I suppose we should have expected that immediately before the combat stream we’d be getting briefed on the search for the system where Bark’s Finest had holed up. For efficiency reasons this briefing took the form of a data file to internalize, and we did so immediately after receiving it.
The file in question was about as dry and clinical as such a document could be. First and foremost, it covered the analysis of Captain Fuller’s fortune telling equation. Extracting it from the backup of Alex Fuller another me had retrieved was an involved process requiring a team of cryptographers to break the cipher he’d put on his memory structures, but the lack of copy protection on the data along with the resources of an entire intelligence agency being thrown at it meant that it was cracked in extremely short order.
As for subsequently interpreting the fortune telling equation to determine where Bark’s Finest went, that turned out to be somewhat trickier. While all the functions in the algorithm were entirely deterministic and had no form of learning built in, they were also extremely dependent on the input data for what the output would be, with the tiniest changes yielding completely different answers about where to go. Given that we couldn’t exactly replicate the data Captain Fuller had entered with 100% certainty, that also meant we couldn’t pin down his location to a single star system with anything remotely resembling certainty.
However, we most definitely could massively narrow down the possible destinations for the pirate ship in question. Of all the plausible variations of the input data we could feed the fortune telling equation, 99.9% of them said that the pirates would be going to a binary system of a red dwarf and a blue star comparable in mass to Sirius. Such systems weren’t exactly common by any stretch of the imagination, immediately reducing the number of star systems that would need to be checked by several orders of magnitude. Further narrowing of the criteria had subsequently reduced the number of systems in need of checking to about a hundred.
Twenty thousand military Voidskippers were tasked to tracking down Captain Fuller’s not-so-merry band of pirates, divided into twenty fleets of a thousand each; each fleet would therefore only need to check five star systems in order to make sure all possible bases were covered. As for fleet composition, it would be almost entirely Cruisers; the logistics trail needed to keep a fleet of Battleships running meant they wouldn’t be suited for this mission, and the lack of stationary infrastructure the pirates would be obligated to protect meant that the Skimmers a hypothetical Carrier group would bring could be simply outrun and ignored. Cruisers had neither of those problems, both being direct-combat Voidskippers, and being capable of producing their own fuel and spare parts using local materials to mitigate dependence on external supply lines.
And so the fleets were sent off into the void, searching for Bark’s Finest among the stars. The first round of star systems to be checked were those closest to the Red Star Union, covering those within about forty light years. The methodology was pretty straightforward; show up a couple light days out from the system primary, then spend a kilosecond or so peering at the inner system with a broad-spectrum array of telescopes and gravity wave detectors to determine if anyone has recently set up shop. That would be close enough to get reasonably up-to-date information on if Bark’s Finest and the accompanying stolen Non-Orientable Wormholes were in a given system, while also not immediately alerting the pirates of our fleet’s presence thanks to light lag.
As expected, none of the first wave systems were the location of the pirate base. Our fleets simply showed up, took a look, and quickly determined that there wasn’t anyone in-system. And so it was on to the second set of star systems. Nineteen of the fleets of course found nothing of interest, but one of them quickly spotted activity in-system and called the others within range. They then Skipped in-system with weapons hot… and proceeded to scare the crap out of an innocent bunch of colonists trying to establish a new home for themselves.
On the one hand our fleet had an easy time almost immediately determining that these were most definitely not the pirates we were looking for. There was just too much stuff going on in system that didn’t fit the profile, such as the lack of any Voidskippers aside from one currently being disassembled to access its power plant for conversion into a wormhole factory. On the other hand, the people in-system were quite justifiably freaking out, simultaneously trying to muster their force of defensive Skimmers even at the same time as they were broadcasting surrender messages and frantically trying to figure out who they’d pissed off to attract an invasion fleet that was such blatant overkill.
They would have just left, but bothcommandand parliament felt that our newly-discovered neighbors at least deserved an explanation for what was going on, as well as reassurances that this was all a major misunderstanding. Therefore our fleet left one Cruiser behind to talk with the colonists here while the rest resumed their pirate hunt, Skipping back out of the system in various directions.
Profuse apologies were of course immediately offered as well as an offer of diplomatic relations with the Red Star Union, including assistance establishing a system timewall to prevent any future surprises of this variety. On their part the colonists were rather furious about the sudden interruption and associated scare, but they did ultimately accept the apology and offer of trade relations. And so the search continued, the fleets of Voidskippers leaving behind a comm hole link connecting the newly-founded Sapphire Tiara system to the Red Star Union.
The third set of star systems checked was also a bust in terms of finding the pirates, with no activity of any interest to our searching fleets. There weren’t even any settlers to give false-positives waiting around. And so the fleets moved on to the fourth set of systems. Only now did they find signs of pirate activity in one very specific star system eighty seven light years from Stonebeach, a series of heat signatures and gravity waves from in-system that were highly indicative of someone trying to get a wormhole factory working.
