It wasn't very often that officers in a navy fought hard to get assigned to a worse class of ship. Looking at the raw specs for the UNSC Fenrir, one might easily mistake it for a superannuated model, reminiscent of the Mjolnir-class frigates that had last left the dockyards of Jove in 2034, and these days, were only seen limping back to boneyards to be scrapped for parts.
The Fenrir boasted a maximum acceleration of 12 gees, seeming impressive only till you remembered that more modern ships could pull several dozen. Its armaments seemed anemic, sure, it was up to the task of sterilizing the surface of a small moon, but it lacked the ability to punch right through the crust and sprinkle mantle like a proper planet-killer. Even when the raw output of a weapon-system might sound impressive, the tracking and Effective Terminal Effect of its weaponry seemed paltry.
Its AI system was antiquated, almost stupid. It was one of the rare craft where the human captain held more than nominal command. Were they the old-fashioned type, loathe to trust lives to a machine that thought faster and lived harder than they did? No.
Maybe you might mistake its crew for cowards who wanted an easy berth. After all, while offense wasn't its strong-suit, it could certainly hold up to a beating. The demand for Crafter tech strongly outstripped supply, yet the Fenrir had a hull with enormous amounts of the stuff. The pseudo-material was impressive stuff, soaking up and distributing kinetic force and thermal energy far more capably than mere matter could. (It would be nice to call such products meta-materials, but the term was already reserved for engineered and entirely mundane stuff well before SAMSARA brought about metahumans in its wake)
It had layers upon layers of force-fields, once again pure Crafter handiwork, and in conjunction with its hull, it could withstand the full firepower of a Centauri Dreadnought for a minute at near point-blank range. For more typical engagement distances, measured in light minutes, the Fenrir could survive nigh-indefinitely.
I did mention you'd be mistaken if you considered the crew cowards. The Fenrir used its ludicrous durability not to linger at the edge of combat effectiveness like a glorified missile boat, but rather to ensure that a very expensive payload made it to the thick of the fight.
For it was made part and parcel to carry some of the best metahumans that money could buy. Or well, not money, but national might enlisted in a conscription drive. A typical manned UNSC ship had 2-4 metahumans on board, a capital ship might have a few dozen. Numbers weren't everything, a ship with a single good Class 4 could often best one with half a dozen class 3s, and a large fraction of ships had no metahuman crew at all, leaving aside the substantial number of fully automated craft filling out the ranks. The Fenrir and it's kin were positive opulent, housing a single Class 6 and a dozen class 5s, and anywhere from fifty to a hundred Class 4s and below.
In this light, some of the design decisions make more sense. An unfortunate fact of the matter is that in the AC system, advanced AI could often be a hindrance as much as a help. Even Turing couldn't make promises that the best models were immune to Centauri insubordination, a bigger mind often equated a larger surface area for subversion.
Sometimes, it really was a blessing to be a mind too small for doubt.
The Proton class AGI (barely meriting the general in Artificial General Intelligence) was simple. Pared down, optimized for speed and resilience over thinking galaxy-brained thoughts. Not that it wasn't dangerous, a chimpanzee with a baseball bat means someone's going to get hurt. Protons were the absolute go-to for sheer intransigence and near-immunity to electronic warfare. Turing had adversarially tested it with nearly every possible input its tiny electronic mind could hold, and proven that it would not waver. This was computationally intractable for anything significantly larger, the latent space became too large to explore. It did carry a quite recently released and relatively respectable Radon AGI, but by default the system was disconnected and air-gapped, meant to be activated in the unlikely scenario humans on board had been taken out of the loop (usually in a irreversible terminal manner).
The hard thinking and strategizing was done by the human captain, who in this case was one of the rare supes who had powers that directly improved their cognition. This was a headache, especially today when even wracking his brain to the point it felt like it would explode showed him few options but imminent death in his immediate future.
"Bulldog, status report?" He demanded, using an antiquated AR HUD that had a millionth the bandwidth of a neural throne. Metahuman Rejection Syndrome sucked, a tiny thought of thousands whispered in the background noise of his expanded mind.
