Bad Neighbours

Chapter Two

"All ships report ready for jump, sir."

"Thank you Lieutenant."

Admiral Sir Charles Epsom studied the tactical hologram floating in the centre of his flag bridge, his eyes passing over the constellation of light chips that represented the largest ZOCU fleet to have been assembled since the Battle of Haraway forced the Zodiac War to a close. It was also the largest fleet to leave Zodiac space since Lord Dorrington had led the Zodiac Combined Fleet to Aldebaran and his death at the hands of the EU; a trio of Pallada class battleships, including his own flagship Iceni, three Ionia heavy cruisers, twelve Concord cruisers and a pair of upgraded Spartacus heavy cruisers, as well as over fifty Proton light cruisers and other destroyer weight ships from every member world of the Zodiac Outworld Colony Union.

When Epsom had assumed command of what was then simply Force R, three months before, he had not been expecting anything so grand as becoming Mankind's first line of defence against an apparently hostile unidentified species- presuming, of course, that they weren't simply Rim dwellers using advanced Postie or Precursor tech dug up on some backwater world in the middle of nowhere as he suspected they were. His assignment had simply been to oversee the major annual training exercise and wargames held to give the components navies of the Union experience working together as part of a single fleet. The arrival of Intrepid in the Ophen system, however, had changed everything.

While he didn't for a moment believe that the people who had attacked the UN research mission were actually aliens, the point remained that they had demonstrated clear hostility, and had seized control of a technological artefact of unknown but clearly advanced providence. There was no telling what they'd do with the thing, and even if it was a catapult, and not some sort of weapon or military installation, the technology it contained could well have significant military implications. Epsom had fought in the Magnate War as a Sub-Lieutenant. He knew how odd and twisted isolated colonies could become, and the prospect of a world like Rebirth or Delten arming themselves with salvaged xenotech or Precursor superweapons was terrifying.

It simply couldn't be allowed to happen. He'd given Intrepid access to the military priority hyperwave to get word back to the Core, of course, but he knew that his fleet had been the closest, and there was no telling how long it would take the EU or PACT to organise a response. 'Too long' was his opinion, and that was ignoring the fact that 083 was only four jumps from Ophen. He had cancelled the exercise on his own authority, redesignated Force R to the Zodiac Combined Fleet, a title inactive for a decade, and advanced towards 083. From the tone of the hyperwave broadcasts he had received before the redlines cut off interstellar comms, the politicians on Londenium couldn't decide whether to be angry or elated that he was showing the Sphere ZOCU still had the military muscle to intervene outside it's own borders. At the 'official' request of the UN, in the person of one Commnder Alverez, no less.

He suppressed a chuckle at the thought of the EU reaction to that.

"Initiate jump countdown on my mark... mark."

"Aye sir, ninety seconds to jump."

The alarm system hooted the combat jump warning, three high pitched whistles that were distinctly unpleasant to listen to. Epsom reached for the helmet racked beside his acceleration couch. Deftly, he checked the contacts, then slid it over his head. It clicked into the collar ring of his vac suit, locking firmly in place with a cheery beep as his suit electronics registered an airtight seal. All over the flag bridge, and indeed, all across the fleet, men and women were replicating the process; although, objectively, the jump from UNSO-085 to UNSO-083 would take three days, subjectively it would be almost instantaneous. If the arrival jumpzone was invested by hostile ships, combat would be brutal and immediate.

"Thirty seconds."

"Five seconds.... Three... Two... One..."

Epsom was careful not to wince as the disorienting, nauseating feeling of an FTL jump washed through him. It just wouldn't do to throw up in front of his flag staff; quite apart from any other issues, it would make the inside of his suit smell foul, and he was potentially going to be wearing it for a long time.

"Contact! Single ship, bearing one-three-zero by zero-one-zero at one point five million klicks! Designated Charlie One!"

