Story 2: United Earth Navy

    2073, Earth Orbit, Colonial Construction Facilities

    There were days when Commodore Ciara Hunt was ashamed to be an officer of the United Earth Navy. Not because of an ultimately inconsequential scandal, those that happened in any big organization and anyone who claimed differently was simply good at cleaning up after themselves, but from secondhand embarrassment as she watched the new recruits struggle to make their way around the under-construction O’Neill Cylinder.

    Once it was finished, it would be shipped off to a new colony, which made use of its rotational pseudogravity since those lacked the spare enchanters to maintain magical artificial gravity.

    But for right now, it served as the perfect environment for cadets at the Luna Naval Academy to experiment with maneuvering in air-less zero-g environments. Badly.

    Hunt caught a cadet’s leg before he could inadvertently kick her in the face and hurled him across the cylinder even as she warped space to make it so he landed lightly on the war wall, feet first.

    She really shouldn’t have been here at all, she was supposed to have been in command of the 11th expeditionary fleet to check out a potential but unlikely alien contact ... except the ships for that hadn’t been finished yet even though she’d already gotten the bump to Commodore in expectation of that deployment. So the 10th fleet had gone.

    And as for why the ships were delayed, well, it might be guaranteed to become an advantage in the long term, but right now, it was just frustrating. A simple advancement in power conduction had caused the brass to require a redesign of all future ships, as well as an overhaul of all hulls currently under construction, causing mass chaos in the shipyards, and putting several officers slated to command those ships currently unavailable in awkward positions.

    So she’d grabbed the academy assignment to avoid winding up with some crap, potentially even make-work, job while waiting on her command to be, well, commendable.

    But this, she’d enjoy. Oversee the next graduating class of officers, then command the UENS Exeter with its mix of old hands and newly minted officers on the vessel’s shakedown cruise.

    She kinda felt for the heavy cruiser, having been stuck in a similar limbo to her. It had been finished the day the discovery had been made, and up until a week ago, discussions had raged about whether to deploy the ship as-is, or retrofit it, though since it had been finished, it would have been a ridiculous amount of work to do the latter. So she could “use” it.

    ***

    One week later

    Sadly, there were regulations about the conveyance of senior officers, otherwise, Hunt would have flown over to her temporary command under her own power, but thankfully, modern shuttles had plenty of ways to see the surrounding universe. And by warping space, she could sit stoically in her chair and still view the universe as though she were sitting there with her nose pressed against the viewport.

    The Exeter looked much like every other heavy cruiser in humanity’s arsenal, six hundred meters long, a broad, rounded, wedge with a blunt bow, wrapped in glittering reflective armor that was, in turn, covered in gun turrets, weapon ports, sensor blisters, maneuvering thrusters, and a handful of radiators in case the magical heat dispersion worked into the armor itself failed.

    It was a utilitarian design, unlike cruise liners, diplomatic vessels or luxury yachts, but there was beauty in that. A stark, lethal, beauty.

    If she didn’t know how new it was, she wouldn’t have been able to tell it apart from a ship so outdated it had to be decommissioned. That was how starships went. In order for them to work, they had to be kept in tip-top shape, so it did not take much beyond that to make them look nice. Even pirate ships, crewed and commanded by some of the worst scum humanity had ever produced, were still presentable.

    The Exeter was also heavily armed with particle beams, lasers, railguns, and a handful of missile launchers spread around the hull. All very standard, all across the fleet.

    It was simple, it was boring, and it worked. Yes, there were a million different ways you could get cute with magic, [Skills] or both, and every possible combination of either with the currently existing technology, and even restricting oneself to just tech one could make so much more, so many different weapons ... but there was something to be said about building stuff that actually worked in all situations, and with all gunners.

    There were some interesting anecdotes that got thrown in the face of anyone who tried to declare their new weapon types as the non-plus-ultra in armament.

    So while, even being extremely strict with what qualified as a “type,” there were hundreds of types of weapons that could be used, you could count what was taken out into the field on one hand.

    They could always be used, it kept the number of replacement parts reasonable, and prevented unnecessary confusion.

    Of course, there were also drawbacks to this process, mainly, that these weapons could be countered. Namely, magnetic shields to disperse particle beams and reflective, magically cooled, armor to deflect lasers.

    That was the flip side of the argument. Unless one ship was significantly larger than what the other was meant to deal with, modern vessels started fights virtually immune to each other’s guns and would slowly wear each other down unless a spell or [Skill] could turn the tide.

