Spooker
patreon
Grass Eaters | 7 | Prime Directive
🕑 Added 2024-03-05 00:05:45 +0000 UTCOettro
2 years, 4 months ago
“Captain Harris. We’re moving the Nile behind asteroid Oscar-2 to dump our heat sinks. They’re at ninety percent capacity, and we haven’t emptied them since the delivery trucks missed their schedule.”
Chuck replied, “We’ll watch your six, Gregor.”
“Appreciate it, Chuck.”
He cast a sidelong glance at his fresh XO, Commander Samantha Lee, giving her a tacit nod of assurance.
Lee, all business, relayed the orders into her microphone with a calm voice. “Nav, put us behind the Buns. Bridge to CIC, give us up-to-date firing solutions on all four bandits. Just in case.”
---
An hour later, the Malgeir convoy arrived.
“Admiral! Malgeir ships blinking in right now! Gravidar identified six heavy lift transports and a duo of Shepherd-class missile destroyers!” Carla reported to the flag suite.
Amelia replied near-immediately, voice laced with urgency, “Dammit! Is the Nile still radiating her heat sinks?”
“Yes, Admiral. The Malgeir ships are close to them, occluded behind the asteroid, and they’ll have the Nile in visual in just under ten minutes!”
“Get Captain Guerrero on the line, tell him to hurry up, shake it off, and zip it up.”
“He’s signaling a negative, Admiral. Can’t make it, too much residual heat left on his hull!”
Tension spread across the ship. This was spiraling into one of those nightmare scenarios they trained to avoid.
Amelia made the split-second choice. “Shit! Advise him to maneuver to hide his ship from the Znosians, even if he must reveal himself to the Malgeir ships. The Puppers are about to be either distracted or dead soon anyway—”
Harris’s calm voice sliced through the comm, “Admiral, the Znosians are firing.” The digital view screen pulsated with the ominous red glow of twenty missiles, now streaking angrily towards the Malgeir fleet. He continued, “Sensors see four missiles for each escort, and two for each supply ship.”
Amelia glanced at the digital map for two seconds. “Those cold-blooded critters sure are being efficient about this, huh? Get me an update on the Nile!”
“She is coming into view of the Malgeir sensors now, Admiral!”
Amelia paused, her mind racing through possibilities, then made her decision. “Jam all FTL comms in this system. Broad-spectrum, full power. I want no signals, in or out.”
---
MNS Seiddiu
Beta Leader Preitamplo of the Malgeir Navy was not a particularly competent specimen of his race. While born with handsome brown fur, scarlet red eyes, and an imposing figure that could have made him a successful model in the acting industry, he was also born in a position to never have to work a day in his life: his parents were rich minority owners of a mining company on a frontier colony world.
When he refused to go into the family business, that created somewhat of a scandal in their social circles; he quickly became an embarrassment to the clan.
Naturally, his mother kicked him out of the house and sent him to the Navy.
Then, because she wasn’t totally heartless, she paid someone at the Defense Ministry a handsome sum of money to get him promoted to his position and transferred to a safe job escorting supply convoys. It was a boring job, but quite lucrative given the value of goods he was responsible for and the plentiful opportunity for graft.
When he was commissioned, Preitamplo had been given less than a week of tactical instructions on Malgeiru before being sent off to captain a Delta-class ship in a supply convoy.
But he hadn’t thought he’d needed to pay any attention! Which is why when he blinked into a sector and immediately came under fire from an overwhelming number of heavily armed Znosian ships, he froze.
“Captain! Captain! The Znosian missiles are nearly crossing the halfway point! What are your orders?” one of his subordinates shouted, trying to snap him out of his panic.
Preitamplo looked helplessly at the radar. Four Grass Eater Delta-class ships! He technically had more ships than the enemy, but his were all unarmed supply ships. The only combat effective ships they had were their two Delta-classes, including his own command.
He tried to remember his training.