"WEAPONS ORANGE. SHIELDS YELLOW. HULL GREEN. METAHUMAN PAYLOAD AT 78% OF NOMINAL" Bulldog replied, as stubbornly unflappable as the real deal. Captain Johann Yossarian had never cared for the human touch in a machine, Bulldog was always blunt and slightly mechanical in its manner, though it certainly wasn't so dumb as to not be capable of typical speech.
One of the Yossarians sighed, out of the thousands sitting in their collective Mind Palace. It was how his/their brain envisioned itself, a collective consciousness run by democracy and far more cognitive capacity than could reasonably be expected within the confines of a human skull. He knew that being down to mere 78% of their payload was a bloodless way of saying that almost a dozen of his crew had died. It had merely been an hour into the engagement, another at this rate of attrition, and command would likely yank them back, mission scrubbed, forced to limp home and lick their wounds at the colossal speed three dedicated Teleporters afforded.
Those three were fine. All alive and untouched, though one of them was distressingly close to burning out from overuse, which could always get messy. Yossarian 551 had no choice but to burn her candles at both ends, this Teleporter had limited range and payload but a rapid cooldown, and without her, the supes fighting in the periphery of the ship would quickly find themselves isolated and picked off by the seemingly endless waves of Centaur drones and spaceforms. It helped prevent Yossarian Totality's own burnout that the emotional cost of sending his men and women to their death could often be borne by more mental forks, each wiped clean when the burden of conscience grew too much to bear. Was it any consolation to those who died that a little bit of himself died with them?
Yossarian 1723 wept and rocked in place, not noticing the grim looks on his clones faces as a few of them surrounded him, and then rent him limb from limb, reforming the spare cognition into a new, unblemished copy. The new Yossarian, quickly self-assigning themselves the number 3302, shook his head and immediately jumped into work micromanaging another set of jump parameters. All of this elapsed in significantly faster than real time, Yossarian-in-toto could trade-off fewer mental forks for faster runtime, but given the sheer velocity of orbital combat, had opted for a slower speed per thread in favor of having many, many more of them.
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Yossarian had opted to be awake for the entire year long journey, with only Bulldog keeping watch beside him. He didn't need anyone to talk to really, he had more than enough company in his head. It was an extended vacation as far as he was concerned, a year of rest was far longer than he would have gotten if he'd stayed back on shore leave. It could have felt like decades if he'd let himself involute, running only a few copies at lightning speed.
He'd wandered the halls of his ship, whistling to the coil whine of the few spots that were using non-superconducting cables. At the very core of the ship, he often stood to lay eyes on the Radon AGI's containment chamber. A waste of space, as far as he was concerned, he considered the efforts to keep it that airgapped paranoid. The AI was housed in a black-box the size of an apartment complex, with the umbilicals offering the gigawatts of power it needed kept spooled and far from the suggestive sockets they'd mate with.
Sometimes, he felt tempted to plug it in. It would make for better conversation than Bulldog, he'd wondered idly, before continuing his patrol to the crew quarters. They were capacious, meant to keep his metahuman subordinates from going stir-crazy, especially the ones with MRS so bad they couldn't use full-immersion VR. Right now, anyone else would have been either confused or pissed off by the odd droning static that filled the air, but that was an intentional move by Yossarian. Three hundred different songs, played at different speeds, each teased out and appreciated by a strand of his psyche. He found the exercise oddly relaxing, and in a way, good practice for the cacophony of war.
He kept walking, finding himself in the slightly chilly environs of the cold-storage facility where the majority of his crew lay dormant.
Ryan Chungho
A Class 5 Cryomancer. The irony of being frozen wasn't lost on him or Yossarian, though only the latter was awake to appreciate it right now.
Yosef Garamond
Another Class 5. Yossarian hadn't actually met him while he was awake, the man had been delivered to Fenrir in cryosleep. He'd asked to be awoken a few weeks early, preferably in the company of his wife. Yossarian flicked through a display that concisely laid out the man's rather unique set of powers, and resolved to make himself scarce when the time came. Still, he felt a tad bit miffed, considering it rude of Yosef to not introduce himself at all.
