated the formations, with mobile suits in hot pursuit. Point defense was a chancy affair, as likely to hit a friendly suit as a it was one of the enemy, but GINN's could take such a hit better than the variable fighters could and the attackers were firing back with autocannon little diffierent from the Militias point defense, while the GINN's beam rifles would destroy or cripple an enemy suit with almost every hit.
A number of the Enforcer pilots had been carrying loads of short range missiles and held them back for use at point-blank range and fire spread through the fleet. Not all of them had made it this far and the GINNs had paid especial attention to the handful of fighters still carrying missiles, but more than half ripple-fired heavy loads of the small missiles at ranges too short for any meaningful evasion. Virtually all of them died instants later, as vengeful GINN's lashed out, but the damage was done.
The Azincour and the Malkavian simply exploded and the luckless Maldon Bridge[/i] drifted out of formation, engines in ruins. The Assamite pulled back to take the heavy cruiser in tow, for without its turreted beam cannon it would be of little value in a stand-up fight. The Confederate had taken the brunt of no less than three such attacks and staggered out of the crossfire trailing fire and with four turrets out of action, but the others were still spitting fire and they only needed to go a little further before the two surviving assault carriers would be in range.
From one side of Rau's bridge there was a cry of dismay and he jerked around to see the Communications Officer on his feet, looking over at the Radar Officer. "Enterprise just dropped off the net," he reported.
"She's still there," Radar responded. "Brining up a visual."
The shot from an aft-pointed camera sprang up on a side-screen and the computers magnified and cleaned up the feed until they could see the Enterprise clearly. The large ship was indeed intact, and its guns were still firing, but there was only fire where the conning tower should have been.
It was the Flight Control Officer who explained the mystery. "Kamikaze!" he reported. "One of our GINNs saw a variable fighter fly right into the Enterprise's bridge. It must have killed everyone up there instantly, and taken out the radios as well."
"Dammit," Rau growled, watching as the officers all reflexively checked the windows of their own bridge. "See if you can make contact with their Combat Information Centre," he ordered the Communications Officer. Even if the main radio is out, they should have a back-up online soon."
"We're in range of the Carriers!" the Gunnery Officer reported.
Rau nodded. "Switch fire to them immediately," he ordered.
Outside, the large turrets turned slightly, bringing the powerful sixteen-inch beam cannon to bear on the targets in front of them. Behind them, the greater range of the eighteen-inch beam cannon on the Enterprise had come into range at almost the same moment and one Assault Carrier staggered under the barrage, tough armour deforming under the beams.
There was a sudden actinic flash from one side and Rau grimaced. From that direction, the source could only be Boaz, and it didn't take a genius to realise that the light was too bright to have been caused by mere plasma warheads. "Warning to all ships," he said in the silence. "Also to Jachin Due for relay to planetary bases. UG Enforcers have employed battlefield anitmatter weapons."
.oOo.
The flash of light was also visible from Jachin Due and similar conclusions were being drawn, although except in the asteroid's command centre, there was little time to spare.
"Are they likely to use those here?" the Commander serving as executive officer asked warily.
Commodore Noventa shook his head. "If they haven't yet, then it's not likely," he said solidly from his chair in the centre of the compartment, not taking his eyes off the holo-display that was trying to keep up with the dogfight that was moving steadily towards the base. Commander Noin had had to call in her two reserve teams of mobile suits already and the Confederacy suits were down to little more than half-strength even so. The Enforcers had lost more than twenty fighters, however, and given time the GINNs might have been able to wear them down.
By that time, however, the fight would be taking place inside Jachin Due and that was just a little closer than Noventa was willing to allow them.
"Signal Commander Noins," he ordered. "We're going to join in the fun. Ready all missile launchers for maximum fire in thirty seconds."
Outside, in response to his signals, the scattered Confederacy mobile suits regrouped and it was not at all coincidental that the locations that they formed up upon left an open route for the variable fighters to use to close on Jachin Due. The Enforcers were quick to exploit the gap and the remains of two squadrons shifted to fighter mode and punched through, trying to engage the asteroid at pointblank range.
Across Jachin Due, hatches sprang open and to the dismay of the Enforcers, magnetic catapults began to fling missiles at them, rockets flaring to life once the missiles cleared their launch tubes. Noventa's gunners called for a staggered drive activation, so the first volley was barely a head of the next two as they slashed into the variable fighters, engulfing them in plasma fireballs.
In fighter mode, the variable fighters were not agile enough to evade the targeting systems of the missiles, but the handful that switched to mobile suit mode discovered that they were too slow to get out of the killzone before the blasts tore through them. It was Catch-22 with a vengeance, and by the time Jachin Due ceased firing, it's small magazines reduced to only half their previous state, not one of the variable fighters that had pushed through survived.
The remaining fighters, now only equal in number to their opponents, found themselves fighting not to destroy the enemy but to stay alive. Then Noventa played his trump card and the Tzimisce swept majestically out from behind the asteroid-fortress it had been hidden by, its two beam cannon raking at the Enforcers.
Within moments, the variable fighters were fleeing, their fighter modes faster than anything that the GINNs could manage.
"Good job, Commander Noins," Noventa broadcast. "Get your suits back inside. Commander Gladys and the Tzimisce will pick up anyone who can't move under their own power. We've got just enough time to rearm you, if they decide to send in a second wave."
Shaking his head, Mu took stock of the survivors. His own team was doing well enough - Nicol's suit was going to need pick up, judging by the damage to his thrusters, and Dearka's machine was, quite literally, headless. The teen had also wrecked his beam cannon, driving the muzzle into the back of one variable fighter and rapid firing it through the briefly surprised Enforcer and into a second fighter behind it, but he was mobile and the other two were both more or less intact.
Other Teams had not done so well. Not by far. Heine Westenfluss had made it through, but he was commanding only four suits, an amalgamation of Team Orange and Team Gold that did not include poor Miguel, who'd been shot to pieces somewhere. Team Green was just gone, and Team Red, having been reduced to two suits during the dogfight, was flying beside Team Blue, which had oddly enough managed to survive with all five suits still in apparently mint condition - quite a surprise for a bunch of rookies, but he had to give them credit. For all their lack of experience, most of the novice pilots had done as well as more experienced soldiers could have been expected to.
"Nicol, signal the Tzimisce for pick up," he ordered. "Same for you Dearka."
"I can still fly," protested Dearka.
"I know that, kid, but without the sensors in your head, your fine manuevering is going to be iffy and we don't need you demolishing the docks when you land. Just take it easy. You've all done well."
"Well!?" Yzak protested. "We got beat on like drums. Look at Team Blue - not even a scratch on their damn paintwork."
"At least we're all alive," Nicol pointed out softly and all eyes went to the trail of broken suits that trailed out behind them."
"Nicol's right," Athrun said firmly. "And next time we'll do better. But for now we should get aboard. We'll need to get ready for a second wave. Without Boaz, we'll be more of a target for them."
.oOo.
There was no second wave however, and no sooner had the few score variable fighters to survive and lifeboats from the more damaged of the two Assault Carriers been taken aboard the less damaged of the pair, than the Daedalus-class vanished with the distinctive haloing effect of a jump. It's sistership blew up almost immediately in a ball of antimatter that made it perfectly clear that that there had been a reserve of antimatter weapons aboard.
That was ample reason for their decision not to scuttle the ship by the conventional means before leaving of course. A plasma reactor (or several reactors, no one in the Confederacy had gotten a good look at the insides of the UG's new carriers yet) would quite neatly remove a ship from existence if certain safeties were overridden. But antimatter was another matter entirely - the warheads would inevitably be triggered by such an explosion (probably the trigger mechanism in this case) - the blast had scoured the jumpoint clean of not only the carrier, but of all four of its broken sister ships as well, and would have destroyed the only surviving ship as well if it hadn't jumped first.
It also meant that Rau would be wary about sending any ships into or through the jump point until it had had a day or two to settle. Antimatter detonations did funny things to jump points sometimes, and using a jump engine in a jump point unsettled in that way was... well perhaps not fatal. The ships that had tried might have ended somewhere intact. But none had ever been heard from again. The use of antimatter weapons against a jump point was, of course, something that Confederacy absolutely prohibited. For that matter, although a reserve of antimatter warheads was maintained, the Militias hadn't fired one in anger since the last Alliance stronghold was defeated in the Lesser Etiyoke Cluster, over a hundred and ninety years before.
The Unity Government evidently felt differently.
Not that Rau would have attempted a pursuit anyway. It was a given that a second wave of Assault Carriers could be about to emerge, since the jump point in Zjevlovecoe wouldn't have been affected, and that there would definitely be a sizeable force of ships that would have followed up the attack had it been successful in critically damaging the defenses.
And those defenses were looking just a little on the threadbare side at the moment. Over a hundred and fifty mobile suits had been destroyed, as had seven cruisers. Several more, as well as the Enterprise, were limping towards Jachin Due for emergency repairs to get them back to the orbital dockyards over Alpha VIII. The military bases on the moons of the gas giant had been built by the Alliance's Terran Union predecessors and had been home away from home for the Militias of Alpha Iayuvi's three inhabited worlds and seven shoals of orbital habitats since the Confederacy liberated the system from the Alliance. They were also on the far side of the system at this point in their orbits and at least a week's travel for an undamaged warship.
The idea of launching a counterattack with one battleship and several cruisers, all of them still damaged to one extent or another did not fill Rau with glee, but he supposed that for all that his opposite number in the Zjevlovecoe system couldn't be sure that there wasn't a heavy battlegroup on the way out from the system's planets, quite capable of doing so. A useful illusion, he decided.
It was only a pity, he mused, that La Flaga's damnable luck had held out. The Unity Government Enforcers had been stopped cold and it would have been nice to cement that particular victory by getting rid of that particular irritant. A little public display of grief might have been in order, and then drinking ostenisbly to his elder half-brother's memory and actually in celebration that the only legitimate offspring of Aldo La Flaga had departed the universe.
As it was, that individual had not only survived, he had led the sons of several prominent politicans into battle and somehow managed not to get any of them killed. Failing in that would at the least of been a black eye for the La Flagas, politically. Instead, it would bolster their position and while the younger La Flaga seemed genuinely unconcerned by the influences that shaped the Confederacy, his father would not be so naive.
But it was not and never had been an ideal universe, Rau reminded himself. He had cemented his own reputation with this battle and it would be... obsessive, dangerously so, to let his dislike of his blood father overwhelm the practicalities of the moment. With that settled for the moment, he turned his attention to taking account of the casualties and of rescue operations for lifeboats and ejected pilots who might be endangered by the usual detritius of battle. On another level, he started mentally composing the many reports that he would be required to make on the battle.
BuShips really needed to do something about those damned conning towers, for one thing. And there ought to be some way to deal with the explosive shells of variable fighter cannon. Admittedly, a mobile suit couldn't be armoured everywhere if they were expected to move, but there should be something. He made a note to check reference texts on body armour design - the same problem had probably existed back on Terra back when the deadliest projectile was the arrow so there might be some useful ideas there.
.oOo..oOo. .oOo.
Major Roy Fokker watched as the halos of energy that surrounded the transport faded to reveal a subtly different star field. The halo had been even more intense than usual, which he guessed was probably because of the additional energy that was necessary to make a jump through a Class-III jump point.
