“Huh.”
Flight looked up at Willow’s utterance. “What is it?”
“Remember those idiots we dueled?” Willow asked, glancing up.
She nodded. “I do.”
“When I backplotted their base course, it seemed to be a pretty close match to a direct course to the Enterprise. Now that we’ve found it, and confirmed the presence of two pirate cruiser guards, I did it again- it was a direct course. The ship behind them was a freighter, apparently- and those idiots would have arrived about three days before us, on our original flight profile.”
Flight nodded. “Meaning, the mission would have been a failure,” she muttered. She sighed, gazing out the front window at the distant asteroids, amongst which her sensors told her the Enterprise could be found, with two pirate cruisers waiting to catch anything coming from in-system. “Good thing we deviated, then.” She sighed. “I’d rather not attack those two cruisers unless we have to- what are our options?” She glanced up at the rest of her bridge.
Skies studied her panel. “They’ve got line-of-sight to the Enterprise, but it doesn’t look like they’re too worried about asteroids drifting between it and them,” she observed. “We might be able to hide behind one and snap up the Enterprise while it’s hiding us.”
“There won’t be anything acceptably large passing by like that for a month or so,” Willow muttered. “Looks like one recently did exactly that, so now it’s moving in the wrong direction.” She glanced up. “If they’re not tracking the asteroids to be sure nobody moves them around, we could easily direct it over and use it.”
“The part I find interesting,” Blacklight said suddenly, “is that these are not the same pirates as we met earlier.” She tapped a couple of keys. “The flags are different- and I want to say those cruisers aren’t ordinary pirate cruisers.”
“Really…?” Willow asked, her Hands fluttering across her panel. “Oh wow, you’re right. But what the hay are two Equineothame Navy High Cost-class cruisers doing under a pirate flag?”
Flight let out a snort of laughter. “The High Cost class?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Willow nodded.
“You know about them?” Skies asked, raising an eyebrow.
She nodded. “Yes. King High Cost of Equineothame personally ordered the designers of that class to cut as many corners as possible to keep the price down.”
“Huh,” Willow blinked. “No wonder the Navy doesn’t use them. Maybe this is where they keep disappearing to?” She paused. “The sensor suite on it looks like it’s been upgraded.”
“Their comms security hasn’t,” Blacklight observed. “Just breached their comms. Sounds like one of them really wants to go home, and the other is reminding him to wait until the ‘Boss’ arrives tomorrow.”
“We don’t have much time,” Flight observed.
“Their electronic defenses are trash too,” Blacklight observed. “Well, unless I wanted to take control of something, everything is locked down there. But… Yeah, they’re not tracking the asteroids. We can safely move them around.”
“Alright,” Flight said, and took a deep breath. “Let’s do it.”
“All inside!” somepony cried.
Flight immediately punched the button to close the ventral cargo bay doors, and tapped the maneuvering thrusters. That call meant that everypony was back inside her ship proper, and she wasn’t going to lose anypony if she accelerated- and she already knew from her readouts that the Enterprise was securely locked in place by the docking clamps in her main cargo bay.
Finally, she touched the throttle back again, and brought her ship down to ‘land’ on the massive asteroid once again. They had pulled it off- they had seized the Enterprise while out of sight behind a drifting asteroid they’d directed past.
Silence held for several minutes.
“They haven’t noticed a thing,” Blacklight observed calmly.
“That must be their ‘boss’,” Willow observed.
Flight looked, and winced. “Yikes. Are they also Equineothame classes?” It was a good few hours after their operation had succeeded, and they were- slowly- accelerating away from the area, with a couple of recon drones trailing behind them.
“Uh… Yeah. None currently in service, though- either ancient mothballs or new designs ordered by King High Cost and never adopted. Still, though- twelve superdreadnoughts, twenty dreadnoughts, and about two hundred assorted smaller classes.”
“Range three light-seconds,” Skies observed. “We’re only barely outside their missile envelopes, but they’ve probably got thirty-two artillery cannons in there.”
“They’ve noticed Enterprise is missing,” Blacklight observed.
“Radar pulse!” Willow cried suddenly.
“Polarize!” Flight ordered, punching a button she’d pre-configured to instantly set the throttle up to maximum fully-compensated thrust.
“This’ll keep us out of LOS!” Astral Eye injected, tapping buttons at her own console.
