LANCER: BATTLEGROUP - Breaking Upon the Diamond Shoals

Klaxons dragged Flight Lieutenant Ines Ibanla out of bed with a blaze of adrenaline. She scrambled out of her bunk while still wearing her combat suits, and ducked reflexively - but she wasn't in the brig, not anymore. She had spent the weeks flying to this position in the brig, but they had shunted her out of it in time for precombat training and honing. Not that she needed it. It took more than a few weeks to sand her edges off.

"Think this is another drill?" Kailen, her wingmate, asked as they rushed from the bunk rooms to the throbbing deck. The sudden jolt of acceleration that almost slammed them to their knees, which came without warning or indication, and made every single new astro on the ship drop to the ground at once, made Ines and Kailen both shake their heads.

"Definitely not a drill!"

The past two days had been maneuvering at extreme ranges. Ever since the Armory had nuked the outer system telescopes and effectively blinded their best ships, the whole fleet had dispersed out into a staggered, defensive posture. There were rumors that some of their spoolships were way back in orbit around the Shoals itself. Ines, though, didn't give a shit about lances or kinetics. She cared about the fact that-

Shudder.

The Cú Chulainn had just jinked again.

"We're getting shot at!" Kailen said, huffing.

"Well, yeah! That's the fun part, isn't it?" Ines asked as they came to the flight briefing room. Their flight coordinator was a finger of the Fleet Legion, poked down into their subjectivity and into a subaltern, who looked like a faintly abstracted, slightly professorial mechanical spider. It lurked in the middle of the briefing room, where the rest of the squadron was gathering. The projection showed the current disposition of the ships - and the travel time and time to targets on several preliminary attacks from both sides. The fleets were still at the ranges where things could take hours before they took seconds.

"All right, Lancers," the NHP that wasn't entirely an NHP at the moment said. His voice was musical, interweaving different tones and shifting gender subtly every few seconds. "We don't have much time, so I'll lay it out. We've got an optimal target within your flight window. The Cú Chulainn is going to be burning hard on a tangent course and you will be taking some flying mounts out and engaging the PCV-GC Fearsome. We've already seen launches from their flight pods - expect friends out there. Your primary goal is going to be securing the route past the Fearsome and to the Ra. Blair Mountain is launching Century Rain squad and we need them to reach their targets."

Ines' smooth, slippery gray neck prickled. If she had had body hair, it'd have tried to rise right up.

Everyone in the battlegroup had heard...rumors about some of the squadrons and escorts that they were packing. The brass didn't like talking about it and no one wanted to come out and say it. But that much not talking about stuff made Ines want to break out in hives. If she could.

Sharks didn't get hives.

At least, not girls who had modded themselves to look like cute shark girls did not get hives.

If she had, she'd have left a really mean review on the omninet, growing a tail had hurt.

Ines focused again as their Legion laid out their routes and prospective enemies. But all the while, she was buzzing to get to her very own chassis. Her pride. Her joy. Her chassis.

"Good luck, good hunting."

The Lancers stood and hurried through the door. Ines was locking her helmet on as she and Kailen arrived in the hanger bay. Flight mounts were being strapped onto the shoulders and hips of the chassis that stood in the hanger, while last minute spot checks and loads were being trundled from the printers to their stations. Kalien grinned. "Good luck, Ines," she said. "Remember, keep your head!"

"And I'll watch your tail," Ines said back. The two girls slapped hips and Kailen's scorpion tail and Ines' shark tail slapped together. Then they were off. Kailen was swinging into the mountainous head of a burly looking HA Sherman, which had been painted dayglow pink with tiger stripes and the bizarre and inexplicable motto of KANE LIVES across the meeting planes of the chassis head. Ines had asked Kailen to explain it, and Kalien had gone on rambling precise of early Cradle media entertainment that had left Ines wishing she had just stung her instead. No, Ines' chassis was much classier: Sky blue and gunmetal gray, with white highlights, it stood out in a hanger of exotic choices and tailored picks.

Ines flew an GMS Everest.

