Aboard UEFg Indus

There is something in the air.

The Indus has a crew of three thousand. Weeks of unrelenting raids, Jump Five deployments, and pitched battles have taken a toll. They are filthy, exhausted, and afraid, running on the acid biochemical dregs of endorphins and bad Fleet coffee. 

But they do their jobs with dogged competence, like a living callus: deadened, numb, but still intact.

Now, though - now something new is creeping through the crew. Officers mutter at their stations. Deck gangs gather around terminals, sneaking a few moments of gossip between maintenance squawks.

The word has spread, down from the Admiralty, leaking through the bureaucracy and FleetNet to combat ships and pilots. A Big Op is about to go down.

Admiral Netreba is going to make a move.

With the taste of a brewing storm under her tongue, Captain Lorna Simms peels away the scabs of her command's 400% casualty rate and starts building some honest-to-Mars esprit de corps, praying that these rooks will not die screaming like the rest.

She does it the Martian way: card games in the bunks, basketball and football, rowdy back-and-forth during briefs, one-on-one training flights that piss off the deck crew and burn precious fuel but might save her people.

And, most importantly of all, in the ring: the chalk circle she and long-locked Lieutenant Levi put down together in the big storage closet behind her office. She lets her people spar, no holds barred, no concessions for size or sex (women get no mercy, men get no cups). There is one rule: when you leave the ring, you need to be flight-ready, or you will pay.

And it is during one of these sparring matches, as the squadron cheers Ogre and Glance, that Simms explains to her new wingman how they might just win the war.

"The Tevs are lords of all they survey on the other side of the node," she explains, straddling a plastic-backed stool like an egret perching on a lectern. "But that node has limited throughput. It takes time and energy to move a battle group through. They can't move all their ships to Delta Serpentis to resupply - so the supplies have to come to them."

She scratches at the roots of dirty blonde hair hacked off at chin height. "They've got a base at Neptune. That could keep one destroyer group fueled and armed. They've got Jupiter, but they haven't whipped it into submission yet. They're still bottlenecked at the node. But, Tevs being Tevs, they've prepared for that and deployed two backup plans. Those two Anemoi logistics ships are more valuable than any destroyer. They are the reason we can shoot one of their corvettes to hell and find it back on the lines a week later."

"Take those two ships, retake the node...checkmate. They starve."

She thinks about it for a second, and then laughs. "Until they jump their reserves through. Then we're fucked."

"Maybe," her audience says. "Maybe not."

Simms arches an eyebrow. "What, are you in a rush to win the war or something?"

The woman watching her makes a grin that is half-predatory and half the manic terror of a condemned prisoner. "Yes. God, yes."

Simms shakes her head. "You've got discipline issues, Laporte," she says.