Chapter 37:
December 5th, 4233
Temporary Staging Point Agrippa – 1 Light Year from Priorii
Outer Reaches
United Terran Concord
UTCNS Warlord
Alicia ran her hand over the railing that encircled the upper level of Warlord's command deck, her fingers tightening on the smooth metal surface, the only outward sign of her anxiety. She hated this part, the waiting. However, it was also necessary. She'd sent a handful of destroyers to scout Priorii ahead of her main task force. There was an argument for holding the entire battlegroup outside detection range and launching the probe, but no one knew how sensitive Lefu HTBs were – emerging a 'safe' distance away could mean one or two days' travel time. And when the Lefu pickets detected her scouts, they'd have that much additional time to prepare. At least this way, her intel was current and since the bastards already knew they were coming, it gave her a better look at what their preparations were.
Currently, the Lefu were fielding about sixty ships, none of them dreadnoughts and only a pair of Lakhesis carriers. Though the nature of Lefu technology made their forces almost even, without dreadnoughts, the advantage swung towards Hunt; boomers were a force multiplier, particularly the Lefu's SDs. She was pleased that their garrison force lacked them – a Lefu battleship might be death incarnate to virtually anything else, but to her boomers, entire squadrons of them were nothing but target practice. The admiral was feeling less celebratory about the vast strips of minefields – half-completed or not – that were being laid across the system and the half-dozen or so OWPs in Prior's orbit.
The Lefu – she still found it hard to refer to them as Evea'shi; that made them people, made them more then the fucking blight that they were – were definitely committed to the defence of their conquered system and she could see why; despite the damage inflicted on them by the retreating forces, the Priorii shipyards had been fully repaired and were now a ghastly skeletal hybrid of Terran and Lefu technologies. Enmeshed within a spiderweb of girders and gantries, her probes had managed to pick out a handful unknown cruiser-sized ships. There was still nothing solid on those ships, but from the few (admittedly blurry and distant) images that scouts had been able to capture, they were nearly complete.
That was the last thing the Concord needed, but it also meant that the bastards would fight even harder to keep the system. It didn't matter a good goddamn how hard they fought. She was going to bury them.
Hunt had to give her counterpart credit, though; their minefields were not as large as those at Unicorn Set or Tebrinnin, but they'd been laid to protect the system's asteroid belt and inner planets. A star system was a vast area to cover, but the Lefu had positioned their SLIPs well, if conservatively. Most were positioned to defend the inner-system., but there were a few smaller fields cloistered about a number of the outer-system moons. The Lefu fleet itself was staying close to Prior as well. Perhaps they believed they needed the assistance of the fixed defences. It was an encouraging thought.
Evacuation vessels were moving across the system, though many of non-combatants were still tethered to orbital works or grounded on Prior, presumably breaking down the pre-fab complexes that they'd had set up. A handful of cruisers and destroyers were escorting the convoys out towards the hyper limit and though it irked Hunt, she had no choice but to let them go. She could break off a piece of her battlegroup and try to slip them around the system to hit the convoy, but from her scouts' data, those ships were simple transports and freighters, not the valuable construction vessels. Although many of them had to be stuffed full of industrial components, it just wasn't worth putting holes in her screen and re-ordering her task groups this close to zero hour. Besides, if Reignfall went as it should, she'd get another crack at those ships sooner or later.
Until then, her first priority was taking this system and driving the tattooed freaks back into the outer dark.
A light code flickered on the holo tank, drawing the admiral's attention. The destroyer Sea Wasp had returned, the last scout she'd sent out. The DD was dipping back towards its assigned place in formation, transmitting its information to Warlord. There was nothing new there. Hunt circled the crew pit a final time, offering comforting words to the crewmen and women at their stations. It had been too long that they'd been on the defensive, too long holding back, too long accepting what the Lefu had been giving them. It was time to change all of that. Priorii belonged to the Concord and by God, it was well past time to take it back. No more dithering, no more failed attempts at diplomacy, no more useless entreaties to an alien species. It was time and past time for this.
