Excerpted from post-operation debriefing, Canfield ASFB, 2 Jun 2058:
For the record, please state your name, rate and post.
Eli Haithcock, Force Commander, Captain of TAS Omaha.
Thank you, Commander. Now, I understand you were the one to broadcast the distress signal?
Affirmative.
And on whose authority did you break ansible silence?
My own, as ranking in-system officer in command of an Alliance vessel.
Commander…there were eight warships in your flotilla, and my records indicate that you were the second most junior officer in command. Am I to understand you that every single officer overranking you was dead or incapacitated at the time?
Or no longer in command of a vessel, yes.
Explain.
How many friendlies did 3rd Squadron find when it arrived in Tau Ceti?
According to this debrief….one moment…..one.
And that’s how many ships there were when we broadcast the mayday. The Omaha was the only boat still intact. And I use the term intact loosely.
And this was due to enemy action?
Affirmative.
Number and disposition?
Two orbital platforms. Roughly 15,000 tons each.
And number of supporting vessels?
None.
…None? Commander, you mean to tell me that two stationary targets destroyed nearly two-thirds of the Alliance’s combat fleet, but your ship miraculously survived for two weeks in the same system, and the relief squadron came under no enemy fire?
That’s precisely what I’m telling you.
Please…step me through the sequence of events.
Fair enough. We were headed to Tau Ceti. Top brass got it in their head that we needed to go punch the Wraiths in the nose, just to show it could be done. Two full battle squadrons. My boat and five other Omaha destroyers, two Vanguard carriers, and two flights of Comanches. The old man apparently decided to hold 3rd Squadron in reserve, and thank God he did. We were about 20 minutes from the Tau Ceti jump point, so everybody was suiting up, calibrating their fire controls, et cetera when one of the boys over on Victory spotted her during a sensor test. Vanguard and Astoria switched on too and confirmed the target. Took us all a minute to believe what we were seeing.
And that was?
The goddamned Aung Zay Ya. Not just another one like it. High-resolution imaging confirmed it. It was the original boogeyman. The same bastard that killed the Gagarin, still hanging around after 14 years.
That was not an unanticipated scenario, Commander. Your briefings included the probability of encountering it during your raid in Tau Ceti.
Yeah, but there’s just one little thing. We weren’t in Tau Ceti yet. We were still in Loot 7 [Luyten 726-8].
But that….were there signs of a jumpgate?
Nope. And yeah, I know. That means the SOBs learned how to jump.
Our analysts had declared that the Aung Zay Ya had no jumpdrive. How di-
Maybe it had a jump tender. Maybe they don’t use jump points the way we do. Maybe we wouldn’t know what a Wraith jumpdrive looks like if it bit us in the ass. Maybe after 14 years, they just got there the old-fashioned way. I don’t know. All we knew is that it was there, and we were really glad somebody decided to do a sensor test when they did.
Continue.
Vice Admiral Yoshioka sounded the General Quarters, and we got to it. All the torpedo tubes were loaded, 1st Fighter Squadron got launched, and we all closed as a pack. Oh, and we figured out why their ships are so damn blurry.
Oh?
Jammers. We got into firing range and the missile control techs couldn’t get a lock worth a damn. Had to close to almost half the range before we could get a decent firing solution. We were about 20 M-klicks out when we detected the enemy firing salvos. Wasn’t much to do but push ahead and hope the damage wasn’t too severe. I have to tell you, those new Goalkeeper guns worked like a charm. We counted something like 135 inbound threats, and only one got through and tagged the Victory. Just a pockmark in the armor, but it was enough to know that we’d be in a world of hurt without them.
Anyways, once we all had a decent firing solution, the Admiral gave the order: 2 full salvos, cease fire to observe fire effect. Took about a minute, and then we just sat back and watched the scanners. Meanwhile, the Devil Dogs had closed the range and let rip with all their Arrows before turning back. The Arrows actually outran our Tomahawks and got there first. It was pretty sweet to sit back and watch impact after impact and know they were getting a taste of their own medicine. Admiral Yoshioka must’ve been great at counting cards, because the last salvo to hit was the one that did her in. Everybody cheered when they saw that red blip turn orange and then wink out. We were all big damn heroes, slaying the dragon, all that jazz. Heard tell that as soon as the 1st Squadron landed, they all set to repainting their Comanches with the blazon “Gagarin’s Revenge”.
I guess it’s human nature for first victories to go to your head.
So, the Aung Zay Ya was destroyed with no damage to your forces?
Well, just that one missile that hit Victory.
Right…and this was at what time?
24 March. Don’t remember the exact time, but I’d say about 1200 Zulu?
And your distress signal was sent at 1745 Zulu the same day?
Affirmative.
So now tell me about what happened in Tau Ceti.
Once everything was reloaded, we finished navigating to the jumpoint and both squadrons jump simultaneously, sensors and weapons hot. Sita and Rama were on the far side of the system from the JP, so we headed for Ravana first, since that’s where the Gagarin was attacked. Once we got in close, our nav sensors picked up a faint reading on the surface. Turns out the Wraiths had dropped a battalion or so on that rock. Listening station, probably. The Admiral said that UniCom would probably love the chance to take a Wraith facility intact, so we bypassed it and figured we’d leave it for the ground pounders later. We changed course and headed for Sita. We hadn’t been an hour underway when the sensor sweeps spotted them. Two orbital platforms, different configurations but both around 15 K-tons. We were around 33 megaklicks out when we started detecting some thermal wobble.
