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  Scruples

  1

  January 9, 2444

  Orica System

  Inner Zone

  A tiny jumpship decelerated against Orica C, the smallest of the three stars that made up the trinary system that the Nestafar had made their capitol. Some said jumping into or out of a trinary was more difficult, others said it was easier because it gave you more gravity well options to work with, but it was true that with the stars orbiting around each other you had a moving target to hit, making accurate stellar charts a must for transit into or through the system.

  The Alliance had all the Nestafar maps, or so they they’d been told. That said, the Nestafar could have been setting them up from the get go. Fortunately the long animosity between them and the Calavari had seen their enemies compiling detailed charts of their most precious systems, Orica included, so it wasn’t a surprise when the jumpship came out of its coast phase and decelerated right on target for the innermost star.

  Very nearby was Orica A, with its huge red glow providing the background to Orica C’s yellow hue. Had the jumpship not had differential drives it would have been a more robust navigational calculation required to push off of both stars for deceleration purposes, but the Bsidd ship didn’t have to bother, for they and every other major power in the Alliance had the technology to pick out one gravity well and exclude the others.

  The tiny ship was barely larger than a lizard battleship, but a true jumpship it was, though it carried no cargo or other vessels. It was a scout ship, pure and simple, and as soon as it got itself situation into a holding position over the star in lieu of an orbit, it began picking up Nestafar tracking signals.

  Thousands of tiny beacons spread across the system were pumping out lightspeed detection signals of various types, allowing delayed detection of any ship entering the system. Should the scout ship delay making another jump, Nestafar patrol ships would be quick to begin intercept maneuvers, coming from one of the 93 inhabited planetoids within the system.

  This scout ship, however, had come in very close to Orica C, with the stellar radiation making detection a bit more difficult. Add to that the sensor dampening hull plates that the Bsidd researchers had reverse engineered from lizard hull segments, and the scout ship had a small window of invisibility in close to the star to work out of.

  So there it sat, soaking in the signals from afar while it was backlit by the yellow star. Most traffic coming into and out of the system used Orica A’s much larger gravity well as their jumping point, which meant that Orica C was less likely to receive traffic…and in a few hours’ time it would be receiving a lot of traffic in the form of Alliance warships. Warships that would need a heads up as to what was going on in the system and where all the key pieces were at.

  Thankfully, the Bsidd sensors could pick up the reflective pings from the Nestafar beacons just as well as they could, so every ship within its line of sight was being registered, on a delay, and updated into a forming battlemap that was being overlaid onto the system map that the Elarioni had provided. Given that they had never been in the system themselves and had only stolen it from the Nestafar databases, the Alliance wanted confirmation before they’d risk the sizeable fleet they’d assembled, so if the scout ship didn’t find what it was meant to find by the time they arrived it would flag them down and they’d jump back out of the system as soon as they recharged their capacitors.

  The delay in doing so wouldn’t matter, for no amount of patrol ships would be able to harass them in sufficient numbers, but if they were to achieve a surprise attack they’d have to split up immediately upon arrival and essentially be flying blind to their targets without knowing what was actually waiting for them.

  And there was a lot waiting for them. Even from its limited perspective the gangly jumpship, which looked like a twisted knot of bluish/purple tubes, began tabulating the fleets of warships present over several worlds, along with hundreds of defense stations and millions of other ships moving about. Some were jumpships, but most were interplanetary cargo ships serving the system by carrying cargo to and from the various planets and moons.

  The system was an empire in and of itself, holding more planetoids and infrastructure than Star Force’s core zone. One of those planetoids, the 17th out from the inner two stars and 4th in from Orica B’s very high orbit, was the Nestafar homeworld.

  It wasn’t the largest, nor the most populated Nestafar world in their territory, or even in the system, but it was the planet their empire had began upon and was still the focal point in their society. Their industry was another matter, with three planets in orbit around Orica B holding their primary shipyards. They accounted for 43% of all shipbuilding the Nestafar possessed, though that staggering number didn’t do the actual facilities justice.

  Even at vast distance between the central two stars and their sister out in high orbit, the scout ship had no trouble picking up sensor images from some of the orbital facilities around the trio of worlds, or rather the two that were visible. The third was on the opposite side of Orica B and temporarily obscured from view.

  The scout ship held position, soaking up data from the current side of the star then slowly moved around it, hovering on its gravity drives. As it did more planetoids came into view, as well as more ships in the gaps. As predicted, the infrastructure was almost entirely located in orbit around the planets and moons, with only a handful of signals coming back confirming the presence of interplanetary facilities that the Elarioni-stolen map had indicated.

  Two were refueling stations, set close in to the center of the system to service passing jumpships without them needing to make a microjump further into the system. Four more, set at LaGrange points between the stars and planets, were military outposts with quick response fleets capable of reinforcing the various planets or going after ships coming into the system. By staying on the gravitational jumpline between two gravity wells, or more accurately just off it to avoid collisions with passing traffic, they had the option of moving in two directions, albeit at a slower pace given their distance.

