Part LXVII - Section 2 of 2----------
"Captain, we're getting some unusual returns at extreme range on radar" the sensors officer reported. "It might just be floating rocks, but that would be very unusual this far off the plane of the elliptic and the returns are stronger than I'd expect, even if the asteroids concerned were irregularly shaped and mostly metallic" she continued. "If I was forced to hazard a guess, I'd say it was wreckage."
Francis frowned. "Wreckage?" he repeated. "Here?" he added dubiously. Nobody in their right mind would ever come
here, that naturally being a requirement of being in a position to leave wreckage behind in the first place. What was the point unless you were the sort of people that had a weird fetish about binary brown dwarf systems? The iron rain thing was mildly cool in principle, but it wasn't like you could go down and watch.
"It's a hundred thousand klicks out, right at the limit of our ability to detect and track anything aerospace fighter sized or smaller. If you want to know for sure we'll either have to send a dropship or go take a look for ourselves, Sir."
Captain Francis looked over to his XO. "The sail's not deployed, there's no point, and it's not like we can't charge the K-F drive while underway. Let's rev up the engines and take the old girl out for a spin" he suggested, grinning. "Sensors, please provide the helmsman with a heading, after we've notified the crew to prepare for thrust we'll go with option two and go take a look for ourselves" he decided, thinking that it was just nice to have something to do. If you were only going to ever stay at the point where you jumped in what was the point in having a ship with a transit drive anyway?
While a
Riga II class destroyer like
Yukon could happily maintain two gees of thrust as long as the fuel held out, and even make it up to three gees for shorter periods, like dropships in transit it typically never pushed the engines above one gee for the simple reasons that it was less expensive in terms of fuel and easier on the crew.
Since they were already burning hydrogen in the fusion reactor to recharge the Kearny-Fuchida drive, rather than using the jumpsail as they would have elsewhere, it would have certainly been extravagant to give the engines everything they had, no matter how curious they were about what they had run across out here, but in retrospect nobody would have complained if they
had run
Yukon up to full thrust given their discovery.
As the warship got closer it became apparent that initially at a hundred-thousand klicks the radars had only reached the very edge of what now seemed to be a very large debris field, and there were multiple returns from increasingly massive chunks of floating metal,
Yukon beginning to deaccelerate so she wouldn't just accidentally crash right through the middle of it.
A
Riga II destroyer was well armoured for a ship its size, but ploughing through a cloud of junk at spaceship velocities was still a major no-no.
Although describing it as junk might be doing the wreckage an equally major disservice.
"Mother of God" Francis heard the XO whisper under his breath as they neared what could only be the shattered hulk of a warship, and it wasn't alone out there.
Coming to a relative halt just at the edge of the thickest part of the debris field Captain Francis ordered a fighter squadron to launch and go take a closer look, not wishing to risk a collision between
Yukon and anything large enough to potentially put a dent in her hull.
It didn't take them too long to identify the first shattered warship. She was obviously an
Aegis class Heavy Cruiser and more usefully given just how many of them had been produced her name was emblazoned on her hull.
Originally on launch in 2415 she had been the THS
Athens, later the SLS
Athens as the Terran Hegemony fleet was redesignated with Star League registries.
She was better known by the name she had been given when First Lord Richard Cameron handed her over to the Rim Worlds Republic in 2763, the one she still bore.
"It's the ****** RWS
Tadeo Amaris" Francis said in wonder as images transmitted back from the fighters appeared on the main display screen. "What the heck is
she doing here?" he asked rhetorically, not expecting anyone present to have any more inkling than he did.
She might have been an older design but the
Tadeo Amaris had been one of the more powerful capital ships in service for the Rim Worlds Republic during the war and had achieved considerable notoriety as a fast commerce raider that could outrun most anything she couldn't outgun. Her ultimate fate had been a mystery, at least until now, but that was true for a lot of warships on both sides.
"Looks like there's what's left of a
Riga class frigate a couple of hundred klicks further out, damn thing's practically blown in half from the looks of things" the sensor officer reported. "Whole area is littered with broken dropships and ASF's, as well as chunks blown off the warships, all those contacts and returns are sending the radar absolutely nuts. This was one hell of a fight, Sir" she said in awe.
