Operation Georgia
Copyright© 2026 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 7
Medina, Outer System
With mounting fury, Strike Leader Mikkel Blazey studied the Tactical Display on the Bridge of his disguised Strike Cruiser, Wakanda. Nothing he saw improved their situation; that was virtually hopeless. Finally, he turned away from the screen and swore softly and continuously for nearly three minutes. His second-in-command, Section Leader Kavir Torazil, watched and listened admiringly. Not one repetition, he observed.
When the Strike Leader’s tirade ended, there was complete silence on the Bridge. Torazil sighed. It was his job to break that silence. There was no more time for theatrics.
“So what do we do now, Strike Leader?” He gestured at the Tactical Display. “When this mission was planned, the Tactics Analyst neglected to include a scenario for arriving in the middle of a naval battle, a battle, I might add, which our esteemed comrades in the Navy seem to have utterly and completely lost.”
Blazey glared at his second in command. Torazil had a knack for asking the right question at precisely the wrong moment. The Strike Leader thought longingly of what was waiting in his cargo pods. How could he deliver those packages when this system was crawling with Bitch warships? The Bitches had just finished splattering a superior Imperial Navy force across half the system. He had no doubt that the slightest hostile act by Wakanda would bring massive retaliation. A Strike Cruiser was powerful, but he had studied the records of several recent battles the Imperial Navy had fought with Bitch fleets. There was no way Wakanda could last even two minutes against any serious Bitch attack group. He shook his head angrily and made the only decision left to him.
“We flush the pods and get out. Pick a trajectory that has the best chance of putting at least one of our packages on course for that damned planet and then dump them all. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” He shook his head again, utterly disgusted with the Navy in general and with their situation in particular. “There’s nothing much else we can do.”
Torazil’s bland expression changed not at all. “And then what, sir? Run for it?”
Blazey rounded on his second in command. “What else can we do? Do you have a better idea?” He drew a deep breath, fighting down his anger. “Do you have any more flippant remarks, Torazil?” Silence. The man was not a complete idiot, though sometimes Blazey wondered how close he came. He turned back to his Tactical Display. “I didn’t think so. Go ahead. Get on with it.”
Torazil punched numbers into the computer, waited patiently, and then considered the options his program offered. He selected the least risky option. Slowly, like the wallowing merchant vessel they appeared to be, Wakanda came about and settled into the proper trajectory. It was a poor chance, but it was the only chance they had.
“The computer projects that it will be at least an hour before we can dump them with even the faintest hope of a hit, Strike Leader.” Torazil kept his voice neutral. There was still a chance that the posturing fool would realize their only real option was to hyper out immediately, hang around in dead space for a few days or weeks, then come back and try again. Maybe the Bitch fleet would be gone by then.
“We don’t have an hour, Torazil.” The Strike Leader pointed at his Tactical Display. On the screen, they could both see a warship modifying its vector to close with them. “That’s one of their cruisers.”
“There are several Bitch fighters with it,” Torazil noted calmly. He closed a row of switches and began powering up the Strike Cruiser’s concealed weapons. If the Bitches sent no more than this, perhaps a surprise attack at point-blank range with energy weapons would buy them enough time to finish their mission and get out. He looked for any other telltale vector changes among the Bitch warships he could detect. There were no other threats. He glanced at their identification beacon and smiled.
“The beacon has responded correctly to three inquiries so far, and there have been no others. Our disguise appears to be intact, Strike Leader. There is a chance we can make this mission work after all.” Blazey nodded silently. Both officers’ eyes remained fixed on the Tactical Display as their Mission Clock counted down what remained of the hour they must wait before launching their cargo.
Aboard the Families Cruiser Atkey, First Officer Lina Smirnova frowned. “That makes no sense. Try again.” She turned her command chair and watched her Comm Tech.
“Right away, ma’am.” The gal ran through the sequence again. “No, ma’am, there’s still no reply. All we have from them is the standard beacon that says they’re the Families Merchant Cloud Hopper. Nobody over there answers me.”
“Could they have damaged comm gear?”