"Your BGM-998 is prepped, Ines!" her chassis tech called down. "We've got it loaded with your choice - I swear, if I didn't see the authorization from the admiral, you'd be up before the DOJ/HR!"

"Paracausal ammo isn't that bad!" Ines said, stepping into the elevator under her chassis, which shot up, putting her right into the cockpit. She settled into the chair as she locked in. Her voice clicked onto the coms. "It just gives techies headaches. See, the trick is, you don't even pretend to understand it and just assume it's magic!"

Her techie seemed unamused from the grunt alone.

With her heavy machine gun locked into her arms and her backup - a big knife - at her hip, Ines flicked on the controls and her cockpit came to glowing life. A cheerful, female voice spoke. "Weapons, online. Systems, online. Coolant is good. Flying attachments at full reaction mass." A beat later. "Glad to see you're out of the brig, Lieutenant Ibanla."

"Hey, Cerulea," Ines said. "Ready to kick ass?"

"I do not have legs with which to kick, Lieutenant Ibanla. Besides, even if I did, I believe the 10cm paracausal rounds loaded into your BGM-998 would be far more efficacious than a kick," Cerulea crooned, her voice so soft and so demure that it had to be sarcastic.

"Launch in five."

Ines breathed in.

"Four."

The systems whirred.

"Three."

The rocket engines rumbled.

"Two."

Ines felt the thumps of the magnetic catapult locking home.

"Go! Go! Go!"

Her chassis was flung from the hanger bay and into the depths of space, whipping away from the Cú Chulainn so fast that between blinks the ship went from a sleek skyscraper of blue, gray and red to a glittering star. The rest of her squadron was visible from the green triangles that flared to life around them. "All ring, Ines, you're on my wing," Kailen said as the chatter of the rest of the wing crackled through the line. The flying mount kicked on and Ines was jammed back into her seat by the Gs. Her lips skinned back as Cerulea threw up the blue indicators for Century Rain squadron and the red indicators for the bad guys coming their way. She sighted on her target.

The time between launch and combat felt eternal, but it couldn't have been more than a half hour. Everyone knew where everyone was, and everyone knew when they were going to meet. That didn't make certainty, though. No one knew what each chassis carried, nor what each pilot could do...nor who was going to get lucky.

During that half hour, Ines took a moment to glance around. She saw pale winks and flashes that could have been kinetics, long spool lances, thrust plumes, anything. X-beams and grazers were equally invisible. And the fleets were so far apart that she mostly seemed to share space with nothing but the stars. Then...the gap between wings closed.

Closed.

A twin appeared before Ines, her subjectivity snapping into the dreamlike slowness of action. She twisted her controls and her Cerulea brought the heavy machine gun to a shoulder firing position. She loosed. And the rounds in her magazine did something. The counter in her HUD spun dizzily as her machine gun's barrel glowed with blue-white flurry. Rounds whipped out, tracers lining through space and the other chassis - a red painted GMS Everest - blew apart as Ines whipped past them.

"Hah!" She laughed, while Juji, one of the other pilots in her wing, cried out.

"Fuck! I got winged. My left arm actuators are shot."

"Are you MKed?" Wing Lieutenant Mercer barked.

"No, I still have my shoulder-"

The deceleration that slammed into Ines was as brutal as the acceleration. The dot ahead of her went from star to toy to skyscraper. Then she slammed home, her magnetic boots clamping onto the skin of the Fearsome. Nobby towers that were point defense guns jutted from the side, while long chute-doors were recessed into the sides like canyons. Ines sighted and fired in a quick spray, and a burst of high caliber, quasi-real bullets tore a nearby defense gun to shreds. She charged-scrambled forward, feet and one hand keeping her connected to the Fearsome despite its movements through space. Her shoulder crunched against the point defense tower and she peeked around - while Cerulea murmured.

"They're deploying hardsuits."

Men, actual human sized men, came boiling out. Several of them were carrying shoulder mounted munitions that launched whizzing rocket-swarms that started to whip past her, trying to hit her without hitting the ship. A scything line of molten hull material announced Kailen shooting by as a streaking star. The hardsuits were gone and air was gouting into space from the impact site.

