The minutes crawled by, hunched over your scanning station, trying to locate the enemy. You kept just signs of it, just a trail, having to track it by the emissions left from its engine, from the cloud of cold air launching its drones, from the spike of tachyons when its drive wound up. Like footsteps in shifting sands.
You took a sip of your coffee. You'd tried explaining what silica tasted like to Lera before, but it wasn't really possible. It didn't taste sweet or salty or bitter, it was a flavour that other humans just didn't have access to...and it was a
good flavor. For you at least. For other humans... just a good way to ruin the enamel on their teeth.
Except Daeds was kind of a sneaky jerk, because the good flavor slowly gained a weird aftertaste, that got weirder and weirder the more you had at once. It was a self regulating process, so you didn't overdo the silica. It was the trace elements you were made of, how your body repaired itself, but your body could only hold and use a limited amount.
"AM missile loaded, captain." Jae-Hwa said, "Should we launch?"
"We should. Follow it up with a pair of laser drones, we'll see if we can't take out theirs at a distance. First rule of point defense: keep the point well away from you." the captain said, and there were a few chuckles as everyone went about their orders.
CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK.
The sound of a probe launch is always an intense one - but firing armed probes sounded different to your ears. Mostly, it's because they're launched
hard, magnetic assists, not the more gentle acceleration of scanning probes. That added pressure on the firing mechanism transmits through the superstructure of the rocket like someone whacking a hammer against the wall - it doesn't help that the Newton-2 is pretty dinky, insofar as rockets went. On your scopes, the drones show up as a pair of tiny, blinking white dots on the green wireframe of the range meter, with one red dot to indicate the AM missile.
You glance over at the screen to follow their progress in colour, the display a mix of the external cameras and data from the tachyon sensors. The AM missile showed up as a brilliant red flare, like a starburst, though that was just how the signature of its magnetic containment field was displayed: if you looked out a window you'd seen nothing at all.
What happens next is emblematic of warfare in space. The long, slow wait - and then the action that happens between blinks. The blipping dots of the drones approach the hazy probability circles that indicate where the enemy drones might be - and then the view flashes, like a strobe light for a few seconds. Too fast for anyone to narrate, just a series of lights playing against one another.
"We've lost one of our drones, but I think we took one of theirs." Jae-Hwa says, staring down at his own display. "Sandra, what does your scanner show, the drone log doesn't make a lot of sense.
You play it out again on your scopes, slowly scanning through the timescale. One of the enemy drones decloaks, just for a moment, revealing what looks like a rounded and shining surface. On optical scanners and gravimetrics, you can see a twisting vortex at its core, something charging inside.
The nearest probe wheeled its laser around in the tiny circular housing, and for a half-second danced around on the surface of the enemy probe. The scattering light and expanding superheated gases finally show you the shape of the thing fully, a sort of long teardrop with a quartet of magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters driving it along. The laser vapourized a good chunk of the insulated layer just rear of the reflective surface, and then its log ended as the temperature on the drone's surface spike so rapidly…
Your drone didn't explode, it just
evaporated. All its components turned to a rapidly expanding cloud of gas, with only the uranium in its fission reactor left as free-floating liquid slag.
"The enemy drone hit it with a laser that, uh, deep-fried it." you muttered. "Temperatures in excess of three thousand degrees kelvin over, uh, about three seconds."
The beam originated, though, from the Sphere Builder's war rocket. It clearly has a projector, visible when it fires, and it fired
at one of the opened drone, which
redirected the laser and shifted it from ultraviolet to X-rays. Those X-rays had then hit the second metric drone, and that field had upshifted it
again to what read to your sensors as hard gamma. A graser, fired by using an UV gun. This implied some
fascinating things about the ease by which the Sphere Builders could generate power and metric fields...but that was all for later thought. The tactical analysis was pretty obvious.
