Bad Neighbours

[Screwball]

This, alas, is only half of the next chapter. The second half is something like 95% done, but the last sections still need work. Since it's creeping towards the ten thousand word mark, I'm going to chop it in two.

On the plus side, that means that the next bit should be up sometime this week, rather than two months from now. :p

* * *


Bad Neighbours
Chapter 6a

The Kynda class cruiser was well on it's way to completion. The Russian missile ship bore a distinct resemblance to a very long brick; a slab sided, solidly built cuboid with an aft end flared to accommodate the bulk of a fusion torch drive, it's sides studded with missile tubes and the protective domes covering scattering field emitters. Unlike more modern designs, the Kynda lacked the forest of sensor masts and radar systems associated with leapmissiles, instead sporting a comparatively anaemic array of sensors concentrated amidships. Or, at least, it would have sported them, had they been installed.

The large dome of the ship's main radar was being lowered carefully into place. The operation was a delicate one; care was being taken not to inadvertently damage any of the delicate components of the radar itself, or any of the other, already installed systems. A single false step or ill timed twitch could have been disastrous.

Admiral Liao Daiyu twitched as her com wailed, and the tiny resin dome stuck fast to one of the model Kynda's RE-77 fire control trackers. Muttering something extremely unladylike under her breath, she took a second to school her features into the calm expression expected of somebody of her exalted rank, then pressed the button that accepted the call. The face filling the free floating holoscreen that blinked into existence before her, that of Senior Lieutenant Wang Hao, was considerably less calm than her own. Behind him, the command centre of Mir Orbit One, the primary orbital station that serviced the sole inhabited planet of the Alshain system, Mir, displayed a bustle and energy she usually associated with a major exhuman guerilla attack.

“Liao, go ahead.”

“Sorry for intruding, Ma'am, but we've got something up here that I think you need to see.”

She arched an eyebrow.

“Oh? Pump it to my display, please.”

“Yes Ma'am, one moment.”

A second, larger screen appeared next to the first, bearing a duplicate of part of the the main system plot in the command centre. The data codes next to most of the light chips were omitted, as was the majority of the Alshain system not relevant to whatever the watch officer was concerned over, simply to squeeze a display that filled a screen wider than her day cabin from bulkhead to bulkhead into something that could be projected easily in the available space. It took Daiyu a moment to orient herself with the truncated plot, but the number of civilian ships – mostly ore haulers moving between the system's stupendous asteroid belt and the halo of foundries and factory stations orbiting closer to the star or around Mir itself – and the position of Alshain IV, the single visible planet, made it clear that the plot was of the Mir side of Alshain.

It was also rapidly obvious just what had caught Hao's attention; a bright orange rash of contacts hovering menacingly near the outer edge of the display, and the necklace of individual light chips scattered in a half sphere nearly a light minute in front of them.

“They just appeared out of nowhere three minutes ago. There wasn't any warning, and we detected no metric deformations that would indicate an FTL jump. For that matter, they're nowhere near a charted jumpzone, and we've swept that area heavily enough looking for Miran navy ships that we know for certain there isn't one lurking around and we just happened to miss it. Their 'pickets' look to have appeared with the rest of them and then made microjumps to their present positions, again without any detectable alterations to the metric. So far as we can tell, they're playing fair with normal physics. In fact, they've got a hellacious IR signature; I'd be surprised if there was a single entropy sink on any one of those ships.”

“Have we got anybody out there?”

“Commander Yang and Tse Yang are in a position to generate an intercept with one of the pickets without using their FTL. Everything else is either civilian or too far away to be useful without making a jump.”

“Have they noticed Yang?”

“Not so far as we can tell, Ma'am. I think they'd probably have tried doing something about him if they knew he was there, given how close he is.”

“Thank you, Senior Lieutenant. I'm going to declare Case Blue; get on the hyperwave and advise Earth what's going on here, then start evacuating noncombatants to the surface. I'll be up momentarily.”

“Yes Ma'am!”

Daiyu took nearly five minutes to reach the command centre. Orbit one hadn't been designed, initially, as a military installation. Indeed, the majority of its volume was still dedicated to commercial and civilian activity. The destruction of the majority of Mir's orbital military infrastructure during the PLAN invasion, and the subsequent actions of exhuman Miran saboteurs and remnant MSN ships had further eroded the military presence in orbit, with the result that the Chinese military administration had shifted it's base of operations to Orbit One. As a military station, it was poorly laid out, but it was big enough and could provide enough power to operate psuedogravity generators, a necessity for permanent habitation, it had plenty of space to accommodate the personnel needed to run a government and it had excellent communication links, as well as boat bays spacious enough to support the brigade of naval infantry that formed the Security Force's rapid response force.

It also held over a hundred thousand people, on average, at any one time. That meant that the evacuation of civilians required by Case Blue, the contingency plan for the sudden and unexpected invasion of a system by an unknown force present in strength, was going to be a nightmare. Moreover, the evacuees, not just from Orbit One but from the constellation of other stations that ringed Mir, would all have to squeeze themselves into the relative handful of domed settlements on the surface. The natives, in deference to their insane social and religious dogmas, didn't bother to dome their settlements; they simply pushed their augments further and further, rather than take the simple, easy and sane route of maintaining an Earth-normal atmosphere. Almost all of the domes on the surface had been erected by the PLA to provide secure garrison towns, and they had not been intended to hold hundreds of thousands of extra people. Given that the People's Republic more or less controlled the systems at the other ends of Alshain's three jumpzones, nobody had seen any need to build them with that in mind, since any impending attack on the system – by the Russians, for example – would have by necessity provided ample warning and thus time to organise a proper evacuation.

None of the planners had thought about fleets appearing where they literally had no possibility of being, however, for the understandable reason that impossible things had a pronounced tendency to not happen. That was, after all, the definition of the word.

The nerve centre of Alshain's system defence most certainly had been purpose built, however. The black armoured sentries standing beside the hatch braced to attention as she approached. She returned their salutes, then nodded in thanks as the rightmost soldier activated the hatch controls. System Control, Orbit One's command centre, was a large hemispherical compartment filled with circular banks of consoles rising up from the recessed floor level like a technically advanced version of the terraces once used to grow rice on the side of mountains. In the middle of the compartment, an expansive holoscreen displayed the system plot. Dozens of supplementary windows hovered around the sides of the big plot, bursting with information not displayed on the graphical representation, and each one of the dozens of crewmembers seated at the computer consoles was surrounded by yet more free floating screens. Most striking of all, however, was the view of the outside environs of the station shown on the thin, durable flatscreen coating the bulkheads. Despite being buried near the centre of one of Orbit One's three spherical hulls, it was as if the rest of the station didn't exist and the compartment was open to space. The dirty orange and brown orb of Mir hung to her right, surrounded by a glittering necklace of reflected light and drive flares, and the stars burned bright and unblinking without any atmosphere to interfere with their light.

The unidentified fleet waited sullenly in a tiny corner of the main plot. Seen in relation to the rest of the system, it seemed tiny, insignificant, but the way the neatly ordered light chips denoting civilian vessels were scattering towards the nearest jumpzones – or fleeing towards Mir, if they didn't have the good fortune to be FTL capable – made it obvious that, however tiny it might have been compared to the entire star system, that fleet was more than large enough to have a profound effect on the human inhabitants.

“Admiral on deck!”

“As you were,” she waved the command crew back into their seats before they could come to attention. Hao continued rising from the commander's station on an elevated platform raised above most of the workstations and providing a clear view of the system plot. She returned his salute, then gestured to the display.

“Has the situation changed?”

“No Ma'am. Commander Yang is on course to intercept his target in thirty two minutes, and we're in the process of putting some of our out-system arrays close to their main body. Whether they'll stay in one place long enough for us to get any good readings, I don't know, but...”

“But they've already shown that they can mircojump, and the arrays aren't designed for speed.”

“Exactly, Ma'am. There's a good chance they won't be there. We have, however, managed to patch into some mining survey sats in that region; they're out of reaction mass and running on batteries, so we can't manoeuvre them into better positions and the data quality isn't very good, but it's a hell of a lot better than just seeing a fleet's worth of IR sources and nothing else,” he tapped a command into the console before him, and one of the displays enclosing the platform on three sides obediently presented the data available on the intruders.

Daiyu's eyebrows shot up with such force she was surprised they stayed on her face.

“Is this accurate?”

“Until we get something better in position, Ma'am, we're presuming it is. We've gotten confirmation from three different platforms; none of them agreed on everything, but all of them show that monster in more or less the same place. They all agree on their acceleration as well.”

She hadn't expected the data to be good, but she hadn't imagined for a moment that it would be as bad as it was. The mining satellites that were her only real source of data were ill suited to the task to which they were being put; their radars and passive instruments were intended to keep track of relatively slow moving rocks and to gather accurate information over months or years of operation, not hours. Even worse, without reaction mass, they were on a slow drift out of the system, and far, far out of their instruments' optimal range, especially considering that universally obsolete nature of the sensors on satellites that had been in place long enough to exhaust their drives and drift so far out from any place thy could have been commercially useful. In fact, there were eight platforms in the right general area, but five of them were simply too far away for their myopic sensors to provide useful data. Daiyu desperately wished that one of the much more capable and modern Type 89 recon platforms was in the right position to take the unknowns under observation. The big, purpose designed Type 89 mounted some of the most capable radar and lidar systems in the Sphere, as well as powerful optics, an astounding array of passive sensors and a set of more esoteric theotech-derived sensors. On top of that, they were constructed of the most advanced stealth materials the People's Republic of China could manufacture, outfitted with coldgas thrusters and sported large entropy sinks. They were actually more capable than the sensor suites on some smaller and less capable warships, and extremely difficult to find, even in active mode, but as a result were expensive. No commander ever had enough of them to cover all areas of a star system, and despite the fact that she had a large number in inventory compared to most stations as a result of the need to keep track of what was left of the Mir Star Navy, there were still huge gaps in coverage.

Compounding the problem, as a result of their coldgas propulsion, they weren't exactly speedy. Deploying them from a starship mitigated that somewhat if the vessel had a chance to build velocity beforehand, assuming the ship wasn't FTL capable, but from a standing start, it could take weeks to reposition a Type 89 in response to unexpected circumstances. That was why they were usually placed in locations one could be reasonably certain would be of interest at some point, not in the middle of nowhere. Which, unfortunately, happened to be where that fleet had chosen to appear.

As a result, the information on the unknowns was distressingly low resolution; the exact count of individual units was somewhere between 60 and and 75, although it was entirely possible that that count was on the low side; more than one of the reported contacts were low confidence enough that they could have been two vessels that looked like a single target. That was bad enough; Daiyu had a grand total of 36 ships under her command, and 21 of them were little more than glorified police cutters, slightly upgunned to deal with Miran smugglers and armed merchant raiders. Against a proper warship of any sort, their single popgun particle cannon, flimsy shields and all but nonexistant armour meant that they were little more than metal coffins. Worse, nine of her 15 proper warships were destroyers and four of those were Kai Yang class ships, with a powerful energy armament and excellent defences, but intended more for stealth and picket work, with all the limitations that highly stealthy ships suffered. They were simply too slow to keep up with the rest of her fleet. Tse Yang happened to be in the right position to make herself immediately useful, but the other three Kai Yangs, while they could certainly make any rendezvous point via use of FTL, would be of limited use in a general engagement. Especially in light of the preposterously high acceleration the unknown ships were showing. That left her five Cheng Kung cruisers and a single Zhuxi class system control ship as her truly effective long range striking force, and five destroyers of assorted classes – none of which mounted leapmissiles - to screen them.

