Into the Black

(War Room, Aurum Throni, Inner Throne, Terran Orbit)

Fleet Admiral Yamamoto breathed a sigh of relief as the messages began coming in. The opening days of the war had not gone well for the Empire. The Imperium had struck without warning, with only a few picket ships being able to sound the alert before they were destroyed.

That alert had enabled the defense fleets to start moving to the targeted systems. But only one had managed to get in place in time. The others moved quickly, but the Ihm had unleashed a new weapon to disrupt Transition drives. A whole fleet had been knocked out of commission before the fight even began.

Things had only gone from bad to worse from there. Three systems were cut off, and the Navy was forced to play cat and mouse with the larger Ihm fleets. Two of the initially targeted systems had been lost. Massive rifts into Hellspace had been opened, and, at last report, those systems were in the process of being drawn into that chaotic dimension.

Worse still, from a tactical point of view, was that the three primary naval bases along the border had been wiped out. While the Navy had been responding to the enemy, the Ihm had used Hellspace to slip ships behind the lines and strike at the barely defended bases. All three had been destroyed.

Normally, there would have been more ships to defend the borders and the bases, but the Civil War had decimated large sections of the fleet. While the losses in superdreadnoughts had been relatively minor, the smaller ships, like the destroyers and frigates and corvettes, had been savaged by the infighting. In total, before the Ihm attacked, the Navy had already been at almost 60% of its previous strength, and that is with the new hulls coming off the lines at the shipyards, a process that had slowed considerably due to all the damage to the Empire’s infrastructure and manufacturing that the two sides had caused.

Of course, getting new hulls was only half the problem. The real bottleneck in rebuilding the fleet was in getting trained officers in place. Enlisted spacers could be found and trained easily enough, but training an officer to lead a ship into battle, much less taking a squadron or fleet into a war zone, was no simple matter.

The destruction of the Naval Academy was a heavy blow. Sure, other officer training grounds had been hurriedly established, but the loss of the teachers was keenly felt. There were still plenty of brilliant officers in the Navy, but many of them could not be risked away from their current commands, with the dearth of qualified replacements. And those who had the skills to teach what the Navy needed the new officers to know were a rare breed.

So, no, the opening days of the war had been far from pleasant, as far as the Navy was concerned. The Ihm had outplayed them, pure and simple. It was obvious that the core of this attack was part of a plan that had been put down well in advance. Oh, the ships being able to move through Hellspace was new, obviously, but the rest of it? The attacks on ‘soft targets’ to draw the fleet out of position for attacks on the logistics? That was no off the cuff maneuver.

The Tachyon Jammers had been deployed just before the fleets were projected to Transition in. If they had been done the moment the ships got into the system, those systems would have still been cut off, giving the Ihm time to deal with system defenses before the fleet could reinforce the system, but 8th Fleet wouldn’t have been knocked out like they were, with the jammers disabling most of the fleet as they hit the system. That attack only worked because of the surprise value, and with more warning, 8th Fleet could have come out further from the system, outside the Jammer’s predicted range.

The surprise of that Jammer’s existence had been total, and he was ashamed to admit that the surprise had paralyzed their thinking, temporarily. Relief fleets were initially told to take weeks to move into position, rather than transitioning to the front, out of fear of how wide the jamming might extend. That was what had left the bases open to assault. All except Bandar Base.

Thankfully, the Empress had thought ahead. Hearing of 8th Fleet’s plight, she had contacted Black Star, and engaged their services as mercenaries. Most of their fleet had used X’thari drive technology to reinforce Bandar Base, while a task force went to rescue the remnants of 8th Fleet. They had worked with Bandar’s commander to enact a defense plan.

The plan had almost worked, too. The Black Stars had crippled a large portion of the enemy fleet in the opening moments of the engagement, even bringing down the Jammer, so that 3rd Fleet could Transition in behind the Ihm, trapping them in a pincer attack. It would have worked, if the Ihm hadn’t resorted to forbidden weapons.

Unrestricted nanite bombs were the stuff of nightmares. Restricted nanites, like Greenwave, which had specific guidelines for what they would or could consume, were bad enough. But without those restrictions? It was the ‘grey goo’ scenario that scientists and writers had cautioned about since before the first Luna colony was even established.

Bandar was gone, and Uldat with it. The Ihm had destroyed the other bases when they realized that they wouldn’t be able to hold them, throwing logistics along the front lines into total disarray. Thankfully, they’d used more conventional means on the other bases, but it didn’t change the fact that the Imperial Navy was in terrible shape, all along the front.

Thankfully, the Ihm weren’t able to capitalize on their victories. The Special Action Squadrons were behind enemy lines, doing their best to pick apart enemy shipping and infrastructure. They were focused on the systems just behind the lines, and working inward, trying to strain the Ihm logistics as much as possible.