"Come on, Ines, we gotta keep dancing out here!"

Ines grinned, detatched one of her hip mounted munitions, stuck to the ship...and then yelped as the Fearsome engaged a sudden acceleration, jerking her off the side. She tumbled, corrected herself - and then saw the winking flare of her munitions going off. The big carrier was still manuevering. Still fighting.

But she'd taken a lick - no two ways about it.

Ines shouldered her BGM and sighted on the next chassis to cross her line of fire.

Flight Sergeant Lim Biovare barely flinched as the Balor whipped Bunny in half with a crackling, buzzing hellwhip. The two halves of the Genghis that had been flying by her right tumbled through space, the pilot shouting over the lines. "Redlining! Critical! Fusion brea-" And then he was lost in a wave of static - reduced to ghost and radiation by the flare as his upper torso exploded into a flare of white light. Bio barely had time to register Bunny's death. She was too busy trying to avoid getting slashed in half by the Balor across from her. This squadron, identified as Century Rain by SIGINT and HUMINT, hadn't been easy to identify from a distance.

Up close...

Well.

They were unmistakable. No one else looked like shambling mounds of hissing death like a Balor. Wreathed in the witchfire of their nanoswarms and made only slightly more solid by their flying frames, each Balor was distinct and horrible in their own way. Not all of them had the damn hellwhips - several had graywash sprayers, others had hive nexues and a few had mixed in some more mainline, normal weapons like rail rifles or machine guns...but even those showed signs of HORUS infection.

Bio hated HORUS. Creeping, awful, inexplicable cell of terrorist. It was one of the reasons why she was, in the end, loyal to the Armory through thick and thin. Union, in their attempt to accept everyone, allowed anything. That included HORUS. She frowned, fiercely, as she felt her control almost slip as the Balor ahead of her slash its hellwhip at her. She dodged away from it with a spurt of her maneuvering thrusters and lifted her 0-Beam rifle up, scything it straight along the midsection of the Balor. The enemy chassis boiled like reactive metal being dunked in water, but she wasn't sure how much of that was damage, how much of that was the nanoswarm acting to protect itself.

"Fearsome-2, ignore Century Rain. Target of opportunity identified." The cold voice of FLEETCOM made Bio scowl. She hated to see HORUS get away...but the Balors, after their little bit of fun with their hellwhips, were already on a divergent tangent. She wasn't sure where they were going - but FLEETCOM had the big picture. So, she glanced down at her charts and let out a little grunt.

There was an enemy carrier getting dangerously close to her and her wing.

"Catboy, Neck. On me." She said, over the direct line - before grunting as she was pushed back into her seat by the acceleration. Catboy and Neck joined her, their thrust plumes cutting curved arcs through space. The enemy ship swelled before her - a skyscraper with two fluted, sweeping flanges spreading from the back. A pocket carrier! And her wings were far enough away to give her a chance that pilots dreamed of. "Pick your targets - aim for com pintles and PDGs."

"Got it!" Neck said.

"Yes, Mom," Catboy said, his voice flushed with the excitement of battle.

0-Beams took time to really warm up, so the initial spray that Bio put down was pretty no-nothing to write home about. Armor plating bubbled and streamed as she aimed down range - but then she had to focus on jerking herself left, right, up, down, all to avoid streamers of rounds and lasbeams that were trying to slice her out of the sky. According to doctrine, you needed to do three passes with a 0-Beam for maximal effect...but according to doctrine, you also had to avoid getting killed if you could help it.

"Come around for another pass once they're cooling," Bio said, grunting as her chassis was launched out of immediate, easy range of the pocket carrier's PDGs.

"Oh shit! Those Balor assholes have reached the fucking Ra!" Catboy exclaimed. The Ra at this range was a tiny speck in the distance, glittering and glinting. But it wasn't like it was hard to miss the Balors on scopes and radar. With a moment to breathe, Bio glanced down at her own scopes and was able to get a view locked and stabilized image of a Balor, hellwhip in one hand, cutter in the other, slicing into the side of the elegant sweep of the Ra's outer skin.

"We should do something!" Catboy said.