"Jump the fleet," she ordered, returning to her command chair.
~
Aboard the sigil citadel Nascent Inferno Commandant Second Rank Likanic Akenii prowled the command center. The Enemy were prompt, he had to grant them that. And they'd arrived with a larger force then he had believed that they were willing to spend to reclaim this system, but a smaller one then had left the Major Enemy Base. There were other Enemy forces in play, but they were not his concern, not at the moment. His mission was the defence of Sentinel Nine and the shipwombs that lay within it. The vessels there were not yet fully operational. He had ordered the artisans to prepare them for flight, just in case the system should fall. Akenii didn't think it likely, but he had not risen to the rank of archon by taking foolish gambles.
He moved his hand over a control globe, rotating the starfield image. His force was quite outnumbered and the Enemy's Onslaught Fleet element would be difficult to subdue. Or so they thought. Hoped, even. They were here because Command had wanted them here, because this is where they would be crushed.
Akenii shifted the view again, to the largest of this system's ringed worlds, where in the depths of its rings the greater part of Bereavement's Canticle lay in wait. Not only them; Command had expected this system to be of value to the Enemy and the Enemy's Scouting Fleet and rath drones had seen what the Fleet had wanted them to see. The archon had taken great pains to conceal this operation and Akenii was looking forward to watching the payoff.
The Evea'shi officer smiled a predator's grin. Come to me, he whispered to the Enemy ship masters. Come and kill me, so that I can show you what I can create. Let me show you the Lake of Sorrows. As the range slowly but surely counted down, Akenii felt a slow dirge rising from his throat, the tune picked up by his subordinates until Nascent Inferno's command and control shuddered with hymnals.
~
"Emergence complete, admiral. The task force is assembling into prescribed formations. Drone shell is deploying, escorts are moving into screening positions and carriers have begun their launches."
"Hostile forces?"
"Increased emissions from the enemy armada, ma'am. They're definitely combat-hot, but they're not too interested in coming out to meet us, at least not at speed. Jamming's still heavy; we still can't get good reads on the ship classes."
"I suspect we'll find out when they open fire. Time until we close with the first minefield?"
"We'll cross into missile range in two-three-seven minutes."
Four hours. Hunt nodded. "Very well." She watched the display, trying to define the unpleasant feeling in her stomach. This looked… exactly like it should. Alicia forced the feeling aside; it was only the echoes of battle jitters. That's what she told herself. Instead she concentrated on the fleet status tables.
BG 97 had six BCVs assigned to it; Winston Churchill, Julius Caesar, Thomas Cochrane, James Wolfe, Tamerlane and Lin Piao. The 812th had gotten the lion's share of carriers, but Hunt's command had a far greater proportion of battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, trading long-range platforms for additional missile strength. Combined with a solid foundation of eight dreadnoughts, Hunt had enough firepower to smash the system's defenders twice over.
Churchill and Caesar's squadrons were armed with anti-fighter weapons, while the rest of the carriers' HAVOCs were loaded for anti-shipping strikes. Together, they were the speartip of BG 97's offensive into Priorii. Almost a thousand Concordat fighters hit vacuum, a wave that shifted and churned into a thrust pointed at the Lefu's capital ships. With such minimal fighter cover of their own, the tats' casualties were going to be heavy.
That should have been reassuring, but Hunt found herself drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair. Something was wrong. She could feel it. She hadn't risen this far in rank without listening to her gut once in a while and now, now it was telling her that something was wrong.
"Hostile fighters have launched. Tracking three-three-six emissions patterns. Moving to intercept our HAVOCs. Estimate four hours until our forces can range on theirs."
Hunt nodded in acknowledgment, trying to force that unsettled feeling away.
~
Commandant First Rank Kiena Vastii could almost feel Torment's desire to attack, the dreadnought seeming to strain beneath her. She knew that the other Onslaught Vessels and those aboard them must feel the same way, but that was not the plan. Chains of Torment would only fire when she desired it and she did not desire it yet. She awaited the word from Balance of Judgement and that would only come once the Enemy had committed themselves to the attack.
