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====== Story: Battlespace ======

===== Battlespace I =====

At first glance, a fleet battle may appear chaotic. No neat ranks or columns here, only a whirling maelstrom of warships and missiles, thousands or hundreds of thousands of kilometres across. But there //are// patterns. There //is// a structure. If you know the principles, you can see them. Here, a flanking maneuver. Here, a damaged ship screened by its allies. Here, a priority target hammered by coordinated fire. Here, a battlegroup trying to extricate itself and jump away.

When you see the patterns, if you’re fast enough, you can play them.

That’s what I do now. I camouflage myself in the patterns. I play the role of a cruiser; I am a few hundred metres larger, and much more dangerous, but the enemy doesn’t know that. My EWAR systems are good, and in this battle, they are looking at patterns.

As a cruiser, I am fast and aggressive, but not very important. I’m a disposable asset, thrown around the battlespace as the situation demands. I slot into an attack run, then when it’s done, I merge smoothly into a carrier’s escort wing. Then I’m called away to protect a battleship, struggling with enemy corvettes. In this way, I slip between patterns, but have none of my own. I’m never notable, never vital, never alone. There are always bigger fish.

A trio of enemy warships catches me on one transition, sweeping in on my tail and sending a hail of missiles and lance rounds at me. If they had good AI, they would see through their gun cams and know I’m not what I seem - but they don’t, and their fire controllers are only looking at targets on a projection. Their lance rounds shatter on my shields, and my point defenses burn their missiles from the sky. My reply is swift; I cannot give them the chance to highlight me for their admirals to pay attention to. I cut my main drive and flip 180 degrees, unmasking my own particle lances. One burst per target, to start with, slicing away their antennas so they can’t scream for help. Then my smaller guns burn off their turrets from their hulls, while my lances bore lengthwise down the cores of their hulls.

A minute later I come about again and fire my engines, breaking trajectory with the three burning hulks.

Still the enemy does not see me. Oh, I feel the rattle of incoming fire against my shields. But they don’t pay attention to me. And now I’ve made my way halfway across the battlespace, and their blindness will cost them.

I roll in close to a superbattleship, then dive away as its main batteries engage the enemy flagship. I’d say it’s an even fight - my ally could fairly lose that duel. If it were one on one. The enemy believes it //is// one on one.

I complete my arcing course. My lances are fixed on the flagship’s midsection. All their guns are firing - the other way.

I drop my jammers, dump a thousand missiles into the black, and sing as I behead them.

===== Battlespace II =====

From my seat on the command deck of the Bearcat MBT 2B2 "Warrior Bard", I control an area of the battlespace 30km across.\\  
I am the information warfare officer. I am linked directly into the local battlenet, for which "Warrior Bard" serves as a focal node. At my fingertips, I have information from hundreds of individual combatants and recon assets. My eyes in the sky are drones and gunships, and above them the deep penetration sensors of the battleship //Razor// and her escorting cruisers. On the ground, I see through the eyes of troopers spread across my AO, and the gun cameras of their light tanks and IFVs. I hear condensed analyses of intercepted enemy traffic, and smell a virtual breeze that tells me the exact composition of the local atmosphere.

We're cruising through the countryside at a steady 25km/h. We could go much faster, but we're here as a capital unit, not a charger. Many metres below me, our tracks are crushing trees, hedgerows, and smaller hills with ease. Up here on the command deck, I feel only slight changes in inclination as we roll up or down slopes.

I am the queen of all I survey. Information is victory, and I know everything.

15,330m ahead, one of my drones burns out its jammers and drops into a steep dive, but a missile catches it anyway and annihilates it. I'm not worried. An IFV in my forward screen is already launching a new drone, and the unfortunate casualty spotted its killer before it died.\\  
I tag the enemy missile carrier hidden in a copse, and send it to the gunner. I hear a muted whirr from the turret bustle as one of the VMACS racks tilts upwards to expose its launch rails above the turret roof, then a //thump// as a missile leaps away into the sky.

In the battlespace, I see three things at once. A gunship has found the missile carrier's companion and as I watch, shreds it with a burst of gauss gun fire. Simultaneously, a trooper team walks into a wall of enemy jamming, plotting a disconcerting dark smear on my awareness. Simultaneously, our own missile streaks across the map and turns the first missile carrier into a crater. I pass the jamming warning to a drone swarm, and have them sketch out the edges of its effectiveness. The zone has a centre, and as they circle it, the drones pick up enemy battlenet traffic going in and out. That gets passed up for analysis, but the existence of the traffic alone is enough to sell me on this target.

I use a tightbeam signal to order the trooper team to back out of the jamming, and tag the epicentre for the gunner. On //Razor//, a strategic AI believes the jamming marks a command post, and the fire mission is upgraded.
I feel the turret traverse a few degrees. Above me, the loading system slams a 400mm antimatter round into the breech. A jolt, a bone-vibrating clunk, and a few seconds later, a rising mushroom cloud tells me my battlespace is uncontested once more.

The enemy were short-sighted. Their defensive jamming blew their own cover. Noise is information.

Information is victory.

===== Battlespace III =====

Tanera cut out mid-sentence. //Signal lost.// I figured he’d been hit, but then my armour gave me a big red alert. //Battlenet uplink lost,// it said. //Switching to peer-to-peer mode.//

No one likes being in P2P mode. You don’t have an authority dictating the plan, holding a master copy of the map, or processing information so it’s usable. You just have everyone sending directly to each other on the tactical net. The tac net’s designed to handle low-level coordination between nearby teams. Trying to run an entire battle through it is only marginally better than using handwritten notes and couriers. There’s no processing or analysis, no strategist collating data and seeing the big picture. It’s like trying to assemble a chicken out of a bowl of chicken soup, into which more soup is constantly being poured.

There’s one more thing that no one likes about switching to P2P.

Instinctively, I looked up. Beyond the expiring smoke trails, I could see stars moving in the dawn sky. None of them seemed to be exploding...but without the proper battlenet, my location tag for //Arrow// was outdated.

That other reason for being scared of losing the uplink is because the uplink is your connection to your home ship. Your ship is your ride in, your ride out, your source of fire support, your commander, and your home. The battlenet signals arrays on a battleship like //Arrow// can provide full coverage for an entire planet from orbit. If they’re unreachable, there’s a serious problem.

Tanera pinged me by tightbeam. //“I don’t know what the fuck just happened, but our existing problems are still here. We’ve got to get fire on these railguns.”//
I signalled my acknowledgement and checked my map. Not too outdated, yet, and Tanera’s targets weren’t moving. Still one big problem, though: I’d forgotten to save the direct channel for fire support to my local storage. My fault. Too reliant on the net. This situation is exactly why I should have saved it.\\  
That said, improvisation is a soldier’s most important skill. I hunkered down behind a wall with Rodriguez and started scanning the sky again.\\
There! A gunship, flying low above the trees, its gauss guns swiveling in their mounts and hammering at something in the forest. I tracked it carefully, locking on with my targeting suite, and sent it the most powerful tightbeam my antenna could manage.

My aim was rewarded. Three seconds later, a message came back. //Local battlenet server requests connection.// The gunship crew, blessed be their names, were on the ball. I connected, and immediately sent invites to my team and Tanera.\\ 
The world started to light up again, filtered intel from the gunship’s local server flooding into my battlespace awareness suite. I uploaded the railgun position to the net and flagged it as a priority target. A few seconds passed, then another gunship picked up. //Target located, eyes on. Missile away, missile away. Standing by for hit report.//

Back on the net. Back in business. Time to go to work.

{{tag> story}}