There was something about launching countermeasures, but he knew they didn’t have any: the Seiddiu crew had sold the chaff launchers’ control solenoids for some quick cash on the black market a few months ago. Which Preitamplo knew about because they shared some of its profits with him. It had led to a nice weekend at a bar with a young male dockworker, and to fuel the habit, he quickly allowed them to sell off other surplus equipment, including a large number of railgun munitions and missiles from her supply storage.
While they did leave enough of the equipment to pass a perfunctory inspection, they were mostly defenseless except for a few rounds in their magazine.
Facing certain death, a confident determination came over Preitamplo, a primitive instinct that came naturally to most Malgeir. He never amounted to much in life. These Grass Eaters might kill him, but he wasn’t going out without a fight! He looked at the radar to pick a target, any target—
“Captain! We’ve just detected another ship, an Omega-class! It’s hiding less than a thousand kilometers away, near that asteroid off our port side!”
Omega-class? That’s just my luck. One of those tiny enemy ships we do have a chance of killing today!
Having made his peace with impending death and with his confidence restored, Preitamplo stood up to his full height, looking every bit as authoritative as the real warship captain he was pretending to be. He ordered, “Target that Grass Eater Omega-class! Fire everything we’ve got at them!”
---
TRNS Nile
“VAMPIRE! VAMPIRE! VAMPIRE! Three vampires inbound, from the lead Malgeir escort!”
“All missiles identified! Last gen Pupper mediums! Primary onboard radar seeker, unencrypted simplex datalink, and IR visual backup.”
“Tracking additional rail projectiles from Escort-Lead and Escort-Two!”
The Combat Information Center on the ship turned into an organized hive of activity as information on the incoming threats was catalogued and identified. Three red dots appeared on the ship’s target sensor overview. The ship’s computer quickly determined the positions and vectors of each of the threats, sending countermeasure and defensive suggestions to the relevant officers while updating their targeting systems in the changing battlespace.
“Escort-Two has launched on us as well. Two more vampires incoming!”
“Captain Guerrero, permission to engage automatic—”
“Granted, XO. Cancel EMCOM Alpha. Move us to Automation Level Three and authorize all defensive measures. Nav, full combat power to thrusters and afterburners. Transfer flight controls to CIC.”
The Nile’s Combat Information Center acknowledged the course transfer command, and the hum of the inertial compensators drastically changed pitch as they worked overtime to accommodate the increasing acceleration the ship’s main thrusters were now outputting.
“We have solid track on all vampires. Computer engaging threats at will.”
Her internal weapons bay doors snapped open for a few milliseconds, spitting out half a dozen hard-kill active protection missiles. A visually spectacular barrage of flares, chaffs, and decoys, ejected in every direction from a hidden hatch near her engines, overshadowing her thermal and radar signatures against the incoming threats as best they could.
“Woodpeckers, one to six, online.”
“Defending! Crank us away from those missiles!”
Then, with precision and consistency made possible by her super-Terran intelligence chip, the Nile immediately began automatic evasive maneuvers from the railgun rounds while boosting away at an optimal vector to force the incoming missiles into a longer intercept trajectory.
“Jamming their feelers!”
“Get the supply ships too!”
“Roger, extending cone to tertiary.”
Electronic warfare devices filled every known communication frequency spectrum with overwhelming electronic noise and signals towards the direction of the missiles, blinding the seekers on the incoming missiles and accidentally burning out the sensors on the ships that launched them… and all the other ships in the Malgeir convoy.
Captain Gregor Guerrero knew that if the Malgeir ships had a non-zero chance to begin with… they now had negative chances with their sensors completely blinded by his ship. They wouldn’t even be able to track the Znosian missiles bearing down on them, almost in range for terminal maneuvers.
Very unfortunate for the poor Puppers, yes, but I didn’t fire on them first. He held onto that little nugget of solace and tucked the rest away for his Navy-assigned therapist to untangle later as his ship continued to defeat the incoming threats.
“Vampire trashed! Two… no, all vampires defeated.”
“Continuing to monitor incoming slugs. Computer is categorizing incoming fire as sporadic and ineffective.”
“Captain, CIC is asking whether we should return fire on the Malgeir ships. We have them locked up with the gravidar—”
He ordered, “Negative! Just get us out of here! The Puppers are dead from those bandit missiles in a hot minute anyway.”
