Cold War
by Warringer
Chapter Eleven
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Grand Admiral Juri Andreyewich Kobalew smiled as he looked over the reports of the attacks on Narn, Gaim and Cascan space. The orbital assaults on Kotok, Dra'Shii, N'Chack'Fah and Silkan had been successful. Now all that was needed were the planetary assaults and the construction of forwards bases for the next step.
He leaned back in his padded chair and reached for a small cub with tea and vodka. This little gamble Joseph was going for hopefully worked. Especially if the bases at Coriana and Sin'Talith were finished and their existence leaked to Mossad.
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Tau Ceti Station was the base of the Tenth Frontier Fleet, a massive Bremerhafen class dockyard station orbiting the double Mars sized planet Tau Ceti II. Like most of the Frontier Bases, the station was lacking about half of its shipyard capability for an increased number weapons.
Tenth Fleet counted 150 vessels, spread to seven Task Forces. Two were Carrier Task Forces, consisting of a large Graf Zeppelin class super carrier and two Enterprise class carrier, four Essex class escort carriers and six Arleigh Burke class missile destroyers. Three were Dreadnaught Task Forces, consisting of a single Iowa, fifteen smaller Arleigh Burkes, eight Tigonderoga class cruisers, three Kirishima class heavy cruisers and a single Essex class escort carrier. The last two Task Forces were Cruiser Task Forces of two Kirishimas, eight Tigonderogas and twelve Arleigh Burkes.
It was a force strong enough to defend the three worlds of the Ceti sector, Tau Ceti II, Ceti V and Epsilon I. Of cause these worlds had smaller picket ships protecting them, but those vessels were little more than the gunboats of the space age, only armed with a hand full of missiles and rapid fire Ion Pulse and Plasma Pulse weapons. Enough to hunt down Raiders in the area but not to defend a system against the Soviets for longer than maybe an hour.
Admiral von Bülow was the commander of this force and he would be damned if the Soviets would set a foot into NATO space without going through him first. About an hour ago, he had split up his forces. A Carrier Task Force, a Dreadnaught Task Force and a Cruiser Task force had gone to Ceti and Eridani, while his Tirpitz and her Dreadnaught Task Force. Tau Ceti Station was more than enough to take the roles of a Carrier and a Cruiser Task Force.
Von Bülow grit his teeth as he stared at the data in front of him. Several NATO freighters hadn't been on schedule and the companies that employed them started to complain about presumed Raider or Pirate attacks. Slowly but surely he started to think that he had been wrong. Not the Ceti sector had been the target of the Soviet fleets, they had gone after Narn space.
"Those sneaky bastards..." he muttered.
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Captain Daniel McMichaels frowned. Life got complicated in the last years. Ever since both the USSR and the NATO had finally pushed into outer space and created the New Frontier as the NATO called it.
He looked around on the CIC of the Francis Drake and sighed. He was a pirate, so what? He had made good money with the raids on smaller colonies of the Narn, Centauri and races of the Leage. The base of operations of his small company of pirates was a small system called Sector One by the Centauri. There wasn't much to know about the system, it had a small Centauri colony, but they weren't interested in the asteroid belt that was far out in the system.
McMichaels had started out with a small ship and a small, entirely human crew. Now he was in control of a ship they had found in this system, crashed into the asteroid that now was their base. The ship happened to be a 900 meter long Hauri battle cruiser and they had been able to salvage and repair it. It was amazing how intact two million year old technology could be when it was exposed to hard vacuum.
Of cause the Francis Drake wasn't only a Hauri ship anymore, too much modifications had been made to it to mount weapons of every race in Known Space. They even had a Soviet Cloaking Device.
He looked at his crew in CIC, they were also of every race in Known Space, humans, Narn, Brakiri, Markab, Pakmara, he had even several members of the Ancient races as part of his crew, even an Ancient, who happened to be his XO. In the last years they had learned that they had much in common, especially that they disliked to be compared to Raiders.
Raiders were raging beasts, destroying every ship they were able to get and stealing all their freight. His Pirates on the other hand were much more civilized. The ships they intended to steal from were stopped with the help of tractor beams, possible weapons destroyed and the crew was able to get away with their freight gone. They treated everyone the same. They were more like the not so historic 'good' pirates displayed in old human movies than anything else.
Now it was time to get off some of their loot and McMichaels had decided that it was time to try out Kotok for their drop off point. So the Francis Drake was escorting a pair of Pallas class freighters, in case some Raiders tried something stupid.
"Activate Cloaking Device and prepare to leave Jump Space," he orders and his crew complied.
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"You brought a Landmate on my ship?" Aquilia asked as he glared at David.
David sighed and looked at his Landmate. Ichiko was still hugging the damn thing. Mentally he added a serve Mecha fetish to her School uniform and lolikon fetishes.
"Yes," she said and sighed again," They are considered standard issue for agents like me."
"Well," Franklin added," It could turn out to be useful, Cap. We need everything we have at the moment."
Aquilia glared at the big Negro and than back at the Mossad operative. Than it was his turn to sigh.
"I suppose you are right. But now we need to get away from here. This area will be swarming with Commies in a few hours or so."
"And we need to try and take some of the Narn with us," Norim, a Hauri and sort of the man for everything aboard, said and the rest of the group nodded, except for Ichiko, who was too busy hugging the Landmate.