Innes in Command
Copyright© 2026 by Lumpy
Chapter 28
Innes had watched the time tick down for three hours, the time ticking down as the Skylark made its run out. The captain gave a good performance, making it look like he too was headed for the GATE point until Jun made a staged open call to it, requesting it to come back to the station, that there were some discrepancies in its cargo.
Captain Delon made a good show of it, selling the annoyed captain routine, finally giving in and turning around. Innes had no way of knowing if the Dart was monitoring the open channels, but he had to assume they were.
He would, if he were on that ship.
“Chief, send my thanks to Captain Delon and Commander Jun. You have the watch,” Innes said, getting up and hurrying out of ops as soon as the chief acknowledged the order.
The bay was a hive of activity when he got there. The fighters were already loaded and fueled, and the shuttle was loaded with supplies, but most of the marines were still on the deck, waiting to march on board. All but two of the Marines were here.
One was down sick and the other was babysitting Tan, which Innes had approved as he needed to make sure the trade counsel didn’t mess anything up.
They were gambling enough without him getting involved.
Innes crossed the deck and went into the shuttle, making his way to the cockpit. The pilot and co-pilot were already strapped in, running through their sequence.
“We’re ready to launch on your order, sir,” she said as he entered the cockpit.
“Consider it given,” Innes said, strapping himself into one of the rear seats. “Stay with the fighters until we clear the station, then fall back to the position we discussed.”
The pilot’s hands moved across her controls, and Innes felt the shuttle lift from the deck. Through the viewport, the fighters released from their cradles in sequence, their maneuvering thrusters firing as they oriented toward the exit.
Innes opened a channel to all four fighter pilots, the two currently flying CAP and the two launching. “All fighters, this is Kingsford. Listen up, we don’t have much time and I’m only going through this once. Our target is a Concordian corvette currently on an intercept course with the Distant Horizon. We’ve got naval mines being deployed at the coordinates directly in the Dart’s path. Your job is to engage her and pull her through that position.”
“They’re going to see the mines and maneuver around them,” Paquette said as his fighter pulled out first, crossing the magnetic field in a rippling shimmer and moving out into the vacuum.
“They won’t,” Innes said. “The mines are well shielded, designed to hide in debris fields. However, there’s a chance they’ll detect them when they’re almost on top of them, which is why you’re going to keep them busy. I need their sensors focused on you and not the space ahead.”
“Understood, sir. We’ll do our best.”
“I know you will. Stay at extreme range initially, probe their defenses, force them to react. The closer they get to the minefield, the more aggressive you need to be. I want them so focused on you that they don’t see what’s coming. Kingsford out.”
Innes brought up the tactical feed on his console. The station was falling away behind them now, the fighters were picking up speed, their icons on the display racing toward their intercept point.
The Dart showed as a crimson icon in the distance, still moving on a steady course toward the Distant Horizon.
Innes opened a channel to Pierce back at the operations center. “Chief, I need you to forward all tactical data to my console here. I want to see everything the fighters are seeing.”
“Already done, sir.”
Commander Menon sat in the Dart’s command chair, watching the plot. The Distant Horizon was accelerating away from Shiro Station now.
Things were, thankfully, going as planned in spite of the hurried way the event was kicked off. After months of careful and slow positioning, it had been a shock to suddenly get a message to begin the attack now, and on a direct beam, no less.
Tan hadn’t explained what the rush was, but it was clear something had gone wrong. He’d had his sensor tech checking every ship orbiting Shiro, concerned that something like a Concordian warship could have turned this into a fatal exercise in futility.
Thankfully, so far, they hadn’t seen one.
“Sir,” the man at the ops station said. “Multiple contacts launching from Shiro Station. I’m reading four, make that five craft on an intercept course with our current heading.”
“Classification?”
“Four appear to be small craft, probably fighters, while the fifth is larger, possibly a shuttle or light transport. They’re burning hard, sir, looks like they mean to intercept us before we reach the Horizon.”
