---
---
Zenith Jump Point, Alphard System
Marian Union, Antispinward Periphery
March 2979
The jump ended, and with it what mild nausea had afflicted Precentor Wellings subsided as well. Placing his hand on the microphone stand at the helm of his jumpship, he used it for a quick voice test before turning it onto the general channel for the jumpship and its docked dropships. "All hands, ready for launch! We fight in the name of blessed Bla-!"
There was a vicious rumbling sound and a sharp pain in his abdomen, where he was secured to his chair. He could feel his harness rubbing back and forth against him at high speeds - a sign he hadn't adjusted it properly, but even moreso…
"Damage control, full report!" he demanded.
A few moments later, a panicked voice resounded back over the intercom. "We've lost the back half of the Light of Terra! The jump core has been severed!"
Sweat beaded on his brow. "Was it a misjump?"
"N-no, Precentor!" the call came back. "It was there a second ago, but… a foreign object struck us moments after our arrival. It was an enemy missile!"
"Those blasted barbarians! Heathens! Fuckers!" Wellings cried, clawing at the air with his hand. The residents of the system couldn't possibly have fired that missile and then missed and hit the jumpship. There wouldn't have been travel time if they'd fired after they could attempt to hit a dropship. There was only one explanation for the strike: they had launched stationary missiles the moment they saw the jump signature form and set them to aim for the center of that, in the hopes of scoring disabling hits before the battle started.
These savages had actually made the decision to risk the destruction of the jumpships if it meant disabling their dropships.
Gritting his teeth, he cast his hand out wide, and yelled into his microphone. "All hands, immediate launch! Show these faithless barbarians the power of our conviction! Show them the wrath of Karpov!"
"Precentor." his comms officer called back from where she sat before the console. "Reports of damage from four friendly jumpships. No response from the remaining three. Only Toyama's Vision reports no damage."
"What of their associated dropships?"
"All carrier dropships report green."
Grant Wellings permitted himself a cautious smile at that revelation. "Then we shall show them our conviction. Issue my command directly to the dropships while necessary - all vessels are to immediately initiate Operation Vengeance! Moreover, Toyama's Vision must be defended at all costs until they are able to rejump - news must reach the First Circuit of what we've found here!"
He really shouldn't have made a pun out of this plan name, but how was he supposed to resist? What else could one call something as righteous and lavish as casting over three hundred of the Star League's finest aerospace fighters into the void in retribution for a cowardly blow?
Perhaps it wasn't so necessary to get a ship out to call home after all - certainly, if they were all to die in this dark and distant place, a message would have been sent. However, it was only by way of a courier that they'd still be able to inform the most enlightened minds of the sheer depths of depravity they had found here. Precentor Simms and Primus Takami needed, at all costs, to be informed of the monstrous character of these 'Marians', such that they could ready the WarShip arm to reduce them to ash!
Such was the Precentor's conviction as a man of faith.
- -
Precentor Jonnels gazed down at the security footage for but an instant, and his blood instantly froze in his chest. "Nighthawks. Their boarding marines are wearing powered armor. The fighters disabled so many of those boarding shuttles, and yet… the one or two which pierced the envelope came bearing the powered armor of the Star League itself?"
"Precentor, your orders?"
He glanced over to Sub-Precentor Nielson with a cool dread in his eyes. "Get the damned Tornadoes out to the affected areas immediately. Back them up with ordinary marines if necessary. In fact, send anyone you can get into a suit! Do not let them reach the engineering section, or there will be hell to pay!"
They'd come here out of concern for the possibility that a dangerous industrial power was emerging, and he could see now that one was, indeed, emerging. It would require too much of a coincidence to assume that the shuttles which reached them were the only ones which carried powered armor troops - the ones that were destroyed or disabled, they also had to be carrying augmented marines.
Though it was only one thing thus far, there was now solid evidence that the people of Alphard - of the Marian Union - were producing not just some manner of military machinery, but genuine lostech.
