Operation Georgia
Copyright© 2026 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 5
Medina Hyperjump Limit
Flight Second Traci Walker would have stifled a yawn if she could. Not much chance of that. Sitting inside the cushioning fluid of her Personal Capsule, tucked inside her fighter like an egg in a carton, she couldn’t move much at all. Normally, she wouldn’t notice that because she would be too busy fighting and surviving a combat mission, but not today. This duty was boring, boorrriiinnnggg! There was nothing worse than a patrol where you knew nothing was going to happen.
Still, she thought, this is a relief after the past few months. A nice, safe, routine little patrol where nothing was going to happen was certainly preferable to diving into a squadron of Imperial destroyers and cruisers with only the other girls from your flight along to share in the fun. If only she hadn’t pulled interferometer duty. Of all the things a gal could be assigned to on a patrol, long-baseline searches had to be the worst.
“Pearl? Traci. I’m in position.” She double-checked her coordinates just to be certain, and then aligned one laser in the direction of her Flight Lead and another in the direction of the station the locals had quite sensibly buried in a nice, big orbiting rock. “I’m scanning.”
Both were a full light-minute away. Traci spent the wait time dreaming about her upcoming dirtside leave. In the eight days they had been in the Medina system, three of the girls from her squadron had been down to the planet and returned. They had stories to tell that sounded like pure bliss. There was warm air, blue skies, crystal-clear water, huge trees and beautiful flowers, and birds and bugs and lots of other living, growing things. You could walk for kilometers in almost any direction and not see another person. And the colors! Greens, blues, reds, yellows and browns; while you saw those colors on a ship, these were living colors, not splotches of paint on a bulkhead.
Tia had told everybody about staying up late watching the sky at night and getting up equally late the next morning for a swim in the lake. She’d had no duty at all, just a few days to lie in the sunshine and relax. Sylph had been even luckier. It had rained on her. She had told the girls in the Ready Room how everyone on her leave contingent just ran outside and stood there, letting the raindrops fall all over them. Medinan shopkeepers and hotel staff had thought they were crazy, but to crewwomen who had just spent half a year on board totally climate-controlled ships and fighters, it just didn’t get any better than a rainstorm.
The Captain had announced that they would stay for at least two more months, and promised that everyone would have at least two trips to the planet. That sounded wonderful, but Traci’s first turn was still almost 15 days away. Somebody had to mind the store while everybody else was playing. Her patrol was part of that duty.
The Medinans had no watchships. Instead, they had deployed lots of tiny, sensor-packed drones all over their system and monitored them from only a few crewed stations. There was no central station orbiting over their planet, so there was also no convenient, common collection point where folks would collate and double-check the information gathered from all over the system.
Traci knew they used to have one. Rumor had it that some Families officer who had lost most of her Family on Setosha had gone nuts and attacked the place with a Scout, destroying the station and several Imperial ships too. In her six years in the Navy, Traci had heard many fantastic stories. This one was probably the most ridiculous. A Scout? Impossible. Those boats were unarmed. The crew didn’t even carry pistols. Maybe they had butter knives, but those were the only things that were even remotely like weapons on a Scout.
Traci silently chuckled in amusement. She could just see someone threatening Imperial cruisers with a knife. The kin-killers would probably pass back a dinner roll if you did something that dumb. Then they’d cook both you and your dinner roll.
She’d heard of one Scout, once, that had actually flown in real combat. That had happened in the Graveyard system. The Scout had used her ship’s drive to wreck the drive of an escaping Idenux cruiser. That Scout’s captain must have been nuts, or incredibly lucky, take your pick. Her ship had needed a complete rebuild afterwards. Of course, it had been worth it. That particular Idenux cruiser was getting away with crew stolen from a Families merchant. The Scout girls had expended their ship to delay the Idenux long enough for Navy fighters and cruisers to catch up with him. That only ended one way.
The commander of that Scout had earned a birthright for her part in capturing the Idenux. Traci knew that last part was true. She’d seen the vid when the birthright was presented. The Scout captain had vowed never to try something so crazy again.