It took Flight about three seconds to order her navigation computer to follow Astral’s twisting course along the asteroid field.
“Arty inbound!” Willow cried, then paused. “Six rounds deflected, twelve more missed.”
“They must be lacking any true tactical talent,” Skies observed. “Eighteen rounds fired while the ships were still turning, no time for proper aiming. Only one of those rounds would’ve passed within a kilometer of us if we hadn’t polarized the hull, and even then it wouldn’t have hit.”
“And now they’ve got only fourteen shots left,” Flight observed. “Unless they’ve upgraded their power grids quite significantly.” She sighed. “Had we been in the Dawnbreaker, we could’ve set her up on a lateral spin and given them a literal hail of artillery, but she’s not done yet.”
“That kind of tactic would be a very bad idea,” Willow observed. “You never want to get your ship into a spin on anything other than its own central axis- if you do that, you lose motive power and make all your point defense solutions that much more difficult.”
“Uh… Okay,” Flight observed. “So we wouldn’t.” She scowled. “If they fire any artillery that looks like it might hit, use anti-stealth mode for a few seconds.”
“Anti-stealth mode?” Skies asked.
“Our polarizers are ridiculously powerful,” Flight answered. “Anti-stealth is what the engineers called the most effective- and detectible- run mode, where even artillery becomes an easy point defense solution.”
Willow chuckled. “Eh, standard anti-artillery doctrine is working well right now. We’ve got a full second and a half after they fire to calculate its trajectory and intercept it- and now that we’ve got sensor lock on all of their artillery weapons, we can accurately predict when they will fire- I’ve never seen arty cannons as telegraphic as theirs, but I’ll take it.” She grinned. “And a missile can accelerate fast enough to cover multiple large ships from a single round in that time. Combine the three, and their shots are easy point defense solutions even without the polarization. That’s why nobody uses artillery at close range any more.”
“Except these idiots,” Flight observed. “What happens if the missile misses?”
“That’s why you launch multiple missiles for each incoming arty round, then back that up with energy fire if it gets close.” Willow grinned. “I’m eight for eight right now.” She glanced down. “With sixty missiles, so far.”
“You mean they’ve only got six left?”
“Three,” Willow corrected. “Three of them fired when they didn’t even have LOS. Oh, there goes the fourth one, wasting its shot against some innocent asteroids.” She sighed. “And… Artillery duel is over, unless we want to turn around to unleash a few of our own, or stick around for some other reason.”
“Let’s just get out of here,” Flight decided. “And I think we can also turn the engineers loose on the Enterprise.”
“Well,” Willow sighed. “Now that we’re well and truly lost once again, where do you want to go, Princess?”
Flight sighed. She and Willow had just started their shifts on the bridge a few minutes before; Willow had spent that time studying her panel. “Home. But in such a way that we’re not likely to be attacked out of the blue again. I don’t really care how long it takes, so long as we’re alive.” It didn’t exactly help that the entire crew had developed lasting headaches after visiting the Enterprise; Mending Shade, the Thestral medic, was no exception, and had no idea what was causing the headaches.
“Got it,” Willow nodded, and started tapping keys.
“Alright,” Willow announced. “I’ve got us a retirement vector.”
Flight looked up; it had been a little over an hour after she’d told Willow she wanted to go ‘home’. “Alrighty then,” she began. “Whatcha got?”
Willow sent it up to her panel as well. “We start out by continuing our current periodic evasive maneuvers for another couple weeks, then turn against the plane of the system, reduce speed, point ourselves back in-system, and allow ourselves to fall back in-system like a comet, under silent running rather than just stealth. We’ll also look like a derelict to anyone that sees us. I noticed this POI you have saved, and it shouldn’t be too hard to hit it on the way in.”
Flight blinked. “That POI is the base of the pirates that killed my sister,” she observed.
Willow looked up. “You mean the ones that got River killed?”
She nodded. “Yes, the ones that started that battle.”
