Sacking
by JJ
Copyright© 2026 by JJ
Science Fiction Story: This belongs to the Swarm Cycle. This centers on some action.
Caution: This Science Fiction Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Military Workplace Science Fiction Space Polygamy/Polyamory .
My unit had been assigned to the battle cruiser “No More Mister Nice Guy” in dealing with a new Sa’arm incursion into one of the Confederacy’s advanced-- i.e. “not human occupied” systems.
Now I’ll admit that the name of my mother ship had taken me aback when I was first assigned to her, but I was given an introduction to “The Culture” stories by Iain Banks and the whole issue of gravitas. I just hoped that the outcome of our story in dealing with the Sa’arm would be rather happier than those stories had ended.
Our “Space Action Group” centered on “So Much for Subtlety”, a heavy carrier over 50 kilometres in diameter with a full sixty four fighter wings and eight gunboat divisions. I had to admit that it was aptly named, given the inability to make it stealthy.
All right, so some wag decided that the ship needed to look like the Death Star with the big dimple, kind of reminiscent of the old AT&T logo. She was recently built given the new manufacturing facilities we humans had put in place which really would have upset the Confederacy. We humans, at least, were a post-scarcity culture ... at least, the humans no longer on the earth.
The other three cruisers-- and our cruisers were all over five kilometres in diameter, with two fighter wings and one gunboat division, like mine, each also carrying huge fucking magazines full of HSIT shells and carrying names like “Attitude Adjuster”, “Hand Me That Gun And Ask Me Again” and the “Agamemnon”. I have no idea how that latter ship ended up as part of this deployment.
We had a bunch-- well, to count it properly, a “shit-load”-- of tin cans with us carrying more conventional designations, named after various soldiers and aviators from earth. It is funny to know one is named the “Chuck Yeager” even though, at last report, Chuck Yeager is still alive.
We were there to keep the main body of the occupying force of dickheads from surviving arrival. The Sa’arm’s so-called “reconaissence in force” on the planet was being ground down by a shit-load of Marines and the ground support ship “Meddle Not in the Affairs of Humans” and was well on the way to rendering the Sa’arm forces into little tiny pieces. It was up to us to ensure that The Sa’arm couldn’t reinforce their spearhead, nor to allow them to call for them, either.
Our pickets kept us all up to date on the hyper traces of a large fleet. A scout division had been dispatched to look over the system the courier had been sent to and we’d gotten word that the Sa’arm would have to move because they’d used up yet another planet and weren’t comfortable in being a wholly space-borne culture.
Since Sa’arm were already on the Sierra Club’s shit list, this little bit of news wasn’t going to add much to the nature-conservancy’s outrage. The more rabid tree-huggers, at least those still on earth, were almost foaming at the mouth, already. Given the changes to the earth in getting ready for the Sa’arm had, with the introduction of various synthesizers and other, cleaner, manufacturing technologies, more and more had been done to make Earth more of a garden planet. If anything, the most rabid tree-huggers were all for getting as many human beings off the planet ... and never seemed to realize that the Sa’arm could undo everything.
The Sa’arm aren’t inventive and likely haven’t been for some time now. We believe they were far more inventive on their home world where some of the environmental challenges helped them by making mistakes a lot easier. Out in space, though, they were more like tribbles, though, thankfully, they did not breed quite as quickly as the fictional tribbles.
Hmmmmmm ... find or engineer something like tribbles? Some wag suggested that it’d be interesting to see a Sa’arm world hip deep in them...
Nahhhhh ... We would end up on the Sierra Club’s shit list if we set anything like that loose.
I was in charge of the Nice Guy’s gunboat division of sixteen gun-ships, each shaped more like an arrowhead so that what we lost in a smaller defensive perimeter gave us back that much more space to mount weapons. We carried the gamut of regular weapons-- missiles and beams-- but we also each carried four HSIT ... SPAM ... shells. Pissing off a gunboat is a bad thing.
The division under my command was tasked with interdicting the Sa’arm inter-system communication by destroying or even capturing Sa’arm courier ships. Others had the job of close combat. In a way I was glad we weren’t providing the picket force, though long-range scouting seemed like a good idea. I even approved of rumors that we could form wolf-packs and do raiding the Sa’arm.
“Skip,” my Tac officer spoke up, “The Subtle just dropped a cloud of SPAMs into the path of that incoming Sa’arm fleet.”
Considering the magazine size of Subtlety and how the big manufacturing plants on the largest moons of the gas giant in-system was turning them out in quantity, I knew that this barrage was going to be a big one. I was also certain, given that I’ve seen this action before, that it was going to fuck up the Sa’arm fleet, too, though there’s always been a good percentage that managed to exit hyperspace.
“All right,” I responded, “have our fleet come to Alert One, keep an eye out for any couriers that try to get out. We don’t want the dickheads to catch on and decide to shift their efforts to this system. Put a globe around the computed break-out point.”
“Aye-aye” answered my Comm officer.
“Oh, yes, weapons tight until we get a target that fits our profile, we don’t want to piss away anything we’ve got on a target that’s going to stay in-system.”
“Aye-aye” from Weps.
Battle commenced five minutes later and we had ring-side seats.
The HSIT-- well, “shit”-- shells, also known as SPAMs, have a hard time targeting in hyperspace. Additionally, they don’t tend be as destructive in hyper as they are in normal space but can damage a ship enough to keep them from being capable of putting up a fight if they even can make the jump back out.
Out of an estimated 81 hive ships, 6 survived untouched and an additional 15 managed to pop out of hyper with various levels of damage ... and the rest perished while still in hyperspace.
Each of the six intact ships, within minutes of arrival, sent off couriers. The others had been too damaged to do so or we would have had too rich a target environment. We had to have a lot of over-kill to make sure that the Sa’arm stay in the dark.
“All right, there are nine of them in three different directions, detail the Marshfield, McGraw and Carlinville to take out the three heading towards the north, the Oldsmar, Fishkill and Eatontown to the southerly group of three. Finally, have Beachyhead, Calais and Peenumunde deal with the three going back to where they came from.
That just took away over half of our strength, which, truly, is over-kill, but I had a feeling we were in for more of a fight than we expected.
Within an hour the McGraw, Eatontown and Calais came back to pick up new SPAM shells from the supply further in-system. The others returned to formation, not having to use the big shells in the magazines to close the door.
Meanwhile, we’d had to open the range as SPAM shells went in to the dickhead fleet while it was in normal space.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.