No wonder the wretched mercenaries had died here.
"Engineering team, communications team!" he called out. "Barricade yourselves in your compartments if necessary. Hold out for as long as you can. We must survive to jump out, or else our masters will have no way to know of our wider victory or defeat on this day!"
If only this operation had been carried out with the full resources of the Explorer Corps, they could have prepared a Direct Reciprocal Unmanned Message chain to deliver information automatically. The damned fool of an old man, Mars… he was responsible for this. It was his fault for not being trustworthy, for raising the stakes of this mission so much!
As always, it was lacking faith which worked to obstruct the will of Blake.
Precentor Jonnels would simply need to strengthen his own faith enough to deflect vibroblades if he wanted to make up for it, judging by the images still marching along the path of the security cameras. How strong did faith need to be to do that, though?
He couldn't recall the relevant scriptural miracle by its specific wording at the moment…
Ah, well. Armor was better for swords and bullets anyways. He turned his gaze to the Sub-Precentor before he got away. "...And while you're at it, prepare equipment for the bridge crew."
"Yes, Precentor."
---
---
Zenith Jump Point, Alphard System
Marian Union, Antispinward Periphery
March 2979
Paul relaxed the throttle for a second while he jerked his stick to the right and back, gradually diverging from the head-on approach with the enemy dropship as the thrust accumulated. There wasn't a snowball's chance in hell he was getting within weapon's range of an Achilles like that - his Dragonfly II was a light dogfighter at its core. With just two large lasers and, flat out, five and a half g of thrust, the reworked Canopian job would get scrapped in a second, increased armor or no.
All he could do now was trust in the modded Air-to-Air Crockett to find its way home while he switched games to its escorts. Though there was some slim chance that the abbreviated limpet systems would successfully get the physics unit in blow the dropship from the inside, it wasn't actually his job to see the thing scrapped. The strike fighters behind him had that work.
Seconds later, his sensors alerted him to the luminescence of an external detonation - it was to be expected, when your missile could only drill through the weakest points imaginable, that you'd have more duds than successes - and he turned his attention toward the big, bad Ironsides that was squaring up to pass him by and go after the inbound Stukas.
Recognition systems said the thing was carrying a boatload of old Royal tech, but it was plain to see that it was pearls before swine in this pilot's hands - anyone with actual battlefield experience would have noticed him whirling to get on their six, and in a naked-assed fighter like the Ironsides that meant death if they didn't respond. Or…
Paul rolled his eyes, chiding himself for the basic logical error. That was it, wasn't it? The modifications the eggheads had made to the base Dragonfly frame to unify its engine model with that of the Lightning meant that this kid didn't realize they were out-paced yet, even if they had an inclusive rec guide that included the extinct design. In the little world in their head, their fighter had the armor lead, the speed lead, and the firepower lead, so they didn't need to worry about a little bug.
Paul shoved the stick forward all the way once his nose was pointed the right way, luxuriating in the feeling of getting slammed back against his chair. Ah, this really wasn't a damned thing compared to centrifuge training or flight in a high-g trainer. His flight suit gave him a nice, enveloping hug and all was more or less well in the world.
As the pilot of his prey panicked and flipped their own thrust up to full, Paul couldn't help but let out a choked laugh into the cockpit. "That wasn't it, kiddo. You needed to flip around here."
Saying that into the emptiness of his cockpit, he waited for the distance to close a bit before letting off his first volley of shots, lasers invisibly streaming into the void around the rookie as he closed the gap. In not too long, he'd need to let off for a bit - match thrust, rather than exceed it - in order to give himself a breather, but for now he was okay.
He had time to scratch out this twenty something amateur before they figured out how to fight in the void.
Secret was, without aerodynamic forces, you could just spin in a constant trajectory. Can't shake your enemy? Just do a little spin with main thrust off. It was like jousting at that point - the pursuer would either need to break off or commit to a heads-on exchange at that point, and for all his meager greatness, Paul wouldn't win that fight if he stuck it out.
