Tales from the Vast Reach

This story comes from LeftHandofGod:

One: I’m sitting in the Senate chambers, chatting with gnadeb and crazyrat, when the guards at the door suddenly straighten and pull the doors open as Pipper sweeps in, followed by Shiny and DeFalco. Pipper moves to the speaker’s podium and activates the wide-channel connection. All across the vast expanse of the Imperium, people are stopping to watch. The wide-channel is only ever used for extremely momentous Senate meetings, such as Senate elections, and the 1st and 2nd Declarations of Imperium. “Fellow leaders of the Imperium, I am here today to present a bold and daring proposal. War. For too long, we have suffered the indignity of second place in the galactic rankings. We have fallen even further behind in this cycle of history. The Imperium fades and becomes a joke! No more! Fluffyrom and his minions shall no longer deny us our rightful glory and power. No more shall we travel the stars in fear of a Honorverse fleet lurking in the unseen shadows between worlds. No more shall we suffer economic hardship because of raiders. No more! I say we take the fight back to them! For this day, I say that the Imperium…RISES! Who stands with me? As he sits, the vote flashes up on each of our individual screens: WAR WITH HONORVERSE? Y/N One by one, the Senate votes, each Senator standing in turn to explain their decision. DeFalco, the wise founder of the Diplomatic Corps, cautions against becoming overconfident of a swift victory. “I fought in the last of the old wars, before the union of The Culture and The Federation. Such an undertaking as this is long and bloody, and we will see no progress on our home worlds while we fight this war. We must be prepared to see this through unto its bitter end.”

In the end, every other Senator votes yes. Except me. And so I stand to deliver my speech to my colleagues. “The people of Vast Reach have been greatly taxed by the ongoing conflicts throughout the Galaxy. I fear that the taxes and further hardship of a war would be harsh to my subjects and debilitating to many of the less well-off. And even more, I fear for the unity of our great alliance. When Culture and Federation signed the accords of Empire all those long years ago, the fault lines did not disappear overnight. But the passing of time and battles fought together has brought us closer than ever. Yet a war of this magnitude may see the end of that union. I cannot, and will not support this measure. However, if this Senate does so degree that war will be prosecuted with Honorverse, than Vast Reach shall marshal her fleets and I shall lead them forth against the foe.” And so the Senate passes the measure, and the Senators disperse in a somber mood as preparations for the long conflict ahead begin…

Two:

There’s an old spacer’s saying that seems to hold particularly true right now.

In space, no one can hear you scream.

That must certainly hold significance for the crew of those ships dying out there in bright flashes. The truly chilling part is how quiet it all is, standing here on the observation deck. Hundreds are dying, and here, there’s just...nothing.

Elandra Vos brought her fleet here to plunder resources to fund the war effort against Honorverse, but things aren’t going that well. The battle’s well into mid-stage by now, but the balance of power is still precarious. Emerging from the jump into the system had provided a nasty shock to all the commanders present when the PDU defenses over the planet had revealed themselves to be networked together, with a black-market AI running them all. Add in the fact that the blasted thing had two Wardens and a small complement of Volkers for fire support, and things had gone bad very fast. Vos’ captains had wanted to re-direct fire towards the Volkers, but she’d remained firm and ordered missile fire laid down on the defensive units instead. The captain of the ship she was currently on hadn’t taken too kindly to that order, insisting on attempting to override her authority. That had stooped very swiftly after she pulled her graduate knife and eviscerated him. No doubt the cleaning staff would be complaining about the mess for weeks if they lived through this fight.

The sudden beeping of the bridge alert icon on her datapad took her away from the gruesome lightshow in front of her.

“This is Vos.”

Acting Captain Daverson was on the other end, looking flustered. “Ma’am, we’ve broken the back of the enemy defensive units, and the corvettes are mopping up the rest, but our cruisers are beginning to fail. As such, some of the remaining cruiser captains are getting nervous. They’re requesting permission to reform into a looser configuration and pull in the fighters as defense against secondary fire.”

