Erewhon Sector (Origins' Wing Commander fanfic)

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

I needed some light relief, and playing Privateer; Gemini Gold sort of spawned this. I just felt the need to do something simple and straightforward, with explosions and silly physics. Classic Kilrathi war era, 2667 or thereabouts. I've chopped some zeros off to make everything more or less fit together.



'Come in, come in.' The sector governor's office was big and square, spacious because it was almost empty. It looked like the work space of someone who had only just shipped in.
Rear- Admiral (Ret.) Paliezewski had been here for fifteen years.

On one wall of his office was a spinning image, flatscreen showing a rotating holo- object, the many stars of Erewhon sector, a handful in blue, a handful at the opposite end of the cluster in red, and the overwhelming majority in grey. It was a very strange map to have in a high official's ambit, reflecting as it did reality rather than propaganda.

'Hmph.' Marian “Oryol” Paliezewski said, pressed a button on his desk, revered the image to all blue and red. He was a heavy man, still wore something that could pass for naval uniform despite the fact that he was now supposed to be a big high chief. There was precious little around here to be chief of. 'Perhaps it is better that you should see it as it is...why have you been sent to Erewhon sector?'

His visitor said the first thing that came into her head, or maybe just the last thing that it all boiled down to. 'Fight Kilrathi.'


'Do you know, Commodore Ch'en, what Erewhon is? It is a globular cluster thinly connected to both sides, yes, but it is also a final hope. If we and they mine out every single usable piece of metal from our homeworlds and throw it at each other, and leave it broken and sizzling between the stars, then Erewhon will give us both new ground to continue the war for another thousand years.

It may take that long for it to become useful; if there were to be a form of life that eats silicon and breathes carbon dioxide it would perhaps find paradise, but this is no place for human life, not yet.

Eighty stars, four hundred usable bodies and how many drifting rocks a man could stick a drill into I cannot count, and on how many of them is there air to breathe, water to drink and ecology to eat? A dozen perhaps, more if the Kilrahi have been at least as successful as we.

Although I suspect not; they make poor colonists as a rule...perhaps the reason they went to war, to take what they could not make. Erewhon is barely broken ground; this is not Enigma with it's garden worlds and asteroids, it may take a century for this shambles of stars to become worth fighting over. I say again; why have you been sent?'


Ch'en reminded herself that Paliezewski had been a fleet officer once; the opposite wall to the display shone with past glory making it hard to ignore. A single blown- up still, of one of the old Waterloo- class cruisers soaring past a broken- backed and burning Fralthi- class Kilrathi cruiser; the name of the terran ship was just visible- Vistula.

He had been promoted and detached from the old TCS Vistula to take command of the sector and make something of it. Which was happening, literally, at the pace of climate change. A lot had happened in the rest of the galaxy in the last fifteen years.

There were outside imperatives. One of them being that the Confederation desperately needed a victory, any victory no matter how distant, no matter how minor. Another being that they might really need space to put a few billion or so refugees.


The sector governor guessed most of it anyway. 'Would you be about to lay the rhetoric on me, Commodore? Tell me that this hole in god's pocket, this scattering of frozen rocks is in some mysterious manner the hope of humanity?

'Oh, I know the ministerial-propagandizers and their ways. When we lose something and keep the journos off it, it simply ceases to be mentioned. Not brought up, un- planetized. The number of old comrades I have “lost touch” with, posted to no.1 depot sol-antarctica; the number of nonexistent places that I could find on star charts from fifteen years ago...

The war is not well, and your orders are to stir up trouble far away, in the hope that the great cats will react, divert forces out here to the end of nowhere away from humanity's core stars. And you thought not to tell me of this, to avoid discussion with cathodyne platitudes?'


There was only one reasonable method of dealing with that, and it was to go on the attack. 'What have you done for humanity? How well have you prosecuted the war? This sector is dead, it does nothing for the cause of the Confederation.' Ch'en, nerves frayed by the last three years, lashed out, unwisely and with too little care of where it would lead.

