[Writing] Corgatha's Short stories.

[Corgatha Taldorthar]

Before I put down my first story here, I'd like to make a little introduction.

*clears throat and slowly sips a small glass of water held in my left hand*

There are two main reasons why I'm putting some stuff up in here. Firstly, I'm working on a novel. It's a huge pain in the butt. If you haven't already, you can look into the level of detail I put into the abortive World Of Aeroch RPG setting. The world I'm creating for the novel is about 10 times more detailed, and there's a light, but it's at the end of a very long tunnel. It's hard to keep my spirits up, and its hard to keep going with no sense of progress. So some smaller little projects taht I can say are "done" help me keep going.

The second reason is that it occurs to me that I haven't been a very good forumite. Obnoxious with my demands for attention and information, breaking a rule once, generally combatitive, etc. Replacing my personality with a more agreeable one would probably be the better choice, but sadly, that's one I don't know how to do. Sorry guys, you're stuck with me until I irk someone so badly that they ban me. So the new plan is to contribute somethign that will hopefully make the mixed bag experience more worthwhile for the rest of you.

Oh, actually, there is a third reason, that one being I'm a sublime egomaniac and I like praise . Bad Corg!


Anyway, this is a short story I wrote instead of paying attention in class. There will probably be more in store. They're sci-fi set in a near future. This first one goes through a bit of the first successful Jump to another star system and setting a kind of transmitter that can return signals to Earth. (Sort of like an Ansible for anyone whose read the Ender's game series)

So without further ado, I give you Achievement

***********************************************************************

                 There was a crack and a hiss as the transmission went through. Though the reception was worse than what would be accepted from a discount cell phone in a thunderstorm, an estimated six billion people, both worldwide and on the colonies at both Mars and the asteroid belt were gathered at a vast number of stations to hear the communication.
   It isn't every day that the first extra solar manned operation succeeds. Through the static, a mellifluous voice half spoke, half sang out "This is helmsman Gefram Valdez, pilot of the U.E.S.S. Explorer. We have reached a stable orbit of a half an AU around Barnard's star. We have dropped the beacon, and are within communication contact with home. The Hawking drive works.
   The next day, pundits would make jokes about the claims for insurance over hearing damage due to the noise of half of humanity cheering at the same time. At the moment though, those pundits were cheering themselves, except for one stout blond woman, with an odd heart shaped scar on her left cheek, who bent over to address her daughter and assure her that she too could be an astronaut when she grew up, and thinking about how impressionable six year olds were.
   Back aboard the Explorer, the excitement was present, but buried under a thick layer of professionalism. Gefram turned to the woman to his left, a petite, dark haired woman of about forty.
"I'm surprised there isn't more cheering. They were joking back home that half of humanity would be watching. This is something of  letdown."

"You moron. We won't be receiving all the stations we're transmitting to, only to the labs of a few half dead, foul smelling theoretical physicists who didn't pass their cardiogram tests. We should get His Britishness to speak to them."

"Damn political correctness. But you're right." He turned to his console and flicked a switch,  shouting at the screen he bellowed "Byron! Get your lazy ass up and to your communication system. You might be a lousy physicist, but you're what we've got, and it's your job to blather back and forth at them. Get to it."

"You could be a little less confrontational with him. I don't like him either, but belittling him every other time you open your mouth isn't going to make him work any harder."

"We've had this conversation before. The only reason he got on board is because he's photogenic and because jolly old England threatened to pull their resources from the Drive if we didn't include someone from their island. There have to be a dozen better physicists  that are healthy enough to travel, and even Vikran has a better personality. Where is he anyway?"

"He's been sulking for the past few hours. He made some sort of minor miscalculation for the Jump. Remember how we didn't quite get to the nadir point? I was in Medical, and I had to keep him away from anything dangerous. He was ranting and whining about how his miscalculation could have killed us all."

"Proud idiot. Has anyone ever made an entire jump calculation correctly without the aid of Fish or whatever the supercomputer is called? No. A bit of error is to be expected. How can someone be so good at math and so stupid?"

"He's a nineteen Gefram. He'll get a little less excitable as he ages. What were you doing at that age?"

There was a slam on the console. "Dammit Cheryl! You know I wasn't college educated like the rest of you snot nosed academics. And yes, I take pride in my ability to fly a craft. I don't need no stinkin sheepskin to do that. I don't need to be reminded how everyone here has an IQ of over 150 except me. Why don't you go talk to your genius friends over there?"

A long, tense silence ensued. The apologies came almost simultaneously, and there was another awkward moment of the two talking over each other, he shamefaced for his angry reaction, she for not being sensitive enough.

Another pause.

