Incursion Vector

001

[▲] Sol Sector, Terran Alliance Space

The entirety of Flight Methuselah watched from the briefing room as the Gagarin Shipyards silently and almost majestically loomed into view as they rounded the night side of Jupiter. Originally the yards had been a space platform towed out to orbit Europa and serve as an oxygen refueling platform. When breakthroughs were made in FTL travel the operation was bought out by a research co-op and restructured into a zero-gravity manufacturing facility, taking in raw materials mined out of the Jovian moons and putting out FTL engines. The facility was ultimately seized and retrofitted into a military shipyard during the civil wars two centuries prior. It had remained firmly in the grip of the Interstellar Navy ever since and was the only military facility capable of manufacturing, constructing, and decommissioning a ship bow to stern on-site.

Comprised of two slightly offset interlocked rings sharing a center of gravity and lethargically rotating to maintain half-Standard gravity, Gagarin was just under a quarter the diameter of Luna and housed more than fifty thousand personnel. Mostly they were part of the Naval Engineering Corps or their immediate families, though at the end of the Colonial-Terran cold war Naval High Command had commissioned a few bars and bordellos to be built in the civil radius for R&R purposes.

Grinning at the station, Damien pointed out the solar-panel dominated profile of the original refueling platform which sat comically at the gravitational center of the rings like some sort of time capsule. It was hilariously out-of-place amid the sleek and nearly seamless plating of the shipyard itself. "Got to go on a field trip there in kindergarten. You know when that thing was built they still used laser disks to store information? Apparently they'd need about two thousand of these little magnetic bricks with spinning plates to house a single VTI process. Not even the whole VTI! You'd need an array of them the size of the Heinlein just to run CIC on a corvette."

"Thank God for forward progress," muttered Karda as he awkwardly picked at the sleeves of his brand new dress uniform in a vain attempt to make them reach past his wrists. "Did they really have to make us wear these things? It's a shipyard, not an Admiral's reception."

"Forward progress my ass," growled Nim irritably. "How many centuries in space and female dress blues still consist of heels and skirts?" Naturally the pilot had yet to don the lower half of her dress uniform but the fact that she was still wearing her jumpsuit was not going to stop her from complaining about relinquishing her boots. "This is bullshit."

Having already dressed in her neatly pressed uniform herself, Calli waved her hand at the pilot to dismiss her complaint as invalid. "You shouldn't complain. Spacers look good in skirts--low grav long legs, so they say."

"I do say," interjected Karda with a lecherous grin. A second later he yelped in shock as he received a harsh smack across the back of the head from Calli.

"The heels are going to be quite the freak show," Nim hissed through her teeth. She was about to say something even more derisive when she caught sight of a familiar shape jutting out of one of the moon-side docks of the station and felt her tongue catch in her throat. "Hey, there's the Brahe."

Sitting gimped in dry dock with a dozen smaller repair ships flitting about her like flies swarming a corpse was the INS Tycho Brahe, her gunmetal stiletto form hammered to pieces by enemy fire. Most of what Nim could see of the port and starboard batteries had been turned into a series of blackened slag and yawning hull breaches. The bridge was open to space, as were most of its aft engine compartments. It was amazing that there was so much of it in one place, and even more incredible that the Navy was deciding to salvage her bones. From a distance it looked as though everything important had been ravaged beyond the point of recycling.