It was a paltry force in comparison to that of the intruders purely on the basis of numbers. Worse, those ships were impossibly fast; nothing short of a solid state postie drone could have matched them, everything she had access to was more or less immobile in comparison. Adding insult to injury was the massive ship that occupied the centre of the unidentified fleet. With such poor quality information, and at so long a distance, it was difficult to accurately judge sizes, but unless she was very much mistaken, that ship was in excess of a kilometer long. Bigger than the Chang Zheng. In comparison, Hu Jintao was just over three hundred meters from bow to stern. Unless the PLAN possessed a truly crushing technical edge – something that seemed unlikely, in light of the truly preposterous acceleration advantage of the other ships – there was simply no way they could stop the newcomers, should they prove to be hostile.

“What's the status of the evacuation?”

“The first shuttles are away, and all ground stations have been instructed to prepare to receive refugees. I, ah, took the liberty of alerting General Sheng as to the specifics of the situation, and he's begun deployment of his GTO assets around major urban centres and started dispersing his command infrastructure.”

“Very well done, Senior Leiutenant.”

“Thank you, Ma'am. I'm afraid I don't think there'll be time to get everybody off, but I've prioritised single parents and children. A number of private citizens have placed their personal craft at our disposal, and the 197th have made their assault shuttles available. Even so, we just don't have the lift capacity.”

“Not your fault, Lieutenant. I don't plan to fight from this station, in any case. Should the unknowns prove to be hostile, I intend to take Hu Jintao and the rest of the fleet to meet them as far away from Mir as possible. It's remotely possible that we can dissuade them. You'll remain in command here until Captain Minh arrives from the surface, should he do so. If I cannot stop them – and honesty compels me to admit that such an event is likely – then you're to surrender orbit. There's no way you can fight that,” she nodded to the display. “With what passes for the fortifications around this planet. General Sheng has enough GTO artillery to cover him, especially with all the crap in Mir's atmosphere, so there's no need to get yourself and everybody else on this station killed. Make sure Captain Minh knows that.”

“Of course, Ma'am. What about the MS teams?”

“There's empty hangar space on Hu Jintao. We'll transfer the suits to her and the Cheng Kungs, and swap out Type 225s if we run out of space. Standard protocol for equipment that might fall into enemy hands applies to anything still aboard if you have to surrender,” that meant 'make it unusable'.

“I'd better get on that, Ma'am. I don't think we've got a great deal of time.”

“You're a master of understatement, Lieutenant. Put me through to Commander Yang, then get on the transfer. Comms!”

“Ma'am!”

“Fleet orders. Make ready to get underway. Rendezvous with the flag in three-zero minutes at coordinates to follow. Message ends. Astro! Get me a least time course that puts us 300K klicks at maximum accel directly away from them.”
“Yes Ma'am.”

“Admiral, I've got Commander Yang for you.”

“Very good Lieutenant. Carry on with your duties.”

“At once Ma'am!”

Daiyu turned to her com screen and cleared her throat.


* * *

Commander Yang Zhou regarded the space where Admiral Liao's com screen had vanished, and stroked his neatly trimmed moustache.

“It appears, ladies and gentlemen, that we will shortly be required to earn our princely salaries,” a chuckle filled the cramped CIC of Tse Yang. The Kai Yang class was a marvel of ship design; it was well armed and well protected for it's size, and represented a major advance in stealth technology for the PLAN, even if it was inferior to the front line active stealth technology deployed by PACT ships. That was combined with a capable sensor suite and an affordable price tag. Unfortunately, such things did not come without compromise, and in the case of the Kai Yangs, that compromise had been crew comfort. The destroyer scale vessels had crews more of a size with the tiny, obsolote frigates that smaller nations still maintained to inflate the size of their fleets, and they were supported in considerable discomfort. There were exactly half as many berths as crew members, the internal accessways were claustrophobically cramped and most compartments were so small and packed with equipment that crew almost had to climb over one another to reach their stations. The stealth ships attracted a very specific sort of sailor; those with the sort of extensive modifications that meant fatigue was of minor concern at best, with no problems with confined spaces and with incredibly steady nerves. A significant proportion were drawn from the submarines that the PLAN still deployed into the seas of Earth, although even they considered conditions austere.

Tse Yang was a pitch black needle of insidium one hundred and fifty meters long. Without her weapons deployed, her hull was unmarred by turrets or the other unstealthy protrusions that represented the essential tools of violence needed by any warship. The rear third of her hull bulged out abruptly in order to accommodate her engines and the outsized entropy sinks needed to reduce her infrared signature enough that she was, more or less, undetectable even in the vacuum of space. Under conditions of stealthy running, her internal compartments could become cold enough that frost would form on equipment and crewmen could suffer frostbite if not in their temperature controlled skinsuits. Even now, Yang's breath misted the air in front of him.

“Distance to target, Mr Cao?”

“40K klicks, sir.”

“Hm... go ahead and sound general quarters. Then get me a clear channel to that ship. Let's try talking to these people.”

As the GQ alarm began to howl, Yang picked up his helmet from the rack beside his crash couch and settled it onto his suit's neck ring. The seal clicked and there was a hiss as the suit pressurised, but he checked the telltales anyway; the indicator for his seals burned an unblinking green. A glance around the CIC showed that everybody else was fully kitted up, not surprising given that there had been ample forewarning that this moment would come.

“Sir, you're on, broadcasting in the clear,” announced Lieutenant Han from his position in the alcove that served as Tse Yang's communication section.

“Unidentified ship, you are intruding in space belonging to the People's Republic of China. Please state your intentions or withdraw immediately.”


* * *

“Any idea what they said?”

“No sir. They're transmitting from somewhere close, though. If you can keep them talking, we might be able to get a fix on their position.” The turian frantically working at the sensor station didn't look up from his display, and Ship-Commander Asturius flicked his mandibles in irritation inside his helmet. Nobody had ever had to deal with starships that weren't blindingly obvious – indeed, such a thing should have been impossible – but the craft moving about the star system were incredibly hard to pin down. Judging from their crawling acceleration and the way they were scattering away from the newly christened 78th Frontier Fleet, most of them had to be civilians, but if they'd switched off their torch drives, they would have been more or less invisible.

He had no idea how it was done, but the humans had obviously capitalised on the capability to create truly stealthy spaceborn warships. Until the completely unexpected transmission arrived from nowhere, Limitati had had no idea another ship was within hundreds of thousands of kilometers of her. Quite how the humans had managed not only to hide a starship but also a starship sized drive torch was completely beyond him, but obviously they had found a way. Either that, or the fellow had just happened to be in exactly the right place at the right time.

Or, from his point of view, more likely the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Very well. Open a channel and transmit on the same frequency.” He waited until one of the com operators indicated he was transmitting. “Human vessel, I am Ship-Commander Asturias. I speak with the authority of the Turian Hierarchy and the Citadel Council. Your people have violated Council law and unlawfully attacked a Hierarchy patrol fleet performing their legitimate duty; disengage your stealth systems, power down any weapons and stand by to receive my boarding parties immediately, or we will fire into you.”

He had no real idea where the other ship was, certainly not enough to actually shoot and hit anything, but the humans didn't know that. Of course, they were vanishingly unlikely to even understand what he was saying, but he would have sounded ridiculous speaking nonsense into the pickup, and it was useful to have some sort of proof that he had at least tried talking before any shooting started.


* * *


“That was unhelpful. Anybody recognise the language?”

“No sir. I can't imagine trying to wrap my lips around some of those sounds.”

“Unknown language, completely unidentified ships of unfamiliar design that have physically impossible accelerations, appearing from a nonexistant jumpzone... I like this less and less as time goes on. Go ahead and clear for action, Mr Cao, but no targeting them yet. Mr Han, transmit the standard warn off signal on continuous loop, and, ah, send our friends the prepackaged first contact greeting.”

“Sir?”

“I'm aware that I might be about to get egg on my face, but none of the other Great Powers are responsible for this, and I have my doubts as to whether any Rim world could build something larger than the Chang Zheng. That doesn't leave any other options; they don't look like Velan drones to me!”

“Ah... they'll be able to work out where we are if we do that, sir.”

“I'm aware of that, Mr Han. I'm not going to fire into them and maybe start an interstellar war without provocation, though. Transmit the package.”

“Aye sir, transmitting now.”


* * *


“They're transmitting again. Two signals... I can't make sense of either of them, but one's a voice transmission and the other is some sort of repeating pattern. It could be a first contact package.”

“Unfortunately for them, they've already made their intentions perfectly clear through their actions at Relay 314. They must consider us criminally stupid if they think trying to talk now is going to do them any good. Have you located them?”

“Um... possibly, sir. We've got them localised to...”

“Found them!”

Asturias whipped his head around as the tactical rating yelled.

“Can you target them?”

“Yes sir! I don't know what they did, but I'm getting a radar contact. Not much of one, but we can lock it up.”

“Well then, open fire!”


* * *


There was very little warning. The ship that was the target of Tse Yang's transmissions flipped about, aligning it's longest axis with the Chinese vessel. Nobody in her CIC had enough time to realise what such an abrupt course chance probably meant; Limitati's railcannons spoke three times in ten seconds. Two volleys passed within ten kilometers of the destroyer, close misses in a space combat environment. The third raked the Chinese ship along it's dorsal surface; without active flash shields, the heavy ferrous slugs smashed into the human vessel's armoured hull like white hot awls. Atmosphere belched out into space, carrying debris and crewmen with it, and alarms wailed briefly before vacuum silenced them.

“Return fire!” Snapped Yang.

It took a handful of seconds for Tse Yang's four particle cannon turrets to train on the other ship, during which time it pumped another two salvos of kinetics into her. They weren't powerful enough to kill her outright, however, and she was built to take punishment; more atmosphere erupted from hull breaches, but she shrugged the blows aside contemptuously. Her would be murderer never had a chance to complete a sixth volley; six 40mm particle cannons erupted into rapid pulsed fire. Actinic fury hammered into Limitati like the fist of an angry god, passing through her kinetic barriers as if they didn't exist and craving deep into her hull. Armour flashed into vapour, vainly attempting to carry the storm of energy away from the frigate with it, and then failed completely. The turian ship tumbled away from Tse Yang, its forward sections reduced to glowing ruin and its drive flickering.

Trailing streams of fiery atmosphere, Tse Yang vanished in an an eye twisting flash of light.

[Cheb]

Hmm, I wonder. If the fight goes bad for humans, someone could decide stealth-sneaking a big nuke to the mass relay and there goes the Turian ticket home.

[Ellen Kuhfeld]

"Insidium". I like that word.

[DCG]

Great to see this updated, And the more details on the ships helps a lot. Easyer to make mental pictures of them now.

[Screwball]

Bad Neighbours
Chapter 6b


Seen from the veiwport of an intership shuttle, Hu Jintao was an impressive sight. At 412 meters long, she was as large or larger than any battleship or carrier in the Human Sphere, and massed considerably more than most. Her central body was a single unbroken length of alloys and beta-titanium armour. Studded with particle beam turrets and leapmissile tubes, she tapered into a confusion of sensor masts at the bow and sported a pair or rotating hab sections aft before her hull flared to support a massive fusion drive. Nestled on each side of her main hull, two hangar pods thrust themselves into space, their central runways swarming with activity as Lao Hu mobile suits skidded to a halt and were quickly ferried into the hangar spaces below the runways.

Compared to a dedicated battleship or carrier, as would be built by the EU or PACT, Hu Jintao was terribly inefficient, capable of performing both roles but excelling at neither. With a vast area of space to cover, however, and facing dozens of brushfire conflicts with smaller powers and feral drones, China hadn't been able to abandon the concept of the system control ship like the other major spacefaring powers; while improved drives and expanding catapult systems had brought other spheres of influence closer together, it still took months or more to cross the theoretical Chinese interstellar empire. Having dedicated carriers simply wasn't much use if the necessary ship was weeks away from where it needed to be. Hu Jintao could do almost anything that might have been needed, from supporting a planetary invasion, fighting in a line of battle or launching a fighter strike on an enemy carrier group. She wasn't as good at any one of those tasks as a specialised ship, but as with the venerable American MacArthur class, flexibility was considered more important than raw efficiency.

