"Well," Sabatine replied with the exaggerated care of someone who knew they drunk a little too much. She snickered as she remembered how Kaiden had found her covered in mud after freeing the Admiral's pinnace.

"It isn't ONLY getting your hands dirty," she conceded. The headed down the companionway towards the officers quarters, Sabatine running her hand along the metal bulkhead to steady herself.

"Think he is going to go for it?" Kaiden asked her. A grin that would have done a mongoose credit spread over Sabatine's face.

"Florins to flaxseed sir," she responded with drunken formality before slipping into her room and collapsing on the cot.


_______

"Extracting," Sabatine reported, for once not feeling the discomfort of the procedure due to the hangover she was nursing. As she had predicted Captain Micha had changed his patrol orders immediately, and on the next day watch they had executed a short in system hop to get a look behind on of the smaller gas giants which the sailing directions listed as having a number of small moons. This was their second transit, exploring the vicinity of the unnamed gas giant on the fringe of the system.

"Contact!" Sabatine shouted as sensor data poured in through the pickups now they were out of the matrix. Her heart dropped like an icy comet. She had expected to find a couple of pirates in a nest, perhaps with captured ships down on the surface of one of the moons. Instead the sensors registered not one, but three ships. All of them warships, all of them Alliance.

"Enemy ships!" she snapped, toggling frantically between displays to sythesize the data she was seeing.

"Two destroyers, and Gods, there is a heavy cruiser on the ground," she repotted, her voice decreasing in volume though the icy grip on her heart didn't relax. This was a terrible situation to be sure. The sensors registered the destroyers Halifax and K-21 at about one hundred and two hundred thousand miles above them, offset at an arc of about 120 degrees. The Heavy Cruiser Hikendorf, was in a shallow crater below them at a range of perhaps 90,000 clicks. The visual data seemed to indicate that it was taking on water from a fairly sophisticated set of ground installations. The freighter they had seen running was there also now that she had time to look at it, but the oversight could hardly have mattered less. By luck, whether good or ill was yet to be seen, they had extracted between the picketing destroyers and the grounded heavy cruiser. The destroyers were in the process of putting their rigs up, probably in preparation to make a short jump in system to swat a nosy RCN corvette, judging by the sparing, they had only recently arrived from a long voyage, probably through the St John cluster, and hadn't yet had a chance to shake down.

"Say again Lieutenant," Micha asked, googling at her in shock.

"Hostil..."

"Incoming!" Helena Graving shouted, and the hull began to shake as the heavy plasma cannons began to traverse. Sabatine glanced down at her board in shock, amazed and horrified that the enemy had been able to react so quickly. It wasn't ship based missile fire, rather one of the anti ship batteries defending the ground installation had opened fire.

"Permission to engage," Graving called leaning forward intently over her display. Micha's mouth worked but no sounds came out, perhaps he was suffering from a particularly rough transition, but it was a piss poor time for it.

"Sir do I hav..."

"Fire!" Sabatine shouted and before the word had fully escaped her mouth the heavy guns crashed in syncopating blasts that made the hull ring like a giant bell. Unusually for her class, the Vicky mounted six inch guns rather than the conventional four inchers. There wasn't much difference in the rate of fire, but the stress they put on the frames and mountings was exponentially greater. CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! Graving's first shot swatted the missile out of existence in a burst of flame. Unlike a ship based missile the ground to air variety had more fuel and less warhead, the plasma ignited the fuel reserves in a spectacular fireball. The second shot detonated the battery itself and the third and fourth rounds hit the Hikendorf squarely. Sabatine was about to tell the gunner to cease fire, plasma shots couldn't penetrate an atmosphere but the sensors showed rigging and masts subliming in fireballs as the gunner raked the grounded cruiser. Belatedly she realized the moon had no atmosphere and whooped with delight as the enemy ship rocked and sparkled with plasma hits. At this range the armor was thick enough to turn aside the hammer blows, but the ships exterior fittings and rig were torched in an instant. Graving apparently noticed this too and shifted her point of aim onto other targets. The freighter blew apart under a direct hit that scattered pieces of it over a square kilometer of moonscape.

"What are you doing!" Micha yelled, finally seeming to snap out of his fugue, eyes wide with shock, "you have just started a war!" Sabatine blinked at the absurd statement. The very fact that Alliance ships were here, and had a base meant they were already at war.

"Halifax is launching," Ottis reported his voice excited but not alarmed. Sabatine glanced back to the board and saw that the boy was right, missile tracks appearing on the PPI as cyan lines which intersected with the course of the Vickie.

"Orders sir?" Sabatine demanded.

"Give me a moment," Micha snapped back. Sabatine's eyes widened with shock, they didn't have a moment, it might already be too late.

"K-21 is maneuvering," Ottis reported as the second destroyer, slower off the mark than her consort began to accelerate, hard enough that pieces of her half deployed rig were carrying away. They were comically outgunned, probably still alive only becaue Graving had fried the sensors and welded the turret mountings of the Hikendorf before the cruisers heavy guns could gut then. 

"General Quarters!" Sabatine shouted, though only an idiot would need to know to get to battle stations at this point.

"Lieutenant Hickoring this is my ship and..." Micha began to protest but Sabatine was no longer listening.

"I am maneuvering," she called over the command push and rolled the ship, twisting to bring Graving's guns to bear on the incoming missles. The great guns began to hammer instantly, working to nudge the incoming warheads off their predicted lethal courses. Another four, then four more missiles coughed from the Halifax, filling the board with cyan trails.

"XO," Sabatine called over a two way link, bypassing the useless shouting on the command channel.

"Kaiden I hope you have some brilliant plan to get us out of this, because we are deep in the shit."