"Sir, we just lost contact with station Haline. Sensors are reporting it destroyed or in a non-functional condition."

  There is a momentary pause before the CO responds,

  "Any data on which direction the enemy fired from?"

  The response is instant,

  "We did, but we got a massive thermal burst after; they either burned away or jumped, but that was three seconds in the past based on readings. They are picking us off from a few light seconds out."

  The middle-aged Coast Guard commander swears under his breath from inside the defensive bunker buried within the natural satellite of the world he is posted over. The posting is an important one for future operations. A two-planet system bordering the UEG, with the one rocky planet being an Earth-like world stuck in the Precambrian level of life. The world was chosen as a military staging ground for any conflict with the UEG. Right now, it is relatively abandoned as the forces to be staged haven't arrived yet, as the war had just begun, and there were considerably hotter solar systems that need soldiers at the moment, but the future potential of the world cannot be underestimated.

  It works best as a place where fleets can rest and radiate heat in a somewhat safe area, and the location of the system grants a relatively "close" distance to important strategic systems on both sides, so the ships can be nice and cool as they appear in major industrial, commercial, or military zones in either nation. This is why the mostly uninhabited planet below has defensive rings around it and a large quantity of orbital stations surrounding it, keeping the world secure as a strategic asset. Unfortunately, the navy fleet that had been staging in the system had left just days before and was engaged in battle, so they could no longer return and support the Coast Guard.

  Around a day before the loss of Hailne station, it is assumed that a newer model of UEG Hunter-Killer battleship had entered the system at a minimum of thirty light minutes from the staging world and the Coast Guard defenses, an impossible range to do anything offensively, but the ship must've quickly burned and coasted all the way into the maximum engagement range from anywhere between ten and five light seconds away, by the time any of the sensor satellites noticed the jump and burn, the ship was millions if not billions of miles away from where it once was, and in this size of an area, especially since the system has a healthy asteroid population, its nearly impossible to pin-point where the enemy vessel is except when it fires or moves, and even then it can choose when and how that happens as it is mobile and the Coast Guard defenses are somewhat static.

  It also hasn't helped that any of the Coast Guard patrol vessels sent to search had all been vaporized in a matter of seconds after they had gotten a sensor return. Of course, a call for help had been sent, but it could be anywhere from days to weeks before a naval support fleet could arrive because, despite FTL existing, it still isn't instant travel.

  It's also not like the enemy vessel hadn't been seen, because it had on multiple occasions, even at visual distance for the cameras on a few of the sensor satellites. This also led to some concerns, as this hunter-killer ship wasn't of a known UEG class; it was closer in size to one of the massive fleet battleships, but capable of moving and evading like the smaller, stealthier hunter-killers.

  The Coasties stare out into the void, watching screens as they return with nothing, until suddenly a very close FTL signal is found, and as the guns swing about, a direct line communication comes through, both revealing the ship as friendly and with a message from the captain.

  "This is Rear Admiral Hollander of the USS Starwish II. I have come to help with your little pest problem."

  There is a collective sigh of relief from all of the crew, but the CO notices that this new ship is invisible on almost all sensors. If that line of communication wasn't open, they wouldn't be able to see the ship as it moves close to the defensive compound on the moon, using the rocky body as cover from any UEG eyes.

  Now, within visual range, the Coast Guard CO gets a good look at the very strange ship and understands it's some sort of new model that high command wanted tested that has been sent to their rescue, and as far as he is concerned, it is a very odd ship.

  The vessel is long and angular at first glance, but upon closer inspection, the shape of the vessel is actually a series of carefully designed slopes, granting the ship, despite its size, a lower RCS profile and well-angled armor from most directions, but of course mainly focused on the front. The ship is definitely a hunter-killer design due to the very skinny shape of the ship, rather than the more bulky design of other battleships. The CO notes how unnaturally skinny the vessel is compared to all other models, causing him to wonder where the hell all the crew is located, since drone capital ships are banned in warfare by international agreement, but he quickly infers that the new design may be built on the principle of lower crew numbers leaving the vessel about as wide and tall as some coast guard patrol vessels of frigate classification despite the near-kilometer length.

