Indigo Squad (31 page)

Remember, we’re talking about the simplest layout for the purpose of illustration. The concept of a dorsal and ventral hull makes no sense in some alien ship designs, but with most human-crewed ships, it is possible to nominate one face of the outer skin as being the upper/dorsal hull, and from there locate port and starboard beams and ventral hull.

Neither frames nor decks always run the length or breadth of the ship (especially ships with nacelles) which can be confusing. Starting amidships and moving to port, it appears that frame numbers are being missed. For example, compartment, 03 in particular can often appear to jump on the
Beowulf
.

Finally, many ships also employ a fourth coding attribute that identifies the usage of the compartment.

So, to take an example of
Beowulf
’s compartment A02-02-05

Deck A02: Is in the port nacelle (second deck aft of forward-most)

Frame 02: Is third deck in from port hull.

Number 05: Is on the dorsal side, roughly a third of the way ‘up’ from amidships.

If you find this confusing, you aren’t alone. Take a map! Navy crew often delight in using the confusing layout of their home to bamboozle Marines newly embarked on their ship. Remember that they have probably lived their entire lives never having ventured more than a hundred meters outside the ship’s hull.

This infopedia section was extracted from
humanlegion.com

Category: Tactics:

— Interstellar fleet engagement

As part of our treatment of fleet tactics, we should spend a few, brief moments with the most unlikely fleet engagement of all: combat in the gulf between the stars.

The first question a fleet commander must ask herself is how combat in interstellar space could ever come about in the first place. It’s a question we’ll answer in a moment, but first let’s remind ourselves why ships and warboats clash within a star system.

Planetary systems provide the cover of asteroid belts and planets, both of which can be used for tactical advantage. There are gravity wells too (especially those centered on planets), and raw material aplenty to throw into those gravity wells. A system’s moons and planets provide natural defensive bastions to take or defend.

Planets can provide resources too, in the form of food, raw materials, and people. Populations can be used as miners, soldiers, craftspeople, explorers, or blood sacrifices for your vengeful pantheon of gods. Planets are worth fighting for.

Out in the space between the stars there are none of those things. No one owns interstellar space. No one would want to.

Even for Marines, it is easy to forget how vast the gaps are between stars. Some people wax poetically about these distances, comparing star systems to specks of dust — or seeds perhaps — floating on the vast ocean of interstellar space.

Yet even that description is inaccurate, for there is no two-dimensional ‘ocean’ surface bounded by a fixed shoreline. The stars carry out their whirling dance around the galactic core in absolute emptiness, trapped and jerked around their orbits by gravity.

Sea faring vessels navigating a planet’s ocean can use a fixed littoral geography. Continents do not move on a human timescale. Ports do not normally shift position. By contrast, stars do. Our origin star of Sol, for example, is traveling around galactic core at a speed of 230 klicks per second.

Relative local stellar geography remains broadly constant over the timescale of an interstellar journey, but on human and ship scales, it is shifting constantly. If you plot a course to a star ten light years away, for a ship with an average velocity of half lightspeed, you will need to aim for where that star will be in twenty years’ time. Ten light years is next door in interstellar terms, but over the course of your flight, your neighbors will have moved approximately 150 gigaklicks, or a thousand times the distance between Earth and Sol.

And that, remember, is to pop over to see the neighbors. Most journeys are longer.

As a consequence, star navigators do not have the equivalents of the fixed trade routes and deep water channels of sea farers.

Earth histories talk of deep water blockades. Intercepting mid-Atlantic convoys traveling from North America to Europe was crucial in several major conflicts. To do something similar in space is nearly impossible.

With good intelligence and luck, a fleet commander might anticipate roughly where an enemy convoy might be, but matching vectors to engage an enemy wishing to evade is almost impossible.

Convoy killers patrolling the deep waters of a planetary ocean can push against the water to slew around and change course to intercept.

By contrast, in the vacuum of space, while it’s true that convoy hunters could point their bows in any direction within a few short minutes, inertia would keep them moving in the same direction, no matter where their bows were pointing. To change the direction of movement and reach intercept velocity is an operation that would take weeks of constant acceleration.

What all this amounts to is that interstellar fleet engagement is really a limited extension of in-system warfare. Battles occasionally take place on the hinterland of star systems, analogous to mining the bay leading to a sea port. For example one power may attempt to mine trade routes and another to counter with mine clearing.

Once out by a few light weeks from the edge of a stellar system, there are only four possible circumstances in which ship-to-ship combat can take place.

One: engine damage
. The maneuver capability of one fleet’s ships has been severely damaged, meaning an enemy has the time to change course, pursue, and catch them.

Two: by mutual consent of both parties
. This is the most common reason for interstellar conflict, usually where two fleets — each confident of its own superiority — meet midway between two systems for a ritual showdown.

Three: Mutiny
. This may lead to conflict between loyalist and mutineers within the same fleet.

Four: Trickery
.

This infopedia section was extracted from
humanlegion.com

Start reading the third book in the annals of the Human Legion now…

From his position in the steep slopes of the Gjende Mountains, a concealed figure trained his visual display onto the murky valley floor far below. The low-light enhanced image showed Ensign Brandt innumerable craters filled with the rubble and fused ceramalloy that had once been Detroit’s topside.

A little more than a year earlier, this Marine Corps base had been the ensign’s home.

He didn’t care about that right now. The wreckage made for good cover. That’s what concerned him.

But of the enemy, he saw nothing.