Though it could not truly comprehend what she was saying, the commandant whispered soothing words to her ship letting her confidence leak into the mental link, touching the minds of the thousands of her crew, her brothers and sisters. Her assurance was not without reason; Chains of Torment might be a newborn, but its soul was that of a destroyer, built to rend and slay entire fleets. With its kin at its side, there was no more perfect killer in the galaxy. And with the Flail ready to be wielded, Torment was all the more deadly.
Vastii licked her lips hungrily. The Flail had received the blessings of the artisans and it lay within the magazines of every Onslaught Vessel here. More importantly, it did not violate the proscriptions that the Host must labour under in dealing with this Enemy. At least, until they had enough evidence to finally wage war instead of a grating police action.
Well. One thing at a time. First, they'd christen the Flail in combat. She was looking forward to that moment. Kiena watched the tactical display, watched the vast train of firepower descending upon Akenii and his outnumbered ships. She knew Likanic well and the urge to come to his aid despite the plan burned in her soul. But they were both Evea'shi. There was no victory without sacrifice, no chance for survival unless all Enemy lay dead.
The commandant leaned back against her chair, keeping her breathing steady, listening to the murmurs of her crew. Only a little while longer, she consoled herself. Only a little more.
~
"Admiral – we've managed to get a recon probe through the inner-system defences," Singh leaned in to quietly inform Hunt. "It didn't last long, but we got some good, hard data off the shipyard before we lost the drone. I think you should take a look. We may have a problem."
"How so?"
"I've got the telemetry up in SPS, ma'am. If you'd care to…"
"Yes, of course." Hunt stood up. Asija wasn't usually this circumspect, but there was something in his voice that warned off her annoyed reprimand. She stood and followed her flag captain to Secondary Plotting, stepping in front of the main computer screen. Singh activated a feed, pictures captured by the doomed drone scrolling over the monitor. Both the raw images and the processed versions came up for comparison. Hunt froze the slideshow at one picture in particular, her mouth drying. "Asija," she began, gesturing to a stadium-sized piece of hardware. "Does that look like a-"
"Yes, it does, ma'am."
"It can't be, because what I was going to say was that it looked like part of the hyper system from a Venerator."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Bastards," Alicia hissed through her teeth. "They're building goddamn Frankenships. Those aren't warships – they're testbeds. They're trying to see how to integrate our hyper tech into their systems. That's why they're not withdrawing." Her jaw set. It wasn't enough that the Lefu killed her people, burned their ships, bombed their worlds. No, they had to loot the dead and rifle through their pockets.
That was enough to offend her morally. What was far more worrisome was the proof that, as she and her fellow officers had feared, the Lefu were trying to overcome the flaws in their own hyper systems by analyzing and reverse-engineering Concordat designs. She didn't know how many sites this research was being conducted at, but this one had to fall, no matter the cost.
~
Kiena let her attention wander, her eyes drifting towards the sensor feed showing the golden starfield of parasite pods, each of them drifting inert and silent. Sentinel Nine had sharper teeth then the Enemy could ever imagine. Sentinel Nine; such a dry, unimaginative name. It did well enough for a designation, but if this operation went anything like it was expected to, then she would suggest a better name for this system, the code name Akenii had given this gambit of his.
In Evea'shi mythology, there had been a young woman who had fallen in love, but her beloved was married to another woman, one of the Ovea'brei's historians. In jealousy, she had betrayed the artisan to the Brei'orai, but they had not taken only the historian, but many others. None were ever seen again. Though she tried to comfort him, her beloved found no rest in her arms and his anguish for his lost love drove him away from his new wife in the vain hope that he might find the love that the Brei'orai had stolen from him. Like her, he was never heard from again.