“Okay then,” Willow muttered, studying her panel. She tapped a couple keys to throw a whole bunch of dots of light onto the screen, scattered about the asteroid belts, and to color-code the projected course by what looked like distance. “These are the locations of all the Equineothame-run long-range comms relay sats, and on the green parts of that course, we’ll be in range to hit one with an encrypted message for someone back home. If I…” She tapped a few more keys, and little time labels appeared at each point the path changed colors. “Aaand, that’s how long anypony on Equineothame will have after receiving it, if we transmit at those locations, before we arrive at that pirate base.” She paused, then clicked a few more buttons. “And how long they will have after receiving our message before they have to leave to meet us at the pirate base, at Navy peacetime speeds.”
Flight rubbed her chin with a hoof. “The first contact window is in a week and a half, it looks like,” she muttered, “and they’ll have quite a while to respond.”
“About two and a half months, yes,” Willow agreed. “You want to plan on that?”
“I think we’re going to want to talk to the crew first,” Flight muttered. “You’re absolutely right, I won’t be going in without Navy backup, but I also want to be sure the soldiers are ready and willing to infiltrate that base to recover any prisoners they might still have.” She took a deep breath. “In either case, I would be staying on the bridge to offer missile support, while the Navy provides artillery.”
“In that event, I’ll stay with you here,” Willow nodded. “I won’t do much but slow the soldiers down.”
“Uh, Admiral?”
High Admiral Timber Wolf looked up at the comms officer; they had just completed a full-vessel simulated exercise. “Yes?”
“We’ve just downloaded a long-range transmission from the Princess. It’s flagged as personal.”
“Personal?” she asked, tilting her head. “Huh. Forward it to my quarters, please.”
“Good evening, High Admiral.” Princess Flight was smiling at her from the front of an empty room that looked like the unholy offspring of an aircraft cockpit and a warship bridge. “I’m sorry it’s been so long, but when the engines went nuts on us on our testing voyage, the comms suite took the brunt of the damage. In any case, as you can probably tell, we got the comms running again, and the engines too- though only barely, so it’s still going to be quite a while before we get back home.”
She scowled as the Princess continued with her meaningless drivel, and looked down at her panel. Was the Princess really so starved of communication that she’d send her a message like this? No wonder it was flagged as personal! The text layer probably carried her expected course, so she could respond in kind without losing transmissions to signal decay.
As expected, it was encrypted- but it took her three tries to decrypt it.
It wasn’t any normal encryption that she might have expected. Rather, it was encrypted against her personal high security key, used for top-security messages from the Royal Family that only she could decrypt.
And it didn’t carry course information at all. The message was very short and to the point.
The Princess wanted an artillery squadron at a specific point in space and facing in a specific direction at a specific time. She checked her chrono, and the celestial map bolted to the wall, and nodded. She had about… Two, maybe three months before she would have to leave… if she used a straight-line path, which the secrecy of the message certainly suggested would be a bad idea.
She heaved a sigh, and looked up again as the Princess’ meaningless drivel came to an end, and playback finally finished. “You’ve gotten good at this, Princess,” she muttered, and leaned back. She had yet to replace Willowstone on her bridge, so the tactical station remained empty…
But she herself had once been an exemplary tactical officer. If over eighty percent of the Navy could get away without any tactical talent on their ships at all, she could make do with her own talents.
She leaned forwards again, slaved the tactical system to her panel, and started planning.
But how would she get them out? Wait, no, that was easy. The Princess had explicitly authorized a live-fire exercise. She would just… She smiled. She’d just ‘forget’ to drop target beacons, or even tell the beacon teams where they were supposed to be, and count on the Princess to provide targets when the time came.
There wasn’t any other reason for her to ask so specifically for artillery.
She rubbed her chin. She hadn’t put any limits on the exercise- and half the Fleet would be just as easy to hide in deep space as only a single squadron. So, if she picked her ships based on trustworthiness, then took as many as she could find… Yes, whatever the Princess needed artillery for, two and a half thousand such vessels should be more than enough. She’d have to be careful, though, to make sure that only the officers she trusted knew the true intent- not even the crews of their ships!
She looked down at her panel. With nearly five months to get to the target location, it wouldn’t be hard to subjugate the entire tactical network to her bridge console, and even use ships with un-trusted crews. That would let her avoid breaking up the Fleet in a strange way- and she could even spoof the Fleet’s navigation systems, so any traitors wouldn’t realize what they were doing until it was too late to send a warning.
She grinned. Thanks to the Princess’ official authorization, she could actually teach her people a thing or two without fighting a life-or-death battle with those that were supposed to be her allies!