And so the fleets converged over the target system over the next eighty kiloseconds, the number of Voidskippers lurking on its outskirts increasing from one thousand, to two thousand, to twelve thousand heavily armed Cruisers all ready for combat. At that point the light from our fleet was perilously close to the pirates’ position, and would have given away our imminent attack if we’d waited for any further reinforcements. And so the decision was made to attack with only twelve thousand Voidskippers on hand.
To ensure encirclement our fleets were positioned all around the target system. The plan in this case was for a small group to Skip into the system a few seconds before the rest of the fleet, with the point being to get more up-to-date information on where exactly in the star system Bark’s Finest was currently located. The rest of the fleet would then use that information to Skip into the system simultaneously, englobing the pirate ship in question.
All that sank in very quickly, the data file containing the background briefing being internalized with ten seconds to spare before the combat stream was scheduled to start. That left Max and I time to relax and immerse ourselves in the sensory package prepared for the stream before we would truly need it. Compared to the senses present on a single body the sensations we were receiving were very alien, as it consisted of the combined sensor feeds from twelve thousand separate perspectives, compensated for time displacements and synthesized into the closest thing to an omniscient third person perspective that the laws of physics would permit.
We barely had time to accustom ourselves to the perspective we were plugged into before the combat stream started, and we were lost in the events taking place. The first Voidskipper scheduled to Skip into the combat zone was a Cruiser named Thunder of Sagittarius, of the Quasar class; I took the opportunity to familiarize myself with her design just before things kicked off. She was a fairly typical example of such a warship, with a hull length of 25 kilometers, an outer hull diameter of 4.5 kilometers, three redundant warp drive rings amidships, an armor layer 150 meters thick, a massively redundant set of radiators blending both electrostatic droplet coolers and solid panels to dump several Petawatts of waste heat at full capacity, and so much internal reinforcement and compartmentalization that she’d be fully capable of surviving a full-length Skip even after being on the receiving end of multiple kilometer-wide hull breaches.
She was also armed with a massive number of capital grade Raster Blaster turrets; each turret was fitted with two plasma wakefield accelerator electron beam cannons in a side-by-side configuration, along with an additional laser emitter on top of the turret. These turrets were equipped with monstrously powerful motors rendering them capable of a full turnaround in barely over 81 milliseconds, and coupled with the metric distortion optics they were fitted with, they could direct their beams to anywhere in a thirty degree cone almost instantly.
Rather than being mounted in isolation, the turrets were clustered on retractable superstructures allowing twenty three turrets in roughly the same location to fire on a wide variety of arcs with minimal obstruction. These superstructures were mounted in rings of ten offset at an angle to allow the hull’s curvature to prevent them from blocking each other’s lines of fire, and there were twenty six such rings spaced along the ship’s hull; one in the aft behind the radiators, and the other twenty five concentrated on the fore of the ship.
Multiplied together this accounted for slightly less than eighteen thousand separate beam weapons, roughly a third of which could fire at any given single target simultaneously. Firing said third of the guns at full power draw needed about three Exawatts of power, with each beam weapon having an averaged output of roughly five hundred and fifteen Terawatts, equivalent to several low-yield fission warheads for every second of fire. In addition the beams were pulsed with a frequency of six hundred kilohertz in order to concentrate their firepower into infinitesimally short periods, meaning that even a grazing hit would blast a sizable crater in the hull of the target.
Powering all of this was of course Thunder’s Non-Orientable Wormhole reactor, a typical two-chamber design using both ends of her NOW pair simultaneously to balance the mass loads at each end. The flow of antimatter flashed a larger quantity of matter into plasma with a lot of kinetic energy, directed into a linear induction generator by a magnetic nozzle. The generator would then proceed to rob this plasma of most of its kinetic energy to produce electricity before venting the waste plasma into space in a quartet of high-velocity plumes to reduce the waste heat load that the radiators would need to deal with.
The amount of plasma being routed through each exhaust port could be varied in order to add to the turning capacity of the ship. Of course, the primary turning capacity came from the four lines of warp nodes running down Thunder’s spine, using internal warp fields to generate thrust without need of propellant. The 1.5 Exanewtons of thrust they generated could easily be converted into torque, giving Thunder of Sagittarius an angular acceleration of 0.35 radians per second squared, and a turn-around time of 5.9 seconds from a standstill. Structurally she was sound up to 60 RPM without active compression thanks to a comprehensive carbon nanotube structural frame, and the warp nodes could provide that too if needed.