Besides which, the simple fact that she was bigger than most dedicated battleships and carriers allowed her the extra tonnage to match most opponents one on one anyway.

As soon as Daiyu's shuttle touched down in the starboard hanger pod, an automated tug clamped it's magnetic grapple to the shuttle's nose and dragged it quickly off of the runway. Thirty seconds later, the angular, gunmetal grey form of a Lao Hu slammed into the deck and skidded to a halt, feet striking sparks from the tough alloy surface.

There was no side party to greet Daiyu as she disembarked, with the slow, deliberate pace of somebody using magnetic boots t counteract microgravity, only a single Junior Lieutenant who looked painfully young inside her helmet.

“Welcome aboard, Ma'am.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant...?”

“Mao, Ma'am, Sandra Mao.”

Daiyu raised an eyebrow at the Junior Lieutenant's pronounced American accent and Western name. Reverse immigration from America and Europe wasn't uncommon – with the People's Republic mostly recovered from the catastrophic effects of the Breakdown, families that had left China generations before in favour of more prosperous or politically liberal pastures were returning to their original homeland in unheard of numbers. It was distinctly unusual for the children those families brought with them to find a place in the military, however, at least as officers. For one thing, they generally lacked the necessary proficiency in mandarin, and most of them were considerably less augmented than was the norm. American immigrants weren't quite so bad as Europeans, put they were still at a notable disadvantage compared to most candidates.

“Lieutenant Mao. I could wish it was under better circumstances, but unfortunately, even Admirals don't always get what they want.”

“Y-yes, Ma'am.”

“Now, Lieutenant, I think we should vacate the bay before we get in the way of something a lot bigger than us.”

“Oh,” Mao jumped, as if she hadn't realised where she was, and swallowed convulsively. “Of course, Ma'am. Please, follow me. Captain Yi is waiting for you in CIC.”

Mao led Daiyu to a personnel lift safely recessed into the nearby bulkhead. Once both women were inside, she punched in a destination code. As the lift car sped away from the unpressurised flight deck, the hiss of incoming atmosphere made itself audible, and by the time the doors slid open, Daiyu and her escort had their helmets tucked neatly under their right arms. Without her helmet, Mao looked even younger, like a schoolgirl dressing up in her mother's vac suit for a costume party.

“First cruise, Lieutenant?”

“Uh, yes Ma'am. I transferred in aboard Zheng He two months ago.”

“How are you finding things in the navy so far?”

“Good, Ma'am. I wouldn't ever have gotten off Earth if I hadn't joined, and I can make my family proud of me if I do well out here; I'm the first one of us to join the navy. This sort of thing wasn't featured in the recruitment packs though.”

“I shouldn't worry too much, Lieutenant. So long as we all do our jobs, we'll come through this fine.”

“Really, sir?”

“Really. I won't lie about the odds, and they aren't good, but remember that we're not trying to stop these people. So long as we can distract them from the planet long enough to evacuate the stations, we win; they can claim the orbitals, but I'm confident that General Sheng can hold the planet long enough for us to assemble a relief force. That is something we can succeed at, so long as everybody stays calm and does their jobs just as well as we've been trained to do. Can you do that, Lieutenant?”

“Yes Ma'am!”

“Glad to hear it. I'm sure you're going to do your family proud.”

“I hope so Ma'am.”

Hu Jintao's accessways were as hectic as her flight decks. It was, in Daiyu's opinion, a miracle that neither she nor Mao, considerably more clumsy than her admiral in microgravity, were involved in a collision with any of the crew hurtling around the interior of the massive ship.

The system control ship's CIC was as large and well appointed as anybody would expect in such a large ship. There was more than enough spare volume and mass to accommodate a spacious compartment with large, easily visible displays and space to move about. Most of the crash couches were occupied by suited figures engrossed in the myriad tasks involved in getting a fleet – even as small a fleet as the Alshain Station – underway. From the tactical plot, blown up to occupy a square four meters on a side, she could see that all of her ships were gathered into a neat formation around Hu Jintao, although all of them were surrounded in a halo of tiny contacts as Lau Hu suits, shuttles and Type 225 multirole fighters made their way between the ships and the nearby stations. It was obvious that none of the ships would have their full complement of officers and other ranks when they went into action; there simply wasn't time to recall all the personnel on the planetary surface of the less accessible of Mir's space stations, especially with the frenzied evacuation consuming the lion's share of the available space lift. Nevertheless, there would be more than enough to make do, and anybody not able to make it back to their assigned ship had orders to assist with the evacuation as best they were able, or to offer their services to General Sheng in whatever capacity he deemed fit.

“Admiral Liao! Welcome aboard.”

“Thank you, Captain Yi. Lieutenant Mao makes an excellent guide.”

“Glad to hear it. Thank you, Lieutenant,” he said, nodding to Mao. “Return to your station.”

“Yes sir.”

Mao launched herself towards a vacant crash couch in the tactical section, neatly snagging a conveniently placed handhold and swinging herself into a sitting position. Yi waved Daiyu into his ready room and thumbed the door controls, sealing the hatch behind them.

“It's her first cruise, you realise? I was tempted to send her to the station rather than get her killed with the rest of us, but I need every warm body I can get my hands on,”

“I know. She told me on the way here; I told her we'd be okay if we 'do our jobs'. You know, I never had to lie so much before I made Admiral. Do yourself a favour and stay in command of a starship for the rest of your career. It's a lot less stressful.”

Yi threw his head back in laughter.

“I don't think I'm going to have much problem with that after today!”

“Maybe not. I need a situation update.”

“They're still coming. We're going to need to jump within 23 minutes if we want to make the optimum course. Yang managed to get Tse Yang to the Novaya Pripyat jumpzone; she's taken some damage, but nothing some time in yard hands won't fix, but he lost 32 dead and double that wounded. At least gave us some performance data on them; we know we have an advantage at energy range... or, at least, we would if they didn't outnumber us so badly.”

“Even a mob with clubs can kill somebody with an automatic rifle if there are enough to them, Yi. I think we want to stay as far away from them as possible for as long as possible.”

Yi arched an eyebrow.

“That's the next item. Their accel has jumped another ten percent. I wish I knew how they were doing it; their drives look weak compared to ours. A Kai Yang at maximum power has a torch twice as intense as on of their cruiser sized ships, but they're pulling an impossible accel, even that big bastard. If we could get our hands on that tech, we'd run rings around them.”

“Shit. Fine, we're expediting our departure. Abort any transfers that aren't going to be here inside of ten minutes. We're going to cut it close as it is, and if they've got more drive power in reserve, we're going to be in even more trouble.”

“Aye aye, Ma'am.”

“I intend to make this a long range engagement, as much as possible. Since we've got full magazines, I see no reason not to use them, and we'll combine that with long range suit and fighter strikes. They'll run us down eventually, but there's an outside chance we can keep them busy long enough for everybody to get planetside. If they have transports – of anything we can identify as transports, at least, we will target them as a priority. It's hard to invade a planet when your troops are all drifting in vacuum.”

“That's not the most brilliant plan ever concieved.”

“Remind me why I chose a... what's the phrase.. 'wise ass', like you as my flag captain?”

“Because you have a refined and tasteful sense of humour, Ma'am.”

“I knew there was a reason. Well, Captain, your perspicacity knows no limits. Unfortunately, lacking a much larger chunk of the navy here in Alshain with us, there's not much we can do other than play for time. Now, the clock is ticking and there are still things we need to do. First...”


* * *


Hu Jintao flashed into existence seventeen light minutes from Alshain, accompanied by the distinctive explosion of light and radiation produced by a delta dust FTL drive. An instant later, her smaller consorts made their own appearances from the centre of exotic particle flowers.

“All ships accounted for, Ma'am.”

“Thank you, Mr Huang. Mr Sun, be so kind as to reassemble our formation.”

“Aye Ma'am.”

Out of the PLAN's black vacsuit, Senior Lieutenant Huang Chen, her staff warfare officer, looked for all the world as if he had stepped out of a recruitment poster. The dim combat lighting of Hu Jintao's flag bridge – in reality, a duplicate CIC provided for the benefit of an Admiral and his or her staff – rendered him into a more or less featureless mannequin bent over his tactical station, his face invisible inside the closed visor of his vac suit helmet. Three gravities of acceleration didn't appear to be bothering him much, although it was hard to tell through a suit, which was more than could be said for her. Of course, he had the advantage of considerably more extensive transgenics than her. Every crash couch in the crowded compartment was occupied, for the majority of her staff had already been aboard what was technically her flagship. Given that Hu Jintao hadn't left her berth at Orbit One in nearly six months, and Daiyu's preoccupation with the affairs of governing an occupied star system, there hadn't been much call for the huge ship, and although she and her staff had been through regular tactical drills both alone and with Captain Yi's officers, she hadn't really maintained the sort of contact with the crew of her flagship that was expected.

There was an undeniable hesitancy in the way the squadron responded to her orders; she wasn't a brilliant tactician in the first place, being more gifted as an organiser than as a warrior, and if the tactical career path hadn't been more or less the only route to flag rank, she would have been happier as a logistics officer. That, in point of fact, was the entire reason she had been assigned to Alshain in the first place, although she privately cursed the planners who had decided to hand her the thankless task of trying to hammer a fractious mess of Russian exhumans too warped by their insane religion and personal masochism to have the good grace to colonise a world that could be described by the adjective 'habitable' into a functioning, prosperous Chinese satellite rather than a poorly controlled Russian thorn in China's side.

Even the Russians had been glad to be rid of the place; they'd barely even murmured at the UN when Fleet Admiral Tang had blasted most of the MSN – the various navies that used that acronym – out of space and dropped the better part of quarter of a million troops into the ongoing civil war that masqueraded as a colony. Daiyu couldn't blame them.

Unfortunately, the unfamiliarity of her modest fleet in operating as a unit combined with her own mostly technical competence in orchestrating a battle was exactly the wrong combination needed for this particular endeavour. There were some officers in the PLAN who, she was sure, would have glanced at the plot, withdrawn to their day cabin for an hour to think, then produced a brilliant plan that would effortlessly driven off the presumed aliens. Presumably, such a plan would involve a great deal of steely eyed glaring at the plot and the officer – whoever he or she was – eating a leisurely lunch in their crash couch. Liao Daiyu was not, alas, that officer.

She had always been good at looking confident, however, and she could manage a decent steely eyed glare. That seemed to be enough to convince her subordinates that she had a halfway decent idea what she was doing, something far superior to the alternative of panic and confusion.

Even she had quickly determined that there was only one viable course of action. Left to their own devices, the unknowns would reach weapons range or Mir in a little over a day, assuming their weapons possessed similar range to those of the defenders. At that point, anybody left in orbit would have to surrender, or face certain death. They could almost certainly have made the trip faster; their picket shell had microjumped to their present positions – indeed, the halo of small ships had continued to expand to the point that her fleet, now just over one and a half light seconds from the juggernaut bearing down upon Mir, was a hundred thousand kilometres inside their nearest picket.

The horde of virulent scarlet icons – and, especially, the single oversized triangle denoting that monstrous superbattleship – continued to devour the distance between the two forces. Despite their almost comically undersized drives, they maintained an acceleration that should have smeared the occupants over the bulkheads like particularly gruesome jam. In comparison, Hu Jintao and her consorts would have seemed completely immobile if not for the velocity carried over from their FTL jump. Even that was the shuffling pace of an arthritic pensioner compared to the sprinting pace of the enemy.

“How long until they're in leapmissile range?”

“Twenty seven minutes, Ma'am.”

Crossing that sort of distance should have taken the better part of a day or more under any sort of sane acceleration. Daiyu was glad that her helmet hid her wince.

“Status of the enemy?”

“They've definitely seen us. I'm picking up activity consistent with pre-battle E-war system tests and they're hitting us with radar and lidar pings. No suits or fighters yet.”