The initial theory of jump points had been laid out by physicists in the late twenty-first century, although the basic concept had been looked at hopefully for at least a century before then. It had not been until the twenty-third century that the first human jump transit had been made by the International Science Vessel Discovery. Fifty years later, when the body of knowledge involving jump points had grown exponentially, the possibility of Class-II jump points had been raised: even harder to detect or use, but perhaps leading out of the closed network of the Iayuvi Cluster's star systems.
The collapse of the New United Nations delayed the solution of these problems for decades as the colonies were forced back upon their own resources until Terra managed to put it's affairs in order and re-establish interstellar trade. In that span, the old first-generation jumpships, little more than jumpdrives to which between two and nine sublight transports could connect for the journey through a jump point, were replaced by second-generation jumpships that could economically haul cargos from orbit of one world out to a jump point, make transit and then reach another world.
But the new government was not entirely welcome on the colonies, having had two generations to get used to home rule, so when Adrienne Bashir managed to locate and transit through a Class-II jump point from Delta Iayuvi into the Emyoje Cluster, she triggered a rapid surge of migration away from the control of the Terran Union and it's genetically augmented ruling caste, the Coordinators. When the Union followed, the Independent Governments resisted, at first with no great success. Only in the mid-twenty-sixth century would the Etiyoke cluster governments create the Alliance that would break the back of the Terran Union and exterminate the pureblooded Coordinators, banning the biological research that had led to them.
But only a iconclastic few in the physics community had theorised what Roy had just experienced: Class-III jump points leading out of the Forty-Two Worlds. In the closing days of the Alliance, when the upstart Confederacy had shattered the hardwon peace enforced after the defeat of the Terran Union, the Hawking Flotilla had left the Uvbeyou system with the seeds of a new colony, a military cadre and the entire faculty of the Alliance Insitute of Applied Sciences, jumping blindly through the only Class-III jump point they had been able to locate with their preliminary research - research of which they carried every trace with them.
And for two hundred years they had hidden here, in New Etiyoke, preparing for the day of the return when they would reestablish the Alliance once more. It was truly ironic that the colony had included so many with partial descent from the Coordinators (whose diluted advantages had still allowed future generations to rise to great heights) that today almost everyone in the orbital colonies that clustered around Osiris could claim at least some of that blood.
It was on Osiris, where painfully slow terraforming was still proceeding, that the Unity Government's Enforcers had their ultimate headquarters, despite the establishment of the Senate in Alpha Etiyoke. And it was there that Colonel Bruno Gloval and Major Roy Fokker had been summoned, as the senior survivors of the debacle at Alpha Iayuvi.
Gloval, a tall man with a thick black mustache, was looking out of the same window - no great surprise as it was the only one in the observation lounge. It must have been a body blow for the man to be taken away from his command when it needed to be refitted and prepared for new use, the Icarus had been an almost new ship and a prestigious assignment. Now, because of orders he had protested fruitlessly, he was likely to see his career go down in flames.
A similar fate might await Roy of course, but he was more junior, merely the commander of a wing of variable fighters. Of course, that wing was little more than two squadrons now, so there was likely to be some official disfavor for that, but there was little chance that he would be sidelined. Experienced pilots were in short supply for variable fighters. Those who lived long enough to make full use of the Phoenix were able to work miracles when employed correctly - which they had not been at Alpha Iayuvi.
"Have you ever been to Osiris before, sir?" he asked.
Gloval shook his head solemnly. "No, Major," he replied. "I was assigned to the Ezoe front until I was recalled to take command of the Icarus. But you were one of the first from the old Militias to transfer to a variable fighter - you must trained here?"
"Yes sir. The newer flight schools were still being set up so I came here to learn. It's an interesting planet but I don't believe that you'll have a chance to see it up close. The military command centre occupies one of the colony cylinders and movement is restricted. I doubt there's much of a nightlife up there either."
"Well, I suppose that we may have more important things on our minds than the night life, very soon," Gloval said and, apparently bored with the conversation, turned away from the window, taking out his pipe. Then he spotted a no smoking sign and put the pipe back inside his jacket. Honestly, you'd think that the New Etiyokeans were afraid of catching some disease off of a little tobacco, he thought in disgust.
.oOo.
The chamber being used for the tribunal was silent for a long moment after the last testimony had been taken. Located under one of the 'secure administration' buildings in the Horus VII orbital habitat (meaning that it was an outwardly normal office building that a mobile suit would have been hard pressed to damage, set in a parkland setting that a carrier task group would have a hard time threatening), the room was, as custom dictated, darkened. A single spotlight pinpointed the ordinary looking office chair welded to the floor only a metre and a half away from the door, but the officers sat behind the U-shaped table on the podium that the chair faced, were lit only by the muted glow of their workstation displays.
"Troubling," said one officer from one of the bends in the U.
When it became clear that he did not propose to clarify the word, a woman halfway down the other arm cleared her throat. "In what sense do you mean, tribune?" By tradition, all officers on a tribunal were refered to as such, rather than by rank, as they all carried equal authoruty and responsibility for the tribunal's findings. In practise, everyone knew who out-ranked who and the seating order reflected this, with the senior officer at the base of the U and the most junior at the far ends.
"It means that that idiot Hayes has cost us thousands of Enforcers, hundreds of variable fighters and five of our newest carriers," grunted a man sat right beside the central chair.
"And we appointed him," said the first man cuttingly. Eyes widened around the table.
"He has previously showed considerable ability," offered the woman. "And it is important that the upper commands not be held exclusively by our people. The cluster is happy to unite with our leadership, but not if they perceive themselves as being under our rule. Opening command slots to officers drawn from the Militias is necessary."
"Hayes is ambitious," offered another officer. "If he loses his rank over this, he'll muddy the waters. Say it's predjudice against an outsider, or that we're not being aggressive enough. Anything to keep his name clean."
"Someone needs to pay for this cock-up?" the first man asked. "Tribunals are not witch hunts. Just because we could have someone courtmartialed, does not mean that we have to. We were defeated. It happens. We cannot expect otherwise. What is important is that we learn the lessons of the defeat and do not repeat the mistakes that were made."
There was another silence, before the woman in the central seat spoke, her voice sure and authoritive. "Marshal Hayes cannot be entrusted with another field command. Offer him assignment to a anministrative post. The Fortress Command in the Pedeoo system will require an officer of his grade. Responsibility for one of the few routes into the Cluster, but one behind the frontlines. Other outsiders will be promoted as we continue to expand the Enforcers, reducing the disparity."
There were nods around the room.
"As for the lessons learned, we should bring Colonel Gloval and Major Fokker... Brigadier Gloval and Lieutenant Colonel Fokker, I should say, after their heroics at Alpha Iayuvi..."
More nods. Publically promoting outsider officers involved would make it clear to the officer corps that there would be no scapegoats and mitigate the effects of sidelining Hayes.
"And discuss with them what changes must be made to prevent further such debacles."
Within moments, the two officers had returned. Since there was only one chair, neither sat in it.
"Gentlemen," the woman in the central seat began, "It has become clear during this tribunal that we need to review our fleet's tactical balance. As the most recent officers to operate against the Confederacy militias, your opinions are hereby solicited. Mr. Fokker, pre-war exercises indicated that variable fighters would have a critical advantage against mobile suits whereas since the initial surprise wore off, they have actually required a significant edge in numbers to defeat them. Your thoughts?"
Roy straightened. "Ma'am, the variable fighters now employed are not those simulated in the pre-war exercises. The proposed variable fighter was to operate with an onboard plasma fusion reactor and carry a weapon load equivalent to that of a current model GINN. However, the variable fighters placed in production are operating on high-density power cells which limits their operational range and cannot power a full-scale beam rifle for more than a few shots. As a result, the fighters are using automatic cannon that are significantly less likely to destroy a target and do not have the endurance to keep fighting long enough to keep hitting the targets."
"The compromise was necessary in order to maintain our operational pace," another of the tribunes observed. "However, if the Pheonix cannot perform then perhaps it should be withdrawn until a fully operational variable fighter is available."
"They still give us a mobility advantage," the man next to him objected.
"With respect," Roy said. "We've also been slow to evolve doctrine for variable fighter operations. That's improving, but so are the Militias tactics to deal with us, and they've been making up ground rapidly. The longer they have to work out how to deal with us effectively, the less effective a new Variable Fighter will be."
"And they will have new suits of their own," added the tribune who had proposed withdrawing the Phoenix fighters. "Intelligence makes it clear that research is underway to build a new generation of their mobile suits, better equipped for anti-variable fighter operations. They may also have variable fighters of their own before long."
"Then we'll need to do something about that," Gloval said boldly. "Our carriers are excellent for carrying variable fighters and the lightweight mobile suits developed here, but they do not have the anti-shipping capability of the Militias warships. Unless we can improve our ability to take them on ship to ship, or regain our edge in mobile weapons, then we will not be able to maintain the offensive."
There was an outraged silence. Those before a tribunal were not expected to speak unless addressed.
The woman at the centre of the table nodded her head. "That is a concern," she agreed firmly. "And it must not be allowed to come to that. How do you propose that the matter be settled, Brigadier Gloval?"
Gloval blinked. "Brigadier?" he asked.
"That is one conclusion that the Tribunal has drawn," she replied.
"Ah," Gloval grunted. "Well, our assault through the jumppoint failed for two reasons. Firstly, we were too tentative. As soon as the assault carriers had launched their fighters, they should have left and a new wave come through. Cruisers and battleships to take the Militias ships with heavy weapons. We still have many captured from the Militas and we can't afford to waste them on patrols or second-line duties - we have to use them to bolster attacks. And we need to build more of them. The antimatter missiles worked, so they'll be warier of our fighters now - if we have a better fighter, we can use if against their mobile suits but we need dedicated anti-shipping fighters as well, ones that can carry the firepower to take down a warship not just peck at it the way that we have been doing."
"Do you concur with this, Lieutenant-Colonel?"
It took a moment for Roy to realise that the statement was being directed at him. "Yes ma'am. I've seen the specifications for the original variable fighters and they'll make a huge difference. The Phoenix is a good concept but the Valkyries would eat them for breakfast. Combine that with capital ships that can meet them head on and their current fleet can't stop us. We'd still have to consider what they might pull out of their hats, but we could handle everything they've shown us so far."
"Very well. If there are no further questions...?"
The other tribunes shook their heads one at a time.
"Thank you for your comments, Brigadier, Colonel. I believe that quarters have been arranged for you on the station and you can expect to receive instructions in the next forty-eight hours about your next postings."
.oOo.
"Brigadier Gloval?"
At the chessboard in the recreation room of the Bachelor Officers Quarters block he'd been assigned a small apartment in, Gloval looked up from the move he'd been about to make. By relative casualties he was losing, but he knew that the trap he'd been patiently laying was only a few moves away from snapping closed around his opponent's king. "Yes?" he asked, a slight bite in his voice.
The young woman standing at the door was only in her early twenties, but the cuffs of her white uniform jacket bore three gold rings, marking her as a Lieutenant-Colonel. She looked a little taken aback by the response, but not too much - white jackets marked officers acting as staff, be it the general staff here at the high command, or directly assisting a flag officer in the field, so she could hardly be unaccustomed to dealing with short-tempered senior officers.