Fortunately for her, Paliezewski lost his own temper in response. 'How hard did high command have to look to find someone so completely ignorant? If you are an example of the current calibre of line officer it is little wonder that we are losing.' He shouted, and saw her start to wilt then spring back, although she stopped short of round two.

She looked up at the ceiling, and he looked down at his desk, and eventually he said 'Perhaps you had better show me the rest of your orders.'


Wordlessly, she handed over a compcrystal; it took a little while for the desk computer to convince the crystal that the older decrypt codes did, indeed, check out. Wire- frame holoimages appeared.

'Among us but not of us, I see. Not under my orders, no requirement for the sector fleet to co-operate, the poorness of the planning is almost painful. This smells of shambolic.'

'You have a sector fleet?' Ch'en asked. No-one at Unicorn Base had been entirely certain.


'As do they.' Paliezewski pointed out. 'Every half year without fail, and in fact the Kilrathi already have set their calendar by it, they make some kind of lunge at us, we beat and burn them back. New groups of Kilrahi warriors coming of age, see you, setting out to try their courage against the vile squishy terrans.

They send their victorious survivors back to the house of cats, so to a lesser extent do we our glorious defenders to the Confederation, although they clearly make not much of an impression- we have two real ships of force and two modern ships, and they are not the same two.

We and they are at the minimum to hold what it is that we have; a major defeat or a major stupidity, both sides have long range independent fighter groups and we operate in a dusty desert of the logistic, would perhaps open the possibility of erosive victory. Do you understand the rabbits and the foxes?'


Ch'en had to think very hard about that; 'Are you referring to interdependent cyclic feedback situations?'

'For the love of- yes, I am. Why not make it as complicated as possible? Consider; we, and they, have a limited manufacturing capability. We, and they, can make weapons, to defend ourselves, or terraforming tools, to make livable worlds, which can swell our manufacturing capability eventually.

If there was no pressure, there is no doubt- expand. If we make too few weapons, however, the Kilrahi come and take our worlds and it is all for nothing. If we make nothing but weapons, we may be strong now- but in the future, they will outpace us, because they have invested in growth, and destroy us.

If we go all out for war and attack them- to throw everything on the winds of chance- it is a powerful temptation. Yet, we are the inferior force. One carrier and one functional cruiser, and under three hundred star fighters deployable, against three carriers and three cruisers and six hundred fighters.

We have a sufficient force to defend and deter- they do not have a sufficient margin of superiority to ensure victory. Have you brought enough with you to change that balance?'


Ch'en looked bemused. This area was supposed to be almost devoid of force; a free fire zone populated only by a handful of militia units, easy targets- the group had been sent precisely because they could make an impression out of proportion to their numbers.

Instead there were sizable battle groups duelling- in slow motion, perhaps, but the forces existed.

'The Lockwood battle group is essentially a recon-in-force formation; one Concordia class carrier, Lockwood, one Tallahassee cruiser, Blagoveschensk, Two Southampton class destroyers, Recife and Galway.'

'A hundred and forty fighters between them,' Paliezewski added up, 'mostly Arrows and Hellcats, yes? Strike capability thin? Modern craft, but transport killers and trench strafers, not for killing capital craft and shielded installations? How are your destroyers loaded?'


'If I had asked for more, I wouldn't have been given it- the central front in Vega is far too important to divert much from. Even fighter torpedoes are in limited supply.' Ch'en evaded.

'Manufacturing those missiles- each costs as much as a fighter. Rarer materials. We turn out less than ten ship to ship missiles a year, manufactured by hand on laboratory workbenches. Fighter torpedoes we have perhaps twenty, perhaps thirty in a good year.

