Extra Special Bonus Preview Time!!

Hey! Hey! Guess what?! I ran out my buffer entirely! It finally happened! 

By way of a mea culpa, instead of a preview of next week's chapter of The Floret in the Mirror, you get an excerpt of like length from a fic I've been writing off and on for over a year at this point. Someday it'll get finished — until then, it's languished on the back burner. But you, o' patrons, get a sneak peak at what I have occasionally described as "What if that Star Trek TOS episode "Balance of Terror," but it's HDG?" 

I am hoping that once this work crunch gets done with, I can take a week or so and really buckle down to refill my chapter buffer. 

Until then, enjoy the logistics of SPACE!!!!! 

Content Warning: The Terran half of this is basically golden age mil-scifi techwank with a dash of feralism, so if you have a low tolerance for that kind of thing, go in prepared (lol). 

---- 

The control room lighting was bright as day, halogen harsh on gunmetal surfaces. It always amused Lucian to see vids of fictive ship-to-ship engagements with overdimmed lighting, as if being barely able to see what one was doing so one’s face could be dramatically lit by screens would let one do one’s job better. But amusement was a thought for another time, and he put it aside — the next five minutes might decide whether 26 Cygni remained a free system or whether it would fall under the sway of the invaders.

“Sensors, report target track,” he muttered as he stared into a repeater display that showed a map of the system — the swollen, helium-burning star at its heart, the dusting of rocky worlds in its middling orbits, and the gas giant sweeping the system’s perimeter.

“Sensors, Conn, report target track,” the deck officer repeated, loudly enough to be heard across the control room.

“Conn, Sensors, Tango-1 remains in orbit around P3, periaps 300, apoaps 340, inclination 15 degrees,” came the reply.

“Got ‘em right where we want ‘em.” The XO, Russ Caulfield, was leaning over the same display as the captain. He was not bothering to suppress the excited grin on his face. The harsh lighting caught the sweat on his face, but everyone was sweating — the heat sinks were struggling to keep up with the ship’s thermal load, even drifting free. The reactor was running at full, and the capacitors were approaching full charge. “Let’s light ‘em up!”

“Not yet,” Lucian said, his eyes remaining fixed on the orbital path of the small moon about to eclipse 26 Cygni III, a harsh little world, barely habitable, but blessed with copious amounts of fissiles. It was a strategic system, and the Cosmic Navy had fought hard to keep it — alas, in vain. Nothing had yet stopped the Affini juggernaut as they smashed one system after another.

“We’ve got the weeds dead to rights,” Caulfield hissed. He was an arrogant hothead, and Lucian often wondered how far his father’s name would suffice to cover up that glaring flaw — hopefully, he thought, long enough for him to learn that combat in the void was a thing of math, of planning and contingencies, far more than a thing of the gut.

The gut had a place, to be sure — as long as Terrans were Terran, it always would — but the gut couldn’t override physics, and Lucian Hodges, Captain of the CNS Enceladus, would rather that Caulfield not be ushered to command before he learned that fact. He had, at least, learned not to undermine the Captain’s authority by arguing out loud.

“We may,” he responded in an equally soft tone. “Remember what happened to the fleet, Russ. We take no chances with this. Every shot we fire, we have an escape route. It does humanity no good for us to throw away the ship on a wild gamble.”

Caulfield grumbled. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I get that. I saw them take the fleet apart. But that’s exactly why I want to dust the fucking weeds.”

“And we will,” Lucian said. “Every enemy has a weakness, and theirs is arrogance. Leaving just a single ship behind has restricted their options. They have one ship, we have one ship — and we’ve seen them fight.” He tapped the symbol on the screen representing the xeno ship. “That’s a fleet tender, no doubt. Logistics, not open combat. She kept away from the fleet during the battle.”

“A sitting duck.” There came the grin again. Bloodthirsty, Lucian thought. Never a good quality.

“If this were wargames, and that were a Severn-class or even a Gyre, you’d be right. But let’s not fall victim to pride — their technology is better than ours.” He watched Caulfield seethe. Of course he doesn’t like acknowledging that anyone’s better than him. “So, we treat that logistics vessel like a stars-damned dreadnought. Which means, if we want to kill it, we need to be damned clever.” The moon slid smoothly towards eclipse, and sweat continued to bead on his brow. There was no gravity to pull it down his face. “Weps, remove capacitor safeties and stand by to fire primary linear accelerator, salvo of fifteen KKV-100s. Pilot, check alignment with firing solution.”

