by Aer-ki Jyr
As he worked, the warships around him began to drift apart, putting more distance between them to make it harder for a miss against one of them to impact another by accident, and even as he issued the orders he saw a tiny icon flash by that belonged to a rail gun slug fired by the station. Too far out of range for a reliable shot, the station defenders were hoping to get a lucky hit in, knowing that they had ammunition to spare.
Several more flashed by as his fleet approached, with the battleship using reverse engines to slow down rather than flipping over to use the main engines. Their approach speed was low enough that such a maneuver was possible, keeping the main rail gun in line as the massive ship came to a standstill at long range from the station…with the smaller ships forming two ‘horns’ and continuing to close while moving wide, keeping the firing lane in between the battleship and station clear.
As soon as the reverse engines shut down the pilot adjusted their attitude enough to bring the rail gun’s firing arc into position, then the gunner micro-adjusted within that arc, launching a heavy slug in towards the much larger station.
With the size comparison between battleship and station in his favor, Paul kept his flagship at range and began a slugging match across the gap. Return fire blossomed all around the Excalibur as tiny highlighted slugs flashed past like a meteor shower, a few of which hit and deflected off the angled armor, scraping off furors into the Herculium as they passed.
The Excalibur’s slugs had a much bigger target to aim at, and a much longer firing barrel to aim with, increasing its accuracy versus the station’s multiple batteries. Unable to target specific weapons or hull plates, the battleship’s gunner did manage to hit the station with about 3/4ths of the shots fired, which caused significant smash damage as the metallic slugs hit face on against the station’s thick armored plates, breaking through with each hit and savaging the interior.
The station, given its size, couldn’t be killed quickly, but as the exchange continued Paul noted where the damage was occurring and began updating his target list for his other ships that were just now coming into flanking positions.
A red flash illuminated on the battleship holo to his left, indicating a hull breach just starboard of the tip of the triangular hull where one of the station’s slugs had hit almost square on. It hadn’t deflected much, and now there was a gaping hole in the armored hull, but fortunately it had missed the primary rail gun. Had that been hit, this battle would have been much harder to win.
Tiny dots began flashing on the station, indicating the points of invisible laser strikes as they ate small craters into the armored hull by superheating the material in an explosive fashion. Missile plumes from the flanking ships also leapt out, the long range variety first, with retaliatory flights coming from the station and crisscrossing the space in between. Anti-missile turrets activated on both sides as the maelstrom intensified.
A moment of calm ensued for Paul as his hands fell from the control pedestal and he was forced to watch how the battle played out. His eyes darted from one point to another, along with the floating damage statistics he had running on a holographic panel that oriented off his right shoulder as if it was a transparent wall, detailing each ship in his fleet with green/yellow/red hull markings letting him assess damage at a glance.
After a few minutes of what seemed like chaos Paul smiled and entered a few additional commands, seeing his plan beginning to unfold. Eliminating weapons emplacements on the station as if they were chess pieces, he began carving out a blind spot in their defenses while rotating his damaged ships around, having them present undamaged flanks to the station while moving their hull breaches out of the line of fire…as well as altogether hiding behind one another or doubling up anti-missile coverage by bringing their ships closer together.
The Sabers knew what they were doing, so Paul wasn’t burdened by having to issue orders concerning everything. That left him free to troubleshoot and look out for surprises by the enemy commander…though for this part of the trial it was a computer simulation only. No Clan or any personnel were defending the computer-controlled station, in order to give each attempt at the trial an objective score, whereas an opponent would learn and adapt when faced with multiple runs.
As the blind spots in the station’s defenses began to manifest themselves Paul highlighted the ‘safe’ regions and uploaded that navigational data to his fleet, allowing them to trust his tagged zones and maneuver inside them as they continued their assault. Once they were all tucked in safely they began trashing the station’s hull and digging further and further into the lateral superstructure as the Excalibur continued to blow through the ‘front door.’
Paul stood ramrod straight, arms now crossed behind the small of his back as he watched the grinding ensue. It was almost an academic exercise at this point, but with the missiles’ ability to arc around a closed line of sight there was still an element of uncertainty, though his own fleet’s arcing missiles were pinpointing and destroying the station’s launchers and anti-missile defenses one by one, overwhelming the latter before exposing and lighting up the former in a textbook assault typical of Clan Saber.
When Paul’s fleet had systematically destroyed all of the station’s defense systems the trial automatically ended, saving them the time of having to blast every bit of it into oblivion. The holograms surrounding Paul vanished and he looked out at his Clan members on the bridge mockup as they all stared at their floating score number that had replaced the tactical hologram.
4,589
Paul nodded. “Good work. That puts us into 2nd behind the Neon Squirrels by…” Paul hesitated, doing the mental math, “319 points. That’s catchable if we have a few good runs or they screw up.”
“Liam’s not going to screw up,” Levi told him.
Paul smiled. “Probably not, unless we can make him screw up when we go head to head.”
The second gen Archon checked his watch. “Three hours?”
