Awaiting Orders

Twelve kilometers of bristling photon turrets and jam-packed hangers, but the closest thing to tea in the stocks was a weakly caffeinated powdered shrub-bark taken on from the last friendly jump gate hub. Supposedly "authentically roasted", it went down unsatisfyingly with the acrid smell of burnt plastic. Admiral Laguear counted himself somewhat lucky that he took his tea hot enough that he wouldn't have to find out what it tastes like. He jabbed a well worn chew-stick in his mouth to try to head off any aftertaste, and leaned back in his command seat.

The bank of man-sized displays half encircling the bridge provided a panorama of the fleet easily taken for a window view, were it not aglow with projected vectors, telemetry, and sensor information. Disembodied in the surrounding black space, a picture-in-picture live feed of the bright planet-scape below hovered by the console of the shift's acting sub-captain.

"Time enough to monitor the situation dirt-side? I though you had a ship to run?"
Startled out of his sub-command chair, Sub-Captain Haegle summons a flutter of similar PiP pop-ups flashing the ships vital stats. A sea of green and blue indicators flash and disappear as the diagnostics run through each system and subsystem in the blink of an eye.
"All green, Sir!" barked the sub-cap, trying to hide his chagrin. It was just he and the Admiral on the bridge this late in the shift, but he'd rather have soiled himself before the entire bridge crew than show weakness in front of the Admiral. After all, he was up for review soon.
"At ease Haegle, I'm well away the ship can run itself."

This was sadly true. A ship as large as leviathan class literally couldn't be run just by human direction. Nearly every facet of the the ship's systems were AI controlled and maintained. The human crew was more for backup, and to abate the paranoia of the anti-AI old fogies in the appropriations echelon. AI could prime the cannons, calculate the attack vector, coordinate fire control, and even simulate the ensuing explosion and debris paths from half an AU away, though only humans were legally permitted to pull the trigger. Even the quantum hardware for the AI software was maintained by excision repair nanite swarms. While less human lives on the line was certainly a good thing, the normal monotony of routine ship life between battles was that much more boring without any routines requiring actual human direction. No wonder all the good tea was gone.

Knowing this does little to abate their uneasy boredom though, especially knowing that a real battle is taking place just a few hundred miles down the gravity well. The Capital Fleet Peordhgar had pulled into the system weeks ago, smashed up the orbital defenses, and given the planet a good 72 hours of orbital bombardment before the ground invasion began. Now it was up to the grunts dirt-side to get the job done, while the Levi crews had nothing to do but watch robotic drones polish the photon barrels and place bets on which recycler team would bring in the most debris by shift's end.

Here rose an odd hope at the moment a single red vector-glyph blinked to life on the screen of otherwise empty space. Something! The sub-captain pulled up the ship's primary sensors console at center screen and began to process and refine the incoming data.

 

"Admiral, Sensors indicate at least 120 separate warp disturbances. We ought to be in transponder range If they wanted to identify themselves as friendly."
"Command knows we've taken the system, no reason for transponder silence. Get me mass estimates, and run through possible trade/commerce identifiers." Laguear mulled on his chew stick as more figures danced on the screen.
"Already on it sir. Rough estimates in the 10^10kg range, each, at 30 something warp units."
"Unless they ordered rush-delivery orbital bases towed in from out of system just before we melted their comm array, I'd say those are dreads inbound. far to fast though. Get me an ETA and then start crunching numbers on which system they came from. must have been a fairly high level jump gate."
"Aye sir. At initial Dreadnought mass estimates, I'd give it at least 200 hours before they enter the system... Dreadnought ID just confirmed by Shield Refraction of Background Star-light by the way... Shall I alert the next bridge shift?"

Laguear chuckled to himself and pulled up his own console from the touch-pad on his command chair arm-rest.
"That shouldn't be necessary. The sensors have already logged and tagged the fleet. we'll have the rest of the orbital debris mopped up in other 72 hours, and the deployed ground forces have already finished pillaging their fill. We'll be out of the system with at least 3 or 4 days to spare."
"Aye-Aye sir, I'll leave a memo in Sub-Captain Nied's inbox, he's on the next crew shift." The sub cap slouched back down in his sub-command chair dejectedly, running the numbers mentally to confirm, in vain, that he'd be on the bridge shift 200 hours from now. No chance of earning distinction though, not if they're already 4 days mid-warp by then.

