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“Weapons free! Weapons free!” The Admiral screamed, even as several of our Fleet’s Cruisers were turned to plasma.
“Open fire! Evasive maneuvers now!”
The neatly ordered formations of The Admiral’s Warfleet broke into immediate chaos. A colossal cloud dancing and morphing in endless Brownian motion. Ships darting to and fro. No target ever at rest.
Even so, vast swaths of our Fleet were simply unmade as Torsion Beams cut relentlessly through the swarm. Ships by the dozens smeared across hundreds of LightCycles.
In turn we lit up the intervening space with our particle beams, the Void between the two forces rendered an incandescent glow, opaque to all but our sensors.
The screens on the bridge displayed the false-color images of our adversaries—and… something else.
“Admiral!” Captain Goolie shouted, even as he feathered The Vengeful Redeemer through the hail of laser fire and gravity beams. “We just received another encrypted relay! There’s… there’s ships! Not Hegemony, at least that what their transponders are saying!”
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“Do we have an I.D.?” The Admiral asked, her disciplined calm a strange contrast to the chaos of the moment.
“About 3 dozen ships, identifying themselves as Bronze and Opal Squadrons! And what looks to be 4 light cruisers!” The Captain responded. Then suddenly in a panic. “Admiral! They appear to be flanking us!! Should I commen—“
“—No, Captain!” Admiral Preyl snapped. “Do not engage! They are friendlies!” And then repeating the order on the comms. “Attention Fleet, do not engage secondary squadrons! They are friendlies!”
At this point, mere MicroCycles into the battle, almost a third of our fleet had been destroyed and we had barely touched the enemy.
Even if the firepower of The Hegemony ships hadn’t outclassed us, their vastly superior numbers would’ve caused major issue. But, as it were, they both outgunned and outnumbered us. The ships of our Fleet were more agile, but that still wasn’t enough to turn the tide. As nimble as we might be, dancing in stochastic jerks like that of the Ank’alk’kla fly, the sheer quantity of Hegemony ships was too much. Even the quickest pilot in the fastest craft is ultimately doomed when the opposition can simply englobe you by virtue of their nearly 20 to 1 ratio. It wasn’t a question of if we would lose this battle, it was merely a question of how long it would take.
The Redeemer was surrounded on all sides, The Hegemony Armada having devoted nearly one hundred ships to the task of eliminating the obvious flagship of the Admiral’s Fleet.
I saw the displays showing the web of Torsion beam aftershocks that we bobbed and weaved within. The ones that Goolie had so expertly managed to dodge thus far. I found myself wondering what it must be like for him in that moment, lost in a flow state. His natural aptitude, and years of rigorous training, landing him the most coveted position in the Navy, pilot of the Admiral’s flagship. I wondered how it felt to do, at the highest of levels, what one was born to do, and—if the present situation was any indication of anything—what one was born to die doing.
I read the change in his body language immediately as one the Torsion Beams cut through TheRedeemer’s reactor, disabling it. I saw the defeat on his face as the realization hit, we were dead in the water.
We were a ‘sitting duck’ as the Humans’ would say.
And—as I watched the dozens of bright icons popping up on the displays, warning of Hegemony Cruiser Gravity Cannons spooling up—I made mental note that we would very soon be a ‘reduced-to-constituent-atoms duck’.