The Return to Strange Skies (JNC Edition)

by Hiroyuki Morioka

  “If you’re delivering meat, then it’s gotta be a freezer van, right?”

  “Yep. But don’t worry: It’ll be empty when we leave from here, so the refrigeration won’t be turned on.”

  “Phew. I don’t particularly enjoy getting packed in ice.”

  Jinto pondered. Escaping the city by slipping into some cargo was a good plan. If Lafier sat in plain view, she’d attract notice for sure. She could dye her hair, but if they took her hat off, they’d see her froch .

  The only problem was how much they could trust these people. Certainly, if they hid with the cargo, they’d be hard to spot. On the other hand, they’d also have no idea where they were being taken. For all he knew, they’d exit the cargo hold only to find a flank of soldiers with guns pointed squarely at them.

  “I’m sorry, but we’re gonna have to pass. We can’t put that much trust in you.”

  “You can’t trust us? Why? You think we’ll sell you out to the army?” asked Marca.

  “I mean, we are your ‘hostages,’ aren’t we? You didn’t think we’d have faith in our ‘captors,’ did you?”

  “And that’s just how it should be!” Undertaker nodded, as though to say Jinto had hit the nail on the head.

  Marca facepalmed. “We’d never ally ourselves with an occupying force.”

  “Why not? It’s been bugging me, actually: Why DON’T you cooperate with them?”

  “Because what we’re after is independence from the Empire . ‘Independence ’ being the operative word.”

  “That only strengthens my case...”

  “I won’t lie, I was full of hope when they took the planet. Yet now it’s clear as day they have no intention of leaving us be. So why do you think we’d buddy up with our conquerors?”

  “Yeah, they’re even nastier than the Abhs,” said Bill. “At least the Abhs just let us be.”

  “That’s not the worst of it!” said Min, his emotions on his sleeve. “The bastards shaved off my hair! Just because I’d had it dyed blue, the nerve of them. It wasn’t out of some weird admiration of the Abh! It just balanced out my face’s color scheme with my moustache!” he added, stroking his red and yellow moustache.

  “My business is as good as finished, too!” said Undertaker, wringing his hands.

  “Your business?” Jinto meant to ask Undertaker what grudge he held against the enemy, but Marca started speaking before he could.

  “In any case,” she concluded, “now you see how little love is lost between us and that blasted army. Besides, the Abh may have been taken by surprise, but I don’t see them falling behind in the theater of space. Even if we did ally with them, nothing good would come of it.”

  “So you have faith in the Empire .”

  “In the Empire ’s force of arms, yes,” she corrected him.

  Jinto folded his arms. “I can’t tell how serious you are about your own objectives anymore. Do you really think you can successfully secede from the Empire , given how powerful it is?”

  “We have to hold out hope,” said Min. “The Empire may not be terribly interested in terrestrial worlds at the moment, but we can’t be sure that state of affairs will last forever. We have to assume it won’t. If the Empire made some unreasonable demand of a terrestrial world, what means do we have to resist them? They could even rain antimatter bombs on us if they were so inclined.”

  That doesn’t add up, thought Jinto. If they wanted to bombard the surface of Clasbule with antimatter bombs, the fastest way to justify it would be to force through independence. It’d work wonders to attract the Empire ’s notice.

  Seeing Jinto’s expression, Min said, “We’ve got a persecution complex, is what you want to say.”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  “Then what?”

  “All I want to say is you guys are like kids who want to run away from home just because you fear abuse from a parent that’s never laid a finger on you, not even knowing that if you do run away, the harshest punishment you could receive is when you’ll inevitably be taken back home to those parents.”

  Min narrowed his eyes. “You... I’ve never been so insulted in my life.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it, honest. If you’re offended, I apologize.”

  “I’ll accept your apology. But my opinion isn’t changing.”

  “Right. I don’t want to nitpick your ideology,” he said, trying his best to console him.

  “Glad to hear it. Be careful how you speak and act from here on out.”

  “I will.”