“Go ahead and clear the fleet for action. Hold all suit launches until they deploy fighters of their own; I don't want to leave them behind when we jump unless I have to.”

“Aye Ma'am.”

The plan was simple. Tse Yang's encounter with the enemy picket had demonstrated that, while the Chinese defenders appeared to have the advantage, ship for ship, at close range, the enemy could also hurt them. At such a large numerical disadvantage, closing to energy range would have to be an option of last resort. For that matter, there was an argument, which made a great deal of sense, in her opinion, that the fragile, lightly armed ship that had been the only casualty on either side so far had died so easily because it was an expendable unit that the enemy hadn't bothered to shield or heavily armour, in which case even a one on one match might not be as one sided as she might hope. Whatever the case, a close range slugging match would inevitably end in her command getting pounded to pieces, especially since the superbattleship probably outmassed her entire squadron.

Instead, she intended to force a long range missile exchange as long as possible. The absurd acceleration of her opponent made that difficult, but it could, theoretically, be done using microjumps. A missile duel would test the waters, show how fragile the invaders really were, and it would be a lot more survivable than allowing all of those ships to take potshots at her with railguns. Given the short tracking times available against leapmissiles, it was also the easiest method to reduce their numerical superiority, although there were still dozens of ships in that fleet large enough to mount leapmissiles of their own, not counting the number of launchers that could be crammed into what had to be the enemy flagship. Of course, the enemy had the ability to make short range FTL hops as well, which promised to make things interesting.

The distance between the two forces on the plot continued to creep downwards as the invaders steadily overhauled Daiyu's squadron. She sat motionless, watching the distance counter tick down towards 100,000 kilometers.

“Drop to combat acceleration.”

“All ships acknowledge combat acceleration, aye!”

The weight crushing Daiyu into her couch vanished as Hu Jinato and her consorts dropped abruptly to a single gravity of acceleration and everything inside the Chinese ships took on it's apparent normal weight. On the plot, the closing rate between the two forces slid upwards a barely noticeable fraction.

“Mr Huang, at 100,000K, begin the engagement. The primary target is their superbattleship.”

“Yes, Ma'am,” Huang's hands darted across his console. “Kee Lung's fire control is still rejecting my master solution. Captain Hsu and Senior Lieutenant Kao haven't been able to isolate the fault without stripping the system down completely. They're going to have to engage individually.”

“Understood. They're authorised to select their own targets when we enter range.”

It seemed to take an eternity for those extremely fast ships to cover the remaining distance between them and the edge of her squadron's missile envelope. Eventually, the counter floating at the top of the plot blinked crimson, and Huang calmly depressed his firing key.

Hu Jintao shuddered almost imperceptibly as her battery of launchers spat ten missiles into space. Four of her five cruiser sized companions hurled their own deadly quartets towards their foes at the same instant, followed seconds later by their fifth unfortunate sister. The slim, matte black cylinders screamed through space, riding the angry glare of chemical rocket motors, then vanished into the impossible distortions of FTL transits. A fraction of a second later, they reappeared, in front of and 'above' their target. The range was still long; the immense closing velocity of the oncoming ships mandated that enough space be left to reaquire their chosen prey and reorient themselves, and there almost wasn't time. Almost.

The HN-33 leapmissile was, in concept, a simple weapon. A chemical motor to carry it a safe distance from it's launch platform and to position itself properly in relation to it's target, a small, one shot FTL drive, and a single oversized laser assembly and capacitor. It was designed to minimise tracking time, and the volley fired by the ships under Liao Daiyu's command gave their turian opponents exactly fifteen and a half seconds to notice the abrupt appearance of new contacts on their sensor displays, recognise a threat and respond. It wasn't long enough.

Of the twenty six missiles in the main PLAN salvo, twenty of them reaquired their primary target, the dreadnought Palavan. Six, their small internal sensors half blinded by the stress of FTL transit, locked themselves onto smaller ships, and all four of Kee Lung's first launch found their primary target when they emerged from their jump. Within the space of three seconds, all thirty missiles reduced themselves to melted, red hot conglomerations of slag as their capacitors released their stored power all at once, sending stilettos of coherent light stabbing deep into their victims.

The cruiser Gallia received the attention of every one of Kee Lung's missiles, and one of the orphans from the main salvo. Armour boiled under the assault, glowing red, then white as the human weapons carved into the ship. Crewmembers in compartments near the points of impact shrieked as the thermal bloom melted their armoured suits to their skin, heated their air supply to temperatures that seared the inside of their lungs. Computers, control runs and mechanical systems fused and melted as the deadly light punched its way through the ruined vessel. Gallia lurched out of formation, streaming atmosphere like a funeral shroud, as one of the lasers immolated her CIC, and the ships in her path scattered to avoid a catastrophic collision.

Two of the orphan missiles from the main salvo targeted the frigate Mediolana; the small ship wobbled slightly as a pair of beams struck her amidships, then broke in two, hurling charred corpses into the blackness of space.

No other ship was as unlucky as Gallia or Mediolana; the other three mistargeted missiles tracked different targets. All of them lurched in space as powerful lasers stabbed into them, but without the concentrated attention of multiple projectors, their boiling armour succeeded in dumping enough energy into space – and in diffracting the beams sufficiently – to save all but those in immediate proximity to the impact from being cooked alive. One cruiser, Narsos, fell out of formation as the laser carved through its engineering spaces, but it remained under control, and damage control parties leapt into action, sealing hull breaches and dragging the charred ruins of former crewmates from the molten hell of their crippled ships' drive rooms.

Palavan took the brunt of the defenders' fire. Twenty missiles vented their white hot fury on the massive dreadnought, clawing into its belly with knives of coherent light. Armour failed and plating buckled, flesh and metal exploded into vapour and the huge ship staggered as the humans hammered at it. For all the power and numbers of the Chinese weapons, though, Palavan emerged from the criss-crossing pattern of lasers intact. Large swathes of its armour were charred and melted, and atmosphere gushed in burning plumes from rents in the huge ships' pressure hull, but despite the dead and wounded crew, for the most part the damage was completely superficial.

“Many hits on primary target, Ma'am. She's streaming air. I count one confirmed kill and two probable cripples also,” Huang's grin was visible even through his tinted helmet, although he had refrained from the rather undignified whoop one of his subordinates had allowed to escape when the enemy destroyer had broken up.

“Excellent work, Mr Huang!”

“We strive to please, Ma'am.”

Daiyu watched the icons on her plot flash as more leapmissiles expended themselves against the solid wall of red icons. One of them was abruptly replaced by the purple cross of a dead ship, but the big icon, the real target, remained stubbornly unchanged, beyond the flashing border indicating that it was taking damage. A flick of her wrist summoned a holoscreen carrying a feed from Hu Jintao's optical sensors – effectively high powered electronic telescopes. At this range, with the naked eye, the enemy ships would simply have been tiny dots, but in the display, the enemy flagship was perfectly visible. The damage inflicted by her missile strikes was obvious in the blackened, scorched armour and billowing atmosphere, but it was equally obvious that nothing vital had been hit. Even as she watched, a section near the bow of the central, elongated hull seemed to expand, as if a huge child inside was blowing soap bubbles of molten metal, before bursting in a shower of red hot armour. Whatever systems aboard the titanic ship were supposed to contain hull breaches evidently functioned properly, for the initial plume of escaping gas cut off abruptly as the available air rushed out into space.

Then, as if a switch had been flipped, the cascade of hits dropped to ones and twos from each salvo.

“Mr Huang?”

“Enemy PD, and E-war, Ma'am. Their jamming isn't a problem, but that PD isn't like anything I've ever seen before. I can't guarantee much success if we continue to rely only on missiles.”

“Options?”

“Unless you've got another 50 or 60 launchers hidden somewhere, we don't have many, Ma'am. If we want to be anything other than an annoyance, we're going to have to close the range and put some particle beams on them. Unless you wish to withdraw, we've got a choice between letting them close sublight or microjumping into range; the latter has the advantage of surprise, but it also means...”

“That we won't be able to microjump out until our drives have cycled,” Daiyu finished the thought for him. “I can't say I relish the thought of sitting in front of all those railguns with no way to escape them, Huang.”

“My thoughts exactly, Ma'am.”

Daiyu frowned. Her first thought was to disengage; there was simply no way her command would last long against that many ships in a close range fight. If it hadn't been for the Mir orbitals, in fact, she wouldn't even have hesitated. There was, after all, no way she could expect to actually hold the system, and risking severe damage or destruction to her ships for no reason would have been pointless – not to mention frowned upon. On the other hand, abandoning everybody in orbit around the planet when her total losses so far amounted to less than 40 personnel and a moderately damaged destroyer, purely on the basis that the people attacking the system had excellent point defence and she was too afraid to close the range was also not a course of action that would be well regarded.

“Very well. Comms, message for Captain Minh; 'Enemy point defence is more effective than expected. I am unable to effectively deter him at long range. I therefore intend to allow him to close with me in order to bring my particle weapons into play. I expect that I will eventually be forced to retire, and I will therefore be making a microjump to the Novaya Pripyat jumpzone, rather than returning to orbit around Mir. The enemy will reach energy range in forty one minutes. I advise you to adjust your plans accordingly.”

“Recording's good, Ma'am.”

“Then send it. Mr Huang, we will be making a conventional approach.”

“Yes Ma'am.”


* * *

Radik watched the human ships flip over 180 degrees and start decelerating towards his fleet. The action didn't have all that much of an effect on the closure rate, not over such small ranges at least, and the reasoning behind the move was blindingly obvious.

He could respect the determination and the bravery it took to close with such a superior force. He had been afraid that the humans would produce another improbable weapons system, and so they had, but their FTL missiles and their powerful laser warheads weren't much of a threat to Palavan, not in the numbers the humans seemed able to launch them. In the place of the human commander, he would have engaged his FTL and escaped; it was preposterous to suppose that such a small force could have a meaningful effect on a fleet the size of his command. On the other hand, Palavan might prove to be somewhat less durable against the human particle weapons than against their laser missiles, and that was assuming that there wasn't something else stuffed aboard one of those ugly ships.

In light of his purpose in the system, however, it was fortunate that the human commander had not chosen to do so. He had maintained some faint hope of establishing peaceful contact, but the actions of one Julis Asturias had made that a compete impossibility, and that had closed off all the options his orders allowed him bar one. It would have been hard to overawe the humans with turian military prowess if, after killing or crippling seven ships and damaging another five, the humans had simply retired and suffered no military losses. 'Ridiculous' would have been a more apt adjective, in fact, and it would only have served to get more people needlessly killed in the long run by giving the humans the impression that they could actually fight a war an win. Far, far better to browbeat them into peace before they attacked something important, both for the galactic community and for certain senior officers.

Fortunately, the humans had instead decided to hand themselves to him on a golden platter.

“You have a target?”

“Yes sir. Their ECM is making things difficult, so I can't guarantee perfectly accurate gunnery, but I can't imagine it'll take more than one or two hits each to put them out of action.”

“Fire as soon as you have the range. There's no need to draw this out unnecessarily.”


* * *


The first slug smashed into Kee Lung when Daiyu's squadron was still 60,000 kilometres from their opponents, far, far out of energy weapon range. The cruiser's flash shields sprang into life, and almost immediately failed, the projectors exploding spectacularly as the shields failed. Despite that, the slug was deflected by just enough that the ship survived without any more major damage. Seconds later, the second slug arrived, punching through the armour around the Chinese cruiser's bow. Kee Lung seemed to fold in on herself slightly as the kinetic impactor passed through her, and then the third projectile crashed into her bow. The cruiser exploded before any of her crew even realised they needed escape pods.