The sector group is centred around Qalbat; she's a thirty year old Bengal batch II class strike carrier. Officially lost in the first battles for the sector, we retrieved and reconditioned the wreck, but half her engine mounts are stone soup clusters or ripped from Kilrathi wreckage, her sensors and fire control electronics are patchwork, a quarter of the bays are closed down- we conserve what useful life she has left.

Two cruisers, one cannibalised to feed the other- Gettysburg class Lostwithiel, she can, approximately, move but hardly fight, the Waterloo class Sakhalin is functional enough to risk on sweeps and raids. Nine destroyers, two Exeter, two Gilgamesh, two Southampton, three captured Ralari- beware of those, scan any Ralari you meet.

We are facing the remains of a carrier battle group; three light carriers, two operational in varying definitions of the term. Three older cruisers, eleven destroyers. Your force may just be enough to, nominally, bend the odds to us- and sieze something that we can hold against counterattack. Attracting kilrathi counterattack is, after all, the object of the exercise, is it not?'


TCS Lockwood was a new ship; long, as light as something built out of foam-steels could very well be, brutally slablike, but still with the smell and the shine of something fresh out of the yards. There were very few old ships left.

The Concordia class were still in limited production despite the age of the design for many reasons; one of them being the expense of retooling and reskilling for the newer, more efficient Ranger batch II's, one of them being to use up existing parts, but the main and most sensible one was that they were fifty percent faster than the Rangers.


The Confed was only now fully realising what a monstrous mistake they had made with that design choice. Possibly, the way things were going, a terminal mistake. If a strategy is based on individual superiority, quality over quantity, then it would be a good thing to actually have some kind of qualitative margin; for all their toughness and efficiency, the Rangers were just too easy to outmanoeuvre.

Paliezewski had seen it happen too often, well read the reports and read between the lines anyway. Let Confed jump in, loop a fast cruiser with a large light fighter complement or a cruiser division past them to the system entry, push the main force back, hammer and anvil.

The Waterloo class were really the only ships Confed had ever built that had the proper speed and complement to fight that kind of running, manoeuvring war. In fact, that entire generation, Gilgamesh and Waterloo and Concordia, that had been the mid phase of the war in which they were actually winning.

Attrition had taken it's toll. Few of them left, and the modern designs...no wonder they were looking for a diversion away from the main battle front. 'I'll detach an element of the 772nd Independent Patrol Group to Lockwood, as liaison and coordination.'



TCS Lockwood was a new ship, and not a happy one. Brand new, but the contractors at Proxima who had assembled the ship from the ferried- in modules had obviously been channelling the spirits of SevMash, because the results were...the only word for the quality of assembly and construction was Soviet.

It was very late, in a generation- long war, and the crew were divided into the handful who had personally suffered for whom this was a crusade, and those who had nothing better to do and nowhere else to go. The survival probabilities were such that, on average, you died. And when the bottom line was drawn, they were carriers and the clue was in the name.

Not really fighting ships in their own right. The old Bengal class had organic weaponry- in spades, although the rounds they were supposed to fire were long obsolete. They were fighting ships. Concordia class could only defend themselves, some of the time, maybe, if the cats didn't try too hard.


The first clue they got that there was a problem was four unidentified craft approaching at high speed from the direction of the Lyonesse jump point. As many of the stars in Erewhon as possible were named for imaginary places- Shangri-La, Cloud Cuckoo Land, El Dorado, like that. The nav maps were having trouble interfacing with the newer systems; the format was too old.

Nobody particularly wanted to hit a jump point with a bad field angle on; it didn't matter as much for fighters and little baby gunboats, but a big ship screwing up an entry could easily come out upside down, back to front and inside out. It was the last bit that really mattered.

Lockwood was still wrestling with the out of date local mapping system, as far as they were concerned they couldn't go forward, couldn't go back. The commodore had taken a shuttle off to liaise with sector command, commanding officer was minding the formation.

