USD: 35 days after the battle of Dedia IV

Location: 90 Pegasi, IND Iron Horse

Alex’s heart pounded as she rushed through the narrow corridors of the ship. Sailors were up and about running to their stations and she found herself having to weave between bodies of men who were in a hurry. A slow red flashing of the alert lights was punctuated by the loud klaxon repeatedly blaring a call to action.

|GENERAL QUARTERS|

|THIS IS NOT A DRILL|

|ACTION STATIONS|

Alex nearly tripped over a loose conduit, and one man caught her and sent her on her way with no pause. She had never experienced such a tumultuous rush to action on the Tears, and the realization of just how many crewmen were on the ship hit her.

Normally they were in their berths or at stations and she had not really noticed their presence. Only a few would be eating in the mess at a time, and that had been the largest gathering she’d seen. Other than her first trip to the gym.

The shadows of exposed conduits and red flashing lights gave the corridors an eerie look. She pushed the feeling away; she needed to get to the CIC!

She turned the corner and reached her goal. As she stepped onto the bridge, controlled chaos was in action as officers and seamen talked at their stations in a hurried but quiet clip. Most of the action was occurring at one station in particular. Starting toward it a hand clamped down on her arm.

“Stop right there. Who permitted you on the bridge? This is a controlled area.”

Alex froze to look up at a grim-looking sailor who was in a different color uniform. It was black with gray highlights instead of gray with gold highlights. It took her a half second to recognize the man as one of the shipboard marines.

“I…”

She froze, torn between the aggressive handhold on her arm and the sudden questioning she didn’t have an answer for.

“I asked you a question, girl,” the marine sergeant barked at her when she was slow to answer.

“Sergeant, I’ll permit her to observe,” Thraker said as he appeared, entering the CIC from the same corridor as Alex had.

Thraker passed by the scene without pause, and the sergeant released her with a frown and additional comment, “I’m watching you. No funny business.”

“No problem.” Alex said, then hurried to follow Captain-Major Thraker.

He headed straight to the SigInt station, bypassing his captain’s console.

“What do we have, gentlemen?”

A young lieutenant looking over the shoulder of a seaman turned to answer. Alex didn’t miss the confused glance he threw her way, even if it only lasted a second. It made her feel even more out of place despite her headlong rush to the CIC.

“Captain, we are picking up 37 and rising active broadcasts in the vicinity, all coming out as survival pods. Almost all of them Corpo from the looks of it. Seems the Sollies already picked up theirs, if there were any. There’s also a considerable amount of wreckage, at least sixteen ships or reads from sections big enough to be a ship. That’s just the ones with active power sources we can make out.”

Thraker rubbed his beard as he considered, “A battle around the jump point, and recent as well if they’re still this clustered.”

Alex looked at the monitor herself and felt a bit of shock. There were two rows of three round screens, each one with its own spinning line reminiscent of an ancient radar readout. She was familiar with it, but the Shrike’s system had been a 3D hologram that digitalized everything and mapped it out for her on a display.

The seaman sitting at the console turned and added to the conversation, “Sir, I’ve been looking at the more distant reads. There’s still ongoing fighting.”

The lieutenant turned to look at the screens. “Wait. You confirmed it? I thought we couldn’t make out those ghosts?”

“Yessir, but the big civilian transport in the convoy, IND Myopie, has an M-spec radar return. Even if it doesn’t have an active search dish, I can use its receiver. Look.”

The lieutenant nodded, “I’ll be damned, Martin. You continue to surprise me.”

Thraker studied the monitor for a moment before looking at Alex.

“Ms. Myers, what do you make of it?”

Alex swallowed a surge of panic at suddenly being put on the spot. “I’m sorry, I can’t actually read these…” She looked at the one monitor that she thought she understood and pointed at it.

“This looks like the escape pods, all the small bright dots. I don’t see any of the wrecks or the fleet.”

Martin spoke up first. “Ma’am, each monitor is based on a distance band. You’re right, these are the survival pods. They are small with a hard light because they are actively transmitting, so it’s a clear read. If you look here…”

Martin pointed to several fuzzy spots on the first and second monitor.

“These are the wrecks; we are just picking up transient signals from radiation on them. That’s why the clouds are hued yellow instead of turquoise. Then here…”

He pointed to the fifth screen, which Alex now understood to be very distant. She immediately spotted several groups of red clouds, but they were so fuzzy and faint she had to look closely to see them.