In total, Thunder of Sagittarius was a highly refined and optimized war machine, with every last cubic meter of her volume being for either winning fights in space or keeping herself in good working order between fights. She was also being used as a scout to provide accurate navigational information to the other eleven thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine other Cruisers just like her making up the rest of the fleet. She would almost certainly see action at some point during the upcoming space battle, because nailing down a single fleeing Voidskipper was a lot of work in the absence of static infrastructure that needed to be attacked or defended. Still, initially she wouldn’t be getting stuck in.
And so the combat operation actually started, Thunder of Sagittarius firing up her warp drives for action and Skipping a couple light days deep into the system. Almost immediately she spotted Bark’s Finest in a parking orbit only ten light seconds out from the red dwarf in the outer system, so she performed another Skip to about a light minute away from there to double check. Bark’s Finest was still in her previous position from this perspective, though she was orienting her nose directly towards the system primary. That was all the data the rest of the fleet needed to make a decision. The presence of the system’s companion star in that position was rather inconvenient, but upwards of 99% of the fleet was able to skip in to englobe Bark’s Finest immediately, with the closest hundred and twenty all being within about ten thousand kilometers.
Since this was a short skip the Skip Shock wasn’t too bad, so the fleet already had their guns extended and ready to fire as soon as they emerged. Over a million beam weapons fired at once… and hit nothing but empty vacuum as Bark’s Finest dashed into warp, miraculously evading the immense barrage of directed energy weapon fire. Somehow their panicked zig-zagging back and forth had managed to avoid all the incoming fire, meaning that they survived for long enough to get a plan together and gun their warp drive to maximum Skim speed.
Immediately all the members of the fleet not in the 90 degree cone in front of Bark’s Finest stopped firing; it wouldn’t have done anything of use at that point, since there weren’t any useful trajectories their beams could possibly take to hit the pirate ship they were pursuing. However, they were still very useful in those positions; with Bark’s Finest charging forwards at almost exactly the speed of light, no ship she hadn’t already passed would be able to get information as to her location. Therefore it was absolutely imperative to keep observers in the pirate ship’s light wake.
Wormhole communications did a lot to ensure sensor telemetry was available to those ships still in front, but this still introduced a tenth of a millisecond of lag in those ships’ reactions. So when one of our cruisers had a massive gash burned through her armored hull without even the slightest bit of warning it was still a tenth of a millisecond before any other ships in the fleet knew, leading to another cruiser having her aft warp torus broken in half and a third getting a significant number of her gun batteries slagged before the information percolated out to the rest of the fleet.
Bark’s Finest had been fitted with Winterblasters.
That single piece of information needed hardly any elaboration whatsoever to send feelings of dread through everyone plugged into the combat feed. A ship full of unrestrained violent thugs was now fitted out as a system-leveling weapons platform, commonly known as an Obliterator Ship. While those Gamma lasers were admittedly rather inefficient for combat against ships, they were amazing for destroying static infrastructure, with even a single Obliterator Ship being capable of demolishing a significant portion of even a Megasystem if they got within range. This was quite possibly the worst-case scenario for things those pirates could have done with the NOW pairs they stole, at least in terms of sheer destruction.
The mere existence of an Obliterator Ship was considered justification for a total war featuring complete mobilization of every single system in range to crush whoever was building one. Simply by fitting a Voidskipper with Winterblasters you were signaling your willingness to commit genocide on a truly monstrous scale, and therefore made yourself an existential threat to anyone within your force projection range. And now a pirate crew had one.
This changed the goal only slightly; we were already here to conclusively end the pirate career of everyone aboard Bark’s Finest, this just meant we had to be a bit more careful about it.
It was actually a slight surprise when Thunder of Sagittarius volunteered to bait Bark’s Finest and draw fire away from other ships, but the idea made a great deal of sense. She was in a position where it would take only minimal angular adjustments to Skip directly into the danger zone with an alignment conducive to staying in front of the pirates while Skimming in reverse, exploiting the same light lag effect to avoid incoming fire that the pirates were using.
This was the exact same sort of maneuver used to intercept a fleet that just charged straight into a star system without authorization; flank behind and in front of the target so you can both see and shoot them while they can’t return the favor, and they’re forced to break from their warp trajectory to deal with you if they didn’t want to die.
It was settled almost immediately, Thunder of Sagittarius and twenty other fortuitously positioned Cruisers firing their power plants at full Skip power for a fraction of a second to appear out of warp a few thousand kilometers in front of Bark’s Finest. Immediately they started blasting away with their massive batteries of particle beams and lasers even as they receded away from the pirate ship at the speed of light to avoid being on the receiving end of those terrifyingly dangerous Winterblasters.