“It’s time,” said Brandt over the Force Mexico Battle Net. “Sergeant, pull five Marines from flank and rearguard to reinforce then team covering Gates 3 and 5.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Sergeant Bernard Exelmans in what the NCO insisted was an authentic French accent.

Brandt had to fight to keep his mouth clamped shut. He felt a powerful need to explain to Exelmans his decision to weaken his flank and rear guards. Out of a total of only 60 Marines to retake the entire planet, Brandt commanded the 18 of Force Mexico. With so few they had to take big risks. That’s why he’d denuded his guards, but this was no time to be explaining himself.

“Force Mexico, report!” demanded the taskforce commander over Wide Battle Net.

“In position, major,” replied Brandt. “Awaiting your go order.”

——

From the opposite mountainside, Lieutenant Tirunesh Nhlappo zoomed her display onto the major who was taking cover in one of the few remaining walkways in Jotunville still standing.

Before the civil war had erupted over Tranquility’s surface, the transparent walkway had provided a vertigo-inducing connection between two Jotun palaces. Those palaces were now fused slag, yet the walkway remained defiantly aloof of the destruction all around.

The lieutenant disapproved of using the walkway. It was a dangerously exposed position, doubly so for the force commander. She creased her brow. The idiot boy was trying to lead from the front because he hadn’t the balls to tell someone else to take risks for him.

But the major possessed luck, and Nhlappo had seen enough action to believe in lucky officers, even ones as ignorant like Major Arun McEwan.

An enhanced squad to take a planet? The stats said they hadn’t a hope in hell. In the entire galaxy, Nhlappo couldn’t think of anyone other than McEwan who could prove those stats wrong.

The major’s voice came over WBNet. “Force Kenya, status?”

Nhlappo looked across to her senior NCO, who was stationed in the cover of a rocky outcropping.

Sergeant Majanita was alert enough to notice the scrutiny. She gave a nod before scanning her position. The gossamer thin screen of Marines covering flanks and rear was in place and reporting all approaches clear. Nhlappo had high hopes for Majanita.

Majanita gave a thumbs-up.

“We’re ready, major,” said Nhlappo.

——

Major McEwan caught the slight disdain in Lieutenant Nhlappo’s voice. He knew why. The former chief instructor wanted Arun to keep back, but Arun justified leading the assault by virtue of needing to respond to events as they unfurled.

Every time he told himself that, he believed it a little less.

“Send in the recon, sergeant,” he told Gupta.

Arun’s former squad commander relayed his instructions to Hecht and Caccamo, the drone operators, before acknowledging: “Drones, away, aye.”

Inside the major’s stomach it felt as if an army of miniature Trogs was on the march. His nerves weren’t deserved, he told himself, because his first command was going well.

Beowulf
was safely hidden in the Kuiper Belt. They’d scouted the system without revealing themselves, as far as they could tell, and today they’d secured a position near Detroit unopposed.

Frankly, it had gone too well. He couldn’t believe this luck would hold.

No one spoke. Probably the other 59 souls in the taskforce felt the same way.

He was an officer now, he told himself. The Marines looked to him for leadership. Which meant motivation and morale were now part of his role description.

“Today we begin to retake what was ours,” he broadcast. “We do so not in the name of the Human Marine Corps but of the Human Legion. Today some of us will likely die. For the first time in centuries, we fight and die in the name of humanity.”

Arun’s speech was greeted by silence.

But only for a few heartbeats before a response came in near-unison.

“
Oorah!
”

The jolt of confidence gave Arun a high, but only for a few seconds. Soon he was wincing as he listened to the faint whirr of the recon drones skimming along the cratered ruins of Jotunville. If he weren’t inside his suit, with his AI, Barney, selectively amplifying the sound of the drones, he doubted he would be able to hear them.

But he could. And if he could, so too could the enemy.

Barney split the incoming feed from the two drones stacking one above the other onto his helmet visor. Jotunville and the entrance to Detroit were deeply shadowed, being on the valley floor between the immense Gjende Mountains. Barney used infrared and false-color to make sense of the gloomy scene witnessed by the drone sensors.

In the years he’d spent here before boarding
Beowulf
, he’d experienced brief moments when the sun penetrated to the valley floor, illuminating the transparent building material of Jotunville like brilliant jewels. But even in the semi-darkness of the day, Jotunville had possessed a functional charm, an
efficiency
, which had appealed to what he supposed was the Marine aesthetic: a sense of order and precision.

Now the crystal walkways had shattered, taking on the color of burned sugar as the transparent material had fused. Rubble spilled into craters part-filled with liquid that Barney had colored a poisonous yellow.

As the drones crossed the ambiguous boundary between Jotunville, where the officers had lived, and on into Detroit, the craters grew in number and depth, the wreckage looked more scorched, poly-ceramalloys melted and contorted into new shapes.

Even from here, Barney was relaying the noise of the drone motors.

Arun silently cursed the White Knights. He’d been told many times that the Human Marine Corps was a joke, given third-rate equipment. Navy vessels such as
Beowulf
were described as cardboard ships, designed to register a sensor blip on enemy sensors but not seriously to fight.

Never having worked with better equipment, it was easy most of the time to dismiss such talk as a manifestation of a human inferiority complex. But every now and then the stark truth of their lousy equipment quality would smack you in the face. In his Marine battlesuit, Arun could activate stealth mode, though not indefinitely in the strong gravity field of a planet. The technology was so effective that sophisticated enemy targeting systems would be blind to him.