GblaRCS Chpt 67

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 67 -==
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When it was announced that one of the first McKenna class battleships to be completed by Blue Nose Clipperships would be named the SLS Thorin this oddly enough resulted in many complaints from politicians in the Thorin system itself. Krester's Ship Construction, who made the rival Texas class, operated a shipyard in Thorin and had wanted the name to be assigned to one of their own battleships.Unfortunately for Krester's Ship Construction, someone had already told the then First Lord of the Star League Michael Cameron that the name Thorin in old Norse meant 'Thunder Warrior', and given the massed batteries of lightning-throwing Naval Particle Projector Cannon the McKenna class was known for he thought it was such an appropriate name for such a ship that he outright insisted upon the SLS Thorin being a McKenna and presided over the naming ceremony himself."Bond, L, Battlewagons of the Star League, Terra Firma Press, 2750
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===Tour of the Stars aboard the Yukon===
SLS Yukon – Unnamed system between Comstock and Stettin – 2846
Captain Francis shook off the feeling of nausea and indescribable wrongness that accompanied every jump he had ever taken and, after thanking whatever deity might be responsible for his not suffering from Transit Disorientation Syndrome, he made sure that none of the rest of the bridge crew was suffering too badly either.
Even after hundreds of years of interstellar travel scientists had failed to pin down exactly why something deep down in the human subconscious reacted in the way it did to jumping from one point to another using a K-F Drive. Most people simply went with the assumption that things, including of course people, were simply not meant to vanish from one location in the universe and then suddenly pop up in another, and that when they did the universe mildly freaked out about it for a while, freaking us out too as collateral damage.
Still, it was all worth it for the privilege of getting to command your own starship, a warship no less, and getting to jump around the galaxy in Francis's estimation. The Yukon was basically his until he was willing to give her up. Successfully getting her and her passengers and crew back to the Inner Sphere alone all those years ago meant that everyone thought of her as his ship, and that he had earned the right to captain her until he went gaga or died of old age in the captain's chair.
That didn't mean it had always been the choicest of jobs. Sometimes thanks to her Lithium-Fusion battery Yukon got landed with the most banal missions just because she was fast and there wasn't an L-F Tramp available to do it instead. In this case the HPG at Al Farghani had showed signs that it needed a part replacing and Admiral Bremman wanted that potential failure dealt with ASAP so he had decided to have Yukon haul ass there with the required kit before it broke down completely.
Since Yukon was heading out that way anyway why not have her conduct the much-delayed survey of the Astrokaszy system as well it had been suggested to Bremman, and then someone at the university somehow caught wind of the mission and put in a request to have Yukon visit a few interesting star systems while winding its way back to Niops too, dropping off astronomical sensor buoys for later collection. 
Francis was at a loss how this particular star system met anybody's notion of 'interesting', but apparently it did so it was one of the detours he was required to take that turned what should have been a six-week mission into at least a twelve-week one.
"Should I unfurl the jumpsail Captain" the First Officer asked deadpan, breaking Francis from his thoughts and causing a couple of other crewmen to chuckle.
"What for? Practice?" Francis replied with a chuckle. "It's not like it'll collect much in the way of wattage out there" he noted. "The primary in this system makes Niops look like ****** Sirius" he observed disparagingly, looking across at a display screen. "So, unless you're volunteering to put on an EVA suit and go outside with a flashlight to point at the sail and double the number of photons hitting it, probably best to just use the fusion reactor instead" he joked.
"If you say so, Skipper" the First Officer responded, grinning.
Jumpship crews could go their entire careers without ever visiting a system like this one, and they would in no way feel a sense of loss for never having done so. Both the primary and secondary stars of this binary system were diminutive Brown Dwarfs and not only did that mean no possibility of habitable planets, and little chance of a decent asteroid belt, it also meant no meaningful starlight to recharge your drive with.
The primary here was a Type T Brown Dwarf, most what little light it put out was shifted down into the infra-red part of the spectrum making it look a vaguely dull pink, or washed-out magenta to the naked eye. It really was a miserable excuse for a star, and if not for the fact its companion was an even dimmer Type Y that was literally brown you'd never look at it twice.