Rounds from Palavan's main cannon tore down upon the Chinese squadron like c-fractional hailstones. The first hit on Hu Jintao smashed her fusion torch and FTL drive into useless wreckage, and sent splinters of beta-titanium armour sleeting through her internal spaces in a lethal storm. Daiyu was thrown violently against her restraints, and Huang Chen was neatly bisected from head to crotch by a fragment of spinning bulkhead. With her drive gone and no acceleration, blood and thicker things hung in the air like macabre Christmas ornaments on an invisible tree. Somebody was screaming, and she looked aside to see an Able Spaceman clutching the stump where an arm should have been, thrashing wildly in her restraints.

The plot was still active, and it occurred to her that it was a damn good thing that such vital pieces of equipment were so durable. She coughed, and red splattered the inside of her helmet.

“Oh.”

A questing hand found a javelin of metal emerging from the centre of her chest. Raising her head to look at the plot again, she watched the icons of her ships blink out one by one. She didn't even have time to realise when one of the slugs crashed into what was left of Hu Jintao and reduced the system control ship to floating wreckage.

* * *


“All targets neutralised, sir.”

“Good job. Navigation! Plot us a least time course to the planet. Leave behind an appropriate force for search and rescue.”

[Cheb]

she wasn't a brilliant tactician in the first place, being more gifted as an organiser than as a warrior,

Glaringly so
I'm pretty sure that "approach head on" is not a valid strategy agains an enemy whose abilities and range are largely unknown. Her duty wasn't to die delaying the alien fleet but die unraveling the range of enemy's abilities and transmitting intel back home.
I'm afraid they won't let her into Valhalla

P.S. I wonder what happens if even one of the mobile suits survives long enough to board that super-dreadnought. Words "eviscerated from inside" come to mind

By the way, how many worlds are there in the human Sphere? I'm getting a feeling that Turians continue digging themselves deeper and deeper.

[Screwball]

Well, her approach isn't completely insane when taken in light of usual Sphere ship design. Basically, spinal weapons aren't in favour outside the navies of a handful of Indies, and even then, they're considerably less powerful than ME dreadnought cannons in terms of range, striking power and rate of fire. In Sphere parlance, the phrase 'long range weapon' is synonymous with 'leapmissile'. Her approach was far from ideal, but the basic idea was that, if it turned out the turians did have leapmissiles, she could jump away before they had a chance to smash her to bits on the approach, and if they didn't, she could exit as soon as the close range engagement turned against her. If she'd used her FTL to close the range, she'd have had to hang around in their range while her drives derezzed. We know it was a terrible idea, but she didn't know how brokenly powerful a dreadnought cannon is compared to Sphere weapons that aren't nukes.

That's not likely to be how it's portrayed on Earth, though, given that a SysCon is a pretty hefty weight of metal roughly equivalent to a battleship in prestige, and even during the ZOCU War, there were maybe ten battleships lost in action. Losing one (and the rest of the squadron) in exchange for killing some destroyer sized ships and cruisers is going to get her excoriated.

And, yeah, generally if any Sphere combat unit that isn't from the EU or Russia gets close to a ME ship, that ship is screwed, unless it's something wildly improbable, like a Proton vs a Dreadnought. The EU and Russia will have problems because they use railguns and/or missiles a lot. Although, on the other hand, it's pretty explicit that GARDIAN systems can be overcome by simply saturating them with targets, and the Russians have a fondness for Macross Missile Massacres...

As for planets, there's Earth (or, more accurately, Sol, with a total population firmly in double-digit billions), a dozen or so First Stage colonies (population in the hundreds of millions), between thirty and seventy Second Stage colonies, Longshots and miscellaneous Expanse worlds (population between thirty and forty million on average), and hundreds of Rim worlds (population generally between ten and twenty million). The Rim adds precisely zero economic or military strength to the Sphere, however, since the Core and even ZOCU are only vaguely in contact with the Rim, and large parts of it aren't even charted. There could possibly be thousands of human inhabited worlds settled via Longshot that Earth hasn't recontacted yet.

[DCG]

"Leapmissle" Thats a rather awesome idea, Does that come with the setting or is that one of yours?

[Screwball]

They are indeed A Thing in the setting, although they're rather more recent than a lot of stuff, and they've undergone a large number of changes from the original 'why don't we put a zero-shift system on a nuke and teleport it into the other guy's drive room?' idea.

[Pale Wolf]

Yay, updates! (Sorry for taking so long to respond, I was kinda blitzing through stuff and away from forum for a while)

Your people have violated Council law

*Twitch* You can't violate a law that doesn't apply to you. I can violate every single article of Iranian law in alphabetical order, but Iran has no say in it as long as I'm not in Iran... I'm seriously hoping to see this guy's ass kicked. They know by now that they're not part of Citadel space and Citadel law has no hold on them.

send our friends the prepackaged first contact greeting.”

Finally! Someone tries diplomacy. (I'm not inclined to disagree with ZOCU going after them, though, the Turians shot first and ZOCU just ran them out of human space)

they've already made their intentions perfectly clear through their actions at Relay 314.

*Twitch*

You. Shot. First. They. Responded. To your aggression. They were nice. They only ran off your people invading their territory. They didn't launch a counterattack.

“Well then, open fire!”

*Notes down this turian's name.* Asturias. Are you gonna die like a bitch? I hope you die like a bitch.

The turian ship tumbled away from Tse Yang, its forward sections reduced to glowing ruin and its drive flickering.

^_^ No screaming, but in the circumstances, I will assume you died like a bitch. ^_^

On a side note, the Citadel and turians have no goddamn excuse for this kind of behaviour in a first contact situation. They know there are alien races out there, and more popping up every so often. It's not common, but there should be protocols in place, and if those are sane protocols, then they're violating every single goddamn one. The humans, on the other hand, have never seen an actual alien... and yet are still behaving so much more reasonably.

Seriously, the onus is on the turians here - they know there are other races. They know any aliens they run into are likely to not know there are other races, and may react with a great deal of surprise. They're supposed to be playing the elder brother here, and instead they're playing the psychotic. (This short rant also applicable to canonical First Contact War. The 'if you see a child playing with a loaded gun' example they've brought up in-game really doesn't work. If you see a child playing with a loaded gun, you don't shoot them yourself.)

but the big icon, the real target, remained stubbornly unchanged, beyond the flashing border indicating that it was taking damage

Tsk. Doing it wrong, girl. Damage is superficial, but you can vaporize the little ones. Concentrate on the little ones, clear up the numerical superiourity, and then you can swarm the big one if necessary - remember, its primary armament is axial, it can only shoot one at a time. Or take a few hours of firing leap missiles at it if you prefer.

At least don't stop firing the missiles. The GARDIAN on the Palaven is nastier, but you should still have enough to at least blitz a few cruisers out of existence. You've got fourty-one minutes to do it, seriously!

It would have been hard to overawe the humans with turian military prowess

Not gonna overawe anyone with your prowess in drowning them in bodies... they've already inflicted more than their number in losses on your force, so I doubt the bulk of humanity's gonna be all that intimidated.

it would only have served to get more people needlessly killed in the long run by giving the humans the impression that they could actually fight a war an win. Far, far better to browbeat them into peace before they attacked something important

Is the turian mindset unable to comprehend 'maybe stop attacking them and there will be peace'?

the Russians have a fondness for Macross Missile Massacres...

I have said many a time. They only call it Macross Missile Massacre because the guy who coined the term has never looked at Russian equipment.



Fun read, looking forward to more. And some very significant turian assbeatings.

[Screwball]

Rejoice, for I am alive. Just very slow. Thanks to Norseman, who I don't think anybody on this board knows, for beta reading this chapter; one beta reader out of two isn't bad!

Bad Neighbours
Chapter Seven

Mir Planetary Defence Command was an unduly impressive title that brought to mind hollowed out mountains, miles of armoured tunnels and a remote location. General Sheng Ming stepped out of the lift into a complex of rooms that was decidedly less impressive than that. The walls were simple concrete, still with their original Russian stencils, and compared to the sorts of facilities that housed PDCs on other worlds, the complex was small and cramped. Banks of electronics crowded against the walls, lights blinking, and most of the available floorspace was occupied with consoles and their operators. It was fortunate that the steel grates his booted feet crashed down upon were raised above the true floor level, otherwise he would more likely than not have tripped over a tangled nest of cables within meters of the lift doors.

The command centre itself was roughly circular, with a free floating holotank dominating the middle of the floor and concentric banks of consoles forming a trio of semi-circles over one half of the room. On the other side of the holotank, a raised platform, itself packed with smaller holographic and flatscreen displays and a tangle of chairs, provided the command staff of Mir's planetary defence network – such as it was, and what there was of it – with access to and information from units scattered all over the planet. Three evenly spaced steel doors, four including the one he stepped through, studded the walls. Though they were tightly closed, he knew that they led to even more electronic equipment, feeding the displays in the command centre with processed data already assembled into a coherent whole, rather than hundreds of individual snapshots that would have been worse than useless. The whole scene was dimly lit with red overhead lights, and cold enough that he was glad for the fingerless gloves he had pulled on while descending the lift from the surface base.

Sheng was not a tall man, nor was he endowed with much in the way of hair or looks; in a military packed with combat-oriented transgenes of one stripe or another, he stood out, not just as a result of his lack of stature, but because he possessed the distinctive pale skin and white hair of an Omoikane template. The top of his head was completely hairless, but he sported a pale goatee and neat moustache. One amber eye was narrowly missed by the ugly purple scar that threaded it's way down the left side of his face and tugged one corner of his mouth up into a permanent grimace. He was clad in the same tan uniform as the other soldiers in the command centre, eschewing the digital-adaptive fabric of a field uniform in the interests of comfort.

“As you were, people. We've got more important things to do than bow and scrape for the benefit of my ego,” he waved the assembled technicians and officers back into their seats before any of them had a chance to start rising to their feet. “Colonel Song, what's the situation?”

Song was obviously an Atlas. Sheng often suspected he went out of his way to conform to stereotypes, given that, in addition to being massively built with arms and legs like tree trunks and a head that looked as though it had been hewn from a block of stone by an indifferent sculptor with a fetish for large jaws, he possessed such copious quantities of body hair that strands – or, in several cases, tufts – could be seen poking out from the cuffs and collar of his shirt, and his eyebrows could quite easily have been mistaken for a very large, very furry caterpillar draped across the top of his eyes. As the massive officer descended from the command platform, Sheng fancied that he could see the metal steps sagging under the weight.

“Unless these fuckers pull more acceleration out of their magic box of tricks, sir, then we'll be ready for them. They're going to have to make turnover soon or they'll miss the planet. At the moment, we're assuming they're going to go for zero relative velocity with the planet at 90,000 kay, given the range of that SBB's main cannon. That's significantly outside the rang of anything Captain Minh has left up there, given that his stations have no leapmissiles. After that... depends on what they want with us.”

He waved a hand at the plot.

“If they're here to kill us all, then they could just sit out there chucking rocks at us or making silly faces or whatever they feel like doing to piss us off, and there's not a fucking thing we could do about it. We're at the bottom of the gravity well, they're up the top, so they can let physics do all the work for them. We'd just better hope they haven't come here to wipe out the squishy humans.”

“Assume that they aren't here for genocide, Colonel.”

As Song had been speaking, he had lead Sheng up to the command platform. He deftly manoeuvred his bulk through the cramped space and settled into a battered chair that creaked alarmingly under the strain placed on it by a combination of Song and 1.5 times Earth normal gravity. A young man in a lieutenant's uniform handed him a plain ceramic cup full of coffee. It looked absurdly tiny in his huge hand.

“Here you go, sir.”

“Thank you, Cai,” he took a sip. “Aaah, excellent as usual.”

“Thank you sir.”

Song spun his chair slightly to face Sheng directly, and waved at one of the unoccupied seats..

“Please, Sir, sit. Can I offer you a....?”

“No thank you, Colonel. Coffee doesn't agree with me, I'm afraid.”

“Ah. Well, then we can return to the matter at hand. If they're not going to drop rocks on us from orbit, then we have options. The simplest is surrender...”

“Absolutely not. My mission – our mission – is to defend this planet in any way practicable. I wouldn't consider surrender even if we hadn't spent as much blood pacifying this hell-hole as we have.”