"Brigadier, I'm Colonel Hayes," she told him. "I have your new orders."
The document that she held out was parchment, folded twice and sealed with red wax. It was an old tradition, one inherited from the Confederacy's Militias rather than the old Alliance Fleet, to relay certain orders on parchment. Green wax to confer a medal, black wax for a warrant of courtmartial... and red to assign the command of a ship. He could not help but to feel a surge of exceitement at the sight, although there was also a degree of surprise. Command of a ship was usually the responsibility of a Colonel or Lieutenant-Colonel, occasionally a Major if the ship was not a combatant, but almost never a Brigadier.
Taking the orders, he cracked the wax, sealed with the age old badge of Etiyoke: a dragon, a phoenix and a tiger, and unfolded the parchment. "Thank you, Colonel," he said absently, examining the orders and then paused, reading them more carefully. "Hmmm. I see that I shall be taking command from Colonel Lisa Hayes. Is this you?"
"Yes sir," she replied. "I've been overseeing the construction."
"Hmmm," he said again. "Have you indeed? In that case, Colonel, perhaps you could show me my new ship. I rather gather," he added, folding the parchment and tucking it inside his jacket. Unlike Lisa's his was the blue of a ship's crew. "That she will be a new experience for me."
Lisa smiled, more naturally. "Yes sir," she said. "I rather anticipated that you would want that."
"Good," Gloval said approvingly. "My apologies, Mr. Havel," he added to the Major who had been facing him across the chessboard. "I will have to finish beating you at chess another time."
The younger man raised one eyebrow at the comment, given the number of pieces taken, but didn't directly address the assertion. "Not a problem, Brigadier Gloval. And congratulations on your new command."
.oOo.
True to Lisa's words, there was a car waiting outside the building, to whisk them to the port, and a shuttle had been reserved for him. He had to wonder if this sort of treatment was standard at Horus, or whether it was something that he could expect now that he was a flag officer.
"There will be a short delay before we depart, sir," Lisa said apologeticallty. "The commander of our fighter group has also been named today, and he'll be joining us on the shuttle."
Somehow, Gloval wasn't surprised when Roy Fokker stepped out of the car that arrived a moment later. His guide was a blonde major with a coffee-coloured complexion - one of those odd combinations that made it very clear that she had Coordinator ancestry. Like Roy, she had the green jacket that marked a member of the mobile suit/variable fighter corps, but without the pilot's wings.
"Good Afternoon, Roy," Gloval said in greeting. "It would seem that we are both being assigned to the same ship once more."
"I suppose that they don't want to break up a winning combination, sir," Roy agreed. "Although I have to wonder what this ship's going to be - I didn't even know that there was a carrier called Alliance."
Gloval's eyes twinkled and both women hid grins. "Well, perhaps we should see for ourselves," the Brigadier suggested drily, and gestured for the women to lead the way to the shuttle.
.oOo.
The military docks that they set out for were orbitting almost half-a-million miles away from the high command's station and the inital clusters were crowded with factories for sub-assemblies. But as the shuttle threaded through the network they came across more and more docks where partly-built ships were surrounded by construction frameworks.
Most were Daedalus-class assault carriers and Prometheus-class fleet carriers, but there were others as well: small, blocky ships that Colonel Hayes identified as Birmingham-class escort carriers and round, clumsy looking ships that had been intended as missile cruisers but were now being modified before they had even been launched.
Right at the far end of the lines of ships lay a much larger framework. Rather than cutting between the structural members, Lisa guided the shuttle along the length towards the open mouth where the construction gantries had been removed so that the ship would be able to leave. When she rounded the final barriers to view, Roy gaped shamelessly and even Gloval was speechless.
The ship was huge - twelve hundred meteres long and almost four hundred wide, with a long flat deck leading back to massive engine blocks at the rear. A command structure reared up from the hull and long barrelled weapons jutted forward from turrets either side. "The first Alliance-class monitor," Lisa said reverently. "More than twice as large and ten times as powerful as any battleship in the history of the Forty-Two Worlds. She carries more than five hundred mobile suits and variable fighters, with primary armament of four railguns, eight eleven-inch beam cannon and a spinal antimatter beam cannon."
"Antimatter beam?" Gloval asked, incredulously. "A directed antimatter weapon!? Impossible!"
"Not at all," Lisa said confidently. "It's not something to use lightly, of course, but it's capable of devestating tight formations of vessels -"
"And if the ships move apart then they can't support each other against our fighters," exclaimed Roy. "Even the threat we could use it would weaken their defenses!"
Claudia chuckled. "Such enthusiasm, fly boy. And you haven't even seen one of your precious fighters aboard."
Roy gave her a suspicious look and then grinned. "Is that your way of telling me what I think you're saying...?"
"Let's just say that we won't be carrying Phoenix's into harm's way," she said smugly. "Orders were amended just yesterday and we'll be getting the first production runs of Valkyries - six full wings and almost half as many mobile suits to back them up."D for Drakensis
Contagious, rampant insanity isnt against the rules.
D for Drakensis
You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.
"How far do we have to go?" called the commander from her chair.
"Two thousand kilometers," replied the navigator, half-way across the smoke-filled compartment. "Two-fifty seconds at the current deceleration. We'll be below maximum jump velocity in two-thirty, jump engines ready in two-sixty!"
"All suits!" ordered the Flight Ops officer. "Make sure you're docked in two hundred seconds."
There was a crackle of responses over the ship-to-suit bands as the handful of defenders diverted just enough attention to respond from their primary mission of keeping the cruiser intact for those critical minutes.
Another wave of missiles hammered at the rakish ship and the bridge compartment shook as one of the explosions took off a radar array mounted nearby. A second later, the suit responsible exploded as a green beam of energy from one of the Tzimisce's own mobile suits blasted straight through it.
There were only three friendly suits out there - out of the five GINN that had been aboard at the beginning of the engagement, three had been destroyed and only one survivor from the Tzimisce's sister ship Lasombra's suits. The Lasombra had taken engine damage in the initial attack and, limping, had turned on their pursuers to give the other Musai-class ship a chance at escape. More than an hour had passed since they saw the flash of the plasma reactors losing containment and tearing the Lasombra apart.
Two more of the enemy mobile suits dashed in, discharging their missile loads before closing in with their cannon. The Lasombra's only survivor dived in, literally sweeping the missiles of one suit aside with it's shield as his beam rifle picked off the other volley. Then his green-trimmed suit writhed under the explosive shells of the suits. One of the Tzimisce's violet-trimmed suits was there suddenly however, and it's larger beam cannon tore one of the suits apart in catastrophic overkill as the anti-shipping weapon wasted it's energies on light-weight mobile suit.
The other suit's pilot saw that discretion was the better part of valor and his suit went through the familiar folding that converted it into a sleek aerospace fighter before zooming away to regroup for another attack.
"What's the threat assessment?" the Tzimisce's commander asked, and then grimaced when it became clear that radar officer was in no condition to reply. Ignoring a dozen safety regulations, the commander unstrapped and crossed the compartment in a single bound to check the readouts for herself.
"Unless they've gotten a lot faster, there's only one more squadron of that can reach us before we jump," she concluded. The odds looked bad - the enemy squadron was made up of an even dozen suits - but more than a few such squadrons had already been driven back by the handful of hardened veterans.
"Just once more wave," the Flight Ops officer promised the weary pilots. "We're almost home."
"Get them docked," the commander ordered. "They can fight from there and we can jump the minute we reach the point. For that matter, Nav! Bring us around one-eighty. Let's remind them that we still have fangs."
There was a mutter of approval from the rest of the bridge crew and the commander dragged the Gunnery officer's corpse aside to let her take over the controls of the two remaining beam cannon mounted along the front of the Tzimisce's spine. The cruiser's steering thrusters fired and she spun easily on her axis as the three suits closed in and then used magnetic clamps to secure themselves against the hull.
The enemy squadron reached maximum range and then both turrets fired, only a fraction behind one of the anchored suits and three of the attacking mobile suits vanished into fireballs. A moment later and the green bolts of beam rifle fire were reaching out to target the wave of incoming missiles as point defense began to track and fire.
A wave of fire flowed towards the Tzimisce as missile after missile exploded. For a moment it looked as if none would make it, but against all odds, a single warhead came close enough to trigger it's proximity trigger and send hurricane of shrapnel into the rear of the bridge. The commander's empty chair was shattered by the impacts and a shard of the hull decapitated the Flight Ops officer. Two of the medics trying to tend to the dying radar officer died with her as they failed to close their helmets before the air rushed out of the compartment, leaving only a handful of stations manned.
"We're in the zone!" shouted the navigator. "Jump engines still charging!"
More missiles rushed in, including three from the assault carrier closing in behind what was left of the tattered enemy mobile suit squadron, closer and closer, some dying under the point defense fire and others from weapons less suited to that precision work, as they fought for those precious ten seconds that they needed.
The Navigator was wiser than to simply report readiness and the instant her indicator went from amber to green, he mashed the button to trigger the jump engines. For a split second, the Tzimisce was haloed in white and then it was gone, leaving the five surviving missiles to detonate meaninglessly, light years away from it.
.oOo.
Red lights ignited across a dozen command boards as a point of light appeared within the holographic representation of that roughly spherical zone that humanity called a jump point. That colour was enough to send Admiral Rau le Creuset leaping from the couch he was napping on to the desk that held his communications panel. Fortunately, it was not enough to have several automatic systems start firing off the beam weapons of the hundreds of expendable buoys that ringed the jump point.
"What the devil's happening!" Rau demanded.
The face under the uniform cap in his display paled. "Sir, one of our pickets just jumped in, heavily damaged. She's transmitting an invasion warning."
Rau grimaced. Ships on picket duty operated in pairs. If only one had returned then the other quite simply couldn't and ships of any kind were in short supply. The only thing harder to lay hands on these days was replacement crew in fact and he would be down one of those as well.
"Understood. I'm on my way to the bridge. Get the picket's commander on the line in two minutes and activate defense plan alpha-delta seven."
Without any further comment, he cut off the communication with a vicious slap of the panel and shoved his feet into the dress boots of his uniform, snagging the long jacket from the back of the door. It had only been a month since he'd been assigned out here and it was sooner than he had hoped that his command would be put to the test.
The Greater Etiyoke cluster had always been a difficult region for the Confederacy, for it had been the industrial heartlands of the old Alliance Worlds and one of the most heavily militarized regions. When the Alliance fell, the successor states that would later form the Confederacy had dismembered the cluster to prevent anyone from obtaining it's impressive economic might and channel it towards further wars of aggression.
But generation after generation of Etiyokeans had remembered that their combined strength had been sufficient to bring many of the Forty-Two Systems to their knees and the local militias and governments had consumed a disproportionate amount of the Confederacy's limited attention over the first century and a half of it's existence. On that record, perhaps more attention should have been paid when those rumblings died away, for that had signified only the quiet before the storm.