    Still, Hunt had spent the last two decades of her life playing devil’s advocate in pitch meetings for more exotic stuff, and rarely had the designers had a response to her pointed questions beyond “we don’t think that’ll be an issue.”

    A proper upgrade would be nice, one of these days. But until then, well, she’d learned to be utterly lethal with the weapons she currently had.

    Besides, where the energy weapons fell short, you had railguns and the ship’s crew. The former because there was no hard counter to kinetic weaponry other than not being where the projectile went, and the latter because there were so many different [Skills], spells and other human-created effects that no one could effectively prepare counters for even a fraction of them.

    Standardization, dependability, and power from technology, flexibility, growth, and fine control from magic. That was how modern combat worked.

    Hunt left her office and stepped onto the bridge, sitting down in the captain’s chair on what would likely be her very last voyage as the commander of a single ship. Spatial magic was already sparking off her as she prepared to take the ship to FTL.

    For as creative as humanity had gotten with almost every other facet of technology, they only had one useable interstellar faster-than-light travel, even counting even remotely viable prototypes, for there were none.

    It was the three Aspect combination that allowed for the acquisition of the [Alcubierre Bubble] [Skill], or nothing.

    Granted, their FTL coms weren’t much better, being an inherent point-to-point system based on a principle that essentially amounted to magical quantum entanglement, a process that was so complex that each ship only had a single communicator linked to the headquarters at Mercury, but there were other ideas. Nothing that was currently useable, but at least they were getting there.

    “Take us out, fifty percent engine power,” Hunt ordered, addressing the helmsman. It would still be a bit before they reached the point where vessels could make the jump to superluminal speeds.

    Once they were out in the galaxy, she’d let the other wielders of [Alcubierre Bubble] get some hours in, and learn to use the [Skill] to its greatest effect, but in the Sol system, care and control were needed, not to mention that she could jump out from significantly closer to the Sun than any of her subordinates.

    All ships had to have at least one percent of their crew, or ten people, whichever was more, capable of taking the ship into FTL by regulation, though very large ships, including battleships and even the currently-hypothetical planetary assault carriers, were allowed to go on with less.

    The issue was that if the ship did take damage, only one person on the crew could transport it between star systems, and that person was killed, it would doom everyone onboard to a slow and agonizing death. Admittedly, calling for a “tow” via the FTL comms was possible, but considering that each vessel only had a single communicator useable at interstellar distances and that might easily be destroyed at the same time as the living FTL drive was killed ... it was an important precaution to take.

    And while a multitude of commercial vessels had gotten away with only having one or two people capable of using [Alcubierre Bubble], the reason that regulation had been put in place was because of when it hadn’t. And things had gone wrong several times after that, proving to anyone who bothered to look why things were the way they were.

    Soon, the Exeter passed the invisible line where Hunt was comfortable with initiating FTL and that was what she did, finally pumping the mana she had been collecting into her chair and through the enchantment that shot through the entire vessel, twisting reality around the ship, the effect spreading out and slowly wrapping the entirety of the vessel in a field of impossible energy.

    The universe around the ship vanished in a blur of multicolored light, shifting into a grand tapestry of warped images and space bending in ways it was never supposed to. And they were off, to explore a few nearby systems, do some training exercises, make sure everything worked in the field the way it was supposed to and then actually complete their mission.

    ***

    Two weeks later

    Their mission wound up being as simple as it was common: pirate hunting.

    In theory, piracy should have been utterly superfluous in the modern day. All it took was a little elbow grease, a willingness to kill something, and a list of easy monsters to beat and you could easily get all the resources you wanted in a reasonable amount of time.

    Sure, you’d never reach the heights of Isaac Thoma or Arthur Wells unless you took risks aplenty and had some luck to boot, but you’d be able to buy just about everything you could possibly want well before that point.

    Yet people still cheated, still stole, still murdered. Because it was easier. And because there was one thing money couldn’t buy: people. Slaves, specifically. Admittedly, money could buy them, but someone still had to handle the capturing and that was where the pirates came in.

    Thankfully, the theoretical nightmare scenario of System-enforced slave ownership had never materialized, but there were still plenty of ways around that, and Hunt had sadly seen most of them in action during previous anti-pirate operations.

    Repeated checking of someone’s status sheet, truth-telling abilities, the limited mind control the System did allow, on top of all sorts of manipulation tactics and some enchanted jewelry to shock or otherwise disable a slave when they “acted up” ... It was bad. Always.

    A lot of the time, the pirates didn’t even try to justify what they did, but there were plenty who made the attempt anyway, occasionally even claiming to be on some kind of divine mission or having godly “permission.”

