Admiral Screef leaps away from the admiral's chair and dives to avoid the blast of shrapnel that shreds the forward viewport. He is lucky. A second later and he would have been shredded himself. Pieces of debris cut through his chair like a ribbon in a ribbon ceremony and he barely avoids it.

"TACTICAL!" he screams. The oval-matrix shields kick in and restore cabin pressure to normal. No danger of being sucked out into space. They had learned.

"We've got four enemy fighters on scope, sir," reports a virtual tactician. Lucky bastard. The new decree allows all non-essential personnel to work from home. Since tactics officers can do their job from anywhere and since they were never really needed in person on the bridge anyway, the Tactical Division had made a strong push for keeping their talented agents away from the battlefield. "Two Nover-class fighters and two of unknown class."

"Let's get tracking on those hostiles," orders Screef. He wipes his face of the fragments of viewport.

"Tracking," replies the tactician. "Indeed I am. Hey Halara, can I get another caffo? Whoops, thought I was on mute."

It is the fourth day of the Battle for Beermerfer, a pivotal engagement in the Conflict. Espionage agents had discovered a crucial link in the Resistance supply chain and if they could knock out the communications array on Be3refemr, they could deal a significant blow to the whole thing. The whole thing could collapse if they can just knock this array out. It has to happen.

Six frigates appear from beyond the accretion disk of the black hole that orbits Beferemr: Krigman-class by the looks of them, but they are out of range to be of immediate threat. Not a problem. We'll deal with those.

Screef sighs louder than the rest of the battle and looks around his empty bridge. He is on the ship by himself. Somehow he has managed to be the only military man here. Even the enemy fighters are likely remote-controlled. Nobody's fighting wars these days. It's just computers matching artificial intelligences against each other's. But they still need a man present for it to count and that man is Admiral Screef today. He has drawn the bad stick.

"All right let's get this thing under control." He talks to himself. He takes a backup admiral's chair out of the storage closet and sits in it.

Stars churn crazily as his command vessel moves into offensive formation and brings its formidable batteries to bear. "FIRE!" A relentless salvo of yellow lasers erupts into the blackness of space, hitting nothing. "FIRE AGAIN!" More salvos, blue this time to signify seriousness. The computers would register the change and respond accordingly. Oval-matrix shields work both ways. Screef did not care. One way or another, this battle will be his last.