Untitled Space Opera Thingy

[Companion Cube]

I wrote the following as a short story set in a SF-verse I'm playing around with, hence the lack of character development. Critiques would be appreciated.


*Story begins*


Riley swore as we exited FTL, and bright, garish displays popped up all over the command screens on the bridge. I'd been having a conversation with Perez about a time, a few years back, when he served a stint on a outer veil cargo ship smuggling almost a kiloton of Dreamy Blue through Navarchy space. I almost spat out my caffeine as I read the display, wondering why the hell the ship wanted to increase my reproductive organ of any nature size! A moment later, Perez noticed and laughed at my discomfort as the displays were replaced by the standard images of space, and a lonely planet hanging in front of us.

"Ad Ship" said Eight, the first words the synthetic had spoken on the entire voyage. A moment later, he clarified; "It's a refitted tug with a low-grade non-sentient AI installed, programmed to hang around near the main FTL-space entry vectors, and broadcast an info-stream to any approaching ship which doesn't show a military clearance code." He punched up a visual display of the thing; up close, it was covered in holographic bill boards, similiar to the pop-up windows it had generated on our approach.

"'s a pain in the ass, is what it is!" Piped up Riley from his station. "I thought we had software to avoid this kind of bullshit; I don't want to need to clear away all that crap every time we make a landing." Perez looked up from his console.

"Yeah, about that; I checked the documentation, seems our subscription ran out a few months back." Before any of us could answer, the proximity alarm pinged and flashed up a visual of something big closing in on us. A few seconds later, the computer identified it as the Cu Chulainn, a Hegemony LINE warship, a few thousand klicks off. A terse comm signal invited us to decelerate and prepare for sensor probing. Perez grimaced.

"Security's gotten tight recently. Last time we came past here- before your time, newbie- we only had to deal w' customs, and that only when we landed." Interested despite myself, I put an enhanced visual on my personal screen. The Cu Chulainn was a Tacit-class light cruiser, with a frontal armament of sixteen heavy particle cannon, arrayed in a grid on the nose like the torpedo tubes of an ancient Terran submarine. Over five hundred metres long, sensor masts and point-defense weaponry bristling along its sides, it seemed about to engulf us as it closed in. A full second later, one of the subordinate AIs on the thing must have declared us clean, because the cruiser twisted in its flight and accelerated towards another point in space, where the sensors informed us another ship was preparing to re-enter real space. Delayed but unmolested, we fired up the engines and continued on our way. Ten minutes of boredom later, another contact popped up on one of the bridge displays; this one, however, possessed considerably more mass than the cruiser. Asking Riley what is was, he answered:

"'s one of LINE's fleet bases. Jus' a big doughnut, really, hanging around at the system's second Lagrange point." The symbolic visual generated by the Designation's subsentient AI confirmed his words; a ring floating in space, given scale by the dozens of warships docked to it, made tiny by its bulk.

"We're avoiding it, of course." Said Eight behind me. "The Hegemony takes a remarkably dim view of any unauthorised vessels approaching its military facilities." While he spoke, Riley was occupied working out a landing trajectory, an insistant comm message informing us of our designated landing platform on Kempelen's main spaceport. I leaned back slightly in my seat as we flipped to orient with the planet, and began the dive towards the equator of Kempelen's largest inhabited continent. The Whimsical Designation bucked as we entered the planet's atmosphere, the outer hull glowing. Almost immediately, the forward maneuvering thrusters fired and slowed us as we passed through the mesosphere. The main HUD showed clouds approaching, far below. At Riley's station, a mass of landing indicators lit up his display, and with practiced ease he levelled out our descent, increasing the power of the forward thrusters. For an interstellar courier ship, the WD was surprisingly aerodynamic, or so it seemed. To my mind, anything that didn't explode or plow straight into the ground on reentry was 'aerodynamic'.

A few stomach-churning minutes later, we were making our landing. During our descent, I'd noticed sensor blips on the adjacent monitor, appearing and then flashing away. While most of my mind concentrated on not throwing up, an inquisitive fragment decided that those brief encounters must have been other ships or transatmospheric vehicles, making similar journeys. This was confirmed when I got a decent look at the spaceport as Riley opened up a direct feed from the outside cameras on the main display, eclipsing the sensor readout that typically resided there. He later told me he preferred landing with the main screen on visual display; gave him a better idea of his position, he said. Considering he didn't use it for atmospheric reentry, I wasn't particularly reassured by that remark.

The spaceport itself was vast, even seen from hundreds of metres above; a complex of low buildings surrounded by dozens of crater-shaped landing zones, bathed in the late afternoon sunlight of the Kempelen system's G2 star. Even as we approached, a ship was taking off, a heavy cargo barge presumably bound for one of the LINE capships high above. After settling into the landing pad with a squeal from the landing gear, we were promptly boarded by a sweeper team from Customs, anonymous in their hazard suits. Riley looked vaguely distressed as the team checked every nook and cranny of the vessel, while Eight hissed as a floating probot caromed off his skull, bleeping intermittently. Fortunately, we weren't carrying anything of questionable legality, just a few 'items of interest' and several tons' worth of porn. As we debarked, automated loading bots began the hard work while Perez attempted to haggle with a port official about our landing fee.

