I found this little piece of background fiction a while ago, just after I began converting things into subfighters and such. It's narrative 'fluff' from a
Traveller 2300 fan-made tech article about the Royal Navy in the 2300AD setting. The author was one David Gillon, whom I don't know, but I'd like to thank for the inspiration.
Link to said article here: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/%7Edheb/2300/Europe/UK/RN/RNSFD.htmIt pretty much encapsulates all the 'hard' SF concepts I'd like to blend into
Glory Deep; reasonably real-world tech, some AI but with human skill remaining a factor, and battles that go all '
Top Gun' when the sneaky stuff ends.
(Although recent new conversion acquisitions have me planning some more outlandish, alien technologies for a new fleet... more on that soon, I hope!)
Anyway, have a read, and I hope you enjoy it.
There's a tremendous peacefulness in the dark of the Southern Ocean's abyssal depths, just hanging there, drifting in the silence of the deep with no lighting but the faintest flickers from the instrument console. The viewscreen was on, but there was no light for the external cameras to see by. If I flicked on the external lights then there would be a few krill even at these depths, maybe one of the stranger denizens of the oceanic bottoms, but external lights don't go with Cat-1 EMCON.
The peacefulness disappeared with the voice in my earpiece.
"Moray Lead, I have a track."
Moray Three had sensor watch while the rest of us tried to sleep. I flicked a switch, dropping their sensor data onto my viewscreen.
"Argie SDV going for a cable tap?" I wondered aloud. Hooking into the Falklands-British Antarctic Territories fibreoptic link was something they tried with monotonous regularity.
"Looks like," Moray Three agreed, but I hadn't been asking his opinion and I hit the alarm to jolt all four of my crews awake.
"Target heading for the cable," I said, "Let's go shake him up and escort him back across the border. Weapons tight, ROE Alpha 2. Tactical spread, 5 klick spacing, follow my lead. Confirm."
I got the confirmations as I pulled my HMD down and checked we had greens right across the board. Lucy was hunched over her tactical display just to my left, locking up all the data that four Narwhal sub-fighters could generate. She gave me a thumbs-up to say that she had the track herself.
"Jettison datalinks," I ordered, "Three, two, one, now."
There was a slight click as the fibre-optic cables linking the four-ship formation into a single forty klick long interferometer dropped free. I'd been after the engineers back on Conqueror to sort that, avoidable mechanical noise was a problem, but it was too late to cry over spilt milk as we accelerated away.
"Lucy, tell me we didn't lose him when we dropped datalink?"
"Still got him," she confirmed, "Thirty klicks and closing. Keep it below fifty KPH and you can get within 15 klicks before he can hear us if he's got the standard sensor kit."
"How do the engines look, Mickey" I asked over the intercom.
"Sweet, Skip," Mickey answered from his lonely seat in the engineering bubble, "I can give you 100 KPH indefinitely if you want it. Gas generator is fully primed, we can supercav on your command."
"Not just yet," I told him, "We might try that when we get a little closer, scare the bejeesus out of our poacher before we escort him back to their side of the border."
"Skipper, I like the way you think."
Some people claim that flying sub-fighters is just like flying one of the skimmers' Sea Furies, but there's a difference in scale and time, our combats are simultaneously more intimate and more prolonged. I sat patiently, watching the range tick slowly down, ready to startle our quarry with evidence of our cleverness.
"Oh, Christ!" Lucy said suddenly as the range fell past sixteen klicks.
Her data dropped onto my HMD even as she spoke. Six more targets, three low, three high, all suddenly heading our way. They had sprung a surprise of their own, but the thing that startled me most was Lucy's reaction. I think it was the first time I'd ever heard her swear.
"Argie Gattos," she snarled as the data firmed up, "We've been suckered."
"Hook, line and sinker," I echoed, "Active datalink, bring up the net."
Even the active datalink's low energy blue-green lasers will scatter enough to give you away, but when the other guy knows where you are the subtleties of stealth are pretty pointless and the datanet would let us share data again.
"Vampire! Vampire! Vampire!" Lucy yelled, "Torpedoes in the water. They just went supersonic and the Gattos are accelerating, gas generators coming on line."
We were at peace, supposedly, but I don't think there's ever been a year the services haven't buried someone in some foreign field. Maybe today it would be my turn to pay the price of peace, but not if I had any choice in the matter.
"Weapons free, switch to active sensors," I ordered as I shoved the throttles to max. Sonar can't track a supersonic torpedo, active LIDAR can, if you don't mind shining a searchlight for anyone to see.
"Decoys away, countermeasures active," Lucy told me, pre-empting my next order.
"Lock them up and get me a shot," I told her. "All Morays, close and engage. Mickey, ULF message to Conqueror, 'under attack'".
That was all I could say, 'need help' was superfluous when help was hours away.
"I've got a shot at the SDV," Lucy said.
"Take it," I ordered, knowing as I said it that it was probably no more than an unmanned drone sent to lure us into the trap. There was a hiss as one of our torpedoes was punched out of the VLS, a momentary fizz as its gas generator sheathed it in the bubbles that let it travel through the water at supersonic speeds, then it was gone.