For an instant, Epsom's blood froze in his veins, but then he relaxed. Only a single ship, and far, far out of range. The logical conclusion was that whoever these people were had spotted Intrepid's departure, but hadn't been able to localise the jumpzone to invest it and had therefore left a sentry to watch the area.

"Anything from the inner system?"

"Aye sir, infrared and microwaves from the vicinity of the artefact. We're too far away for any sort of resolution, though. Charlie One is accelerating towards the inner system at three-one-one Gs."

He nodded, and firmly suppressed the impulse to try and rub his chin in thought. That was more than 15% greater than the fastest destroyer in the fleet, let alone his battleships. Initiating a stern chase would be a losing proposition.

"Hail them, open channel. Hyperwave, radio, comm laser, everything; make sure they can hear me."

There was a pause as the two techs at the communications station took to their controls. Then, the section head, a sandy haired Lieutenant by the name of Conroy looked up.

"You're live, sir."

Epsom nodded.

"Unidentified craft, this is Admiral Charles Epsom, commanding officer of the Zodiac Combined Fleet. You have been involved in an illegal attack upon the United Nations Autonomous Rapid Reaction Oversight Wardens. Strike your drives and prepare to receive my boarding parties to take control of your vessel. Failure to do so will result in the use of force to compel your surrender. You have ten minutes from the receipt of this message to comply. Epsom out."

"Message sent, sir."

"Very good Lieutenant. Be so kind as to inform me of any reply."

"Yes sir."

The minutes ticked down with no reply, only the cruiser opening a larger and larger lead on the ZOCU fleet. Finally, the countdown expired. Epsom glanced calmly at Conroy. The junior officer shook his head, and Epsom sighed. Briefly he entertained sending another message, then snorted. He had given them more than enough time to surrender; it was clear that either they had no intention of doing so, or they lacked the capability to understand his ultimatum. Instead, he depressed one of the colour-coded comm studs on the arm of his couch.

"Aerospace Control, Commander Gillingham." The voice of the fleet's seniormost Aerospace Group Commander hissed from his suit speakers.

"Commander, this is Epsom. It seems our friends are still in system, and have left a watchdog out here at the jumpzone. I want him removed from my sky."

"Admiral, it would be my pleasure."

* * *

The Legionnaire's acceleration pushed Lieutenant Joanne Thornton back into her seat as the mobile suit sped from the catapults of the Mercian Proton class light cruiser Obdurate. She could see other suits launching from all over the fleet; tiny, incredibly bright pinpoints of fire or glittering trails of stardust accelerating out into the void.

It wasn't as grand a sight as such a spectacle would have been ten years earlier during the middle of the Zodiac war, when ZOCU had been able to field purpose built carriers an addition to the aerospace complements on other ships, and when the Zodiac Combined Fleet had had nineteen battleships and nearly a hundred cruisers, with a total aerospace complement of over a thousand craft... or, at least, that's what the visuals in the training simulators had suggested.

Given that this was her first ever combat mission, and the largest simultaneous aerospace launch she'd participated in, it wasn't something that she had personal experience with. Even so, despite the paucity of ships, despite the fact that the Hoplites had been left in their launch cradles and despite the fact that at least half, and probably more, of the available Legionnaires and Sarissas had also been left behind, it was still an impressive sight.

Her suit prodded at her over her neural interface, and she swung onto a new heading. Compared to a Sarissa or Hoplite, her Legionnaire was clumsy, slow and massive, laden down with armour, missile pods, particle carbine and plasma lance. Nevertheless, it settled easily onto the new heading, pointed squarely at an immaterial dot four light seconds away from the fleet and one light second from the watchdog ship. She couldn't see it with her naked eye, but her suit was feeding her data from it's sensors; the target was moving directly away from them, 'down' towards the ecliptic where, presumably, the rest of the unknown fleet that had pasted the ARROWs expedition was waiting. It was piling on the acceleration- she didn't think any ship that wasn't using postie-derived drives could match that performance- but it wasn't fast enough to escape the wrath of the ZOCU Mobile Suit Corps.

