Sitting in the darkness of space for weeks at a time, all systems powered down, in a constant state of readiness to turn them back on as soon as possible... this wasn't something most starships were built for. And so, luckless saps like Rank-2 trainee Chimm were tasked with the wonderful job of, without using any energy whatsoever, leaping from an airlock at the end of a tether with a magnetic, spring-launched net gun, and waiting in the void for hours to intercept packets of batteries and supplies.
Their onboard hydroponics facilities were struggling; barely providing any food or air on the minimal provided light. Without the packets being so silently sent out, the ship would be forced to power back on and return to formation; and if even one of the ships did so, it would foil their plans to draw in the Swarm fleet to ambush.
Chimm was relatively relaxed, and had just nabbed the most recent package; a 2-ton crate of oxygen tanks and rations; when he felt a sudden jerk on his tether.
He blinked, six beady eyes focusing behind him as he started slowly reeling the package in; and stopped, staring in horror. The ship... was missing a chunk the size of a tank from amidships, and looked to have a bite taken out of the front. He felt a sudden jerk; momentary, intense pain; if not for his armor, his arm would have been yanked from the socket.
And then... the ship was growing more distant. He ignored previous orders and powered on his suit, checking his display. He was moving away from the ship at a rapid clip. He needed to slow down and...
He looked at the ship... and then at the cargo container he was now attached to.
For the whole crew, maybe a month of food, air and water. For him? Years. It would suck. But so long as he didn't draw attention to himself, he could drift until the battle was over, no matter how long it took, and the Republic had the system under control; and then just call for rescue. If he went back to the ship... well. No guarantees.
He slowly wound the tether back on, drawing himself, the chunk of the ship, and the crate together... watching his crewmates seem to vanish into the darkness.
***
One moment, the system seemed to be peaceful; space was unusually dusty from the stripping of the star, and the habitable moon was rapidly en route to becoming an icy ruin; the government long since evacuated, the remaining survivors struggling for food and heat.
The next... Drakth's board lit up. Dozens of enemy ships; at least two hundred; of one of the known Rogue Descendant navies had just appeared, and that enemy scout ship at the edge of the system had disappeared, at seemingly the same moment.
Even as reports came in, Republic ship lights were vanishing from the plot; and while they were taking out a handful of the enemy fleet, the numbers were heavily favoring the enemy. Drakth smiled. This couldn't be all. Let a few more come in, then...
Hundreds of other lights appeared. Then thousands. They seemed to be mostly in clusters; bands of pirate ships. Masses of swarm navy vessels. His in-system ships were out-numbered... and heavily. They must have stripped every available ship in this backwater hellscape to gather such a fleet, and drawn them in from other sectors; none of the ones out on the edge of the galaxy like this had fleets this big.
"Signal the fleet. Sleepers awaken. And pass a message back through the gate. Unknown number of enemy craft have arrived to steal the orb; at minimum four thousand. Recommend responding with overwhelming force."
He watched the screens, expecting to see over 2000 stealthed ships suddenly light up. Some of those enemy ship clusters had appeared virtually on top of them; they could turn a bit of that surprise attack back on the enemy and start getting casualty counts pushed in the right direction.
He kept staring... a handful of ships came online. Maybe fifty. Sixty. But...
He was getting reports of debris, scattered around the system. Every flotilla had been decimated; most of their numbers gone. The enemy fleet must have known where the stealthed ships were, somehow.. and fired on them the moment they arrived. Even so, their speed and response time was insane. Had they brought some new weapon into play? Warp-capable missiles? Or... Missiles using whatever drive had brought them into the system? It was a good thing every speck of data was being transmitted through the gate. None of this would surprise whoever ended up reinforcing him.
Over a thousand of his ships had been destroyed in the opening moments of the battle. His career was over. If he were lucky, he might still be in the navy when it was all said and done. The crew looked to be in a panic, though they remained at their stations. His XO looked up at him; a solid veteran of hundreds of purge operations, the man seemed stunned. Appropriately horrified; hundreds of thousands of naval personnel had just died, alongside more valuable hardware than had been lost in this sector in a century of constant strige.
He shook his head. "...Order all surviving ships to break off and mass on the gate. We need to keep this space open for just a few minutes while backup comes in. No matter how many of them there are, or how capable, for every ship they have, a hundred of ours will be here to crush them. And if by some twisted miracle even that weren't enough... a thousand. Ten thousand. We won't need it... but we'll have it. There's a formation of a million ships not five light-seconds away through that gate. All we need to do is hold for ten minutes and the day will be ours."
As if in challenge to his remarks, suddenly the screen lit up with signals. That oddly-shaped, bulbous scout craft, and five similar ones, had appeared; as had the Rogue's vessel, apparently with a name; the Gaze of Wrath. They had emerged into a space that, minutes before, had contained dozens of stealthed ships; now only a single ship was slowly coming online, damaged... only to be silenced by a single particle beam shot from one of the unknown scouts.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
All seven vessels were radiating enormous amounts of power; and one of them, the thick, blade-shaped Gaze, was starting to approach the gate. They seemed, oddly enough, to be strangely passive; the Gaze was the only one moving in.
"...All ships. Assume formation Alpha. I want the pincer formation; we close in on the rogue from all sides as he tries to reach the gate. Start firing as soon as we hit five light-seconds... there's little chance of a hit, but some chance is better than none. We've seen the data. We can expect between ten and fifteen of us to be destroyed before we reach firing range."
The mass of ships; Battleships, Battlecruisers, a handful of escorts; the deadliest, most capable members of the fleet, most of them of the sort that were supposedly able to go in alone and handle a fleet of more primitive vessels singlehandedly; over sixty were charging forward, all hoping not to be one of the unlucky ones to be taken out. If those six scouts had targeting like the rogue, they might take out nine tenths of the fleet before it closed to range; but even so...