Anya Garamond
Class 4 and a speedster. And a friend. Yossarian laid a hand over her sarcophagus fondly, it was never a bore to chat with her, she could speed herself up to the point he'd struggle to keep up. Perhaps she'd opted for the taciturn Yosef as a husband because she wouldn't have to bore herself listening to him, he thought slightly uncharitably. No matter, if they had things to speak about, his request for privacy would provide it.
This section of the ship held ten of the crew capsules. For the sake of redundancy and safety in transit, the rest were sequestered quite far apart in the safe interior of the vessel. Still, Yossarian's word was law, and he'd gauged the risk to be low enough that he'd gathered those seeking an early awakening together. The Garamonds first, and then the long list of people who wanted extra time to unwind before combat nerves kicked in. The majority of the supes were veterans, and surprisingly, insisted on only being brought out at the last moment. He suspected that they hoped that they wouldn't be needed at all, that the drones would mop it up, and would much rather come to in the relative safety of a dock.
He hesitated at a corner. On his left was quite clearly another containment zone, a high security enclosure that promised swift and painless death on an unauthorized breach. Unlike the cradle for the Radon, he felt that the security was warranted.
Still, it had been months since he'd visited, and he felt a need to gaze upon their most valuable cargo. It was also their most dangerous one.
He overrode the security systems, stepping into the Hraesvelgr's den.
Even the access corridor hummed with the subsonic thrum of thirty-seven independent containment fields. Yossarian’s teeth vibrated as he stepped through each successive layer – molecular shears deactivating in perfect sequence, hermetic bulkheads sighing open like the petals of some infernal flower. Even here, at the edge of sleep, it pressed against his expanded consciousness. Not a presence. An absence. A singularity where reason curdled.
He steeled his nerves and stalked into the containment chamber thrummed with a basso profundo vibration that made his teeth ache. Even through the neural dampeners, he could feel the thing’s dreams scratching at the edges of his mind-forks - half-formed equations about tidal forces and Roche limits, whispered in the language of shattered moons.
There was no hidden message in the audible noise. Or perhaps there was, if you were willing to set aside your sanity as the cost of entrance.
Hraesvelgr floated in a tank of amniotic fluid. Solid diamond walls, a gemstone flawless but for the horror it encased.
The fluid wasn’t liquid at all, he'd realized on his first and penultimate visit. Bulldog’s tersely worded manifest had called it ‘non-Newtonian Bose-Einstein condensate (therapeutic/containment grade)’, but up close, it moved like sentient mercury gifted with translucency. It chilled the room, and he swore he saw mangled cuneiform in the short-lived puffs of mist accompanying his labored breath. Thicker tendrils of the stuff coiled around Hraesvelgr’s wrists and throat, pulsing in time to the chamber’s containment fields. Every few seconds, the metallic pseudopod would flinch away from the Class 6’s skin as if scalded, only to be dragged back by whatever dark energy kept the system in flux. Yossarian had met a few Class 6s in his day, as a 5 himself, he moved in exclusive circles. He wasn't sure the number fit this abomination, but apparently the brass steadfastly refused to assign anyone a higher number. Maybe it let them pretend to themselves that the heroes were equal to the villains.
Hraesvelgr’s form was a study in contradictions. From the neck down, its body resembled a mummified astronaut - desiccated limbs curled fetal, skin the color of comet ice mottled with burst capillaries where gravitational tides had ruptured capillaries. But the head... the head was all wrong. A smooth obsidian sphere replaced the skull, its surface crawling with impossible reflections - not light, but spacetime itself bent into a funhouse mirror. Yossarian caught fractured glimpses of his own death in those curves: his body spaghettified into a helix of meat and bone, the Fenrir crumpling like tinfoil around a singularity the size of a pinhead.
Unknowing to him, hundreds of himself huddled together for warmth in the confines of his skull.
Yossarian pressed a palm against the hyperdiamond. Frost bloomed where his capillaries burst. Idiocy. He managed to pull away, leaving a layer of ripped skin adherent to the walls. He shuddered, staining his suit with smeared blood as he reflexively wiped his hand clean.