“That's what I thought you'd say, sir. So, me'n my minions up here have been plotting,”Song waved his cup at one of the holodisplays. Sheng leant forward and studied it. The sphere hovering six inches over the projector was nearly a foot across and reproduced Mir in exacting detail. Most of the planet was empty, but here and there, icons representing towns dotted the surface. The five domed settlements that passed for cities on Mir were spread along the coastline of the shallow, salty Alliluyeva Sea. Three of them, Dyurtyuli, Gorodovikovsk and Klintsy were huddled close together at the mouth of the Anbar River, the site of the original colony landing at the western point of the arrowhead shaped Alliluyeva. The industrial metropolis of Baykalsk sprawled out under three domes of it's own at the other end of the sea, and the planetary capital, Lyantor, straddled the estuary of the Shaubnin, just west of one of the barbs of the Alliluyeva. Gossamer thin threads of blue light traced the paths of the railways that linked the five major cities and the nearest towns, threading over the bare rock as if marking the footsteps of a particularly adventurous holographic spider. Clustered around the domed colonies were the upwards pointed blue arrow icons of ground to orbit artillery. More was grouped around the hydroelectric dams that provided the colonies with vital electricity, and a necklace of blue beads hovered over the most heavily populated region of the planet.

“Obviously, we can't protect the whole planet, and most of it's useless anyway – all we'd succeed in doing is allowing them to land their entire army right on top of us while we attempt to defend almost completely uninhabited and lifeless wilderness, populated here and there by religious fanatics that hate us. We've had to change the standard set-up around somewhat, though; this sort of heavy duty point defence is what the Type 19 was made for, but considering the way these arseholes chewed up Admiral Liao's leapmissiles, I doubt that any old-style pure chemical drive or fusion drive missiles we can throw would be at all effective unless we can launch truly huge numbers of them. That's in a ship to ship engagement – starting from the bottom of a gravity well like this, well, we'd probably have more luck putting out Alshain by pissing on it than getting hits on them with missiles.

“So, we've pressed our Type 14s into that role instead. They don't really have the range for it, so they're going to be able to land closer than I think any of us would like, but we know particle cannons are effective, so we can stop them from landing on top of any of the domes or from dropping KKVs in a tactical artillery role. If they're willing to just plaster us indiscriminately, then I'm afraid we're fucked. Oh, we'll try the Type 19s anyway, but realistically, there's nothing we can do to stop them. As it is, we've included them in our deployments on the basis that they might at least distract the Little Green Men up there. On top of that, I've been in contact with Captain Minh, and he's transferred control of all his defsats to me, so we can use them to thicken our coverage. If we slave them to ground-based fire control, they won't be putting out active emissions, and we'll get at least one good shot from them before they're killed.

“Unfortunately, sir, deploying the Type 14s that way means I can't spare anything to cover mobile formations...”

“Don't worry about that, Colonel. In this case, I'm more than willing to indulge the Miran tendency towards violence. I wish whoever's in charge up there all the pleasure I've had in dealing with those barbarians over the last six years. Actually getting some use out of them will make for an interesting change of pace.”

Song snorted and too a gulp of his coffee.

“That's one way of putting it, sir. Personally, I wouldn't be too teary eyed if those creepy bastards and the fuckers who killed the Admiral wiped each other out. At least then we could leave this hellhole and get a posting on a habitable world. Anyway, that simplifies things a lot, sir. There's good news in orbit as well; at first it looked like we were still going to have people up there when the enemy came into range of the planet, but they stopped to conduct rescue ops in what's left of Admiral Liao's fleet. That game Captain Minh time to evacuate people onto ships in orbit or docked at a station that he wouldn't have had otherwise. I can't imagine it'll be very pleasant aboard, but they're all FTL capable, so they should be able to escape to Novaya Pripyat before anything gets too close. They couldn't take everybody, but they got all the civilians off, and Minh is sending down everybody he can on the last shuttle flight and in escape pods. Even pushing life support and space restrictions well past safe conditions, there isn't the capacity to get everybody own, so there's still going to be three thousand people left up there. They're all volunteers, though, and Minh apparently shares your opinion on surrender, sir. He's got a plan...”

* * *

“Sir, we're now at rest relative to the planet.”

“Tell me, Iulius, what do you think drove them to settle here?”Radik stood in the centre of Palaven's flag bridge, studying a large holographic facsimile of the the planet and it's seemingly fragile necklace of stations. There were dozens of them, far more than he would have expected on what seemed to be a mostly empty world. It was clearly a sizeable colony, despite the harsh conditions on the planet, but the overdeveloped orbital infrastructure and the large number of ships that had been in the system upon their arrival were wildly out of proportion to what such a colony should have demanded.

Commander Iulius, Radik's youthful chief of staff, looked up from his display and cocked his head.

“Sir?”

“We know they need an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, same as us,” Radik said, nodding at the display. “The gravity surface gravity down there is almost 60 percent greater than Palaven Standard, and the gravity on the station we captured was, what, just over 16 percent of what we're going to have to deal with down there? Granted, it was spin gravity, so they were limited by the size of the spin section, but even so, it's a steep step down. They don't display any great resistance to extremes of heat, and that lump of rock has a surface temperature that I would generously describe as 'barely tolerable'. In short, we have a species that appears to need similar planetary conditions to us, living on a world that isn't even barely habitable to them. To make matters even more confusing, the know that there's a garden world that should be prime planetary real estate for them in the nearest system, and not only is it untouched, there's absolutely no evidence that they've ever even been in that system. So, why? Why here? Why would you plant a colony here?”

“Ah, I haven't really considered it, sir. We have hostile environment colonies as well, and I suppose they might have settled here for the same reason.”

“That's what I thought of at first, but it doesn't make much sense. Most of our hostile environment 'colonies' are mining or resource extraction complexes, or research stations set up somewhere out of the way to make it difficult to snoop on them. They have populations that might have a hundred thousand inhabitants, two hundred thousand at the outside. It's plain as day that there's a lot more people than that down there. The latest estimate I've seen, based on the radio emissions from the surface, is between ten and thirty million. That's not a mining colony or an out of the way research complex that caters to the more unsavoury corporate element. It's a full scale attempt at properly settling the planet, and so far as I can tell, a successful one.”

“They could be xenoforming it. That doesn't make a great deal of sense, with a virgin garden world so close by, unless... perhaps there's something that stops them from settling there?”

“It's a possibility. Our scouts aren't exactly equipped for full scale planetary surveys, and we don't exactly have authoritative information on their biochemistry. Maybe the dust on the garden world gives them all fatal allergic reactions – that sort of thing's not unknown, after all. It still doesn't explain why they'd want to settle here, of all places; the atmosphere would kill them with just as much certainty.” He shook his head. “Never mind. We'll find out when we get down there, I suppose. Have there been any communications?”

“No sir. We're getting plenty of radar pings from the stations and from the surface, plus at least three sources well outside planetary orbit that we haven't been able to localise – two of them are behind us by now, in fact. They could be some sort of stealthy reconnaissance platform or more of those picket ships. They definitely know exactly where we are.”

“That much was obvious when they launched those escape pods from the stations, Commander.”

“I suppose,”Iulius said, after a long moment. “It's possible that they've managed to get everybody on their stations on a ship or planetside, sir. There were a lot of those radiation pulses their drive causes in the vicinity of the planet.”

“Maybe, maybe. They still haven't so much as asked us who we are, though. I suppose they might have assumed there's no point in talking to us, since we're clearly hostile. Damn that triggerhappy idiot Asturias! He didn't know what they were saying, but at least they were talking to him!”

He sighed heavily, clasped his hands behind his back and stared at the dirty orange planet floating before him.

“Very well,” he said at last. “Iulius, send both messages.”

“Yes sir.”

Iulius turned and strode into the operations pit. Radik could see him bent over the console of the duty comm officer, speaking quietly as he relayed the instructions. The messages were simple; a demand for surrender, and the reasons behind it, in Universal Turian. The second was a single English word; surrender.

“If you'd asked me, I would have suggested they're here because the place is strategically valuable to them.” General Miras Vespia said, from his position leant against a handrail at the edge of the operations pit. In contrast to the young Iulius, Miras was older than Radik, and by some considerable time. One side of his head was a mass of scarring, and the same injury had claimed his right eye and mandible. A flat, lifeless prosthetic stared unblinkingly out from the socket, it's black, angular housing a sharp contrast with the brilliant white facial tattoos of Nimines.

“It's a thought I had entertained myself, but I would have expected them to have a bigger fleet here if that were the case. It also begs the question of just who it's strategically valuable against; none of the humans we captured at the relay have given any indication that their species has encountered another sentient life form.”

Miras snorted.

“Yeah. That doesn't fill me with confidence; I've been paying attention to our progress with them. We can barely string together a coherent sentence in this 'English' of theirs, and Daktarian's starting to suspect they might be speaking multiple languages amongst themselves. The old bastard probably thinks they're just doing it to spite him, which wouldn't surprise me. I certainly wouldn't be willing to lavish hugs and kisses on us if I were in their position. So, they could be lying, or acting, or just not understanding our questions, and we could be waltzing into the middle of an interstellar war zone. They need somebody to use all those ships on, after all.”

“Considering the size of the fleet that countered us at the relay, I think it's fair to say that this isn't a 'front line system' in any war they may or may not be in the middle of fighting.”

“I can't argue with that,” Miras pushed himself off of the rail and walked to Radik's side. He studied the unpleasant looking world briefly, then snorted again. “Maybe they're pirates? I can't think of anybody who'd be more willing to settle somewhere nobody would ever think to look for them.”

“Perhaps. But when was the last time you saw a pirate stand and fight in an untenable position when he could have run?”

“Hmph. Point.”

“Sir, we're getting a reply from the planet!”

“Well?” Radik leant towards Iulius.

“I'm afraid it's not good news, sir. It's just one word: No.”

“Can't say I'm surprised.”

“Nor am I, General. Unfortunately, that means more people on both sides are going to have to die. Are your men prepared?”

“We've been ready to go since we arrived. Now that I've had a chance to look at the way they're set up down there, I have some concerns. Unless we're willing to crack their domes, then once we've forced breaches, then we won't have orbital fire support. That could be difficult if they have any great number of troops inside.”

“No, cracking the domes is out of the question. We're here to force a resolution to this whole mess on our terms; if our opening moves are an attack on civilians on the scale that killing all the humans under those domes would be, that's only going to make them more determined to fight and complicate the post-war situation. I'm aware that makes things more difficult for you, General, but I'm afraid in this case, the easy option doesn't achieve our objectives.”

“That's what I was afraid of. Oh, I'm certain we can do it,” he said, in response to the startled look and half formed question on Radik's lips. “That armour of theirs is tough, but not invincible, and we've got most of the army units in an entire sector with us right here, including the 7th Epyrus Heavy and 283rd Armoured Scouts. They're going to hurt us, but there's no way they can have that much combat power concentrated here without knowing we were coming before hand. I'm certain they've got plenty of tricks left to pull out of their magic box, but unless they're already fighting a war down there, then I don't think they can stop us.

“My main concern is what they've got to throw at us on the way down.”

“We've got fairly complete photographic coverage of their main colonies, General,” Iulius said, as he made his way back up the steps from the operations pit. “They don't show GARDIAN towers or other fixed planetary defence emplacements.”

“Maybe not, Commander. On the other hand, they've clearly managed to miniaturise their power sources enough to create practicable energy weapons; they might not need permanent structures to handle the power requirements, which raises the possibility of much smaller, much less obvious weapon systems. There's enough crap floating around in the atmosphere down there from all the volcanism that I wouldn't put all my faith in those pictures under ideal circumstances, and certainly not with an unknown technical base involved. On top of that, however, we know they've got what looks like a major airstrip at this colony near the southernmost point of the minor northern sea; what sort of air cover are they going to have available? We're going to sacrifice a lot of our acceleration advantage in atmosphere, and from what we've seen so far of their 'fighters', they're formidable machines.