Finally Gefram broke the tension. "How about I put on some music, calm some stuff down."

"If you're going to play Space Oddity again, I have to warn you it stopped being funny after about the a hundredth time. How about something" She stopped for a brief while, barely perceptible by anyone except to those who knew her well. "Jazzy?"

" I'll put something by Armstrong on, hold on a sec while I fiddle with the computer. How's Joseph?"

"He's working at some factory, always complaining about how one day they'll build a robot to do what he does cheaper."


"Well, according to you, he's been saying that for nearly twenty years, and they haven't made a workable robot yet. I never understood what you saw in him."

Cheryl leaned back in her chair. She sighed deeply, and half closed her eyes. "I know what you're trying to drive at Gefram. He isn't as smart as I am, or even that smart period. But. I don't know how to say this."

She got up off her chair and paced around, looking at the floor and not the man she was speaking to. "Yeah, by most reckonings, he's the one who married *up*. But there's was always this quality to him. Yeah, I couldn't talk work with him, I couldn't talk most topics with him, except shockball.  He had those funny paranoid rants that weren't based in any sort of reality. But there was this vitality to him, like his life had purpose."

Her companion gave a nasty chuckle. "You could have just said he was good in bed. It's shorter that way."

She snarled, the twisting of her features marring a very attractive face. "I do not mean that! I'm not some adolescent. Look at Vikran, or Byron, or our doctor. They're all geniuses, even Byron. He might not be the best, but he'd still get a professorship at almost any university he likes unless one of a tiny handful of people wanted to chair there. You're the best pilot in the world. Hands down. I've lost track of how many times you've told over that seven kill sortie in the war. But look at us. Why do we need two psychologists on this mission? Two out of seven people! Joseph was a person, not a job crammed into a human body. And he was stable in a way that I think we'll never be because of it."

"Cheryl. I'm almost sixty. I'll be retiring after this mission. I had a long and illustrious career. I did manage to have a family, and although I didn't get a chance to see them much, that's going to change when we get home. I'm going to fish. I'm going to cast this weight off and be happy. And you know what? I'll be written about in history books. I'll live on after I discard this flesh. You think it's easy to get to where we are now? But we all worked hard for it. I for one think it was an investment worth making."

She slowly walked back to her chair, sitting slowly in the padded cushion. "I read your file, of course. You liked to play with airplanes as a child. You played.  When I was four, I took an exam. Never saw my score, but a man in a white lab coat said something about me being a prodigy, and convinced my parents to send me away to some boarding school. We never played, we worked. I'm no mathematician, but I was doing algebra at seven. I'm no sociologist, but we were studying the applications of irony and sarcasm at nine. I'm no chemist, or doctor, but I can give a fairly good dissertation on how reaction energy is what keeps a virus going, and how that new Inhibitor drug will, despite what the skeptics say, kill the common cold. Something never formed in me, and Joseph had it. That's it."

The tension persisted until someone came in to break it.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Interesting story. I presume it's going somewhere, because it's just a fragment so far...

[Corgatha Taldorthar]

It is and it isn't. Have you ever read the Foundation series? I was kind of planning on borrowing that format. A snapshot here and there, where you get a middle section of the characters lives, all the while depicting a society in flux, but not returning to these figures. These guys, they're done, except for a little note I have in the computer.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Hmmm.

I never really liked that particular format. I'd just get used to a story, and it'd stop being about people I knew, and changed to being about random other people.

Readable, but not engrossing, as it were.

[Corgatha Taldorthar]

First Contact

A burst of white light thinned, almost to a breaking point as the door closed with an almost inaudiable click. Once the portal was closed, there was only illumination from a pair of terminals, and a small strip of glowing blue material on the ceiling. A woman, short, stocky, with brown hair, streaked tastefully with grey down to her shoulders and dull green eyes swiveled on her chair, away from the terminal she was perusing to regard the newcomer.

He was tall, and almost skeletally thin, with a long oblong face that was all planes and hard angles. His skin was waxy and pale, and it seemed like it had been a wrapper placed on a package one size too large for it. He smelled ever so faintly of tabacco. He was clutching a manilla folder closely to his chest, which did not alter in its position in the slightest as he gave a jerky bow to the woman, who did not seem to notice his gesture.


After a moment her voice found utterance. It was brittle, edgy, like she was expected to break into sobs at any moment. "I want his head on a plate. Bring whatever's left of him back from Iskander so I can rip him apart personally."

"Madam Director, we have confirmation that the flagship was destroyed. Most likely in the second volley."

