Chapter One Hundred and Four - Battle
“To all Accord-affiliated ships within the Sol system,” Day said.
She didn’t just ‘say’ it, of course. She transmitted it in the Accord common language, her voice sounding exactly like a higher-ranking officer, down to the regional accent. The kind of voice that, if the Accord society was anything like a human one, would command immediate respect and maybe fear.
“You are to immediately evacuate your vessel. Set life shuttle coordinates to the following for immediate collection. Do not bring weapons. Do not resist. Do not transmit on any open frequency.”
She doubted those instructions would be followed, but it was better than nothing.
The transmission was aimed at two of the FTL ships, the two civilian vessels.
A hard scan, fired off by Candle as she came closer, gave them a decent idea of the two ship’s disposition, and it wasn’t looking all that great.
Several torpedo impacts, dozens of missile strikes, and Lullaby’s little kick, had left both ships in a sorry state.
Still, entire decks were still completely intact. The damage was staggering, but the mass and sheer bulk of Accord FTL ships meant that even that wasn’t enough to completely obliterate the vessels.
The civilian ships had point-defence platforms that had come online mere seconds before the first missile struck, and while they weren’t terribly impressive, they had still wiped out nearly a quarter of the missiles.
Day gesture to a kettle on Twilight’s other side. “Can you pass me that?” she asked.
Twilight absently grabbed the kettle and handed it over. “Here. Starting particle cannon fire, by the way. We’ll hit their point-defence on the way by, but it’ll give away our position.”
“I’d rather take that risk than get hit from behind,” Day said.
The four of them were flying in a fairly tight formation, all of them primed to fire as soon as the range cut down. And it did.
Candle was the first to open up, her larger guns leaving faint scars across space as she fired. She had two heavy turrets that fired ballistic rounds, and those took quite a bit longer to hit than her particle cannons.
Lullaby was next, and she fired her own guns, though they were nowhere near as impressive.
Day and Twilight came into range next, and with all four of them sharing a tactical net, it wasn’t hard to have rounds rip into and through the point defence turrets of the civilian ships long before they could do anything about it.
Candle’s bigger round rammed into communication systems and detonated, leaving short lived balls of roiling fire to spread across the side of the FTL ships.
Then they were past both ships, leaving them appropriately neutered.
That left their final target.
The military FTL ship wasn’t the largest of their targets, and it had had exactly as many weapons pointed at it as the others, but it was noticeably less damaged.
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The ship’s point defence network boasted three times as many laser arrays as the civilian ships, and it had a number of spine and belly-mounted turrets. Nothing much bigger than the kind of particle cannon that an Accord destroyer would carry, and overall, the FTL ship had less armaments than an Accord cruiser, but it was still armed even if it was clear that the ship was never meant to be in the line of fire.
Only a few of the missiles they’d fired at it had struck, and while the Casaba-Howitzers had all gone off, the ship had fired up its thrusters and juked to the side, avoiding two strikes while taking the others right against the hull.
Essentially, the ship had come out of it with a bloody nose, but nothing worse.
They were going to remedy that.
“What’s the tea taste like?” Twilight asked.
“It’s not bad,” Day said as she blew across her cup. “Do you want to try?” She handed the cup to Twilight who sniffed it, then took a sip.
“Hot,” she said. “And a bit bitter.”
“Maybe you’d like it more with honey?” Day asked.
At the same time, Day’s six torpedo tubes opened up. Her sister’s did the same. Two from Lullaby, eight on Twilight’s hull, twelve on Candle’s.
At once, they fired, twenty-eight three-metre-long torpedoes launching out of their ships, spinning around to counter thrust, then roaring off towards the military FTL in a wide spread.
Candle’s big guns fired, again and again, and soon they entered ‘short’ engagement range with their particle cannons. The rage where dodging became nearly impossible.
The FTL ship didn’t take it so easily. Dozens of missiles launched from small, well-hidden tubes along its sides a split second before those same areas became the next target, and the ship’s own particle cannons swivelled around to take aim at the four of them.
Day winced as a round rammed into her hull, then bounced off at a slight angle.
“Decoys are coming on,” Twilight said.
A lot of the fire from the FTL ship was going off into the void, aiming at ghosts. But even if they were picking targets at random, they only had so many decoys.
“Knife-fighting range in two minutes,” Candle said. Her avatar shivered, and Day knew that she’d just been struck. Her bulk was ahead of them, attracting the most attention and eating the most hits.
But she gave back tenfold. Every second that passed meant another dozen strikes, and the FTL ship only had so many guns to lose.
They’d had time to map most of the ship out, and every round they fired had an objective. The return fire was practically blind, hoping to hit something critical even as all four of them spun and twisted and ran through pre-planned evasive manoeuvres.
They might have been fighting a giant, but they’d come prepared.
Then both sides were in each other’s point-defence range, where laser bloom was no longer an issue and where even their projectile-based point defence guns could start dealing damage.
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