“I don't want to get ourselves into a situation where we send my people down in drop shuttles and hit heavy a heavy fighter umbrella, but we can't send frigates in to support them due to planetary defence grade GARDIAN equivalents that we can't see from up here. On the other hand, we can't really afford all the problems that are going to come with landing in the middle of nowhere and covering the distance to their colonies on foot; they've got to have serious fleet units out there somewhere, and we know for damn sure that plenty of the ships in this system have gotten away, and the environment down there is going to play havoc on our kit over extended periods of heavy use.”

“Given that the airstrip is outside of the dome, I think we can arrange for it to be made unusable without a great deal of difficulty.”

“Music to my ears, sir. If we can ensure that my shuttles aren't going to be blasted out of the sky, then I plan to land troops at each of their colonies simultaneously. I've got enough transport to shift a division for each target; ten minutes from landing to lift off. Losses are going to cut that down pretty sharply, but if all goes well, we'll be able to put enough people on the ground quickly enough to overwhelm them. If it should transpire that they do not, in fact, have planetary defence equipment in any great quantity, then with your permission, I can supplement that capacity with frigates, which can, of course, double as tactical support platforms. If they do have those defences, then we'll detail fighters to deal with them as the situation requires. If they turn out to have the ability to protect their airbase, then I'm afraid we're going to have to rely on fighters to suppress them and deal with their surface to orbit weapons at the same time. That's clearly not the ideal situation, but it's possible, and the alternative is sitting around up here picking our toes until a human relief fleet arrives.”

He tapped a command into the hologram's controls, causing the view to zoom in to the settled area of the planet. Green icons representing turian shuttles appeared around the domes, shortly followed by a healthy stain spreading out from the shuttles over the surrounding land. When they reached the domes of the colonies, they stopped, wiggling back and forth.

“Reaching the domes shouldn't be too difficult, if we can call on orbital fire support while outside. The humans are going to have to retreat, surrender or be destroyed. Ideally, we'll be able to seize an open entry point before they can withdraw through it, but if we can't, the first wave will take breaching equipment and temporary airlocks with them. If we don't have orbital support, it will be trickier, but if we can land troops quickly enough, we should have significant superiority in numbers.”

On the hologram, tiny explosions blossomed along the edges of the domes, and the green of turian control started inching it's way inside.

“Once inside, things will get tougher. They're going to be damn hard to kill without completely redesigned rounds, but we know that enough fire will bring them down. In the meantime, we can put more missile launchers into the field to at least partially compensate for our lack of anti-armour weapons. The domes are big enough that we can use gunships inside once we're away from the walls, but for the initial breaches, we're going to have to rely heavily on the 7th and 283rd to deal with strongpoints. However, we almost certainly have the advantage in combat endurance – unless they can make pockets bigger on the inside than on the outside, then they can't carry anywhere near as much ammunition as we can carry heat clips.”

The angry orange of human controlled territory began shrinking, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed.

“Eventually, it will become obvious that their situation is untenable, and at that point, hopefully, they will surrender. They did so at Relay 314 when it was obvious they'd lost, at least. I've forwarded the details of the operation to your terminals, now that it's been finalised. I would suggest, sir, that you sit in when I brief my senior officers this afternoon.”

“That sounds like an excellent idea, General. I'll clear my timetable.”

“Thank you sir. The final issue is the orbital stations. I have units standing by in preparation to board if you decide it's necessary.”

Radik zoomed the hologram out and stared at the stations hanging motionless above the planet for almost a minute. Finally, with a sigh, he turned back to Miras.

“Yes. We can't pass up the intelligence opportunity they represent. If they still have people aboard, and they put up insurmountable resistance, vacate the station and we'll destroy it. If you can convince them to surrender, so much the better.”

“Of course, sir. If you'll excuse me, then, I have things to set in motion.”

“By all means, General. Good luck, and be safe.”

* * *

“Bravo Three Three, Bravo Ten, come back.”

Sergeant Chen Hwai-Min toggled the transmit switch on his comm.

“Bravo Ten, Bravo Three Three, go ahead.”

“Bravo Three Three, bad news, I'm afraid. The fish aren't biting today; Mountain King tells me we've got shuttles inbound to the hull; they're ignoring the docking ports completely. Get yourself over to A6 and set up to repel boarders. There's a shuttle headed that way.”

“Solid copy, Bravo Ten. We're on our way now. Bravo Three Three out.” Cutting his transmission, Chen glanced around the cargo transfer bay his squad was set up to defend. The rectangular compartment was almost twenty meters from the deck to the deckhead, and ran to five times that on it's longest axis. It was crowded with cargo handling equipment of all sizes, abandoned shipping crates and the bulky figures of twelve armoured Chinese soldiers and their four drones.

“Alright, listen up!” Cheng barked. “Our friends outside turn out not to be stupid enough to charge out of the hatches straight into our fire. Looks like they're going to try cutting through the hull somewhere near junction A6. Grab your shit and get moving, or we're going to be late for the party.”

“That's extremely inconsiderate of them if you ask me.”

“It might have escaped your notice, Wang, but they've not been particularly fucking polite during their visit to the wonderful resort world of Mir so far.” Cheng couldn't see the support gunner's face through the helmet of the PA-10 battlesuit the man wore, but he could clearly, and probably accurately, imagine the exaggerated roll of Wang's eyes. “There'll be time to bitch at them while we move, so get going, unless you want to wait around for ET to come out of that door and fuck you up the arse?” He thrust a gauntleted hand towards the sealed blast doors that lead deeper into Orbit One.

“Ah, no Sergeant. That doesn't sound very enjoyable at all.”

“Glad to hear it, since, being an alien, his wedding tackle is probably barbed.”

Preceded by the buzzing of the drone's lift fans, Cheng lead the way to a smaller access hatch in the starboard wall of the compartment. It was a squeeze to fit through, being designed for maintenance technicians and personnel access, not power armoured PLA soldiers. The accessway beyond was larger and had more headroom; Cheng and the eight men in PA-8 suits had no problems, but Wang and his fellow support gunners in their larger PA-10s were brushing the bulkheads on either side and the deckhead above. Nevertheless, they maintained a good pace as Cheng led them through the maze of passages towards the point where the shuttle was expected to attach itself to the outside of the station's hull.

“Bravo Three Three, Bravo Ten, come back.”

“Bravo Ten, Bravo Three Three.”

“Three Three, we've got problems. Your target diverted, and we've now got boarders inside the hull between A8 and A9. They're headed inwards along access nine. Get in front of them and hold them up for,” there was a pause. “Hold them up for fifteen minutes, give us time to get some support into that area, then withdraw to fallback Charlie.. It looks like there's at least another three boarding parties at large in that area, but I can't give you any specific locations, just that we've got multiple hull breaches and no pressure loss all the way along A access. Keep an eye out for them, and don't get yourself surrounded.”

“Copy that, Ten. We are currently near C5. We should be making contact shortly.”

“Acknowledged, Three Three. Good luck. Ten out.”

“Change of plan,” Cheng announced, turning to his squad. “They're already aboard, and they've got friends. We take C access to starboard until we hit C9, then head for the hull. We should find them coming towards us. Wang, Wu, when we hit C access, you two take point. There are no friendlies in front of us, so anything that moves needs extra ventilation. There are more boarders 'somewhere' in the area, so go to squad tac-comm only. Staggered line once we reach C access.”

The reached C access without drama. The larger accessway ran parallel to the outer hull, at right angles to the smaller, numbered maintenance access spaces Cheng and his squad had been struggling through. Like the transfer bay they had started in, C access was littered with abandoned cargo crates, but there was no small handling equipment or unused transportation to be seen. The auto-loaders bearing the crates stood patiently in the middle of the metal corridor, yellow and black, four legged titans waiting patiently for their organic masters to return and give their simple automation orders. The Chinese slipped out into the larger space quietly. The drones sped off down the corridor, whilst Wang and Wu, with their heavier armour and weapons, headed each of the two staggered lines or soldiers, picking separate paths among the silent machines.

“Hold up.” Wu held up a hand and dropped to one knee behind the leg of an auto-loader holding a crate plastered with Shanghai Daijang logos. “Drones are getting something witchy on passives from up ahead. I'm going to active rada...”

His announcement was cut off by the wail of a threat warning in Cheng's ear, as somewhere ahead of them, something started radiating active targeting emissions.

“Active threat!” Cheng yelled, somewhat unnecessarily, given that the rest of his squad were already scattering behind the available cover and reaching for their wrist consoles. Wu rose from his position behind the flimsy protection of the auto-loader limb and dashed towards another Shanghai Daijang crate sitting alone on the deck. Further up the accessway, there was a thump and a flash of fire, then the howl and glare of a rocket motor as a projectile streaked through the air. The missile caught Wu in the side, erupting into a flash of orange and yellow light and sending the bulky suit tumbling into an awkward twist of armour and limbs. Cheng could clearly see the gaping hole that had been blown through the torso armour, and the ruined meat within. Wu didn't rise.

“Shit. Go to active countermeasures!” Cheng bellowed over the squad comm net, suiting actions to words as he stabbed a finger onto the smartcloth console at his wrist. “Anybody have a target? And why the fuck didn't the drones catch them?”

“Got a good track on it for the entire flight, boss,”Zheng Wei, one of Cheng's three surviving support gunners announced. “Fifty meters further up, there's a pair of shut down auto-loaders parked next to each other. I'm marking the location now. Dunno about the drones, though.”

Cheng expanded the map of the immediate area his computer projected into the bottom right of his helmet hud. A blinking crimson dot marked the point Zheng had seen the missile launcher. The space between the Chinese unit's current position and the enemy offered sparse concealment, but the enemy position was a confusing mishmash of industrial machinery. Describing anything involved as 'parked' was being generous; it looked more like the operators of the machines involved had managed to get into an accident in their rush to evacuate, and nobody had stayed around to clean up. The power cells of one of the auto loaders were exposed, bathing the entire area in a blanket of infra-red radiation, masking any other sources nearby.

Gunfire sounded further up the accessway, a rippling snarl that was unlike anything Cheng had heard in his life, outside of the antiquated automatic weapons that featured in historical movies. There was a wail of damaged lift fans and a loud crash as one of the drones fell to the deck. More rounds chewed at the edge of Cheng's crate, the durable plastic offering little resistance to the tiny, fast projectiles. They shattered on his armour, with a force that felt like somebody was smacking him in the chest with a lead pipe. He fell onto his rear with a curse, and the next burst missed him, punching all the way through the crate and producing billowing clouds of fine white flour that coated Cheng in a thin film of white dust.

“Fuck this. Deng, take over C drone and go look for the ones on access nine! I'll take A and D! The rest of you, return fire!”

More threat warnings shrieked as the boarders fired another missile, but, confused by the electronic static the Chinese suits' ECM was blanketing the airwaves with, it twitched off target and slammed directly into the auto loader Cheng's third support gunner, Gao Dong was crouching behind. The machine blossomed into a ball of fire, and spewed fragments of red hot metal across the Chinese position, rattling off of armour. Gao cursed vilely as his scorched armour stumbled out of the fireball, then turned to the enemy position and, heedless of his exposed state, filled the air with a torrent of explosives.

The QLB-86 SAW was bigger and bulkier than the Model-80 combat rifle most of the rest of the squad carried. It was less handy in confined spaces as well, and generally considered a pain to maintain. Importantly, however, its large box magazine provided it with a significantly greater ammunition supply, and Gao's PA-10 could carry enough reloads that he didn't have to make every shot count. 20mm, high explosive armour piercing rounds marched through the attackers' position with metronome precision, smashing through crates and machinery alike before detonating with bone cracking force. They were designed to punch a hole through infantry armour, not as fragmentation rounds, but their impact on the environment in the enemy position sent shards of metal from machines, bulkheads and the deck scything through the air. Enemy gunfire snarled, and Gao staggered as they shattered against his armour, but he didn't lose his footing, merely adjusted his aim slightly and allowed his last two rounds on-board guidance systems to place them onto the point his computer indicated the fire had come from.