Paul did likewise. “Make it two. I want to run through the other Clans’ results before we get into the melees.”
“Two then,” Levi confirmed as he and the six other Sabers filed out of the simulator.
Paul followed them out and clapped Ryan on the shoulder as his 8-man team stood by for their turn. “All yours.”
“What’d you hit?”
“4,589,” Paul told him as he walked passed.
“Alright Spartans,” Ryan rallied sarcastically. “Let’s go for half of that!”
Paul laughed along with a few of Ryan’s Clan, accepting the compliment. The Sabers always had high naval scores, but Roger and Liam were equally fierce competition, having specialized in that area in order to get a leg up on Paul, whose Clan was more balanced. Their Clans both rated a level 6 in naval, thanks to more than half of their Clan members being devoted to that discipline.
Even now some of their Clans were traveling to another trial in Atlantis, while Paul had taken his best people out to Titan for this one. Logistically speaking the travel time required excluded Paul or any other trailblazer from competing in all of the trials personally, plus their non-Clan duties also eliminated large blocks of the calendar from their availability, meaning that many of the trials would be contested with second rate Clan members.
This allowed for a lot of gamesmanship, with Clans picking when and where to send their best people. Any naval trial that Paul attended had Clan Saber with an edge, but when Roger and Liam were also present that edge became so slim that it was almost negligible. Still, he knew, that while they battled it out here, the other Clans would be sending people elsewhere to take advantage of his and the other trailblazers’ absence, since they’d all decided to attend this trial.
Paul figured they had a 20% chance of winning this one, for which the prize would be a new Viper-class inter-planetary starship. The Sabers had fallen behind a bit after the second of 10 challenges within this naval trial when Clan Neon Squirrel had sunk an incredibly high score and Clan Saber had come through only
with an above average mark. The challenge they’d just run had been #5, with the remaining five being versus battles rather than point runs. One would be defensive, another offensive, a third head to head, and the last two would be tournaments, with points awarded for how far each Clan progressed.
For now though, Paul had two hours to spare…which meant it was time for another briefing session.
Instead of going back to his quarters in the orbiting sanctum, Paul headed over to a small lounge that the trailblazers had reserved for their specific use where he found Sam, Will, Greg, Erin, and Dan waiting for him.
“Tear it up as usual?” Greg asked as Paul walked in and shut the door behind him.
“Pretty much,” Paul said, sliding into an overly cushioned chair.
“Alright, what’s up?” Erin asked, leaning forward.
“Something big,” Paul said, dropping his voice out of reflex, though no one in the hallway could have heard them speaking short of a shout. “We’re organizing a Clan-wide project without Davis’s knowledge.”
Greg raised an eyebrow. “Going behind his back?”
“Getting the jump on him,” Paul corrected. “We want to start colonizing the outer zone before he can lay claim to it.”
Dan whistled.
“That’s…” Erin said, running the implications through her head a couple of times, “ambitious.”
Sam smiled widely. “Oh, that’s perfect. He did say we were supposed to operate independently.”
“Exactly,” Paul agreed.
“What exactly are we looking at?” Will asked.
Paul got up and walked over to the video monitor hanging on the wall and brought up the system map he and Jason had been using to bring everyone up to speed in small groups throughout the course of the trial.
“We need to establish on these five worlds,” he said, tagging four small planets in the bottom end of the outer zone and Dysnomia, which was in orbit around Eris at the outer edge of the high zone. “From these we can branch out into these clusters,” he said, adjusting the map to draw mini constellations between other planets, each attached to the five linchpins.
“They’re all small,” Erin pointed out.
“Yes, but they’re ours if we can get to them first,” Paul explained. “In time we can transition out to the larger ones, even Mordor eventually, but if we can pull this off we’ll have access to more territories than Davis is making available to us through trials, and we can split it up according to our own terms.”
“We don’t have the ships to get that far out, do we?” Greg asked.
“Yes and no,” Paul said, repeating the conversation he’d already had four times with other groups. “We can get there with current inter-planetary starships but it will take a while…or we can refit them with larger fuel stores for enhanced speed.”
“Which diminished cargo capacity,” Erin noted.
Paul nodded. “We need to design our own inter-zonal starship to achieve the enhanced range…not to mention put some more forward armor on it to accommodate the greater speeds. We’re going to have to design and manufacture them ourselves, which no Clan is in a good position to do on our own. We need everyone…or almost everyone to commit resources to this. Only the united Clans can make this happen at the speed and volume we want.”
“What do the numbers look like if we went at it solo?” Sam asked.
“Randy was already considering that when we stumbled onto his plan. He was looking at snagging one planet using existing ships in an exaggerated supply chain. The plan was workable, but he was going to have to acquire a lot more ships to make it work. We think that fielding new technology will be worth the combined expense.”
“This was Randy’s idea?” Dan asked.
“That Jason and I stole, yes.”
“Bet he wasn’t too happy about that,” Dan said, snickering.
“Not really,” Paul admitted, “but that’s his own fault for getting sloppy and trying to buy ships from other Clans en mass. It tipped us off right away.”