“Traci? Pearl. Contact--and I’m reading you within predicted norms.”
“Pilot Walker, this is Noelle, Abased-Before-His-Glory. I have your transmission. How do you hear me?”
The accent was strange and sometimes difficult to understand, but at least it was a woman running the Medinans’ end of this interferometer. Traci wasn’t sure what she would have done if there had been a man working with her from their station. A gal just felt more comfortable working with another woman.
“Noelle, this is Traci.” She checked her instruments through her shunt. Nothing twitched. She was now a functional part of a huge triangular antenna that measured a light-minute on each side. “Everything looks quiet to me. Are you sure you had indications of something out here? Pearl? Do you have anything?”
She waited patiently through the lightspeed delay while her message made its way to the station, and the operator replied. “Yes, we are certain. Our instruments caught the remnant of a hyperjump footprint.”
“Traci? Pearl. There’s nothing at my end. The link is secure.”
The hardest part of all of this was maintaining her position. Station keeping was never fun, but this particular job was harder than normal because Traci had only a very small volume of space to work in. Interferometry was not new to the Fleet, but it was not often needed. That was why the Navy had Scouts and Watchships. From what Traci had heard, the Scouts assigned to their mission were getting a rest, too.
She checked her position by stellar alignment, by signal strength from the station, and from Pearl. She cross-checked the equipment temporarily attached to the outside of her fighter so she could link with the Medinan station. There weren’t any problems there, either. She would need to keep an eye on that gear. She was 1.8 million kilometers from anyone else. That was a long way to go for help if there was a glitch.
Hours passed, and nothing showed up on their scan. She knew other pairs were doing the same thing. The Medinans had never liked the idea of Watchships with crews isolated for months at a time. Instead, they had built those uncrewed drones to do the boring work.
Having served a year on a Families Watchship, Traci could only applaud the Medinans’ solution. Their uncrewed technology was different than the Families’ drones, but it allowed the Medinans to deploy units all through their system in many redundant layers. They appeared determined to push their drones further out into interstellar space, but that was obviously a recent effort and nowhere near completed. Traci and her flight were filling in some of the gaps. Of course, being one of the “drones” now gave her a different perspective on the whole process.
Fortunately, this duty was only temporary. The Captain had volunteered them, pointing out that fighters were a lot more flexible than any drones the Medinans were prepared to launch. About the only good thing Traci could say about this duty was that it had bumped her flight up five days on the leave roster. Because of that, nobody was complaining ... much.
It was nearly time for her relief to arrive when something big ghosted through her greatly extended sensors. Traci was half-asleep, but the taste of fading hyperjump fields brought her awake with a snap.
“Pearl! Noelle! Did you catch that? Hyperjump footprints, at or near the edge of Intersect 31.”
The worst part of this job was the waiting for a reply; the two minutes necessary for the message to make a roundtrip seemed to last a much larger piece of forever than she could stand. Pearl answered first.
“I had something. My instruments confirm it was near Intersect 31. Noelle--work out a position change, please.”
“Pilot Walker. Pilot Flores. Our computer confirms that emergence. I will send you each a position change as soon as we finish computing them.”
“Noelle, this is Pearl. Send a message drone to Eckern as well. They can cross-reference with you, warn the rest of the fleet, and launch more fighters if they’re needed.”
Traci knew she should have thought of that as well. Somehow, Pearl always came up with those ideas first. That was why Pearl was a Flight Lead. Traci wondered what their contact was? Intersect 31 was on the very edge of their coverage.
Noelle sent new positioning data. Traci edged over to the new coordinates and waited through the two minutes to confirm she was properly connected again. She watched her sensors closely, but sniffed nothing. That couldn’t be right. She quickly ran through her diagnostics and confirmed her equipment was working properly. What did that leave?
“Are you getting anything, Pearl?” she asked on their private channel.
“Nothing,” Pearl replied two minutes later. “I just checked my playback, and it was definitely hyperjump footprints. I don’t have a good count, but there were more than one of them.”
