The FGR fleet, if such a ramshackle and disparate group of various different ships with widely varied weapons loadouts could be called such a thing, dropped out of hyperspace on the edge of the El’gan Alpha system, just on the very farthest reaches of where the system’s singular star could force a planetoid to orbit it. The scouting ships that had preceded the ‘fleet’ had already begun to pull back in order to join up with the FGR forces and soon began transmitting the data they had gathered. This was a less comprehensive scouting mission than they had done in the weeks leading up to the attack, and thus the scouts only had data regarding what little defenses they could spot in such a short period of time.

According to both the initial and this secondary scouting mission, there were thousands of asteroid bases, each of which were lightly armed and seemed to mainly be geared towards mining and refining. This was understandable, the system was one of the few places in the galaxy where you could get a mineral worth exponentially more than its weight in gold, so of course there would be a great many mining bases and of course those bases would have some way of deterring would-be pirates.

The only cause for concern that the data brought up was that the asteroids floating through the massive belt that surrounded the star made the act of taking larger warships through such space a very risky endeavor. Even smaller warships had shields designed to take hits from asteroids, but they could only endure so much. In fact, they were mostly to take care of the incredible amounts of micro meteorites that made early space travel so dangerous. Even something as small as a grain of rice traveling at such ludicrous speeds could potentially destroy an unshielded and unarmored ship if the technology used in making it wasn’t up to snuff, so having shields was an absolute necessity.

This inconvenience would mean that they would have to take the longer, more indirect way to reach the larger of the mining base clusters, but at the very least this would obfuscate their movements and prevent their attack from being noticed until it was far too late for the evil Arcadians to do anything about it. Still, the fact that there was not a single warship in the system aside from their own (that they were aware of, at least) meant that they were the ones who had the superior firepower instead of the Arcadian bastards.

The Free Galaxy Resistance ships began to move out, completely unaware of the hell they were about to walk themselves into.

…

The first aim of the attack was to knock out the orbital gas-mining stations around the singular planet in the El’gan Alpha system, a large, Jupiter-sized gas giant called Z’ar Nou’l in the language of the race that previously occupied the area. Roughly translated, Z’ar Nou’l meant ‘waste dump’ as it was where the unusable materials from the system’s mining venture were dumped along with any industrial waste and the occasional person or persons who tried to start a union. The rest of the galaxy had viewed gas giants as useless, but it seemed that Arcadia had a use for the fumes and vapors that swirled around in the tempestuous atmosphere of the celestial object.

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Whatever they were using the gas they mined from the planet for, it was obviously something evil. And, by that logic, added to the fact that it was the target with the greatest visibility and the greatest potential for calling for help, the seven gas-mining stations had to be dealt with to slow the production of whatever nefarious substance the gasses were being used for. Probably drugs. Or nerve agents. Or drugs that doubled as nerve agents. The Arcadians were evil like that, and they certainly were using the stuff for something terrible and ethically wrong, so destroying the stations was a good thing to do and would deal a blow for justice and freedom everywhere.

The fleet comprised of almost three hundred ships of varying sizes, makes, models, types, classes, builds, loadouts and more was not stealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but that was not something you could tell their crews. To them, they were slowly and silently creeping up on the clustered stations, stations whose crews were none the wiser that their imminent and righteous doom was approaching.

Before the ship with the longest range could fire a shot, the seven stations began to descend into the gas giant’s atmosphere, slowly slipping out of view as they breached the cloud layer and vanished from sight and sensor alike.

“The fuck?”

This was the general question in everyone’s minds, but if they thought about what the stations were designed to do it would have made sense. Being an orbital station meant that gasses had to be shipped up to the station for them to be processed, but an orbital station that could descend into the clouds, gather materials on its own and then go back into orbit so that the gathered gasses could be more easily shipped made a lot of sense, if it could be done with minimal loss of productivity.

There was no telling when the stations would go back to orbit and there was no possible way for said stations to use hypercomms to call for help while inside the cloud layer, so the FGR fleet resigned itself to the knowledge that it would not be able to attack the obviously evil and totally unethical gas mining stations where they were absolutely sure something totally nefarious was going on.

Begrudgingly, they turned the fleet towards the asteroid belt and made ready to have their ‘warships’ navigate something that no warship would normally be capable of navigating. This was going to be a pain in the neck.

…

“Understood. We are preparing for them as we speak, and I must say, you guys made a good call. And don’t worry, they will learn in their last moments why you should not kick a Vespiwasp’s nest. Once they get too far in, then we’ll show them why forcing us to send troops away from the front lines to deal with these nuisances only makes us angrier, not more vulnerable.”