Feeding protocols nominal, Bulldog intoned through the chamber’s speakers. Causal dampeners at 89% efficiency. No bleedthrough detected since last maintenance cycle.
The captain didn’t need the report. He could feel the wrongness in his molars, taste copper at the back of his throat. He felt his visits foolhardy, but necessary. If something as trivial as his presence could cause it to breach confinement, well, the mission had been doomed from the start. He owed his fellow crew the mercy of a swift and painless death while in stasis.
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Mustering up his courage, he pulled on a set of gloves and then tapped the glass. An immediate reaction. The sphere’s surface rippled like water, and suddenly Yossarian wasn’t looking at a containment chamber anymore. He stood on a plain of black glass stretching to infinity, beneath a sky torn open to reveal the raw machinery of the cosmos—great gears of plasma grinding stars to dust, fractal lightning that rewrote DNA with every strike. Hraesvelgr hung crucified at the nexus of it all, obsidian skull split open to vomit forth a nebula of dying worlds.
Yossarian retched, stomach acid tasting alkaline. Something injected him, a servo-arm dispensing pseudo-medication according to pre-arranged protocol. The bosses must have known that someone would be dumb enough to yank the chains. He came to, the world tossed sideways. Or rather, he must have fallen, and now, he struggled back on his feet with tinnitus for company.
Bulldog’s voice cut through the static, colder than the void between galaxies.
“COGNITOHAZARD PROTOCOLS ENGAGED. MEMETIC FILTERS AT 100%. RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE RETREAT.”
Fucking idiot bot. He was all flesh and blood. He didn't have the luxury of a lace and neural filters distorting consensus reality into something more palatable. He let his mind take the blow instead.
A hundred Yossarians screamed as their mental forks unraveled into redshifted screams. He wasn't outright immune to coghazards, but he had his ways of dealing with them.
Backing away, Yossarian watched the containment chamber’s stabilizers flare crimson. Hraesvelgr’s fingers twitched in its artificial womb, and three decks below, the Fenrir’s navigational array suddenly reported a 0.0003% deviation in local spacetime curvature. Enough to add five meters of error to every torpedo salvo. Enough to turn a clean kill into a glancing blow. Enough to get them all killed.
Good. He needed to know what it was capable even in undeath, locked down to mere fractions of its full power. A part of him, freshly spawned to replace the dead voices of the internal chorus, chastised him for his hubris, his demand for knowledge, for control over his ship and its crew.
Other parts of him yelled back that it was necessary. He didn't know the enemy, so he needed to know himself. Then again, with friends like the Hraesvelgr..
He stumbled out of the facility in a fugue state, waving aside a robotic manifestation of Bulldog that stood by, watching quietly. He noticed the redness in his right eye reflected back on its mirrored surface.
To the crew quarters. To the comfortable, anachronistic sofa fresh out of a Parisian parlor. To spin up more copies and remind himself of what the Hraesvelgr was. What it did.
They'd found it buried in the ice. Hundreds of meters deep, at the northernmost reaches of Svalbard. A man-size anomaly in ice that by all rights should have been undisturbed since the last Ice Age maxima. The details of containment were vague, censored past his ULTRAVIOLET clearance, but he knew the process was costly.
That had been two years back. In all likelihood, it had been taken as a prize by some greedy nation-state, only for them to realize their mistake.
As far as he was concerned it was served to the UNSC in a silver stasis casket with a polite note: “Please point away from Earth.”
He could connect some of the dots himself.
Looking back, what else could have caused the Ganymede Incident? Three UNSC dreadnoughts converted into non-Euclidean origami over the course of 13 seconds. Security footage showed crews walking into bulkheads that hadn’t existed moments before, emerging as inverted tessellations of flesh and polymer.
They must have sent those Teleporters after it. The ones with terse obituaries only distributed to friends and family. They might even have sent Consul, he pondered. There had been a hole punched straight through the moon's icy shell, back out the other end.
