Bleed Rate

Tomás Garza had been staring at the logistics display for eleven minutes. He knew it was eleven because the timestamp on the last update was still visible in the corner, and because Duarte, his supply officer, had stopped pretending not to watch him from across the command table.

The numbers were simple. Four Supply Nodes pulling raw material from their asteroids, each one producing at a steady rate. The Mining Station on the Kapoor cluster, boosting output from the surrounding nodes. Total income for Gravity Well Smelter Basin, League side: just under a hundred units of supply per minute.

His fleet cost a hundred and thirteen.

Thirteen units per minute. That was the gap. It didn't sound like much. Garza had done the arithmetic enough times to know exactly what it meant: at the current drain, his operational reserves would hit zero in roughly forty hours. The Mobile Shipyard's fabrication bay would go dark first, unable to produce without feedstock. Then the repair systems would throttle back. Then the ships themselves would start to feel it, slower reactor cycling, reduced weapons output, non-essential systems shutting down one by one to conserve what remained.

You didn't explode when you ran out of supply. You slowed down. And then someone who hadn't slowed down came and finished it.

"It was six nodes a week ago," Duarte said, because someone had to say it out loud.

Garza knew. Gravity Well Smelter Basin had been comfortable eight days ago. Six Supply Nodes spread across the best asteroids in the northern half, the Mining Station humming on the densest cluster, a hundred and forty units coming in against a fleet that cost a hundred and seven. Comfortable surplus. Enough to build, repair, replace losses if it came to that. The arithmetic had worked.

Then the Compact had hit two of his nodes on the eastern rim.

Clean strikes. A pair of NEC destroyers had slipped in along the dust lane where the Listening Post's coverage thinned, put sustained fire on the extraction arms until the structures buckled, and pulled back before the patrol frigate could close the distance. Ninety seconds of weapons fire. Two nodes reduced to slag and drifting debris. Twenty minutes to reach the wreckage. Four days to rebuild each one, if he could spare the supply to do it, which he couldn't, because the loss of those nodes was exactly why he couldn't spare the supply.

That was the part that made Garza's jaw tighten. Losing income made recovery expensive. Expensive recovery drained reserves. Drained reserves meant you couldn't protect what you had left. It was a spiral, and once you were in it, the only way out was to change the arithmetic.

He pulled up the tactical overlay and set it beside the logistics numbers. His fleet: the Varga, a heavy cruiser and his flagship.

Two cruisers running staggered patrol rotations. Three destroyers. Five frigates for screening and recon. And the Mobile Shipyard, tucked behind the Kapoor cluster where the asteroid density gave it cover and the proximity to the Mining Station kept the supply lines short.

Every one of those ships cost supply to keep operational. Reactors consumed fuel rods. Weapon capacitors degraded under charge cycles and needed replacement. Hull plating stressed during maneuvers. Atmosphere recyclers burned through filters. The bigger the ship, the heavier the drain. The Varga alone consumed more per minute than two frigates combined, and he'd long since accepted that as the cost of having something in his fleet that could take a hit from a Compact cruiser and still shoot back.

He could cut costs. Pull two frigates from the screen and power them down to cold standby, reactors at minimum, weapons offline, life support on conservation mode. That would save enough to shrink the gap to four or five units per minute. Buy himself another week of reserves, maybe ten days. But he'd also lose a third of his sensor coverage on the western approach. The last time a patrol gap had opened on the eastern side, the Compact had put two nodes in the ground.

"What's their supply situation?" he asked.

Duarte brought up the intelligence estimate. It was assembled from sensor returns, patrol observations, and the kind of educated guessing that passed for analysis on the Outer Line. "Three nodes confirmed, southern cluster. Possibly a fourth behind the brown dwarf, out of our sensor envelope. No Mining Station visible, but their output numbers suggest they have one somewhere we can't see."

Three nodes, maybe four. If the Compact was running a fleet of similar size, their margins would be thin too. That was the thing nobody back on Barnard's Star understood about the Outer Line. The supply didn't grow. The asteroids had what they had, and the nodes pulled it out at a fixed rate, and the fleet needed what it needed, and the gap between those numbers decided everything. Tactics, strategy, morale. All of it came down to the gap.

The Compact's third confirmed node sat near the southern rim, anchored to a mineral-rich asteroid roughly two hundred kilometers from the nearest fixed defense. Covered by patrol traffic but not by a Defense Platform. Reachable through the dust lane that curved along the gravitational contour of the brown dwarf, if you were willing to fly it without sensor coverage for the last thirty kilometers.

Garza looked at it for a long time.

"If we hit that outer node," he said.

"Their income drops by twenty per minute." Duarte didn't look up from his board. He'd already run the numbers. "If they're tight, which they probably are, that puts them negative."

"And they come hit ours."

"Probably."

Garza studied the positions. His four nodes producing supply to feed a fleet that consumed more than they made. Their three doing the same. Two forces sitting in the same Gravity Well, each one slowly extracting the asteroids around them, each one watching the other's operations with the quiet intensity of someone counting the food in a neighbor's pantry.

He thought about the Mining Station on the Kapoor cluster, the heavy structure bolted to the three largest asteroids in the formation, its processing arrays amplifying the output of every node within range. That station was the reason his income was a hundred instead of eighty. If the Compact found a way to reach it, the arithmetic wouldn't just be bad. It would be terminal.

He'd come to the Outer Line because the League needed people who could build. Garza had spent fifteen years in ORI logistics, running supply chains for mining operations in the Barnard system, turning raw asteroid material into ship components and station modules. He was good at making things work, at squeezing output from aging equipment, at finding the extra margin that kept an operation alive when the budget said it should have folded. Standing on the Varga's command deck watching supply numbers bleed felt like the opposite of everything he'd trained for.

But the League also taught you something else. When the numbers don't work, you fix the numbers.

"Pull the Estrada and Koln off western patrol. Form up with the Raza. Three destroyers, fast approach through the dust lane south of the Kapoor cluster. I want them on that outer node in forty minutes."

Duarte didn't argue. He pulled up the comms board and started formatting the orders. The plan had problems. The western approach would be unscreened for at least two hours. If the Compact had a raid staged, they'd find open space where there should have been frigates. And hitting a Supply Node was loud. The Compact would know exactly where his destroyers were the moment the first shot connected.

But thirteen units per minute was a clock, and the clock didn't stop to let you think.

Garza watched Duarte send the orders, then turned back to the logistics display. The numbers hadn't changed in the last three minutes. They wouldn't change until either his destroyers reached that node or his reserves ticked down another notch.

He left the display on. The coffee at the edge of the console had gone cold two hours ago, but he picked it up anyway and drank what was left.

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