The commands were repeated, and the responses came back. The lights flickered slightly as the linear accelerator’s magnetic coils charged, stealing what power wasn’t topping up the capacitors. Lucian thought he could feel the heat redouble, but he knew it was just his imagination. One minute to the keyhole, he thought. Then, thirty seconds. Twenty seconds. Ten. The surface of the moon crept towards the point of light that was the third planet, threatening to block it from sight. “Fire salvo,” he said calmly. He felt each shot as gentle shoves a half second apart as Newton took his due — for every hundred-kilo slug it fired at a goodly fraction of the speed of light, Enceladus recoiled ever so slightly.

He’d timed it perfectly. The final slug screamed over the surface of the little nameless moon, less than a kilometer from the surface. Drifting fines might disturb its trajectory slightly, but it had no atmosphere to speak of, and by the time he was able to process the thought, 26 Cygni III was eclipsed, and with it the xeno vessel in orbit around it.

“Deploy all radiators, max extension. When saturation is reached, begin venting thermal ballast. Set reactor to 5% and rig for cold running.” On the hull of the ship, thermal baffling slid away to reveal the ship’s heat-sinks and radiators, which slid out and away from the slip like fractal-edged knives as they fully unfolded, their tines already glowing with infrared radiation that, without the mass of the planet between them, the xenos would surely detect. Then, as if a dam had given way, coolant began to gush from the radiators in a rapidly expanding and sublimating spray, leaving a wispy cloud behind the Enceladus as it orbited.

Lucian watched the heat sink temperatures plunge alongside the rapidly emptying thermal ballast tanks. “Secure thermal ballast. Pilot, make my course… 116.21 by 98.22. Sound burn.” The telltale buzzing of the burn alert rang through the ship. Caulfield and Packett braced themselves, grabbing the rails that ran around the low ceiling. “Burn for 5.3 kps, one quarter thrust. Nice and easy, if you please. Weps, fire burn decoy one.”

The cloud of coolant would be a dead giveaway, of course, when its relative motion brought it around the rim of the moon. So, for that matter, would the radioactive plume from his engine. The xenos would be able to track its trajectory and thereby derive his own. Hence the decoy: the missile streaking away on a totally different course was gently saturating space behind it with uranium salts and reaction byproducts chemically indistinguishable from those Enceladus left in her wake. It would never hold up to direct observation, of course — for that, you’d need a “decoy” with identical engine and mass parameters as the ship, which for obvious reasons was impractical. With the moon in the way, though, a ploy like this could work. It was exactly the kind of stealth Enceladus had been designed and built around.

“And now,” Lucian said, feeling the thrust push him back in his seat, as he followed the salvo’s progress in-system, “we wait.”

<hr>

The circular room, a broad dome with a crystalline pillar at its center, was lined with soft benches, the floor a gentle moss. An airy breeze swept through the arched doorways, and dozens of creeping, flowering vines lined the walls. At this time of night, it was mostly empty — only two Affini sat there, watching the holographic displays playing around the central pillar, along with a lone Terran. They shared a tablet between them, and apart from the adorable little noises the Terran was making, it was the only sound.

“Oh no, look at how precious,” Nephra Serotina, Third Bloom said as her vines entangled with those of her student, her brilliant blue flowers mingling with Indi’s violet fronds. “She did that unprompted?”

“Absolutely unprompted,” Indi Viridia, First Bloom said proudly. “You see why I fell for her?”

“I won’t lie, part of me wishes I’d seen her first,” Nephra said. “Of course, I’ve been just a bit busy of late. Maybe once we get this planet properly taken care of, I can spare some time for xeno-cafe visits.”

“You should! The way her eyes lit up when she first saw me, oh, it was too sweet. I knew then and there I had to have her. Didn’t I, petal?” She leaned down and lifted the little Terran in her lap, stroking her gently.

“Mmmhmmm~” The Terran arched her back and sighed happily. Half a dozen xenodrugs were coursing through her bloodstream, and every touch was ecstasy.

“Good Jillian,” Indi purred, scritching the nape of her neck.

“Shouldn’t she be asleep? All the texts say Terrans are diurnal.”

“Oh, no, this one’s very nocturnal. You can’t get her out of bed before mid-afternoon. Practically made for me, don’t you–“ She paused, leaning forward to stare at one of the displays around the crystal pillar. “What in the world is that?”

“Hmm?” Nephra took the tablet and called up the display onto it. “Looks like a thermal event of some kind out by the fifth planet. Perhaps vulcanism, but the reports don’t indicate it’s particularly geologically active. Too small for that, and these energies…hmm.”

“Should we alert the captain?” Indi said, clutching Jillian close.