As the standard year 2751 drew to a close, the Confederacy had been consumed with the excitement of the Christian religious festivals, the two hundredth anniversary celebrations of the signing of the Articles of Federation and the celebration of the New Year. In ten star systems, a wave of assassinations and small unit combat swept almost unnoticed through the upper echelons of government. Even as the Confederacy's second century closed, almost a quarter of it seceded and as the new year dawned, a United Government was declared for the Greater Etiyoke Cluster.
The Confederacy Defense Militias had been called upon to put down the rebellion, only to discover that the jump points were guarded by fleets significantly larger than intelligence had suggested and equipped with weapons that had definitely not been drawn from the armories of the militias from Etiyoke. The result had typically been disaster as vessels emerged blindly into killing zones. Rau le Creuset himself had made the first step towards his current rank when he inherited command of the damaged Chivvay-class Heavy Cruiser Gettysburk he was navigating and managed to plot a hasty jump back in time to warn off the remains of the overconfident Iayuvian militias. Out of the thirty ships that had jumped into Etiyokean space, only the Gettysburk and a lone Musai had escaped and on the other routes, casualties had been even worse.
With the local militias devastated, the Etiyokeans had pushed forward an offensive before reinforcements from more distant systems could arrive. The Lesser Etiyoke Cluster had been fortunate enough to have reinforcements arrive in time and the lone jump point leading between the two clusters had seen the Etiyokean forces take losses almost as severe as they had inflicted weeks before. Ezoe had done less well and by seizing the key border systems, Etiyoke forced the defenses to be spread thin to guard several more and drained the reserves even more heavily to contain them there.
Finally, in the Iayuvi cluster, the battle had raged back and forth as the militias had been pushed back from the jump point but not allowed the Etiyoke squadrons to push through the vital connection to the two jump points leading into the rest of the cluster - most importantly, to Terra. Finally, a large force of Militia ships had transited from the Zjevlovecoe system and the defenders had welcomed their allies... until those very ships suddenly switched their IDs and opened fire on them.
The ships had come from Etiyoke's militias, now absorbed into what had become the Unity Government Enforcers, and their betrayal had broken the back of the defenses. Ironically, the lack of a strong central command had been all that saved the militia fleet, as individual ships and squadrons scattered and fled, the confusion made it impossible for the Enforcers to be sure if there was a counterattack underway until the handful of ships Rau had been able to hold together were already firing.
There had been little time, for if Zjevlovecoe had fallen then Terra itself was threatened, but Rau's crew had abandoned the Gettysburk moments before the automatic controls sent it ramming into one of the Enforcer's two Gwazine-class battleships and under the cover of his mobile suits they boarded the second and overwhelmed the crew of the other, retaking it for the Confederacy and racing back to the Terra jump point and thence to Alpha Iayuvi when the Terran government abruptly declared their neutrality.
That particular idiocy had at least served to keep the mother world from being bombarded, or even occupied, but the fighting over the other worlds had lasted for months. Rau and the Confederate had been one of the few bright spots of the Confederacy's record in the war, so far, and he was flung into combat over Mars and then for the Jupiter colonies, exacting a heavy toll before being driven back and out of the Solar system, buying time for the rest of the Confederacy to organize its resources.
And now, as a newly-minted Admiral, without even time to break the habit of answering his telephone as 'Commodore le Creuset', he had been placed in command of the defenses for Alpha Iayuvi.
It was an important role. The three systems that gave the cluster it's name were among the oldest of the Forty-Two Worlds, having been colonized in the first decades after the discovery of jump points. If they were to fall then nothing but a rump of the cluster would remain in the hands of the Confederacy, which would carry a potentially disastrous impact upon both morale and on economic might. However, resources were slim. He could be spared only his own Confederate, the Dolos-class heavy carrier Enterprise and a mix of Chivvay and Musai-class cruisers. Together, the ships could field roughly two hundred mobile suits and there were also emplaced defenses - a network of sensor and weapon buoys around the jump point, backed by two asteroid bases hastily converted to house an additional fifty mobile suits.
It would have to suffice.
The bridge was a large, open room that located the commander's seat rather regally at the back, with the work stations around the edge of a sizeable (for a space ship) open square of deck that allowed for a number of staff to stand around at the commander's presence. One of the changes that Rau had made was to have a large holodisplay set up in the centre, so that he had a large tactical display to work with.
No sooner had he entered the room than the display created a smaller window facing his command chair and displayed the worried face of Commander Talia Gladys behind the visor of a spacesuit helmet. Rau viewed her with mixed feelings. On the one hand, she was a capable officer but she also owed at least part of her rank to political connections. It was an odd prejudice to have in the Militias - given that the Militias owed their direct allegiances firstly to the various Families and only then to the Confederacy - but Rau had his doubts about Talia' Dullindal patrons. That family occupied a moderate stance and Gilbert Dullindal, while objectively a capable executive of his own world was one of the leaders amongst the small faction that had indicated that they would be favorably inclined towards a peace agreement even if it left Greater Etiyoke to go it's own way.
On the other hand, Talia Gladys was the commander of the Tzimisce, which suggested that the Lasombra had come to grief out in the Zjevlovecoe system. It was a pity, but if there was any ship in his small fleet that Rau would be dry-eyed about losing, the Lasombra might be it. Not for any crime of the ship, but because of one of the crew.
"Commander," he greeted her, settling into his seat. "What's going on across there?"
Talia sighed. "They're on their way here, sir. We got jumped by a carrier's worth of those transforming mobile suits and saw the carrier at long range. It was one of their assault jobs - best guess is that they wanted to punch out the picket so that they could jump without you receiving a warning. Since we made it back..."
"They'll either abandon the operation or push ahead before we can call in support," he said. "Agreed and a very good job on your part, Commander. How are your people?"
"Too many lost, sir. The sickbay took a hit early on and at least a third of the ship is depressurized. We can move and fight, but we're a long way from business as usual. Probably need a dockyard at some point. And the Lasombra's a complete loss - we saw her reactor go. They got their suits off first but only one of them lasted to get back with us."
Rau hid a grimace at the news. It wouldn't do to show regret at anyone's survival, but if only one pilot had survived then he could guess quite easily who it would have been. "Let me guess, Flight Lieutenant la Flaga made it back?" At her nod, he raised one eyebrow. "The man's definitely a survivor."
"Alright Commander. I can't offer you a dockyard at the moment, but move yourself over to Jachin Due. They'll be glad of all the close support that you can offer if the Enforcers do come through and Having a few veterans with them should stiffen up the suit squadrons there."
The Commander looked like she was going to point out the old truism that you can't stiffen spit with ball bearings, but refrained. He understood her feelings - the squadrons at Boaz and Jachin Due were made up almost entirely of novices right out of flight training and operating older suits. Not any older than the GINN's that had operated with the pickets, but significantly inferior to the CGUE suits on the Enterprise or the newer GuAIZs that hadn't even reached the frontlines yet. Still, some of the pilots would probably turn out well, if they survived long enough.
.oOo.
The hangers of a Musai-class cruiser such as the Tzimisce are located not far below the bridge, so it took Talia only a short while to reach the large compartment. It was open to space as the doors at the back had been opened to admit the incoming mobile suits, but that was no surprise for the large hanger was only very rarely pressurized.
The Tzimisce's own mobile suits had already landed and being moved into their docked locations at the front of the hanger, leaving only a relatively narrow space for the last suit to land. Talia held her breath as the damaged GINN entered the hanged carefully and a slight shock went through the deck as it settled onto the catapult. The surviving Techs rushed forwards to secure it and the large doors began to fold open.
All the suits had taken damage she realised - Miguel Aiman's was missing an arm, which must have limited it's ability to handle the heavy beam cannon it carried, and Heine Westenfluss's suit was so scorched and blackened that it was hard to make out the original colour scheme. The last GINN was the worst off, with one leg reduced to an immobile stump and the rear thrusters torn halfway. She was surprised that it had managed to make it back to the hanger.
When the suit's hatch opened, a broad shouldered figure in a violet-trimmed flight suit emerged. This would be the mysterious Flight Lieutenant that the Admiral thought had a knack for survival. There had been a hint of dislike in that comment and she wondered what lay behind it. Gliding along the gantry, she gestured for the three pilots to go down the ship into the general crew quarters rather than up into the pilot's ready rooms which had been opened to space by the same impact that had done such damage to the bridge.
The two Flight Officers were still in their teens, she remembered as she followed them down to one of the still pressurized sections of the ship, but La Flaga had sounded like an older man over the radio. This was confirmed once they were safe to remove their helmets - he was five or six years older than the other pilots, with a handsome face not covered by the half-mask that was fashionable in some parts of the Confederacy and slightly tousled blond hair.
"Welcome to the Tzimisce, Lieutenant," she told him. "Sorry about the Lasombra."
"She was a good ship," he said with grim resignment and she guessed that he had been in the Militias since before the war. That was the reaction of a seasoned soldier, few and far between these days.
"And welcome back to the two of you," she added to Miguel and Heine. "Although you won't be here long, I'm afraid. Probably not long enough to even get out of those flight suits."
"We're being reassigned?" Miguel exclaimed. "What for."
"You may not have noticed, Flight Officer," Talia observed testily, "But my ship is just a little broken at the moment. We'll be deployed in close support of the Jachin Due forward base until there's time for repairs and the three of you are going to be joining their mobile suit detachment. Most of their pilots are right out of the flight school so they'll need the benefits of your experience." Her face softened. "The pilots quarters took some damage in the fight but you've got an hour or so to salvage what you can before you leave."
The youngsters saluted promptly before departing upwards again. Heine halted in the door. "Commander?"
"Mr. Westenfluss?"
"I'd just like to say that it's been an honor to serve aboard the Tzimisce, ma'am. I hope to have the chance again."
Talia nodded. "You've done very well, Mr Westenfluss. And if you're available for my flight group in the future, I'll be glad to have you aboard."
Flight Lieutenant Mu La Flaga smiled thinly at the exchange. After almost six years in service, he knew how the Confederacy Defense Militia really worked and recongised the offer and it's acceptance. It was more the rule than the exception for officers to form cotories of junior officers, promoting their careers in return for their junior's support and loyalty. It also allowed officers to pool their connections within the Confederacy to obtain the best possible supplies and assignments.
In this case, Commander Gladys had obtained the support of the Westenfluss should it be necessary in future, and would probably get a good flight officer for her next command if they could arrange the assignment. For his part, Heine would have a mentor, and likely a shot at Flight Lieutenancy earlier than would normally have been the case, as well as the protection of a patron favored by the Dullindal family. It was hard for him to criticise - he knew his own career would not have done so well had he not had the La Flaga name to fall back upon and a mentor in the late Admiral Halliburton, but objectively, he had to worry about how it divided the Militias against themselves.
"I imagine you don't have much in the way of kit, Lieutenant," Talia asked him, breaking him out of his reverie.
"Nothing I'm not carrying," he said, spreading his hands illustratively. Since all he was wearing was the standard flightsuit, unencumbered by even a survival pack, that meant he probably didn't have anything more than whatever he wore beneath it - not even a uniform.
"Well, I think some of our supply rooms survived," Talia advised the man. "We should at least be able to provide some of the basics. Go requisition yourself a couple of uniforms before you leave - they'll not do anyone any good here and you can't wander around in a flight suit forever."
.oOo.