She snorted. “Nervous cruiser captains. Imagine my shock.”  Elandra glanced at the tactical displays scattered across the viewport glass for a moment, then nodded. This fight was almost over, and they had the upper hand. Still, no need to waste good capital ships. “Granted. Tell the Revelation and the Reaching Hammer to hold position, though. We need them in secure firing lines to kill those battle stations.” He transmitted the orders and turned away as an aide yelled something from offscreen, She arched an eyebrow. “Problems?” Daverson grimaced. “Maybe. It looks like the enemy commanders have given up hope of actually winning and are going for the command ships instead. Those Volkers are ignoring the cruisers and maneuvering for a firing position against us and the Rivaled Dawn. I’ve given orders for the corvettes to bring them down as a priority, but I -” He’s cut off when the entire ship shudders from the simultaneous impact of four Volker primary blasts. “Dren! The shields are gone. We need to pull around.” The shaking repeats itself, and red damage alerts and hull breaches begin flickering up on Elandra’s screen. She shakes her head and starts sliding her fingers through menu screens. “No. Sound the general evac alarm and overload the jump core into main gun. That’ll give the extra range and punch needed.” He stops, troubled. “Needed for what? That much power will put a hole in even a Warden. What could possibly take that much damage?” She looks up and flashed him a feral grin. “Have you ever heard of zirtel ganlen?” Puzzlement. “No...” “Translates as 'shredded winds'. It’s an old term from the first settlers of the homeworld that describes a phenomenon that occurs during planetary bombardment with directed energy weapons. The energy released into the atmosphere disturbs weather patterns. Pump enough energy into the atmosphere at one point, and local weather patterns collapse and reform as colossal storm systems. On a big enough scale, the damage to a planetary biosphere is immense.” He recoils, horror dawning in his eyes. “That violates every single galactic treaty of the last 400 years. Following through with this would make you a war criminal and see me executed for obeying such an order.”

“Then maybe it’s a good thing you won’t be doing it, then.” She swipes a glyph on her pad, and the sudden roar of the overstressed jump core began reverberating throughout the ship. “Sound the evac, captain.”

Daverson was now looking at her with disgust and fury as the Volkers resumed their bombardment on the hull. The display screen behind her now looked as if the data core supplying the information was hemorrhaging, there were so many alerts and warnings.

She turned away and headed to go suit up, as the alarm began to sound throughout the ship. “All hands, proceed to airlocks and vacuum-suits. All hands, proceed…”

As she suits up, the displays on her HUD begin flashing even more urgently. She’s got minutes left to make it to an escape pod now. But the deathblow comes just as she reaches the turbo lifts that stretch across the ship. The shot strikes the ship right in the midsection, and the entire superstructure shatters like glass.

And then the world is spinning, and she can’t stop or slow down, and she’s spinning, and… Wait. She has thrusters. She can get back to the wreck, find a pod, and get out of here with the fleet when they leave.

Half an hour later, she’s gotten to the wreck and is clambering over the hull when the blinding flare from the side startles her out of her focus and nearly sends her flying off again.

The fleet.

The fleet is leaving without her. Now she’s just sitting there, and there’s no hope or rescue coming. Maybe this is what really happens to those cadet commanders that get sent out to die on raids. Irony tastes...bitter. She’s halfway to just giving up and venting her suit when she sees the flicker of a salvage ship’s running lights. The fleet won’t be coming to rescue her, but who cares? She can rescue herself just fine.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Two hours after that, the salvage team arrives. One of the benefits of going through the full nine yards at the War Academy is that she knows exactly where a salvage team would start on such a big wreck.

Which means she knows where to place the traps.

She grins as the leading members of the team stagger and slump, clouds of oxygen venting from their now shredded suits. She loves nanowire. Makes it so easy to kill people in vacuum. Coincidentally,  it also makes it easier to retrieve their access codes for the salvager. She stands up from the corpses and hefts the anti-boarder plasma cannon she tore form the hangar as she heads towards the idling ship.

One way or another, no matter how many corpses she steps over on the way, Elandra Vos is going home.

Three:

Star System 4F369A 2840

The proximity alarm brought Elandra’s head around back to the dashboard from where she’d been staring into the black. One glance told her that it had bad news written all over it.

After all, you can tell things have gone to Dren when pirates the authorities don’t even care about are coming after you. Although if the moron was trying to run her to ground, an abandoned debris field in the middle of nowhere wasn’t exactly the ideal place to do it. She finds herself more than happy to oblige him with a fight, however.