Drakth blinked when the six scouts vanished. What were they doing? Why come in so close to.... Sensors started to light up. Thousands of signatures. Tens of thousands. Small, metal objects, traveling with ordinary speed alone... Missiles. Undoubtedly going to activate and start to accelerate when they arrived.
"...Run the numbers. How many can our point defense and counter-missiles handle, assuming no surprises?"
His tactical officer glanced up. "If they all come in at once, between four and five thousand. Anything more than twelve thousand is virtually a guarantee the entire fleet will be crippled. Over twenty, both us, and the gate, will be lost."
Drakth nodded. He would personally have pegged it lower than that, but perhaps point defenses were better than when he'd graduated. "Understood. And the number of incoming?"
"...Fifty thousand, sir. If they start to fire up engines so that all of them strike at once, we'll have fifty thousand coming in at... two minutes. The Gaze of Wrath will reach the range it has fired at in previous recordings twenty seconds after that."
"... This is Commander Drakth to Commodores Chack and Chorti. Advance ahead of the fleet, set engines to everything they can do, damn the safety protocols. Prepare to fire all weapons. And I do mean all. Death blossom."
His officers stared at him for a moment as the signal went out; but he didn't return their gaze at all, just staring at the screen. The Rogue's plan was perfect. Dumping half a dozen cargo ships full of missiles at once in a single wave of death... If he could crush Drakth with these missiles, and destroy the gate, the fleet would never arrive. Hopefully not -too- perfect; if he'd seen this coming...
***
"Sir. The Battlecruisers, all of them, are advancing ahead of the fleet. The Battleships, cruisers, escorts... all of the lighter, and slower ships have stayed in formation."
Eyeball studied the display. Doshet was actually in position in a secondary pilot seat; Eyeball's plan called for him to vacate the seat once the enemy fleet was cleared out between them and the gate, and the poor Jernal was fidgeting in place; it was hard to imagine, in the excitement of battle, that for him this was the equivalent of waiting long minutes between anything at all happening.
The Battlecruisers were fast assault capital ships; the heaviest solo operators in the Republic fleet, they had more guns than anything else; but not nearly the armor of a Battleship, instead focusing on speed and power. In a one-on-one battle, they were the most dangerous thing the Republic could throw at you; even if a Battleship could likely survive their fire long enough to take one down.
"Just... twelve Battlecruisers? Splitting his forces? What good will... Ahh."
He could see it before it happened; not that it would do much good. From each of those Battlecruisers, massed fire emerged. Missiles. Particle cannons... and the familiar sight of a Pulsewave cannon; only, unlike the relatively small one on the 8AD, these were full, capital-scale devices.
Thousands of ribbons of beautiful white light speared out in every direction; a few drifting back to strike the fleet defending the gate; a single Battleship going offline, an Escort detonating in a burst of fire. Some of them randomly penetrated among the Battlecruisers themselves; each of the ships unwittingly heavily damaging the ships alongside.
But the missiles...
A single one of those strange energy forms would lance through a dozen, a hundred missiles, setting off a massed chain of explosions. So many, so intense, that often other missiles were destroyed by the scattered debris.
In a single, beautiful moment that seemed more like an art presentation than an actual battle, the enemy vessels had wiped out over ninety percent of the missiles; and created a massed cloud of debris that would surely stop more. At the cost of... crippling all but one of the Battlecruisers. A single lucky vessel sped ahead of its companions, still firing its point defense weapons, spitting out its own missiles.
In the last moments before the swarm closed in, it managed a second shot.
Six seconds later, the ship was struck by over a dozen missiles simultaneously; as this second volley; only a single shot; still cleared out hundreds more of the missiles.
Eyeball shook his head slowly. Three destroyed enemy capitals, nine crippled; and far enough in advance of the fleet that he could clear them out before they could start to circle around him. They would never even know about the hundreds of drone fighters Ascension had laced in with those missiles; they had seemingly cleared all of them out with the first volley.
He looked at the readouts, the makeup of the enemy fleet, and projected their course. He could take out the first ten in the first fifteen seconds of the fight. Then his weapons would be overheating; he'd risk melting them down if he just kept firing til it was done. The safest approach... if it could be called safe... would be to just keep firing as they surrounded him, dodging fire and killing them as they closed.
There were... over forty left. Only a few hundred missiles; likely to all be intercepted at this stage. He could call for backup; Ascension's six warships would even the odds up nicely.
Then again... he felt fine about taking them on by himself. And if the enemy fleet saw his one ship sail in and crush forty of their best, before what he was going to do to that gate...
He smiled. "Drop acceleration by... seven percent. And aim our course.... here." He tapped a few keys. A projection showed a curving arc, up over the enemy's current location; granted, they were spreading out even now, but this would force them to make adjustments, draw out the time they were at range. He still had some missiles left, as well; he'd loaded on over forty thousand, and while the four thousand left couldn't overwhelm the enemy point defenses if they all stuck together, by the time they spread out...
He had this. Add in a few decoys to make the dodging easier during the forty seconds or so they'd have him in range before he finished the last one off, and he had this in the bag.
"I want... sixteen of the decoys toggled to mimic the Gaze. The rest, missile swarms as usual."
He glanced at the screens. Those crippled battlecruisers could barely maneuver, had no shields, and were stuck flying ahead of their companions. He dialed his controls, shifting them to only firing a single weapon-barrel at a time. No need for overkill right now; that would come when he was killing fully shielded battleships.
The first of the crippled battlecruisers went down at nine light-seconds away; a single shot directly through its main reactor. He cleared the others up in the coming seconds, before focusing on the fleet ahead; and rapidly moving to surround him. This promised to be fun.