Ideally when plotting a route around the Inner Sphere every stop along the way would be an inhabited system, that way if something went wrong you weren't stranded in the middle of nowhere with nobody around to help. If there wasn't an inhabited planet available you would pick one of the commonly used waypoint systems on the map that were known to be frequented by travelers anyway, usually because they were halfway between two inhabited systems and had a star hot enough to charge your K-F jumpsail quickly.
If there wasn't one of these frequently visited waypoint systems available on the route they wanted to take either then a Jumpship would look for any other B, A, F or G Type star in roughly the right location, and use that as a stepping stone instead.
If they were unfortunate enough that there weren't any of these more luminous stars where they needed them to be then they would choose a Type K Orange Dwarf instead and resign themselves to it taking a few more days of deploying the jumpsail to charge the drive than they'd like.
In the absolute worst-case scenario, they'd jump to a Type M Red Dwarf that would take even longer to charge the drive, there was a good reason why the Niops Association had been so happy to get their Olympus recharge station operational after all. There was at least always a Red Dwarf around wherever you were though, they were by far the most common star type after all. 
What you wouldn't do was jump to a Brown Dwarf, because at best those things were basically like taking the smallest, least luminous Red Dwarf possible and then turning down the dimmer switch all the way.
Arguably they weren't even stars at all because they had so little mass they couldn't fuse hydrogen, they were just gas giants with delusions of grandeur.
Francis sighed. "Is there anything duller, literally or metaphorically, than a Brown Dwarf?" he asked the bridge crew rhetorically, thinking that only the Niops government would ever request that a ship go out of its way to take a look at one. Sure, it was a binary system, but both 'stars' were Brown Dwarfs and double nothing is still nothing.
What made it worse was that the last system they had visited to drop off a sensor buoy had been a big bright glorious Type B3V, several times the mass of Sol and with a Jupiter sized planet orbiting her. It only made the feeling of anticlimactic 'meh' produced by the binary of brown disappointment even stronger.
Thinking back to earlier in the mission Astrokaszy might be worth claiming eventually, Francis considered. It was ludicrously hot at the equator by the standards of even marginally habitable worlds, and much of the planet was arid way beyond even Alphard-like conditions, but there were seas situated at both the northern and southern poles and the trusty J-U Water Purifier was up to the task of irrigating the desert if necessary so the climate wasn't a deal-breaker for colonization.
Having visited it though it was easy to see why the Star League had abandoned the place after its temporary service as a logistics hub during the Reunification War, during which time an SLDF facility on Astrokaszy had supported the campaign to absorb the Magistracy. That was back before the J-U had been invented anyway, and even after it had been there were still plenty of other systems a lot closer to Terra that the new technology had made available for colonization instead, so the Star League had never gotten around to going back.
If it wasn't for the possibly useful strategic location of the system if the Niops SLDF ever needed to use it as a logistics hub again, possibly for a campaign against the Free Worlds League this time, Francis doubted Niops would be all that interested in raising a Red Cameron Star over Astrokaszy III either. That was the case even though the team of geologists they had brought along had found indications that some valuable mineral wealth might be hidden under the sands, after all the Niops Hegemony was not short of resources, it was short of people.
There was also the ownership issue to consider though. Astrokaszy had hosted an SLDF base, at least for a while albeit admittedly centuries before, it had no native population and had never been claimed by any other power, so should the Niops Association as the de jure successor to the Terran Hegemony assert sovereignty on that basis even if they weren't going to settle the place?
That was a decision for people further up the chain of command than Francis to make fortunately, he just hoped he wasn't going to get stuck with making regular supply runs there if the High Associator and General Romanov decided to plant the flag now that the precedent had been set that Yukon made a decent cargo hauler. Damn those dropship collars!
News had hit Niops just before Yukon set out that Archon Marcus Steiner of the Lyran Commonwealth had been killed in a dropshuttle accident and by the time they arrived at Al Farghani the story updates arriving via HPG had developed into there being an emerging succession crisis, with the late Archon's widow Melissa in dispute with his younger brother Claudius over who should replace Marcus as ruler. From there it seemed to be spiraling out of control, and after the survey of Astrokaszy, with Yukon jumping back to Al Farghani on the first leg of its journey home, CNN was now reporting that Claudius had not only arrived on Tharkad with several regiments to support his claim, he had gone so far as to threaten to torture and kill anyone that got between him and the throne, including his sister-in-law.