It wasn’t but a fraction of a second after this that we got out confirmations of the first two hits on Bark’s Finest, the spotter ships trailing after the pirate vessel confirming that significant amounts of armored hull plating had been flashed into plasma by the extreme amounts of energy from even a hit with a duration measured in microseconds. And it really was microseconds; between the sheer speed this was happening at, the light lag we were forced to deal with, and Captain Fuller’s apparent expert handling of his ship, it was proving shockingly difficult to actually inflict significant damage on the pirate ship in question despite the massive advantage we had in the performance of our vessels.
It was after about a second of this and another glancing hit that we noticed a distinctive change in the course Bark’s Finest was making. While before her movement had been somewhat aimless aside from simply moving so fast forwards as a defensive gambit, now the averaged vector of her chaotically corkscrewing through space was aimed directly at the red dwarf star a mere nine light seconds away. While we weren’t quite sure about what exactly Bark’s Finest would attempt, it was now absolutely clear that they were trying to reach that star for some reason.
Thunder of Sagittarius and the other fleet elements in front of Bark’s Finest were still blasting away in an attempt to take out the pirate ship, but with the rate at which they were doing damage it wasn’t at all certain that the pirate ship would be mission-killed before they reached their destination.
That’s when the gestalt intelligence driving Thunder of Sagittarius suggested a somewhat risky gamble: she would deliberately approach closer to Bark’s Finest in order to improve the probability of a hit. This would open a short window of opportunity for the gamma ray lasers mounted to the pirate ship to score a hit, but by the same token it would vastly improve Thunder’s ability to get hits in on the pirate ship.
Command mulled over the proposed course of action for the barest fraction of a second before they authorized Thunder of Sagittarius to approach to within 1,000 kilometers of the current best fix on the piratical Obliterator Ship’s location. And so for a fraction of a second the cruiser at which had acted as our fleet’s vanguard shifted her warp drives to maximum forwards skim speed to deny Bark’s Finest any opportunity to realize what she was doing.
A tiny amount of incident energy clipped one of Thunder’s warp toroids and disabled that warp drive, but she still had two more in good working order. Then the incoming fire cut off to zero as she returned to full reverse skimming, her movement preventing any incoming fire from that direction from reaching her. Now that the cruiser was in a much closer position with far fewer opportunities for Bark’s Finest to dodge she took the opportunity to open fire with everything she had.
The ships that had been spotting confirmed amounts of matter had been blown off consistent with Bark’s Finest losing the entire front four kilometers of her hull, indicating that Thunder of Sagittarius had hit upon a working strategy. Then seemingly instantly the pirate ship was beside them and blasting away with its Winterblasters, sending the ships we’d previously had spotting scattering to avoid getting hit. In retrospect it was fairly obvious what had happened; the pirate ship had gone into reverse to avoid being instantly obliterated, and we didn’t see it happening because of light lag.
The chase towards the red dwarf star now resumed at slightly lower speeds as Bark’s Finest oscillated backwards every so often to chase off spotters, massively degrading the telemetry we had available and dropping the hit rate from our entire fleet down to just one or two incidental hits per second, instead of the nearly catastrophic damage that Thunder of Sagittarius had managed to inflict in the brief interval her gamble had worked for.
By all our current estimates, Bark’s Finest had at least a 60% chance of still being warp capable when she reached the red star if this current state of affairs was projected into the future. Clearly another maneuver was needed to inflict more damage onto Bark’s Finest, the only question was what.
It took around a tenth of a second and twenty nine thousand kilometers of distance for a proposition to be made: array the fleet in front of Bark’s Finest and perform what basically amounted to drive-by attacks, warping opposite the pirates’ direction of travel to make it so a one-dimensional scan pattern would have a much higher probability of a hit. The only sure way for the pirates to avoid damage from this sort of maneuver would be for them to go in full reverse, which they wouldn’t dare to do given that reaching the red star was apparently important for their escape plans. The first ship would have the advantage of surprise to protect them as they charged past, but subsequent flybys would be at risk of the pirates knowing it could happen.
Once again Thunder of Sagittarius volunteered for the risky gamble, since she was already in position for it. A tiny fraction of a second passed as she re-oriented her turrets, made an educated guess about where Bark’s Finest would be when she passed, and took the plunge. Her lasers and particle beams blazed as she drove by Bark’s Finest at top speed, the distribution of fire flattened into a fan shape with hardly any scanning at all as she made her pass.
A fraction of a second later, the spotters confirmed that Thunder of Sagittarius had come within 2,000 kilometers of Bark’s Finest, her beams scoring deep gashes all along the pirate ship’s hull. Still the pirate ship kept going, indicating that the damage to her warp drive wasn’t sufficiently severe to render it totally inoperable. No matter, we had fifty more Cruisers already in position to perform their own drive-by attacks and finish the pirates off.
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