The original
Riga, a frigate rather than a destroyer like the
Riga II, had first entered service only a few decades after the venerable
Aegis, and the Terran Hegemony had stopped producing them in favour of the generally superior
Congress class even before the formation of the Star League. Being old didn't make them useless however, and the SLDF kept some of them in service for another two centuries while offloading others on the navies of the member states. The Rim Worlds Republic literally had dozens upon dozens of the things in commission when the Amaris War broke out, though the superior warships of the Star League Navy soon whittled that number down fast because they had literally dozens upon dozens of modern
battleships to counter the aging frigates with.
"What happened to the
Aegis?" the helmsman queried. "Someone nuke her?"
"Not looking at that battle damage they didn't, she's been cut to ribbons by directed-energy-weapons, big ones" the XO responded.
"Yeah, and unless I miss my guess we're about to get a good look at what did it as the lead fighter clears the wreckage of the
Aegis and the
Riga" the sensor officer replied evenly. "Putting her telemetry on screen."
Captain Francis stared at the magnified image for what seemed like an eternity. "If we can get closer without crashing into anything bring us alongside, get the shuttles ready and start getting personnel suited up for EVA. I want to recover the logs from all these ships if we can, starting with the
McKenna there" he ordered, rightly assuming that all the smaller holes in the battleship were the result of naval autocannon fire from the
Aegis and the
Riga, while the one gigantic rent in her side had been caused by a contact nuclear explosion.
A
McKenna wasn't a fragile ship by any means, she carried more weight of armour than the
Aegis and the
Riga combined, but if she took a nuke directly against the hull then she wasn't going to come out of it too well especially if she was also getting pounded by massed naval autocannon, plus capital ship lasers and particle projector cannon.
As the fighter got closer it was able to make out the name of the stricken battleship. "Guess we know what happened to the SLS
Thorin now too" Captain Francis noted. Out of the original two-hundred and eighty
McKenna class battleships built less than twenty survived the Amaris War to join Aleksandr Kerensky's Exodus, most known to be lost to the Terran Hegemony's SDS AI warships and armed satellites but some known to have been lost in action to human foes and others having simply vanished.
Equipped with a bay holding five small craft, three of them K1 dropshuttles and the other two Mark VI landing craft, as well as possessing plenty of EVA experienced crew,
Yukon was perfectly able to carry out a proper preliminary investigation of the wrecks without having to jump back to Al Farghani to request assistance and Captain Francis wanted to be able to present as thorough a report as he could when he reached Niops.
It wasn't an easy job however. Not only were the three shattered warships in a poor state, potentially dangerous for anyone to board there was also the matter of their former crews to consider.
The worst discoveries were, as ever in this situation, all the poor bastards who hadn't been killed in the fighting and had died later from lack of oxygen or even worse lack of food and water in still airtight compartments, praying for a rescue that never came.
Many had left messages for loved ones before the end, some choosing a quick death by suicide after penning their final letters, and Francis had these carefully collected by his people while also telling them to be as respectful of the frozen, usually vacuum desiccated corpses they encountered as they could be.
General Romanov and Admiral Bremman would likely want to organise a proper burial in space with full military honours for all of the crew of the
Thorin later but that fell into their bailiwick not that of Captain Francis. What the brass would choose to do about handling the remains of the crew of the RWS
Tadeo Amaris and the frigate they learned was the RWS
Aquarius was also not his immediate problem, but Francis hoped that even as an enemy they would be accorded due respect, they had obviously done their duty and gone down fighting even if it was for the other side.
Not everyone would agree of course, Francis knew. As a commerce raider the RWS
Tadeo Amaris and the naval squadron it had led as flagship had hit an awful lot of civilian shipping during the war and the Rim Worlds Republic military wasn't exactly renowned for treating non-combatants according to the laws and customs of war so opinions would surely differ on what to do with their war dead.
Although the logs of the
RWS Aquarius proved unrecoverable, repeated volleys of Heavy Naval PPC fire from
Thorin had utterly wrecked her bridge as well as the back-ups stored elsewhere in the ship, enough files were able to be retrieved from both SLS
Thorin herself and the RWS
Tadeo Amaris to piece together what had happened here seven decades earlier and how it came to occur. The vicious action that had seemingly resulted in the loss of three large warships, their associated dropships and aerospace fighter contingents in a system objectively not worth fighting over located in the ass-end of the Inner Sphere was truly a tale worth recording for posterity.
