Disclaimer – Everything either does belong to Joss or it should. I’m just borrowing his shiny ‘verse for a while.

The 21st Lancers belong to the British Army so I’m borrowing them too. I hope they don’t mind.

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“War is the realm of the unexpected”

B.H. Liddell-Hart 1895 - 1970 ( Soldier and Military Historian)

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Sihnon Defence Fleet – Sihnon Sector – 2522AD

Commodore Shichang of the Alliance Navy watched in horror and astonishment as the leading ships of the units under his command suddenly found themselves directly in the path of a time-on-target railgun bombardment that must have been fired several minutes earlier at a point where they would intersect his chosen rally point. At least two dozen Major Exospheric Combatants of Frigate size and above, including seventeen of his larger Missile and Particle-Beam Destroyers which had been leading the Fleet in, had been pounded to scrap without the opportunity to fire back so much as a single shot.

The problem was how in the nine hells could the invading ships know where the squadron was going to be at that time?

The only rational explanation was that the enemy could intercept and decrypt the latest Navy Codes which he had been using to order his small flotilla. So much for Military Intelligence and their vaunted quantum cryptography he thought gnashing his teeth before informing the Fleet that radio communications were compromised and that all future orders would be by line-of-sight laser array.

It wasn’t as convenient as a method of communication as his flagship, the Heavy Destroyer Harbin , could only signal perhaps five vessels at a time by laser as opposed to all of them simultaneously by radio but it was totally secure because only the ship actually being signalled could receive the message.

The second time-on-target railgun barrage that took out three more destroyers and eight Frigates just before they entered effective Directed-Energy-Weapons range was therefore a real shocker. Once aga