Dry, No Lube Ch. 09: Invasion

Good.

"Now, as you know, we are currently on the Arm." She shrugged. "Meaning we're the unlucky fuckers on the hook to take this invasion straight up the ass. Dry. No lube. And, as we also know, the Tirving is not designed for ship-to-ship combat." She swept the room, making eye contact with Jatsupa by the door. He gave her a brief nod. "I've got calls out to get assistance from any Fleet warship, and by the end of the day I'll make that an Alert warning. In addition, the Leith will tell the Node to send us help.

"Despite that? We're the ones that are here. Now. And we won't run away. And if I'm right in my guesses, I think we're going to be balls-deep in this thing before any significant help can reach our position. So here's my intention." She nodded to the XO. "Commander Jatsupa and I will take a look at the charts and pick a place where we can wait for the enemy. I'll devise an early-warning strategy. We'll prepare as best we can, and when the enemy comes? We'll resist them. And in the end, our goal is to do what we can to stall them and give the Hearth time to prepare."

She saw nods now, grim understanding passing among the assembled officers.

Pixy felt her body go still, as it always did once she'd decided, all the possibilities at last coalescing into a plan, however tentative. "I can't tell you yet what we'll do, or how we'll engage. But we will. I want that idea clear in all our minds."

A hand shot up. "What about the Army, ma'am?"

Pixy shrugged. "The Army works with us, not for us. But right now they're under the temporary command of one of their company commanders, meaning... well." She smiled. "Let's just say that I'm confident they'll follow whatever suggestions I choose to give them." A low crackle of laughter rippled among the crowd. "Actually, credit where credit is due: they did themselves proud yesterday, with the flextube. But I don't anticipate them having a great deal to do with a fight in space. So, if I can, I'll be looking to land them if possible. For everybody's safety." She glanced around, deciding to end this before anyone else tried to chime in. "Okay. Back to work. The XO and I will get you any information we can, as soon as we can. Comprehend?"

"Aye aye, ma'am!" The shout was hardly a cheer, still less a chant, but it was enthusiastic. And that was enough, for now.

* * *

The Bacchanal Arm, ravaged for two years by Fleet's Placer/Extraction ships, stretched for almost ninety thousand light years from the nebula where it branched off the main structure of a nondescript patch of a galaxy called NK-4554. The Branch was a useful spacefall to aim for when punching up lightspace coordinates, meaning it had been a common rendezvous for all sorts of spacecraft bound from the Perimeter to the Hearth.

Predictably, Fleet had fortified the Branch early in the Wars, but over the years its importance had dwindled as it ceased to be a frontier and, instead, found itself lodged firmly inside Federation-controlled space. But there was still a small planetoid there in a stable orbit around an artificial gravity well, along with an airy space station, both well-armed with spreader rockets arranged in several trap-batteries. Pixy stared at it now, glimmering on the star-chart above her conference table, along with its little glowing label.

"Fulvius." She stirred and looked through the chart at her XO. "Ever been there?"

"Twice." He shrugged. "Typical. Just a trap-battery and listening post. Third-tier Marine garrison, small Fleet establishment. Most of it is a supply depot run by one of the big civilian companies." He twitched sideways, checking his implant. "Commanding officer is a retired frigate captain, supplementing his pension. The Marines haven't been transferred in over seven standard years." He reflected, looking back up at her with those silent eyes of his. "I'm not sure I would depend on Fulvius Station to win a war, Captain."

"If we're right, and there's a full-scale invasion headed our way? I'm not depending on anyone to win that war," Pixy snorted. She nodded. "Should we bother telling that frigate skipper that we're coming?"

"Will it change your decision?"

"No."

Jatsupa raised both hands. "Well, then."

"Still. It'd be polite." Pixy studied the outpost once more, then turned to summon Juno for some tea... only to remember that Juno was gone now, Hearth-bound. She felt a pang. "I'll grab the Army and get them started. We'll send the whole battalion down. Every swinging dick, gone. Off the ship."

He nodded. "Should I make a plan to detach the Barracks Barge for them?"

Pixy's eyebrows rose. "Can we do that?"

"Jettisoning it is easy," he shrugged, "but getting it down to the surface is... well. Doable. We've got enough shuttles. We'd just need someone to coordinate the lift." He smiled briefly. "And it might give the soldiers something to think about instead of getting stranded on Fulvius Rock."