Whatever the reason had been, the UNSC must have agreed that it wasn't for deployment anywhere near the vicinity of Sol. Hence here. Hence Hymir, where he had been granted discretion to abandon the damn thing (but only if absolutely necessary and mission critical to the task of killing the Centaurs, he couldn't drop it off into orbit because he didn't like it, sadly).
He shoved that thought to a rather displeased fork, and poured himself a cold brew, feeling inclined to mull over longer-term concerns, though they felt just as fatal.
The mission had been mutual suicide from the start. Humanity had vacillated, prevaricated even, in many of its strategic objectives when it came to how to handle the Centauri influx.
For a few happy years, it had been confidently assumed that while the initial fleet engagements around the system had been abject failures, the aliens had no ability to use FTL travel, and could be dealt with quite leasurely.
"They're slowboating out of the system. As long as we keep the rate of expansion of their Von-Neumanns and antimatter fabs to below 300% per annum, we've got the time to build up critical mass of our own. Jump in a dozen fleets, blast the inner system, and then hunt down the survivors in deep space. Even if they coast out, it'll be decades before they can re-establish themselves in the nearby systems, and we've already set up monitoring probes in a ten lightyear radius around AC. There's no need to panic." A distant memory of some pundit pontificating on a stage far, far away. The nerd had the maths to back himself up, and besides, it was what the attendees wanted to hear.
A little bit of an alien threat? Frankly amazing. Just what the world needed to make individual nation states stop posturing and threatening to release world-ending arsenals of the mundane and metahuman kind at each other. Keep the masses afraid, find more excuses to keep the metahumans shackled in a manner that would win popular approval.
You could excuse a lot of dysfunction, and even outright suffering, if people were convinced it was for a good cause. Sure, everyone knew that most countries were building up strategic reserves as a power play against each other, but nobody was going to be the first to defect and start a war until the aliens were truly ground down, right? It would take a decade or two, but disaffection could be channeled, and perhaps false amity would foster a real one.
A Yossarian sighed. A mere year or two after that confident proclamation, the first RKVs were discovered, mostly by sheer dumb luck. The majority were neutralized at great expense, but a few struck true, battering the budding manufactories in the outer gas giants. Alarming, that the Centaurs had managed to fire some of them without obvious notice (Fleet Command had been happily tracking launches, gloating at their precognitive awareness of what they believed the Centauri considered hidden trump cards, unaware of the many that slipped their net). Greatly discomfiting, but once again, reassurance was sprayed like an aerosolized opiate that the inner system was safe, too many systems and failsafes in place to let a single damning strike wipe out the cradle of humanity. There was no real urgency.
Then the discovery that the aliens had long slipped past the AC containment lines. That while more pundits had been loudly proclaiming that there was "no stealth in space", hydrogen steamers had escaped to the edges of the Oort, building more hidden facilities and rapidly bootstrapping their alien tech. The stealth ships emitted targeted beams of neutrinos, nigh undetectable unless you were right in their path, and could achieve accelerations that rightly should have lit up the night sky.
Alright, that was concerning. $500T to the defense budget. Everyone felt the pinch of tightened belts that surveilling such a vastly widened volume entailed. You couldn't just stick a probe in an oasis of sunlight, you had to check every cubic lightyear for lingering growth, planetisimals and ice-laden asteroids being snacked on for another generation of probes and weapons.
If only they had still been in the initial stages of growth..
The greatest lie humanity told itself was that war had boundaries. That containment zones meant something to creatures who carved shipyards from rogue planets' frozen guts. While Terran analysts fixated on Alpha Centauri’s dying binary embers, the Centauri bloomed like mold in the void’s damp corners – every ice-cloaked planetesimal a womb, each wandering super-Earth’s mantle pregnant with fusion forges birthing dreadnoughts sleek as obsidian shards.
In those four years of human complacency, the Centauri had transformed these wandering worlds into a distributed, near-undetectable network of manufacturing and strategic nodes. Each planet became a fortress, a foundry, a seed of exponential growth - invisible until the moment of catastrophic emergence. Where humans saw empty darkness, the Centauri saw infinite potential, engineering entire civilizations into the frigid interstices between stars.