It was slightly more than an hour later that the three mobile suits, somewhat patched up but still a long way from being fully operational, stepped out of the hanger one at a time (the catapults were out of action and would be for at least another couple of days) and flew slowly across the kilometre or so of empty space that seperated the Tzimisce from the looming mass of Jachin Due.
The asteroid had been tunnelled out during a mining operation centuries ago, and then the tunnels had been dug into storage and facilities for freelance asteroid miners ever since. It had taken almost a month for tugs to bring it out to the jump point, but the thick rock would provide a good layer of defense against most weapons, protecting the hanger bays buried deep inside. A sliding door covered one of the old mining shafts and once the three suits entered, it closed behind them. Three more doors shielded the interior of the asteroid where a dock once used by small one-man prospecting skiffs now held almost thirty GINNs.
Techs with lighted batons steered the new arrivals towards berths near the back were repair gear was being prepared. Obviously, getting their suits up and running would be an immediate priority for the base. From the look of the paintsprayer, they'd also be getting repainted at the same time.
A slight woman with close-cropped black hair was standing just inside the airlock once they had disembarked from their suits and entered the base itself. All three men saluted as they saw that her red uniform jacket had the single silver star of a Commander on both epalettes. "Welcome to Jachin Due," she told them, returning the salute. "I'm Commander Noin, the flight group's commanding officer. Or chief babysitter, as it sometimes comes down to."
"Flight Lieutenant La Flaga," Mu replied. "Pleased to be aboard. Should I ask about the babies?"
Noin grimaced. "They're not as bad as pilots go," she explained. "But the average age of pilot in our flight group is seventeen, and that's with the handful of experienced pilots pulling the average up."
Mu winced. Twenty-odd teenagers convinced of their own immortality and with all the confidence of a pilot who'd never seen combat... it sounded quite nerve-wraking.
"They're really scraping the barrel," muttered Miguel from his lofty status as an eighteen year old and ace.
"I'll expect you to be an example to them, Flight Officer Aiman," Noin replied. "I'd offer to keep you together, but frankly, I need to spread your experience as widely as possible. With the three of you, we have thirty mobile suits. I'm going to shuffle that into six teams of five and put one of you into each group." She pulled out a clipboard. "Mr. Aiman will be in Team Gold under Lieutenant Matthews. He's got seniority but no actual combat experience, and he's smart enough to listen to advice. Mr Westenfluss, you get to play nursemaid to Team Orange under Lieutenant Olor. She's not senior at all I'm afraid, but she is connected so try to be nice while you're in the base. If she gets out of line outside, take over. That's a direct order from me and I'll back you to the hilt."
Heine gulped. That was a legal order - barely - but it was not one that any officer in the Militias wanted to hear. The Families had long memories for slights and if he wound up ousting Lieutenant Olor then there was every chance of a feud breaking out between the two families.
Noin, for her part, smiled thinly as she saw the hint drop in. "The pilot quarters are seperated by team," she said. "You shouldn't have any difficulty finding them. Here," she passed each of them a sheet of paper from the clipboard. "Room numbers for each Team and the briefing room. Go meet your people and get some sleep. The best guess is that we have at least a few more hours before the Etiyokeans can concentrate their assault force."
"So what burden do I receive, Commander?" Mu asked once the boys were out of sight around a corner. "I notice that you didn't want to name names around the others."
"They'll hear soon enough," Noin replied drily. "Team Violet is made up of pilots with the highest connections."
"Council?" Mu asked.
"Committee," she confessed.
The blond was severely tempted to start beating his head against the wall. Flying with pilots connected to the Confederacy Council would be awkward enough. When they were connected to members of the Militias Command Committee, things would be about a hundred times worse. "Who?" he asked faintly.
"Joule, Amalfi, Elsmann and Zala."
Mu buried his face in one gloved hand. Patrick Zala was currently the deputy chairman of the Committee, and Ezra Joule would probably replace him if Zala managed to unseat the incumbent chairman during the next elections. That made keeping his squad alive and out of enemy hands into an almost national priority. "I'm trying to imagine how things could get worse, and right now I'm running short on options," he admitted.
"Well, at least we have a little warning," Noin pointed out. "Every minute they don't attack is a little readier that we are."
"That's assuming they don't blindside us again," Mu pointed out. "We still don't know how they managed to get into Zjevlovecoe without going through Okireul. We had the jump point from Nyiiureul locked solid and that's the only route between the clusters. If they manage to blindside us again, well, we could lose the whole front."
"That mustn't happen," Noin said flatly. "The political situation's looking pretty shaky as it is. If we take another major defeat it might not be Zala or Clyne in the Chairman's seat come the election. If we get some whacko pacifist, then this war's over and it'll be the Alliance all over again."
Mu sighed. "Well hell, I guess we'll have to win then."
"And if we need a miracle," Noin suggested, a slight grin crossing her face. "We have you and Rau le Creuset here, that's doubly lucky."
She spent much of the next few hours wondering at the shadow that crossed his face at her wisecrack.
.oOo.
With the surprise lost, all that the Enforcers could do was either abandon their attack or proceed anyway. In the grand tradition of gamblers anyway, they put all their chips on the table and less than eight hours after the Tzimisce's arrival, six of their Daedalus-class Assault Carriers jumped in rapid succession.
The problem with attacking through a jump point is that you're attacking blindly, without sure knowledge of what the defenses will be, while the defenders know that any attack will have to come through a relatively limited space. The best hope is that the defenders cannot know exactly when that attack will come through and it is not and never had been possible to keep defenses at full readiness at all times.
Without surprise, the Enforcers knew that they would face defenses readied for them. But they also knew that wars are not won without risk. Six assault carriers was a formidable force to lead them through: each was sixty-percent larger than the Enterprise and carried sixty-percent more suits, albeit the smaller and more fragile models that the factories of Greater Etiyoke were turning out in such numbers. They lacked the formidable energy armament of the smaller ship, but then again, there were six of them and all of the almost one thousand suits they carried were the variable fighters that had proven so useful against the larger Confederacy mobile suits so far.
All they needed was to win some space for the fleet carriers to emerge and sheer numbers could carry the day.
But in victory or defeat, this battle could not but cost them. Primed for the arrival, it took less than a second for the weapon buoys to open fire. Four seconds later they were gone, the cheap beam weapons destroying themselves as they each fired only one shot. Defense plan Alpha-Delta Seven dealt with just such a rapid transit and in accordance with its directives a quarter of the buoys had targetted each of the first four ships to transit. Assault Carriers were tough ships... but not that tough.
As the First Battle of Alpha Iayuvi reached it's sixth second, thousands of Enforcer personnel died in the silvery balls of plasma fire that had been their ships. But the ships had jumped with their catapults primed for rapid launch and more than a third of their suits had already been away before death arrived. So too, the survivors of the first wave were launching rapidly, and a sprinkling of red lights fanned out from the jump point in Rau's holodisplay. Rather too many for his liking were headed for the nearer of the two fortresses, Boaz.
For a moment, the young Admiral hesitated, pondering amendments to his plans. But there was little time and he dared not add confusion to the concern amongst his crews. The odds had been cut and less than six hundred variable fighters threatened his two hundred and fifty mobile suits and the ships that supported them. The Assault Carriers, he ignored. There would be no more transits into the system until the Enforcers knew that nothing was in place to threaten their precious fleet carriers. Assault Carriers, for all their expense, were designed to be expended breaking through warp points. Fleet Carriers were not.
No, until one of those Assault Carriers returned to call in a second wave, the battle was down only to them.
The deck beneath him shuddered as the Confederate's engines fired and it led the ranked squadrons of cruisers deeper towards the jump point and away from Boaz. The two bases were on their own - only by pushing close enough to underline the threat he posed, could he force the Enforcers to break off. And the only way to do that was to survive the hundreds of variable fighters threatening to engluf his command in entirety.
The lights of beam cannon began to stab across the blackness of space.
.oOo.
On Jachin Due, there had been little time for the new arrivals to grow acquainted with their comrades. Exhausted by the running battle in the Zjevlovecoe system, they desperately needed to sleep before the invaders arrived and all three were asleep when sirens and red lamps banished any hope of further rest.
"They're attacking?" Nicol Amalfi exclaimed in surprise from the desk at the side of the small barracks that housed the five pilots of Team Violet. He was a slender, green-haired youth, almost fragile in appearance. "But they don't have surprise."
"Perhaps they were counting on us thinking they wouldn't without that," the slightly older boy brooding by the window muttered, lifting the helmet that lay beside him. Athrun Zala had his father's coloring, but it remained to be seen if he would grow into the same powerful build.
The only one of them not already in a flightsuit was Mu, who skinned into his with ruthless speed, barely flinching even at the sanitary fittings. "Perhaps you should be getting to your suits?" he suggested gently and the four pilots jumped to obey, Yzak Joule smirking at the perceived rebuke to Athrun.
Mu shook his head as he followed them out of the room, sealing up his flightsuit as he walked. Was I ever that bad? he asked himself. The sad thing was that he probably had been, back when he was a teenager. It had taken several hard knocks for him to get over the after-effects of adolesence and he suspected that these youngsters were about to have just such a collision with reality in the form of a murthering great battle.
In the docks, the mobile suits of Team Blue were already vanishing into the catapults. On the far side of the cavern from the entrance passage, the catapults were set to launch five suits at once, allowing the docks to empty in rapid succession. Commander Noin's Team Red were moving to launch the moment the catapults were clear and Mu could see Miguel Aiman's suit leaving the gantry to join the rest of Team Gold.
The techs had worked wonders in the little time that they had had, Mu noted as he moved quickly along the gantrys to his own GINN. There was still sign of damage, but all the necessary systems were operational and if the paint was lacking in a few places, at least the violet trim had been reapplied.
"Right then, boys," he ordered. "Get your crates moving and in line for the catapults. And make sure you're at one hundred percent ready status before you get on the catapult. Once you're on it there's no time for you to back off and get a spare ammo pack or the like. Check in."
"Yzak Joule, ready," snapped the teenager.
"Elsmann ready," his buddy added, his suit carrying the Team's heavy beam cannon.
"Athrun Zala, ready."
"Nicol Amalfi, ready."
"Mu La Flaga," the blond finished. "Flight Control, Violet Leader. My Team is ready to launch."
There was a crackle on the radio and then an unfamiliar voice replied: "Okay, Violet Leader. You are clear to launch after Team Green."
That left Team Orange last in line, Mu noted as only one of the suits from that team was out of the maintenance racks. From the look of the blackened armor, it was Heine Westenfluss who was waiting for the rest of his squad and he didn't envy the boy having to deal with a lieutenant who had let her squad get that slack.
Team Green vanished as the catapult hurled them out into space and Team Gold stepped into their places. Mu let the boys take up their positions behind the yellow-trimmed GINNs (calling them Team Yellow would have been... indiplomatic, so standard nomeclature was Gold instead and a few Militias even paid for gold paint) and then filled the open slot himself, noting that it left him right behind Miguel. The new arm was noticiably better polished that the original that still held the heavy beam weapon that Miguel favored.
Then Team Gold diminished rapidly into the distance and it was time from Team Violet to step up.