"Here they come," Lucy muttered as the LIDAR locked up the incoming torps. There were a dozen of them, which meant three at each of us if the Argies had sequenced it right, and the Armada boys were no fools.
"Four of them coming at us," she said. So maybe the Argies were having a bad day, but it didn't make me feel better. "Targets locked."
"Engaging," I said, taking the shot myself, the hull echoing as four interceptors went into the water one after the other. I squeezed again, four more shots to back up the first four.
"Point Defence active" Lucy said, "The Gattos are supercavitating, but subsonic, I have a good paint on the high trio."
"Take them," I said, the hull echoing as heavyweight torpedoes punched out one after the other. Lucy glanced at me and sent a second trio away at my nod. Now wasn't one of those time when it made sense to be frugal with ammo. The other Morays were firing, the Argies started punching out interceptors of their own and suddenly my tactical screen was a mess of incoming and outgoing trails.
"Go super!" I ordered Mickey, hauling the Moray nose high as the gas generator went active and we were suddenly sheathed in bubbles, our drag instantly cut to a fraction of its normal value. Our speed built, dragging us out of the mess of incoming and outgoing fire, but the rattle as our point defence started spewing 20mm super-cavitating shells into the water said that not all of our interceptors had claimed their targets.
"Target crossing high port," Lucy yelled and I snap-turned, gee dragging us down into our seats as our speed crossed 200KPH. A Gatto flashed by close enough to see and I hit the trigger instinctively. Somewhere behind me a cartridge spewed gas explosively into an MHD and a gigajoule of power was dumped into the laser system. The beam linked us and the Gatto for a fraction of a second, water flaring as it flash-boiled, then the Gatto blew, crumpling from one moment to the next as the laser sliced open her pressure vessels.
"That's a kill!" Lucy said, her face washed of colour by the suddenness of violent death.
I was too busy to think about the lives I had just taken, trying to make sense of the fight on my tactical display. Moray 3 and 4 had gone low, taking the second trio, and I could only see one Gatto down there now, but there were two on my tail and I couldn't see Moray 2 at all.
"Mickey, arm the booster!" I ordered, yanking tight the straps on my harness. Lucy gave me a shocked glance, but we were down to last resorts, and the thirty seconds of thrust from the giant firework strapped to our tail would take us supersonic, maybe give us a moment or two outside their sensor lock in which to turn the fight around.
"Read..."
Mickey's voice was cut off by a stunning impact. The kind of force it took to throw a three hundred tonne sub-fighter tumbling through the depths was incomprehensible and for precious seconds I couldn't string two thoughts together. I gathered my scattered wits as the tumble abated, but it left us hanging inverted, the boards flaring the red of critical failures all around me, before failing entirely, leaving us in darkness.
"Luce?" I asked.
There was no answer and I reached into the blackness. I found her helmet by feel, wincing as shards of her visor sliced open my questing fingertips. Sense struck and I reached up to pull the lightstick from its clip under my seat, shook it to set its chemicals to work. The cold blue light never flattered anyone, but it made Lucy look like one of the living dead, eyes rolled back in her skull, blood painted down her face. Her tactical screen was smashed, presumably by the impact of her helmet. Only the barely visible movement of her chest and a low moaning convinced me that she was alive.
"Mickey?" I asked, but there was no reply, not even when I found the sound-powered phone in its clip under the mess that had spilled down onto the overhead console and used that instead.
I was on my own, and the part of me that could think and plan wanted to hide in some dark corner until someone could come and save me, which makes it just as well the Navy drills you until you can react without thinking. My hands reacted even if my mind was shot, throwing breakers, testing circuits, until finally we had some semblance of emergency power from the batteries. The boards flared red again, but now I had time to deal with them, assuming no one sent a torpedo down to finish us off.
Poking a handful of switches soon convinced me that we weren't going home under our own power. The control system was fried, and probably everything else as well. The Argie torpedo had killed my ship, the only question left was whether it had killed me as well.
"Mickey?" I asked into the sound-powered phone. One final try to salve my conscience, but there was nothing, nothing but an ominous groan that I hoped was the ship and not the command bubble. I pulled open the guarded flap on the arm of my seat, fingered the two buttons there for a moment as I said goodbye to the ship, then hit them one after the other. The ejection circuits were self-powered, if the engineering bubble had survived then maybe the ejection charge would still function, if it hadn't I had done what I could. The command bubble's own ejection charge was startlingly loud, and I'd never envisaged ejecting while hanging upside down. The sensations were far worse than I had imagined and for a moment I thought the bubble had failed, but at our depth bubble failure would have killed us instantaneously. We drifted for a moment, wobbling, then there was a series of softer bangs and the bubble slowly righted itself as the propane balloons inflated around us. I reached across and snagged Lucy's hand in mine. She was probably too far gone to know, but it might penetrate at some level and it made me feel better.
"Hold on," I told her, as we drifted in the silence of the deep.
Cold War: Southern Ocean
Lt Cmdr Robert Miller, RN
Proceedings of the USNI
May, 2297