Again the bridge grew silent, save for the occasional chirp from the hanger logistics AI to draw attention to the hanger status display, of an alert that such and such transport has finished docking or unloading or whatever. Haegle hated that chirp. Secretly so did Laguear, though he'd only been acting on the Peordh for a month or so; It almost made him miss desk duty. Haegle had been on the Peordhgar for 28 months, since it first left the orbital shipyards of his homeworld. In an empire that churns out Levi's every other day, 28 months is a long time to stay commissioned as just a sub-captain. He was beginning to wonder if someone had put a rank cap on his file. Did he P'O an especially vindictive higher-up? Was it that time he complained to Gate Traffic Control about being bumped back in the Jumpgate queue for that Exec Corvette? How was he supposed to know it was...

A different sort of chirp, more of a chime, came from the headrest of his command chair. 1 new message in his inbox.

[Coded]From: SC_Nied @ Peordhgar
To: SC_Haegle @ Peordhgar

Thanks for the heads up. BTW, Laguear still on the same chew from yesterday? Why do only the weird ones make Fleet Admiral?

Reply - Report - Copy Savebox[/coded]

Haegle allowed himself a smirk before quickly deleting the message. Nied was a lousy commander, and Haegle wouldn't hesitate to report him for a break of command procedures that put his crew in jeopardy, but he wasn't about to get an otherwise decent guy demerited for inappropriate use of the message system, though the former might very well help on his quest for his own command.

Pulling up a system console he probably should have had access to, Haegle snuck his way into the security backup directory of the mail system and made sure to remove any leftover trace of Nied's uncouth message. How the man got to Sub-Captain without learning to cover his own tracks was a mystery Haegle grudgingly pondered.

[Coded]Delete (1) y/n? Y_[/coded]

With the stroke of a key, the bridge lights, display, ventilation, and just about everything else but gravity and life support shut off. "Ack!" uttered Haegle. "No-no-no!"

Haegle fumbled for the stud on his uniform that would activate his own emergency illumination. the cuffs of his uniform emitted a weak glow, enough for him to see what his hands were doing, and navigate his way to the backup terminal at the back of the bridge. The Admiral, on the other hand, deftly stowed his chew-stick and retrieved a pipe from his pocket, calmly filling and lighting it despite the pitch black. Haegle was halfway to the backup terminal when emergency power kicked on.
"Good, I was worried the smoke detectors might still function on emergency power." Laguear let out a satisfying puff and began picking at the newly revived console display in front of him.
"Hmmm... Computers' down... almost all of them." "Wait! Sir! I can explai-!" Laguear pulled up a list of systems status on the main display that jittered for a moment before solidifying and then disappearing as the display drivers crashed.
"Even the backups, but their isolated from the primary network. they don't even speak the same language..."

At this point Haegle found it prudent to shut his mouth and ascertain the situation. No manner of irresponsible deletions in the message security system could possibly effect the back up systems. There weren't any physical connections between systems, they were even on different power supplies. 
"Sub-Captain, if you can access the PA, put out a fleet-wide announcement of high alert. It is my belief we're under attack." Haegle leapt back to his terminal in time to see several messages, relayed from other ships of the fleet to that effect, received and fade out of ship's memory. 

"From what I can gather Sir, the other ships are experiencing the same phenomena... I cant reach the rest of the bridge crew though sir, shall I go fetch them in person?" 
"No, I'm sure they're on their way, assuming the automatic blast walls haven't been triggered. I need you at the scanners. I don't care how you get them running, But I need a full sweep of the area. Look for signatures of Ion weaponry, I've heard of them being tuned to generate ElectroMagnetic Pulses that can partially penetrate shields." 
"No good Sir!, its not so much the sensors, as the computers, they're failing and correcting right and left, its almost like somebodies jiggling the power switches." Laguear clamped down on his pipe as if it were a chew and began pulling up dozens of redundant displays to run and replace his command console as they continued to crashed every few seconds. 
"I don't care if you have to hand-grind your own telescope lenses, I need info on whatever fleet is out their Now! You can worry about the computers later. If you think a Leviathan's shields are Ion bomber or frigate proof its no wonder they execs have a hold on your rank!"

