Diplomacy snippet 1

Okay, so, I goofed, I'd planned to post snippets Friday and through the weekend and forgot. Oops? No excuse (and yeah, I know that's an excuse.)

I should be sending this off to Goodlifeguide for final formatting today... with or without the borderline sinus migraine I'm currently fighting.

Anyway, here is the first.

Chapter 1

Virgin's Holes Pirate base

Commodore Obadiah Rogers checked his force as they recovered from the jump and then nodded quietly to himself. He listened with half an ear as his staff reported on the status of the task force. So far, everything was running smoothly and according to plan.

He had twenty ships in his force, far more than what had been used against Dead Man's Hand. From the look of things, it was indeed overkill but the Neodog wasn't going to complain.

He had four Mark III CEVs, including the Admiral Chūichi Nagumo, his flagship. There were four Resolution II class heavy cruisers, four North Hampton II class light cruisers, one tanker, one tender, two Drua class transports for the Marines, one personal transport, a Liberty class freighter, and two couriers.

Judging just from the neutrino and grav emissions that were coming in there weren't a lot of opposition in the star system to have to deal with. He was fairly confident most of them would run the moment they realized he was there.

All part of the plan he reminded himself.

He nodded and signalled assent when his chief of staff inquired about the next phase. As he silently watched, recon drones were deployed ahead of them. Only when they were six million kilometres out did the task force shake down and begin to move out with the cruisers taking point.

The two couriers, tanker, tender, freighter, and one CEV remained behind to watch the Cenarius jump point. No self-serving pirate would be going back that way.

As he watched, Vertigo peeled off as planned to cover the Tau-OX22 jump chain to Federation space. That meant the pirates had only two choices left to run to.

He frowned ever so slightly, not at what was going on but in brief reflection of switching from one hot seat to another. He still missed being in command of a ship like his beloved Remarkable. Being a flag officer meant even more headaches and paperwork. It also meant a lot more responsibility. If he got this wrong, a lot of people were going to die.

Fortunately, he had Belfast's detailed scans of the star system to work from. They were years out of date, but they were a starting point. Combined with intelligence gathered from prisoner interviews and captured database mining and they had a pretty good picture of what they were up against.

His mind turned to another concern. Once they completed the capture of the base, they would only have two pirate groups left to nail down. That inevitably brought him back to the bane of any flag officer's existence. Well, other than paperwork.

Politics he thought with a pang. He had thought he'd had enough of it as a skipper, interacting with internal navy politics while dealing with the Admiralty as well as external politics with interactions with civilian and the occasional civilian government in the star systems he visited. Politics were the bane of any serving military member's existence. There was a reason they all tried to steer well clear of such things.

Of the original expedition force, he and Janice Yu were the only ones to reach the exalted flag rank. They'd had a bit of a wrestling match to get their star, neither one of them had been aware of it at the time. Admiral Logan had been bumped to vice admiral, and Helen Richards had gotten her second star to be promoted to rear admiral. After that the brass had been ready to balk at anyone else getting a star in their command area. After all, the two ladies had gotten their additional stars well out of the zone—Helen for her work with stamping out the plagues, Shelby for her tireless work as the circus ringmaster.

They'd imported over twenty thousand people in two drafts from Rho sector. Unfortunately, they were not going to get anymore or any new warships for some time in the future. In fact, he was secretly worried that they might become victims of their own success. With the capture of this base, the powers that be might order a cutback on construction, especially after the disaster in Horath.

He grimaced. He'd lost a lot of good friends there. People who he'd gone to school with, people he'd served with. The pain was an old wound but still there.

But, with the disastrous end of the battle of Horath had come the need for the fleet to rebuild. The fleet was still reeling. Second Fleet was still in the process of rebuilding after the disaster of Horath so Tau had been thrust to the back burner.

This mission was long overdue. But even though it felt like they were finally getting down to it, he still didn't quite feel like it was over.

At least, not yet anyway.

“Forty ships are getting underway at the pirate base­­—correction, forty-two. Only seven had warm nodes.”

“Nice. And no picket either,” the commodore murmured. He assessed the situation and nodded. He could of course try to race for the other jump points in order to cut off their escape. That would force them into a running battle around the star system. Some of the ships might even jump out randomly in their desperation to get away.

Can't have that he thought. Besides, they can run but they were just going to go down tired in the end, one way or another.

“~~^V^~~”

Lieutenant JG Clay Petrov nodded to his squad of Raiders as they settled down for the briefing. He had recently been promoted off of the heavy cruiser Marlin when she'd gotten to port. He'd taken his squad with him.

They'd run all of the sims on the base on the way out. The Drua class ship they were on was nicely outfitted with sim rooms to be used as shoot houses. It also had extensive and some would say lavish computer support to allow them to run virtual sims and intelligence processing activities.

He looked over to Sergeant Jared Morales. The Neochimp Marine crossed his arms and wiggled his lips slightly as if he was suppressing a smile, which he probably was. Everyone was excited and eager.

“Okay, by now you've all read the plans and could probably navigate them in your sleep,” the lieutenant said, surveying the group. There was a chuckle from the assembly. “Tough.” That earned a groan. “We've got three days to practice and prep, and I'm going to make sure we got it down cold. Now …”

“~~^V^~~”