Tech Williams shrugged. “That’s always possible, ma’am, but unlikely.” The equipment in Families ships was a lot more rugged than anyone else’s, an unlooked-for by-product of living in a nebula. And Families ships always carried redundant equipment, especially comm gear.
First Officer Smirnova looked again at the scan. There was something very odd about this. A Families merchant always greeted a Families warship. Given all the relations every Family had serving in Fleet, the odds were very good that someone on the merchant was closely related to someone on the warship. By now, they should have been chattering up a storm. This was too quiet. She tried to imagine what else it could be, but nothing came to mind.
“Cloud Hopper.” She turned away from the Comm station. “Why does that name sound familiar?” She glanced around her Bridge. “Anyone?”
“Wasn’t there some sort of fact sheet a while ago about a ship named Cloud Hopper?” Her Exec thought for a moment, but then shook her head. “I don’t remember what it was, ma’am, but I know I have a vague memory of seeing something.”
“Dig it out,” First Officer Smirnova ordered. Second Officer Michelle O’Hare pulled open a file and began rummaging through the pages. Smirnova glanced at her scan again. “Until we get this sorted out, let’s keep our distance. I don’t like it. Even if they don’t have comm gear, they should be able to rig something. I’d have somebody in a suit at the airlock by now. The suit comm would certainly reach us.”
Atkey paced the merchant for nearly half an hour. Finally, the Exec grunted and pulled out a file folder of Fleet notices. “Ma’am? Look at this.” She handed a single sheet to the Captain. “It’s the latest list of missing ships. It caught up with us three months ago, back when we met that courier from Home. Cloud Hopper is on this list, overdue three months at that time and presumed lost.”
First Officer Smirnova considered this new information for slightly less than a second. “Get our Marines ready to board. I want to know who is on that ship. Bring us parallel but stay 500 kilometers away. Keep all our weapons hot. If they so much as point a toaster at us, I want to drill holes through their engine spaces. If it turns out to be Families after all, we’ll apologize and buy them a new set of engines.”
Strike Leader Blazey watched a pinnace pull away from the Bitch cruiser. Their ship was bigger than his, faster than his, and had more energy weapons and missiles than his. They had four of their damned fighters hovering nearby. Worst of all, they had more time than he did. It would be another 25 minutes before he could launch his packages. “Do you have a good firing solution on that cruiser?” He did not look away from the Tac Display.
“At this distance?” Torazil snorted. “How can I miss? The point-defense qualification range gave us targets at longer ranges.”
Blazey watched the pinnace for a moment more, then dismissed it. He keyed a series of commands on his console. “On my mark, engage the Bitch cruiser. You’ll have one full second of fire. After that, I’m discarding the disguise and we’re heading for the hyperjump limit as fast as we can.”
“What about our cargo?”
“Can you see any way to accomplish our mission now, Section Leader? I can’t. We’ll need everything Wakanda has to run away from those damned fighters. As we break off, use any unfired main weapons to burn the cargo pods. That’s all the mission sanitation we can provide. We will not be boarded.” He scowled. “Whichever admiral lost that battle here should be shot. If it hadn’t been for his bungling, we would have accomplished our mission.”
“Weapons set,” Torazil reported.
The Strike Leader nodded. “Stand-by.” He rested his finger on one of the buttons on his console. “And three ... and two ... and one ... Mark!”
The weapons on Wakanda were the largest fixed-mount beam projectors Imperial engineers could squeeze into her hull. They were only slightly smaller than those mounted in a battleship. They had been deliberately modified to fire on overload and burnout gracefully. During the brief period of time Blazey could use them, she had twice the actual energy output of any fixed-mount weapon in Imperial service. It also meant Wakanda’s primary weapons had a firing life measured in seconds. The four weapons that currently bore on the Bitch cruiser flashed and snarled. Their beams smashed through Atkey as an incandescent storm of raw energy. Bulkheads burst open, decks were ripped apart, gun mounts and missile launchers were smashed, and crew killed.
Wakanda’s beams missed Atkey’s spine. Atkey’s cetacean—an orca named Abbi—retained partial control of her wrecked cruiser. Instinctively, she rolled and accelerated away at an acute angle. As she rolled, she briefly caught the merchant in her sights. She tripped her weapons’ firing circuits as each mount and launcher bore on the ship that had hurt her. One missile launched, then another. They were stand-off warheads, and the range was so close that they detonated immediately. An energy mount fired and ripped a gouge across the enemy’s rear parts.