"No," Bio said, her voice firm. "We have our orders. FLEETCOM has the big picture. We're good for another pass, right?"

Streamers of tracer shells, barely visible as hissing beads of pale white, whipping around the sleek pocket carrier - her nameplate visible from this new angle as the UNS-CV Cú Chulainn. Bio squared her shoulders as she saw just how much angry, angry death was flying her way. She stuck out her jaw, knowing it was square.

"You first, Sargent," Catboy said.

Biovare kicked her chassis into full gear - screaming towards the Cú Chulainn for another pass.

---
ALERT ALERT! LEGIONSPACE SIREN IN EFFECT!
CHOOSE ONE!
[ ] Until the end of BG Diamond's next turn, BG Diamond cannot take or benefit from actions or effects that would move it back any number of range bands.
[ ] A ship in BG Diamond, chosen by the QM, takes 1d6 damage

NEXT, PLAN VOTE FOR NEXT BG OPERATION - USING THE SAME FORMAT AS BEFORE.

At the ranges Captain Sven Halston's frigate, the Hurricane, was currently fighting in the engagement that was beginning to swirl throughout the Diamond Shoals, he could launch torpedoes when he rolled out of bed, take a shower, breakfast, go to the bridge, accomplish his morning duties, go to lunch, handle any emergencies that cropped up during the day, handle his afternoon duties, have dinner, and retire to his quarters for his off-shift time while his first officer took the bridge, go to sleep, then wake up again before the torpedoes that he had fired had even become visible to the enemy fleet.

It was an odd way to fight a war, he reflected as he sat in the officer's mess, over the busy chatter of conversation and clink of dishes. Their Union allies had already reached the range where enemy ships were visible on mid to short ranged scopes - the part of the winding gyre of war that their battlegroup worked best at. Carriers were sitting at just the edge of their effective operational ranges...and that was the discussion for the evening table.

"Have you seen the reports on this wing that the Armory's brought? They're firing some kind of semi-coherent paracausal lance weapon that we're still trying to figure out the rough physic approximation on," Gala said as she salted her already salty meal, stirring with some recycled plastic chopsticks. "According to the fleet astrophysicist, they're on some kind of increasing curve."

"Lets hope it's not an exponent," Apa said from her place across from Gala.

"You can't tell this early," Gala said, shaking her head and beginning to shovel food into her mouth so fast that Sven was shocked that she wasn't biting into her toothpicks.

"Do we have any firing solutions for our payload?" he asked Apa. "We've been looking for a chance to opportunity fire our torpedoes..."

"Not yet, skipper," Apa said, sighing as she used a fork to twirl up noodles. "Legion's still trying to punch a hole through their outer syntactic interpolations. My whole department is throwing their math at it, but...well." She shrugged. "There's a lot of weird going on out there, from a demi-real perspective." She flashed him a very Gala-esque smile.

Sven shook his head. He turned to Varnie. "And our long term maneuvering?"

"Good, sir," Varnie said, before going back to shoveling meat chips into his mouth.

"Quite," Sven said.

Sleep was hard. Sven laid in his bed, considering popping a pill - but some part of him rebelled at the idea. Maybe it was the straight laced, Diasporan isolation in him that recoiled at the idea of taking a pill. Maybe it was the eminently logical part of his brain being leery of mixing the psychology of long-term warfare and unpredictable pharmacological effects. Maybe it was he just hated pills. He laid in bed, looking at the ceiling with soothing music piped quietly from his pillow, and tried to not imagine the slowly gathering energies that were building up on either side of the fleet. Of the torpedoes, already on flight.

Then-

Cha-CHUNK!

He sat bolt upright in bed, his heart hammering, before his wrist cuff - which hung loose and limp in his uniform, cast over a chair next to his desk - flared to life. "Sorry, Captain!" Ada's voice piped through the wrist. "We got a firing solution - too perfect to pass up."

"No, it's fine," Sven said, rubbing his face with his palm. "Good work, Ada." He laid back in bed, his eyes closing.