Finally, he dialed the flagship on his FTL communication console. “Amelia, the Puppers must have mistaken us for the damn Buns and fired on us! We’re defending.”
It only took her a second to come back with a reply. “Understood, Gregor. Good call. We are taking care of things on our end.”
---
MNS Seiddiu
Preitamplo’s blood drained from his face as he watched the unexpectedly versatile target ship effortlessly escape from every weapon they’d thrown at it, denying him the glorious and honorable death he deserved.
“Fire the missiles again,” he snarled angrily.
“Unable, Captain! We are still reloading the missile batteries!”
He glanced towards his radar computer. It had stopped responding. For some reason, the cursed thing malfunctioned and crashed as soon as his first missiles went out. All he could see was the enemy’s strange Omega-class dancing around in his ship’s exterior optics, nimbly avoiding the railgun projectiles the Seiddiu was thumping out at her every few seconds.
The Seiddiu’s crew never got to finish reloading their tubes before the missiles from the Znosian raiders reached them, ending the war for the Seiddiu, its sister escort, and all six transport ships it was supposed to protect.
---
TRNS Mississippi
“Admiral, the Znosian raiders are now reacting to the Nile!”
Initially, the four Znosian ships did not seem to recognize the significance of the barrage of Malgeir missiles and weapons fire heading towards the occluded Nile. The countermeasures deployment and maneuvering bringing her out of the shadow of the asteroid piqued their interest. And with the Malgeir supply convoy now disabled or destroyed, that mild interest became their undivided and very unwelcome attention.
All four of the alien raiders started to accelerate towards the now very-much-visible TRNS Nile.
“The Nile’s getting painted by active Znosian fire control!” Chuck announced urgently. “They’re trying to lock her up. Her computer automatically jammed their radars, but they’ve got to have her on passive by now!”
The universal sign of a hostile act, one that allows a preemptive response by even their strict Prime-Directive-compatible rules of engagement.
In any case, the Znosian ships’ very observation of the Terran ships was their death sentence: the only thing worse under the Prime Directive than firing upon an alien ship was allowing a hostile one that had become aware of the existence of humanity to continue to live.
Protocol Two.
That this imperative in the addendum was ironically and totally contrary to the original spirit of the namesake of this law was not lost upon the journalists and political pundits who initially covered its passage. But it was a contingency for an emergency scenario where humanity’s existence could come under threat and Task Force Frontier Security religiously followed it to the letter.
Without hesitation, Amelia spoke into the intercom, her voice colder than a Charon winter. “All ships, weapons free. Waste the bastards!”
---
Atlas, Luna
“Waste the —beep—”
“Solid track on all bandits. Kraken one and two away.”
“Kraken three and four away. Merging delivery package.”
The remainder of the engagement containing footage of highly classified Navy technology and tactics, the video feed cut off.
Amelia continued her statement to the public hearing, describing the events in language that was pre-approved by the Classification Department:
The Amazon and the Mississippi were positioned at the equivalent of point-blank range in interstellar combat, and the Znosians were fixated on the exposed Nile. Their close-in defenses didn’t even have time to respond to our ambush. Three of the Znosian missile destroyers detonated instantly. The other managed to eject its damaged fusion core before it went critical, but subsequent weapons fire from our ships finished the job before they could evacuate. The active engagement was over in milliseconds.
No Navy ships were damaged in the incident, and we sustained no casualties.
We stayed around for another twelve hours, firing our railguns into the only remaining Znosian wreck to break it up into smaller, unrecognizable chunks to get rid of any potential evidence of who we were. Total munition expenditure for the engagement was 4 Kestrel-class anti-ship missiles, 12 Lightning-class counter-missiles, 38,500 rounds of armor-piercing plasma-incendiary from our spinal railguns, and various electronic warfare devices.
Decrypted intercepts of Znosian communications showed that they did record imagery of the Nile, but our FTL jamming devices blocked them from transmitting it out of the system. To this day, there is no evidence that the Znosian raiders were ever aware of the Amazon or the Mississippi, only the Nile.