With a gulp, Haegle turned back to his terminal and pulled up every system he could, trying to see if any of them could stay online long enough to emulate the sensor software. He managed to keep the shield status display online for a good 4 seconds before it flickered to static, but otherwise had little luck. "I agree Admiral, whatever it is disabling our systems, I don't think the shields are having any effect on it!"
"Glad to see you paid attention in officer training, Now get me those-" "Sir, without computer control to correct for ambient EM radiation dampening, The shield dynamos have been slowly cycling down since the start of the attack."

 

At this the Admiral cocked an eyebrow, but was otherwise silent.
"I cant make an exact calculation obviously, but considering our shields are rated for 20 minutes power-free cycling in the event of a quadruple reactor shutdown, I'd guesstimate us at about three-quarters shield strength. The ship's computer systems are still holding at sixty-something percent error free memory at any particular time though. As soon as one array auto-rectifies, an error in some other position is tripped, but the rate hasn't changed even as our shields lose strength. If this were some sort of EM pulse attack, should the computers' conditions be getting worse as the shields weaken?"
"Interesting... What are you proposing sub-captain?"
"I know it sounds crazy sir, but it smells to me like a DDoS. That's the only sort of attack I could think of which wouldn't increase in effectiveness as our shields fade"
"A DDoS?"
"Directed Dispersal of Superluminals; The focused emission of faster than light tachyon particles to disrupt quantum computing."
"Intriguing, but normally tachyons cant interact with subluminal matter. At least not in any statistically relevant way. As i'm sure you learned in the academy, even the specially designed detectors used for tachyon communication have notoriously low bandwidth and high packet loss... something about the negative mass of tachyon particles preventing them from interfering with normal matter wave fronts."

Laguear stoically puffs on his pipe, despite the flashing and dying alerts exploded onto the display screens.  "I'm still not convinced its not an Ion attack. It takes massive amounts of energy to transmit absurd numbers of particles just in the hope that one or two might improbably phase through an atom of normal matter in just the right way as to sometimes flip a quantum bit."
"I know. The old joke is that its like trying to send a message to another city by loading millions of sub-orbital transports with human messengers and dumping them overhead from 10,000 m with no parachutes. Statistically speaking, one or two is likely to survive, whether by freak accident or dumb luck, with sufficiently minor injuries as to allow them to forward your message to the intended recipient, but the rest..." Haegle weighs his words carefully before the Admiral.
"Needless to say, its an obscenely inefficient means of communication. However, as fast as a sub orbital flight -and gravity assisted landing- is compared to delivering a message on foot, a message sent via tachyon communications is several orders of magnitude faster than sending a courier on the fastest of warp ship through the greatest of jumpgates, its nearly instantaneous. And since it normal doesn't interfere with matter in any classical sense, you don't have to worry about it diverging from the direction you aim it; no need to account for gravity or dispersion with distance. You can fire it from anywhere!"
"But Haegle, for tachyon particles to be interfering with a fleet ship's computers, it would require the focus of dozens, if not hundreds of tachyon stations. To reach such levels of tachyon saturation as to cripple an entire capital armada would require the combined resources of thousands of systems! Surely you don't mean to suggest..."

 That the incoming dreadnoughts would be subject to the same barrage of particles was little solace. Whatever minor threat their own home system might pose, they we're obviously part of a much large organization.
"Sub-captain, what effects would such extreme tachyon exposure have on human crews?"
"Medical DB is still inaccessible at this time sir, though I wouldn't expect any interactions above the quantum level. Still we have no idea ow long we will be trapped in it's focus." "I'd put it at a little over 200 hours Haegle."