"They can bank their lasers, ma'am," you said. "The drones are unarmed - but the main ship has a laser that it can hit their metric fields with. They upshift, then redirect and refocus it, with… negligible efficiency loss. Our drones are programmed to tumble when they detect that they're being hit - they're not programmed to even know that attacks can come at these angles."
"Well that's terrifying." Captain Karantirova said, her voice utterly neutral. Like she was commenting on a sports game she didn't particularly care for.
"At least it looks like we gave as good as we got." Jools pointed out. Sure enough, the lasered enemy drone was fully visible now, the screen zooming in on it as it tumbled out of control, bleeding reaction mass out the red-hot hole in its flank.
"Actually, it isn't
as bad as it sounds," you said, hurriedly. "These metric fields are limited in the amount by which they can upshift or downshift light - they don't just go straight from UV to gamma or anything harder. That means they can't just completely nosell our lasers by shifting them down to radio or something."
"And it means that more drones doesn't mean more lasers." Jae-Hwa declared triumphantly, before deflating a little. "It just means longer ranged, more focused, scarier lasers."
"Will our screens still block it?" the captain asked, and you made sure to double check the numbers before answering.
"They should. Not on that, but I've got a clear lock on their heat signature, we can walk the AM missile right into it." you said, the crosshairs closing on the screen.
"Miss Robinson, what are the gas plumes I'm seeing on my navigational scanner?" Mr. Sythe asked, and you felt butterflies in your stomach at being addressed by him before responding.
"Aahh… they've launched two more probes." you explained. "Cold gas launches… kind crude for them, don't you think?"
"Lower emissions than a magnetic assist. Better for avoiding detection." Mr. Sythe pointed out. "Also, simplicity has its own virtues in technical designs."
"Our second drone just spotted theirs. One second, firing manually." Jae-Hwa said, depressing a pair of buttons. On the screen, there was a blue glow for a moment, the camera jumping to show the enemy probe suddenly rendered in the light before something inside went
pop in the heat and blew it open like a soda can in a vacuum chamber. "Got 'im. Didn't even have a chance to shoot back, I bet their main laser was still recharging its capacitors."
"Well done. Turns out being invisible isn't the same thing as being invincible." the captain said.
---
You have two Advantage, which the tactical team (aka: you as voters) can spend when making attacks and such.
The enemy has closed to 6 Range. You are Moving Away, so as long as things hold they'll advance 1 per turn toward you. If you stop burning away, 2 per turn.
Your AM missile will hit next turn, and your drone will come into their range. They have launched two more drones.
You have 4 rockets in your ready rack: you regenerate one a turn.
Sandra Robinson at Research:
[ ] Scan for their exact location (needed for weapons to hit) (Location known)
[ ] Scan for their tactical capabilities (grants Advantage, reveals weapons)
[ ] Scan for their technological capabilities (grants Insight, reveals shield/hull)
[ ] Scan for their navigational capabilities (grants Energy, reveals delta v/FTL rating)
[ ] Wait
Kyo Jae-Hwa at Tactical:
Probe Options: Between 1-3 at a time. Choose cladding (FTL, naked, anti-laser, anti-kinetic) and choose either a warhead (atomic, NEFP, warp destabilizer, AM if loaded) or drone package
(laser, rail, scanner). You may freely mix types, even mixing drones and missiles.
While the AM missile is hot, it *must* be part of the next volley of probes fired, but you can hold it until then.
[ ] Fire Probes. (List number, cladding, warhead/package)
[ ] Fire Lasers (no target, out of range)
[ ] Ready an AM missile (List cladding).
[ ] Wait.
Mr. Sythe at Astrogation
[ ] Burn away.
[ ] Burn toward.
[ ] Charge FTL drive.
[ ] Try to place the planet between the two of you.
[ ] Wait.
Aliya Hashemi at Engineering
[ ] Redirect Power to Sensors
[ ] Redirect Power to Shields
[ ] Redirect Power to Weapons
[ ] Redirect Power to Engines
[ ] Redirect Power to FTL Ring (Not at FTL)
[ ] Wait