“The red clouds, those are ships?”

“Exactly. Red because they are active drive plumes. We can make out that there are two separate groups if you look here. We can get another console to spit out their bearing and heading. Normally we wouldn’t be able to see anything that far, but drive plumes are very hot, so we know both groups are burning hard.”

Thraker cleared his throat. Someone somewhere turned off the klaxon, but the red slow flash on the bridge continued.

“So, now that you can read an old sensor screen, what can you tell me, Ms. Myers?”

Alex took a moment to study the consoles. She now knew that things weren’t quite as dire as she had first thought. There was no active threat near them. Still, bridge operations had come to a standstill as everyone waited for orders from the Captain.

And he was waiting for her.

She examined the heading readouts and distances and studied them. “How do you tell what kind of ships the clouds represent?”

“Here.” Martin said, reaching down to grab a data pad and hand it to her. For a second she almost feared he was going to hand her a paperback book, but it was a pad with a camera on the back.

“We can take a snapshot, then scan the cloud, readout should show ship classes from highest confidence to lowest.”

Alex and Martin worked together for another few minutes while Thraker turned to go address other officers and stations across the bridge. By the time he returned to them, she had an answer ready.

“Captain, we make it out to be a Solarian and Corpo battle-group. Hesitantly calling it six Solarian battleships, 24 cruisers, and numerous smaller elements. The Corpos have five battleships, 36 cruisers, but significantly fewer small elements. The wreckage nearby is mostly small elements. It might account for the lack of them in the Corpo battle-group.”

As she repeated her and Martin’s findings, she realized just how much she had been relying on Nameless. It was a question that she’d never thought to ask how the answer was being provided, even if she somehow had known what the information meant and what to do with it.

Thought she knew what to do with it, she corrected herself.

“They’ll be in range for action in approximately twelve hours. They shouldn’t know we have arrived for about ten hours at their current distance, accounting for relativistic effects and light lag. The Corpos appear to be attempting to decrease the engagement time while the Solarians are trying to increase it according to their direction of burn, but there is no way for either side to avoid combat at their current velocities.”

Martin and the lieutenant nodded at her answer.

“Very good.” Thraker answered, then turned to the comms station.

Alex realized that he hadn’t already known the answer; he had expected them to figure it out for him so he could make a decision on what the ship should do. That was a lesson in itself.

“Comms, signal the life pods. We will collect and deliver them to 63 Hydrae. Have them berthed on the civilian ships. Ops, take us to yellow alert.”

The harsh red lighting disappeared, replaced by the regular beige hues that highlighted to old looking metal of the bridge. A yellow highlight remained as the alert light continued to flash slowly.

But all Alex could focus on was the Captain-Major’s words. 63 Hydrae. She had studied the map, and that system was through Corpo space.

“Captain! We can’t go to 63 Hydrae! We have to go back!”

Heads all turned toward her outburst, and Captain Thraker turned to look at her.

“Ms. Myers, you’ve been shown a courtesy by being allowed to remain on the bridge. I will speak with you in private in my office when I have concluded things here. If you wish to remain and observe operations, you may do so—but quietly.”

Alex felt like her chest was about to explode. She nodded in acceptance.

Seemingly satisfied, Thraker turned back to the officer he was speaking to, but the Bridge-Sergeant was giving her a dirty look.

USD: 35 days after the battle of Dedia IV

Location: Nu Crateris, Eastern Continent, SRS Heaven’s Fire

Walls like those the humans had erected around Dedia Prime would have been effective, but Heeler knew he did not have the time or resources to waste on such a project. Instead, the drones and nestling that had arrived dug. And dug.

Until hundreds of kilometers of trenches had been created, backed by a low earthen wall, each adorned with spikes of metal, sharpened rock, or wooden splinters. Behind the wall was a flattened space for defenders to take cover behind so they could fire upon any charging hordes from safety.

This had worked terrifyingly well in conjunction with the laser towers that swept the plains of anything that approached with fire. At several points, the towers had been forced to fire upon their own trenches, but the defense had slowed the onrushing attackers enough to focus them into ash.

