We had seen nearly constant battle for the last month and a half. Fifty-four days with only a handful of those not having seen some conflict. According to the SF news our side was supposed to be winning this war. According to the battles we had actually fought in, nobody seemed to be winning. We killed a few of their ships, they killed a few of ours. We seemed to be fighting a war of attrition with the key question being who would run out of ships, ammo, or pilots first.
Hoping for a few days break to calm frazzled nerves and make some critical repairs, we had jumped to some empty space, chosen seemingly at random for no other reason than that it was empty, with no stars, planets, space stations, or most importantly enemy ships.
It was two days into our planned week long repair sabbatical, just about the time the repair crews had things taken apart and were starting to put them back together again, and I had just come on shift as the duty pilot when everything went to hell. The first warning came from the jump sensors, alerting us to first one, two, four, then a dozen incoming ships. Then the weapons sensors started blaring, "incoming missiles . . . incoming missiles" the sensor tech on duty muted the alarm only to parrot its message.
"Incoming missiles, multiple tracts, inbound from the ships that just jumped in. I am also picking up a bunch of hi-velocity stuff at extreme sensor range coming at us from the opposite direction. Those hits are not accelerating at this time, but size and shape are consistent with more missiles. There must be over fifty of those out there."
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