  Then comes the actually strange features of the vessel. First is the clear lack of external turrets or fixed guns. The CO guesses the main weapons of the vessel are either entirely hidden VLS systems or the guns are pop-up as a means of protecting them and further reducing the sensor profile of the vessel. This type of weapons loadout isn't new, just rarely used due to both the human want for an internal gravity which makes pop-up mechanics expensive and matinence heavy, but also many just find it annoying to have to wait even a half-second to use guns, which are supposed to be the fast and easy option at close ranges compared to missiles. Yet, if the role of this new ship is to be stealthy and rarely need "oh-shit" shots, then the pop-up weapons aren't too much of a hassle.

  The hardest to notice feature, requiring a close look with zoomed optics, is the scale-like skin of the ship. These small dents all over the vessel, without any gaps between them, make the whole vessel seem like a long, black fish in the depths of space. The CO does a small test, assuming something about those small dents or divets all over the exterior of the vessel, and has a radar dish aim directly at the vessel. There is no reflection, but after a second, an observation satellite gets hit by a very faint and heavily fractured radar ping. It then hits him, the ship isn't absorbing the radar or other sensor return, it is scattering the return, and other various waves are scattered by the divots. Only visual light isn't scattered entirely, but at certain angles, the ship practically shimmers as it scatters intense visual light, lasers used to gauge distance. All of this scattering and the very weak returns far away, the ship is practically invisible at great distances, and very difficult to detect at closer ranges if one cannot find it with optics.

  The Coastie finds himself impressed with the new vessel, and feels relieved that an advanced vessel such as this has come to save his skin, but a little frustrated that his and his men's lives are somewhat tests for this new platform. The speaker on his headset comes to life with the Rear Admiral's voice,

  "Alright, my adorable Coasties. I gave you a good look at my sick new ride, and I got the general rundown of what's plaguing you. So all I ask is that you keep your sensors open and grant me control of the detection satellite network in this system. I'm gonna have to sniff these bastards out. I have one or two chances to hit them before they know they're being hunted, but I don't know how long it will take for me to find them in the first place. I know I technically can't tell you what to do, but please listen to me if I give targeting data, and also don't shoot at anything that moves unless you have an optical lock, unless I say, because I don't want one of your big ass planetary defense guns splitting my new ship in half, or turning me into atoms."

  The Coast Guard CO responds,

  "I'd prefer it without the pet names, but I'll listen, if you're the Rear Admiral Hollander I've heard of, I'll trust ya with my life."

  The Admiral responds,

  "Thanks, buddy, I'm cutting our line. See ya soon."

  The communication link cuts, and the ship practically disappears from every screen aside from cameras. Then the thermals catch the ship as it accelerates rapidly from around the moon and out into the greater space of the solar system. The CO gets a request to access the satellites and grants it, but they do not receive any orders or even have data links established, because a single stray bounce from a radio communication is enough to reveal a ship, and in a hunt like this, stealth is armor.

  Single ship combat is the most mind-numbingly boring part of space combat, unless both ships have their radiators out and are broadcasting their location. This is because all weapons, aside from defensive ones, are capable of one-shotting most vessels with a good hit to any central or important part of a ship. Armor is only useful against the smaller caliber guns of destroyers or smaller classes of ships, with the exception of more specialized large vessels like the USS Catfish, as none of these guns have the output capability for relativistic rounds by either limitation of power produced by the powerplant, or the guns aren't rated for the stresses. Although armor works against these weapons, nuclear weapons of all types and relativistic rounds make fights between stellar behemoths a matter of who shoots first or hits first. Without the combined electronic warfare might of a whole fleet, single ship combat looks a lot more like a sniper duel on the ground, just with more dimensions to move and considerably longer distances.

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  Stealth is armor for hunter-killer battleships when faced with either planetary defenses or any of their own kind. Not being seen in the first place is the outermost layer of the survivability onion and is the most important in space because there is rarely anything to hide behind. Yet, there are many issues with stealth in space that make it far more difficult to actually hide. Firstly, there is nothing for very large areas, meaning if you're the only physical object in that area, you can be seen pretty easily. Second is thermal, ships produce heat to exist, hell almost all vessels practically run on manmade suns, and that is hot. In space, there is no medium to radiate into, so heat has to be radiated in the form of different waves, the most efficient currently being infrared, which reveals you as a big glowing spot against the blackness of space. Lastly, since there is no medium or atmosphere for electromagnetic waves to be dissipated, absorbed, distorted, or muffled. This means any communication, sensor sweep, or attempt to radiate heat can be seen from the other side of the solar system with ease at the speed of light. A stray radio call can reveal your position to someone who is listening, and since space is so empty, it can be traced back to you with very little margin of error.