She sighed, bringing her left palm to claw at her forehead, but then thinking better of it. "I know Seth. I know. Just venting. What on earth possessed that idiot to do something like that? We lost a brand new fleet of  forty-"

"Thirty eight- Madam Director. Two jumps were confirmed by Barand City's station. In fact, they'll probably head there. More informa-"

"No amount of information is worth the loss of thirty eight scout ships. Do you know how much a Hawking drive costs? That sets us back what? The entire GDP of earth of a year? Please tell me I'll wake up in a few minutes."

"Madam Director, please. This is no time for levity. The one good thing abut this is that we don't think a Jump can be traced, so they won't know where we came from. if nothing else, we have a little time to hide"

"They..... Curse the day that probe picked up those transmissions, and good old Admiral Batbrain had to impress these aliens with the, what were his words? The puissance and technology of Earth and the will of the Universalist Confederation of Humanity.  Yes Seth, I've been replaying the battle, if you can call it that. Did Tactical manage to decipher enough of their transmissions to know what these things are?"

"Well, the electronic jamming was simple enough to break, but the language is proving a bit difficult. There's chatter in there about Sauracki, or something which our boys think is a name, but it's nothing definitive. Oh, and the preliminary consensus is that they're some sort of reptilian species, based on the ship design and the hissing noise they make to communicate. But that isn't relevant."

The woman stood up, a slow, deliberate gathering of height, although it didn't make her even close to being equal to her adjutant in stature. Still, the flashing in her eyes made it clear that mention of such inequality would be imprudent. "You are not to tell me what is relevant and what is not. You are to advise and inform, not to dictate policy. Is that clear?"

"Yes, Madam Director. " A pause. "But it remains. We need to do something. It's almost certain that they'll come looking for the people who shot Stiletto missiles at them, even if we did so ineffectively."

"Can we do anything? We outnumbered them over three to one, and we got sliced to ribbons. I'm sure you've seen the reports."

"Those ships weren't designed to fight a war. And they wouldn't cost all that much to redesign. The main cost in a starship is the Hawking drive. It wouldn't be that hard to up the power of the navigational shield or to put real missile racks on instaed of those puny Stilettos. The tecnology exists, we just never bothered to apply them to our exploratory vessels."

"But I don't control the treasury. We'd have to break the news to do that. Do you know a good way to break to the public that we've encountered an alien species and had our fleet practically wiped out?"

"If they fell back to Barnard's star, they'll be back on the planet in four days. We'll be able to keep any transmission quiet, but once a spacer gets to port, the cats out of the bag."

"Why do you always have to be so negative Seth? That's a problem for tomorrow. Lets get some sleep dear, it's past 1."

[Noone]

On First Contact:

I find it makes a lot of the same mistakes that Achievement does, it's a good introduction but not really a 'short story' as it is. For one, I find it very difficult to 'connect' to the characters. The physical descriptions are decent, but nothing really stands out in this piece. The ending seems more like an abrupt stop than an ending too, conversation is over, but there are just so many dangling threads in the writing that it isn't possible for a reader to piece them all together. This would be a good piece to build upon, much like Achievement, but on it's own, it just doesn't shine.

Anyways, to something else that I caught in your first post.

There are two main reasons why I'm putting some stuff up in here. Firstly, I'm working on a novel. It's a huge pain in the butt. If you haven't already, you can look into the level of detail I put into the abortive World Of Aeroch RPG setting. The world I'm creating for the novel is about 10 times more detailed, and there's a light, but it's at the end of a very long tunnel. It's hard to keep my spirits up, and its hard to keep going with no sense of progress. So some smaller little projects that I can say are "done" help me keep going.

I could understand if you didn't want to post something like that in public until it's done, but if you want to feel like you're doing something with that rather than just trying to reach for a light past an endless tunnel, I would suggest having some close friends read the pieces of it. Relatives probably aren't the best for this sort of thing unless they're literary scholars (which would be nice), since they may have the tendency to say everything you make is arbitrarily wonderful. Anyways, if you have a close-knit group of friends, you can have them read it without in a sense, 'spoiling' it for the big wide world. They may not be the best source of critique, but I imagine some input and possibly praise is better than none. You could keep feeding them the pieces by e-mail, or give them a hard copy when you see them next. If you're the type of writer that needs some bait in order to reach the end of a tunnel, yet are afraid of public scrutiny for some reason, then this seems like the best solution for you. At least, that's my take of your situation, from what you have written.

[Corgatha Taldorthar]

*slaps forehead*

You're not supposed to "connect" with the characters. They're placeholders, nothing more.  I was trying to send across a message that the success these people achieved was done at a sacrifice of the self, but maybe that got lost in the shuffle. I wasn't trying to make people, not complete people anyway. They've traded away their humanity to become tools, which was what I was trying to convey, especially with "First Contact" They don't talk like a husband and wife, not until the very end, when the work conversation is over.