Wobble?
Yeah, the thermal readings from the station were fluctuating ever so slightly and rapidly. The EQ boys on the Admiral’s ship thought that it was solar radiation refracting off their hulls as they rotated. But my EQ officer, Ensign Moeller, thought it could be missile or small craft launches. Guess I had one of the better EQ officers in the fleet. His letter is going to be extra tough to write.
UniCom offers its sympathies on the loss of your crewmembers, Commander, but it is imperative that we understand what occurred. Please, continue.
Right, sorry. Well, about ten minutes later, Astoria picked up the first salvo. Moeller was right, one of the platforms was launching missiles. Lots of missiles. Based on their size, we figure they were AMMs. Individually, just a divot in the hull. But they were coming about twelve per second. The Goalkeepers couldn’t keep up with a stream of fire like that. It was like trying to shoot a swarm of mosquitos with a shotgun. The carriers were the first ones hit. Biggest targets, I guess. Those divots started turning into cracks and craters, and pretty soon you began to see interior lighting peeking through the hull where the bulkhead had been breached. We weren’t in range to fire, and we knew if we turned about we’d still get hit with everything because it was at least four hours back to the jump. So we just kept pressing forward, like a guy pushing through wind and rain with his umbrella. After the first couple of minutes, Vanguard and Victory were so badly damaged that they fell out of formation. Admiral Yoshioka ordered all the Comanches launched and for the destroyers to continue at full speed.
We complied, and then we started getting hit. Atlanta was the first one hit, then Birmingham and my boat. Then out of nowhere it stops. We’d been hunkering down against the vibrations of the impacts and the dull chattering of the Goalkeepers such that it was kind of a shock when everything went silent.
The Admiral called for a damage report. The carriers were in a bad way, but they were still there. Victory had lost her jumpdrive, but those carriers have enough spare parts for the whole squadron so they’d have been able to fix that after a few days. The bigger problem is that both carriers had lost their Overseer radars, and the Watchmans on the Omaha are really for point-defense, not targeting. But at this point, we were convinced that the platform was bingo ammo and it was time for payback. Us destroyers had come off pretty light. An thruster here and there, a Goalkeeper or two, nothing that would prevent us from attacking.
About another 20 minutes passed, and we were closing on target when suddenly it started back up. A damn rain of metal. The carriers had already started withdrawing, but they were so tore up to begin with. Vanguard broke apart after the first volley reached her. From what I understand, that volley hit the bridge, killed most of the command staff including the admiral, and wiped out of most of the control systems. After that, the ship just tore itself to pieces without the main computer cluster to control it. Victory went up in a fireball about forty seconds later. Looked like either her ammo storage or a thruster array cooked off.
Then the destroyers started taking fire for real. It all happened so fast, and we were under fire too so I couldn’t give you a precise chronology of who got killed when. But when it was over, there was only Brooklyn, Cleveland, Omaha and the two Comanche flights. Nobody was talking about it, but I think we all knew just how far up smeg creek we were. We’d lost our rides home, and the Comanches had lost their hangar. They could go minimal burn to save fuel, and the life-support on one of those babies can work for a couple of weeks, but it’s not a week you’d want to spend.
Force Commander Manion was skipper of the Brooklyn and he was senior officer in-system at this point, over Tripathy on the Cleveland and me. Omaha was so badly shot up at this point…the ammo in the belly magazine had cooked off. The shunts did their job of aiming the blast out away from the ship, but it took a big chunk of armor with it. And the force of the blast had knocked most of the thruster plates off the array. We were limping along slower than a mining rig and had no ammo except for one in the tube. We made to start looking for survivors, while the two remaining destroyers and our Comanches went to pay a social call to those SOBs on the platform.
We’d assumed the other platform was a civilian habitat or sensor array or something, because it had never so much as blinked at us. We were wrong. Brooklyn and Cleveland had to close almost to knife-fighting range because of losing the TAC radars on the carriers. I’ll still don’t quite understand what happened next. They closed until they were almost right on top of the two platforms. And the second one opened fire with gauss cannons just like ours. Lots of gauss cannons. Apparently the Wraiths subscribe to the “death by a thousand cuts” school of thought.
The fighters got some potshots in, but they weren’t making much of a dent. Meanwhile the withering gauss fire that thing was putting out was just methodically shredding them. I think the fighters made a half-hearted attempt to disengage, but I could be wrong. Those pilots were green and I think the poor guys were just scared so bad they froze.
By 17:44 it was over. Brooklyn and Cleveland were gone and all twenty Comanches were puffs of laminate and trialum. That’s when I sent the mayday broadcast. Then we went back to ansible silence, dropped to minimal thrust and waited and hoped to God somebody heard. Obviously, the message got through. Seeing the Vengeance shimmer in was one of the happiest moments of my life.