The Third RWR Defence Squadron led by the
Tadeo Amaris had been an ongoing thorn in the side of the SLDF during the war, opposing Kerensky's conquest of the Rim Worlds Republic and later hitting supply convoys and targets of opportunity in an attempt to forestall Operation Chieftain, the liberation of the Terran Hegemony. With the whole squadron equipped with lithium-fusion batteries for fast strategic mobility, and the
Tadeo Amaris herself packing enough firepower that chasing after them in smaller vessels would have been suicidal, the SLDF had been forced to reassign much needed
McKenna class battleships and
Avatar class Heavy cruisers away from the Hegemony campaign to try and hunt them down.
Eventually after over a year of fruitless searching, and with the
Tadeo Amaris and her compatriots successfully interdicting convoy after convoy of much needed supplies, Aleksandr Kerensky offered a reward of two million dollars to anyone that could provide information as to where the
Tadeo Amaris was heading next, and although that led to a flood of false leads one of them panned out.
According to files found aboard
Thorin a disaffected member of the crew of the
Tadeo Amaris that had decided the war was lost, and that accepting defeat would be easier with a couple of million bucks in the bank, had managed to leak the next rendezvous location for what was left of the Third RWR Defence Squadron after several years of attrition. Not knowing if it was just another false lead, but also knowing they were the only battleship that could reach there in time, the captain of the SLS
Thorin had sent out an HPG using the ships own hyperpulse generator informing command that he was moving to intercept and then went after the enemy squadron.
Presumably that communication from SLS
Thorin was never received by anyone, not unprecedented given how disrupted SLCOMNET was at the time, so the SLDF didn't know where she was going or why. They just realised later that another of their battleships had gone missing, one of hundreds that had been lost during the war.
You could argue that the SLS
Thorin had been lucky to catch a lead on the location of the
Tadeo Amaris, and to be currently close enough to where they were heading to intercept them, where the battleship was most certainly
not lucky was where hyperspace spat them out.
The crew of the
Thorin weren't nearly as freaked out by jumping in practically on top of the
Tadeo Amaris and the
Aquarius as the crews of those ships were, the
Thorin had been expecting them to be there after all, but for a ship that was designed to be a long-range sniper finding itself in a knife-fight instead it still came as an unpleasant shock.
In ideal circumstances an
Aegis would stand no chance against a
McKenna. Despite being much larger and more heavily armoured the
McKenna was a far more modern design, equipped with engines that could push her to 2.5 gees of acceleration compared to the mere 1.5 gees the
Aegis could manage. Since the massed batteries of Heavy Naval PPC's the
McKenna mounted also outranged the guns on an
Aegis all the battleship needed to do to win handily was use her superior thrust to keep the aging Heavy Cruiser at range and burn her down.
These were
not ideal circumstances. By sheer bad luck the
Thorin had found herself close enough for all those big naval autocannon on the
Tadeo Amaris to be brought to bear, and despite immediately gunning the engines to try and open up the distance she quickly took a few solid hits that disabled them.
An almighty slugfest ensued with the
Aegis and the
Riga throwing everything they had at the
McKenna while the big battleship did likewise.
While the big battlewagons duked it out the dropships and aerospace fighters went at each other, an
Achilles carried by the
Tadeo Amaris and a
Titan belonging to the
Aquarius taking on a trio of
Pentagon dropships launched by the
Thorin while smaller less well armed
Leopard CV dropships and scores of aerospace fighters engaged in a massive furball of a dogfight.
Thorin caught a nuke fired by an
Ahab heavy aerospace fighter in all the confusion, the
McKenna, like the
Aegis she was engaged with, lacking in point-defence-weaponry.
Ironically SLDF doctrine said that ideally a
McKenna should operate with a
Riga II, the L-F battery equipped destroyer/carrier hybrid able to keep up with the fast battleship and providing her with additional fighter support for exactly these kinds of engagements.
Unfortunately for the SLS
Thorin, when her
Riga II support arrived it was seventy years later in the form of the
Yukon.
All things considered, 'better late than never' was probably
not a sentiment the crew of the Thorin were entirely convinced by from their vantage point in the afterlife.