“Give me a moment, it might not be… ah,” Nephra said soothingly, her vines tightening slightly around Indi. “Let me check something.” She split her hand into two dozen fragments and began rapidly typing in commands, calling for spectrographic studies and electromagnetic surveys of the part of the sky the thermal pulse had been detected in. “Well, well, well,” she said a moment later, smiling across at Indi. “Do you know what we found?”

“Is it dangerous?” Her vines coiled around Jillian, who murmured happily as she looked adoringly up at her owner, totally ignorant of what was going on.

“No, silly,” Nephra said, laughing. “It’s just a little Terran ship! A lost little fish we need to catch, but it’s trying to be sneaky. This is some kind of a coolant chemical, I think. Look at that specific heat! So clever when they want to be, these Terrans. And this is a propulsion trail from one of their nuclear fission engines. Though… ohhh. Very, very sneaky. Two propulsion trails, but not nearly enough heat in that coolant cloud for two ships.”

“So we should inform the captain?”

“Yes, we should,” Nephra agreed. “But I think, and I’m hoping, that e will let me handle this myself. Here.” She passed the tablet to Indi and rose to her feet, striding forward toward the crystal pillar. With a dozen vines, she began to arrange a control workspace, a halo of holographic displays surrounding her. “Captain, this is Tactical Specialist Nephra Serotina, Third Bloom. We’ve detected a Terran vessel that appears to be employing subterfuge, and which I believe has hostile intentions. With your permission, I would like to bring Tillandsia to full combat readiness and arm the Firebreak.”

<hr>

“Captain’s Log, CNS Enceladus. Following the loss of the 8th Fleet, we maintained our station in solar orbit in outer 26 Cygni, observing the enemy. The majority of the xeno fleet has departed, leaving a single ship we believe to be a fleet tender of some kind in orbit around 26 Cygni III. Said ship is, we estimate, roughly nine kilometers long, but lightly armed. I have therefore elected to carry the battle forward. The opportunity to finally strike a successful blow against the xenos, coupled with the potential to salvage usable technology, is too essential to pass up.

Two hours ago, I fired a salvo of fifteen KKV-100s at maximum velocity and conducted an occluded burn to place Enceladus into a modified Molniya orbit around 26 Cygni V, providing maximum occlusion time with reference to III. The KKVs should intercept the target vessel in forty-five minutes, so a little over an hour from now, we’ll know if we’ve finally managed to punch back against these xenos.”

He terminated the recording and took a long, slow sip of coffee from the sealed thermocanister while the computer transcribed the entry and filed it in the main server bank, the ship’s black box, and the emergency dial-home drone.

“And what if we didn’t get them?” Caulfield said. He was leaning against the bulkhead in Lucien’s quarters, opposite the bed and the fold-out desk, drifting slightly — the ship was once again ballistic, radiators closed and heat sinks holding back the thermal tide. They’d be coming around the gas giant soon, and any emission was now dangerous.

“Their ships are more maneuverable than they should be,” Lucien admitted, “but with no launch transient to speak of, a point-four-one-cee relative velocity, and a vantablack coating, the only way they’ll be able to spot them is if a star along the flight path happens to be occluded — and those things have a cross-section about so.” He gestured with his hands, one holding the coffee canister, the other flat, about half a meter apart in front of him. “So, our odds are good. They might choose to adjust orbit, or break orbit, but I doubt it. Any movement on their part is a significantly greater energy expenditure than it’d be for us, and they have no reason to depart — there’s a steady stream of shuttles to and from the planet.”

“Probably taking off the population,” Caulfield said. “Shipping them off to the mines.”

“If they wanted them in the mines, they’d keep them there,” Lucien said. “The fissiles down there are the whole reason we care about the place.”

“Well, then they’re dropping captives from other worlds, other ships,” Caulfield growled. “Whatever they’re doing, it’s nothing good.”

“Well, we can agree there. And even if we can disable or kill that ship, we don’t have the manpower to take the planet. Best we could do is indiscriminately shell from orbit with the linear cannon, which would not be my preference — we’d smash our own infrastructure, and when we do take this planet back, we’ll need it. No, our best case scenario is a critical hit that leaves the tender disabled, giving us the opportunity to press a demand for surrender. If they are indeed carrying a population of captive Terrans, we free them and use the able to hold that ship, force the xenos to show us how to work it, and begin stripping it for useful tech and intelligence. Either could turn the tide of the war.”

“Not a bad plan, sir.”

“It if works, Russ,” Lucien said. “If it works.”

<hr>

“I don’t understand,” Indi said. “We’re not doing anything. I thought you got permission for full combat readiness?” Jillian rocked gently in her arms, coming down from a truly blistering high.