The whole sorry affair seemed more Marik than it did Steiner, but the latter did have their moments and none of the Great Houses could boast that they had never had a messy transition of power with nobody kicking up a fuss about who was in charge now.
It did make you appreciate being a functional democracy though, Francis considered, looking forward to getting back home so he could find out if the Lyrans were shooting at each other yet. 
As the crew got to work surveying the system with the ship's sensors, preparing to drop off the buoy and inspecting the K-F drive and the fusion powerplant in preparation for their next jump to a real star system in a few days' time, Francis decided that since they weren't actually in any kind of rush he might as well give the bridge crew a little fun. "Okay, show of hands' he spoke up. "Is the best description of a Brown Dwarf that it's a miserable failure of a star or is it a planetary gas giant suffering from morbid obesity instead" he asked humorously. "Who says failed star?" he asked first, raising his own hand.
"I think they're quite interesting myself, Brown Dwarfs I mean" the navigation officer commented sheepishly while about half the bridge crew raised their hands, most of them grinning.
Francis turned to the navigator. "You think Brown Dwarfs are 'interesting', Lieutenant Pressfield?" he asked incredulously.
"Yes, Sir" Pressfield replied, more confidently now.
"You're sounding a lot like a Niops native saying things like that, but if I remember right you weren't actually born there were you, Mister Pressfield?" Francis asked him, frowning.
"No, Sir, I was born on Buffalo Meadows, but I wasn't very old when my family moved to Niops" the navigator replied.
Captain Francis shook his head and sighed. "Clearly you spent more than enough time under the thrall of the Niops education system to be deeply corrupted by it" he said sadly, the rest of the bridge crew clearly amused by the observation. "Okay, I'll give you a chance to make your case. Tell me one interesting thing about Brown Dwarfs. You're under the gun here son, think fast."
"It rains molten iron" the navigator replied immediately.
Francis blinked. "Come again?"
"In the atmospheres of Brown Dwarfs, you can get clouds of iron vapor and under the right weather conditions when it rains, the raindrops are formed of molten iron" Pressfield told him. "Really, you can look it up" he said. "That doesn't happen in regular stars because they're too hot and regular planets aren't just big or hot enough."
Francis looked at him. "Never let it be said that I'm closed minded because that has got to be the most literally and figuratively metal weather-related factoid I have ever heard" he told the navigator. "I continue to maintain that Brown Dwarfs are utterly useless from a practical standpoint, but I'll freely concede that they aren't quite as boring as I thought they were until now. Well played Lieutenant now get on your calculator and work out the best place for us to drop off that buoy so we can get the hell out of here as soon as the drive is charged."
"Will do, Captain" the navigator replied, getting to work crunching the numbers.
The Niops Astronomical Sensor Buoy (Mark II), or NASB-Mk.2, that the nerds back home liked to have dropped off in what seemed like random places to others, but presumably weren't to them, were actually just modified Star League Navy sensor boys with a few extra pieces bolted on, the earlier Mark I lacking one of those pieces which Francis thought might have something to do with detecting cosmic rays, but wasn't entirely sure. Powered by solar panels and with a plutonium fueled Stirling radioisotope generator as backup they could happily run for decades without maintenance, although how long it would take one to completely fill up its solid-state hard drive with all the data it was collecting again Francis had no idea.
The Yukon could have just dropped off the buoy and then used its lithium-fusion-battery to jump onto the next system without delay, but unless you were in a hurry it was best not to double-jump more than you had to. Repeated rapid jumps put unnecessary strain on the K-F drive and until the Arsenale Nuovo shipyard was up and running performing a proper full refit and repair on something the size of a Riga II simply wasn't possible. They had used the battery to get to Al Farghani as quickly as possible, Admiral Bremman's orders being 'don't spare the horses', but after that all the subsequent jumps had been slow and steady.