Reminded, Traci quickly checked the playback on her own equipment. Those hyperjump footprints were definitely there; lots of them. She automatically checked her links to Pearl and Noelle and then her own sensors again; still nothing. Those footprints were definitely in the Medinan system somewhere not far outside the hyperjump limit. The ships that had caused them should be obvious to her and to Pearl. They should have indications all over their sensors. Instead, there was nothing. Those ships had vanished completely. Or had they killed their drives, like Corey Andersen did at Setosha? It would be much harder to spot the ships if they were sneaking up like that. How could she be missing them entirely? They had to be out there, somewhere.
Traci studied the sector where they’d seen the footprints. There was no way they could have completely missed those ships. The large virtual antenna she and Pearl and Noelle formed might miss a fighter, or one of the Children, but those were the only things that were small enough that they could still be too faint to be sensed by now. Unless they were looking in the wrong direction.
The idea struck a spark. She half-remembered something from a class in signal direction finding she had taken years ago during her Watchship training. Yeah, that had to be it. They were looking right at it, and it couldn’t have moved much, not this far out in the system. They’d have seen it by now, unless they weren’t looking where they should.
She cleared her mind and let her memories wander back to that training class just before she had been posted to a Watchship. She remembered something about someone using a vertical antenna for range detection and thinking they were looking one way, not realizing which direction they were actually looking. This might be like that. The gravitic imprint of a hyperjump emergence would look almost the same on one side of the system as the other. Drive fields would not be anything like that easy to spot.
Can’t hurt to look in the other direction, she thought. Of course, it’s probably clear across the system. But there’s nothing in our assigned sector, and there’s nobody scanning so far out on the other side of the system. That’s where the Medinans have their drones. It will be at least an hour before any of the information from them gets back to be processed at one of their stations. We don’t have an hour to wait, not with that many ships.
“Noelle? Pearl? This is Traci. What if we look in the opposite direction, across the system? Let’s try it, just on the off-chance we got our vectors reversed when we set up this antenna.”
The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. After all, they weren’t using a carefully designed physical antenna with known tolerances. They were using a pair of fighters linked by laser communications and synchronized by a computer technology no Families ship had ever worked with before. They’d been so rushed setting this up that it was very possible they had made such an elementary mistake.
“Pilot Walker? This is Noelle at the station. The antenna is configured properly.”
“Traci and Noelle. This is Pearl. Noelle, let’s try it. We have nothing to lose. It will only take a few minutes to flip 180 degrees, scan, and analyze. If there is anything there, believe me, we’ll see it. If there’s nothing, we can flip back again and resume our planned search sweep.”
The seconds crawled by. Traci tried to think how she could do it herself, or just with Pearl, but nothing came to mind. Everything depended on the computers on that Medinan station. She wished they had a dolphin synchronizing the search instead. A dolphin would have looked behind them just as a matter of course. When you could be someone’s dinner if you didn’t keep a lookout, you learned to take nothing for granted.
“Pilots Walker and Flores.” Noelle sounded reluctant. “I have placed your suggestion before my mentor. He has directed me to test your theory in the spirit of mutual cooperation. He agrees with Pearl that it will only cost a few minutes, and we may shed new light on our path. I will switch the focus of our search and send the new vectors to you both.”
At last, Traci thought. Those footprints didn’t have to be an Impie fleet. She hoped it would prove to be nothing serious, maybe a convoy of merchants popping out to orient themselves before heading into the system. No Families fighter pilot could ignore that many hyperjump footprints, not this far out and not when she had spent the last six months making all sorts of Imperials mad at her. Besides, she thought, it sure beats hanging out here polishing the inside of my fighter until my relief arrives.
She received Noelle’s new vector and adjusted her position to match it. Abruptly, she was seeing, feeling, smelling, and tasting a completely different region of the Glory, all the way across the Medinan system from her current location.
