*JD’s note: Tuesday updates to Flight are moving to Mondays in honour of ‘Mercenary Mondays’ on the X-birb app. Happy Merc Monday yall!
Chapter Three
"In the year 2091, Earthborn explorers on Mars discovered the remains of an ancient spacefaring civilization. In the decades that followed, these mysterious artifacts, when combined with other discoveries relating to the pre-ice age civilization ruins discovered in the Pabodie crater in Antarctica, revealed startling new technologies based around the manipulation of electro-gravitic fields generated by neutronium at high energy states, enabling faster than light travel to the very stars. The basis for this incredible technology was the projection of force-fields that controlled the very fabric of space and time.
The Elder Civilizations of the Alfar Cosmos knew it by many names. Formal Aetheritec. Blue Shift. Protomaterial Physics. Astral Field Mechanics. Degenerate Neutronium Paraphysics. Dark Energon Interaction.
Earthborn civilization knows it instead as the Kajita-Holtzman Effect, and with its discovery, mankind returned to the stars once again." ~ Old Earth Historian
SHV Princess of Dixie, Zenith Patrol
Zenith Jump Point, Edenstar System
Pentagram Cluster, Solar Hegemony in Exile
"Jump warning! Jump warning! Unscheduled hyperspace transition in thirty seconds!"
"Set General Quarters! Captain to the Command Deck! Captain to the Command Deck!"
The combat information direction centre set in the red-litten lower pit-like sub-deck that surrounded the elevated command deck above them was a hive of frenetic activity as crew frantically secured for General Quarters, dogging all hatches and containers, sealing skinsuits, donning helmets, and strapping into crash chairs. Klaxons blared their hideous racket and the loud-hailer rumbled the general announcements of a war-ship coming to life.
The SHV Princess of Dixie was a Schwarzer-Panther class battlecruiser, a sister-ship to the SHV Konigsberg that famously had carried the Royal Family to safety in the opening hours of Tubal Khan’s Palais Coup.
The House of Khan has caused no end of trouble for Solarian Hegemony and the Earth Duchy at her core. Legendary villain Solomon Ulrich Khan had led the 28th Century rebellion against the then unloved Hegemon, Rikard III Chanceron-Stirling, who fell at his hands, before himself falling to the legendary hero Karl Norman Hammer-Rhomanov who then established the Rhomanov branch of the Stirlings (a coup by marriage made necessary by the failures of Rikard) as Hegemons of the Solarian Sphere. As if that was not enough, Solomon's 30th century descendant, Tubal Analis Khan had organized the Palais Coup against the infante Arcturus, after the mysteriously convenient assassination of Alexandyr II, and using the greed of the Great Territorial Houses and the unpopularity of Elise's Regency, nearly captured and ending the royal Rhomanov-Stirling line then and there.
Of course, the Konigsberg had been ambushed and disabled in the Pfaf system near Novy Volgograd where the refugee Royals had been attempting to link up with The General, that is to say, the Lord Commanding General of all the Solarian Hegemony Armed Forces, the Boyar von Neu Sevastopol, Romanovic Fyodorovik y Ungern-Sternberg. The Konigsberg had been abandoned, drifting and dead, and the Royals continued on, relying on the Aegis II class cruiser SHV Agamemnon (the very ship that now shared Princess of Dixie's Zenith Point Patrol), reaching Ungern's camp on Novy Volgograd, just in time, before he had pulled up stakes to launch Operation JANUS, the invasion of Tubal Analis Khan's own Far Stars Khaganate.
Despite the Royals surviving that ambush, many saw the incident as the beginning of the end for the relationship between their General and their Hegemon-Mother. Although it was never said openly or plainly, Regent Queen-Mother Elise had self-evidently blamed Ungern (who in the absence of an adult male of House Rhomanov-Stirling, had been made the Regent and Protector of Elise's former husband, the now assassinated Alexandyr II Rhomanov-Stirling after the death of his own father Simon I Rhomanov-Stirling) for the glaring weaknesses in Alexandyr's character so masterfully exploited by Tubal Analis Khan prior to the Coup and Succession War. That their location had leaked to Tubal's forces, well no one believed that Boyar Roman had done it on purpose, but for the Lady Elise, she obviously held him responsible, and it was hard to argue the point; incompetence, negligence, or malice, did it really matter in the end?
Together with various statements from The General that, could be, in the right light, interpreted as supporting a reformation of the Earth Duchy along republican lines and potentially ending the office of Duke-Princheps of Earth and Hegemon of the Solarian Hegemony entirely, making the office of the First Lord of the Solar Hegemony elective once the civil war concluded, the Lady Regent had obviously concluded that Ungern was politically unreliable and started creating her own power base.
The stage had been set for a messy new civil war between Lady Elise's Royalists and Lord General Ungern's Kadets, once Tubal Khan was taken care of. And this nearly came to pass, especially given the way Lord Ungern-Sternberg had been perceived to use Royalist aligned units as cannon-fodder, emotions were running quite high at the end of the Earth Campaign. However, Ungern's death at the hands of the Vulture Lords of the Solarian Hegemony's Member Territorial States, in their roles as Council Lords of the High Council of the Solarian Hegemony, as he attempted to coerce them to accept his plan for reconstruction of the Earth Duchy, prevented this from ever coming to pass.
It was at this point that the Lady Regent, seeing the in-defensibility of the Earth Duchy itself, given the smashed state of her fixed defences and the hollow state of the SHDF itself, with the armies and spacey of the traitorous Solarian Territorial Magnates already crossing the borders into the Earth Duchy proper, declared the High Council dissolved and ordered Operation VOIDPATH; the removal of the SHDF, the Solar Hegemony government and civil service, the Royal Household Militia, and the Duchy’s own government, civic guards, and civil service, and as many civilians and refuges as could be carried, from the entire known Human Sphere. Beyond the Far Periphery, deep in the black, where the SHDF had long ago created secret and safe black sites for just such a contingency.
The void-path itself turned into a bitter and grinding fighting retreat, with the armies and spacey of the Vulture Lords and Periphery Barbarians alike hounding them every step of the way, seeking the blood of the last Stirlings, or at least hoping to capture them as a way to secure their own position as Lord Paramount of a new order. The only reason it worked was that even savaged and decimated as they were, the SHDF was still the single largest body of armed men and ships in the Solarian Sphere, by far, and none of the Vulture Lords could bring themselves to trust each-other long enough to join forces for long enough to matter.
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