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Grass Eaters 3 | 71 | Condition Two
🕑 Added 2025-04-07 15:47:00 +0000 UTCZNS 0312, Grantor (4,000 Ls)
POV: Telnokt, Znosian Dominion Navy (Rank: Ten Whiskers)
Ten Whiskers Telnokt was horrified.
In Dominion Navy doctrine, there were seven conditions for a fleet, in descending levels of readiness. The highest level of readiness, officially referred to as Condition One in training, was known to the crews as battle stations. This was usually reserved for when a fleet was in a state of combat, which was defined by the presence of predator combat ships in the current star system.
The next highest level of readiness, Condition Two, was set for more extended periods of preparedness. Where combat was imminent. Condition Three was for when combat was probable. Condition Four was for when the fleet was transiting to a sector that was in combat. And so on, until Condition Seven, which was usually when the fleet was in a protected port for maintenance, or during peacetime, which — for the Dominion — was never.
The condition levels allowed a fleet master in the Dominion Navy to balance between two competing priorities: fleet readiness and conservation of resources. The problems of an underprepared fleet were easily self-evident. The consequence for the other end of the spectrum was less obvious but still quite predictable. Over-taxed fleets drained resources quickly. Ships kept at high readiness required more maintenance. Without that preventative maintenance, they’d malfunction more in combat. Crews that were always kept on their paws exhausted quicker, made slower and poorer quality decisions, and officers who were constantly bombarded with the false alarms that were an inevitability of high condition levels tended to become less sensitive to actual issues.
In other words, the condition level for a fleet must be set correctly by its fleet master. Not over, and not under. No error was tolerated.
When the enemy fleets blinked into the fringes of the Grantor system, the Grand Fleet under Telnokt was at Condition Two. She justified this on the basis that all surrounding systems had either gone quiet or were sending clearly compromised signals back to the Grantor system. She assessed the predator fleet had likely completely cut off and surrounded the Grantor system. The enemy’s intrusion into the Znos system further added a background layer of anxiety that backed up her set condition.
Practically, Condition Two meant that two thirds of the ships in each squadron must be ready to enter direct combat in minutes, not hours. To satisfy that requirement, of her 15 squadrons in Grantor-3 orbit, a third were on active patrol, a third were on standby, and a third were in maintenance mode. That meant only five squadrons of her ships in Grantor-3 orbit were sitting with their engines cold.
When the enemies blinked into the system, Telnokt raised the readiness level of her fleet to battle stations. That meant all eighty squadrons, especially the ones with cold engines, must immediately begin to make preparations for battle.
Which was fine.
That was how it was all supposed to go.
The Grantor-3 garrison squadrons were deep inside the Grantor blink limit, hours away from where the enemy could come in and strike. They had long-range reconnaissance assets in the outer system fringes that were supposed to give them literal days of warning when the enemy invaded. They had time before they needed to engage.
She did everything by the book.
Which made it all the more frustrating when — without warning — thousands of surface-to-orbit missiles rose through the Grantor-3 atmosphere. A deadly swarm rising from their own occupied world, towards her ships. The five cold squadrons still warming their engines never stood a chance. Their explosions bloomed in silent, terrible beauty against the blackness of space.
Sixty proud ships of the Dominion Navy, wasted in a single, unexpected strike.
Stabbed, in the back, by her own planetary defenses.
Telnokt bristled as her paws clutched her command chair tightly. “What about the other squadrons, Computer Officer?”
“More missiles incoming from the surface. A few ships in the garrison squadrons — six other ships took proximity hits, but they’re burning away and launching countermeasures,” he replied calmly. “They should be out of minimum powered envelope in a few waves.”
“Our own batteries! How could this have happened?! Who is responsible?”
“No one has taken responsibility yet. But logically, this should be within the area of responsibility of our people on the ground. The ones who control those orbital defense stations.”
“And they haven’t taken responsibility?”
“No, they have not,” he confirmed with a shake of his head. “We’ve managed to get ahold of a few of our supply bases down there. They say many of our facilities are facing attacks from the locals.”
“The locals?! Isn’t that within the jurisdiction of the State Security officials down there?”
“Yes, Ten Whiskers, and we have been trying to reach them—”
“Is Administrator Krelnos of Grantor City station— has she taken responsibility?”