In her grief at what she'd wrought, the young woman drowned herself. Some interpretations of the tale said that her soul found no rest, still bound to the mortal world within the waters that she had cast herself into, her spirit trying to atone for her sins by luring other betrayers to their deaths. Others claimed that the dead woman's soul called out to the guilty and the innocent alike, drawing them to her, either in the hope that she might find both her beloved and the woman she betrayed and reunite them and thus find her own redemption… or simply because she'd been consumed by despair and could not stand to see the living have the joy that she was denied. No matter the fate of her soul, the waters in which she was believed to have drowned herself in became known as the Lake of Sorrows, feared as a place of suicides and murders, even to the Ovea'brei's masters.
Kiena was something of a romantic at heart; she believed the former variation on the myth of the Lake of Sorrows, but in all permutations of the tale, one thing was always clear. To set a foot into the Lady's domain, to let but a single drop of its water touch you, was to never leave. The commandant smiled thinly as the Enemy reached that invisible point in darkspace and the order came in from Balance of Judgement. At last.
The Enemy did not know it yet, but they had set just foot within the Lake of Sorrows and the Lady was waiting for them. "Ascend," she ordered, her voice a husky purr. "And move to engage." Like specters from the darkest shadows, Bereavement's Canticle raised themselves out of the dust and ice of the gas world's rings, the surge of their awakening systems piercing the darkness like the first motes of dawn's light, or the first chords of music. This was their time, their song.
And they did not sing it alone.
~
"Contact! Multiple contacts, eighty million klicks off, two-two-seven degrees by twenty-four. Drive signatures – ten, twenty, no correction – forty. Correction, sixty-eight capital ships. Drive emissions indicate nine, maybe ten SDs, admiral."
Before that news had time to sink in, there came another cry. "New contacts!" another Sensor rating called. "Reading, five, ten, thirty, seventy, two hundred," the count kept going up until the midshipman's face was drawn, his voice toneless. "Reading over one thousand SLIP pods activating, admiral."
"Multiple launches from hostile fleet – admiral, we've got Azazels. Incoming HAVOCs."
Alarms droned as the first flickers of inquisitive fire-control systems landed upon BG 97, missile pods turning to direct their payloads at the lumbering husks of the of the Concordat fleet, sensor stations warming as their scanners and EW systems pried and tugged at BG 97's jamming. Within minutes, those platforms would be ready to fire.
Hunt could feel her stomach writhe, acid bubbling into her thought as the grim reality of the situation imprinted itself. This should have been impossible; OMI had checked and re-checked Priorii in preparation for Reignfall – there'd been no sign of this level of buildup! But Alicia refused to let herself be bogged down in denial. The Lefu had timed their reveal well; BG 97 was now too deep in Priorii's gravity well to simply hyper out and her HAVOCs were committed to attacking the forward fleet. Which, she realized belatedly, had been bait.
Bait that she'd swallowed. Stupid, stupid fool!
She could wallow in her own incompetence later; right now she had several problems. Given their positions, no matter how she came about, if she attempted to turn the fleet around, she'd be banking towards either the SLIP field or the second Lefu task force. Neither of those prospects was conducive to a long and healthy life, especially since turning would put her ships' sterns and their blind zones to the faster Lefu fleet body ahead of her. Holding and fighting wasn't an option; the minefield and the dreadnoughts would have her fleet in a crossfire; they'd never need to close to energy range to finish her that way.
The third option was cutting and running: her faster units might make it to the hyper limit, especially if those left behind covered them, but that would mean abandoning her BCVs, her boomers, her battleships and possibly her battlecruisers. The Lefu could counter that by diverting their escorts and HAVOCs to attack the fleeing column. She couldn't see more then 30% of her fleet surviving and that was only the lighter units.
That left the fourth and final option. In a perfect world, it was something that she'd never even consider, but this was not a perfect world. Maybe the bastards had expected her to panic and flounder around. Well, too bad for them. You never had to fight the Resurgency, did you, you bastards? Let me show you a little something from their playbook.
"Message to fleet: all reserve power to thrust," Hunt ordered, clenching her teeth into a hateful grin. "We're going in."
"Course, admiral?"
Alicia nodded towards the haze of sixty ugly red icons, the lighter capital ships defending Prior. "Right down their throats."
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