Abbi tasted the hits, seeing pieces spin away from the enemy. Her foe was crippled, but she couldn’t stay for the kill.
Her flank was torn open, and her crew was dead or wounded. She hurt, and she wanted so very much to hurt the enemy back... too late for that, now. She had to get her crew away. Lina would not answer when Abbi tried to talk to her. Nobody answered her except the other ships. They were coming, Jaci and Holana, both of them hot and angry and moving as fast as they could after her startled cry for help. The little friends streaked past her, too, furiously charging the enemy. Abbi dodged and danced as she ran. As long as she had any control at all, this enemy would not hurt her crew any more.
Wakanda tore free from the merchant ship disguise and accelerated away at her maximum of 335 Gs. As their unfired weapons bore on the severed cargo section, Torazil targeted the drifting pods. They were easy targets, but nothing happened when he fired. He checked his control panel and saw why. The Bitch cruiser’s parting shot had ripped a slash in Wakanda that damaged a large number of critical internal circuits. His fire control computers recorded his shots. They even posted that information to his console. He tried again, and missed. Damn! They cut the bypass circuits, too.
“No hits on the cargo pods. We have a Fire Control issue.”
The Strike Leader snarled some incomprehensible curse and glared at Torazil. “Deal with it. We have other problems.”
Among those other problems, though Wakanda’s crew would not realize it for a few more minutes, were the connections between their point-defense clusters and the main power switching panels. Those connections had been neatly severed by Abbi’s last shot.
“What the...?” Flight Second Traci Walker was in the fighter nearest to Atkey and the other ship. She was confused. There’d been a flash of weapons, from the ... merchant? Suddenly the two ships were racing away from each other. Hanging in the void between them was a trio of abandoned cargo pods and a shuttle full of Marines.
“Does anybody know what happened?”
“That must have been a disguised Impie warship,” Pearl Flores answered uncertainly. She watched the Strike Cruiser fleeing towards the hyperjump limit. “They fired on Atkey, and now they’re running for hyper.”
Traci thought about that for a few seconds. “They’re a long way from hyper, Pearl. Seems to me we should try to catch them so somebody can find out what’s going on here.”
“Best idea I’ve heard in the last minute, Traci. Jodie and Manda, you stay with the shuttle to make sure nothing bad happens to it. As soon as Traci and I disable his engines, you bring them along to knock politely for us.” She and Pearl whipped about and accelerated after the fleeing enemy ship.
An Imperial Strike Cruiser was capable of 335 gravities of acceleration when pushed. Strike Leader Blazey spotted the two fighters closing and cursed luridly. Until that moment, he had thought only an Imperial Frigate or Fast Attack could keep up with a Strike Cruiser. The fighters behind him were pushing well over 500 G’s. They couldn’t possibly keep that up for long, but then, they didn’t have to. He bit off another useless curse. He had 20 seconds’ head start, and the hyperjump limit was 15 minutes away at his best acceleration. He didn’t have to do the math. He wasn’t close enough, not close enough by half. If those fighters didn’t run out of fuel soon, he’d have to cut his way out of this one.
“They’re only fighters,” he said. “And there are only two of them.” He’d trained against Imperial fighters, and he’d come away stunningly unimpressed. Whichever idiot had authorized that stupid waste of resources should be shot--probably would be shot when things settled down a bit--Imperial Intelligence had a long list of people the Universe could well do without, and everyone was just waiting for the day they could work through that list.
“There’s nothing else around that can catch us, Torazil. We’ll turn and engage them. We can make this quick.”
“Firing solution already locked in,” Torazil replied. He had no answers yet from Damage Control regarding Wakanda’s remaining big guns. No matter, for gnats like these Bitch fighters, he preferred point-defense lasers anyway.