And the Dyson Swarm... God. The Swarm. Not some delicate constellation of mirrors, but a ravenous metallic epidermis devouring Rigil Kentaurus whole. We’d mapped continent-sized panels drinking stellar fire to birth singularities – temporary, screaming black holes spun up like lathes to forge hull alloys that laughed at teraton blasts. Gigatons of explosives detonated every few minutes, human strike craft hurling themselves against the nascent Swarm like insects against a windshield. The scale was incomprehensible—human efforts reduced to the equivalent of trying to dismantle a hurricane with a flyswatter. Millions of lives, trillions of machines, were nothing more than momentary friction in the aliens' relentless machinery of expansion.
As for Toliman’s star-lifters? The Centauri didn’t mine stars. They performed gravitational vivisection. Magnetic tendrils wider than Saturn’s rings plunged into the star’s heart, extracting heavy elements like surgeons plucking metastasized jewels. Their forges didn’t construct warships – they extruded them, kilometer-long killers coalescing from superfluid helium baths like obsidian nightmares given mathematical form. Each generation, their ships got bigger, faster and meaner, and even at the very start of the conflict, one of their warships could equal two of ours. Now, they often verged on the incomprehensible; how did they make nuclear pasta retain form when freed from the pressures of a neutron star? Was the fervent theorizing that the borderline-miraculous energy dissipation of their new hull coating an evidence they were somehow exploiting anyon-like particles and their topological phase? Who the fuck knows anymore.
Yossarian grimaced, forcing a few forks that had become side-tracked into grim daydreaming to focus on the here and now. They'd been to AC, but right now, this 'minor' engagement a lightyear away deserved every bit of his concentration.
Hymir loomed before him on the Tac. A decade ago, there might have been little to see at all, the rogue Ice Giant had fled its cosmic nursery billions of years ago, too small to simmer on the edges of nuclear fusion like a brown dwarf, or retain enough formation heat like a super-Jupiter to be a slowly dying incandescent bulb in the night. The only light would have been the dim crackles of lightning, this far out both Sol and the three stars in AC were barely notable in the night sky. Perhaps the odd aurora, if a sudden influx of cosmic radiation had encountered the stagnant and receding magnetic field it clung onto like a tattered robe.
Now, Hymir shuddered in and out of view as actinic arcs of ship-to-ship combat lit up long dead space, but viewed in infrared, you could see suspicious streams of heat, the waste emissions of RKV launchers that had built themselves up in the clouds before disgorging their payload towards Sol. New splashes of false color joined them, debris and munitions hitting atmosphere, whalefalls from the heavens that would blaze against ammoniacal clouds amid hydrogen skies. Pinprick flashes, this time visible to the naked eye, not true lightning, but orbital defenses aiming unerringly at Terran ships. They might not have been built as weapons, but nothing screams 'dual-use technology' like mass drivers thousands of kilometers long.
Hymir had awoken from its slumber a few years back. Or rather, it had given Sol a rude awakening when the thread of RKV trajectories had been back tracked, finally discovering the rogue planet. The aliens had used the sheer cold of the body to build up in force, content in enough thermal capacity to soak up their enormous waste heat and not raise temperatures more than a few milli-Kelvin. While UNSC High Command had been confident that the majority of RKVs already fired had been intercepted, or at least could be intercepted, eventually a small Task Force had been mustered up to deal with the problem at its source.
Task Force Sleipnir was hastily assembled, after half a decade of war, the remnants of many older fleets had limped back to the far end of the wormhole that opened at Sedna, battered beyond the point of combat effectiveness in-system, humans worn down to bundle of nerves. There was a lot that the Healers and Clairvoyants at the rearward fortresses and docks could do, but even they had to admit that a few months drinking one's self into a stupor helped.
Yossarian cheated. One of the forks drew the short straw when it came to the hangover.
Ugh. He just couldn't keep his mind on track(s), he'd barely been on R&R, only somewhat managing to squash the tremors that seemed to come back everytime he thought about going back in.
Hadn't he agreed to this? His reprieve cut short for a short skirmish, a "mop up", in return for being kept safely planetside for a whole entire campaign. Not just agreed, jumped on wholeheartedly, as had most of his crew.