When we left Oettro, we were certain that we had fully sanitized the scene to comply with the Prime Directive. In fact, I erroneously testified to this in the original classified debrief that occurred right after the incident. However, recent developments have proven otherwise. We now know that the Znosians are aware of our existence, that they managed to recover at least photographic evidence of the TRNS Nile, and that their forces are preparing to fight us.
I will not speculate on how this is possible, but Naval Intelligence confirms that the Oettro Incident is the only possible source of this leak.
Amelia looked up from her script and took a deep breath. “Thank you for your time, Senators. I will now answer any questions you may have.”
The room, previously barely restrained by the strictly enforced Rules of Conduct in the chamber, erupted into utter chaos.
---
“Admiral, can you stop by my office for a quick chat?”
It was phrased as a polite request after the exhausting hearing and the ensuing press circus, but Amelia had been in the Navy long enough to know the difference between a veiled order and a genuine invitation she could refuse. She found herself sitting down in Senator Wald’s office, staring out the window at the rare view of Atlas. Vast, towering low-G skyscrapers, a vivid testament to human ingenuity, stretched toward the star field above the lunar surface.
Senator Blake Wald’s eyes lingered on the view — eyes revealing decades of seen-too-much. His coat was casually slung over one arm. He mused, “Beautiful city, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. Atlas is a fine city.”
He hung up his coat. “Please… Blake is fine, if I can call you Amelia… Great. So where are you from, Amelia?”
Amelia’s voice softened with nostalgia. “I grew up on Ganymede, Senator— Blake. Our city was two research labs, a hydroponic farm, and a residential housing block. And this was before we had all this luxury of artificial gravity with inertial compensators.”
“Charming. I hear they’ve been expanding quite a bit on Ganymede recently.”
A small, wistful smile found her lips. “Indeed. It’s hardly the home I remember when I visit now. Nonetheless,” she pivoted gracefully, professionalism reentering her voice, “I guess I have to thank you for your insightful questions during the hearings, Senator… And taking the bullet for me from some of your… coworkers.”
He waved it away casually. “No problem. I thought you deserved a break…”
Unlike some of the mudslingers she’d interacted with before, he genuinely seemed interested in what they had to say despite being one of those anti-interventionist doves quietly vilified — or feared — in top Navy circles. Amelia asked, “So what can I do for you?”
He hesitated for a few seconds, loosening his tie. “I know you said you wouldn’t speculate in the hearing, and I didn’t press further, but you… know how the Znosians got the photos, right?”
“I may… have an inkling.”
“That’s what I thought. You don’t have to answer me, Amelia, but was it intentional?”
“Honestly, it was not. The Malgeir wrecks were not even on my mind at the time, our onboard legal analysis computers didn’t flag it, and my crew didn’t report it to me. But… if I had to do it again, I’m not sure I’d change a damn thing.”
“No?”
“The Prime Directive— would you have followed orders to fire on the Malgeir lifepods and remnants of their ships?”
“I understand,” Blake sighed and closed his eyes, leaning back into his creaking chair. “What’s happened has happened, but since we’re being truthful with each other, what I want to know is… what would you say are our chances now?”
Amelia froze. “Our chances?”
“You know… if we were to go to war with the Znosians,” he explained. “I get all the intelligence briefings. But you know what the intelligence offices and the think tanks do… They cover their asses. They tell you we’re going to win if we fund this program or that new expensive missile or switch to some new doctrine. And if we don’t, we’ll lose everything in twelve hours. What I’m asking is what you think of it all, given your experience in the hot seat at Frontier Security.”
Surprised by the question, Amelia hedged, “It’s hard to say. There are so many factors involved. Anything can happen in a battle, much less a whole war.”
“This isn’t a press conference, Amelia. Give me your best estimate,” he insisted.