Putting too many miles on the three L-F Tramp JumpShips over the last twenty years, during which time they were used as much for long-range scouting as moving cargo, had left them in a state where they might only be a handful of double-jumps away from slagging their K-F drives. Fortunately they were still able to safely perform single jumps as long as you weren't silly enough to try quick-charging their cores, and there were always dropships that needed to be moved from one Hegemony system to another, so mostly the Tramp crews these days found their rides being used for what the jumpship class had originally been designed for in the first place, working as latter-day tramp steamers.
Fortunately for Admiral Bremman, everyone in the fleet well understood that if he had known when they took the Camelot Command shipyard apart that it would be over twenty years before it was put back together in a new pressurized dock and be up-and-running again he wouldn't have rode the trio nearly as hard as he did. Culpable or not he was still the person stuck with trying to meet an ever-expanding need for shipping capacity without a commensurate increase in actual ships.
Having the three L-F cargo JumpShips a little worse for wear did of course mean that not only Yukon, but also her sister-ship Saratoga, might be expected to take up the slack now whenever a job came up that required a fast ship, one that could haul dropships with her and defend herself if necessary.
A Riga II class destroyer was a little more ostentatious than a Tramp of course, and they could only be used for hauling cargo to places nobody from outside Niops would see them, but on the plus side, in a galaxy where a Tramp with its eight ER Large Lasers and dozen Anti-Missile-Systems was considered heavily armed, Yukon and Saratoga were gods among men.
Going public with Dragoon's Loss and São Gabriel did at least provide a couple of extra ships that could, unlike Yukon and Saratoga, haul dropships to places where they would probably be seen, and the captured Invader which used to belong to Karl Von Strang was considered a real boon that would help a great deal, if only in the short term unfortunately. The problem appeared pretty stark when you looked at a map of the Hegemony worlds and considered how far away some of them actually were from the Niops Association. Sending a ship from Niops down to visit Frobisher and McEvedy's Folly could mean a round-trip of five months or more, and although it was planned to eventually establish a logistics hub in a system known as Huygens at the half-way point that wasn't going to happen anytime soon.
Francis suspected that part of the motivation for the admiral's agreeing to Yukon visiting these previously unexplored, but 'interesting' star systems that lay between the Niops Hegemony and Free Worlds League was to help justify not mothballing any more warships. While he was simultaneously also begging for more money and resources to expand the transport fleet. Being able to point at examples of warships delivering urgent cargo shipments, helping the university conduct astronomical surveys and whatever should help Bremman keep High Associator Murray off his back, a goal which had also seen the navy wax lyrical about maybe reestablishing the Star League Expeditionary Brigade and how useful its small fleet of Avatar class heavy cruisers had been to the cause of scientific discovery.
Obtaining a copy of the electronic blueprints for the SLS Pioneer from its crew on Paran in return for a few surplus spare parts to help keep her going a few more years, along with some naval autocannon ammunition and a promise to return in a few years with more, had sparked some interest at the university at least, particularly those blueprints relating to the vessel's customised sensor arrays. As a result, Captain Francis couldn't help but suspect that a future putative 'Riga III' design might not just be part destroyer, part carrier like his own Riga II, but also part flying observatory in order to keep the astronomers and their pet politicians happy.
Given the rumours that the guys and gals at the Skunk Works on Niops V, who were notoriously always beavering away developing new bleeding-edge weapons technology, were aiming towards the end goal of an Enhanced Heavy Naval PPC design, Francis hoped that someone working there had some common sense as well as academic brilliance because if they did they'd integrate the telescopes the astronomers wanted on the warship with the long-range guns.
Not only would it be cool to literally snipe someone thousands of kilometres away like that, but the navy could also use someone else's budget to pay for some of the R&D. Those damn astronomers seemed like they had a freaking blank check from the government, at least they did under Murray anyway.
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===Unsung tale of Lost Heroes===
"Captain, we're getting some unusual returns at extreme range on radar" the sensors officer reported. "It might just be floating rocks, but that would be very unusual this far off the plane of the elliptic and the returns are stronger than I'd expect, even if the asteroids concerned were irregularly shaped and mostly metallic" she continued. "If I was forced to hazard a guess, I'd say it was wreckage."
