Follow The Leader

The Nightstalker and its six escorts accelerated in pursuit of the cloud of fighters. The Eye was on tactical, and reviewed the sensor reports.

"Five thousand, six hundred and forty-three marks, accelerating at eight standard gravities from Suburbia Prime. They're sticking together." The Eye paused for a moment, and a cloud of tiny false-color dots covered the bridge's main view-screen.

Jolt, sitting in the captain's chair, narrowed her eyes. "Their energy storage capacity is limited. If they're going to jump, they'll have to do it soon."

She regarded the cloud of mauve-colored dots. "Do we have fragment bombs?"

The Eye checked her armory display. "Yes, sir, we do."

"Give me a rack of torpedoes with frag bombs. Thresher, relay that to our wingmen. Let's take as many of them out as we can while they're still vulnerable."

Thresher was at the communications station. "Done. They'll fire at our command."

Jolt turned to the First Mate, who was standing beside her. "Fire at your discretion."

The First Mate tensed and turned to a console. "Transfer fire control now."

The Eye complied, tapping buttons on her tactical console. "Done."

The First Mate entered an attack plan, explaining as he manipulated the controls. "If I understand you correctly, Captain, you wish to deploy the bombs just in front of the leading edge of fighters, resulting in kinetic kills as the targets accelerate into the shrapnel."

Jolt nodded. "Precisely."

The First Mate consulted his display. "Between our launchers and the other six ships, we have forty warheads for the first salvo. All racks loaded -- firing."

From the sides of the blade of the spade-like Nightstalker, small cylinders rolled from the launcher racks on the side. The escorting corvettes, stubby cylinders with a pair of movable, wing-like struts with thrusters on the end mounted on one side next to a heavily-armored bridge module, fired more missiles into the cloud of ordnance from their single launcher racks opposite the bridge.

Computers traded targeting information, then the thrusters of the missiles ignited. A standing wave of neutrino pairs was constrained on one side by a nanoscopic gravity gradient, created by a thin film of stable strange matter. To oscillate at its desired wavelength, the standing wave had to attempt to push the barrier out of its frame of reference; the magnetic moment of the neutral gravity band gap skipping forwards through space-time generated blinding light and heat, which was conducted away from the apparatus by a cloud of vaporizing coolant. The missiles skipped forwards through space, leaving a trail of glowing gas.

An additional set of band gaps closed around the standing wave, this time producing thrust not in ordinary space-time, but in the curved and distorted dimensions of hyperspace. The missiles seemed to curve away as their thrust vectors were forced into a time-line with a non-zero imaginary component, disappearing from the local light-cone on a partially time-like path to their targets. This similarity to a naval torpedo, skimming under the surface of an ocean, led missiles with faster-than-light thrusters to be called "torpedoes".

The torpedoes completed their brief parabolic skip in imaginary time slightly ahead of the front of the cloud of fighters. A charge of chemical explosive sent kilogram-sized chunks of iron into a cloud of kinetic impactors.

The fighters were already traveling at a quarter of the speed of light, following a common vector out of the Suburbia system. The oncoming projectiles vaporized the few fighters that were struck; the survivors scattered, and the advance halted as the formation began to dissipate like a cloud.

Jolt watched the screen as the interrocitor observed the flashes of the exploding fighters. The computer collated the casualty figures to her command display. "Excellent. The first salvo literally decimated the targets -- 10 percent casualty rate."

Thresher, manning the communications station, registered hails from a group of a dozen torpedo frigates patrolling the Suburbia system. With the advance of the fighters temporarily halted by the barrage from the faster corvettes, these vessels could surround and bombard the cloud of small vessels, closing off the escape vectors for the small ships. "We have fire support -- I think we have them bottled up."

The Eye scowled. "Wait a minute -- something's coming!"

Twenty huge battleships materialized from deep hyperspace, re-entering normal space-time in a scattered cloud that rapidly approached the cloud of fighters. The neutral particle cannon of the Reyll war-ships fired.

The beams faded away, twisting away into hyperspace, and re-appeared as scorching beams of energy that struck the approaching corvettes. One bolt struck the Nightstalker amidships, disrupting the main power reactor. The Eye cut the throttle rather than deplete the ship's supply of stored energy, as did the other corvettes. "Twenty marks -- out of nowhere! Main power down, recovery in thirty seconds. Breaking off pursuit."