Maybe the brass had lied about Hymir. Maybe they hadn't known the truth themselves.
Sleipnir had been quickly put together, surviving elements of Task Forces Yama, Alexander and Ragnarok sorted out, hulls rapidly refurbished to bring them up to fighting form. He'd been part of Ragnarok, hence the Fenrir's status as almost state of the art when it came to metahuman carriers. The ships from Alexander hadn't been too far behind either, but the Yama craft felt more like a liability than an asset. He could dimly smell the stench of desperation that they been sent into battle instead of being scrapped for parts and crews rotated.
This intuition hadn't been wrong. They'd come under fire thousands of AU away from Hymir, they'd lacked the element of surprise in the first place, with the lack of enough FTL-capable Teleporters for the entire fleet entailing sublight speeds till their objective. It had taken almost a year to get there, and now it looked like the battle might be over in mere days. Bits of his consciousness chimed in that it was more likely to be hours now, unless they abandoned their mission and turned tail. Even that wasn't likely to save them.
Hymir wasn't alone. Whatever ancient cataclysm or minor gravitational perturbation had ejected the ancient planet into its lonely wandering, it had let it retain what seemed to be the bulk of its own assortment of moons. These had been far too small to image at all, even when the rough location of Hymir had been pinned down.
And they had served as excellent firing points for the aliens entrenching the system.
Sleipnir had come in roaring, a coterie of hundreds of drone-ships leading the charge, strung out dozens of AU ahead of the main fleet slowing down from nearly a third of c. They'd kept most of their velocity, with no regard for self-preservation, they aimed to fire off their considerable arsenals at point-blank range, and in the unlikely event that they somehow survived, primed to kinetically strike what targets they could instead of flying off into the interstellar void. A reminder to the aliens that RKVs could go both ways.
The drones had alerted them to antimatter minefields, lurking stealthed craft and graviton torpedoes, buying precious knowledge for the manned craft following. The UNSC informally called any starship without a human crew a 'drone', but that encompassed ships that dwarfed Fenrir itself. During the seemingly endless fall into system, Yossarian had hoped against hope that the initial wave of several hundred craft had been enough, that they could declare Hymir neutralized, and the rest of them would continue their deceleration burn till it brought them hurtling back towards Sedna.
Alas, the drones charged bravely, fought well and died hard, but left a buzzing hornet's nest for the rest of Sleipnir to fight. They'd fired their dust guns next, and that's not something you'd see in Sol where collateral damage was a concern.
Imagine a blunderbuss firing quadrillions of grains of sand at relativistic speed. They hadn't even really had to fire them, per se, rather asteroid-sized loosely held clumps of debris had been allowed to remain at maximum velocity while the fleet was slowing down, before fusion warheads detonated them and sent the a diffuse cloud of very angry pellets addressed to PO box Hymir.
This wouldn't do much against hardened structures, such as the firing platforms dug into the moons. Even the atmosphere of Hymir was sufficient to cushion the blow, though he had enjoyed seeing it glow as a bugle cry for their charge. Instead, it was meant to clear their path, destroy the bulk of the floating minefields, or at least provide a cone several AU wide that they could freely maneuver in.
The aliens had their own response. They fired their own dust-guns, but with the benefit of having far more mass to throw at them courtesy of big balls of rock that nobody would miss. Yossarian had sighed in relief at the time, knowing that the Fenrir had the best defenses in their fleet. Even then, interstellar warships had their own systems for deflecting or surviving minor impacts at relativistic speed, it was a necessity if you didn't want a stray micrometeor to end you rightly.
They'd taken only cosmetic damage by the time they entered the range of primary weapons, and the Fenrir had flared its shields frontally to shield dozens of other ships that followed in its wake.
By then, the crew had awoken. A few had asked about the Hraesvelgr. The little Yossarian could tell them made them stop asking. Initially, morale had been at an high, because victory entailed dropping off their radioactive cargo and flying home. Now, Yossarian was considering doing the former, and hoping that the fallout would be enough of a distraction for them to get clear before it all went to shit.