Ah, to be young and stupid.
Some time later, his firing circuits and heat management system advised him that he was ready for a second volley, the kid still not having realized what game they were playing, and he loosed it, having had ample time to line it up. "Dumbass."
The two bolts struck true against the aft of the fighter, converging on a point just besides the bell of the main thruster and the thing shone a hell of a lot brighter for a second before cutting out, its fuel lines cut and converted to engine rich exhaust.
"Vajra-6, splash one IRN-SD1b.". Paul angled off of the poor bastard and glanced at the tactical overview radar. In a large battle like this, the sensitivity was damned low to avoid a situation where the thing went completely white, but he could still get a sense of it.
The stitched together sensor data seemed to indicate that while he'd been off in wonderland, the strike squadron had silenced the Achilles itself, and this small area of the fight had closed for the moment.
He gave himself the luxury of a more complete tactical readout for a moment, before wincing and narrowing it again. As expected, that was still a fuckload of fancy birds out there, and not all of them were turkeys. To be expected, since it wasn't christmas or his birthday.
He gave another furtive glance to his squad indicator. He was still a failure of a wingman, but more importantly, Wells and Greenhill were marked off too. That left just him and the command flight out of the squad, even if the overall wing was still mostly fine thanks to the sacrifices.
As someone who'd been held in reserves during the boarding action of 2970, he'd carved the memory of that raid into his head and prepared all of this time to pitch in when something big happened, but he'd never expected anything quite this big.
The enemy was incompetent, but they had the numbers and the grade of metal to make it uncomfortably even. These outlanders had brought six air regiments to fight three, and despite their worst efforts it was looking like they might even achieve some of their goals in defeat.
No breakthroughs. That was the mission the garrison fleet had accepted when it was expanded over the last decade. It was a critical - some might even say holy - mission. The reason was simple - even a lone small craft could carry the munitions needed to crack the nascent Alphard Renaissance Shipyards, in their incomplete state. They'd die horribly after or, perhaps more likely, before they did it, but they still had the potential to put a fatal amount of joules into machinery that had taken a decade to build, and would take another decade to truly complete.
They simply all had to die here. A fighter could be forgiven - it would never reach the planet with its pilot alive anyways - but not one proper vessel could leave the jump point under its original crew's management.
At the current rate, that wasn't going to happen.
The radio crackled as a broadcast began to fight the heavy jamming, before delivering a voice loud and clear. It was the garrison's commander. "Attention all crafts. Cease capture protocol and take stations for annihilation protocol. Repeat, all crafts…"
Ah, that would do it. Paul circled back to give support for the new operation. Thanks to the drop tanks he'd carried at the start, he still had plenty of his original tank of fuel in reserve.
Calling an end to capture protocol meant one thing - the boarders had done all they could, whether that meant they'd taken the ships they'd set out for or they'd been defeated - and the superheavy strike craft were going to begin their part of the work: the delivery of the enhanced Alamos they were carrying directly into the guts of the enemy ships.
As he made his way back at a breathable 1g, he couldn't help but nod. At the end of the day, an aerospace fighter would never be a strike bomber in the same way a Patrol Boat could. Even the largest of their birds could only deliver one or two of the proper shipbreaking missiles before switching to guns - the most purpose-tailored small crafts could manage more than there were fingers on a hand.
They'd taken plenty of losses today, and they were going to take plenty more, but if they were progressing the fight to the full scale usage of tactical-grade missiles, there shouldn't be any viable skeet left to attempt a breakthrough when all was said and done.
---
---
In Transit, Alphard System
Marian Union, Antispinward Periphery
March 2979
Junior Sub-Precentor Janet Brayburn folded her hands against her forehead and rocked back and forth. This was a humiliation. It was a great and horrible failure. It was an affront to Blake's blessed will.