The surviving fighters -- some five thousand ships -- returned to their former vector, approaching the battleships. Jolt and the First Mate watched as the fighters triggered their jump drives and disappeared, one by one, from the screen.

TV Casualty

Media in Corporate space was distributed asynchronously. Maintaining reliable data streams between two points separated by a few light-years was expensive, and considering the differing diurnal cycles of the colony worlds and the star-ships traveling between them, live distribution would have been inconvenient.

The crew of the deep-space cargo freighter had just received the current delta feed from Entertainment Division for subscribers on Deep Space Distribution Plan 9, which contained the following:

Thirty hours of news and public-interest broadcast archives for the previous cycle from Sedgewick Station, Suburbia's West Pole, Astes, Trojan City, and Parkland. The Big Five media markets generally provided twelve half-hour news broadcasts, sorted and indexed to let homesick crewmen catch up on current events from somewhere near their home.

Twelve hours of the highlights of the last cycle's sporting events, cut into short segments, covering sporting events like competetive pack hunting, combat golf, ski jousting, and chess.

Ten hours of entertainment programming.

The news and sports streams contained elaborate, time-coded indexes that could be used to mix short segments into one of the feature streams.

The feature streams were where the various distribution plans began to distinguish themselves. Plan 9 was reasonably popular among spacers, residents of deep-space installations, prisoners, and bar patrons; it concentrated on super heroes.

The Fe Arrans had records of individuals with extraordinary abilities back into the depths of their written history. These once ruled as warlords over the packs they adopted; over time, the religious philosophies of the Reyll prophets slowly limited their political and economic domination, and introduced more sophisticated and egalitarian social structures that encouraged artistic and scientific progress. The paranormals became useful atavisms, conscripted soldiers used in the quiet, civilized wars fought between the Reyll industrial combines.

The Corporation, on the other hand, turned its paranormals into media figures, dressing them in colorful costumes. They were integrated into police and paramilitary forces, and used to communicate information about public safety and war-time propaganda to vast audiences. However, their intrigues, rivalries, and friendships were scripted and managed by a cadre of writers and producers, producing worked scenes that provided continuity to knit together the footage of what the heroes called "shoots" -- usually combat or some other perilous, unscripted situation.

Honor Guard was a relatively popular super hero series. The setup -- the protagonists were a team of advisers to the Space Patrol, attached to an experimental heavy corvette -- ensured variety in location and tone, combined with the comforting conventions of spacer life and police procedural and search and rescue fiction.

This particular feed contained six hour-long episodes of Honor Guard adventures, two hours of short worked comedy skits and celebrity interviews by Awesome Man, a clownish empath in a garish costume, and a two-hour block of music videos and out-of-context clips from documentaries and old movies hosted by former villain Master Decontrol. As such, Honor Guard was the meat in the media soup doled out by the Deep-Space Distribution Network, playing to a captive audience of bored, inebriated space truckers.

It wasn't high culture, but it made the hours pass between sheer boredom and frantic terror -- just the thing for long-haul space flight.

Trailer Parks In The Stars

The survey ship dropped out of hyperspace and took an awkward polar orbit around the distant planet, whose magnetic field interfered with the electrogravitic reactionless thrusters that propelled the vast saucer through the darkness of interstellar space.

The crew were sapient arctomorph felinoids from a yellow dwarf star in the Pleiades cluster. This was one of their first ventures outside of their isolated star cluster.

The planet beneath them was suitable for colonization, with a temperate climate, plentiful water, and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Gravimetric surveying revealed that the planet was deficient in heavy and precious metals, and had numerous anomalous mass distributions. One scan showed an artificial meander in an underground river; there, what appeared to be the ruins of a villiage was found.

The leader of the expedition, a formidable sorceror, approached the town square. An obelisk flared to life, and he was caught up in a beam of pink light.

Four humans sat before him. They were dressed in the clothing of the American Colonial elite, and gathered together at a round table inside a Masonic lodge in Richmond, Virginia.

Much time passes. A long-haul space trucker, carrying a load of bug bombs to the planet Suburbia, checks the ship's autopilot, downs the ice-cold contents of a garish aluminum can, and rises, obviously inebriated, to relieve himself loudly in the head next to his sleeping quarters.

"Hey, Bob! Wake up!"

A drowsy voice comes from the darkened room.

"Whu-?"

"Your shift. I'm needing to crash."

"Did you make coffee?"

"Sorry!"

"What's on TV?"

"Honor Guard reruns."