When Sven finally got to sleep, those torpedoes were hundreds of kilometers away - slender black bolts, still burning. The thin plumes of their acceleration were so well concealed that it'd take crossing the plume directly to have a good chance of spotting them at any range. Their noses pointed towards their distant targets...and those targets glittered with throbbing, pulsing weapons fire.

When Sven came onto the bridge the next morning, he grunted as he saw the payload tracker on the bridge screen - the munitions were a third of the way there. But what drew his eye and paused in the coffee drinking...was the sight of what the rest of his battlegroup had done. The Gale and the Derecho were only a few thousand kilometers ahead, but that had still brought them into enough range to have launched, at roughly the same time he had launched his torpedoes, what looked like their entire corvette and destroyer corps. Chevron after chevron of the tiny dots representing the subline ships glittered on the map, all of them hazing around the formation of carriers that served as the core of the mounted chassis platforms that Harrison's Armory had brought to the field.

"Damn," Sven said.

"They're really giving it to the bastards," Gala said, her shark sharp grin growing fiercer. She turned to her console. "They're almost in our scope range."

The screen blinked from the overview chart to something real. The carriers were all tiny stars, surrounded by the bulbous flowers of anti-subline weaponry. Kill clouds, still red hot from their dispersal launches, and shimmering contact beams and stutter grazers, with a few of the puffy, coiling tongues of railgun exhaust thrown in for measure. The corvettes were easily distinguished from the destroyers by being close in - their bodies winking and flashing as they discharged their over/under high bore kinetic weapons, while the destroyers remained at a distance and peppered the sky with winding corkscrews of missile swarms. The exhaust vanished almost faster than it could be seen, creating the hallucinogenic effect of clawed hands flashing into existence and turning into blooming fireballs around the targets.

"Goddamn," Sam Varnie said, quietly.

"You can say that again," Gala said.

"Goddamn," Sam Varnie said, slightly louder.

"How much damage are they taking?" Sven asked Ada.

"Hard to say, skipper," she said, frowning. "Damn. I've never seen a defensive interlock formation like that - look, they're practically dancing." And now that Sven knew what to look for, he could see the glittering stars that were the Fearsome, the Chastity, and the Davy Crockett were all in constant motion, showing first one, then the other, then the next to the formations attacking them. "They're spreading their incoming hits like a champ - it means each ship goes longer before it gets mission killed. Neat work that."

Then she swore. "Hell!"

"What?" Sven asked.

"Gala, can you check for me this throughline?" Ada asked, making a tossing gesture with her console. Gala clacked away at her keyboard, then hissed.

"Krillshit!" she said. "Sir, we've got a swarm of K-drones and boarding limpets, they look like they were launched from the Ra when their orbits were just so. They're heading right for the Chesapeake and...oh, thank god." she shook her head. "At least a quarter of the limpets missed. See, they're way off course."

She pointed at the projection.

Sven nodded. "I'd have hate to see those land - who knows what nasty shit they had onboard." He sipped his coffee. "God, but I hope the Gale and the Derecho repair crews are ready. They've got a lot of work ahead of them..."

Engineer Sarial Serial had a very serious, and very important job ahead of her. One that required as much of her focus as she could bring to bear. She squared her shoulders...and then whisked off the plastic cover for the fabricated cake before the Hồ Chí Minh's crew of tired, happy looking subline crew and held it out. The cake was ancient beyond reckoning and had changed little across the millennia that the tradition had been dragged, crawling over glass and extinction events.

So long as humanity had poker, they had cards.

So long as they had cards, they had...

"And with this, it's official: You and your crew are turret aces!" Sarial said, grinning as the subcaptain of the Hồ Chí Minh, a chubby cheeked girl named Mary who might as well have come off Cradle she was so innocent, beamed at her. "Enjoy!" She said, then let the crew of the corvette get to work. The Hồ Chí Minh's flight recorder was still playing in a loop in the back of the mess hall attached to the flight deck, and it showed the daring plunge into interdiction fire the scrappy corvette had taken as it flew along the skin of the Davy Crockett and taken out three heavy anti-fighter turrets in a single furious pass. That, plus the turret and the other turret the Hồ Chí Minh had taken down in their last two stories meant that they were an ace - a turret ace, yes, but still an ace.