  Another thing that occurs to me is that both of these are rewrites of something I put in earlier, where I had a much stronger narratorial voice. While I've since decided that I don't like a moralizing speaker viewing from above and commenting, I'm starting to think it works better than a flat descriptor for this sort of episodation.


But fine, if you don't like that, I'll try for a more "classic" tone. I've got one piece on the burner, which will probably be some odd hybrid of this style and a more usual one, and I'm starting up a piece called "Toskar-Grebb" which I think you guys will like more. (But I need to connect here to there, so this other short story has to go forward first)

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

If one doesn't connect with the characters, one should connect with the story. I think the point here is that the story style precludes the latter, and the characters themselves preclude the former...

Why, then, should we keep reading? (or so it goes)

If you can answer that in the next section, that'll be all good. If you're still losing readers after the third section of the prologue, there's something wrong...

[Corgatha Taldorthar]

I know it's been over two weeks, but I'm hoping I don't have to start a new thread, especially since the stories *are* supposed to connect to each other. Blegh, had a lot of junk on my plate, too much really. But the LSAT's are over, so my excuse for not writing dried up.

I like to call this one The Naked Light. I'd have used The Naked Sun, except that Asimov already claimed that one.

***********************************************************************

    The recreational room of the Angus was the only section on the ship that was well lit. Warship design generally was structured to conserve every last joule possible for entrance into either shields, computer function, or in the odd ships that outward planetary militias preferred to use, for the short range quark cannons. It wasn't an oversight. After the disastrous Fenhardt Directorate, the so called Pareing party came to power, and viewed inefficiency and oversight as a form of heresy. The lights were there because the navy psychologists insisted that no amount of training or conditioning could overcome the depressive effects  of staying in semi-gloom for months on end.
 
 So not only was the recreational room the only pleasant section aboard ship, regulations dictated that while no enemy ships were within sensor range, all personnel were to spend at least two hours in that lounge "relaxing".  It was a regulation that particularly annoyed Commodore Eckham.  He was younger than most men of his rank, something only noticeable in the lack of lines on his face and his jet hair untouched by grey. There was a severity to his features and an edge to his voice that caused his few friends to joke that he was born old. He was a harsh man, but most of his sternness was directed inwardly, and he often spared his crew reprimands that another officer would have given. He understood the use of relaxation, at least for his crew, but some sort of inner callous, a refusal to acknowledge weakness rather than strength could keep him going on its own power. Indeed, he feared that allowing himself to relax would collapse the one thing that kept him going through a career of battling aliens with faster and better armed ships.
   
So there were a few cheers when he darkened the doorstep of the lounge, but there were a few surprised stares when he ordered an alcoholic drink and sat down next to George MacVarran, the lead engineer of the missile bays and asked him how he was doing. MacVarran was a transferee off the Dove, a support destroyer which got slagged over Tocularis Three, in a skirmish with the Saurischi two weeks after he switched to the cruiser Angus. His official rank was a Chief Petty Officer, but such ranks didn't mean the same thing amongst the engineering section, who tended to form their own hierarchies. Along with the civilian going by the moniker of Shotglass at the bar, he was the only man aboard who was over forty. He was a crusty, somewhat bitter man, distinctly aware that his knowledge was fast becoming obsolete and that while retiring at his rank was honorable, he wouldn't have much in the way of funding after his skills went down the way of obsolete technology like fission and ICEs.
   
He raised a glass of some foul smelling green substance and motioned for his superior to sit down by him. "Cap'n. Can't have the brats spoiling our discussions. There aren't any emergencies aboard, are there?"
Eckham groped awkwardly with his booze, took a sip while sitting down. As an afterthought, he mumbled an "at ease" and took off his command visor, the piece of technology that integrated a few of his neural functions to the ships computer. It was what made him commodore, and his removing it meant that he was seeing, but no longer with the eyes of officialdom. "No, we're rotating out to Izar, away from the frontline."
   
"And so we survive again Co..chief. Although part of me thinks that we should have plastered them as a follow up after we took Iskandar. They were reeling when we managed to close with their fleet, and we've always been able to build more ships than they were. I doubt they'd have much of a fleet, but we gave them a chance to rebuild and dithered."
 
 Eckham gave a dry chuckle and raised his glass, although he didn't take another sip. "Is that the booze or simply being out of touch with reality again? We didn't have the Broadside mines back then. Taking a little under defended isolated colony was one thing, and that took fifty thousand marines a year. Taking one of their industrialized planets? Impossible. And they had those orbital drone ships, turning them out a hundred a day. Useless in space, but enough in an atmosphere. They would have sliced up huge segments of our fleet trying to drop in. Besides, what would we have to gain? We spend trillions of credits and millions of lives beating them. You willing to exterminate their species so we can settle those eight saunas ourselves?"
   