That almost made him relax. No surprises here.
“Good. Continue on course. Tactical, prepare counter missiles and point defense for when they get to us.”
“Aye-aye, sir,” the man at the tactical console said.
Now would be the real test. These men had all served with him on his previous warship command and were selected because they knew their business, but they’d learned over the past year of studying this ship just how different Concordian ships were from their own.
The weapon systems were much less automated than theirs, requiring a lot of input from the operators while, at the same time, opting for very simple solutions without any of the advanced target assistance and persistent threat analysis that was found in their systems. While he could see some advantage to this system, as far as simplicity went, it was also painfully slow and very easily affected by user error.
How the Concordians managed to expand to be such a significant threat with this kind of hardware astounded him. It was such an inelegant setup.
But his men had spent months training on the Concordians’ own simulators, which should be enough time for them to adapt to the enemies’ systems.
The time to reach the Horizon ticked down and, for the first time since receiving Tan’s message, he was starting to think they might pull this off.
After two and a half more hours of waiting, his ships closing on a constant intercept course, the first missile launch lit up Innes’s tactical display.
He knew making the first move would make them seem like the aggressor, which would matter if they didn’t manage to stop this and the corvette took all his ships down, but he didn’t have time to deal with that. He needed that ship focused on his fighters and not the trap he was hoping they’d walk into.
“Contact bearing zero-zero-five mark twelve,” the shuttle pilot reported. “Single bird, looks like a long-range probe, range to target forty-eight thousand kilometers. The Dart’s point defense is tracking.”
Innes watched the missile’s icon accelerate toward the corvette, pushing hard at the edge of its effective powered range. It was a smart play by Paquette, to launch one missile at extreme range and see how the enemy’s defensive systems responded.
The Dart’s rail gun point defense engaged when the missile crossed into effective range, filling the space around it with flak detonations as the rounds exploded into rains of shrapnel, all trying to catch a piece of the missile.
Innes had spent years in the academy drilling on this exact thing, learning point defense and missile systems and how to take down missiles far enough away that the fusion-fueled ball of plasma and radiation wouldn’t connect with the ship.
What he saw here was more proof that, whoever was on that ship, they did not come up to even the lowest quality standards required of tactical officers in the CDF. Their targeting solutions were all terrible and, if he had to guess, they were just taking the targeting solutions from the computer and using them without any of the checks that had been drilled into cadets at the Academy or in training.
They did manage to take the missile down, but it got thousands of kilometers closer than it should have. Not a big deal with one missile, but if he had a corvette of his own, it would have been child’s play to swamp their point defense.
Of course, he had four fighters with two missiles each, so it had to be good enough.
“Tell Paquette to keep out of their rail gun envelope if he can,” Innes said.
Of course, that wasn’t going to be a possibility for long, since once their missiles were expended, they would need to get close enough for the fighters’ own rail guns to engage.
On the tactical display, the four fighters closed, held at five hundred kilometers from the Dart, their flight paths spiraling and crossing, probing the corvette’s defensive perimeter.
A few missiles leapt out from the corvette to the fighters, but were taken down fairly easily. While they were well within the powered range of the corvette’s missiles, it was hard to hit a fighter with one, thanks to the fighter’s agility and countermeasures. Of course, those countermeasures could be swamped by sending enough missiles, but so far, the enemy hadn’t done that.
It was possible they were just probing, although against four fighters, Innes didn’t see the point. Better to end things quickly.
Another sign of poor training or unfamiliarity with the CDF’s way of doing things.
Paquette seemed to have the same thought, because he did something that normally a fighter should never do. He broke from the weaving pattern, accelerating hard toward the Dart, closing to one hundred and fifty kilometers, opening up with 20mm rounds streaking toward the corvette at five thousand rounds per minute.
The damage was minimal and it would take a lot more to cause any serious harm to the ship with just guns, but it was the first hit they’d made.
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