Sacking

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.

SPAM shells aren't exciting in hyperspace... but, in normal space, they make for a spectacular show, even if their ability to make a hit sucks big time. SPAM shells carry no warhead but are still impressive since they phase into the structure of the target and the intermingled atoms fuse-- or fission, or maybe even both-- and the target explodes. With the lousy ability to target through hyperspace, it would take a LOT of these shells to make an impression. It didn't take more than fifty or sixty shells to take out the nine intact hive ships... which rendered the other, previously damaged, hive ships in even more battered condition. The sleet of radiation certainly wasn't healthy for them, either, despite the shielding they'd acquired from the Confederacy.

But, then, the Sa'arm weren't innovators and had not re-tuned the shielding systems for military action, as we humans had done. We had a technological lead... but there were a lot of Sa'arm out there and their group mind didn't see us.

This latest batch of hive ships that had just been destroyed were rather larger than we expected... until the fleet commander on the Subtlety told us that the Sa'arm must be evacuating the world they were coming from.

It looked like this was going to be an "interesting" deployment. Our factories were making weapons at a furious rate because we knew, now, that things were going to get worse.

That's when my unit was turned into a set of long-distance scouts.

The world our short-lived visitors had arrived from wasn't all that interesting, being a drab place with an even less entertaining sun than the one I'd been born under, but, once we arrived, we set up a satellite constellation to keep an eye on them.

Nothing moved-- or lived-- on that planet unless it was a part of the Sa'arm.

And, let me tell you, there were still a lot of dickheads. I felt like I was looking at a political convention, sometimes.

"Captain," I said, turning to Cheryl, my flag captain, "One damn SPAM and the rest of these dickheads ain't going anywhere."

She smiled and laughed, answering "You wish! As if we were allowed..."

I sighed. "Yeah." I turned to the communications officer, telling him "Send a message up the food-chain asking for weapons free to blow up the planet. We need to cut out this tumor ASAP, they're gonna be launching another fleet in a matter of days."

"Aye-aye" came the acknowledgment. I nodded and turned back to Cheryl. "It's been a long day. I'm heading for my cabin, I need rack time."

Cheryl smiled. "It's my turn, tonight, Joel. I'll be by as soon as I've turned over to the B shift."

I nodded before slowly walking off.

Given the time we'd spent in our survey of the system on arrival, I'd had a long set of shifts in a row, so I was almost completely burned out when I climbed into my berth, my one steward, Pam, cuddling up to me to give me someone to hold on to.

I'd left the other five of my concubines back on the colony and had chosen the second smartest member of my stable to travel with me even though Pam was ditzy about some things. I had to admit that her ditziness in some areas wasn't merely appealing but had brought out the best in me by getting me to think things over as I explained them to her.

In other areas, though, Pam was very sharp, it was just that these weren't wide-spread enough to bring her CAP average up. One of the things that wasn't very high was her score as a heterosexual, but, then, she made up for it by being an exceptionally cuddly and affectionate package.

Additionally, Pam sure liked Cheryl... and all of the other women that got rotated through my bed.

This may explain why I didn't awaken when Cheryl climbed in to my bed, though I did come up to a dozing state while the arrangements were modified, me ending with a woman on each of my shoulders.

The morning, however, made up for the shortage of attention during the night, since, now, I had more attention to give. My tongue woke up Cheryl.

Now, really, it is possible for a person to still be a... ahem... "dead fuck", even with a CAP score over seven. Cheryl wasn't one of them and her screaming climax woke up Pam, who was also not a dead fuck, either. Pam dove for Cheryl's nipples with knowledge garnered from previous rotations. Between us we got Cheryl panting in almost constant orgasms which set the stage for me to mount her.

You may think it's an awful lot of energy to expend on any kind of foreplay, but, as a man, let me tell you that nothing feels better, emotionally and physically, than to have a continuously climaxing woman under you as you pound her pussy into the next galaxy.

All right, so that's one of my key kinks, almost a fetish, but I like it. Cheryl, I believe, enjoyed it when I did this as well. I sure didn't hear any complaints.

Pam went down on Cheryl to clean her up-- and out-- while I got behind my concubine and took pleasure in pounding her face into Cheryl's.

And, yes, Pam enjoyed that, too. She has her own kinks.

We only exercised a little bit of grab-ass in the shower before we got ourselves back into uniform and went on duty.

My request to SPAM the world below us didn't get approved. Instead, several days later, a small fleet of tin cans came out of hyper, escorting a cargo ship. We were advised to stand off and let them work.

The fleet came in fast, dropped into low orbit, and further decelerated as the cargo ship dipped into the atmosphere.

The Sa'arm response was impressive as their beam weapons did their best to slap at the ships... but they did manage to burst the cargo ship open. The tin cans accelerated at one helluva pace and popped into hyper to escape the attention of the ships that had scrambled to attack them.

We got to watch.

It would take at least a month for the Sa'arm to discover that they were as good as dead.

I'll admit there was a fair amount of tension as we awaited the outcome of the raid, and, at least twice a week, a fleet of hive ships would be launched, each heading in various directions, including the system we'd been sent here from. We dutifully passed off the directions each fleet took off in.

We watched, acting as pickets. Our crews maintained their rotations and "spread the love around" as we waited for bad news to arrive.

Cheryl's voice rang out on the PA one evening as a Sa'arm courier ship popped into normal space right by us.

Now is the time for me to explain something about command.

I was, for want of a better term, a Commodore, a rank made to differentiate me from the Captain. The problem here, of course, was that I was above getting my hands dirty with one ship since my job was to coordinate multiple ships.

This may explain why, on arriving at the flag CIC, I had nothing to do, no orders to give, I was just a passenger as we watched Cheryl run her ship the way she wanted to.

So I sat there in my seat, strapped in, my hands clenching and un-clenching as I heard-- and watched-- Cheryl do the work I wished I was doing.

The hell of it was that I suspected she was doing a better job in this crunch than I would. Her crew acted quickly and efficiently, each one taking initiative in their sphere of expertise, and the courier was a cloud of ionized gas in short order.

We had to hyper back out of the system given the way the dickheads responded.

Cheryl expended all of our four SPAM shells on our pursuers and got two of them as I called in in three more form our fleet to pursue our pursuers, and, twelve SPAM shells later, the six ships that had followed us into hyperspace were history.

On returning to the system I decided to have our SPAM shells re-stocked from the Oldsmar and sent the four ships that were now empty off for a new load.

It took another two months-- and sixteen more dickhead fleet launches-- before the dusting came to a head.

Don't ask me how it works, all right? Like the mystery of Sa'arm communication, this isn't going to be solved any time soon, either, but...

The planet died. All life on the planet was gone, wiped clean in an instant, the bodies lying there... with not even bacteria to provide decay.

There would be no more hive ships sent from this world, that was certain.

And, the hell of it, was that we'd have to re-seed this planet with life or the atmosphere would degrade quickly.

My gunship division didn't get to stay, after that. Instead we got orders to meet with another major fleet.

It had taken more than the nine years the Confederacy's AIs had predicted but the Battle of Earth had begun.

And... we were part of it.

The bad news? If this crop got onto the surface we might have to terraform Earth...