The engineer nodded, gulped at his drink, ordered another. "I guess that's why you're a Commodore boss." His statement was cut off as his superior officer stood up suddenly, quaffed his drink in four gulps, gave a slight shudder as he put down his glass and took up his visor, stalking away from the recreational room in a silent fury. The scowl on his face drove the normal hallway traffic to either side as he stomped his way to his cabin. Upon entering, he navigated in the dark, putting down his visor and entering a short command into the terminal not to admit anyone into the cabin or any message unless there was a type three emergency or they dropped into Izar. He hurled himself onto the pallet and drifted......... 


 
Eckham's biometrics, like that of all of the officers, was entered into the ships computer, and at the access of the medical bay. Exactly six minutes and  forty seven seconds before dropping out of warp at one AU above the plane of rotation outside the Izar system, a mild inhaled stimulant was released into his quarters. He awoke, as he always did when he instructed the computer to awaken him, with a light itch behind his eyes but no sense of grogginess.  Despite having no physical reason for the sensation, he still felt weary as he turned on the lights and reached for his command visor. He felt a guilty twinge as he spent more time affixing the equipment to his temples than was strictly necessary.
   
Thankful that the crew couldn't see him  in his supposedly weak state, he barked out into the communicator with more harshness than was his wont, "Helm, scanners up, sitrep! This might be behind the lines but we're still at war people. Contact the Peregrine's Nest." He instantly regretted using the colloquial term for the asteroid station.
   
Structurally, Izar was built a lot like the home solar system. Most of the mass was in a yellow star, with one super-large gas giant with most of the extra solar mass. There were two inner planets, and then an asteroid belt formed from the gravitational tug of war between the two blobs of hydrogen, with a smaller gas giant further out filling out the planetary list. Eckham couldn't remember the mining corporation that first started extracting iron from the rocks, but they had as a company logo of a peregrine falcon in flight. During the war, one of the abandoned mining stations was refitted, and turned into a minor fortress and refueling station.
 
   "Tell them that we need another three tons of propellant, and ask them how many volley drones they have in stock. Sensors, what other ships are in the system? Transfer the data to the terminal in my quarters. Helm, take us to the station. We're not in a rush, calculate the drift we'd need to reach the station in a day." Although not a mathematician himself, Eckham started thinking through calculations. 2.5 AU's to the station from our position more or less, to reach there in a day we'd have to go at.... A beep from his terminal interrupted his reverie. Eckham sat down at his chair and started scanning the files sent over to him on the other ships in the system.
 
    Eckham grumbled as he looked over the readouts of the five other ships in the system. Each colony built its own ships to its own specifications, and often the coordination of force often wasn't even given lip service. This hodgepodge of vessels was a textbook case. The Brawler and the Slasher were built here, in the Izar system. With low quantities of raw materials and relative difficulty of normal supply establishment out here, they were loaded up  with energy weapons, quark fields particularly, only effective at ranges under 300,000 kilometers. Reinforcing them were two Barnard Star missile ships,  the Aggregator and the  Adjudicator  each armed with four tubes with the Plasmalance series missiles. In space, missiles accelerate constantly, and so are moving fastest and at their most deadly the instant before their automatic timers went off. Protecting them was the Buckler, a ship loaded out with advanced ECM devices and dumbfire point defense missiles. But hitting a missile is no easy business, and those point defenses were only good at ranges similar to the quark fields. So either the ships would have to bunch up, limiting their abilities to fire most effectively at a massed foe, or would have to split up and leave one picket unprotected.
 
 He was vaguely troubled. Five destroyers was a lot for a position this far behind the front. Peregrine station didn't have enough supplies to support any sort of major build up, so secretly massing for some offensive seemed unlikely either. 6 ships was considered the minimum for a real defensive formation, and Eckham had been hearing some troubling rumors. He thought they might just be that, rumors, but maybe the Saurischi were gearing up for some major offensive across a wide front. Defensive missions were always the most dangerous; as there was no known way to detect an incoming fleet more than half an hour before dropping out of warp, and no real way of "digging in" like those marines Eckham had occasionally transported always talked about.

   At least the other ships were all up to readiness, and rapidly maneuvered themselves into a loose sphere around the Angus. While this furthered Eckham's nagging suspicion that he was about to be ordered into some sort of covert offensive or desperate stand somewhere, the strong professional force in him appreciated seeing military vigilance, even in the absence of a visible threat.