    You see, the System had caused quite a lot of religious discussion and debate.

    Various established religions had caused shitstorms by claiming that their deities had created it, pointing at certain references to their religion in one [Class] or other but that was only the start of it.

    The smallest facet of a titanic issue.

    No, the largest issue was the various people who decided that the System was a divine revelation meant to show humanity the “right way,” and depending on what shape that “right way” took, things could be fairly okay, bad, or really bad. j

    It had started with the Children of the System, born days after the initialization and destroyed only a few months later after they’d tried to assassinate various researchers on the grounds that uncovering the secrets of the System was “heresy.”

    But things had only escalated from there. Some of the religions were based on “good” ideas like perpetual self-improvement and the like. However, there were also a lot that were highly problematic. This started out as what was functionally worshipping Social Darwinism, but eventually escalated into worshipping any kind of improvement. Mainly the kind that came at the cost of people who failed to grasp power for themselves.

    Pirates, mercenaries, and other criminals might have always existed, justifying their actions with ideas such as “well, it was easy,” or “if it’s so wrong, then stop me,” but now, they had an actual religion with actual “signs” to follow.

    Those who followed various new System-inspired religions weren’t necessarily worse or more cruel than those who didn’t, but they certainly hesitated less before committing horrific acts of brutality.

    And pirates did exactly that.

    “This is our mission,” Hunt announced, illusions flickering to life above the conference room table, showing seven passenger ships, two merchant vessels, and three cruisers. “A pirate band has created a base somewhere between Earth, and the three furthest coreward colonized systems of Triumph, Ithica, and Terra Nova the Twenty-seventh.”

    That last name was about as ridiculous as system names got, but the only ones who laughed were the recent graduates in the room. Everyone else was used to stuff like that. Star systems got an alpha-numeric designation until they were colonized, and then, the colonizer could choose the name with very few restrictions. It couldn’t be outright unprintable, and had to be unique, but beyond that? It could get very, very ridiculous.

    “To date, they’ve taken nine ships, using at least three four-hundred-meter cruisers, or potentially light cruisers, unfortunately, the scanner data provided is rather lacking.”

    That was civilian scanners for you. They kept you from running into asteroids, and would usually tell you if you were about to fall into a star, but beyond that, you’d probably be better off just crushing your nose against a viewport.

    As for the ships, well, despite how the term had been used in science fiction before space travel had become reality, “light” cruisers weren’t smaller cruisers, they just had less armor. Just like how it had worked on Earth’s ocean.

    Of course, depending on the class, a cruiser could be anything from 150 to 500 meters in length, covering a whole lot of purposes, but all cruisers were designed for endurance, long-range travel, and having at least some degree of heavy firepower.

    Even so, their enemies hadn’t got off scot-free either. Half a dozen destroyers had been battered into wrecks by energy weapons, while all of Hunt’s railguns had concentrated their fire on the cruisers. None that dealt fatal damage, actually breaking the ship, but railguns simply could not be blocked by anything short of magic and left massive craters in the enemy armor, making its reflective properties even more terrible than they already were and shattering any magnetic field projectors that might have been beneath the point of impact. In the next exchange of fire, those would be annihilated.

    However, Hunt hadn’t stopped there, because she’d left some ships where they’d originally intended to appear ... all alone. At the mercy of every gun that could not fire at the fleet behind them.

    Four cruisers, quite literally, melted under the concentrated fire of the naval flotilla.

    Behind them, the pirate fleet dissolved into chaos as they attempted to turn around, and, well, things got chaotic. Then again, if they’d been disciplined, they likely wouldn’t have become pirates either.

    “Fire missiles, empty the magazines,” Hunt ordered. Between the Exeter’s twelve missile tubes, the remaining three cruisers’ eight each, and the twenty found across all five destroyers, they could only fire fifty-six a salvo, every thirty seconds.

    That was nothing in the face of an equivalent flotilla, let alone the pirate fleet that still outnumbered them ... but that was all assuming that the defenders properly coordinated defensive fire and were in a proper formation, precisely none of which applied to pirates in general and definitely didn’t apply to these pirates.

    And by the time the pirates had managed to fully turn around, and bring their guns to bear ... Hunt had her flotilla warp away, leaving them to face all the missiles they’d already put into space. While the navy appeared right where Hunt had already spotted the heavy cruisers being readied for departure.

    Her [Stellar Sight], much like most FTL sensory [Skills], including the one wielded by the Exeter’s operations officer, allowed her to see what the sensors would have shown, had they been able to display what was happening in real-time, rather than via whatever arrived with light-speed delays.