  The scout ship did a sensor focus on those outposts, holding a passive receiver directly on those locations and soaking up more of the limited reflective signal, trying to get a breakdown on what was there. It took some time, but the glob of a signal refined itself into the station and the hundreds of ships docked or floating nearby it.

  The scout ship did a basic head count and added that information to the survey it was pulling, which would be transmitted to the Alliance fleet as soon as they arrived.

  When the Bsidd ship moved all the way around the star to the far side and started to come in through the gap between Orica A and Orica C it picked up something that wasn’t supposed to be there. Situated in the gap between the stars was a huge fleet, thousands of ships strong, all of which were warships based on the silhouettes.

  The scout ship moved just close enough around the curve of Orica C to keep itself from appearing as a silhouette of its own off the edge of the star, but it didn’t shoot the gap itself, knowing that if the fleet’s active sensors were sent its way its odds of staying hidden were nil. As it was the Bsidd were closer to the star than they wanted, with their partial shields having to push back a considerable amount of stellar radiation. The outside half of their ship was exposed, which was necessary to pick up the reflective signals at maximum effect, but the hull had to retain the growing amount of heat else it’d start to glow on its own accord.

  That was one downside of the lizard armor. It soaked up EM, which it then had to process internally before it became saturated…and this close into the stars there was a lot of EM coming its way.

  The Bsidd knew the
y could only nose into the gap for a brief period of time, for while they were blocking the stellar radiation from Orica C with their hemispherical shields, they couldn’t shield their front half and still get a good passive sensor read on the fleet. That meant Orica A’s radiation was hitting them and their superabsorbent hull with a ton of heat.

  The scout ship eventually had to pull back around Orica C and lose sight of the fleet, after which the internal processors began eating up some of the extra heat in the armor rather than venting it. Conventional wisdom held that heat coming from the direction of a star would help its cover rather than expose the ship, but that wasn’t true if someone was monitoring the stellar output and saw a blip of radiation that didn’t match what the star was putting out…and heat was one form of radiation.

  The Bsidd held position over Orica C as it orbited around Orica A, gradually exposing the remaining slice of the system that Orica A had been hiding and allowing them to finish their battlemap just before a pair of warships circled around Orica C in low orbit, hunting for the ghost ship that the sensor beacons had picked up entering the system.

  The high speed at which the scout ship had entered the system meant it was plowing into the beacon signals and reflecting them back at greater than lightspeed. Those unusual signal speeds existed as a brief, intense flash on sensors that normally alerted one to an incoming jumpship, if you were on the trajectory line to see them.

  The Nestafar sensor grid was, but after the flash there had been no visible ship. One obvious possibility would have been that the ship had hit the star, but careful evaluation of the flash could produce a descending acceleration curve, indicating that the object had in fact been braking.

  Now, that didn’t mean the ship didn’t hit the star, but had it, there would have been some sort of disturbance on the surface of Orica C…which there wasn’t. The Nestafar had then sent out two ships to pull a close scan near the star, finding nothing on the approach side, so now they were moving around to check the back where the scout ship was currently hiding.

  The Bsidd saw them coming first, and knowing they still had a few hours until the fleet arrived, they turtled up inside their full shields and abandoned any further monitoring. Their mission now was simple…survive long enough to deliver their data.

  Using their superior shielding the scout ship dropped down closer to the star, so far in fact that they entered the extreme upper atmosphere, using it as a sensor-dampening blanket that cut out the Nestafar sensors as well as their own as the intense radiation tried to cook the Bsidd, with their advanced cooling systems sucking heat out of the hull and storing the energy internally, some of which was then used to reinforce the shields…at least as much as the emitters could handle.

  They couldn’t see the Nestafar, and they very much hoped they couldn’t see them. After that point it was just a matter of time, with the deteriorating shield matrix pitted against the clock, and according to the Bsidd’s calculations they’d survive in their presence location until the Alliance fleet arrived with 48 minutes to spare.

  When the estimated time for the fleet arrival came the scout ship increased the trickle of power to its gravity drives and raised up out of the star’s atmosphere and started pumping out its active sensors, looking for ships nearby. The two Nestafar warships were no longer snooping overhead, leaving the area around this side of the star open.

  But the fleet wasn’t coming in on this side, so the Bsidd flew back up into low orbit and reversed course, flying back around the way they’d come until they were in view of the approaching jumplane the fleet would be taking now that the star had completed a full orbital tango with its twin. Though they couldn’t see the response, they knew the Nestafar would be alerted to their position within minutes and begin to deploy ships to hunt them down, but given the signal lag it shouldn’t matter…assuming the fleet was on time.

  Right now all that mattered was staying alive and getting the data to the fleet, and in order to do that the scout ship needed to know if anyone was nearby, hence the active sensors. One contact materialized, coming out of the gap between stars where the Nestafar fleet was, just before the first Alliance ship jumped in, decelerating hard against Orica C and stopping just shy of running into it…though that had been by design.

  The scout ship detected its presence a few seconds after arrival, then began transmitting its data along with the go ahead order, indicating that the plan was still in play, despite the thousands of warships right next door.