    A click in his visor, and a message splays across his view screen "Commodore Eckham, emergency transmission from the station. Report to the bridge immediately." Eckham quickly changed into a commodore uniform, decided against shaving for the nonce, and dashed to his command section. With the visor, it wasn't really as necessary as it would have been in some of the older ship, but protocol dictated that important messages and command decisions were made from the bridge.

   He arrived behind his command desk, slightly out of breath from the run to the bridge. Barking at his helmsman "Open channel!" He turned to the view screen and waited for a moment. When no immediate response was forthcoming, he stated, "This is Commodore Eckham of the War Cruiser Angus. You have initiated an emergency transmission to us. Please state your message."

    A moment passed.

   No picture of anyone came on screen, but a haggard voice rasped through to the Angus "We're sorry Commodore, we're trying to broadcast at all six ships simultaneously, and our equipment isn't all that good. A minute please." Thirty seven seconds later, the voice rang out, with a stilted tone that implied a man trying to keep himself from screaming. "We've detected incoming warp signatures, without corresponding notice from Command or any of the independent trading unions. There are fifty, that is, five oh signatures. Fifty enemy ships are incoming, and they are most likely hostile Saurischi vessels. They will be here in an hour or so.  Commodore Eckham, you are the highest ranking officer here; I implore you to order an evacuation of the system. There's no way we can hold out against fifty Slizzies."

   Eckham's response was cold, distant, aristocratic " Discontinue your use of slang, and prepare any defensive satellites you might have. I will confer with the captains of the destroyers here before making a decision."

    Switching the channel away from the station and to the other vessels, he stated. "I do not believe these are Saurischi vessels. Even at their height, before Iskandar, they never managed to put a fleet together with fifty vessels. I don't think they have the industrial capacity to put that many ships together, not with the losses they've been taking. No, I'd bet anything that this is some new species bumping into us. We'll form a light cordon, on the plane of rotation, as close to the primary as we can safely get. Hopefully, they'll appear either above or below the plane." He switched the communicator to his own ship "Engineering, prepare the Volley Drones for deployment."

   The volley attack drone was the miracle weapon that some say turned the tide against the Saurischi. Although it was technically classified as a missile, it was really more of a small ejected platform, a tube floating through space. It was tiny, at least relative to a warship, and hard to pick up on hostile scanners, especially with the jamming that was a standard part of warfare. It had a limited AI and could contact the home vessel that launched it, and it would pick up as much data as it could on enemy ships and fire at them autonomously, although again fire could be directed from the home ship.

   As the ships maneuvered into position, Eckham bit his lower lip. He wasn't certain what he meant to accomplish. Unless these warp signatures were noncombatant vessels or as puny as the first human starships constructed, there was no way that his little picket fleet could hope to stop them. If they were Saurischi, they would all be dead in a matter of minutes. If they weren't, it was important to gather as much information about their ship design and tactics as he'd be able to. As an afterthought he contacted Peregrine station and told them to evacuate all non-defense personnel and pull them back to the home system, and to keep a man on their sensor and communication room to transmit any battle footage to Earth for future planning.

    The remaining thirty five minutes passed by like an ephemeral dream. Commodore Eckham tightly gripped the back of the chair his sensor technician stood at, and wasn't aware how heavily he was breathing. When the technician's voice rang out, it was like the breaking of brittle crystal, and Eckham once again trembled at how vulnerable his tiny picket seemed.  "Multiple contacts, we have fifty, five oh contacts. All 1.34 AU from the nadir point of the system primary.  Attempting to hail." A pause. "No response, no indication they can interface with our comm."

   Commodore Eckham tapped into his visor, looked at the sensor readings. "Cease hail. They've got some sort of communication net webbing in between all of their ships . They don't seem to have any receptacle for an outside communication. Get me the captains." He waited. "Maintain our current distance from their fleet. Lets try to see what their ships are like and how they move. If they move toward us, fall back on the plane of the rotation, but don't retreat past the first planet without my express order. Analyze movement." The demand was half given to his crew, but more importantly to the ship computer. If they couldn't communicate with this new species, they would have to divine their intentions through more direct actions.

  Data started flowing in through his visor. No visual contact yet, but electromagnetic probing of their energy shields revealed both strength of the force field, the rough volume of the craft, and an estimate of the mass. Most of the ships, forty according to the computer, were tiny craft, maybe a tenth of the mass of the destroyers, with a pathetic screen that could deflect a micrometeor, but no weapon that a human vessel mounted should have much difficulty penetrating. If these things were anything close to the same size that humans were, they'd have to be one person craft. Eckham ordered the computer to label these craft "scouts" until further notice. 5 more were oddly linear, massing twice that of the Angus , and were much more heavily shielded.  They were quickly christened "battleship" one through five. The remaining five dwarfed even the battleships, but had shielding more comparable to the tiny scouts. Eckham was almost certain that they were transports of some sort, and tentatively labeled them as "Tanker" one through five. Oddly, all the ships moved at the exact same velocity, almost in defiance of the basic tenants of physics. Thankfully, they were slow, only about 60% of the speed of the Angus, unless they were deliberately moving at a slow pace.  Eckham ordered the computer to send all of the above data to Peregrine station and to relay it back to Sol.