“I did. Now we wait. We’re interested in this sector of space,” Nephra said, tracing an irregular wedge with a strange tail over one of her holographic screens, a gesture that encompassed hundreds of stars. “You see, they vented that coolant cloud behind the fourth moon of the fifth planet, here.” She jabbed the narrow end of the wedge, just adjacent to a point of light a little brighter than the rest. “The coolant is moving this way, so that was their vector at the time they vented it.” Another gesture encompassed the tail specifically. “The thrust byproducts, meanwhile, point off in that direction and that direction, which means they could be somewhere in or around here-ish — but we can eliminate most of that space, really, because a sneaky little fish like this one wants to hide, which means they’ll be behind one of these moons, or behind the gas giant itself.”

“You got all that from a cloud of coolant and two clouds of thrust byproduct?”

“That and a little intuition,” Nephra added with a cheerful smile. “Remember, a big part of Tactical Studies is learning how to think like a frightened xeno. If you were a little Terran, and you wanted to make the big scary Affini go away, and you had a sneaky-sneak little starship, what would you do?” She watched Indi think it over — she really was a bright student. All she lacked was experience, and this pacification campaign would provide plenty of that. Case in point, the valuable teaching moment this sweet little Terran had given them.

“Well,” Indi said, “hide, obviously. Which isn’t very easy in space to begin with. But venting all that coolant seems like a pretty bad way of doing it, unless they’re bottling their heat all up as best they can and dumping it all at once. I suppose that means they must have an awful lot of thermal baffling to keep all the infrared radiation from leaking out and giving them away.”

“Mmmhmmm,” Nephra said. “A very good point. That’s why I’m looking for light-curve anomalies rather than thermal wake. Terrans like to coat their ships in very low-albedo paint, but over time that gets worn down by micrometeorites and such — and, of course, if they occlude a star, they’ll give themselves right away. They can’t be perfectly sneaky in the optical spectrum.”

“So they hide behind planets and moons,” Indi said. “And do their maneuvering there too.”

“Which means they’re ballistic until we see another cloud of coolant or thruster wake. If I was this little fishy, I’d put myself in a long-period orbit to wait and see if the shots I’d fired had connected with my target.”

Indi stared up at Nephra. “You didn’t say anything about them having fired on us.”

“Don’t tell me you’re surprised,” Nephra said, laughing and winding a few vines around her student to pull her close. “Look at how much heat that cloud shed. That says ‘military reactor running at full power,’ at least in terran Terms — and that says what?”

“Something very energy intensive happened. Right — if they just wanted to observe us, they wouldn’t need to run very many systems at all.”

“Which means — and this is just a guess, but it fits the facts — I think they probably used one of those cute little linear accelerators of theirs to throw something at us. Maybe an explosive payload, or maybe a kinetic interceptor. Impossible to tell, but based on what we know about Terran linear accelerators and the probable mass of that ship, kinetic interceptors should be arriving sometime in the next, oh, ten minutes or so.”

“Well, of course it makes sense when you say it like that,” Indi said. “Their kinetic interceptors can’t piece the hull, can they?”

“Oh no,” Nepha said, laughing. “Well, maybe if they hit a particularly vulnerable spot that had previously been weakened by some other untoward event. And perhaps, if they shot for the radiators and hit a critical point, it might cause minor damage. Nothing that would impair our effectiveness in any way. Either way, we’re prepared, and the Tillandsia is in good condition. Combat readiness means–?”

“Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and make sure no xenos get hurt,” Indi replied. “I suppose I’ll get vines full of that when I do my maintenance and damage control rotation.”

“You’re going to make me nostalgic if you keep that up. You know, that reminds me, one time when–“ She was interrupted by a soft, hollow bwoooonnnnng, like the peal of an enormous bell, that seemed to ring from the floor itself. At almost exactly the same time, warning lights began flashing on the panel responsible for Firebreak control. “Aaah, there we are!” Nephra said, tapping away at her tablet. “A hit amidships, looks like the near side of Ring One.”

“Any damage?”

“No, the kinetic dispersal plating and the potential energy sinks were sufficient to bleed off the impact. Hmm. Point-four-one of light speed? My, that’s a meaty little linear accelerator they have, to throw fifteen of those in the space of a few seconds. Firebreak got the rest,” she added in a reassuring tone. “Once it knew the trajectory, it was easy enough, even at those speeds.”

“So, it’s over, right? We know where they are, and we can go get them?”

“We know where they were,” Nephra corrected her. “But as to where they are…”