  The Hycre jumpship received the data and input it into their computer system, set to relay out to the other ships automatically as they arrived…but they weren’t here yet, also part of the plan, because the Alliance didn’t want the Nestafar to see who was coming.

  Using a computer virus the Elarioni had designed, the Hycre began transmitting into the Nestafar data grid, pumping the program out to as many enemy receivers as it could. The beacons and other receivers bounced the signal around the system, getting it to locations that were eclipsed by the stars and planets, including the nearby fleet that was pinched between the disruptive influences of both stars.

  When the program got into the Nestafar computers it didn’t affect weapons, life support, navigation, or any of the vital systems. Instead it altered the computer records, so that when the sensors saw the first dozen Hycre jumpships arrive the data was lost, superimposed with an ‘active’ map of the system from either memory or the last current location of ships and facilities if they were within a certain range, so that a ship a kilometer off the bow of another wouldn’t just disappear and attract attention.

  The purpose of the virus was to keep things ‘normal’ as the fleet arrived, and that’s just what it did…aside from the scout ship and the first Hycre jumpship, which the Nestafar were now learning about via signal lag. At first it was just another incoming jumpship, but when the sensors confirmed it wasn’t Nestafar the fleet between the stars began to redeploy some of its ships to intercept.

  But their sensors weren’t functioning properly…or rather their memory banks weren’t, so when some ships began to move out of their parking formation the maps the others had of the immediate area didn’t update, making all of the moving ships think they were the only one deploying. In reality some 38 ships had been ordered out from the edges and were repositioning to make tiny microjumps towards the enemy jumpship.

  Flying blind as to where the others actually were they succeeded in leaving without incident, though a discussion over the comms quickly broke out with the commander of the fleet asking why none of his ships were moving. As they tried to sort that out, with the ships claiming to not only be moving, but the only ones moving, the Hycre jumpship released its school of warship ‘fish’ against the harsh glare of the yellow star, with them moving out towards the Nestafar ships that couldn’t see them coming, for their sensor data wasn’t being logged.

  The jumpship itself began moving around the star in low orbit, heading for the approximate location of the scout ship and clearing the lane for the others coming in behind it. Those jumpships decelerated and stopped at a slightly higher altitude, all preplanned, so they wouldn’t risk colliding with each other. Using mathematical precision of the highest order, the ships dropped out some 100 km apart from one another like bread crumbs falling from some invisible hand moving out away from the star.

  Each ship then descended further towards Orica C, releasing the warships it was carrying out of the entry corridor and proceeding to the ‘corral’ point with the others. All of the first wave of jumpships were Hycre, given that they had the best navigational programs and thus had the least risk of misjumping into the star at such close range. Originally their preplanned targets were at various planets and moons across the system, hunting down the Nestafar war fleets and leaving less threats to their allies which were behind them in the jump order, but with the scout ship’s update concerning the fleet a quarter revolution around the star they quickly adjusted their strategy.

  The first few
hundred Hycre warships clustered together and, after quickly finishing off the 38 ships the Nestafar had sent their way, they dove straight into the heart of the Nestafar fleet that couldn’t see them on sensors, thanks to the virus, and began shredding the enemy ships with their brilliant white plasma that appeared as dull streaks in the backlight of the two stars bracketing the battle.

  All Nestafar weapons that relied on the ship’s sensors were rendered useless, and only those batteries that had line of sight capability returned fire. Missiles couldn’t be launched without targets, and without the computer-aided firing the gunners in the batteries had a hard time picking and hitting their distant targets…especially with the Hycre flying their typically evasive battle routes rather than standing still and slugging it out.

  The ‘battle’ was a misnomer, given that it was a one-sided slaughter. The ever growing Hycre warfleet destroyed them all before the last of their jumpships arrived, then the school of ‘fish’ broke up into multiple groups and began making microjumps out to other locations, intent on getting to more of the Nestafar ships before their computers tracked down and eliminated the virus. How long that would take they didn’t know, but they certainly weren’t going to wait around for the rest of the Alliance fleet to arrive and squander part or all of their opportunity.

  In all more than 2,000 Hycre jumpships arrived in one long convoy, decelerating against the star one at a time but only spaced a handful of seconds apart, after which there was a few minutes gap until the first Kvash battleship jumped in, with its tri-sphere hull small in comparison to the Hycre jumpships, but even smaller compared to the ‘starbases’ that followed, each of which was the size of 3 Hycre jumpships and carried not only a fleet of warships, but functioned as troop carrier, battle station, refueling depot, repair yard, and just about every other function imaginable.

  The massive battleships moved into flanking positions, dwarfed by the starbases they were escorting, as each one jumped off to a different position in the system with unique targets. Normally a starbase was reserved for the assault of a heavily defended enemy system or the defense of a highly important Kvash one, but for this assault they’d brought not one, not two, but 17 starbases, underscoring just how important this assault was…and how infuriated they were by the Nestafar’s betrayal of the Alliance.