Francis frowned. "Wreckage?" he repeated. "Here?" he added dubiously. Nobody in their right mind would ever come here, that naturally being a requirement of being in a position to leave wreckage behind in the first place. What was the point unless you were the sort of people that had a weird fetish about binary brown dwarf systems? The iron rain thing was mildly cool in principle, but it wasn't like you could go down and watch.
"It's a hundred thousand klicks out, right at the limit of our ability to detect and track anything aerospace fighter sized or smaller. If you want to know for sure we'll either have to send a dropship or go take a look for ourselves, Sir."
Captain Francis looked over to his XO. "The sail's not deployed, there's no point, and it's not like we can't charge the K-F drive while underway. Let's rev up the engines and take the old girl out for a spin" he suggested, grinning. "Sensors, please provide the helmsman with a heading, after we've notified the crew to prepare for thrust we'll go with option two and go take a look for ourselves" he decided, thinking that it was just nice to have something to do. If you were only going to ever stay at the point where you jumped in what was the point in having a ship with a transit drive anyway?
While a Riga II class destroyer like Yukon could happily maintain two gees of thrust as long as the fuel held out, and even make it up to three gees for shorter periods, like dropships in transit it typically never pushed the engines above one gee for the simple reasons that it was less expensive in terms of fuel and easier on the crew.
Since they were already burning hydrogen in the fusion reactor to recharge the Kearny-Fuchida drive, rather than using the jumpsail as they would have elsewhere, it would have certainly been extravagant to give the engines everything they had, no matter how curious they were about what they had run across out here, but in retrospect nobody would have complained if they had run Yukon up to full thrust given their discovery.
As the warship got closer it became apparent that initially at a hundred-thousand klicks the radars had only reached the very edge of what now seemed to be a very large debris field, and there were multiple returns from increasingly massive chunks of floating metal, Yukon beginning to deaccelerate so she wouldn't just accidentally crash right through the middle of it.
A Riga II destroyer was well armoured for a ship its size, but ploughing through a cloud of junk at spaceship velocities was still a major no-no.
Although describing it as junk might be doing the wreckage an equally major disservice.
"Mother of God" Francis heard the XO whisper under his breath as they neared what could only be the shattered hulk of a warship, and it wasn't alone out there.
Coming to a relative halt just at the edge of the thickest part of the debris field Captain Francis ordered a fighter squadron to launch and go take a closer look, not wishing to risk a collision between Yukon and anything large enough to potentially put a dent in her hull. 
It didn't take them too long to identify the first shattered warship. She was obviously an Aegis class Heavy Cruiser and more usefully given just how many of them had been produced her name was emblazoned on her hull.
Originally on launch in 2415 she had been the THS Athens, later the SLS Athens as the Terran Hegemony fleet was redesignated with Star League registries.
She was better known by the name she had been given when First Lord Richard Cameron handed her over to the Rim Worlds Republic in 2763, the one she still bore.
"It's the ****** RWS Tadeo Amaris" Francis said in wonder as images transmitted back from the fighters appeared on the main display screen. "What the heck is she doing here?" he asked rhetorically, not expecting anyone present to have any more inkling than he did.
She might have been an older design but the Tadeo Amaris had been one of the more powerful capital ships in service for the Rim Worlds Republic during the war and had achieved considerable notoriety as a fast commerce raider that could outrun most anything she couldn't outgun. Her ultimate fate had been a mystery, at least until now, but that was true for a lot of warships on both sides. 
"Looks like there's what's left of a Riga class frigate a couple of hundred klicks further out, damn thing's practically blown in half from the looks of things" the sensor officer reported. "Whole area is littered with broken dropships and ASF's, as well as chunks blown off the warships, all those contacts and returns are sending the radar absolutely nuts. This was one hell of a fight, Sir." she said in awe.
