Quoted By:
“I spent my childhood engrossed by accounts of the early colonization wars. Romanticized stories featuring sleek ships and daring protagonist-captains who tested their mettle in nature’s oldest, darkest ocean. For them, honor was a given and glory always in ample supply.
I now know these accounts to be false. There is no glory in space combat, and honor is a cardinal sin.
Basic physical principles demand nothing less. In deep space, all materials are fragile. Closing velocities are immense. Any damage has the potential to be lethal in an environment devoid of heat, light, and air. As a logical consequence, the first and only rule of space combat is to strike before being hit: to see before being seen. First strikes are good, but ambushes are ideal.
The attack that I have prepared conforms to this principle. A few hours ago, the RAIN began feathering back her drive output, redirecting power to charge the mammoth capacitor banks surrounding the reactor compartment. Adaptive beam emitters – five on each side of the ship – spun in their mounts and dilated their apertures as they finished last minute calibration-checks. They were immaculate examples of optical engineering: devices designed to collimate the killing power of fifty-megawatt laser beam into an impact profile no larger than a child’s thumbprint.
Through the main viewscreen, I watched the corvettes continued their dogged, vengeful fusion burn, unaware that the target of their patrol had already locked them squarely in her sights.
Just moments before I sprung the ambush, I ordered MERRYGATE to ping the corvettes with a targeted burst from the RAIN’s active sensor array – focused radar, phased magnetic resonance imaging, and a few exotic modalities that could peer inside their peculiar, radially-symmetric hulls. Against a human warship, I wouldn’t have bothered; the RAIN could use stolen schematic data to optimize sub-system targeting without my assistance.
But against an unfamiliar target, I was responsible for finding these weak points manually. The corvettes may be small but hitting the right area could still mean the difference between a clean ambush and a longer, messier exchange of fire….