To a certain degree, their search was steerable. By altering energy levels, Noelle could “swing” the focus of their scan back and forth through a limited arc. At this distance, those minute changes had huge consequences. Traci felt the Medinan woman changing the sweep and then, even without her sensor information passing through the station’s computer to be processed and returned, she could see ships, lots of ships.
“Pearl! Ships!” She counted rapidly, 12--18--24--28. “I made it 28 with an inbound vector, and they’re already past the hyperjump limit. They taste like Impie drives.”
She wanted to slam her fighter’s drive to max and streak after the enemy, but she couldn’t. She had to stay with Pearl on patrol until they were recalled. She checked her replay. There was no doubt: 28 Impie ships heading straight for the Fleet in what looked like a combat formation. There was a fight brewing for sure. She hoped she could get into it before it was over.
Noelle, Abased-Before-His-Glory, turned a pale and frightened face to her mentor. Channing, May-His-Mercy-be-Upon-Us, looked carefully at what the Scan showed. He said a quick prayer and hit the button that downloaded reports and instructions to their message drone and launched it. He watched the drone speed away and his lips moved silently in another, simpler, more fervent prayer, one he saw echoed by Noelle: please, not again.
The drone couldn’t reach the inner system in time to alert anyone, but that was no longer its only function. The Families officer who had visited the station when they were setting up this search program had suggested a change to the drones. Her name was Maureen Villeneuve, of Family High Plains. Fighter Director was her task, and she was a Third Officer, therefore her work was respected among those of the Families Navy.
She had explained her suggestion to Brother Channing very carefully and convinced him to test it. After seeing the results on his Station’s own Scan and hearing from the City of His Word, as well as every other Station in the system, Brother Channing had to agree it was a clever solution to the light-speed limits of other signals. Each drone was modified to deliberately start and stop its engines in a unique pattern. The stuttering pattern of gravitic impulses from a modified drive rippled across the system faster than the speed of light and told anyone watching from the inner system where to point their sensors if they knew the code behind the patterns. Brother Channing prayed that would be message enough, today.
His prayer was answered. A bored Scan Tech on Weizman who had caught Bridge Watch because she had raised against someone with a pair of 10s showing, caught the message, cross-referenced it with her code list, adjusted a multi-ship interferometer to focus on the vector, and almost immediately detected the approaching enemy ships. She hit her alarm button, alerting every commander in the Fleet.
A Lay Brother at a gravity wave observatory deep under the central mountains of the largest continent on Medina also saw the stuttering drive. It ruined an hour’s careful observation of a nova shock wave. He transmitted warnings immediately to the Office for Out-System Affairs. Then he sighed, prayed for patience, and set aside his work. He knew there would soon be more gravitic disturbances in his instruments, and it was likely to be days before he could resume his research.
Within 10 minutes of the drone’s launch, sensors on two Families carriers, 20 cruisers, 16 escorts, and more than a dozen fighters were focused on the approaching ships.
“Identification positive.” Tech/3 Maggla Kent turned to her commander on Mohacs. “Those are definitely Imperial warship drives, Ma’am.”
“Alert the Admiral,” Captain Kelly Crawford ordered. “All ships, report readiness.”
Reports tumbled in. Captain Crawford read them and tried to ignore the sour taste of fear in her dry mouth. One in six of the Fleet’s crews and pilots were on leave on Medina. Admiral Korina was with them. Without the crewwomen, her ships would be about 70% effective. Without Admiral Korina in command... Captain Crawford grimaced. She didn’t want to think about how effective they’d be without the Admiral.
There was still time to do something to improve everybody’s chances of living through this. Her fighter squadrons were in decent shape; they often practiced combat at half strength. There was a full squadron on patrol close in, and another forming interferometer antenna arrays with the Medinans. That was probably no longer needed. She considered her options, eyed the reports on the approaching Imperial ships, and made her decision. There should be enough time, barely, if she acted immediately. She knew what she had to do. Admiral Korina had drilled it into every officer’s skull: Get all your forces together before you act!