"Alright ladies and gents, now that we're all in space, a quick refresh of what we're supposed to be doing out here," Lieutenant-Commander Feist's voice crackled through her helmet speakers. The commander of Obdurate's MS team was a weatherbeaten mountain of a man, large enough that Joanne wasn't sure how he managed to squeeze himself into a cockpit, and possessed of bushy, prematurely greying hair. His voice was a perfect match- a gravelly baritone, with a slight, abnormal buzz from the implants that replaced his throat, jaw and part of his face, the legacy of losing a dogfight with an EU fighter in the skies above his home arcology of New Anglia. The hiss and pop of static distorted his voice even further, but his clipped pronunciation made every word crystal clear.

"That fellow in front of us has certainly warned his companions in the inner system that we're here. Or task is not to prevent him from spreading word of our arrival; if it were, we would already have failed. Nor are we to destroy him, if at all possible; access to intact technology, computers and prisoners is an asset that we cannot afford to pass up when it's been offered to us on a silver platter like this. We are aiming to disable him, if at all possible. If that proves impractical, then we can go for the kill, but only then. I don't want to see first battle nerves getting some of us carried away.

"It's only a cruiser, so he shouldn't be much of a threat, but remember that some navies use cruisers as AA platforms; he can still kill you, and will if he gets the chance. Pay attention, and you should be fine. The Sarissas are going to be leading us in, just in case he's got some space superiority fighters or suits he's holding back; we'll follow at a two minute separation. Onslaught, Athena and Felix's teams will follow us in; you've worked with Harawayians before, and Ophen doctrine isn't any different, so you'll be fine. Remember, we aren't the only strike out here, so keep your eyes peeled. I don't want to hear that you got yourself killed by crashing into some prettyboy in a glitterblower."

Joanne snorted. Feist had flown one of the first Mercian Sarissas to enter service before wartime requirements had led to his transfer to ground support and strike duties for which the Sarissa was unsuited and the Legionnaire was king, and it was well known that he vastly preferred the 'glitterblowers' to the unwieldy strike suits.

"Once we reach the rendezvous point, we've got a ten minute wait before the other two strikes reach us, so feel free to practice your singing or whatever. Just keep it off the team channel. Fleet AGC is 'Penthouse,' Onslaught's strike is 'Raven,' Athena's is 'Stingray' and Felix's is 'Archer'. We've got a long flight ahead, so I suggest you get comfortable."

Opening a fresh holodisplay and pasting the fleetwide tactical feed onto it, it became uncomfortably clear just what he was talking about. The tiny chips of light that represented friendly suits seemed to crawl across the gap between the fleet and the fleeing cruiser. It was perfectly obvious that the fleet's heavy ships didn't have a chance in hell of catching their speedy quarry, and even at flank speed, ZOCU's destroyers would be left in the dust. As it was, the suits were overhauling the fleeing ship, but it would take well over an hour to catch it.

Being military craft, Legionnaires did not come with entertainment programmes loaded into their computers. Joanne occupied herself with examining what little data regarding their opponents had been made available to lowly MS pilots like her- a tiny fraction of, she suspected, a tiny fraction, if the copious holes and gaps in the data were any indication. Nevertheless, it served to fill the time until she and her team mates reached the rendezvous point.

The sharp alarm her suit computers sent through her link sent a flood of adrenaline crashing through her. A thought dismissed the forest of holographic windows floating around her, leaving only the flight display and the tactical feed. Feist's voice crackled over the comm again.

"Final weapons checks, ladies and gentlemen. Standard attack pattern; main targets are the engines, after that, weapons systems and sensor kit. We want him blind, lame and impotent when the fleet catches up."

Joanne ran through her mental check-list, reaching out through her connection to the suit to examine the bulky instruments of death clamped onto the suit, or grasped in it's huge hands. Everything checked out.

"Lead, Three, I'm good."

"Two, good."

"Four, good."

"Sit tight, wait for the other strikes to get here. Remember, don't do anything stupid, and you'll be fine."