Drills, patrols, routine slow burn. One quarter standing alert at any time. Captain Joyce “Lucrezia” Perrett was having difficulty understanding her crew. Too much to do, they bitched. Too little to do, they bitched. Something new, they bitched. Same old same-old, they bitched. Twenty- seven years in, no end in sight. They bitched about that, too. If everything was made right, they'd bitch about not having enough to bitch about.


They bitched far more than they worked, that was for sure. The ship hadn't been worked up properly, there hadn't been time. There never was. How is it possible to rush and rush and rush without end for nigh on three decades and get nowhere? Perrett joined in the bitching. They'd had to shut down and realign- virtually rebuild- most of the launch tubes, fire direction was a joke- so much to fix.

Crew were learning how to do it as they went along, too. Perrett was a fighter pilot from the good old days, Scimitars and Raptors, she had made seventy kills off the flight deck of the old Ferocious. Long time behind a desk, training, logistics, recruitment, and now back in the line for...what?

That was part of the problem, too. Old timers bitching about how good things were in the old days. This gang of sacks of shit weren't fighting to protect and save humanity; this was the soap opera generation, they were in it for the melodrama, the pilots for the glory and the ship's crew mostly because their frontier planets were dirt poor.

Sometimes Perrett was glad she had lost her flight certification, because there were days she felt like putting a torpedo into the side of her own ship.


She knew exactly who Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood had been, and she had removed the bust of the legendary submarine officer from the CIC- it was embarrassing her. He had never sent out a ship so disastrously ill prepared as this one was, not even in the early days when their torpedoes didn't work.

They didn't have that problem, just there weren't enough of them to go round. She looked at the status board; six hour one in three they were on, red, blue, green watches, blue watch was on rest- sacking out- red was conducting damage control drills, green was manning stations.

Bad business. The wing worked rotating four hour one in four, out of step with their support personnel. That was the way it was in the manual, have to change it- and then the alarms went off.


'What the hell's wrong with them, are they asleep down there? Can we shoot them up a bit just to wake them up?'

Able Two flight of the Seven-Seventy-Second hadn't exactly sneaked up on the big carrier, more sort of...strolled into position. Not thrashing it, just moseying along like they belonged there. Which, strictly speaking, they did.

The independent patrol wing was a bit squirrelly, too, but they weren't far enough gone to send some of their handful of captured Kilrathi craft to rendesvous with the Confed fleet carrier. That would have resulted in instant gunfire. Able two were four of the theoretically long- obsolete F21 Centurion heavy fighters.

One in four alert meant seven Arrows, seven Hellcats, five Thunderbolt, two Longbow bombers; that meant pre-flighted, armed and ready on launch spots. In theory.


In practise, when the launch klaxon sounded, two of the pilots had fallen asleep and had to be woken up by ground crews kicking their fighters; one of them refused to take it up without a further check, claiming the crew chief had put a hairline crack in the cockpit canopy.

One of the launch control technicians was so obviously stoned, babbling and giggling at random, one alert flight of Hellcats refused to launch. Probably just as well, as they were given a course to vector that would have taken them literally through the flight of Arrows that was supposed to launch at the same time.

One of the Arrows' engines refused to start after launch; the lead Thunderbolt standing alert was armed with a torpedo- which sheared off under the stress and was left in the launch tube. The tube had to be shut down and an ordnance disposal crew sent in. They were nearly killed when a deck officer who didn't understand the situation tried to send one of the diverted Hellcats down the same tube.


The flight of independent patrol fighters had retreated to a safe distance to watch this, and were not at all amused. 'Oooo-kay. This is looking more and more like babysitting duty. TCS Lockwood, this is Able Two Indigo, are you having trouble with your sensor systems, over?'

'Able Two Indigo, this is Lockwood actual, identify by rank and callsign, over.' A deeply unamused voice said.

'Able Two One, Patrol Leader Garden, call sign Weed.' So many of the good ones were already taken, and Tom Garden had been lucky to get even that; he had only just managed to avoid Flowerbed. Worse yet, call- sign Compost. Somewhere out there, there was a distant relative, you just knew...