The original Riga, a frigate rather than a destroyer like the Riga II, had first entered service only a few decades after the venerable Aegis, and the Terran Hegemony had stopped producing them in favor of the generally superior Congress class even before the formation of the Star League. Being old didn't make them useless however, and the SLDF kept some of them in service for another two centuries while offloading others on the navies of the member states. The Rim Worlds Republic literally had dozens upon dozens of the things in commission when the Amaris War broke out, though the superior warships of the Star League Navy soon whittled that number down fast because they had literally dozens upon dozens of modern battleships to counter the aging frigates with.
"What happened to the Aegis?" the helmsman queried. "Someone nuke her?"
"Not looking at that battle damage they didn't, she's been cut to ribbons by directed-energy-weapons, big ones" the XO responded.
"Yeah, and unless I miss my guess we're about to get a good look at what did it as the lead fighter clears the wreckage of the Aegis and the Riga." the sensor officer replied evenly. "Putting her telemetry on screen."
Captain Francis stared at the magnified image for what seemed like an eternity. "If we can get closer without crashing into anything bring us alongside, get the shuttles ready and start getting personnel suited up for EVA. I want to recover the logs from all these ships if we can, starting with the McKenna there" he ordered, rightly assuming that all the smaller holes in the battleship were the result of naval autocannon fire from the Aegis and the Riga, while the one gigantic rent in her side had been caused by a contact nuclear explosion.
A McKenna wasn't a fragile ship by any means, she carried more weight of armour than the Aegis and the Riga combined, but if she took a nuke directly against the hull then she wasn't going to come out of it too well especially if she was also getting pounded by massed naval autocannon, plus capital ship lasers and particle projector cannon.
As the fighter got closer it was able to make out the name of the stricken battleship. "Guess we know what happened to the SLS Thorin now too." Captain Francis noted. Out of the original two-hundred and eighty McKenna class battleships built less than twenty survived the Amaris War to join Kerensky's Exodus, most known to be lost to the Terran Hegemony's SDS AI warships and armed satellites but some known to have been lost in action to human foes and others having simply vanished.
Equipped with a bay holding five small craft, three of them K1 dropshuttles and the other two Mark VI landing craft, as well as possessing plenty of EVA experienced crew, Yukon was perfectly able to carry out a proper preliminary investigation of the wrecks without having to jump back to Al Farghani to request assistance and Captain Francis wanted to be able to present as thorough a report as he could when he reached Niops.
It wasn't an easy job however. Not only were the three shattered warships in a poor state, potentially dangerous for anyone to board there was also the matter of their former crews to consider.
The worst discoveries were, as ever in this situation, all the poor bastards who hadn't been killed in the fighting and had died later from lack of oxygen or even worse lack of food and water in still airtight compartments, praying for a rescue that never came.
Many had left messages for loved ones before the end, some choosing a quick death by suicide after penning their final letters, and Francis had these carefully collected by his people while also telling them to be as respectful of the frozen, usually vacuum desiccated corpses they encountered as they could be.
General Romanov and Admiral Bremman would likely want to organize a proper burial in space with full military honors for all of the crew of the Thorin later but that fell into their bailiwick not that of Captain Francis. What the brass would choose to do about handling the remains of the crew of the RWS Tadeo Amaris and the frigate they learned was the RWS Aquarius was also not his immediate problem, but Francis hoped that even as an enemy they would be accorded due respect, they had obviously done their duty and gone down fighting even if it was for the other side.
Not everyone would agree of course, Francis knew. As a commerce raider the RWS Tadeo Amaris and the naval squadron it had led as flagship had hit an awful lot of civilian shipping during the war and the Rim Worlds Republic military wasn't exactly renowned for treating non-combatants according to the laws and customs of war so opinions would surely differ on what to do with their war dead.
Although the logs of the RWS Aquarius proved unrecoverable, repeated volleys of Heavy Naval PPC fire from Thorin had utterly wrecked her bridge as well as the back-ups stored elsewhere in the ship, enough files were able to be retrieved from both SLS Thorin herself and the RWS Tadeo Amaris to piece together what had happened here seven decades earlier and how it came to occur. The vicious action that had seemingly resulted in the loss of three large warships, their associated dropships and aerospace fighter contingents in a system objectively not worth fighting over located in the ass-end of the Inner Sphere was truly a tale worth recording for posterity.