Those would prove deadly, in the long-term, but of greater immediate impact was the attack by an assassin who had blown up the Ihm homeworld in order to drive their Imperatrix out of ‘real’ space. That, combined with deep strikes by 3rd Fleet and the Black Stars, had forced the Ihm to halt their attack, as both the civilian and military structures were shattered, or at the very least had the mother of all PR campaigns to run to renew public confidence.

3rd Fleet had met only light resistance as they took out an Ihm production facility. In addition to military shipyards, the facility also had research and development labs focused on Exterminatus-class weapons, as well as stockpiles of those weapons. There were other manufacturing facilities, as well, but the loss of so much of their strategic weapons stockpile had to hurt.

The Black Stars’ target had been more political. Taking out the Prime Indoctrination Center, the Ihm equivalent of the former Naval Academy on Luna, would cripple the Ihm Armada’s ability to replace any losses. More importantly, it was a major slap in the face to the Ihm as a whole. Creatures of such pride could not stand an insult like that.

“Any word from the Black Stars?”

Yamamoto looked up, and saw the Empress standing there. “Empress, forgive me. Unfortunately, there is no news, as of yet. At last report, they were attempting to escape and evade a force that outnumbered their own. They accomplished their mission, but retreating proved impossible, thanks to the sudden opening of Hellspace rifts on such a scale.”

He took a breath. “At last report, they were attempting to flee the system at sublight, but the only escape route open to them led directly to the Eye of Despair. The Armada appears to be herding the Black Stars toward it.”

“Anything we can do?”

“Pray for their success, Empress. Everything else is in their hands.”

(Flag Bridge, BSN Ama-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugi, Hellspace)

“Have we figured out the time dilation yet?”

Raven shook her head. “The exact rate keeps changing, from one second per hour on the outside to one hour per second on the outside. There may be other spikes in either direction that we haven’t seen. And we have no way of knowing if these conditions are the same everywhere, or if this is just a more ‘stable’ area of chaotic space. However, the trendline is averaging one second per two minutes on the outside.”

I winced. “Ouch, that is going to make coordinating with anyone outside the fleet a pain.” I paused, and then said, “Conditions are the same across the fleet, right?”

“Fortunately, the presence of so many ships with the proper shielding in proximity seems to be a slightly stabilizing force, at least to the point where the fleet may be experiencing random time dilation, but we’re all experiencing the same time dilation.”

“Small mercies. And signs of enemy pursuit?”

“Our pursuers followed us in, but seem to be trailing us at a safe distance, making sure that we can’t loop back around them and out through the eye. That’s all that our sensors can tell us, unfortunately. We don’t have the tech to properly scan Hellspace, unfortunately.”

I considered the situation. “What about weapons? Can we fight?”

Raven shook her head. “We cannot launch fighters, and the gunboats are all docked with larger ships as parasite craft, since they lack the shields to keep the demons out. Given what we’ve seen, using Starbolts would be an incredibly bad idea.”

She paused, and then said, “As for conventional weapons, research indicates that beam weapons and projectile weapons will function inside Hellspace, but we are unsure what effects they will actually have. Dragonbreath torpedoes are nonfunctional. Missiles do work, but we have been gradually converting the fleet over from missile launchers to torpedoes, so most of our missiles are part of anti-missile defenses, not ship-to-ship weapons.”

“Well, that’s just fucking wonderful. What do we do if the enemy decides to attack? We can’t attack with our strongest weapons, and our men can’t get over to enemy ships unless we physically dock with them. If they come at us with even odds or worse, we’re fucked.”

Raven shook her head. “Unfortunately, if we were limited to conventional weapons in combat against a force that matches us in numbers? Then, I don’t know if there is anything that we could do, given that our ships are built for speed and stealth rather than being able to take a punch. It is possible that we could try and goad them into docking, though that is unlikely. Most likely, all we would be able to do is run.”

I took a deep breath. “Well, that’s just completely unacceptable. We need to start looking for a way out of here.”

“Well, about that, we do have a few options. As you know, there are now Hellspace rifts in several locations. If we could get to one of the rifts the Ihm have opened, then we could perhaps force our way through, to escape. Unfortunately, the Ihm obviously are aware of this. Their pursuit pattern clearly indicates they want to wear us down, believing us to be more at risk from Hellspace than they are.”

“Or they’re trying to goad us into turning and offering a decisive battle. They know that if it comes to a slug-fest, they win, but, at the moment, our best hope is in somehow punching through them, and making it to the rift to escape, right? They know it, and they know we know it. Since surrender is off the table, they’re going to try and make us desperate.”

Raven considered that line of reasoning and then nodded. “There is a high probability of that. However, as things stand, our other options are limited. According to our latest information, Chaos Brigade is too far away to affect a rescue, even if we could get a message to them. And no other forces have the Hellspace capabilities to get us out.”

“Then, until we figure a way out of Hellspace, we need to find someplace to regroup.”