As a child, Mu had never liked roller-coasters. As a pilot, he did not enjoy catapult launches. The flood of adrenaline as he was suddenly accelerated to high velocities took away all control of his suit for the seconds before leaving the catapult and he rationalised that it was the inability to maneuver that rubbed him the wrong way, although it was probably more the way that it made him feel like he was going to throw up. This time was no better than it ever was, but it was over quickly and the five mobile suits soared away from Jachin Due into space that was brightly lit by fiery explosions and the brilliant beams of energy that were causing some of the former.
"Holy shit," Dearka Elsmann muttered under his breath.
"Keep it together, kid," Mu ordered automatically. "Form up on me, some of those fighters are headed our way." The four young pilots moved their suits around into a textbook formation and started to actually put their training to use figuring out what was going on rather than just looking at the pretty lights.
"Violet Leader, Red Leader," Noin ordered over the radio. We have sixty, six-zero, incoming VFs. We're going out to meet them. You'll be backing my team, Orange backs Gold and the others get to play reserve."
"Will comply," Mu replied and vectored towards Noin's flight path, the rest of his team following like dutiful ducklings behind their mother. He switched his radio back to the Team channel. "Okay, I don't know what the academy tells you about Variable Fighters, so here's the straight dope. They're smaller, and more agile, than our suits and fighter-mode they're a lot faster. As suits they're slower and they haven't upgraded to proper beam weapons yet, just small point defense lasers on the heads. Their cannon can hurt our suits if they get a good hit in, but they aren't up to a one-shot-kill. Their missiles can kill you right out, but they're mostly for anti-ship and base work. It takes a damn good pilot to get the best out of them but they don't have any more of those than we do right now. Don't try to tail them, just take what shots you can and try not to let them get behind you - explosive shells can fuck your thrusters up and then you're a sitting duck."
He frowned in thought. "And Dearka, watch where your shooting - your beam cannon will shoot right through one of them so try not to frag a friendly suit behind one of them: it may sound far-fetched but I've seen it happen before."
"Right..." Dearka drawled, disbelievingly, but there was no time for further advice as the incoming variable fighters began to fire off volleys of missiles from below their wings, targeting the approaching mobile suits rather than the still distant fortress. Noin's squadron didn't break formation, instead shouldering their beam rifles and opening fire on the incoming targets. A moment later, the missiles were close enough for Mu to pick one off and his Team followed his example, green beams reaching out to explode the missiles before they reached Team Red.
Dearka cursed as he found that his heavy beam cannon was relatively little use for this precision work. "Save it," Mu snapped. "You've got almost enough range to hit the fighters, so deal with them!"
The younger blond's eyes widened and then he brought the cannon up and the green beam reached out and blew straight through one of the fighters. He really was a decent shot, Mu noted and then frowned as the Enforcers evened the score, a missile detonating close enough to one of Noin's pilots to cave in the side of her suit, sending shrapnel through the cockpit.
There was no time to grieve as the rest of Team Red plunged into the variable fighters and a vicious dogfight halted the advance. Team Gold entered the mix a moment later and suits on both sides began to die. The variable fighters had taken suit mode to deal with their opponents at close quarters and it became increasingly difficult for the still approaching Orange and Violet teams to pick out targets as they reached beam rifle range. Dearka was surprised to find that he actually had to break off one shot as a GINN flew across the path that his beam would have taken. He could see suddenly just how easy it would be for his beam cannon to accidentally hit one of his own side, and became far more cautious with placing his shots.
For their parts, Nicol and Athrun stayed close together, low voiced comments concentrating their shots upon the same targets. It was a good technique and they were hitting almost as often as Mu, which was more than could be said for Yzak, whose wild shooting was well nigh as much of a threat as Dearka's potent beam cannon to the Militia's mobile suits. It was with some relief that they came into close quarters and Yzak was able to stow his rifle, taking out his sword to beat back the variable fighters as they tried to swarm over Dearka. The lure of destroying one of the weapons that could seriously threaten a carrier was enough to bring them closer to the defending GINN than they would have allowed normally and Yzak snarled triumphantly as he stabbed the short blade into the lower chest of one fighter, crippling it. Then his other hand closed around the head of the much smaller suit and crushed it easily before discarding the suit for Dearka to finish with a quick shot from his cannon.
.oOo.
Several thousand miles away, Rau le Creuset was also facing a wave of Enforcers. Together with the sixty or so variable suits attacking Jachin Due, the Enforcers had detached about eighty suits to attack Boaz - a interesting number since the standard organisation for Enforcer mobile suit forces was to group five squadrons of twelve fighters into a single wing, such as that attacking Jachin Due. The reinforced wing attacking Boaz might simply be an intelligence miscue: although Boaz was larger than the other asteroid, it had a smaller force of mobile suits. If they expected a larger force, then reinforcing their attack group would be wise. But it could also indicate that specialist squadrons were attached to the wing for some nefarious purpose.
Nefariousness was a trait that Rau was more than willing to ascribe to the Unity Government. After all, they saw themselves as the successors of the Alliance, and in it's day, there had been few depths that that long deceased polity had been unwilling to sink to in order to maintain their personal power.
However, there was little he could do for either fortress at the moment. The detachment of a hundred and forty variable fighters still left him with well over three hundred fighters descending upon his fleet and there was no choice but to break through them if he was to retake the jump point. Fortunately, the numbers favored him more than anywhere else in the battle - between the one hundred and eight mobile suits aboard the Enterprise, the twenty aboard the Confederate, and the complements of the twelve remaining Musai-class ships, he was outnumbered less than two to one, and while the variable fighters might have the potential to be a match for the GINN, neither their tactics nor their technology had reached that point yet. That and twenty-odd warships should be enough to carry the day.
The volleys of missiles from the incoming variable fighters had been launched from closer than usual, and there had been more of them - a mid-range missile that hadn't been encountered before, but the GINN's had at least some practise in dealing with such a threat and most of the missiles had been destroyed before they could reach engagement ranges. Perhaps inevitably, however, some were missed. Not one had hit the Confederate, but there had been minor hits against the Ventrue, Gangrel and Setite, and a lucky hit to the starboard missile bay of the heavy cruiser Maldon Bridge, had not only taken out the missile by but triggered a sympathetic explosion in the magazines, temporarily disabling the ship's forward beam turret.
Now the fighters switched to suit mode and penetrated the formations, with mobile suits in hot pursuit. Point defense was a chancy affair, as likely to hit a friendly suit as a it was one of the enemy, but GINN's could take such a hit better than the variable fighters could and the attackers were firing back with autocannon little diffierent from the Militias point defense, while the GINN's beam rifles would destroy or cripple an enemy suit with almost every hit.
A number of the Enforcer pilots had been carrying loads of short range missiles and held them back for use at point-blank range and fire spread through the fleet. Not all of them had made it this far and the GINNs had paid especial attention to the handful of fighters still carrying missiles, but more than half ripple-fired heavy loads of the small missiles at ranges too short for any meaningful evasion. Virtually all of them died instants later, as vengeful GINN's lashed out, but the damage was done.
The Azincour and the Malkavian simply exploded and the luckless Maldon Bridge[/i] drifted out of formation, engines in ruins. The Assamite pulled back to take the heavy cruiser in tow, for without its turreted beam cannon it would be of little value in a stand-up fight. The Confederate had taken the brunt of no less than three such attacks and staggered out of the crossfire trailing fire and with four turrets out of action, but the others were still spitting fire and they only needed to go a little further before the two surviving assault carriers would be in range.
From one side of Rau's bridge there was a cry of dismay and he jerked around to see the Communications Officer on his feet, looking over at the Radar Officer. "Enterprise just dropped off the net," he reported.
"She's still there," Radar responded. "Brining up a visual."
The shot from an aft-pointed camera sprang up on a side-screen and the computers magnified and cleaned up the feed until they could see the Enterprise clearly. The large ship was indeed intact, and its guns were still firing, but there was only fire where the conning tower should have been.
It was the Flight Control Officer who explained the mystery. "Kamikaze!" he reported. "One of our GINNs saw a variable fighter fly right into the Enterprise's bridge. It must have killed everyone up there instantly, and taken out the radios as well."
"Dammit," Rau growled, watching as the officers all reflexively checked the windows of their own bridge. "See if you can make contact with their Combat Information Centre," he ordered the Communications Officer. Even if the main radio is out, they should have a back-up online soon."
"We're in range of the Carriers!" the Gunnery Officer reported.
Rau nodded. "Switch fire to them immediately," he ordered.
Outside, the large turrets turned slightly, bringing the powerful sixteen-inch beam cannon to bear on the targets in front of them. Behind them, the greater range of the eighteen-inch beam cannon on the Enterprise had come into range at almost the same moment and one Assault Carrier staggered under the barrage, tough armour deforming under the beams.
There was a sudden actinic flash from one side and Rau grimaced. From that direction, the source could only be Boaz, and it didn't take a genius to realise that the light was too bright to have been caused by mere plasma warheads. "Warning to all ships," he said in the silence. "Also to Jachin Due for relay to planetary bases. UG Enforcers have employed battlefield anitmatter weapons."
.oOo.
The flash of light was also visible from Jachin Due and similar conclusions were being drawn, although except in the asteroid's command centre, there was little time to spare.
"Are they likely to use those here?" the Commander serving as executive officer asked warily.
Commodore Noventa shook his head. "If they haven't yet, then it's not likely," he said solidly from his chair in the centre of the compartment, not taking his eyes off the holo-display that was trying to keep up with the dogfight that was moving steadily towards the base. Commander Noin had had to call in her two reserve teams of mobile suits already and the Confederacy suits were down to little more than half-strength even so. The Enforcers had lost more than twenty fighters, however, and given time the GINNs might have been able to wear them down.
By that time, however, the fight would be taking place inside Jachin Due and that was just a little closer than Noventa was willing to allow them.
"Signal Commander Noins," he ordered. "We're going to join in the fun. Ready all missile launchers for maximum fire in thirty seconds."
Outside, in response to his signals, the scattered Confederacy mobile suits regrouped and it was not at all coincidental that the locations that they formed up upon left an open route for the variable fighters to use to close on Jachin Due. The Enforcers were quick to exploit the gap and the remains of two squadrons shifted to fighter mode and punched through, trying to engage the asteroid at pointblank range.
Across Jachin Due, hatches sprang open and to the dismay of the Enforcers, magnetic catapults began to fling missiles at them, rockets flaring to life once the missiles cleared their launch tubes. Noventa's gunners called for a staggered drive activation, so the first volley was barely a head of the next two as they slashed into the variable fighters, engulfing them in plasma fireballs.
In fighter mode, the variable fighters were not agile enough to evade the targeting systems of the missiles, but the handful that switched to mobile suit mode discovered that they were too slow to get out of the killzone before the blasts tore through them. It was Catch-22 with a vengeance, and by the time Jachin Due ceased firing, it's small magazines reduced to only half their previous state, not one of the variable fighters that had pushed through survived.
The remaining fighters, now only equal in number to their opponents, found themselves fighting not to destroy the enemy but to stay alive. Then Noventa played his trump card and the Tzimisce swept majestically out from behind the asteroid-fortress it had been hidden by, its two beam cannon raking at the Enforcers.
Within moments, the variable fighters were fleeing, their fighter modes faster than anything that the GINNs could manage.
