Trial by Fire Snippet 3

 

Chapter 3

 

PR52-190, Pi Sector

 

System Governor Helen Merkal winced at the latest report from the jump point to Omicron. Another convoy, this one looked like Necron ships.

Jason, her lead electronic tech was starting to get better at differentiating between the enemy ships. There were 2 distinct groups, Necrons and Xenos. They were all black and both sides used rebuilt old ships however there were styling differences.

The Necrons were all about Goth with screaming black skulls and ghoul heads on their hulls. They were nightmarish. The Xenos had sharp angles, dagger points and such. They tended to have them in line with the spine of the ship though so they looked fast and nasty.

The ships were on a course for the gas giant. That was another thing, the Necron ships tended to top off quickly, the Xeno ships took longer. They weren’t certain as to why. At the moment the question was academic.

There were hundreds of thousands of people huddling in various locations across the star system. They were being hunted, so like mice they did their best to not draw attention to themselves whenever possible.

Some couldn’t help it however. She was in charge of the largest contingent on the dwarf planet. Nearly a million people were hidden in the mines deep in the dwarf planet. The Necrons had tried to bomb them out, dig them out, and so on, but so far had failed utterly.

Unlike some poor sods in the belt that had been exposed, hunted down, and killed, she thought darkly.

She silently blessed the folks from Prometheus who had started their tech upgrade several years ago before going into Omicron and most likely getting killed. Those ladies had been awesome and she regretted that her late brother and others had taken advantage of them. Now it seemed… wrong.

<<(O)>>

Commander Joyce Nakamura looked at the report from the sensors and sighed internally. More enemy ships to reinforce their drive south. That sucked. At least none seemed ready to linger here, she noted. They would soon be someone else’s nightmare.

The good news was that they had a handle on the reinforcements. A variety of two dozen ships every 3 to 4 months, sometimes accompanied together, sometimes days or weeks apart. They had just enough passive sensors scattered around the star system to give her a look. She had to filter out any data, the bastards were not above seeding viruses in every transmission. There were even the occasional fragment of a virus embedded in the sensor feeds like! It took some malice and dedication to encode a virus into lasers that strobed at just the right wavelengths for IR and video cameras to pick up. How many civilians had been outed by that trick?

She knew of at least 1 of their hidden sensor satellites. It had been hacked and had given up its location. She had caught it before it had given the location of other links in the network though.

From that they had learned to process everything through air gapped computer servers. The data was deleted as it passed through buffers to get to the servers. There were regular sweeps in the network to look for signs of infection in order to stamp it out.

They didn’t have an AI. She regretted that. But they did have some pretty solid computer systems.

She scanned the 12 ships with a frown. Eight warships, 4 support ships seemed to be the mix that the Necrons went with. Two of the support ships looked like freighters. One of those was a fat bellied troop transport of some sort. It had a big skull on the bow and more skulls along the flanks. The gaping mouths in the skulls on the flanks served as the entrances to the ship’s boat bays.

One of the other support ships looked like that it had started out its life as a classic Clydesdale. The fourth she didn’t have a clue. It was medium sized like the others.

The warships were a mixed bag. Six cruisers, one battle cruiser and 1 carrier. It was interesting that they had a carrier. She was curious about their mix. Did they use 6 ships as their squadron size? Did they organize by squadrons?

The first invasion force had even numbers. Now they were getting singletons of the larger capital ships. Was that because they were slower to produce?

All good questions she wished she had answers to.

More importantly, she wished she could pass on what she had learned and those questions to someone in the Federation. That and be somewhere, anywhere else.

<<(O)>>