Something screamed and thrashed as Gao stepped back into concealment behind Cheng's crate, already thumbing the magazine catch and reaching for a replacement. Zheng leant around the edge of his own cover and began a calmer, more measured barrage. Wang was not far behind, nor were the rest of the squad – although they were considerably more sparing with their rounds. Despite their best efforts, the enemy refused to be completely suppressed; automatic fire continued to chew up crates and the deck, and another missile screamed by the Chinese position, a clean miss.

While they were shooting at the Chinese soldiers, however, they weren't shooting at the drones. Cheng manoeuvred his two robotic minions with the deftness of long practice, weaving them close over the top of the enemy position, the whine of their fans unnoticed amongst the thunder of explosions. Infrared was useless, but optical sensors and radar worked perfectly from this angle, without the confusion of surfaces and angles that provided an enemy a hiding place at ground level.

“I've got solid targets!” He yelled. “Drone A!”

“Got it, Boss.” Zheng muttered.

The Chinese fire slackened as they switched from simply blanketing the area with rounds to single, aimed shots. Guided by Cheng's drone, the smart rounds sliced through the alien position like a giant, explosive scythe. The crates and machinery the boarders crouched behind were no match for the Chinese penetrators, and shields flared and died under the fire. Two of the aliens burst apart in showers of blue gore, and another, his shield down, screamed and clutched at a sizzling fragment of metal embedded in his face. Two of his companions started to drag him behind the more solid cover of an upturned auto loader chassis, but a salvo of rounds from Gao caught one of them in the back, coating the injured alien and his other rescuer in blood and viscera.

Despite the unexpected and devastating increase in casualties, the aliens didn't break. Three of them, toting the bulky mass of missile launchers, sent rockets streaking into the Chinese defenders as the surviving aliens began to withdraw away from the human soldiers. One of them looked up and, seeing the drone, raised his rifle. Cheng's link to the machine dissolved into static.

“Good job lads, they're falling back. Charlie Team, covering fire. Delta Team, you're with me.”

The retreating invaders hadn't left much behind in the way of equipment, beyond heat warped wafers of metal and the mangled remains of the armour the dead were wearing. It turned out that alien corpses were as unpleasant to look at as human remains, and a brief search of the bodies revealed nothing of immediate interest.

“Bravo Ten, this is Bravo Three Three, come back.”

“Bravo Three Three, Bravo Ten. I read you.” Cheng could hear gunfire over the comm link.

“Ten, we've just run into boarders in platoon strength well advanced of where they should have been. They're in as far as C access. We kicked them out of their positions, but they're still between us and their line of advance. I'm going to keep pressing them, but depending on their supply of anti-armour weapons, I may not be able to reach access nine. I'm down two drones and one KIA already and I can confirm that they aren't human.”

“Copy that, Three Three. We've noticed that ourselves,” there was a pause. “Continue pressing them for now. If your ammo situation becomes dire or you start taking too many casualties, feel free to fall back. Keep me advised of your situation; at the moment, the fallback point is still Charlie.”

“Acknowledged, Ten. Good luck, Three Three out,” with a sigh, Cheng switched back to the squad channel. “Right, we've just proved to ET here who the real men on this station are, but the grey skinned bastards apparently think they still have a shot at beating us. We're going to keep pressing them, as far as our ammo allows, then fall back. They're just lucky that we aren't supposed to stop them anyway! Gao, Zheng, it's your turn up front; watch out for those fucking rocket launchers; Deng, take over both drones. Don't worry about conserving power, they probably aren't going to be around long enough for it to matter.”

As the Chinese squad started to wind it's way forwards again, Cheng grinned.

“Lets entice them to stick their barbed alien dicks a little deeper, shall we, gentlemen?”

[Pale Wolf]

Yay updates!

Okay, I have to note that I like Song. He's fun. (Though my mental image of him is stubbornly adhering to 'Armstrong, from Full Metal Alchemist')

but the overdeveloped orbital infrastructure and the large number of ships that had been in the system upon their arrival were wildly out of proportion to what such a colony should have demanded.

I imagine that's because it's under military occupation for some reason?

To make matters even more confusing, the know that there's a garden world that should be prime planetary real estate for them in the nearest system, and not only is it untouched, there's absolutely no evidence that they've ever even been in that system.

Hm. That's actually a viable question. I know OOCly that the reason the Sphere colonized wierdshit planets is because they got longshotted out to them and didn't have a ride anywhere else, but don't they have FTL now and the capacity to explore, find that nearest system, and colonize it? If not with Mirans then with someone else?

“Maybe, maybe. They still haven't so much as asked us who we are, though. I suppose they might have assumed there's no point in talking to us, since we're clearly hostile. Damn that triggerhappy idiot Asturias! He didn't know what they were saying, but at least they were talking to him!”

Quoted for truth. I mean, you shoot the ones who're willingly negotiating, can't expect someone else to come up to the table.

“I'm afraid it's not good news, sir. It's just one word: No.”

Was it accompanied by a picture of an upraised middle finger?

(Though, I do love the tone of the first official communication between them. "Surrender." "No.")

“Given that the airstrip is outside of the dome, I think we can arrange for it to be made unusable without a great deal of difficulty.”

That's not gonna bother the mobile suits much, though, is it?

“Glad to hear it, since, being an alien, his wedding tackle is probably barbed.”

Not so much, but carapaced, and also poisonous. Kinda evens out.

“Lets entice them to stick their barbed alien dicks a little deeper, shall we, gentlemen?”

Oh my. They have a plan, do they?

I'm thinking blow up the station, but I'm not sure that'd do enough casualties to make it worth the while. What they really want is to break Palaven's back, or at least one of the troop ships (if they have troop ships).

[Screwball]

Okay, I have to note that I like Song. He's fun. (Though my mental image of him is stubbornly adhering to 'Armstrong, from Full Metal Alchemist')

That's... not a bad image for an Atlas template, actually. They're just that way naturally, not through training. In this case, obviously, he's Chinese, so probably not blonde.

I imagine that's because it's under military occupation for some reason?

Sort of. It's a combination of Mir being a high grav hellhole and chronic political instability and more or less constant warfare on the surface making it safer to build industry in orbit (that mostly applies to the Russians, who were Mir's 'sponsors' before the Chinese kicked them out). Mostly the hellhole bit; nobody except the Mirans actually wants to live there.

Hm. That's actually a viable question. I know OOCly that the reason the Sphere colonized wierdshit planets is because they got longshotted out to them and didn't have a ride anywhere else, but don't they have FTL now and the capacity to explore, find that nearest system, and colonize it? If not with Mirans then with someone else?

OOCly in this case, it's actually because the guy who made them specifically wanted a nasty world to show how hard they were. ICly, first needs a bit of terminology explaining. That is, there are three general classes of augments in the Sphere; Posthumans, who are uploads and possessed of crazy, physics-breaking technology that nobody understands; transgenes, a class which generally also includes 'normal' cyborgs and other people who are in some way upgraded but still basically human, and exhumans, who are sort of the physical equivalent of the physical equivalent of the Posties. Those are the people who put their brains in a jar to switch between numerous specialised bodies, full-conversion cyborgs who have radically different capabilities from humans and so on.

Mir was settled by a bunch of exhumans with a very strange religion that nobody else understands called the Church if the Immanent Eschaton, and it's got a whole bunch of stuff about becoming divine through the application of technology and enduring hardship. So, they settled Mir because it was the harshest planet they could find that they could augment themselves to survive. The only reason Mir has domes anywhere is because the Chinese or Russians built them; the native Mirans can live outside perfectly fine, but they also have plastic skin.

As for not exploring, jumpdrive FTL is complicated. This is my interpretation, because this specific matter hasn't really been discussed in detail. Technically, it's a go-anywhere drive; you can jump wherever you want to over short distances (like inside a star system, say), but over longer distances, you start getting problems. The whole system accumulates 'quantum static' while in use, and the longer the jump, the more you get. It's wildly unsafe to jump without derezzing your drive; there's a fair chance that you'll just cease to exist. Derezzing is actually what takes up most of the time on an interstellar voyage longer than one jump, and it's why catapults are so much faster; the catapult takes the static, not the ship. The level of static a drive can tolerate depends on how good your drives are - which is one of ZOCU's big advantages; they have better access to Postie technology, and thus better drives. The distance you can jump, on the other hand, is a function of the level of static your drive can tolerate, and your power supply.

Unfortunately, human technology is not capable of building a drive up to just going to another star system, even the closest ones. Fortunately, there are areas within star systems where the energy cost of doing so is a lot lower - jumpzones. You can go from one of them to another without accumulating too much static and without needing too much power. The problem is, each jumpzone leads to another, fixed, jumpzone. So, they can only explore along set paths. That garden world is in a system they can't get to with their current drives, but the turians, obviously, don't know that yet. There's probably a lot of longshot colonies out there that haven't been re-contacted because nobody can get to them as well.

Quoted for truth. I mean, you shoot the ones who're willingly negotiating, can't expect someone else to come up to the table.

In the time between chapters, Radik was banging his head against a wall in frustration.

Was it accompanied by a picture of an upraised middle finger?

(Though, I do love the tone of the first official communication between them. "Surrender." "No.")

Alas, no; incompatible file formats.

That's not gonna bother the mobile suits much, though, is it?

No, but on the other hand, mobile suits are mostly space fighters; they have the aerodynamics of a brick, and are generally out-performed in atmosphere by aircraft (and, as a note, on the ground by tanks, although they're most definitely better than nothing there). The Chinese have SSTO capable fighters, so they don't need a lot of functional runway given their insane power to weight ratio, but they still need some sort of launch facility.

Not so much, but carapaced, and also poisonous. Kinda evens out.

Yes, but barbs sound more painful, yes?

Oh my. They have a plan, do they?

I'm thinking blow up the station, but I'm not sure that'd do enough casualties to make it worth the while. What they really want is to break Palaven's back, or at least one of the troop ships (if they have troop ships).

Indeed they do. I won't say what it is, since that's for next chapter, but explosions might feature!

[Cheb]

[puts away his long prepared "MOAR!" motivator] Yay And right when I was ready to despair

[Pale Wolf]

Unfortunately, human technology is not capable of building a drive up to just going to another star system, even the closest ones. Fortunately, there are areas within star systems where the energy cost of doing so is a lot lower - jumpzones. You can go from one of them to another without accumulating too much static and without needing too much power. The problem is, each jumpzone leads to another, fixed, jumpzone. So, they can only explore along set paths. That garden world is in a system they can't get to with their current drives, but the turians, obviously, don't know that yet.

So in theory they could jump out to there, but unless they wanted to risk ceasing to exist, they'd have to do a serious exploratory mission and it'd take months of minijumps to make it?

A case of 'sure, we can explore the galaxy, but the space we're already in suits our needs and it's a huge blow of resources to potentially come up with nothing, or potentially come up with feral drones'?

In the time between chapters, Radik was banging his head against a wall in frustration.

Most understandably. (Saren's brother = awesome)

The Chinese have SSTO capable fighters, so they don't need a lot of functional runway given their insane power to weight ratio, but they still need some sort of launch facility.

Hm, let's hope they launch the damn things before the turians blow the runway to shit - unless, at least, they can launch off the railways and roads. I suppose the best the MSes can do is serve as some anti-air gun nests and then IFVs inside the domes - and penetrating those domes is gonna be murderous, while they get to choose their choke point, they are going to end up having to funnel infantry through choke points against, pretty much, everything the PLA has.

Yes, but barbs sound more painful, yes?

Yes, yes they do.

Indeed they do. I won't say what it is, since that's for next chapter, but explosions might feature!

Yaaaaaaaay!