"Good job, Commander Noins," Noventa broadcast. "Get your suits back inside. Commander Gladys and the Tzimisce will pick up anyone who can't move under their own power. We've got just enough time to rearm you, if they decide to send in a second wave."
Shaking his head, Mu took stock of the survivors. His own team was doing well enough - Nicol's suit was going to need pick up, judging by the damage to his thrusters, and Dearka's machine was, quite literally, headless. The teen had also wrecked his beam cannon, driving the muzzle into the back of one variable fighter and rapid firing it through the briefly surprised Enforcer and into a second fighter behind it, but he was mobile and the other two were both more or less intact.
Other Teams had not done so well. Not by far. Heine Westenfluss had made it through, but he was commanding only four suits, an amalgamation of Team Orange and Team Gold that did not include poor Miguel, who'd been shot to pieces somewhere. Team Green was just gone, and Team Red, having been reduced to two suits during the dogfight, was flying beside Team Blue, which had oddly enough managed to survive with all five suits still in apparently mint condition - quite a surprise for a bunch of rookies, but he had to give them credit. For all their lack of experience, most of the novice pilots had done as well as more experienced soldiers could have been expected to.
"Nicol, signal the Tzimisce for pick up," he ordered. "Same for you Dearka."
"I can still fly," protested Dearka.
"I know that, kid, but without the sensors in your head, your fine manuevering is going to be iffy and we don't need you demolishing the docks when you land. Just take it easy. You've all done well."
"Well!?" Yzak protested. "We got beat on like drums. Look at Team Blue - not even a scratch on their damn paintwork."
"At least we're all alive," Nicol pointed out softly and all eyes went to the trail of broken suits that trailed out behind them."
"Nicol's right," Athrun said firmly. "And next time we'll do better. But for now we should get aboard. We'll need to get ready for a second wave. Without Boaz, we'll be more of a target for them."
.oOo.
There was no second wave however, and no sooner had the few score variable fighters to survive and lifeboats from the more damaged of the two Assault Carriers been taken aboard the less damaged of the pair, than the Daedalus-class vanished with the distinctive haloing effect of a jump. It's sistership blew up almost immediately in a ball of antimatter that made it perfectly clear that that there had been a reserve of antimatter weapons aboard.
That was ample reason for their decision not to scuttle the ship by the conventional means before leaving of course. A plasma reactor (or several reactors, no one in the Confederacy had gotten a good look at the insides of the UG's new carriers yet) would quite neatly remove a ship from existence if certain safeties were overridden. But antimatter was another matter entirely - the warheads would inevitably be triggered by such an explosion (probably the trigger mechanism in this case) - the blast had scoured the jumpoint clean of not only the carrier, but of all four of its broken sister ships as well, and would have destroyed the only surviving ship as well if it hadn't jumped first.
It also meant that Rau would be wary about sending any ships into or through the jump point until it had had a day or two to settle. Antimatter detonations did funny things to jump points sometimes, and using a jump engine in a jump point unsettled in that way was... well perhaps not fatal. The ships that had tried might have ended somewhere intact. But none had ever been heard from again. The use of antimatter weapons against a jump point was, of course, something that Confederacy absolutely prohibited. For that matter, although a reserve of antimatter warheads was maintained, the Militias hadn't fired one in anger since the last Alliance stronghold was defeated in the Lesser Etiyoke Cluster, over a hundred and ninety years before.
The Unity Government evidently felt differently.
Not that Rau would have attempted a pursuit anyway. It was a given that a second wave of Assault Carriers could be about to emerge, since the jump point in Zjevlovecoe wouldn't have been affected, and that there would definitely be a sizeable force of ships that would have followed up the attack had it been successful in critically damaging the defenses.
And those defenses were looking just a little on the threadbare side at the moment. Over a hundred and fifty mobile suits had been destroyed, as had seven cruisers. Several more, as well as the Enterprise, were limping towards Jachin Due for emergency repairs to get them back to the orbital dockyards over Alpha VIII. The military bases on the moons of the gas giant had been built by the Alliance's Terran Union predecessors and had been home away from home for the Militias of Alpha Iayuvi's three inhabited worlds and seven shoals of orbital habitats since the Confederacy liberated the system from the Alliance. They were also on the far side of the system at this point in their orbits and at least a week's travel for an undamaged warship.
The idea of launching a counterattack with one battleship and several cruisers, all of them still damaged to one extent or another did not fill Rau with glee, but he supposed that for all that his opposite number in the Zjevlovecoe system couldn't be sure that there wasn't a heavy battlegroup on the way out from the system's planets, quite capable of doing so. A useful illusion, he decided.
It was only a pity, he mused, that La Flaga's damnable luck had held out. The Unity Government Enforcers had been stopped cold and it would have been nice to cement that particular victory by getting rid of that particular irritant. A little public display of grief might have been in order, and then drinking ostenisbly to his elder half-brother's memory and actually in celebration that the only legitimate offspring of Aldo La Flaga had departed the universe.
As it was, that individual had not only survived, he had led the sons of several prominent politicans into battle and somehow managed not to get any of them killed. Failing in that would at the least of been a black eye for the La Flagas, politically. Instead, it would bolster their position and while the younger La Flaga seemed genuinely unconcerned by the influences that shaped the Confederacy, his father would not be so naive.
But it was not and never had been an ideal universe, Rau reminded himself. He had cemented his own reputation with this battle and it would be... obsessive, dangerously so, to let his dislike of his blood father overwhelm the practicalities of the moment. With that settled for the moment, he turned his attention to taking account of the casualties and of rescue operations for lifeboats and ejected pilots who might be endangered by the usual detritius of battle. On another level, he started mentally composing the many reports that he would be required to make on the battle.
BuShips really needed to do something about those damned conning towers, for one thing. And there ought to be some way to deal with the explosive shells of variable fighter cannon. Admittedly, a mobile suit couldn't be armoured everywhere if they were expected to move, but there should be something. He made a note to check reference texts on body armour design - the same problem had probably existed back on Terra back when the deadliest projectile was the arrow so there might be some useful ideas there.
.oOo..oOo. .oOo.
Major Roy Fokker watched as the halos of energy that surrounded the transport faded to reveal a subtly different star field. The halo had been even more intense than usual, which he guessed was probably because of the additional energy that was necessary to make a jump through a Class-III jump point.
The initial theory of jump points had been laid out by physicists in the late twenty-first century, although the basic concept had been looked at hopefully for at least a century before then. It had not been until the twenty-third century that the first human jump transit had been made by the International Science Vessel Discovery. Fifty years later, when the body of knowledge involving jump points had grown exponentially, the possibility of Class-II jump points had been raised: even harder to detect or use, but perhaps leading out of the closed network of the Iayuvi Cluster's star systems.
The collapse of the New United Nations delayed the solution of these problems for decades as the colonies were forced back upon their own resources until Terra managed to put it's affairs in order and re-establish interstellar trade. In that span, the old first-generation jumpships, little more than jumpdrives to which between two and nine sublight transports could connect for the journey through a jump point, were replaced by second-generation jumpships that could economically haul cargos from orbit of one world out to a jump point, make transit and then reach another world.
But the new government was not entirely welcome on the colonies, having had two generations to get used to home rule, so when Adrienne Bashir managed to locate and transit through a Class-II jump point from Delta Iayuvi into the Emyoje Cluster, she triggered a rapid surge of migration away from the control of the Terran Union and it's genetically augmented ruling caste, the Coordinators. When the Union followed, the Independent Governments resisted, at first with no great success. Only in the mid-twenty-sixth century would the Etiyoke cluster governments create the Alliance that would break the back of the Terran Union and exterminate the pureblooded Coordinators, banning the biological research that had led to them.
But only a iconclastic few in the physics community had theorised what Roy had just experienced: Class-III jump points leading out of the Forty-Two Worlds. In the closing days of the Alliance, when the upstart Confederacy had shattered the hardwon peace enforced after the defeat of the Terran Union, the Hawking Flotilla had left the Uvbeyou system with the seeds of a new colony, a military cadre and the entire faculty of the Alliance Insitute of Applied Sciences, jumping blindly through the only Class-III jump point they had been able to locate with their preliminary research - research of which they carried every trace with them.
And for two hundred years they had hidden here, in New Etiyoke, preparing for the day of the return when they would reestablish the Alliance once more. It was truly ironic that the colony had included so many with partial descent from the Coordinators (whose diluted advantages had still allowed future generations to rise to great heights) that today almost everyone in the orbital colonies that clustered around Osiris could claim at least some of that blood.
It was on Osiris, where painfully slow terraforming was still proceeding, that the Unity Government's Enforcers had their ultimate headquarters, despite the establishment of the Senate in Alpha Etiyoke. And it was there that Colonel Bruno Gloval and Major Roy Fokker had been summoned, as the senior survivors of the debacle at Alpha Iayuvi.
Gloval, a tall man with a thick black mustache, was looking out of the same window - no great surprise as it was the only one in the observation lounge. It must have been a body blow for the man to be taken away from his command when it needed to be refitted and prepared for new use, the Icarus had been an almost new ship and a prestigious assignment. Now, because of orders he had protested fruitlessly, he was likely to see his career go down in flames.
A similar fate might await Roy of course, but he was more junior, merely the commander of a wing of variable fighters. Of course, that wing was little more than two squadrons now, so there was likely to be some official disfavor for that, but there was little chance that he would be sidelined. Experienced pilots were in short supply for variable fighters. Those who lived long enough to make full use of the Phoenix were able to work miracles when employed correctly - which they had not been at Alpha Iayuvi.
"Have you ever been to Osiris before, sir?" he asked.
Gloval shook his head solemnly. "No, Major," he replied. "I was assigned to the Ezoe front until I was recalled to take command of the Icarus. But you were one of the first from the old Militias to transfer to a variable fighter - you must trained here?"
"Yes sir. The newer flight schools were still being set up so I came here to learn. It's an interesting planet but I don't believe that you'll have a chance to see it up close. The military command centre occupies one of the colony cylinders and movement is restricted. I doubt there's much of a nightlife up there either."
"Well, I suppose that we may have more important things on our minds than the night life, very soon," Gloval said and, apparently bored with the conversation, turned away from the window, taking out his pipe. Then he spotted a no smoking sign and put the pipe back inside his jacket. Honestly, you'd think that the New Etiyokeans were afraid of catching some disease off of a little tobacco, he thought in disgust.
.oOo.
The chamber being used for the tribunal was silent for a long moment after the last testimony had been taken. Located under one of the 'secure administration' buildings in the Horus VII orbital habitat (meaning that it was an outwardly normal office building that a mobile suit would have been hard pressed to damage, set in a parkland setting that a carrier task group would have a hard time threatening), the room was, as custom dictated, darkened. A single spotlight pinpointed the ordinary looking office chair welded to the floor only a metre and a half away from the door, but the officers sat behind the U-shaped table on the podium that the chair faced, were lit only by the muted glow of their workstation displays.
"Troubling," said one officer from one of the bends in the U.
When it became clear that he did not propose to clarify the word, a woman halfway down the other arm cleared her throat. "In what sense do you mean, tribune?" By tradition, all officers on a tribunal were refered to as such, rather than by rank, as they all carried equal authoruty and responsibility for the tribunal's findings. In practise, everyone knew who out-ranked who and the seating order reflected this, with the senior officer at the base of the U and the most junior at the far ends.