  The problem with all of this is that it cannot be avoided, simply dealt with, or mitigated. This is because, other than the emptiness of space, it is simply how physics works. Things produce heat; you gotta get rid of it somehow, and the only way is through electromagnetic waves. You gotta see, and at these distances optical sensors fail, so you gotta use other electromagnetic waves to seek. If you don't want a friendly fire incident, you gotta talk to your allies. All of these things are problems that cannot be avoided in their entirety.

  Heat is generally dissipated passively through special ducts leading to the outside of a vessel that directs all the electromagnetic radiation in random directions, which keeps ships running cold enough to exist, but lacks the capability to dissipate heat when running at full output during combat or after long-range FTL jumps, so massive radiator sails exist on all ships in storage so that during combat they can keep cold without having a mini supernova. Communications can be done through direct laser communication, which has little spillage, but you have to know where your ally is in order to communicate, so there are broader broadcasters that send a wide spread of electromagnetic waves. All ships are covered in electromagnetic sensors so they can see any incoming waves to try and pinpoint foes, but in order to receive, you must send a reflection in most cases; therefore, you must be observed in order to observe. It's brutal, but it's reality.

  The USS Starwish II is simply the best the USA can produce, not the end, nor does it negate these problems entirely; it just deals with them in a different way, in an attempt to keep the ship alive just a few seconds longer than any previous ships when it comes to these games of stealth.

  A few advantages this new ship has are actually things it lacks. For one, it entirely lacks both a magnetic field generator and artificial gravity. Usually something to be avoided in standard design, but the crew compartment I am entombed in is deep beneath thousands of tons of various metals, composite materials, and the liquid sodium of the reactor coolant system. This protects me from space radiation, but it's highly recommended that I don't stand in the way of solar flares. As for gravity, my crew compartment is 15 meters long and is a spinning cylinder. It's practically a one-room apartment with a small kitchen, a bed, a workstation, a bathroom, and finally the command seat I am bound to when piloting the ship. This rotating drum rotates rather quickly, but I don't notice it other than the pushing force away from the center. How the water piping goes into this cylinder is beyond me, but I get my water and food from a nice storage area built into the floor of my little compartment.

  These two features give a stealth advantage as the ship has a minimal footprint in space. For one, even a localized "bubble" of gravity leaves what is effectively a "wake" through space as a ship moves. Bits of dust, rocks, and particles are driven away like a watercraft kicking up the sea. Even when the ship holds an orbital position, the way small meteors suddenly change direction or are drawn into something can give away a ship's position, and the bigger the ship, the worse this footprint is. Then, as for the magnetic field, it's the same thing, but for radiation, you can sometimes detect the way radioactive particles shift and move around the magnetic field like water flowing around a rock in a river. While naturally my ship being made of matter means there is a gravity footprint and the specialized outer hull causes strange reflections and bounces for radiation, it's just negligible compared to a more traditional ship.

  And overall, in space, even a three-kilometer ship's footprint is very hard to see with human eyes, even on a screen using the best sensors in existence; humans just don't have the bandwidth to scan a bubble around themselves of a few dozen light seconds to light minutes. Yet we found a way to overcome our biological limitations by designing near-sapient AI systems that exist as data, which allows them to understand and parse all this data as soon as it arrives. These AIs, by design, can detect those minor changes in how radiation or meteors are traveling and highlight the area where they were detected. This means these tiny advantages my ship has can help even by a smidge, keeping me alive for a few moments more, which can be enough time to move thousands of miles from where I had been detected, if not further.

  Now there is one big problem I have, and that's the enemy had fired and moved an hour before I arrived. While I am certain they are still in the system, where they are is an actual impossibility to tell. The one thing that is certain on top of it all is that they didn't use any form of FTL to change position, as that would result in them needing to deploy their radiators and become easy pickings for any targeting system. Hunter-Killer captains are also known for patience, as all those who were too gung-ho have their corpses as decoration in orbital debris fields. It could be hours before they move again, and another hour after that before they fire again. Or they could be waiting for a specific orbital position to drift to, but I have one decent advantage over them.

  This advantage is that I do have a general idea where they are, by general idea I mean an area of about four light seconds cubed, so definitely a massive space, but due to their short burn that was detected by the local sensor satellites and the few enemy sensor pings that were detected an area can be triangulated down to that level unless they make sound or heat up again, and then the space can be smaller.