The Third RWR Defense Squadron led by the Tadeo Amaris had been an ongoing thorn in the side of the SLDF during the war, opposing Kerensky's conquest of the Rim Worlds Republic and later hitting supply convoys and targets of opportunity in an attempt to forestall Operation Chieftain, the liberation of the Terran Hegemony. With the whole squadron equipped with lithium-fusion batteries for fast strategic mobility, and the Tadeo Amaris herself packing enough firepower that chasing after them in smaller vessels would have been suicidal, the SLDF had been forced to reassign much needed McKenna class battleships and Avatar class Heavy cruisers away from the Hegemony campaign to try and hunt them down. 
Eventually after over a year of fruitless searching, and with the Tadeo Amaris and her compatriots successfully interdicting convoy after convoy of much needed supplies, Aleksandr Kerensky offered a reward of two million dollars to anyone that could provide information as to where the Tadeo Amaris was heading next, and although that led to a flood of false leads one of them panned out.
According to files found aboard Thorin a disaffected member of the crew of the Tadeo Amaris that had decided the war was lost, and that accepting defeat would be easier with a couple of million bucks in the bank, had managed to leak the next rendezvous location for what was left of the Third RWR Defense Squadron after several years of attrition. Not knowing if it was just another false lead, but also knowing they were the only battleship that could reach there in time, the captain of the SLS Thorin had sent out an HPG using the ships own hyperpulse generator informing command that he was moving to intercept and then went after the enemy squadron.
Presumably that communication from SLS Thorin was never received by anyone, not unprecedented given how disrupted SLCOMNET was at the time, so the SLDF didn't know where she was going or why. They just realized later that another of their battleships had gone missing, one of hundreds that had been lost during the war.
You could argue that the SLS Thorin had been lucky to catch a lead on the location of the Tadeo Amaris, and to be currently close enough to where they were heading to intercept them, where the battleship was most certainly not lucky was where hyperspace spat them out.
The crew of the Thorin weren't nearly as freaked out by jumping in practically on top of the Tadeo Amaris and the Aquarius as the crews of those ships were, the Thorin had been expecting them to be there after all, but for a ship that was designed to be a long-range sniper finding itself in a knife-fight instead it still came as an unpleasant shock.
In ideal circumstances an Aegis would stand no chance against a McKenna. Despite being much larger and more heavily armored the McKenna was a far more modern design, equipped with engines that could push her to 2.5 gees of acceleration compared to the mere 1.5 gees the Aegis could manage. Since the massed batteries of Heavy Naval PPCs the McKenna mounted also outranged the guns on an Aegis all the battleship needed to do to win handily was use her superior thrust to keep the aging Heavy Cruiser at range and burn her down.
These were not ideal circumstances. By sheer bad luck the Thorin had found herself close enough for all those big naval autocannon on the Tadeo Amaris to be brought to bear, and despite immediately gunning the engines to try and open up the distance she quickly took a few solid hits that disabled them.
An almighty slugfest ensued with the Aegis and the Riga throwing everything they had at the McKenna while the big battleship did likewise.
While the big battlewagons duked it out the dropships and aerospace fighters went at each other, an Achilles carried by the Tadeo Amaris and a Titan belonging to the Aquarius taking on a trio of Pentagon dropships launched by the Thorin while smaller less well armed Leopard CV Fighter Carrier dropships and scores of aerospace fighters engaged in a massive furball of a dogfight.
Thorin caught a nuke fired by an Ahab heavy aerospace fighter in all the confusion, the McKenna, like the Aegis she was engaged with, lacking in point defense weaponry.
Ironically SLDF doctrine said that ideally a McKenna should operate with a Riga II, the L-F battery equipped destroyer/carrier hybrid able to keep up with the fast battleship and providing her with additional fighter support for exactly these kinds of engagements. 
Unfortunately for the SLS Thorin, when her Riga II support arrived it was seventy years later in the form of the Yukon.
All things considered, 'better late than never' was probably not a sentiment the crew of the Thorin were entirely convinced by from their vantage point in the afterlife.