Considering how dangerous anti-subline and interdiction turrets were, it was almost harder to become a turret ace then a chassis ace or a fighter ace or a subline ace.

"Or drone or limpet or missile or torpedo or nuke or kinetic or..." Sarial muttered under her breath as she came back to the hanger bay. She was about to snatch up her tablet and get to work - only to find it was gone. Not there. Absconded. Stolen. She looked around balefully, then saw Chief Xander was standing at her post, holding her tablet, giving orders over her headset. Sarial scowled and advanced towards him as the repair crews and armory crews worked to refit the needle-long destroyers and blunt, deadly corvettes that had been giving the Armory pukes a pounding for what felt like forever.

"Hey!" Sarial said.

Xander turned to her. "Chief Serial, what are you doing here?" He asked.

"It's my deck!" Sarial said, prodding his chest. "What are you doing here, think you can take over my duties-"

"Chief-"

"-I was printing and fabbing shit when you were still learning how to not puke in microgravity, you flatland-"

"Chief!" Xander said, louder. "It's 0930!"

Sarial blinked at him.

"Oh that's why I'm so tired," she said, rubbing her face with her palms. "I just stepped out to print a cake." She gestured with her hand.

"I thought you stepped out to go to bed," Xander said, frowning at her.

Sarial rubbed her palms against her face more. "...you sure you don't need me for anything more, I can handle-"

"The hanger bay will survive a duty shift without you, Chief," Xander said, pointing with his free hand, straight at the exit. "Get to bed."

That sounded alarmingly like an order from a man who...had the same rank as her, actually. Sarial grumbled under her breath as she turned and started to walk away. With every step, she felt heavier and more weighty, her shoulders drooping as the fatigue she had kept away through sheer dogged determination and adrenaline and...god, how much coffee? She felt the shudder and twitch of the ships acceleration beneath her feet and managed to keep herself walking. She moved out through the hanger bay, found the nearest head, and plugged herself into the machinery. There, she relieved herself of the weight of a solid quarter of that coffee, while her brain buzzed and babbled at her with things to remember.

Sarial's head bobbed forward. Sleep threatened...

She jerked it up, shaking herself. She tugged herself off the toilet, stumbled from the head, then started towards the spinal elevators that would whisk her to her quarters. She considered just finding an out of the way corner of the flight deck to sleep on, but the sudden and horrifying mental image of some idiot crewman running her over with a forklift, or being mangled by a sudden acceleration shift, or depressurized by sleeping in the wrong part of the room, flashed through her. She stepped towards the elevator.

The whole ship rocked slightly. It wasn't quite hard enough for a full hit. Sarial's sleep addled brain puzzled over that. "Not acceleration," she muttered. "Not a hit. So that means..."

A part of her was screaming it, but Sarial didn't quite piece it together until the wall to her left exploded inwards with a spray of hissing smoke and a clunk of collapsing metal. She jerked backwards, coughing and stumbling away. The hole in the wall led towards a seething mass of chittering metal, which spilled inwards, clattering and clinking. Hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of clattering spiders, clicking and whirring as they swarmed out of the hole and into the corridor. Sarial stumbled back another few feet.

She breathed in. Didn't die.

Not graywash, she thought, even as the drones started to chew into the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Lights flickered. Steam hissed. And Sarial brought her wrist to her mouth, speaking into her cuff.

"Boarding alert! We've got fucking drones!"

The drones seemed to all notice her at once.

"Lots of drones," she said.

Then she turned and started to sprint away as fast as she could as the swarm clattered after her...

---
Dun dun dunnnn! Also, some tactical genius had put BG Orchard in having to make...A CHOICE!

[ ] Move BG Orchard one range band forward
[ ] Remain where BG Orchard is AND take 1d6 damage and gain Lock on

Next, vote for what do next with...well, with Orchard. Then we'll be done with this phase and we can resolve all the fucking boarding actions going on! Also, you have special abilities called insightful commander and you have pickets, which let you do neat stuff, which people who know how the game work will put into their votes!