"Fair enough."

He hesitated. "My recommendation, ma'am, would be to bring the shuttles back up here after they land the Army." They looked at each other, thinking the same thing: there were 560-odd soldiers in the Barracks Barge, but the Tirving carried 416 sailors. "Just in case we need a way off."

"Yeah." Pixy sighed. "Definitely something to keep in mind, unfortunately." She had ideas, many ideas: they were keeping her going, but a lot of them were dark, so dark. "We also need to have Luzhenka and her assistant come up with some way to turn a shuttle into an early-warning detector."

"It'll get done." The sniffer beacons were all too large to load aboard a standard shuttle, but he sounded confident. "If we have to, we can just cut away part of the crew shell and strap the thing down inside. The flight deck will still be pressurized."

"Yeah," Pixy pointed out, "but the crew will have to sleep, and eat, and piss. And they won't be able to use gravity with the shell removed."

"Like I said, ma'am, it's a worst-case scenario. Besides," he went on mildly, "people flew in space for centuries, pissing in zero-g toilets. We can do it."

"Yeah." Pixy sounded unconvinced, mostly because she was having trouble thinking of someone to entrust the early-warning mission to. She firmly believed she herself was the best shuttle pilot aboard, and was by no means certain she could trust anyone else to do this right. "Who would you send out?" she asked haltingly, hating the need to bring it up.

Jatsupa did not wait to reply. "Laredo. She's the logical choice. You're sending out fighters as escort, so let her command them from the shuttle and run her sweeps at the same time." He shrugged. "If necessary, Byskop can go as a copilot."

"Wait. What? Laredo?"

"Think about it, ma'am." He leaned back in his chair. "It's obvious."

Pixy thought about it.

* * *

The man on duty in the beam shack at Fulvius Station was a Fleet warrant officer of many years' service, looking ahead to the time a couple of years ahead when he could retire, claim his clone, and live a quiet life back on Quarta VI where his wife was calmly running his farm. It had been many months since he'd had to deal with any kind of incoming message, other than the resupply dumps and the occasional Fleet GP ship come to pick up a load of shit from the civilians on the other side of the planetoid.

So the flash beam message, slamming into his phonic unit with that characteristic Alert tone he hadn't heard in years, jolted him out of a light slumber at the sleepy Station Control block high in orbit. His chair nearly bucked him out as he scrambled to tap the mic. "Uhh, last calling station? Say again, over?" He had no idea who'd been on the other end of the line.

He just knew that it sounded like a professional.

"Fulvius Control, this is Tirving with an Alert beam. Is your commander there? Over."

"Umm." The beam technician was aware that umm was not proper comms procedure, but he'd never heard of a tirving and had no clue how to proceed. "What is this in reference to? Over."

A pause, then a scratchy tone in the beam field told the tech that the caller had just pulled out a coding gun. "The War is coming to your station, and we're bringing it with us. We should be entering your sensor cup by 1500, Fleet local time. I really think your commander will want to speak with me, so if he gets a chance, have him give me a call. Out." The field took on the characteristic buzz that said it was no longer active, giving the warrant officer a chance to pull out the latest Fleet bulletin and start a search.

There she was. USS Tirving (K005), Cdr P Pfeiffer, currently on detached service (vic Bacchanal Arm).

The tech frowned. Detached service? A quick glance at the sensor cup told him space was entirely empty. And he'd never seen a Fleet vessel with a K prefix. Oh well, he told himself as he picked up the voxbox to summon his commander, not my problem. Though something in that caller's tone suggested that soon, it might be everyone's problem.

* * *

Pepper Laredo was unhappy. She understood that her captain, whom she'd never really liked (but grudgingly respected), had reached out a fairly substantial olive branch by choosing her to manage the assignment that, after all, might provide the first warning to the Hearth that it was about to get its ass handed to it.

But she'd have been a lot happier about it if it hadn't meant a long, boring sensor sweep across a vast crescent of space, all in zero-g and with no real timeframe for when she could expect it to be over.

Her scouting mission was maintaining itself over 500 kilometers behind the Tirving, one heavily modified sniffer scout with her and two of her fellow fighter pilots crammed into the cockpit. Three crew meant continuous operations, as she was well aware, even if that meant the fighter escort duties would need to be swapped off among her remaining four pilots, one at a time coming out in relief in their single-seat Interceptors. It was a hell of a mission to manage, and the boredom was (so far) exquisite in its unmitigated interstellar emptiness.