As the Strike Leader turned Wakanda, Torazil locked on to the lead fighter and opened fire. His Fire Control computer reported the discharge. He didn’t see any hits, but that wasn’t surprising; their targets were dodging all over the sky. He reacquired them and fired again. Nothing, not even an indication of a weapons discharge. He stared at the images closing on Wakanda on the Tac Display and then ran a diagnostic on the point-defense cluster. When he reported the results of his test, his voice was a hoarse whisper.
“Point Defenses are not functioning, Strike Leader.”
“Why did they turn?” Traci asked, rolling wildly as they closed.
“I think he’s trying to fire at us,” Pearl replied, weaving and jinking as she warmed up her primary weapon. “They keep painting me with a targeting lidar.”
“I thought so too. I’m seeing oxygen and water vapor leaking from him. Somebody tagged him.”
“Probably Atkey. Maybe caused some other damage as well. Lucky for us.”
Traci began to warm up her main weapon also. This was beginning to look not so crazy after all. Most combat in a fighter was so quick that you never got to use your primary, but this was a situation just made for it, an already partially disabled ship that they wanted to capture relatively intact. “How do you want to take him, Pearl? Together, or one on each side?”
“Straight at him, dancing to throw off his aim, and then split one on each side. Remember, we don’t want to blow him to bits. We just want to slow him down and disarm him for the Marines.”
The two Bitch fighters closed rapidly, rolling, dodging, and making other course changes that threw off the targeting computer. Torazil tripped the manual overrides and fired at them repeatedly, but to no effect. They were maneuvering too radically for him to get a clean shot. “Damn,” he growled. “Hold still long enough for me to kill you.”
The hatch to the Bridge popped open. “We have a fire in the starboard main switching bay,” the crewman reported. “Communications and power to all starboard weapons systems are unreliable for 30 minutes, minimum, Sir.”
“I’m rotating the ship,” Strike Leader Blazey said. “The port-side weapons use the port main switching bay.”
“Explains why I wasn’t hitting anything.” Torazil switched over to the port weapons Fire Control. Wakanda rolled quickly. His targeting lidar settled on one of the fighters. The firing solution light blinked, and Torazil hit the buttons to shoot. As he did so, the Bridge lights failed, their gravity failed, and the air in the compartment pulsed to a distant explosion. Wakanda slewed sideways, driven off course by atmosphere jetting from a major hull breach.
“Good shot,” Pearl complimented her second as they spiraled around the Strike Cruiser. She saw energy weapons apertures and placed another shot from her main weapon in the middle of them. As she came around the ship, a point defense cluster snapped at her. She’d been looking for that and took it out with another shot.
Both fighters took turns riddling the presumed engineering spaces, main weapon bays, and point-defense clusters with their lasers. In seconds, the Strike Cruiser’s engines were down, and its weapons were silenced. It could only wait for the inevitable. The two Families fighters stayed close by, scanning continuously. They wanted to make sure nobody on board got brave or lucky and tried to destroy the ship or restart its engines.
The shuttle full of Atkey’s Marines caught up with them two hours later. Jodie and Manda joined Pearl and Traci circling around the target ship with all the patience of a pack of barracuda circling in on a kill.
“What took you so long?” Pearl asked.
“We checked out the cargo pods they left behind,” Marine Senior Rachel Federova replied. “Each pod had a dozen objects that looked like atmospheric entry vehicles. Some of them were broken open. At first, we thought they were weapons, but nothing showed on our radiation meters. We took lots of pictures and backed out. Those pods will keep until someone comes along to give them a closer look.”
“The crew is probably armed to the teeth and ready for you over here,” Pearl warned.
“Good,” Senior Federova said. “I like it when they shoot back. That makes it all right for me to shoot them.”
“Shoot them all you want, just don’t kill them,” Pearl said. “The Admiral will have lots of questions about all this. Somebody will have to get her some answers.”
The Marines left their shuttle a few minutes later. Rachel Federova had never counted boarding a hostile warship filled with armed defenders trying to kill her among her favorite ways of spending the day, but this was one of the things Marines got paid to do, and she had more than her fair share of experience doing it. Besides, she had friends on the Atkey. She had taken her turn reading to Abbi, just like the rest of the crew. That sneak attack made sure she would execute this assault with something a lot more persuasive than a stunner in her hand. Today she didn’t have to worry about hurting some drugged or tied-up gal stolen from her family. Today it would just be people trying to kill her, and her shooting back.