Able Two Two, Flight Officer Pena, call sign Spacehopper.' Pietro Pena was built like his call sign; he would never have been able to fit into a standard cockpit module, had been forced to protest total ignorance to avoid the call sign 'biggs'.

'Able Two Three, Element Leader Fromm, call sign Freem.' Wulfgang Fromm was almost outrageously normal by comparison, average height, thin to average build, brilliant gunman though. Long range, high deflection was his specialty.

Able Two Four, Flight Officer Ansaldi, call sign Marble.' Luisa di Ansaldi was relatively new to the zoom and zap game, at least officially, but she had brought her own fighter- a free trader who had taken the confed credit.. A cool, conservative flyer.


Perrett realised that they had nothing to match the names to, only the sketchiest idea of who they were expecting. Still, Kilrathi were not the sharpest tools in the shed when it came to bluff, so bringing them in to land wasn't going to result in 'stupid human, die', kaboom.

Although- 'Weed, wait one. Flight, let's see how good this bunch really are.' she told the air group commander, and 'Weed, I'd like to give my people a little exercise. You up for it?'

'Mock dogfight, two and a half to one against?' Weed was already heading away from the target zone, opening the flight out, eyeballing targets. At ten thousand from the circling fighters he said 'Usual protocols? Fine, bring it on.'

Normally this was a very bad idea, simply because of the increased wear and tear and risk of accident, flying at high speed in close quarters, in a sector that was unusually conscious of all those things- but the hell with it. They were pilots.


'All together, then' was arguably equally bad a plan. Two things we could do, Weed thought; split, out and away, and take them one at a time- or stay together, flying- wedge it and head for the carrier.

The Centurions had two big advantages; when they were originally built, the generators, engine modules, shield units of their day were big, clunky, awkward things. Strip and upgrade, and in the space the old school gear left behind modern units of the same volume gave far more power.

The consequence of that was that they could outshoot virtually anything else the confederation had to offer. The huge old sensor dishes mated to a modern processing unit could see and give target motion prediction further and clearer, the amount of power available to put through weapons outmatched the Thunderbolts facing them about two to one.

Marble, because she had her free trader's license and could afford it, was sporting four tachyon cannon. Freem, because he wanted the reach and accuracy, four particle cannon. Spacehopper and Weed had quad plasma cannon. All four twin driver rear turrets, twin proton-reaction torpedo launchers.

Purchased craft like those were the largest single item in the sector's balance of trade. The governor cursed them often for that, but some times, some days, they paid their way. As pirates raiding Kilrathi lines of communication, definitely. They saw a fair bit of action, too.


Which would the regulars learn most from? Outer- barrier fight, leave the carrier out of it to start with? Yeah, probably. The pair of alert bombers, ready to counterstrike an approaching Kilrathi capship, were just hanging back; one of the Thunderbolts was retuning to the hangar. Four heavy, four medium and six light fighters.

'Break and attack.' Weed ordered. 'Leave the T- bolts till last, we can fly rings round 'em. Start on the Hellcats.' The four big, black- painted fighters fanned out, scanned, looked for constant bearings apart from Freem, picked their targets and turned to head on.

The Arrows were racing ahead, and that was exactly what Freem was waiting for- the oblique shot. Estimate the lead- predictable, there wasn't one of them without their throttle maxed- and hose them, cycling through.

Two plasma bolts would go through an Arrow's shields, one would take the side armour, a fourth would cripple, a fifth would kill. The target would usually start dodging after the second. That was the fun part. Tachyon gun bolts were slightly more lethal, but they flew a lot faster, that was the main thing. Hellcats were a little tougher, one more bolt on target would do.


One Arrow came boring in, not jinking at all, heading dead straight for Weed; and Freem caught it on it's starboard quarter, blew the shields- simulated- before the pilot had time to react, guessed which way he was going to jink- high and right- and tracked the rest of the burst on. Full function to drifting parts in three heartbeats.