"'Join Fleet,' the recruiter said." That was Horkins, on beam watch in the back. "'The food's so much better than the Army,' he said." The pilot kicked disgustedly at the canister of rations.

"Shut up." Laredo was not pleased with the shuttle's trim, the way the oversized sniffer affected the attitude. The globe showed a pronounced list to port, which bothered her even though she couldn't feel it as she floated in the seat. "Just watch the sniffer. We can't miss any contacts."

"Ma'am," Horkins muttered shortly. Three days they'd been out here, the flight deck stinking of bodies and, however faintly, of shit from the hydro toilet. He glared balefully out at where Lieutenant Adrian orbited slowly, the nearest stars glinting off his stabilizer clobbets. Tirving was a brighter light way up ahead, and Laredo made sure they kept that light centered in the reticle she'd drawn on the shuttle's forward port.

Horkins yawned. We can't miss any contacts. From how Pfeiffer had made it sound, "missed contacts" were not a high probability. She was expecting some sort of big, massed fleet, the kind of force that would project its own gravity disruptions far out ahead of it in the Lerbal field. Well, unless the Cathos Vremein had invented some sort of technology to cloak that sort of thing, but Horkins was an educated man and he couldn't think of an engineering solution that would lead to that.

Up at the controls, Laredo wrinkled her nose. Centuries of technological advancement; around a thousand years in space, and humanity still had not devised a way to make farts stink less. She turned irritably toward O'Slonowicz, strapped snug in the sleeping sack at the back of the flight deck. "Jesus H Buddha. What the fuck did he eat, anyway?"

"You should smell it from back here," Horkins sighed, leaning back to stretch his neck. "I swear, if I have to smell another..." His voice strangled into silence as though someone had switched him off, his eyes slowly widening as he stared into the sniffer display. "Holy fuck. Multiple contacts. Very many."

Laredo swung into action, the stench forgotten. "Bearing?" She glanced outside to make sure Adrian was still on station. "Behind us, I assume..."

"Yes. Nearly straight back, 3206 mils." Horkins frowned into the scope, shaking his head. "The sniffer keeps trying to quantify the size and number, but it's not happening." He glanced over. "Big. Huge. They're already inside four million poronkusema."

"Okay." Pfeiffer's orders had been clear: stay back long enough to establish a definitive course track, then get the fuck back to the Tirving. "Start your track. I'll call it in." She cleared her throat and keyed the proximity mic for her escort first. "Got 'em, Adrian. Less than thirty million klicks. Set your scope on mid-res so you can watch for drones. Out" She had no doubt the Cathos Vremein could see her. Finally, she barked into the mid-beam. "Tirving, this is sniffer. Contact. Track to follow, over."

The reply was more laconic than she might have expected. "Roger. Out."

"Roger, out?" she spluttered, tossing the mic. "That's it?" She shook her head, hands tight on the controls. "How much longer, Hork? We're torpedo fodder here."

"Fifteen more seconds." They passed tensely, queasily, in that dreamlike way that made it seem like the time would last forever, but they did pass. "Let me lock that in..." He tapped at the scope, saving the course track for analysis back on the ship. "Got it."

"Good." She thumbed the prox band. "We're hightailing it, Adrian. Conform to my speed and movements." She was already shoving the power bar forward as she flicked over to the beam. "Tirving, sniffer. We've obtained our track and we're returning now, over."

"Got it. Safe travels. Out." She shook her head as, with another fart, O'Slonowicz woke to the new vibration of the shuttle.

"Is something happening?"

"No," she snapped, focusing on her flying, "the thing that died in your ass is still dead. Go back to sleep."

* * *

The next thing Fulvius Station heard from their mysterious visitor was an imperious hail from that same businesslike voice as before. "Stand by to receive reinforcements, over."

"Reinforcements?" The warrant officer had now been joined by his commander, who did not like the sound of any of this. Now he stuck out his hand.

"I'll take this." He cleared his throat, summoning the authority of his old days skippering a frigate. "Who is this? Over?"

"USS Tirving," came the sharp reply, "preparing to land reinforcements. My intent is to place them behind your trap battery: I can see a big grass field there. Please advise. Over."

"Advise?" He bristled, not liking this turn of events at all. "My advice is that you bear off and seek another station, over." His tech snickered.