Captain Crawford gave her orders. “All ships, boost for Medina, maximum Fleet speed. We’ll pick up the Admiral and the crews on the fly.” She glanced at her Communications Tech. “Astrid. Keep trying to contact the Admiral or the Flag Captain. Let them know we’re on our way.”
She looked at the scan again and did the sums in her head. It was just bad luck that the Impies were coming in from that far off the ecliptic. That vector had allowed them to penetrate deeply through a region with very little Medinan sensor coverage. As if to compensate for that bad luck, the Impie warships did not seem to be accelerating as fast as other Impies she’d seen in the last six months. Maybe that was a bright spot. She wondered why they were so slow and how she could find out in time for the information to be useful. At the Impies’ current observed acceleration, it would take them four hours to arrive within engagement range of Medina.
Kelly expected it would take the families’ ships three hours to get to Medina and begin a rendezvous with the rest of the crews. Just to be safe, call it another hour for all the missing crew to be settled into their action stations. This was cutting it too close. She sure hoped the Admiral had a trick or two up her sleeve. They were going to need every advantage they could find.
She considered and made another decision. “Recall, refuel, and rearm the girls on close patrol. Send the recall signal to the fighters on interferometer duty. Tell them to push it coming back. We’ll need every chick we can arm and launch. Another dozen fighters might just be enough to make the difference today.”
On Medina, in the warm comfort of her cabin over the lake, Admiral Korina slept soundly. At the first touch on her shoulder, she rolled over and tried to ignore the interruption. At the second touch, some of the urgency in nearby voices penetrated, dragging her away from a pleasant, dreamy conversation with Vikki and Della, pulling her back to the world of girls in uniforms, girls with worried frowns on their faces, girls looking to her for answers.
“Ma’am? Admiral. Ma’am, we’ve detected Impie warships crossing the hyperjump limit.”
Admiral Korina rolled back over and blinked sleepily at the Communications Tech. She rubbed her face, clearing away musty thoughts. She and Sandra had stayed up late, talking. Sandra had flown back to the City of His Word early in the morning and wasn’t due back for two more days. It had been so good seeing her daughter again. For the first time in months, she felt totally relaxed.
“What did you say, Julianne?”
“Impie warships, Ma’am. I have confirmed messages from the Medinans and Captain Crawford. Several squadrons of Impie warships are in the system and heading for Medina. It’s not clear yet whether the planet or our ships will be their target.”
Admiral Korina sat bolt upright in bed and reached for her uniform. “Probably both. Certainly both if they win. What’s our status?”
“Captain Crawford said she’s bringing the Fleet to Medina, Ma’am. She said that’s faster than ferrying everyone back out to the ships. The Medinans have already agreed to our penetration of their defense zone and want to know how they can help. The Lay Brother has offered us every shuttle his people can make ready to fly on short notice.”
Admiral Korina dropped her feet to the floor, pulled her tunic over her head, and picked up her boots. Reluctantly, she slid her feet into them. It seemed like she’d just taken them off and fallen into bed. Sandra should be safe in the Embassy compound. She’d probably be awakened and sent running for the bunker in a few minutes.
It’s up to me to make sure she stays safe there, Adana thought. Wake up. Take command.
“All right, Julianne. There must be a public announcement system at this resort. Find it and sound recall. Form everyone up outside the cafeteria. Ask the resort staff to lay out a simple meal and some brew as quickly as they can.” She sorted through more of the thoughts flicking through her mind. “We need to ferry 500 crew and pilots up to their proper ships, and do it in a hurry. I want a Captain’s Call in 10 minutes on the lawn outside. Do your best to keep a comm line clear for the Medinans in case one of them tries to call.”
“Aye, Ma’am.” The gal hurried out of the room while Admiral Korina rinsed the sleep out of her eyes. Impies. What did they want? She wondered if this was the Impie battle squadron she thought was chasing her. For that matter, was it an Impie squadron coming to punish Medina for changing sides?