  “That aside,” said Marca, “what will you do? If you don’t want to go with our suggestion, I’ll have you stay here for the time being. It’d be dangerous to walk about town. There are soldiers examining the area.”

  “Yeah, that much we know.”

  Undertaker leapt up. “Like hell they can stay here! This is my house! You want me to play host?”

  “You’re going to have to. You have rooms you’re not using. They’d be no impediment to you.”

  “They’re not exactly the loveliest of house guests — especially this little brat,” he said, jabbing Lafier again. “She seems to have mistaken me for some kind of servant of hers.”

  “There’s no helping it.” Marca switched to Clasbulian. “You’re the only one of us who lives alone. How would I explain bringing them over to my house to my husband or daughter?”

  “Just tell them they’re your long-lost younger siblings,” Undertaker answered back in Clasbulian.

  “I’m not going to lie to my husband.”

  “You’re hiding the fact you’re an extremist from him!”

  “Which isn’t technically lying. I haven’t told him I’m not an extremist.”

  Hearing this exchange made Jinto realize just how tiny this organization was. The grandiose sounding “Clasbule Anti-Imperial Front” seemed to consist entirely of these five.

  “Undertaker is understandably worried,” said Min in solemn tones. “If the enemy soldiers ever discover he’s hiding an Abh in his house, he doesn’t know what they’ll do to him.”

  “I’m not worried about that!” said Undertaker, but it was obviously just bravado.

  It was then it dawned on Jinto that he’d neglected to ask something crucial. “Will you be with us on the freezer van’s flatbed?”

  “We can’t NOT be there with you,” said Bill. “The van seats two. If all five of us try to cram ourselves onto those seats, they’d suspect us for sure.”

  “You should’ve led with that little tidbit,” Jinto smiled. “In that case, we can trust you. We’ll be gripping our guns at the ready the entire time we’re together in there, but don’t think anything of it.”

  “Then it won’t be clear which of us are the hostages!” lamented Undertaker.

  “When do we depart?” asked Lafier, breaking her silence at last.

  Marca checked the clock. “Three hours and seventeen minutes from now.”

  “I haven’t had enough sleep.” Lafier addressed Undertaker. “This is your house, correct? I trust your guest bedroom is clean? I’d like to rest, so lead me to it.”

  “I’ll replace the sheets with fresh ones, so could I kindly ask you to wait a few moments?” said Undertaker, his face a painting of despair.

  Chapter 3 : Raïchacarh Üécr Sauder Sfagnaumr (Clash at the Sfagnoff Gate)

  In the high-density area that sprawled between the fleet and the Sfagnoff Gate , innumerable pricks of shining light were gathered.

  “What’s that?” Commodore Tlife pointed to the flock of lights on the map of flat space using his command staff .

  “The chances are 0.9997 in 1 that it’s an enemy fleet,” answered Kilo-commander Cahyoor calmly.

  “Thanks, genius, I know that!” Tlife barked. “But haven’t we put on a show of our force of arms for them?”

  “Yes, sir, we have. Our march was more than sufficient for that,” nodded the Chief of Staff .

  “Then the enemy must be aware of our military might. The
y must be.”

  “If they didn’t get the hint, then we should send them a connecting vessel and tell them.”

  “The enemy has no hope of winning. They can’t have any.”

  “Any commander in their right mind would come to that conclusion, sir.”

  “Then why!?” Rather theatrically, he paused for effect. “WHY are they loitering over there!?” At that moment, something else began to give him doubt. He turned to the Chief of Staff:

  “By the way, you said there was a 0.997 in 1 chance it’s the enemy, right?”

  “I did, sir.”

  “What’s the 0.003 in 1 chance?”

  “That that information is a deception. Or that the sensors all failed at once. Alternatively, that it’s an unknown natural phenomenon, or an assembly of heretofore unidentified intelligent lifeforms. It could also be...”

  “Do you honestly think any of those are real possibilities?” said Tlife, taken aback.

  “Each of those possibilities is exceptionally unlikely on their own, but taken together...”