Riley'd been in touch with someone groundside regarding a possible contract, so we decided to make our way to the premises specified on foot. As we stepped into the street, it was clear that something was up. Having browsed the newsnets recently, I was well aware that relations between the Hegemony and the neighboring Stellar Confederation were deteriorating, but I'd failed to realise it was this bad. As we travelled down the sidewalk, a pair of ARM troop carriers rumbled past, their camo-painted sides adorned with regimental markings. There were guarded checkpoints spaced regularly along the roads, and ground traffic seemed minimal for a city of Abastumani's size. Nonetheless, pedestrian traffic was abundant, and we got plenty of odd looks from the locals, wandering around in our hardsuits; guess they didn't see too many foreigners here.

After a few moments of conversation, Riley agreed to go on ahead while the rest of us stopped for a little R & R. Having found a little cafe nearby where they weren't leery of serving synthetics, we sat down to refuel and check the local news terminals. Half an hour and an overpriced salad later, Riley got back to us, looking a little harassed. I was about to ask him what was up when the sky abruptly went a few shades brighter.

I don't remember much clearly after that point, just Eight yelling at me to get my blast visor down, and then running with the rest through a mob of panicking civilians. At some point I looked up, and saw dozens, maybe hundreds of bright dots falling with dazzling speed from the sky into the distant horizon. I would later learn that those points of light were Confederation troopships performing low-altitude HALT drops. At the time, it looked like the mother of all meteor storms. Now there were ARM soldiers everywhere on the streets, directing the civvies into shelters and rushing along the streets in armoured vehicles. Fortunately, none of them tried to delay us; I reckon they figured us for off-duty LINE personnel.

When we got to the spaceport, the place was deserted, but fortunately the ship seemed to have completed refueling procedures. Looking back, we went through pre-flight procedures in record time, doubtless inspired by the sound of distant thunder as SC armoured regiments closed on the city. After what seemed like an eternity, we were airborn. Watching through one of the rear-facing cameras, I could see flashes of explosives and chains of tracer fire spread over the landscape surrounding the city, with more of the now-familiar pinpricks landing farther off. Hundreds of kilometres to the east, a swarm of endoatmospheric interceptors arrowed towards the battle. Above us, visible on the external cameras, another ship was making it's own escape. Judging by the sensor logs, at least, we were far from the only non-military vessels leaving Kempelen's gravity well during the attack.

In hastily bulldozed craters, the twelve ARM main battle tanks of Aleph Company waited for the enemy. The Stellar Confederation attack had come with scant minutes of warning, the first wave performing an FTL-Jump terminating almost on top of the planet's gravity well, the heavy transport vessels of the enemy spewing dropships as their escorts blasted what was left of Kempelen's orbital defences. Now, as far-off battles lit up the horizon, other units in the theater had reported nuclear detonations at most of ARM's bases in the region. Aleph, preparing for a live-fire exercise at the time, were hastily armed and rushed to cover some of the wide, featureless plains surrounding the capitol. Now, their crews fidgeted nervously in the confines of their vehicles, the gunners peering through their fire control displays. After scarcely an hour of dull tension, the Confederation attack began, firstly with what would have been a punishing artillery barrage if the infantry had arrived; as it was, the shrapnel whickered harmlessly off the thick armour of the tank company. This general bombardment was followed up by a volley of HK projectiles which sent the antimissile screen into a frenzy. This further assault was interrupted by a timely barrage of counterbattery fire from within the city; despite the orbital bombardment and the air battle going on above, ARM was still functioning to some extent. Perhaps realising their artillery had failed, and with the air above too hostile to deploy tank-killing aircraft, the Confederate commanders ordered their tanks forward. The first kill was scored by Aleph-01, a solid hit from five kilometres out, the heavy mass-driver projectile punching through the particle screen and armour of the enemy ATGM carrier. A few seconds later, the enemy replied, and despite, in the end, destroying three times their numbers in enemy AFVs, Aleph Company was annihilated.

Once we cleared the atmosphere, the mood on the bridge calmed down a little; having gotten out of the immediate danger and recognised as harmless by the SC perimeter, we were in the clear. On our way out, we passed the ravaged remains of the LINE fleet base, a slowly expanding halo of twisted battlesteel surrounded by the corpses of the Kempelen system defence fleet. Going over a interstellar news a few weeks later, I found out that something on the order of fifty thousand people died on that station, with precisely zero human casualties among Confederate space forces; turns out the Confeds had sent their invasion fleet in behind a massive screen of drone frigates, piloted by suicidal AIs. The fraction of the Hegemony fleet that had been mobilized had managed to destroy dozens of the things before being nuked into oblivion- the station had accounted for far more. Nonetheless, through force of numbers the Stellar forces had managed to force their fleet carriers close enough to disgorge millions of ground personnel. Within a few weeks, the ground war was, for all intents and purposes, over. It seems ironic- in retrospect- that AI rights were one of the things the two interstellar governments disagreed on.