Notes :
And here it is, the promised special !
It is a special and a shoutout in one, set in Dagger Dance's setting, a sci-fi space opera you can read here : https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/162370/dagger-dance
Now, full disclosure, Dagger Dance is a story that I highly recommend (otherwise I wouldn't have gone all this trouble writing a literal fanfic for it, and yes this is NOT canon to Dagger Dance itself, at least as far as I am aware, and don't annoy Whiskey about it), but it is also one I am not objective about. Its author, Project Whiskey, is a personal friend, and I have helped her get this story up and running, given all the advice I could, etc.
The story has a female MC and I know Whiskey is interested in including some slow-burn yuri, but no promises. Romance isn't always easy to write about and it is her first novel. Not everyone dropkicks something like team crystalline in their debut novel XD
Which reminds me, for those of you who have read The Eternal Seeker Saga, Whiskey is a reader of it, and has been relentlessly lobbying me to start it back up. After her having given me some advice and some fascinating insights, I believe I'll be able to solve some of the major mathematical issues that had prevented me from picking it back up. And for the first time in several years, I've started writing about it.
Don't go expecting regular updates though. It will remain a secondary project to The Fallen World and Manaforged Robotics.
It's just...these specials made me realize just how much I missed writing space battles. And just stuff IN space. With no fantasy elements. I loved the concept of The Starlight Trader, and I still do for that matter, but some days I crave to just fire volleys of nukes between capital ships and fill the void with ephemeral stars.
Which, of course, is the exact reason why I wrote those specials. Anyway, enough blathering, I hope you'll enjoy seeing Alexandra in the mantle of a space admiral at long last !
Edit : Oh, by the way, yes the MFR special is the other theater of that battle with the Amaterasu, Sapphiria's carrier, with CQ as her squadron commander.
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"Enemy carriers breaking off, admiral." Said the executive assistant.
Alexandra nodded.
"Of course they are." She shifted, looking at the tactical display. "This was only a probing attack. They have no intention of endangering their capital ships." She smiled wolfishly. "Unfortunately, it's too late for that."
When the 'unknown assailants' that everyone knew were richly paid mercenaries had entered the system, she'd refused to rise to the bait.
The Republic had been suffering incursions for weeks. Starships coming out of FTL, trashing a few pieces of isolated yet vital infrastructure, hitting a fighter strike on the responding fleet, then jumping out.
Classic raider tactics, death by a thousand cuts and all that.
There were just a couple of problems. Here she had refused to respond. Her 'fleet' has stubbornly stayed on its anchorage, refusing to be baited out.
Normally that would have been surprising, but there were advantages to being known as 'the admiral who loathed strikecrafts' and embraced static defenses and fortifications. For her, holding her fleet under the guns of the orbital forts made perfect sense. So the raiders got greedy.
After all, they could see the fleet. Sure, it was far away, and hard to resolve what the ships looked like exactly, hiding behind the fortress, especially with those gigantic ECM emitters, but the number of vessels was correct and so was the tonnage.
No one would be mad enough to requisition a dozen interstellar freighters to set a trap. Even an admiral's political career would be over. Of course few people would be aware that she was dating a shipping magnate, who wanted these raiders dead even more than she.
"Confirm the positions of the rest of their taskforce."
Her executive assistant nodded. Seraph was a bit unimaginative, but they were a superb XA. The posting would almost guarantee them their own ship to command in a year or two.
"Yes ma'am. Passive scans confirm that their cruisers are decelerating for a zero-zero intercept, and their strikecrafts are preparing for their run on the Amaterasu."
"Excellent." Alexandra gave a mental command through her implants, and a hologram added itself to the tactical display. Captain Irina Subtlety had the most ironic family name in history, given that she commanded a battleship and did not seem to understand the concept of 'discretion', but she embraced it rather than shied away from it. "Captain, I believe our guests have forgotten to knock. Nevertheless, it's time to open the door and...greet them properly."
Her wolfish smile appear once more, and the captain returned it.
"Yes admiral. On your mark."
Alexandra triggered a few commands through her implants.
The installation the raider cruisers were driving towards, an innocuous asteroid that had once been a mining site and now a bulk materials storage, opened.
A good thing about former mining sites, was that they always tried to hollow out the asteroids. You could then convert it into space habitats or cheap, shielded storage, the mass of the rock absorbing any stellar radiation...or scans.
The latter was important to some companies trying to deter pirates. The raiders 'knew' better of course.
Unfortunately for them, what they didn't know was that Alexandra wasn't just a commander that liked to play it defensively. She was also someone who could come out with insane schemes, and had the influence and contacts to put them into action.
"Go." Said Alexandra.
A second later, the fleet the raiders knew was several astronomical units away flew out of the asteroid. They had to take a few seconds to clear the installation and separate before lighting up their main drives and firing missiles, but the cruisers were almost within knife fighting range.
Now, generally, attacking an enemy squadron at such a short range was a recipe for disaster. You were guaranteed to take a lot of damage when particle lancers and railguns could engage at their optimal range and not fire and pray the enemy would be where they had predicted.
That was, of course, unless the enemy was a six ship cruiser squadron intended for raiding...
And you brought a battleship and three battlecruisers meant for these kinds of brawl.
The battleship's spinal gun spoke first. The spear of energized particles reached out and struck like a serpent.
The enemy's command ship had been fairly easy to identify. And heavy cruiser or not, it wasn't made to take that kind of ordnance at close range. More importantly, they were positioned for deceleration, their drives pointed at the asteroid.
The particle lance punched straight through the engines, and into the reactor core. It didn't even get to push its way into the rest of the ship, as the reactor went critical.
Alexandra smiled as the command ship turned into a miniature sun.
The rest of the cruisers fared little better. Three of them survived the first volley, but lost their primary engines. Another began vomiting air and debris, before losing power, and the last one simply came apart as the ship's internal superstructure failed.
"Status update!" Yelled out Seraph, and Alexandra's gaze snapped to the display.
Two of the remaining cruisers were being shredded by the incoming kinetics, following up on the particle lances, but one had managed to fire up their drive again, dodging most of the volley. They were getting max thrust too. Proper military drives then, hardened-
Alexandra flinched as she saw the sensor reports glitch, and the ship crumple, the drive sputtering out.
"Did..." She hesitated to finish the thought.
"Their inertial compensators failed." Confirmed Seraph, and Alexandra grimaced.
That wasn't a death she wished on any spacer. Sure it had been quick, but the entire ship had suddenly found itself affected by the hundreds of gravities its drive was pouring into it.
Everyone onboard was instantly liquefied. And though some ships could and were in fact made to survive that, there was no way when it had already taken that much damage from a point blank particle lance barrage.
She shook herself. No time to dwell on that. She triggered in implants to adress the whole fleet.
"Bring us to max acceleration, and clear the tubes to fire. Let's send those carriers back to whatever hole they crawled out of in pieces."
She could feel the growl of her captains through the link. They wanted these bastards as much as she did, for all the blood they'd spilled.
She disconnected from the network, and gazed at the tactical display, where the enemy's starfighters were still closing in on the Amaterasu.
Make me proud, girls.