  The area I decided on, with aid from the Adam-Class AI aboard my vessel, can be said to have a boundary with ten sensor satellites along the edges of the area and two found within the area, meaning the longest time for any sensor ping to hit a satellite would be about two seconds, but in order to keep my stealth advantage I cannot communicate with these satellites unless I want to make my move and potentially tip my opponent off on my whereabouts. Instead, I begin to use a method I developed during the last war against the UEG. It's risky, but it does work.

  The Nova-Class vessels have specialized engine shrouds that greatly decrease the detectable thermal discharge from a burn from everywhere but behind. I perform micro-burns over the course of an hour, changing my orbital position precisely. The Coast Guard does a broadband sweep of the solar system, and I listen for any reflections. Within the area I chose, there are dozens of objects about the right size for a large vessel, and seven that are oblong in shape, but nothing stands out too much, as all the meteors are metallic, meaning no special sound on the sensor return.

  As I make my slow moves, the Coast Guard helps by continually sweeping the area with sensors, potentially deafening my enemies' sensors to my actions. I time everything with the coast guard, silently counting down between each ping, and during that time, a VLS tube opens slowly on my ship, and using the loading mechanism for the VLS tubes, I silently eject 5MT missiles. Quickly, the tube is closed, returning my vessel to near invisibility. In the great void of space, my missiles look just like more space junk and are not worth any focus.

  Finally, after a long while, I deploy fifteen nuclear missiles on one side of the chosen area of space. I make sure I am far away from the missiles before they detonate.

  In space, nukes aren't these big fireballs like in the atmosphere or even against the hulls of ships. There is a momentary flash, but the radiation sent flying in all directions goes unimpeded. I count the seconds down, and then I open communication with the sensor satellites. And I find my prey.

  The radiation burst from the nuclear bombs hurries through space at the speed of light, reaching the furthest end of the target zone in seconds. On the satellites, the explosions are these linear bursts expanding outward, but I can see them. My sensor AI devours the information on the screen and notices an anomaly on one of the objects of interest. Rather than the radiation being absorbed or reflected by the object, as metallic meteors tend to do, the radiation is reflected away by either a magnetic field or by a localized gravity well at a much greater force than what one of the local meteors should have.

  The enemy definitely figured out what I had done, and were probably looking in the direction from where the explosions occurred, not knowing I am thousands of miles away, and thanks to this being a homefield advantage, they won't be able to see the nuclear radiation reflecting off of my ship without exposing themselves. I don't fire at their position as it will take two minutes even for a relativistic round to travel that distance, and they would be most likely gone. Instead, I do something ballsy.

  Removing the stealthy shape of my vessel, I deploy the great radiator sails on my vessel, the large, incredibly thin sheets of metal and coolant tubes extend from my vessel like the fins on a grayling, changing the brutalist form of my ship into something more akin to an aquatic creature, and in that moment I preform a dangerous maneuver, especially this close to a major gravity well, I activate my Alcubierre drive and space is warped around me for a fraction of a second.

  Then, when I end my jump, I am within a few thousand miles from the enemy vessel, all sensors locked onto it, any idea of stealth gone out the window as I, like a tiger, roar as I pounce on them.

  My ship radiates heat, glowing like a beacon in space on the infrared spectrum. Hidden gun barrels pop out from their sheathed areas within the hull, capacitors at full and relativistic rounds already spinning up inside large internal magnetic mass accelerators. I watch their ship come alive, a massive behemoth in space. The other captain is good as they start by burning hard, hoping to throw off my aim as their massive turrets turn to face me. On both ships, hundreds of VLS tubes explode open as we prepare to unleash nuclear annihilation on one another, but as they had been sitting in silence, afraid to make a single sound, they weren't ready to be jumped like this, and their weapons haven't had time to warm up, meaning their first salvo toward me won't be relativistic as they haven't had time to spin up the mass accelerators.

  With a thought, eight sixteen-inch slugs fly from multiple of my weapon barrels, traveling faster than the human mind can comprehend, matter acting strangely as it moves faster than anything with mass should be allowed to.

  Those aren't my only main guns, only eight of fifty at the ready, eight is enough to guarantee a kill if they hit, but I won't take chances by blowing my load too soon, after all, it takes twenty seconds for a round to be accelerated to relativistic speed, unless it's nuclear propelled. In two seconds, I'll have an answer if I need to fire more...

  A duel between behemoths has begun...