Sitting in the outer system of a star so unimportant- up until presumably wondrous xenotech had been found just floating about at least- that it hadn't even been given a name, waiting for sixty eight other mobile suits to catch up with her strike so that they could, as a group, dive directly into whatever volume of AA fire the cruiser could put up, Joanne for the first time in three years questioned just why she thought it'd been a good idea to volunteer for the Aerospace Force. It was glamorous and exciting, but at that particular moment in time, she decided that she would much rather have waited to be drafted and then angled for a nice, safe spot in the Logistics Corps. Then, instead of floating about in deep space with nothing but a thin shell of composite armour and a flash shield between her an vacuum, she would be ensconced in a nice, safe office in an arcology spire or bunker on New Mercia.

"Why the fuck do they send newbies to these stupid training exercises anyway?" She muttered to herself. "Unlike every other fucking world in the Union."

Further grousing was interrupted by the arrival of the other two strikes, sixteen Legionnaires and eight Sarissas each. There was a brief swirl of confused manoeuvring as pilots jockeyed their craft into position, and then they were ready.

"All elements, Penthouse, you may engage when ready. Good luck, boys and girls, and have fun."

Joanne didn't think that the AGC would be quite so sanguine if he was out here with them, as opposed to safely buried behind [I]Iceni's[/I] massive armour and shields. The Sarissa pilots showed none of her reluctance, however; open comm channels broadcast their shrill whooping war cries as they hurled their machines forwards at the maximum acceleration their physics-bending mercurion drives could manage. Her flash shield sparked and hissed as the glittering quantum dust they spewed behind them washed harmlessly over her suit.

She watched them crawl towards the cruiser on the tactical feed; the enemy ship's drive flare was still little more than an extra, somewhat larger star amongst many, and the relatively tiny drives of the suits rapidly faded into invisibility. When the time came for her to begin her own approach run, she was glad for the neural link; her hands were shaking badly enough tat she wasn't sure she would have been able to keep a firm grip on the controls.

Where the trip to the rendezvous point had seemed to take hours, the dash towards the fleeing cruiser seemed to pass in a flash. Almost before she realised it, the ship was visible in the flight display, a glint of metal poised atop a glaring drive flare, growing visibly larger as her suit hurtled towards it. They were still thousands of kilometres away when the Sarissas in front of them vanished in a boiling could of fire and debris.

"What the fuck?!"

"Holy shi...!"

"Scatterbeams! Break!"

"Ararat, Ararat, please respond on this channel. What is your situation? Come in Ararat..."

Shocked chatter exploded across the comm net; damage reports, demands for information and panicked cursing, all blended together into an impenetrable noise that Joanne didn't have the time to decipher. It was immediately clear that whatever had gotten so many of the leading suits hadn't gotten all of them; friendly IFF codes were still scattered about in front of her, blinking abruptly from place to place as the Sarissas activated their zero shift systems in an attempt to avoid the hellishly effective point defence that had without warning cut a bloody swathe through their formation. The occasional pockmark of flame marked suits that left their micro FTL jumps a few seconds too long, but despite mounting losses, they continued streaming towards the cruiser.

Joanne slipped around a twisted fragment of fused wreckage that came spinning out of the rapidly dispersing debris field between her and the ship, and braced herself for fiery ruin. The Legionnaire shuddered and a warning whooped inside her head as something clawed at her craft, but her flash shield- her wonderful, incredible flash shield- held it at bay, an arcing corona of energy two meters from her armour. Where fully half the Sarissas had died, only three Legionnaires exploded, fused into molten lumps of composite.

"Scatterbeams!" Fiest's voice snapped over the team channel. "Three, keep moving!" Fiest had already thrown his suit onto a wild, spiraling course that probably would have smeared him into a bloody paste on the inside of his cockpit if it hadn't been for his inertial compensators, and her other two team mates were engaging in less impressive evasive manoeuvres. Acutely aware of the certain death with only a wavering energy shield and far, far too thin shell of armour between her and it, she hurled her suit into a wild corkscrew. The beam lost her for several seconds, then hammered at her shield again. More icons vanished from her display.