    The physicists might be constantly arguing about whether the effect should be qualified as precognition or scrying, but the actual classification actually didn’t really matter. It worked, that was what was important.

    Now, half of Hunt’s flotilla might be stuck there, the ships’ captains out of warp [Skills], but the same had to go for many of the pirates. And while facing four heavy cruisers was a tall order for what she had left, these ships were hardly finished.

    Scratch that, most pirates were out of charges. Hunt saw several pirate ships at the sight of the previous battle rabbit, wildly zapping away to save themselves but massively weaken the defenses of those who were unable to escape. Three cruisers vanished under the hammer blows of the missiles’ nuclear warheads, becoming visible again as twisted wrecks once the light had faded. And the destroyers, well, they were tiny, and unenchanted.

    A direct hit atomized them, and even a series of near misses could severely damage them as the radiation fried their systems, leaving them sitting ducks for any follow-up missiles.

    In the end, twelve cruisers and nineteen destroyers were left, scattered halfway across the star system. More than enough to win against what Hunt had left in a straight-up brawl, but the enemy advantage was currently melting away like ice on a hot day.

    Then, the cruiser Ajax lurched out of formation as an incredibly heavy beam smashed into her bow, followed by a couple more as the other two pirate heavy cruisers closed in.

    Spinal weaponry, shit. Hunt bit back a curse. A gun built into a vessel’s spine was, by default, the biggest, heaviest, most powerful gun that could fit on a given warship, but that didn’t necessarily make it a good idea to install one, and that went doubly so for any vessel bigger than a destroyer, since you had to turn your entire ship to aim and doing so with bigger vessels was hard, and doing so left you unable to accelerate in any direction save straight at the enemy.

    But if you managed to pull it off ... spinally mounted guns could hit hard.

    And as though things weren’t bad enough, two pinpricks of light were shooting towards them from the furthest-out heavy cruiser, on the far side of the foundry.

    Hyperians. Fourth Evolution warriors with space flight, FTL, and light manipulation powers, a build-type developed by the UEF and several System scholars to create humans that could go toe-to-toe with warships.

    Not well, not at the Levels she saw, but each of them was worth a destroyer in terms of raw firepower, easily, and the concentrated nature of their power meant that they could, rather easily, land on a ship and burn their way down into the reactor. And, on top of that, since their [Skill]set often contained a significant element of “light,” they excelled at blocking or deflecting lasers.

    Yeah, time to break out the proverbial big guns and empty the equally proverbial clip.

    [Gravity Well] to the left of the three cruisers in front of them, yanking them off course and fucking with their aim, [Twist Reality] to ensure that any hostile teleport effects into the area would drop out their users far enough that the navy could react, oh, [Spatial Warp] to deflect a rather predictable attack by one of the Hyperians into the station, hand off command of the effort against the cruisers to Captain Renard of the Belfast, and finally, use the second charge of her warp [Skill].

    [Not Here, There].

    And suddenly, the Exeter was right in the path of the first Hyperian, the one who’d unleashed the attack, less than five centimeters from the woman’s nose. But considering that they were moving at nearly three kilometers a second, relatively, that distance did not remain for long ... yeah, Hyperians might have little difficulty landing on ships, but they had to match velocities to do that.

    With this kind of head-on collision, it wasn’t the question of whether the human participant would survive. It was which poor bastard drew the short straw and had to clean that up.

    The second Hyperian looked to be about to unleash his big attack, but Hunt warped again, using her third charge, and planting the Exeter side-on with the enemy cruiser, and with the Hyperian on the opposite side of the pirate.

    A broadside duel between similarly-sized cruisers, even if one clearly was a few sensors and point defense weapons short of being finished and severely lacking in the armor department, was not a short affair. Certainly not short enough that the Exeter could finish this before the Hyperian got a bead on it.

    Except it could. [Reality Fold].

    And space twisted in a way that seemed capable of breaking the mind of anyone who saw it. The pirate heavy cruiser could only bring about half its guns to bear. The Exeter, on the other hand could target it with every single gun it had. Also, incoming fire was distributed across every part of the navy cruiser’s hull, thoroughly spreading out the impacts and preventing anything more than cosmetic damage, while the navy vessel was able to concentrate its power and burn a path straight down into the reactor. And when that went, so did the vessel ... just in time for the Hyperian to appear, flashing past the pirate with both hands wreathed in energy.

    [Not Here, There], penultimate charge.