“No. Her station has gone dark.”
“Gone… dark?” she asked, startled.
“We’ve been hailing them, but there has been no response so far.”
Telnokt looked at him in dismay. “Have we— have we just lost total surface control of Grantor-3?!”
“The ground activity of units in the vicinity appear to indicate they are still in command, but they may have lost power. Impossible to tell more without direct communications. But from the Digital Guide’s analysis of satellite imagery, we still have millions of Marines down there, and they appear to still retain some form of organization. Some bases have managed to fend off the attacks. They may still be able to restore control.”
“That— that is a lot of optimistic thinking with the enemy fleet in our system,” she said as another wave of missiles launched from the planet, burning an efficient pattern to intercept one of her squadrons simultaneously. It was truly a mystery how the primitive locals were able to coordinate their missile volleys so extensively.
Then, she looked at the imagery of the ships that had just blinked into the outer system.
Maybe not such a mystery, after all.
She snarled, “We can’t fight the enemy with our own batteries shooting at us from behind at will! Are our squadrons in position to fire on the compromised batteries?”
“They are, Ten Whiskers, but the Digital Guide recommends we consult the surface authorities for an efficient plan of action—”
“It’s hallucinating again! We can’t reach them!” she replied, her voice slightly raised in frustration.
“Yes, Ten Whiskers… Our ships are in position to fire on our surface-to-orbit launch sites. Which should we target?”
“All of them!”
“Even the ones that haven’t launched?” he asked in surprise. “What if we are still in control—”
“Especially the ones that haven’t launched,” she snapped back. “It wouldn’t make sense to destroy them after they’ve already launched everything at us, would it?”
“Ah. Yes, Ten Whiskers.”
Telnokt sank into her command chair and watched numbly as her ships began to take apart the orbital defense network of the planet they had been themselves ordered to defend.
She wondered idly whether someone would one day tally up the damage done to the Dominion by itself compared to what the Great Predators had done. At the thought, she could only sigh and shake her head bitterly.
That really is the story of this war in a nutshell, isn’t it?
++++++++++++++++++++++++
“Ten Whiskers,” her computer officer reported back an hour later.
“What is it?” Telnokt asked in irritation. “Have we completed the predators’ job for them yet?”
“No— not yet, Ten Whiskers. We are still destroying the last few launchers. Some of the locals apparently moved our batteries far from their hangars before launching, and we’re trying to find them all. The primary danger is over though; most of our ships have managed to get out of… the powered envelope of our own captured orbital defense sites.”
“Finally some good news. Do you have more of that?”
“No, Ten Whiskers, but I have an update on the enemy fleet in the outer system.”
“What about them?”
The predator ships — the ones they could see anyway — were burning towards Grantor-3 at a casual, almost leisurely pace. It was half infuriating and half menacing.
“Radar squadron has been closely observing the enemy fleet. It includes at least one squadron of Great Predator ships, the older type they call the Peacekeepers, and we can see them on our sensors sporadically.”
“What about them?” she asked.
Telnokt knew from the moment they blinked in: whether the incoming fleet included Great Predator ships or not, her chances of success in their defense mission here — or survival, for that matter — were not high.
Three years ago, she would have bet her place in the Prophecy on her eighty squadrons against two or three Lesser Predator battle fleets. But this was not three years ago. The nature of the threat had altered radically. The enemy no longer haphazardly committed to action. If they were here, they were sure to have the equipment, confidence, and the planning necessary to defeat her larger fleet. This was part of the fleet that destroyed most of the Grand Fleet on the assault against the Great Predator Nest.
And whatever the raw numbers on screen told her, that this incursion followed the still-ongoing catastrophe in the Znos system did the opposite of assuaging her fears.
Her computer officer continued, “Our Digital Guide identified a pattern in the deployment of their so-called Peacekeeper ships. Their squadron is escorting something else we can’t detect on radar.”
“Their newer Python hiding ships? I thought those were in Znos.”
“Yes, Ten Whiskers. Our reports from the Dominion stated that the fleet that is currently besieging the Znos system accounts for almost three squadrons of those Pythons. As formidable as the predators have become, it is… doubtful that they’ve developed the technology to be in two places at once. And… when the Digital Guide found a pattern within their escorts, we managed to deduce its approximate position before its light reached us, zeroed in on the area, and we’re getting a visual from some of our nearby recon assets now.”