“Doesn’t matter,” she told herself. “The important thing is they’re here. Deal with them now. Later, we can figure out why they came here.” As she reached for her beret, she heard the amplified voice of her Communications Tech informing all Families crew and pilots anywhere near a resort loudspeaker that their vacation had been interrupted. Admiral Korina settled her beret firmly in place and stepped out of her room, heading for the cabin’s front door.
She stopped briefly in the Communications Center they had established their first day dirtside. “Status?” She could hear already through the cabin’s open main door the noise of people hurrying across the resort grounds outside. There was no panic, only the sound of busy, deadly urgency familiar to her from every other call to battle stations she had heard these last 20 years. It was a particularly ugly sound to hear in this place. One moment, people had been lying around in the morning sun, utterly relaxed and at peace. The next moment, they were running for their uniforms and gear so they could go into battle.
“No change in Fleet Status, Ma’am. Their ETA is two hours, 47 minutes.” Julianne pushed back her headset and turned. “We have an estimated time of arrival on those Impie ships. They’re just under four hours from Medina. Captain Kelly reports they are showing a lower acceleration and deceleration than we have seen from the Impies.”
Adana nodded thoughtfully. Older ships? “Do we have any idea what ships they brought?”
Julianne spoke briefly into her headset again, repeating the Admiral’s question by radio to a shuttle in geostationary orbit over the resort on Medina. From there, it traveled via modulated gravity waves to the light carrier Mohacs. Both women waited patiently for the reply. Julianne’s expression suddenly became very solemn.
“Ma’am. Captain Crawford reports four battleships, 11 cruisers, one other large ship similar to a battleship in engine strength, and 12 of their destroyers.”
Battleships. Slow by design, and the old ones were slower yet. New or old, how could she be sure? Admiral Korina looked past her worried Communications Tech and out through the room’s single large window. Her thoughts focused on images she had seen only in records from Corey Andersen’s fight at Setosha.
Four Imperial battleships were two divisions, an entire squadron. Was the other drive signature a battlecruiser? She had known that sooner or later she would need to find her own solution to Imperial capital ships. Several possibilities had occurred to her since she had started her raid across Imperial space. Through the long hours of jump between systems, she had tried puzzling her way through how to defeat Imperial battleships without the resources Corey had had at Setosha.
She had to believe that at least a few of the Imperial warships at Setosha had escaped and carried home recordings of what Corey had done there. Adana had seen precious little evidence of that. Perhaps it existed only in her imagination. But until she knew for certain, she had to treat each new opponent as prepared for her attack. She considered her available forces, and a small, thin smile briefly curved her lips. At Setosha, Corey Andersen had had nearly a thousand fighters at her disposal. There were barely a hundred fighters under Adana Korina’s command in the Medina system.
I guess they were about to see if she was as good a tactician as everyone thought she was.
“Julianne, tell Kelly Crawford to land all of our escorts as soon as she can. Put them on the ocean beaches. Load up the resort ground vehicles with everybody that belongs on an escort and get them to those beaches. Since the escorts are atmosphere-capable, we can have all of them crewed and away quickly. That will leave more room for everyone else on the shuttles. Next, contact the Medinan authorities. Tell them what we plan to do with the escorts. Thank them for the offer of their shuttles and ask how many of them can land on the beach by the lake, and how soon. Ask for an estimate of how many people we can lift on those shuttles.”
“Aye, Ma’am.”
While she watched her Communications Tech relay her instructions, she tried to concentrate. Was there anything else her Fleet needed her to think of and do? Adana considered that for a moment and then shook her head. This much would do for the moment. She would know more when she got back to her bridge and had a chance to study the scan. “Thank you, Julianne. I’ll have someone in here in a few minutes to help you coordinate everything.”
The captains who were dirtside stood waiting for her on the lawn. The bustle of women racing back to their rooms in civilian clothing or hurrying toward the cafeteria pulling on pieces of their uniforms swirled around her.
“Everyone’s heard the news?” She saw her answer in their faces. “I don’t know how we missed them until so late, but apparently we got lucky that way.”
“Doesn’t matter now, ma’am,” Captain Kendricks said. “We’ll sort that out later.”