  “Okay, fine, I get it. Forget I asked.” The Commander-in-chief placed his chin on one of his hands and paced the Commander’s Bridge .

  “Lonh (Your Honor), I thought you yearned for combat,” said Cahyoor upon seeing Tlife’s crabby mood.

  “Oh, I do,” Tlife admitted. “I just don’t enjoy fighting with nagging doubts. What do you think they’re doing here, Cahyoor?”

  “I see three possible reasons,” said Cahyoor, ready to rattle them off. “Possibility 1, the enemy thinks they can, in fact, win.”

  “But how? In the face of this overwhelming gap, how could they possibly?”

  “To split Possibility 1 in two, first of all, perhaps the capabilities of the enemy’s ships far exceed our initial expectations.”

  “Are you saying we’ve failed to fully grasp the hypothetical extent of the enemy’s technological knowhow?” Tlife was less than pleased to learn there was a chance the Empire had been beaten to the technological punch by another interstellar power.

  “What else would you expect from the officers fit solely to feed the cat?” Cahyoor retorted expressionlessly.

  “You’re right!” said Tlife. “The Information Department are all just a bunch of cat handlers! How daft of me to forget that fact.”

  Communications Staff Officer Nasotryua looked resigned and said nothing.

  “But I, personally, appraise the Information Department slightly higher than that. The chances that that is what happened are almost nil. As such, if in fact the enemy believes they’ll win, they may be looking down on the Star Forces . That, or the cause might just lie in their commander’s mental state.”

  “Battling a madman wouldn’t be very elegant, would it?”

  “As for Possibility 2,” Cahyoor continued, ignoring his Commander-in-chief , “this could well be a trap.”

  “What kind of trap?”

  “For example, they might be having a large fleet lying in wait in the normal space by some nearby gate , have their overly small forces engage in combat, hand us a few victories in combat, and pretend to have been driven back into fleeing.”

  “Where’s the trap there, exactly?” asked Tlife, flabbergasted.

  “The trap being, in our blind zeal chasing down the fleeing ships, they ambush us as soon as we recklessly enter the gate .”

  “What did you say?” Tlife felt pity. No matter the circumstances, a starpilot so incompetent as to lack due vigilance when entering a gate would never be adorned with a ptorahaidaisaumh (commander’s insignia). “Do they think me that senseless?”

  “They have no way to know that you, specifically, are this fleet ’s commander-in-chief , Lonh . It isn’t personal. Rather it would stem from their general attitude toward the Imperial Star Forces . There’s no telling whether or not they believe in our deep-seated reputation.”

  “The essence of the Abh is in their overweening pride and recklessness,” said Tlife. Those words were famous even among the Abh themselves; so famous, in fact, that one needed only to hear talk of the “reputation of the Abh” to recall them. “We may be a smidgen haughty, I’ll give them that, but reckless we are not.”

  “Too true, sir. Our war history bears that out. If they’ve done their homework on our past battles, they’d surely think twice before implementing such an uncertain strategy.”

  “If, that is, your hypothetical trap is the one they’ve laid,” said Tlife. “The enemy commander should be taken alive. We need to reeducate him about warfare from the ground up.”

  “A splendid idea, sir,” said Cahyoor, though as coolly as ever. “In any event, seeing as we would never fall for such a crude trap, there’s no particular need to come up with counter-strategies.”

  “Agreed,” said Tlife.

  “Possibility 3, the biggest of the three, is...”

  “That’s a bad habit of yours,” said Tlife. He did think highly of Cahyoor, but he didn’t like how pretentious he could be. “Why didn’t you lead with the biggest possibility?”

  “I apologize, sir,” said Cahyoor perfunctorily before continuing. “They are the United Humankind, or at least, their main force is. And the United Humankind’s military command is known to often lack a certain flexibility in their orders. Perhaps the enemy commander has been ordered to use what forces they have to defend the Sfagnoff Marquessate to the last. If their commander took such a directive to heart, then gathering their forces in this sector is the most logical course of action.”