"It means that that idiot Hayes has cost us thousands of Enforcers, hundreds of variable fighters and five of our newest carriers," grunted a man sat right beside the central chair.
"And we appointed him," said the first man cuttingly. Eyes widened around the table.
"He has previously showed considerable ability," offered the woman. "And it is important that the upper commands not be held exclusively by our people. The cluster is happy to unite with our leadership, but not if they perceive themselves as being under our rule. Opening command slots to officers drawn from the Militias is necessary."
"Hayes is ambitious," offered another officer. "If he loses his rank over this, he'll muddy the waters. Say it's predjudice against an outsider, or that we're not being aggressive enough. Anything to keep his name clean."
"Someone needs to pay for this cock-up?" the first man asked. "Tribunals are not witch hunts. Just because we could have someone courtmartialed, does not mean that we have to. We were defeated. It happens. We cannot expect otherwise. What is important is that we learn the lessons of the defeat and do not repeat the mistakes that were made."
There was another silence, before the woman in the central seat spoke, her voice sure and authoritive. "Marshal Hayes cannot be entrusted with another field command. Offer him assignment to a anministrative post. The Fortress Command in the Pedeoo system will require an officer of his grade. Responsibility for one of the few routes into the Cluster, but one behind the frontlines. Other outsiders will be promoted as we continue to expand the Enforcers, reducing the disparity."
There were nods around the room.
"As for the lessons learned, we should bring Colonel Gloval and Major Fokker... Brigadier Gloval and Lieutenant Colonel Fokker, I should say, after their heroics at Alpha Iayuvi..."
More nods. Publically promoting outsider officers involved would make it clear to the officer corps that there would be no scapegoats and mitigate the effects of sidelining Hayes.
"And discuss with them what changes must be made to prevent further such debacles."
Within moments, the two officers had returned. Since there was only one chair, neither sat in it.
"Gentlemen," the woman in the central seat began, "It has become clear during this tribunal that we need to review our fleet's tactical balance. As the most recent officers to operate against the Confederacy militias, your opinions are hereby solicited. Mr. Fokker, pre-war exercises indicated that variable fighters would have a critical advantage against mobile suits whereas since the initial surprise wore off, they have actually required a significant edge in numbers to defeat them. Your thoughts?"
Roy straightened. "Ma'am, the variable fighters now employed are not those simulated in the pre-war exercises. The proposed variable fighter was to operate with an onboard plasma fusion reactor and carry a weapon load equivalent to that of a current model GINN. However, the variable fighters placed in production are operating on high-density power cells which limits their operational range and cannot power a full-scale beam rifle for more than a few shots. As a result, the fighters are using automatic cannon that are significantly less likely to destroy a target and do not have the endurance to keep fighting long enough to keep hitting the targets."
"The compromise was necessary in order to maintain our operational pace," another of the tribunes observed. "However, if the Pheonix cannot perform then perhaps it should be withdrawn until a fully operational variable fighter is available."
"They still give us a mobility advantage," the man next to him objected.
"With respect," Roy said. "We've also been slow to evolve doctrine for variable fighter operations. That's improving, but so are the Militias tactics to deal with us, and they've been making up ground rapidly. The longer they have to work out how to deal with us effectively, the less effective a new Variable Fighter will be."
"And they will have new suits of their own," added the tribune who had proposed withdrawing the Phoenix fighters. "Intelligence makes it clear that research is underway to build a new generation of their mobile suits, better equipped for anti-variable fighter operations. They may also have variable fighters of their own before long."
"Then we'll need to do something about that," Gloval said boldly. "Our carriers are excellent for carrying variable fighters and the lightweight mobile suits developed here, but they do not have the anti-shipping capability of the Militias warships. Unless we can improve our ability to take them on ship to ship, or regain our edge in mobile weapons, then we will not be able to maintain the offensive."
There was an outraged silence. Those before a tribunal were not expected to speak unless addressed.
The woman at the centre of the table nodded her head. "That is a concern," she agreed firmly. "And it must not be allowed to come to that. How do you propose that the matter be settled, Brigadier Gloval?"
Gloval blinked. "Brigadier?" he asked.
"That is one conclusion that the Tribunal has drawn," she replied.
"Ah," Gloval grunted. "Well, our assault through the jumppoint failed for two reasons. Firstly, we were too tentative. As soon as the assault carriers had launched their fighters, they should have left and a new wave come through. Cruisers and battleships to take the Militias ships with heavy weapons. We still have many captured from the Militas and we can't afford to waste them on patrols or second-line duties - we have to use them to bolster attacks. And we need to build more of them. The antimatter missiles worked, so they'll be warier of our fighters now - if we have a better fighter, we can use if against their mobile suits but we need dedicated anti-shipping fighters as well, ones that can carry the firepower to take down a warship not just peck at it the way that we have been doing."
"Do you concur with this, Lieutenant-Colonel?"
It took a moment for Roy to realise that the statement was being directed at him. "Yes ma'am. I've seen the specifications for the original variable fighters and they'll make a huge difference. The Phoenix is a good concept but the Valkyries would eat them for breakfast. Combine that with capital ships that can meet them head on and their current fleet can't stop us. We'd still have to consider what they might pull out of their hats, but we could handle everything they've shown us so far."
"Very well. If there are no further questions...?"
The other tribunes shook their heads one at a time.
"Thank you for your comments, Brigadier, Colonel. I believe that quarters have been arranged for you on the station and you can expect to receive instructions in the next forty-eight hours about your next postings."
.oOo.
"Brigadier Gloval?"
At the chessboard in the recreation room of the Bachelor Officers Quarters block he'd been assigned a small apartment in, Gloval looked up from the move he'd been about to make. By relative casualties he was losing, but he knew that the trap he'd been patiently laying was only a few moves away from snapping closed around his opponent's king. "Yes?" he asked, a slight bite in his voice.
The young woman standing at the door was only in her early twenties, but the cuffs of her white uniform jacket bore three gold rings, marking her as a Lieutenant-Colonel. She looked a little taken aback by the response, but not too much - white jackets marked officers acting as staff, be it the general staff here at the high command, or directly assisting a flag officer in the field, so she could hardly be unaccustomed to dealing with short-tempered senior officers.
"Brigadier, I'm Colonel Hayes," she told him. "I have your new orders."
The document that she held out was parchment, folded twice and sealed with red wax. It was an old tradition, one inherited from the Confederacy's Militias rather than the old Alliance Fleet, to relay certain orders on parchment. Green wax to confer a medal, black wax for a warrant of courtmartial... and red to assign the command of a ship. He could not help but to feel a surge of exceitement at the sight, although there was also a degree of surprise. Command of a ship was usually the responsibility of a Colonel or Lieutenant-Colonel, occasionally a Major if the ship was not a combatant, but almost never a Brigadier.
Taking the orders, he cracked the wax, sealed with the age old badge of Etiyoke: a dragon, a phoenix and a tiger, and unfolded the parchment. "Thank you, Colonel," he said absently, examining the orders and then paused, reading them more carefully. "Hmmm. I see that I shall be taking command from Colonel Lisa Hayes. Is this you?"
"Yes sir," she replied. "I've been overseeing the construction."
"Hmmm," he said again. "Have you indeed? In that case, Colonel, perhaps you could show me my new ship. I rather gather," he added, folding the parchment and tucking it inside his jacket. Unlike Lisa's his was the blue of a ship's crew. "That she will be a new experience for me."
Lisa smiled, more naturally. "Yes sir," she said. "I rather anticipated that you would want that."
"Good," Gloval said approvingly. "My apologies, Mr. Havel," he added to the Major who had been facing him across the chessboard. "I will have to finish beating you at chess another time."
The younger man raised one eyebrow at the comment, given the number of pieces taken, but didn't directly address the assertion. "Not a problem, Brigadier Gloval. And congratulations on your new command."
.oOo.
True to Lisa's words, there was a car waiting outside the building, to whisk them to the port, and a shuttle had been reserved for him. He had to wonder if this sort of treatment was standard at Horus, or whether it was something that he could expect now that he was a flag officer.
"There will be a short delay before we depart, sir," Lisa said apologeticallty. "The commander of our fighter group has also been named today, and he'll be joining us on the shuttle."
Somehow, Gloval wasn't surprised when Roy Fokker stepped out of the car that arrived a moment later. His guide was a blonde major with a coffee-coloured complexion - one of those odd combinations that made it very clear that she had Coordinator ancestry. Like Roy, she had the green jacket that marked a member of the mobile suit/variable fighter corps, but without the pilot's wings.
"Good Afternoon, Roy," Gloval said in greeting. "It would seem that we are both being assigned to the same ship once more."
"I suppose that they don't want to break up a winning combination, sir," Roy agreed. "Although I have to wonder what this ship's going to be - I didn't even know that there was a carrier called Alliance."
Gloval's eyes twinkled and both women hid grins. "Well, perhaps we should see for ourselves," the Brigadier suggested drily, and gestured for the women to lead the way to the shuttle.
.oOo.
The military docks that they set out for were orbitting almost half-a-million miles away from the high command's station and the inital clusters were crowded with factories for sub-assemblies. But as the shuttle threaded through the network they came across more and more docks where partly-built ships were surrounded by construction frameworks.
Most were Daedalus-class assault carriers and Prometheus-class fleet carriers, but there were others as well: small, blocky ships that Colonel Hayes identified as Birmingham-class escort carriers and round, clumsy looking ships that had been intended as missile cruisers but were now being modified before they had even been launched.
Right at the far end of the lines of ships lay a much larger framework. Rather than cutting between the structural members, Lisa guided the shuttle along the length towards the open mouth where the construction gantries had been removed so that the ship would be able to leave. When she rounded the final barriers to view, Roy gaped shamelessly and even Gloval was speechless.
The ship was huge - twelve hundred meteres long and almost four hundred wide, with a long flat deck leading back to massive engine blocks at the rear. A command structure reared up from the hull and long barrelled weapons jutted forward from turrets either side. "The first Alliance-class monitor," Lisa said reverently. "More than twice as large and ten times as powerful as any battleship in the history of the Forty-Two Worlds. She carries more than five hundred mobile suits and variable fighters, with primary armament of four railguns, eight eleven-inch beam cannon and a spinal antimatter beam cannon."
"Antimatter beam?" Gloval asked, incredulously. "A directed antimatter weapon!? Impossible!"
"Not at all," Lisa said confidently. "It's not something to use lightly, of course, but it's capable of devestating tight formations of vessels -"
"And if the ships move apart then they can't support each other against our fighters," exclaimed Roy. "Even the threat we could use it would weaken their defenses!"
Claudia chuckled. "Such enthusiasm, fly boy. And you haven't even seen one of your precious fighters aboard."
Roy gave her a suspicious look and then grinned. "Is that your way of telling me what I think you're saying...?"
"Let's just say that we won't be carrying Phoenix's into harm's way," she said smugly. "Orders were amended just yesterday and we'll be getting the first production runs of Valkyries - six full wings and almost half as many mobile suits to back them up."D for Drakensis
Contagious, rampant insanity isnt against the rules.
D for Drakensis
You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.
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