   Opening a line to the captains of the other ships, he uttered out a short command "Follow my lead, maintain formation." To his crew, he barked, "Weapons, deploy the volley drones, and move the Angus a hundred thousand kilometers above the plane of the ecliptic. Stand by to manually fire the drones. I don't want them going off if they don't appear hostile."  Eckham fought the urge to pace.
On the sensor screen, the alien fleet divided up into 5 parts. Eight scouts formed around each tanker, and headed to one of the four planets in the system, the fifth, which was accompanied by all five battleships, was headed towards the Izar system's asteroid belt.

Now, Commodore Eckham was a very stolid, very practical man. He achieved his rank through gut, determination, and hard work. He wasn't stupid by any means of the word, and his academic record showed him to be extremely intelligent. But he wasn't given to flashes of brilliance that one notices readily, his was the intelligence of always remembering what he knew, always maintaining his core rate of thought no matter what pressure was brought to bear. Today, he had an epiphany, a brilliant flash of insight, that almost made him go weak in the knees with the force of the thoughts blasting through his mind.

Opening another hail to his five destroyer escort, he had to mentally chastise himself to keep the excited edge out of his voice. "The huge ships. They're colonist ships. There are five bodies in this system, if you count the asteroid belt. They're sending one ship to each, with the battleships to clear out our own people." A pause, while another implication worked through his brain. "Although central command has no protocol for dealing with unknown alien species, the occurrence being fairly rare so far, it is obviously not in our interest to allow Xenoforms, with whom we cannot communicate, to establish outposts so close to our home system. Those colony ships must go down.  I realize it's only six of us against fifty of them, with their capabilities unknown to boot, but if their weapons and ECM are on the same level that their shields and propulsion is on, we  should be able to dive in, slash at our targets, and run. We'll be able to dictate the range of this battle. Buckler, form up on the Slasher and the Brawler in a chevron formation. You will be force A. Same goes with the Angus to the Aggregator and the Adjudicator I'm transmitting the plan to your computers."

Commodore Eckham's fingers flew like mad as he put in the trajectories that the ships were to follow. Essentially, both forces would race back to the plane of rotation, Force B's destroyer pair slowing down to the pace of the Angus on a direct path, whereas Force A would take a slightly more elongated path to the alien force. The idea was for force B to fire first, drawing attention away from the armada, so that the two quark boats could swoop in and burn out the colony ships. The nine drones would only activate if enemy ships got too near them. Commodore Eckham wanted to leave that as a nasty little surprise if he could.

In tune with the visor, Eckham didn't bother to keep track of the numbers that glittered down the rangefinder, simply waiting for the mathematical jumble to turn from red, out of range, to green, in range. "All missiles, fire. Concentrate on the scout ships.  Still gazing into his command visor, Commodore Eckham watched as the tiny orange balls that represented projectiles lanced from the three ships into the armada. Interestingly, the aliens did not fire in return until after two of their scouts had been turned to dust. The response  was a scintillating mass of purple, at least to the visor. Eckham gave a grim smile when he saw that the Buckler was firing some interception missiles, despite them being less than effective at that range. "Thank you Buckler, but make sure to cover your own two charges first. They're the key to pulling this off.

The missiles themselves were woefully inaccurate. The computers estimated that while maneuvering for battle, these missiles would have a 7% chance of striking, and that is without interference or any ECM measures. Only three of the 152 fired struck his task force, the shields repelling the concussive force without too much trouble. Also interesting was that the "battleships" did not fire at all. Either they were armed with more close ranged weapons, or as Commodore Eckham was beginning to suspect, were strictly planetary bombardment devices, intended to pummel population centers to rubble with some weapon akin to the Broadside mine. "Ignore the midsize ships, concentrate solely
on the scout craft.

  Unfortunately, the aliens weren't complying with his plan. Firing all the while, they were wheeling their fleet to intercept the force angling towards the colony ships. Eckham shouted into his comm line "Aggregator, Adjudicator, I know the plasmalances are more effective at long range, but break formation  and dart into their formation at flank speed. We'll follow as best we can. Try to get into range that you can hit their colony vessels.