  Tlife folded his arms. “And you’re saying that’s the highest probability.”

  “Yes.”

  As usual, Tlife began pacing again. The more he mulled it over, the more convinced he became that there was nothing behind the enemy’s actions — that they were merely attempting to resist with what forces they had. Just like Tlife himself had been sent with what forces he could muster. Tlife had the luxury of retreating if he wanted, but the enemy didn’t. That was the sole point of difference between them.

  The question of why the enemy had sent such a small force to invade Empire territory remained, of course. It was probably a diversion. But that was something for Military Command Headquarters to consider, not him. He was dissatisfied that he wasn’t at the main battlefield, but happy that he had a fleet he could command at his discretion.

  “Yes... yes, that’s it!” Tlife raised a fist overhead. “I can feel all of my doubts disintegrating into the atmosphere like so much space dust, and without a trace left! My heart has vacated the riverbank of uncertainty, and finally found its way to the assurance of victory! I know when I need to be grateful, and now is one of those times. Kilo-commander Cahyoor, I thank you!”

  “I am honored,” said Cahyoor, taking the Commander-in-chief ’s vote of gratitude exceedingly dispassionately.

  Then, Tlife stopped in his tracks, and looked at the map of flat space . “I must say, though, I feel sorry for them.”

  “This is not the time to spare the enemy your sympathies, sir,” said the Chief of Staff .

  “You’re right. We warned them. We won’t hold back!” Tlife decreed, gripping his command staff . “We’ll take them in a pincer attack.”

  “I’m against that idea,” said Cahyoor bluntly.

  “Why?” It had taken Tlife this long to build up that sense of exaltation, and now his shoulders drooped.

  “The enemy is too close. They must have caught wind of our movements by now. If we tried a pincer attack in these conditions, not only would it be not as effective, they could very well divide and hit us individually. We probably wouldn’t lose outright, but it would result in needless losses.”

  “Chrir (SHREER)?” Tlife wished for the strategy staff officer ’s opinion.

  “I’m afraid I have to agree with the Chief of Staff ,” said Chrir, to her vexation.

  “I see.” Tlife felt it a shame, yet he understood that the staff officers ’ opinions ought to be respected. Even as Commander-in-chief, Tlife worried himself
over all the everyday decisions — not even being on the battlefield would free him from them — the staff officers set various virtual scenarios and conducted battle simulation after battle simulation. As such, if they’d determined that a certain strategy would merely lead to unnecessary casualties, then he had no reason to doubt it.

  Crestfallen, Tlife’s shoulders drooped. “There’s no getting around it. We may just have to attack them head-on.”

  “Indeed. I believe that is the soundest stratagem, sir,” said Cahyoor.

  “Display the battle formation planes.”

  The map of flat space disappeared, replaced by the hypothetical formations.

  Within the Star Forces , an offensive half-fleet was typically composed of three saubh acharr (offensive squadrons), one saubh mésgér (convoy squadron), one saubh bhotutr (strike squadron), one saubh dicpaurér (supply squadron), and three patrol ships under the direct command of a raichaicec (commander), plus a few longiac (communications ships).

  At present, Tlife had four offensive half-fleets at hand. Those four were lined up on the side, poised to shoot out into the enemy. At the head of each offensive half-fleet was a convoy squadron, shields against enemy mines . After that came the strike squadron. Comprised of battle-line warships , each strike squadron was a bow firing mines . The strike half-fleet , Basc-Gamlymh , was placed so as to cross the four offensive half-fleets laterally, thereby bolstering their strike capabilities.

  Meanwhile, each saubh glar (commander’s squadron) had an offensive squadron following on its heels. These were the spears that would skewer the enemy at battle’s end.

  As for the fearsome reconnaissance half-fleet Ftuné , it would divide its main forces into three and hide between the other groups of ships.

  The supply squadrons belonging to each of the half-fleets would tail from behind alongside the supply half-fleet Achmatuch .

  A supremely textbook battle formation, devoid of pretense.

  “Very well,” said Tlife. “Arrange them at once.”