She taps several icons on the dash and the salvager she’s in pulls about, the tertiary guns strapped to the hull powering up and running through their targeting cycles. It’s been a busy two years for her, fighting her own little war against Honorverse from behind the lines. She can’t make it back to Imperial space without a military-grade jump core to bypass the gates, but she’s had absolutely no luck. Finding even a working frigate is beyond her, to say nothing of finding even a frog to bootstrap her way back. And then there was that fiasco with the Imperial Intelligence agent. Ugh, that had been a clusterfrell.

And now this. There was a bounty on her head big enough to build any pirate lord a truly magnificent fleet, let alone an allied planet with a sanctioned infrastructure. She’d run as far as she could go, but the slimy scum had even hunted her down out here.

Screw that.

She didn’t die in the battle, she didn’t die fighting her way out of half-a-dozen deathtraps, and be damned if she was going to die out here. The enemy maneuvered around her onto a higher angle, rolling to present for a broadside.

Stupid Prime-class frigates. Even half dead, that thing could run circles around her.

Enough of this. Elandra pulled the manual flight controls out from the slot on the dashboard and flipped her ship end for end and accelerated in a ‘down’ arc along the debris field, flickering threads of light connecting the two ships as the tertiary guns exchanged fire. She jinked sideways to avoid the primary shot from searing through her shields as the frigate came into range, then twisted a dial to her side. The lights above her shut off abruptly, every spare erg of power that wasn’t keeping her moving being channeled to the salvaged cruiser primary cannon mounted in the lower cargo hold.

She cut the engine, did a ninety-degree turn of the ship and rolled it around, firing as soon as the cannon was lined up with the pirate, who vanished in a blaze of white light and shrapnel. As soon as she fired, all the lights on the screen shut down immediately. She had a good reactor, but it wasn’t nearly enough to meet the cannon’s demands and continue running the ship normally. Slowly, power began flowing back to the vital systems, lights coming back on and the engines starting the warm-up cycle.

Elandra nervously checked the sensor arrays while she waited, for everything to fully come back. Just as the engine booted up and kicked her back into the pre-set trajectory she’d set down before the fight, her scanners started screaming. The gate on the other side of the planet was bringing something through, and if her readouts weren’t on the fritz again, then the incoming ship was huge. And it had buddies.

Time to leave NOW.

She locks in a trajectory that has her pulling more than double the Gs of the previous flight plan when her comm activates.

“Vice Admiral Elandra Vos. You stand accused of six counts of planetary-scale genocide, two counts of planetary sterilization, and the murder of Planetary Leader Padda. Cease your current boost pattern and stand down to be boarded and taken into custody.”

She startles and starts running scans to find the origin point of the transmission and get an identity out of the speaker. In the meantime though…“Anything I’ve done has been in the service of the Alliance. And while I have done things I may regret, I have saved even more lives in the doing of them. As for the charge of murder, I was unaware that Padda was dead, but I had nothing to do with it.”

There’s a dry chuckle from the other end of the line. “Alliance? I think you mean the Imperium. The Alliance is a passing fancy of bitter and jealous children, and your precious Imperium is fractured to the core. The stressors of war grow day by day, as does the rot inside it. And you did kill Padda. After all, I rather think that you had a hand in the destruction of the space station that fell out of orbit onto his capital and killed him and six million of his citizens, yes?”

She halts, her hand on the response signal. Hand? Elandra had something closer to a whole arm and a leg involved in that mess. The II agent on-world had responded to her discreet probes into the local dark net and shared his plan with her. The the thing was, it had been fairly simple in the basic idea behind it. Plant a transponder beacon on the space station, and have a out-of-date Gravity Well use it to jump in as a surprise attack and destroy the station, as well as the other orbital shipyards nearby. End result: Cripple the production capacity of one of Honorverse’s heavy hitters and save thousands of Imperial ships in the process. Things hadn’t been meant to go down they way they had. The hounds weren’t supposed to be so close to her by then. She probably hadn’t been meant to throw the agent to the wolves to save her own skin. The agent was supposed to have shared the targeting codes for the Well with her. The containment shouldn’t have failed under fire from the defenses. The station was supposed to have been eaten completely, not just shattered and destabilized in its orbit. It wasn’t supposed to have destroyed other orbital structures and brought a rain of burning shrapnel down on the planet. She barely even heard herself speaking. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.” “The same can be said of a lot of things. But instead of might haves and maybes, here’s a promise. I will see you drawn and quartered, and the mangled bits of your body displayed in the forum in Fluff City for the entire galaxy to see.” That shakes her out of her stupor. Fluff City? But that meant that- “Fluffyrom.” “Indeed. It’s not often that I go out like this for just one petty little criminal, but you’ve cut a swath of murder and death across space. The camel’s back broke that day in orbit. Surrender or die.” Elandra laughed. “You mean surrender and then die. Not likely. I’m leaving. Bye!” As she accelerated towards the black network wormhole in local lunar orbit, she received one last transmission, which had her huddled into the seat staring at the endless black as the Gs continued to pile on. “The reckoning is coming, Admiral. For the Imperium, for you, and for your master. For it seems odd that of late, the esteemed Left Hand of God has withdrawn from the fight and his fleets have been mustering in Imperial space. Perhaps there’s trouble in paradise? Not that you’ll ever make it back, let alone live to see the clouds burst.”