“So that’s what he wanted them for,” Greg mewed.
“Anyway, he’s onboard with the grand scheme now, especially since it’ll open up more territory than he’d planned to go after. What we need from you is a ‘go/no go’ decision and your help regardless to keep this a secret.”
The trailblazers looked amongst themselves. “We’re in,” Dan said without hesitation.
“Same here,” Greg added. “I like the idea of beating Davis out there.”
“Should be interesting,” Erin agreed. “Clan Alterra is in.”
“We’re not missing this party,” Sam declared.
“We’re in,” Will said, finishing the unanimous decision. “But this is going to be a bear to pull off.”
“I know,” Paul said, nodding. “But a worthy challenge.”
“How do you want to split up the workload?” Erin asked.
“Only three of us have shipyards large enough to build the ships we need,” Paul began, pulling up a rough task list he and Jason had put together earlier. “If we have the rest of you fabricate smaller components and ship them out to us…”
5
March 3, 2139
The Way of the Clans left the Clan Croft starport around Titania fully loaded, lazily making its way out of Uranus orbit before altering course and heavily accelerating out towards the periphery of Star Force’s dominion. With the ever changing positions of the planets within the star system there was no fixed map to work from, but with farther distance from the Sun came orbital periods of hundreds of years which gave a semi-permanence to their locations. As such, for their first target for colonization, the Clans had chosen a small planet directly outside the relative position of Neptune to keep from having to cut across the inner zone to get to the opposite side and add even more distance to their first expedition.
The planet in question had a diameter of 1200 kilometers, making it approximately the same size as Charon but was located at more than three times the distance from the Sun as Pluto’s moon at 105 AU. It had been given the name Raena in a naming lottery, with the winner choosing her favorite singer for the label, but since none of the Archons could stand her high-pitched screeching voice they’d decided to rename the planet ‘Goku’ for their purposes…as well as making an alteration in Star Force’s database to match.
It took a week of acceleration for the extended range inter-planetary starship to get up to a speed of 4,000 miles per second, whereupon the massive ship entered its coast phase and spun up its quartet of gravity cylinders. Inside the living sections all the modular components shifted from acceleration based gravity aligned with the ship’s orientation to the spinning gravity of the cylinders which was perpendicular in relative direction.
All seats, walkways, restrooms, beds, etc had to be flipped about and had been designed for just that purpose. For the next 3 weeks the two kilometer long, hammerhead-shaped starship coasted out through the high zone and crossed over into the frontier of the star system where even Star Force had yet to travel. Another week of deceleration brought it to its final destination, entering orbit of the tiny planet on April 9.
Having expended a small lake’s worth of fuel to carry the ship out to this point, the Way of the Clans opened up its expansive cargo bays and began deploying dropships that travelled down to Goku’s icy surface. The sixteen of them landed softly in the 4.2% gravity, settling their golf ball shaped hulls down at three separate landing zones where they offloaded cargo and began making round trips back up to the ship to unload the entire hold.
Thanks to the low gravity a pair of crab-like work frames were dropped down to the surface via small maneuvering jets, whereupon they began drilling through the ice until they hit the metallic surface some 745 meters down. Unlike a lot of the other small planets in the high and outer zones, Goku was comprised of less rock than the others, making it more like Mercury in terms of composition and a definite mining hotspot if you could dig down through the ice to get at
the true surface.
Intent on carving out a colony beneath the ice, the workers began enlarging the pair of shafts enough to install a portable lift to get larger pieces of equipment down to the slightly less cold metal/rock. Given the distance from the Sun the exterior of the planet was remarkably cold, but the external ice ‘ocean’ surrounding it allowed a bit of internal heat to remain, but nothing even remotely hot enough to melt the ice.
While the two coring teams continued their work the third landing zone was overrun by treaded ‘scrappers’ that were plowing out and leveling acreage upon which were placed prefabricated habitats that were interconnected with one another to form a small, makeshift city on the dimly lit world. The small running lights on the modules provided a pinprick of illumination to the Way of the Clans in orbit as a visible gesture of defiance against the great void in which the planet drifted and the first sign of civilization to grace the planet.
The starship remained on station for several weeks, insuring that the small colony got its footing before it recalled all temporary crews via one dropship, leaving the others on station, and departed back towards the middle zone where it would refuel and load up again, returning to Goku in just under 3 months time.
By the time it returned the 238 colonists had succeeded in hollowing out a sizeable cavern at the base of each drilling shaft, large enough to accept the heavy mining equipment and additional Clan workers that the starship brought back with it. At one site they began mining operations immediately, while at the other they carved out a footprint into the metal/rock in which they began building the foundations for a permanent habitat using the construction materials brought in the second cargo shipment.
The Way of the Clans second supply run also brought with it more prefab structures to expand the ice-top city made of living quarters and warehouses. Intended only as a long-term temporary base, the prefab city was intended to be completely dependent on cargo shipments for supplies while they slowly built up a more self-sufficient colony underneath the ice.