In the brief few seconds while she flitted from the shuttle to the Imperial warship, she made a last check of her weapons. These Imperials might have more sneaky tricks. Sure, the Admiral wanted prisoners, but the Admiral also knew her Marines wouldn’t get themselves killed just to capture a few armed lunatics who refused to admit they were beaten.
The trouble with defending a warship in space was that the principal reasons why you defended anything were completely lost. Reinforcements weren’t going to show up to save the day, so fighting for time was fairly pointless. Covering somebody’s retreat was out of the question, especially when the ship was alone and its drives were dead. Of course, the defenders might be prepared to blow up their ship and everyone in it. That would give them the satisfaction of killing Rachel and her Marines, but that would be a hollow victory, at best. That said, once a Marine made the decision to board a ship and once the crew decided to defend themselves, a great many things had already been settled.
Boarding a defended warship was always a cat-and-mouse game. The easiest entry was through the airlock, but only a very great fool boarded there because everyone knew that was the easy way in, and ship designers put defenses there from the very beginning. If the boarders had inconsiderately punched holes in the side of the ship, the defenders had to watch those, too. The trouble for the defenders was that the attacker would logically expect that. So the proper solution for the attacker was to blow new holes in the ship and enter through those.
People who gave ship defense some thought did not deploy the majority of their defense guarding against forced entry. That was almost guaranteed that the defenders would be cut off, isolated, and destroyed. Instead, the clever defender identified key points on their ship and just defended those. If there was time, booby-trapping the rest of the ship was a good idea. Many theorists favored this method, arguing also for a quick counterattack against the boarders from Engineering and the Bridge to catch them between two fires.
Most Marines agreed that these theories were fine, but they didn’t do the people having to carry out the attack much good. After all, very few of the theorists had ever been through a real boarding action themselves, with real weapons and real casualties.
All of this presupposed that the attacker actually wanted to take the ship intact. In many cases, it was easier to simply batter the ship into wreckage and then leave it until the defenders ran out of air. After that, taking a ship was relatively easy, except for the fail-safes, dead-man switches, and any booby-traps that were still scattered about.
Senior Federova sighed. Battering a ship into wreckage had her vote every time. Unfortunately, the Admiral wasn’t the only one who wanted answers. Her last orders from Lina Smirnova had been to take live prisoners and intact Bridge equipment. Rachel intended to do exactly that.
Through many years of trial and error, the Families Marines had devised their own methods for boarding a defended ship. Their motives for capturing a ship were seldom as altruistic as capturing the crew. They were usually much more interested in rescuing any captives they found. The Marine method, drilled into them from their first day of Basic Training, was based on the concept of Shock. The equation they were taught was simple: Speed plus Firepower (applied liberally) equaled Shock. The more Shock you applied, the fewer Dear Sib letters your commander had to write. Press the attack and don’t give the other side time to think.
All of this barely touched Rachel’s mind as she approached the hull of the Imperial ship. She had long ago absorbed all of it and made a few contributions of her own. She aimed herself towards one of the holes blown by the fighters. “Charges,” she ordered as the distance closed to a few meters.
The two gals with the assault charges primed them and fired them into the holes the fighters had left. Metal crumpled around the imploder warheads. Air, paper, more bits of metal, and three bodies spun away. Unconcerned, her two squads of Marines dropped into the hull.
Rachel landed in what had once been a passageway. She caught a hint of movement out of the corner of her eye. She fired at it and moved, all in the same motion. Somebody in a vacuum suit fired back at her. His laser blew glowing bits of metal from the bulkhead next to her head. Her shot punched a hole in the bulkhead he’d ducked behind. She rushed his position, firing through the bulkhead. When she checked the compartment where he had tried to hide, he was still there, or at least most of him was. There was a large amount of rapidly vaporizing blood floating around him from several fist-sized holes in his body.