"No." The reply was immediate. "Not an option. We'll land behind the batteries. Anticipated time to near orbit is six minutes, over."

"Six minutes?" The old man craned his neck around, peering at the vastness of space. If this unwelcome vessel was six minutes out, it should be visible by now against the backdrop of the stars.

"Six minutes," the voice repeated firmly. "We're already calculating our entry angles, and we'll let you know if we need anything else. Meanwhile, I'd recommend you get that field clear for my barge. Out."

"What?" Barge? What kind of Fleet ship carried a fucking barge? He stared at his tech. "What kind of ship did you say this was?"

The warrant officer handed over the Fleet Bulletin. "Placer-Extraction. K-ships. I don't know, sir. There's no diagram here."

"Placer/Extraction? Like... shuttles and shit?" The commander's mind whirled, his aging implant coughing up nothing useful. "Are those the ships that have been prancing all over the Arm since last year, stirring up the Flasbards?" Both men stared at each other in horror. Theirs was not the sort of billet where stirred-up Flasbards were preferable.

"The ships that look like tubes?" The warrant officer shrugged. "Could be room in there for some sort of barge, I guess."

"I guess," the commander echoed, squinting out at the stars. He started after a few moments. "There she is." It had been awhile since his old eyes had tracked a moving spacecraft, but it was like listening to a banjo: once you heard one, you never really forgot it. "Coming fast," he muttered. "Looks like less than six minutes."

"She seems serious, sir." They regarded each other for a few more silent moments, then the skipper sighed.

"Send word to the Rock to clear the parade field." They both peered down at the planetoid below, teeming with tiny, oblivious pedestrians on a gorgeous afternoon. "We might as well. She didn't sound like the kind of person who takes no for an answer." He was vaguely aware, now, that it might have been a good idea to take a meeting with this P/E commander when she'd first called, but it was too late now. And he'd been asleep at the time, anyway; his nap was a highlight of his day.

A detector robot in the corner chimed. "Additional contacts in pursuit of the main contact," it announced. "Two small vessels: a Tygon Interceptor and a shuttle with an unusual signature. Closing at approximately 89% greater speed than the main contact."

"Ah," the commander said sourly, "she's bringing friends along." He did not know it yet, but the detector robot was only about forty minutes from reporting a much, much larger cluster of contacts. Because she wasn't just bringing friends, but enemies too.

* * *

"There." Pixy had pointed through the hull, her hand rigid: no tremors. The main decision had been made, after all. "You're going there."

Major Kutuza, the senior Army guy left, had scratched his bald head. "And... just waiting?"

"Just waiting," Pixy'd nodded firmly. "I need you and your men off this vessel. We'll be maneuvering like motherfuckers, and your guys will get sick. Besides," she'd added, "given what's coming? We won't need you up here. It'll just put you at risk for no reason. You can help man the trap-batteries down there, too."

He had frowned. "I don't think we should leave you."

"I'm not asking you to think," she'd shrugged, "I'm telling you not to think. I'm also telling you, yes, to leave us. I'll put it this way: I'm ditching your Barracks Barge either way and sending it to that rock down there. I'd suggest your people be on it when I do. Comprehend, soldier?"

He had nodded heavily. "Ma'am."

She watched now as the massed Army shuttles herded the unwieldy barge down planetside, nodding. "Prepare to jettison their hospital barge, too."

Jatsupa looked at her sideways. "I thought we agreed to keep the shuttles up here in case..."

"We did," she nodded, a chop of her head. "What about it?"

He pursed his lips. "I think it'll be all we can do to get the Barracks down there safely, then return the shuttles to the Tunnel. We're going to run out of time to move the Hospital."

"Indeed," she sighed, "which is why we'll just leave it in orbit. The Army can go up and fetch it when needed." She started. "I mean, if needed." The Army would only need to download their Hospital Barge if something really, really, really awful happened to Tirving. And Pixy wasn't letting herself think about that yet, even though she knew in the back of her mind that she needed to.

"Right." He hesitated, clearly reading her mind. "I've been giving some thought, ma'am, to that if. Just in case."

"Yes. Of course you have. Because you're an outstanding XO, Commander Jatsupa." She scowled. "If. If needed, you'll obviously have a great deal to manage while I fight the ship. So I'm glad you're thinking about it."