The link system showed the flashes of fire, and that was a big advantage to the independent fighter group; the carrier based regulars started bitching that it just wasn't possible, man, that they were cheating, and unfortunately their computers disagreed with them.

Weed nailed one who was too busy talking to fly; twisted out of the way of an Arrow who seemed to think that he could simulate ramming, lobbed a salvo straight down the approach path of a Thunderbolt and followed it with three proton-reaction torpedoes- the usual Gothri drill.

Thunderbolts were tougher than Gothri; a couple of the plasma bolts missed, it twisted out of the way of one of the torpedoes but the other finished bringing down the shields. Weed banked after it, it started firing from the tail turret and it was moving straight, too straight.


There was a burst of com chatter, Marble swearing at one of the Arrow pilots who- Vishnu, there was a flare there, the Arrow was limping away with half it's nose ripped away and sparks flying out of it's gunpod; collision. 'Endex, Endex. Thunderbolt, pull up you fuckin' idiot.'

The heavy fighter driver was too busy trying to use the manual controls on the rear turret to notice he was heading straight for the side of the carrier. 'Flight, use the docking override, bring him down and bring him in.' Perrett snapped.

'Who, ma'am?' Flight control's dazed response came- wasn't he paying attention, or had the pretty lights in front of him mesmerised him?

'Gunnery sees him.' the ominous words came from the ships defence systems command bay.


'Roll starboard thirty degrees.' Perrett shouted at the helmsman. She wasn't going to shoot down one of her own pilots- but it looked as if he was going to do a good job of it himself. Rolling the ship might just-

It worked as she had intended. There was a panicked call of “ohshit” from the Thunderbolt, and he did the worst possible thing; grabbed at the throttle, went on to afterburn trying to slip past. Didn't make it. Slammed into the flight deck, but at a relatively shallow angle- she had rolled the ship to meet him.

The Thunderbolt glanced off the big ship, leaving a shallow, shield-contact molten smear; limped away, for a moment Perrett thought it had regained control, then the pilot punched out and left the drifting, broken- backed fighter.

The Centurions could tractor him in, but it was usually the Arrows' job. They stood off while one of the Arrows flew towards him, and flew, and basically left deceleration far too late; could have been trying to make a running pickup, could have just screwed it- the com system reported the scream, the crunch, the ominous silence after that.


Much later, after the damaged fighter had been reeled in, the flight controller and the Arrow pilots disciplined and the four Centurions landed, Perrett interviewed the four pilots of the 772nd independent patrol group in the flight ready room.

She wasn't going to apologise for the state and condition of her ship; maybe it deserved apologising for, but damned if she was going to do it. Her bad idea had crippled two fighters and killed one pilot with routine tasks she should have every right to expect them to stroll through, put one pilot on suicide watch, one flight controller in intensive care, one flight controller and an ordnance team in the brig.

A certain number of accidents were inevitable. Some non- combat loss was routine. This was still ridiculous. She tried to ignore it entirely. 'Our files on this sector are minimal. We weren't aware of independent combat groups.'

Marble started to say something that weed was sure would have been tactless and abrasive, and worst of all right, so he said quickly, over her, 'Technically patrol, but that's how things get fought around here.' It was much safer to talk technicalities. It meant they didn't have to tell her what a ghastly fuckup her ship was, and she didn't have to defend the indefensible.


Perrett was well past the age to fit in a cockpit, even in these desperate times; forty, with pronounced crows' feet and worry lines. Blonde and horse- faced, classic girl next door looks once upon a time, strangely shaped even in loose Confed undress uniform- she had been neurotically thin through most of her flying career, living off coffee and pep pills, had put on weight in all the wrong places serving behind a desk.

'How much fighting is there?' she asked. Hoping there was just enough to ease her loons in and get them shaped up.