Such cowardice did not befit those who bore the righteous duty of enacting destiny. Who was she to have lead her craft away from the action, when so many hundreds of her compatriots were dying, burnt and blasted, at the hands of these dishonorable heathens?
A warrior's duty was to fight. Why wasn't she? Just because her vessel happened to be a bit faster? Just because of some piddly little orders?
She understood the rationale behind it, but the act of leaving them all to die still stung her even a week later.
Even of those ordered to attempt the breakthrough, none outside of her crew still drew breath. The other assault boats had one and all been shot down before they reached beyond reprisal range.
The true folly of all this was, there was no guarantee she would be able to do anything when she got there. Why would the planet itself not also be guarded? More and better than her had given their blood to bring her to this point - what could she do if even a third of the forces present at the jump point were duplicated at her all-too-close destination?
The thermonuclear devices in the hold of this vessel were simple gravity-type bombs for planetary saturation - and the complement at her disposal was nowhere near sufficient for that. Moreover, they were meant for suborbital use only - they would never survive reentry in a state capable of useful detonation.
Would she be able to deorbit into their operational range?
Perhaps.
"Brayburn." her sensor operator called irreverently, turning his head toward her. "You'll want to see this."
She rose from her seat with a sigh. "What is it, Desmond? Have they already gathered themselves to strike us down where we float?"
The older gentleman scratched his chin, smiling with only his mouth while his eyes fell sullen. "...Not exclusively that. Look there."
He pointed, on his magnified screen, to a cluster of sensor pictures depicting something massive in orbit. It was long - incredibly long, but fast approaching being wider still as the stack of enclosed cylinders under construction to one side and the shorter stack of gantries to the opposite end attested to.
Janet covered her mouth in shock. For someone with even a lick of worldliness, it was plain to see that this thing was an orbital shipyard complex - and one not for dropships but for jumpships at that! For the construction of jumpships, rather than maintenance! Those cylinders were unmistakably core foundries. The gantry nearest to the center of the structure was even occupied by a partial vessel!
"Do you have an estimate as to the displacement of that drydock?" she demanded, before pinching her forehead. "Rather, do you have a positive ID on the ship in that drydock?"
"Negative. The thing is completely absent from our database." Desmond denied, waving his hand around. "However, the large cluster of engine bells at the back makes it clear that the thing is intended for more than just stationkeeping flight. That would mean one of three things - these heathens are primitives, these heathens are fools, or these heathens are attempting to construct WarShips."
"Much as I would like to think it only the former two, that seems incredibly unlikely given the circumstances, and in any case I must react as though it were the latter." Janet grumbled, her pulse pounding away in her chest. "Helm, reorient for a strike run against the shipyard complex. We're going to use our munitions - ourselves if necessary - as kinetic impactors to disable the thing."
Helmsman Zaffigan shot her a dubious look. "At this distance and velocity, the chance we'll hit them with anything is basically nil. Reorienting our vector to that thing without slowing enough for them to shoot us down sounds like hell. You're really feeling reckless today, aren't you?"
"Dead women have no need for recks." she joked, waving her hand around. "Fear is beyond us at this point. There is nothing left but a mission we've been charged by the divine with carrying out. Keeley, ready the bomb bay to launch all munitions. Armed on a time fuse, so that in the event of a miss we might at least harm any exposed cores."
The youth chirped in the affirmative immediately. "Right-o. You know, though, there's only so much you can do to put one of forty dumb fired, shotgunned out bombs hit, right?"
"Which is exactly why we're going in ourselves if they all miss. At least if they shoot us down, we might leave some fragments too large for their anti-meteorite equipment to handle. Our final meal will be the victory of the righteous." she declared with finality.
"Right." the young woman agreed. "Just laying that out there."
Junior Sub-Precentor Brayburn indicated forward to her hand - although she actually meant 'adjust angle and execute a high-g burn' by context - and called out with righteous fury. "Forward, ye righteous, ye faithful. Operation Vengeance is yet unconcluded! Forward in the name of Blake!"