An
Aegis being something of a glass cannon, plenty of firepower but without the armour to match, despite the battle being fought at a range that was advantageous to her the
Tadeo Amaris was not remotely tough enough to stand up to a
McKenna and she was still blasted into a broken hulk before the
Thorin went down.
Her fusion reactors knocked off-line by cumulative damage and unable to power her Naval PPC's the
Thorin had ended up finishing off the enemy frigate by somehow still managing to swing her nose around with manoeuvring thrusters and opening up with her colossal NAC/40 forward battery, this explaining why the
Aquarius was practically blown in half.
The fighting between the dropships and fighters had continued until the bloodlust faded and everyone left realised that they were now all stranded in the middle of nowhere, with the remaining crew of the
Thorin discovering that their HPG was a totally irreparable write-off so they couldn't call for help.
None of the other ships in the Third RWR Defence Squadron ever showed up, at least certainly none did over the next few weeks while there was anybody left alive, and because the HPG the SLS
Thorin had sent out before jumping in had seemingly not been received by anyone the SLDF never came either.
It wasn't just a glorious battlefield, it was a tragic war grave where men and women were still dying long after the fighting stopped.
The question of why in the hell the
Aegis and the
Riga had ended up way out here in a god-forsaken system like this in the first place were finally answered by the discovery of the personal logs of the captain of the
Tadeo Amaris. This kind of binary brown dwarf system being rare enough that this was the only one in the region made it stand out on a detailed star-chart, while simultaneously being somewhere nobody would ever go so they wouldn't be discovered by chance, because, well, Brown Dwarfs.
As for why they were even in that region in the first place, their intended eventual destination was the SLDF training facilities on Circinus, intending to orbitally bombard them, but their orders were to take an indirect route, interdict SLDF supply lines running through the Free Worlds League and then hit some Star League colonies out in the periphery in retaliation for the worlds of the Rim Worlds Republic lost to Kerensky.
If the SLS
Thorin hadn't unexpectantly jumped in and thrown a
McKenna sized spanner in the works,
Tadeo Amaris and
Aquarius would have raided Comstock and Francas before swinging around in a corewards direction and then hitting an obscure Star League scientific colony called the Niops Association a few jumps further on before then heading off to Circinus.
On these twists of fate history hangs.
Later, as Captain Francis sat down to start writing up the painfully long and detailed report he would have to deliver on all this to both the government and the Joint Chiefs back home in Niops, the only light at the end of the tunnel as far as he was concerned was at least it wasn't going to be
quite as epic in length as the one he previously had to write about the voyage of the
Yukon from Arcadia in the Clan Homeworlds to the Draconis Combine.
That was scant comfort though. Just the sections dealing with his time as the chief of the 'Canada Tribe' had run to tens of thousands of words even after he edited it to make the prose less florid.
Under the circumstances the final action of the battleship SLS
Thorin and her crew probably deserved a little florid though, Francis considered as he started typing.
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Note from the Author:If you think that a Red Dwarf star like Niops is small and dim then you might reassess your position if you compare one to a Brown Dwarf, AKA a failed star or a planetary gas giant with delusions of grandeur. Niops might be interested in a binary brown dwarf system relatively nearby but nobody else would be and nobody is going to try and use one as a waypoint for a longer journey either (no hydrogen fusion, no useful amounts of energy to charge a jumpsail).
Brown Dwarfs might be a poor excuse for a star, but having weather that features literal iron rain does give them a little personality.
The Astrokaszy system is uninhabited at this time but it did apparently host an SLDF facility way back during the Reunification War.
The Aegis class Heavy Cruiser RWS Tadeo Amaris was one of the most powerfuil units in the RWR fleet and thanks to its refit by the Star League before Richard Cameron handed it over to Stefan Amaris it had upgraded guns and a lithium-fusion battery. The RWR navy included a lot of old Riga class frigates (not to be confused with the later Riga II class destroyer), and we know from the RWS Sagittarius they were upgrading at least some of them with lithium-fusion batteries (the Tadeo Amaris would want escorts able to keep up with her hence me coming up with the RWS Aquarius).
If the Star League didn't name one of their McKenna's SLS Thorin (after the Thorin system) then they should hang their heads in shame. "Thunder Warrior" is just too good to waste on a Texas. :p