An Aegis being something of a glass cannon, plenty of firepower but without the armour to match, despite the battle being fought at a range that was advantageous to her the Tadeo Amaris was not remotely tough enough to stand up to a McKenna and she was still blasted into a broken hulk before the Thorin went down.
Her fusion reactors knocked off-line by cumulative damage and unable to power her Naval PPC's the Thorin had ended up finishing off the enemy frigate by somehow still managing to swing her nose around with manoeuvring thrusters and opening up with her colossal NAC/40 forward battery, this explaining why the Aquarius was practically blown in half.
The fighting between the dropships and fighters had continued until the bloodlust faded and everyone left realized that they were now all stranded in the middle of nowhere, with the remaining crew of the Thorin discovering that their HPG was a totally irreparable write-off so they couldn't call for help.
None of the other ships in the Third RWR Defense Squadron ever showed up, at least certainly none did over the next few weeks while there was anybody left alive, and because the HPG the SLS Thorin had sent out before jumping in had seemingly not been received by anyone the SLDF never came either.
It wasn't just a glorious battlefield, it was a tragic war grave where men and women were still dying long after the fighting stopped.
The question of why in the hell the Aegis and the Riga had ended up way out here in a god-forsaken system like this in the first place were finally answered by the discovery of the personal logs of the captain of the Tadeo Amaris. This kind of binary brown dwarf system being rare enough that this was the only one in the region made it stand out on a detailed star-chart, while simultaneously being somewhere nobody would ever go so they wouldn't be discovered by chance, because, well, Brown Dwarfs.
As for why they were even in that region in the first place, their intended eventual destination was the SLDF training facilities on Circinus, intending to orbitally bombard them, but their orders were to take an indirect route, interdict SLDF supply lines running through the Free Worlds League and then hit some Star League colonies out in the periphery in retaliation for the worlds of the Rim Worlds Republic lost to Kerensky.
If the SLS Thorin hadn't unexpectedly jumped in and thrown a McKenna sized spanner in the works, Tadeo Amaris and Aquarius would have raided Comstock and Francas before swinging around in a corewards direction and then hitting an obscure Star League scientific colony called the Niops Association a few jumps further on before then heading off to Circinus.
On these twists of fate history hangs. 
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Later, as Captain Francis sat down to start writing up the painfully long and detailed report he would have to deliver on all this to both the government and the Joint Chiefs back home in Niops, the only light at the end of the tunnel as far as he was concerned was at least it wasn't going to be quite as epic in length as the one he previously had to write about the voyage of the Yukon from Arcadia in the Clan Homeworlds to the Draconis Combine.
That was scant comfort though. Just the sections dealing with his time as the chief of the 'Canada Tribe' had run to tens of thousands of words even after he edited it to make the prose less florid.
Under the circumstances the final action of the battleship SLS Thorin and her crew probably deserved a little florid though, Francis considered as he started typing.
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : If you think that a Red Dwarf star like Niops is small and dim then you might reassess your position if you compare one to a Brown Dwarf, AKA a failed star or a planetary gas giant with delusions of grandeur. Niops might be interested in a binary brown dwarf system relatively nearby but nobody else would be and nobody is going to try and use one as a waypoint for a longer journey either (no hydrogen fusion, no useful amounts of energy to charge a jumpsail).Brown Dwarfs might be a poor excuse for a star, but having weather that features literal iron rain does give them a little personality.The Astrokaszy system is uninhabited at this time but it did apparently host an SLDF facility way back during the Reunification War.The Aegis class Heavy Cruiser RWS Tadeo Amaris was one of the most powerfuil units in the RWR fleet and thanks to its refit by the Star League before Richard Cameron handed it over to Stefan Amaris it had upgraded guns and a lithium-fusion battery. The RWR navy included a lot of old Riga class frigates (not to be confused with the later Riga II class destroyer), and we know from the RWS Sagittarius they were upgrading at least some of them with lithium-fusion batteries (the Tadeo Amaris would want escorts able to keep up with her hence me coming up with the RWS Aquarius).If the Star League didn't name one of their McKenna's SLS Thorin (after the Thorin system) then they should hang their heads in shame. "Thunder Warrior" is just too good to waste on a Texas.
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Chapter 67