    The Exeter appeared behind the Hyperian and unleashed its full firepower. As expected, the lasers were outright nothing, and the particle beams were dispersed almost as easily, but the railguns, well ... Hyperians had to be fast, perceptive, and have a ton of magic, which failed to leave many Stat points for Fortitude, especially at the Fourth Evolution.

    The first round tore off an arm, the second slammed into the man’s stomach and sent him flying amidst a cloud of blood, gore, and bone fragments, and the third tore blasted through that, leaving behind just a rapidly expanding cloud of offal.

    [Not Here, There], final charge.

    Even just during that incredibly short duel with the fourth heavy cruiser, Hunt’s flotilla had lost more ships.

    The Ajax was breaking apart, the destroyer Glowworm was just gone, and the Fletcher was currently breaking up, but the pirates had lost a second heavy cruiser, a third was currently being battered into scrap, and the fourth, well, Hunt’s ship had just appeared right behind it and sent over a dozen railgun darts up its tailpipe while its lasers had taken out any weapons that would have a good bead on the Exeter at the instant of arrival.

    Because if your warping [Skill] was precise enough, you could make those kinds of preparations ahead of time.

    The enemy cruiser lurched forward like a drunken pig, all power dying as the reactor went offline, either due to damage or as a precaution, it didn’t matter. Because even while the Exeter turned to reinforce its allies, its point defense weapons burned off everything on the pirate ship that could be used as a weapon, systematically pounding it into scrap metal.

    And the last “intact” enemy didn’t last much longer either.

    Victory, for now.

    And as all this had been happening, Commodore Ciara Hunt, Level 150 [Conquerer of the Shattered Skies], had sat in her command chair and barely moved a muscle, not even turning her head or giving verbal commands.

    Now that this part of the engagement was over, she allowed herself to fall back into a more relaxed pose, and sighed internally. Yep, she desperately needed a fifth Evolution [Class] with more fleet-focused and large-scale [Skills]. Because a commodore couldn’t normally rush off like that, and an admiral, if she ever reached that point, sure as fuck couldn’t either.

    “The remaining pirates are running, Commodore.”

    Hunt sighed. As expected. It meant they had won, but it also meant some poor bastard would be stuck having to chase them down.

    On the other hand, this left them free to conduct S&R and retrieve the crew of the Kirov.

    ***

    Three weeks later

    “Well, that was ... something, Commodore Hunt,” Rear Admiral Sun commented. They were both in his office, aboard his flagship, the battlecruiser Yi Sun-shin.

    “That’s the polite way of phrasing that, admiral;” she replied. “With all due respect, someone screwed the pooch, probably Navy intelligence. Setting up a foundry out here should have left a paper trail, and if there was even a hint of a possibility we’d run into something like that out here, I should have been dispatched with either three times what I got, or a proper capital ship.”

    “You know, some are going to say you should not have taken your entire command so close to the star you cannot use [Alcubierre Bubble] to get out,” Sun commented.

    “Which would have flown in the face of established naval doctrine and sentenced whatever warships were sent in to certain death,” Hunt replied, flatly. “And I’ll tell the same to anyone who claims otherwise.”

    Sun grimaced. “I agree, but you know these things shake out. You’ll have to make that case, several times, most likely.”

    “Can I count on your backing?” Hunt asked, certain that that was where this was leading.

    “Of course, I’ve also already made that opinion clear with our superiors,” Sun said. “For all the good that will do. However, before anything like that can happen, you’ll finish what you started.”

    “Sir?” Hunt asked, not quite sure what he was getting at. She suspected, btu was nowhere near sure enough to voice her guess.

    “Like you said, someone screwed the pooch, probably Rear Admiral Hayes at Zheng He, which is why he’s being ordered back to Earth for ... debrief. I’m his replacement. Depending on this conversation, I can either take this place after the pirates have been hunted down, or right now, and you can take the reinforcements to bring the rest of the pirates to justice.”

    She didn’t even have to think about it for very long.

    “Thank you, admiral. I’d like to finish this.”

    Four days later, a freshly reinforced and repaired fleet left Zheng He base, ready to go hunting.

    Sixteen cruisers, four heavy cruisers, thirty-two destroyers, and one battle cruiser.

    Even if the pirates had somehow gotten back to the foundry, repaired all the damage the navy had done before they left to prevent something like that, and had it running at full burn, they’d still be so screwed it wasn’t even funny.

    Actually, considering some of the shit the Marines had uncoverd on that station, it was very funny.

    And, one month later, the entire region was officially pronnounced pirate free once more.