The aliens were definitely trying to protect their colonists. The bulk of their force, some thirty of the little ships, angled back to intercept his two madly charging destroyers. This time, they displayed more cunning, and fired all of their missiles on the Adjudicator. The concentration of fire and the shorter range made short work of the hapless destroyer, which simply ceased to exist under the barrage.

Commodore Eckham felt that the loss of the ship should dismay him, but it seemed distant, ephemeral. It was the damn visor he decided with a snarl, all it would let him see is a line of statistics, not real people. "Fire all volley drones at will, and activate the ones left as dummies. Task force A, are you in position yet? We're in trouble out here." He knew that Task force A was 557,913 kilometers from the closest colony ship when he uttered his last syllable, but a desperate scrabbling part of him needed to hear the terse "Not yet Commodore. We will be in range in twenty seven seconds"

Twenty seven seconds. Glancing at an inventory screen, he saw that despite their inability to restock at Peregrine base, the Angus had enough volley drones to fire in all nine racks continuously for that long. The Alien vessels were starting to split their fire, the larger warships still remaining silent. The bulk of it was now turned towards Task force A, and being intercepted by the Buckler's Watchmen interceptors. Every so often a little ship would burst like an overfilled balloon on contact with a plasmalance missile, and soon the volley drones started firing their tiny stiletto class projectiles themselves, adding to the carnage. Commodore Eckham felt a grim satisfaction at noting that the damage to task force A was spread out, with no ships down, and already nine of the enemy ships were nothing but ionized dust.

However, Commodore Eckham sensed it wouldn't be enough, and the visor seemed to agree with him, that at the present rate, the little picket A would be annihilated before they could hit the colony ships. He needed another distraction........ Glancing once more at the visor, he ordered it to show all the positions of the volley drones. A few were winking out, courtesy of alien  fire, but a surprising number of them were still broadcasting signals, although the earlier ones had run out of their own ammunition.

Keying the comm once again, Commodore Eckham shouted, this time not even trying to hide the edge in his voice "MacVarran, get on line to the missile controls from wherever the bloody hell you are. I need you to take over pod  BX12CTheta, and get it to fire on that closest colony ship. I doubt you'll be able to hit it from this range, or pierce its shields if you do, but we need them to be focused on us.

Sweat poured down Eckham's brow as the timers toward doom ran down. Twenty seconds till Picket A was in range, 13 till they were destroyed at the present rate. Two for George MacVarran to shoulder aside a young missile operative, staring at his terminal that was doing all the work guiding the drone, and push him to the floor with a clatter. Another second and a half to order the drone to switch targets from a damaged scouting vessel to one of the colossal, brick shaped colony vessels. Four seconds after that, a missile burst 5000 kilometers off the starboard bow of one of the massive edifices of biologically created plastics and titanium. It was a miss, but close enough of one that whatever was controlling the aliens ships identified the drone as a primary threat and obliterated it in a withering hail of fire. Then they traced the signals that were directing it, and turned the wrath of their fire upon the Angus Two seconds after that alarm klaxons were blaring on the bridge of the War Cruiser.

Commodore Eckham's visor disconnected from the damaged computer, and he tore the
disgusting thing from his face. He could hear pressure bulkheads closing, trying to contain atmosphere in the ship. He thanked the designers at Tenryk shipyards for including an armored hull, in addition to the energy shields, and ordered his helm to roll so that their relatively undamaged starboard side (their port had taken the brunt of the fire) faced the enemy.

Static hissed over the communications array. " Brawler......  we're hur...... success....... managed to nail............. withdrawing. Hoping he could be heard, and compensating for damage to his comm by shouting, Eckham bellowed "All remaining ships fall back to Sol. We've accomplished our goal here."


Four hours later, safely in warp space with the three surviving destroyers limping with the Angus Eckham sat in his quarters, admiring a tiny Saurischi statuette, of one of their lizardmen leaning backwards, arms raised to precisely its head level, staring intently but mindlessly above and to its fore. It was something looted by a marine on Iskandar, and through a series of less than legal transactions, Eckham had managed to acquire it. He always thought it was a religious, or perhaps just spiritual icon. He sat and admired the sculpture, thinking about the future.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

FWIW, Art Forum threads get an exception for their authors to the two week rule. Provided you don't go absolutely silly about it.

[Noone]

I found the third story to be far better than your first two. Firstly, I think the length was better, the first two were really too short to get into, plus the paragraphs were a good deal thicker, packed with far more detailed. I found the events to be more engrossing too, with a somewhat chilling excitement once he figures out they're colony ships.
I also get the feeling you spent a good deal more time and effort on that one, just noting the times of posting and all.