"Penthouse, Magician lead," Joanna was amazed as how calm Feist sounded, even while somebody was doing their very best to murder him. "Enemy scatterbeam point defence is highly accurate, extremely effective against unshielded targets."

"Roger that, Magician. Can you complete your run?"

"Affirmative, Penthouse. Suggest you recall the Sarissas; they're taking a hell of a pounding. Looks like one hit, one kill from here. Requesting permission to destroy the ship without attempting to disable it."

There was a pause. The Sarissas were falling back of their own accord, now, their formation and team organisation in tatters, and the cruiser was letting them go, focusing it's attention on the far more resilient Legionnaires.

"Negative, Magician, repeat, negative. The mission is still to disable, not destroy."

"Acknowledged Penthouse. We'll do what we can." There was a click as he changed channel. "Alright, Three, you're with me. Two, Four, you follow us in."

"R-roger that Lead. I've got your back."

"Gotcha bo..."

"Holy shit! They got 'im!"

"Calm down, Two. Stay close with us, follow Three in."

"Yes sir."

The bleeding remnants of the strike hurtled towards the cruiser, twisting and weaving impossibly as they sought to avoid it's scything point defence lasers. There were fewer hits being scored now, a combination of evasive manoeuvres and, though the attackers didn't know it, rising temperatures in their target. Blasting through the wreckage of the foremost Sarissas, the Legionnaires spread out into their final attack formation, before diving down into the teeth of the ship's frantic close range defences.

On of the impossibly accurate beams caught a suit next to Joanne in the centre of mass, burning through it's shield and sending it careening out of formation, straight into her flight path. Even with compensators, her dodge tossed her hard against her flight harness. There was a sickening snapping sound, and a stab of pain from her shoulder, but she hauled her suit back onto course as her suit fed a carefully calculated dose of painkiller into her veins. They were nearly there, only a few hundred kilometers separating them from their target. A thought armed her missiles, and targeting systems lashed out, burning through ECM and latching hold of her foe. For a brief moment, the wildly dodging suits slotted together, opening clear fields of fire for every craft. Missiles blasted away from them; Sledge shipkiller missiles, incredibly short ranged but fast and carrying a heavy warhead that could punch holes deep into the vitals of even the heaviest Core battleship.

Joanne watched in horror as the cruiser clawed all but three of them from space. There had been less than thirty seconds between launch and impact; no point defence could [I]possibly[/I] have intercepted such a high percentage of the salvo at that range. But the unfamiliar ship had, and the three leakers impacted hard against the enemy shields. Warheads blossomed against the shimmering barrier, clawing at it madly to get to the ship beyond, but the cruiser ploughed through the impacts as if nothing had happened. The abrupt switch of targets had given the ZOCU suits breathing room, however.

Fiest led them in, with Joanne immediately behind him. The impossible point defence had taken their remaining team mate, and had not been kind to the rest of the strike. Every suit icon on her display blinked the flashing yellow of a damaged unit, but despite the losses they'd taken, they were finally in range, and at last, they could fire back.

Energy poured from the suits; pulse lasers, plasma lances and particle carbines hurled fire and death at the ship that had inflicted such punishing losses on them, passing through it's shields as if they didn't exist and ravaging it's hull; Joanne was sure she saw the beam from her particle rifle sear it's way into an engine housing. Abruptly, the rear of the ship bulged, then split, releasing a cloud of fire, debris and bodies into space and setting the vessel tumbling uncontrollably away from it's previous course. The beams stopped.

She let an incredulous laugh escape her.

"That... that was it? All that... all that and it went down on the first pass?"

"Count yourself lucky you don't have to hang around in it's defence envelope, Three." Feist's voice was grim. "If they've got a whole fleet of these..."

He broke off with a grunt, then switched channels.

"Penthouse, Magician Lead. Mission accomplished. I hope the Admiral appreciates this."