- -
Comstar First Circuit Compound
Hilton Head Island, North America, Terra
April 2979
"They have failed." Primus Takami concluded, massaging the side of his head. "Or they have succeeded as martyrs. One way or the other, they are assuredly lost to us. Would your sister have been pleased by such results, Sims?"
Karl narrowed his eyes at the new Primus. "Certainly not. If there were some battle-worn stragglers fresh from the battle, holding high the tattered banner of victory at all costs, Adrienne may - if only for a moment - have known some peace from the terror of her visions. Such a result as this would have brought her no solace."
The younger - though by no means young - man seated behind the ornate desk leaned back in his chair, his face somewhat red. "Naturally. And of course, that voluminous assembly of squabbling children will think no better of it. What a mess the first month of my administration has become. To one side, an entire supplemented brigade of the Comstar Guard and Militia dead in Alphard's bleakness, to the other, the wild dogs of the periphery scraping at the hull of a battlecruiser in the hopes of finding that only one small, replaceable part has failed. All we can hope for is that they, barbarians that they are, manage to break it before the Capellans arrive for it."
"Or when they arrive for it." Karl noted. "In any case, I doubt the ship will last through whatever number of back-and-forth battles it would hypothetically take for some side or another to diagnose the damage fully. Most likely, the rimward-spinward states will all exhaust substantial forces chasing after a hull which none of them will ever truly commission into service."
"Which is all well and good, except that it doesn't regain me any of the political capital I've lost!" Primus Takami declared, rising back to strict, rigid verticality in his chair. "Already, I am spoken of as the 'Primus of Defeat' - as a fool who has squandered and compromised the power of the Order on two different occasions. For what? For having been unable to change what my predecessor set in motion untold years ago? What fault do I have in the madwoman's sending our finest out to die in droves."
Karl slapped his hand down on the desk, blood pressure rising at the insult to his sister. "What does their death tell us other than that sending them out was not mad? A polity unworthy of the act would not have buried them all."
"If they had been worthy of the act, they would not have been buried. If the attack had been better planned, better provisioned - if it had been more subtle and more flexible in its execution - we may have acquired some testament of victory. If she was hoping for such a blunt instrument of an attack to work, she should have send an entire division - and far sooner than a decade after the start of planning."
"ROM does not - nay, did not have an entire division in the Comguards!" Precentor ROM protested. "Besides which, even allowing so many forces and such a massive use of hindsight - such a massive and rapid movement of forces would have been impossible to conceal, rather than simply difficult. To do so would have utterly compromised the illusion of our neutrality!"
"...I know." Yin agreed, his eyes cast out to the side. "However, that does not make this easier for me. This debacle has debased the Comguard, it has debased ROM, and it has debased me. Only that old man you feel so much contempt for, Mars, has come out of this clean thanks to your cutting him out of the loop. Surely you understand that something must be done to mend this situation, before I am hit with a vote of no confidence and my position is given to such a non-believer."
Karl shuddered. "I think you exaggerate a bit. The First Circuit would not elect from outside of their numbers. However… they may well call to elevate his post to it, if things degenerate enough. I…"
Karl paused. Primus Takami sighed. "I came into this term with such dreams of reforming the degenerate state of the First Circuit, but it seems my destiny is to see the cancer inside of it metastasize further for reasons beyond my control."
The intelligence man bowed deeply. "I will accept sole responsibility for these failures in front of the assembly. As the immediate executor of both operations, and the one who handled most of the planning, they should be willing to rightly displace the blame from you to me. Assuming they have any intentions other than to oppose you, as all reasonable people should."
"I thank you for your sacrifice, Precentor Sims." Takami hissed, leaning against his desk. "For fucks sake, they went out in the Explorer Corps' livery…"
--------
So this chapter is about...2000 words short of my usual target, and I'm not really that confident in it, but it's a lot better than my original mental image of the aftermath of the last chapter - an immediate second timeskip.
✌️)