She gave him just enough of a glance to make sure he was dead before she cleared the rest of the compartment. Toni slipped past her to clear the next compartment, and Maurelle cleared the one after that. Moving quickly, they leapfrogged toward the presumed engineering spaces. Near the aft airlock, they ran into resistance. Rachel and Toni kept the defenders’ heads down while Maurelle pitched an imploder grenade into them. After that, it was relatively peaceful until they came to a sealed bulkhead.
“Definitely engineering spaces,” Toni said, checking her instruments.
“Fine. Get the sheeting up.”
Toni and Maurelle moved back one layer of compartments and covered the passageway with plastic sheeting. While they did that, Rachel readied the imploder charges, two on the bulkhead separating them from the engineering spaces and one on the hatch, her decoy. By then, six more Marines had joined them, sealing the plastic behind them. They checked to confirm there were no obvious holes in the hull on this side of the plastic barrier and then took up positions with their heavy weapons, ready to attack if called upon.
“Ready?” Rachel looked around when her last charge was placed. Everyone nodded. She slung her accelerator rifle and drew a stun pistol. “All right, then. These won’t be dumb soldiers. We want to take as many live ones as we can. Anybody who doesn’t have a stunner, fall back. Somebody will scream if we need you.”
She touched the timing switch to detonate her charges and then backed away. The timer ran down and the charges went off, wrenching the bulkhead open. At the same time, she hit her boost, letting the imploder wave and her booster pull her towards the hole. She was dimly aware of some sort of fire flicking through the blown hatch, the hatch no attacking Marine would ever dream of using. She smiled. That decoy charge always got them.
Rachel cleared the hole and saw the leader of Second Squad, Senior Jeneen Davidson, fly through the other hole. Between them, they caught the Impies in a crossfire. The Impies tried shooting back, of course, and for a few seconds, the thin air was filled with the flash of weapons. Rachel and Jeneen were protected by their armor. The Impies had none. They had no other tricks, either, so that ended only one way. In seconds, three Impies were down, their unconscious bodies drifting in the microgravity. One Impie at a console was frantically keying something. Without hesitation, Rachel drilled him twice in the back, this time with something heavier than her stunner.
Two more Marines came through the holes in the bulkhead, weapons ready. They slipped back out as soon as they saw they weren’t needed. Jeneen, having trained in Engineering, studied the Impie controls for a few seconds, muttered something about Murphy and booby traps, and then hit the button that should eject the core. In under a second, the core of the fusion reactor blasted through the side of the ship. As it left, the main lights died. Battery-backed lamps came on all over the compartment. Marines flicked on their suit flood lamps. Somebody who sounded a lot like Jeneen sighed in relief and then laughed nervously.
“Lucky again. One of these days, somebody will get cute. I’ll hit that button, and kaboom.”
“Engineering secure,” Rachel reported to the shuttle.
“Understand,” the shuttle sent back. “Attack on the bridge in progress.”
“Jeneen,” Rachel ordered. “Secure the prisoners. I’ll take three of yours and head towards the Bridge.”
“Make it quick, Rachel. Seems awfully quiet up there. I’ll look around for the overrides and see if I can reduce the Impies’ options.”
With her squad and the extras from Jeneen’s, Rachel hurried towards the warship’s Bridge. Even two at a time, her troopers wasted a lot of the compartment’s atmosphere passing through her flimsy plastic airlock. She hoped Jeneen had no trouble stuffing their prisoners into the personnel bags every Marine carried during an assault like this. On a better day, those bubbles would hold rescued kin. Maybe today’s prisoners would provide information that helped some kin somewhere.
Wreckage in the passageways impeded her advance some more, as did checking a couple of Impie bodies and watching out for traps. She soon caught up with the other assault team.
“They have remotely controlled weapons rigged to cover all the approaches, projectiles with explosive warheads that chew up our armor,” Marine Trooper Anna Brodie explained the situation as she helped two other Marines assemble a rocket launcher. “They ripped out a few flimsy bulkheads to open up fields of fire. It’s too far to simply rush them. We have one down and patched already.”
Rachel thought about the situation. “Right. This is a ship, Anna. If we can’t do it from the inside, we’ll do it from the outside. Leave a team here to pin them down in case they decide to rush your position. We’ll go in through the skin.”
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