I'd like to preface this fan-fic by saying that Freelancer and its content are property of Digital Anvil and Microsoft, I do not own any part of it (except a copy of the game). There are certain parts of this story that might offend some readers, as the game contained satire, so this fan fiction continues the trend, try to have a sense of humour about it. Finally, please, no comments about the attributes of any ship. It is absurd to think that a light-fighter in reality can take on and destroy a Battleship, the fact you can in the game was for balancing purposes (although I thought it was a bad thing then too).
I'd just like to give a big thank you to Tommy Brett for proof reading my story. Cheers!
Chapter 1: Survival of the excogitate or procrastinate
They say that war, apart from the loss of life and all that entails, is the best thing that can happen to a nation. It stimulates the economy by forcing it to keep redundancies low and so productivity is higher. Rationing maximises the cost production ratio of the entire populous and finally research and development moves forward at the highest rate in these times than at any other.
For example in the 80 years war between the GMG and Rheinland, after years of deadlock the Rheinland Navy developed the awesome Nova class torpedo; a modified heavy torpedo chassis mounted with a 50 mega-ton thermonuclear warhead. When first introduced, the GMG took heavy losses from this expensive but devastating weapon where it literally ripped apart capital ships in a single salvo. Faced with certain defeat, the GMG generals were forced upon an evolutionary change in tactics, having lost the ability for a phalanx of Battleships to simply line up next to the Rheinland equivalent and just simply trade shots.
They developed several entirely new lines of ships: the Gunship 'sub-capital' ship and the Heavy Attack Craft. The former were set-up in defensive formations around solitary capital ships intercepting the incoming torpedoes with their newly developed high re-fire weapons. The Heavy Attack Craft would launch from the Capital ship that kept itself out of range of enemy guns, taking the battle to the enemy. The H.A.C.s were agile enough to avoid the big heavy hitting guns mounted on Battleships and were heavily armed and armoured so that any escort fighters found near-by were easily destroyed. Although each attack run from a H.A.C. could only inflict a fraction of what one battleship mounted mass-driver cannon could do, there were many more H.A.C.s flying around than capital ships, coupled with the fact that they received little or no return fire they were able to decimate the ranks of the Rheinland Battleship flotilla.
This proved a very successful tactic, and Rheinland was eventually defeated, thus GMG took control of the Sigma systems. This war brought forward the development of the modern day cruisers and gunboats that we see in all of the houses respective Navies. The Very Heavy Fighter (VHF) is also a product of the war, having been refined from the original H.A.C model. Even ideas produced from the mighty Nova torpedo were not lost, they were later developed into the smaller but no less deadly Sunslayer class torpedo, these were small enough to be mounted on fighter/bomber crafts yet lost none of their destructive punch.
Of course this would be all well and good for the cynical ones among us, however, the terrible price the citizens of the warring nations have to pay for such a war cannot be hidden. Everybody who perished in this new age of equal opportunity was a parent, sibling, offspring or spouse to somebody back in the home systems. It is these people who made the ultimate sacrifice, a sacrifice that no amount of time, energy or credits could heal. Aside from the mounting emotional price, what you are left after the dust has settled are machines, highly adapted for one thing: to kill the opponent in the most efficient and speedy fashion possible. Unfortunately these are so optimised for the taking of another's life they are actually quite useless for any other purpose. This is of course assuming you are fortunate enough to have any remaining assets that are still operational by the end of the war, no finer example can be found than that of the War against the Nomads.
People started to count the cost for the first time; the Nomad's legacy was to leave a trail of destruction and suffering behind it. Rheinland who had been fighting a war on two fronts had lost most of its once proud fleet. The Kusarian and Bretonian fleets had suffered similar losses: out of the five battle groups launched from Bretonia only one Battleship returned from the Omega systems, the "Invincible" the flagship of the 4th fleet, whose fighters and gunboats did a valiant rear-guard action to allow the Battleship's hyper-drive engines to charge.
In the Sigma border worlds, crippled fighters and gunboats drifted into the dense radiation fields leaving recovery operations very hazardous and in most cases, by the time the crews were found they were dead anyway. In the true spirit of the resentment between Kusari and Rheinland, new weapon platforms were tested out by both sides on each other. The Rheinland Navy demonstrated the tenacity of the Sunslayer systems, wings of modified Valkayrie heavy fighters launched the torpedoes at very close range where the point defence systems had little chance to react and destroy them before they detonated. All but 2 Kusarian capital ships were destroyed this way; one a newly designed Carrier class capital ship, a platform where huge numbers of space-superiority fighters were launched and the other, the Battleship Nagumo whose faulty hyper-drive system meant it never left the Kyushu system.
However this kind of damage to a Kusarian Navy did not come without a huge price, no less than 48 battleships of the Rheinland fleet met their doom from a number of experimental weapons mounted on Kusari fighters. These weapons cut through the armour on the battleships like it was made of paper, so several well-aimed shots at the main reactor ruptured the containment fields, afterwards the entire battleship would be rapidly incinerated by the super-heated reactor plasma. It is rumoured that some of these fighters were disabled and have since drifted into the radiation fields along with their experimental weapons systems, as not all the weapons were accounted for at the end of the war.
One would have imagined that Liberty, situated in the centre of the colonies, would have incurred vast amounts of collateral damage to her border. However, in the last war, Liberty was mostly a by-stander in conflicts with comparatively little losses; 3 battleships and 1 cruiser were the total major losses Liberty suffered. It was later discovered that they were actually lost in a series of very unfortunate friendly-fire incidents, however during elections era, the government kept these details out of ear-shot. All in all, Liberty's armed forces had suddenly become the strongest of all the colonies.
In lieu of the lack of military assets to safeguard the border worlds, piracy ran amok. Some enterprising pirates were even hitting trade lanes in home systems. The Liberty public, generally unaware of the goings on in a far off Dyson sphere, felt their government to be too indolent and elected a more hard-lined president to replace Jacobi. The former governor of the Texas system fit the specifications well. Naturally, the first course of action for President Shrub was to restore order back into the colonies.
His foreign policy was hard for many to swallow; Shrub 'offered' the emplacement of Libertonian military assets within the border systems to help against the piracy problems. It seems however only Bretonia accepted this 'gift' with open arms; Rheinland politely declined the offer whereas Kusari flat out refused saying it did not need help. However, President Shrub still deployed the fleet in the Tau and Omega border worlds, much to the outrage of Rheinland and Kusari. A deployment was also planned in the Sigma systems, but was later deemed 'unnecessary' following threats from the GMG that any Liberty military assets found in their systems would be an infringement of sovereignty and treated as an act of war. Coupled with the fact that Liberty was so lightly bruised from the mighty war between the other Houses, there now lay a vast amount of hatred towards the nation of mega-corporations and its privatised police force.