He clittered down from his resting chamber at the center of a bunker he had erected in the new CIC of the Heaven’s Fire. It differed greatly from the one the humans had built. It was a small room just enough for him and perhaps a few companions, so there were only two benches for seating set behind his own custom seat.

It was fashioned as a massive round disk that fit his huge curves and strapped him down as needed. The small size of the new CIC allowed it to be much more heavily armored and have its own life-support system. Tactical monitors and displays covered most of the free space that wasn’t taken up by switches and buttons placed on every surface.

For a human, it would be very difficult to reach them, but Heeler’s tentacles were more than long enough to suffice.

The massive ship that had once been a Corpo battlecruiser had never been meant to enter gravity or leave from the surface of a world. He would change that and had been at work conferring with H32 for long hours on how to modify the design while maintaining the same shape of the hull.

As thousands of worker bots continued to fit replacement steel and repair bulkheads, they also installed new RCS ports and worked on building the new bi-phase linear drive that would propel the massive warship.

They would use the same system that Nameless had developed for the Shrike II, that would be capable of vectoring the main drive thrust through the RCS ports. When completed, the issue would no longer be if the ship could produce enough thrust to take off, but of how many kilometers of the planet would be scoured by relativistic fire from the takeoff.

The imagery from the Tifara hive he had viewed warned him of just how terrible launching the missiles had been to the surrounding area. The area had already had a devastated look from being covered in the ash from the destruction of the First Nest, but now the landscape was scoured clean and looked like nothing but a hellish, charred hellscape.

A massive issue loomed: they had no stores of anti-matter, as the ship had possessed none when they had captured it. As Heeler considered how they would begin to rebuild their orbital infrastructure, the ship suddenly shook.

Inside his belly, H32 heated up as the NAI rapidly reconfigured laser defense systems for point defense. As the weapons redirected their energy into the air, the sky filled with a popcorn of explosions.

Heeler growled angrily, accessing screens and zooming in on feeds from high altitude aerial drones. The Queens had somehow deployed hunters with the ability to spit explosive payloads over a large distance.

Worse, the projectiles were capable of indirect fire, while the defense lasers were limited by line of sight. A gigantic mass of attackers had formed behind distant elevation over twenty kilometers away.

The lasers now focused on destroying the shell-like spines flung through the air, the massive horde rushed forward.

Angered, Heeler activated a weapon that had not been seen before.

The onrushing Rexxor closed most of the distance when suddenly the entire horizon lit up with color. Moments later massive pressure wave washed over the area as a mushroom cloud scattered into the sky.

The attack had cost him a shuttle. He had left one in orbit as it had placed the new communications satellite that allowed H32 to bounce a signal back to the nest of his Queen.

The shuttle had only a miniature single-phase linear drive, but it had more than enough power to reach a frightening velocity by the time it reached the surface from geostationary orbit. It plowed through the atmosphere so quickly that friction didn’t have enough time to burn away most of the material.

Instead, it impacted with the force of a powerful warhead as the shuttle slammed into the ground amongst the new hunter-types.

An angry chorus of mind-thoughts slammed into him, and his entire body tensed in pain. He did not have the powerful transmitters that a Queen possessed, but he managed with great effort to fling a singular image back at them.

The picture of starfire falling from the sky to incinerate their nests, painted with his great hatred of the gnawing headache they had forced upon him the last weeks.

The mind-thoughts retreated.

The laser towers redirected their energy onto the oncoming horde once again, illuminating and scouring them from existence before they could reach the defending drones and nestlings at the trenches.

Other than the glowing red horizon with a cloud of ash, peace returned to Heeler’s outpost.

Closing his sight organs, he relaxed and even touched his dreamscape, which was filled with the presence of Szizsielia and Mother, who shared a meal and discussed how to best build a fortress for the world. Enjoying their presence, he provided them captured starship after starship of the enemy, receiving great praise for each victory.

Heeler growled in anger as a voice from inside him caused him to wake from his pleasant dreams.

[Notice: Analysis of historical data completed. A detailed overview of Dedia Prime status is available. Colonists are emerging from surviving bunkers. Orbital remnants of Corporate Systems forces have been detected within the solar system. Disabled ships are likely attempting repair. We have re-established contact with Starlight Revolution orbital infrastructure.]

Heeler growled and examined his consoles, which were flooding with dozens of lists full of new information. He focused on one in particular.

“Contact Daniel Ashburnnn.”