'We and the Kilrathi both have assembly lines- basically, we stole some of the tooling for fighters that were going out of front line use and flanged the rest. We can't make much more than fifty, maybe eighty a year, buy in another ten, twenty on top of that.

Skirmishing- the long range fighters like us- usually burns through that, on a good year we have more at the end than we started with. We don't get too many good years.'

Garden was only about five, six years younger than Perrett; officially too old to be a good pilot, it was a young being's game, but the rules were different for independent units and for militia.


'Is there more to it than that? Warships, planetary attack?'

'Fencing. Each side needs the fleet ships in one piece too badly to take too many risks with, we can just about repair the ones we have, but we can't build anything much larger than a Drayman. Hit and run, independent fighter sweeps- course, with another carrier and a cruiser we might actually be able to afford to go hunting.' Weed said, enjoying the reversal.

Normally, in the rest of the terran confederation, it was the regulars who were gung- ho, even banzai happy; the militia were supposed to be the don't rock the boat types. On the other hand, it was annoying that the high command thought of Erewhon as so marginal that they could afford to send this crew- murdering floating snafu of a ship here.

'So with the task group here, the cats will- they won't pull their horns in, that's not Kilrathi. Harassing action, nitpick at us with their equivalent of independent patrol groups, run us ragged then move in for the kill?' Perrett theorised.


'They're cagier than that.' Weed said, optimistically noting that at least one of them appeared to have their head screwed on. She was right in principle, but... 'They take bigger tactical risks up front, lower long term. Lead in hard, and if it doesn't work back out fast.

After initial contact, I'd expect a squadron level raid, Dralthi- sevens and Gothri. Try for the cheap kill, knock out as many as possible of your fighters- torpedo capable birds are the biggest threat to them; don't let your Longbows and Thunderbolts out unescorted. Then they'll see if they can get a fish into you.

If that doesn't work, expect continual extreme range harrassment- they trail and report, they'll try to snap up stray patrol groups, prod you into making a mistake, com ahead to set up an ambush.'

All familiar enough, but rather more cold and cerebral than Perrett had learned to expect from Kilrathi. She had to ask the obvious question. 'The actual balance of forces?'

We have maybe two hundred fighters tied up in fixed point garrisons, two hundred fifty ship based and sixty independent, maybe a hundred and thirty total jump capable; basically, Rapiers and Sabres, Talons and Stilettos, Gladiuses and us, then some funky stuff.'


She took a deep breath before asking. 'The Kilrathi?'

'About two hundred jump capable, Dralthi VIIs, Vaktoth, and almost a hundred of the old Gothri torpedo bombers. Let's hope you're going to be seeing a lot of them.'

'Because if we're not, that means they got us already?' Perrett guessed.


'Yep. Rest is mainly Sartha, Drathi II and the old Jalthi- those things are going to murder your light fighters.' Perrett nodded; the six- gun Kilrathi fighter had been monstrously dangerous, back in the day. 'Almost all mobile based, the cats don't do garrison.

Used to be we had a chain of hidden depot points to extend our range into their space, but we gave up on them- too hard to keep hidden if you're actually operating from them, too expensive to keep stocked, far too expensive in machinery if they're supposed to be autonomous. Cats haven't, though.

They can turn up anywhere.' Weed said, and looked at the speaker on the bulkhead of the ready room, as if expecting it to blare into alert at any moment.


'I suppose not.' he said a couple of seconds later. 'Murphy usually isn't that neat, even he works in slow motion hereabouts.'

'Or they'll wait until our nerves are thoroughly raw, let us start getting sloppy, jittery, fighting ourselves and then they'll move in for the kill.' Perrett suggested. 'Or at least try to.'

'Depends very much on what their high command's telling them.' Weed said. 'And whether they've received reinforcements too.'

[Alan Bolte]

It's good to try something else once in a while. Seems to work for IO, at least. I'm curious where you're going with this: you've created a setting, but I'm wondering where the plot will go besides the cat strategy outlined above.