She hesitated, then replied, “If we go to war against the Znosians, alone, we will almost certainly lose. On paper, we have a strong advantage in some technologies, like stealth and electronic warfare, and our offensive capabilities can go toe-to-toe against the Bunnies any day. But their ships are bigger and far more numerous. We have six star systems; they have closer to six hundred. We have dozens — a little over a hundred — military ships, and that includes our assault carriers, our minesweepers… everything. They have tens, if not hundreds of thousands. We’ll put up a good fight, and we’ll make them bleed for every station, every colony, and every planet. They’ll pay in blood for every one of ours they kill. But, in the end, they will figure it out. The Navy will be overwhelmed. And it will be all over.”
“How long can we hold them?”
“Weeks. Maybe months. Our problem is strategic depth. There are two, three systems between their frontline and McMurdo. From there, it’s four systems to Sol. And yeah, I’ve heard all about the Deep Strike operations they’re cooking up at Europa and Deimos: they’re… risky at best. We don’t use enough ships: we lose. We use more ships: we leak, and they will eventually figure out where we come from. And even if they succeed… so what? The same problem applies, just later. The enemy is ignorant of us, not stupid.”
Blake sighed. “That’s what I have always been afraid of. What if we get the Malgeir involved? Say we start out slowly, use them to soak up the fight, hand them some of our tech, and improvise from there. What then?”
Amelia considered the scenario for a while. “The most impactful move would be to train them to fight better. Their outdated equipment isn’t as bad a problem as their complete incompetence in battle and their lack of an actual strategy, not to mention their tactical inadequacies. But these Malgeir folks aren’t stupid or cowards either, far from it. They are just incredibly inexperienced with no way to get better. Imagine if their top leaders were eight-year-olds who were given the blueprints for a successful Navy roster from their ancestors thousands of years ago. And their resources and industrial capacity… you know the estimates, their GDP is what? Ten, twenty times ours? Give us a couple of years. We can fix up their Navy to put up a good fight.”
“Say we do that, Amelia. Say we do all that. What are our chances, then?”
“I’d say about even.”
“Fifty-fifty? That’s it?” the Senator asked, aghast. “I was hoping for a bit more than even odds. I know what they say about a fair fight in the military.”
“That we need to plan better, yeah. Sen— Blake, I’ve been watching the Bunnies do their thing for years. The movies make them look like these goofy little imbeciles. And they’re not; they’re psychos. Every so often, they’ll take prisoners”, she shuddered and continued, “What they do to the prisoners and their occupied worlds gives me the creeps. And I’ve fought the Resistance over Saturn as you have. I don’t spook easy. Not anymore.”
She continued, “If we sit back and just wait for the Malgeir to lose… which is just a matter of time. We better pray the Znosians forget about the fact that they’ve already seen us and never find us. Even if we hadn’t left them a trail of breadcrumbs to our home, they would have found us in a few years: this is the direction they were heading anyway. They’re coming for us next; I can guarantee you that… I think you already know all this, which is why you’re asking me these questions. But I’m just a Vice Admiral, not one of the three hundred people who can decide the fate of our species and our Republic. So, respectfully, the real question is one I should be asking you: what will it be?”
The elderly statesman went silent for a minute, then closed his eyes and sighed again.
“As you know, I was a Marine once. I know war’s costs as well as, I suspect, you do. My grandparents knew war. My parents knew war. I have a son and a daughter, both currently serving in the Republic Marine Corps. It was my eternal hope that my grandchildren would not have to know war. That a generation would be born in my lifetime who can laugh naively at our foolishness and ask why— why we left our humanity behind us as we raced into the darkness.”
“But…” he continued, his voice cracking. “That has been the forlorn hope of countless other naive leaders who came before me. And I see that now. This evil we’ve ignored until we couldn’t, it has shown itself and dared us to do nothing. The choice I have for my children and grandchildren is not between war and no war; it is whether they will get a fair fighting chance at all.”
He spoke softly, not with the gravitas of a respected leader of humanity, but as if he was once again a scared eighteen-year-old Marine getting ready to face down a station full of hardened pirates and Resistance operatives over Titan. Amelia could see then, even in the wrinkles of his eyes, that for him — like for her — those nightmares never went away.
“You asked me, Amelia, what it will be. And I think I finally have an answer for you. We will be doing what we have always done as a species: the right thing… After all, it appears that we have already tried everything else.”