“A picture?! Why didn’t you lead with that?! On screen.”
“Yes, Ten Whiskers.”
A blurry blob appeared on screen. In a few seconds, the Digital Guide managed to clean up enough of the interference for the picture to resolve clearly.
The new ship was clearly designed with the same aesthetic and design language as most other Great Predator ships: dark-colored, smoothly angular, and not a single window or exterior light on display. Judging from the sizing scale in the corner of the screen, it was at least four times as large as its missile destroyer escorts, maybe more.
Most peculiar, its mostly flat “top” was adorned with an array of lighter colored dark gray squares, each marking a hatch for… something. They were lined up in four by two grids, eight in each cluster. She did a quick count in her head, her alarm rising as she identified every new cluster.
Following her eyes, her computer officer deduced what she was doing. “There’s ninety-six of them, Ten Whiskers. They look to be… where missiles can come out.”
Her blood went ice cold as the implication hit her. “Almost a hundred missile batteries? A hundred of their missiles?! On a single ship?”
“They— they can’t possibly be hot-reloadable batteries, Ten Whiskers,” he replied quietly.
“I wouldn’t be so sure… and we can assume that there’s at least one independent munition under each of those squares,” she said.
“That would be— that would be a logical assumption.”
“A new ship with a hundred missiles in a volley. And each of them could be one of those that could destroy one of our ships without us detecting them in time.”
“That seems to be the most reasonable assumption, Ten Whiskers,” he replied after a while.
“And there can be multiple of these.”
“That… also seems to be the case. We haven’t observed them yet, but the Digital Guide estimated based on the ship formations that there are at least two, maybe three of these new ships. But it warns us that there could be a thousand there too. We have no baseline to measure our detection ratio against.”
Telnokt analyzed the visible enemy formations of the Lesser Predator ships again. With this new information, everything else came into focus. The three Malgeir battle fleets here — they were not here to fight her.
They are the clean up crew.
They’d brought the Malgeir ships, geared for planetary invasion, already confident that the Terran ships would sweep her remnant Grand Fleet away like the ocean would wash away a poorly constructed mud house on the beach. She took another look at the new ship on the screen, at her battle map, at the ruined surface-to-orbit sites on Grantor-3, and at the complex expression on her subordinate’s face.
And she realized that the battle was already lost.
Maybe even the war.
One thing at a time.
“Order the relay ships to report our situation and my full responsibility to Znos,” she ordered. “And have the fleet burn for the system blink limit.”
“Ten Whiskers?”
“We’re done here. We can’t hold this system, not against… whatever that is. And not against their fleets. We are not going to be wasteful. Not today.”
He bowed. “Yes, Ten Whiskers. Should we— should we set up the Lamed Prey ruse?”
She racked her brain for that specific trick, and when she recalled it, she shook her head. “No. They won’t fall for that one. Not again. If we pretend to be lame prey here, we’d be dead prey faster than you know. It’s time to leave. Abandon every vessel that can’t achieve 80% of our ship’s max acceleration, and prepare the fleet to break through their blockade.”
“Yes, Ten Whiskers. All squadron leaders confirm course set for blink limit.”
Telnokt took one final look at the new enemy ship displayed on the main screen and pointed a claw at a cluster of white markings near the rear of the ship. “Have the computer translate those markings from what we know of their language. What does that one say?” she asked curiously.
After a minute, her computer officer looked up from his console. “It’s the predators’ name for their ship. It says: TRNS Avenger.”
Despite knowing they were still far from her fleet, Telnokt swallowed hard. “Hm… I don’t think I like the sound of that… On second thought, modify my last directive to 85% of our max acceleration instead.”
Comments
87894354
It's been a while since we last saw Buns encounter space mines. Hopefully that's going to change :P
Spooker
New ships.
xxm1rvxx
Ohhh boy, are the humans going to let the enemy leave Grantor so easily?
Valdis Trautmanis
Psychological warfare by the Allies. You can run, Bun, but you're only going to exhaust yourself in the end... Btw, I don't see the Avenger on the Terran Navy roster. 🤔 Is she brand new, classified or both? A new Strategic Missile Carrier or a heavy cruiser class?