Four:

Contested territory; Galtran Cluster Telmarus system High orbit over Telmarus IV 2844

The man on the other side of the table choked on his ale and reeled back in his seat. “Wait, back up. If I actually heard you right, then you want my men and I to help you take on the biggest frelling badass in the galaxy in close-quarters combat while stuck in a pressurized tin can? Are you - wait, no. I think it’s abundantly clear that you’re insane. Please do continue outlining your ridiculous and hilariously suicidal plot.” He waved his hand graciously towards Elandra and leaned forward.

She rolled her eyes and took a drink. “You do realize that a spaceship is also a pressurized tin can? Your outfit seems to be fairly fond of fighting in those.”

“Ah, but that particular type of tin can has the ability to run away. That’s the critical bit. A space station is a damn death trap under the right, or rather the wrong, conditions. And I gotta say, what you’re proposing sounds a lot like walking into the wrong set of conditions.”

“But what if it works?” she countered. “Under the right conditions, it’ll go off without a hitch. Wham, blam, dead body.”

He snorted. “Against anyone else, even Beachlife or Andreanna, you’d stand excellent odds of actually pulling it off. Against him, however? Hmph. Keep dreaming.”

“This is my best shot. And yours too. Don’t you want to go home again? I know I do.”

He glanced at her quizzically. “If you want to go home, why not just contract a group like us to take you home? Not that hard to get across the front lines.”

“It’s true, for a little while, all my energy went into trying to find a way to first raise the money, and second, find a way home. Then I realized the opportunity I held in my hands.” Here she leaned in. “I was behind enemy lines. I could hurt them, hurt them until they bled. If we can kill him, what do you think will happen to the honor-schmuk’s chain of command? Who is really capable of taking his place? While they dispute leadership, their attention to the war effort will be lacking. And then-”

“The Alliance can wipe the floor with them, yes. I understand what you’re looking at, I’m just questioning how feasible this idea really is. You have to admit that if things go wrong, none of us are going to be waking up in the medbay missing three week’s worth of memories, yes?”

Elandra crossed her arms and fixed him with a glare. “I know the risks I’m asking you to take, and it’s nothing I wouldn’t do myself. Hell, I’ll be leading the charge. Does that satisfy your concerns?”

“Maybe.” He pushed his glass aside and signaled a waiter for more drinks. “If you’re so damned determined to follow through with this idiocy, then let’s talk money…”

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Elandra shook the merchant’s hand and gave him the credit chips, turning away towards the docking bay, where the mercenaries were setting up the anti-personnel guns. They’d cleared the area as much as they could, and the guns were set up to provide as much of a cross-fire as possible. One of the squad members had wanted to remove all the crates, but some of the other guys had been adamant about keeping them for cover.

The captain came over to her and checked his gun. “Okay, so let’s go over this again. You’ve sent your little neaner-neaner taunt, what makes you so sure he’ll come here for you personally?”

She half-turned from where she was looking out at the starfield. “He wants me dead, up close and personal. He won’t settle for a long-distance strike.”

Shrug. “So he lands, we fry the shuttle, and then what?”

“We skedaddle before the fleet he brings with him kills us.”

“I can get behind that.” A tech to the side came up to him. He grinned and slung his gun on his shoulder. “Alright, wimps! We got incoming, and they’re mighty peeved. Final checks!”

Elandra checked her sidearm, picked up the forged strontium sword she’d bought a few months back, and locked her armor. Just as the last preparations were being made, a crate to the side splintered and warped in on itself. “What the-?”