Battle for the Confederacy Pt.I
An electric current of fear and tension pulsed through the crowd as they processed what the King had just said. Aster of course wasn’t surprised by the revelation; she had been the one to give it to X’thar after all. Kazlum had leaked the location of the Capital station to the Kruhur four times, the plan had been for them to slay the King, kill the councilors that were aligned against Kazlum, and leave everything in a state of chaos so that Kazlum could take over the Confederacy. But each time the defense satellites had been mysteriously tipped off, and were prepared to face the Kruhur menace.
It was all neatly laid out in the folder Domnall had given her, matched with a detailed set of instructions on how she could find all this information on her own. There was the chance that Domnall had planted the information for when she did her own investigation, but the chances of that going unnoticed were slim. She had passed on the evidence against Kazlum to the King who did his own investigation.
The ship’s lawyers had all been very disappointed when Astarte told them that the trial would likely be cancelled and replaced with a criminal hearing for Kazlum. They had all worked so hard to find every loophole and advantageous legal precedent in the thousand-year history of the Confederacy. But this was the best chance the King had of getting Kazlum within a sealed room to stand trial before the council of nine.
Loud squeaks and groans came from the ancient mechanisms of the courtroom’s titanium vault doors as they sealed everyone within the courtroom. There was a loud KERTHLUNK as two gimbaled plasma turrets emerged from their hidden compartments in the ceiling and aimed themselves at Kazlum and his four massive lackeys.
“What is the meaning of this?” Kazlum rasped, the tentacles under his head going into an enraged frenzy.
X’thar for his part didn’t look the least bit cowed by Kazlum’s wrath. “It has been brought to my attention that you have leaked our location to the Kruhur in an attempt to have me assassinated.” He bellowed imperiously; the acoustics of the chamber were perfectly arranged to amplify X’thar’s voice to every corner of the room. Holographic video displays appeared before each council man displaying the evidence of Kazlum’s betrayal. Hidden projectors also displayed the evidence before all the assembled pirates in the courtroom as well.
This was the way of the confederacy, the grand chancellor had almost unlimited power, but if he ever abused that power in ‘unjust’ ways then the assembled pirate crews of the confederacy could just simply leave and ignore him. They only paid a small tithe and a pittance of loyalty to the king because it was convenient. So if a king wanted to eliminate his enemies then he would need to stir his followers into a frenzy and quickly execute the guilty party.
Kazlum glared at the evidence assembled before him with unblinking black beady eyes and glanced away to stare at Astarte “I take it that this was you’re doing.”
She allowed herself a small confident smirk. “I said nothing less than your complete destruction would satisfy me.”
“I see, using this fool of a king to do your dirty work, it seems I have underestimated you. Too bad it’s too late for you” he said ominously as the station shuddered from several heavy impacts. The lights switched to a blaring red and a siren began its harsh wail, all signals saying the station was under attack.
Aster then realized that just as she had used this trial to lure Kazlum out of his fortress within the Igrathoth, he too had used this trial to lure out his enemies. All the council men, Astarte, and even the king himself gathered in one spot. All the obstacles in between Kazlum and the throne in one place.
Astarte’s head jerked upwards as she noticed the plasma cannons swiveling to face her and her crew. “Guns up!” she roared as the barrels began to line up for their first shot.
Thirty odd anti-material gauss rifles snapped upwards and filled the air-filled high velocity DU slugs that shredded the threat from above. At the same time they were all distracted with the plasma cannons the Egh’ahds on their left drew weapons and began to fire on them, the Marines who had been cautiously eyeing the Egh’ahds the whole time lifted their left arms and activated the semi-transparent shields to absorb the blows and offer cover for their return fire. The Egh’ahds cared little for the bystanders in between them and their quarry, and they shot through anyone who got in their way.
Astarte heard a roar, and she spared a brief glance to the chaos happening below her. Kazlum had leapt onto king’s mighty balcony, but was currently stalled by the army of guards working to delay the massive monster while they withdrew the king to safety. Two of the other lackies had leapt forward to deal with the other councilmen who weren’t completely within Kazlum’s control. She watched as one of the Aunviry lifted the leader of the Wrethren Terrors into its mouth before she had to turn her attention to the other two Aunviry who were charging right at her.
“Contact, two big fucker coming at us” she roared. She bought her gun level with the leading one’s chest and pulled the trigger; several rounds peppered its chest, but it didn’t slow down in the slightest. Aunviry were creatures made for modern warfare and combat, their moistened skin could somehow tank the intense heat of plasma bursts. Their skin was like Kevlar and ignored bullets under a certain caliber, and any that made it past there tough hides was stripped of their tissue shredding power by the steel cord like musculature they were made from. Aster and her marines had chosen the largest gun that could possibly take on the Aunviry, but they still lacked the power needed to bring one of the giants down.
Aster dropped her gun and let it rest on its strap as she drew Tenken and rushed forward. The viewing galleries were about five or so meters off the ground already, matched with her enhanced Hellworlder muscles, lower gravity, and small EM thrusters in her boots, and Aster had everything she needed to launch herself above the approaching Aunviry for a reckless overhead chop. Tenken hacked through the creatures head and drove straight into it the soft mushy brain within. Astarte wedged the blade deeper and twisted it to deal the final blow to the monster beneath her. It didn’t even have the time to cry out in pain before it died. Its legs stumbled as they no longer received any signal from its brain, and its forward momentum threw it toward the ground face first.
Aster gripped Tenken with all her strength as the Aunviry fell like goliath. She felt a hard jolt in her knees as it hit the ground, but it wasn’t as bad it would have if she hadn’t used the Aunviry to crushed her fall. She wasted no time in withdrawing Tenken from its skull and rushed towards the second Aunviry. The cacophonous roar of gun shots filled the room as hardened tungsten shells pounded into its chest trying to eliminate some vital organ that would kill the 7-meter monster before them, but nothing seemed to slow it down.
To try and buy her men more time Aster rushed forward and sliced at the bulging tendon on the back of its foot. Astarte knew that the Aunviry likely didn’t have an Achilles tendon, but any tendon that big had to be important. Her blade swung through the air and passed through the tendon with ease, an arc of red gore following in its wake. The charging Aunviry roared as it fell to one knee, it turned to glare at her with its baleful eyes as a black shadow leapt from the rafters and drove the gleaming metal of its blade right in between its eyes. Aster watched the life left the monsters eyes as Gato rode the falling titan down to the ground letting out a fierce roar in triumph.
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“That was reckless” Astarte said as she wiped the red blood splatter off her face. The rest of her body was completely coated it thick red blood, but she didn’t have the time to clean it off.
Gato grinned with wild abandon “Just following your lead”
~~~*~~~
Karega had been left behind to command the Astaroth when everything went down. He was competent in a close quarters fight, but nowhere near Star’s level when it came to the delicate art of butchering her enemies. It wasn’t a mark against him, Karega had plenty of other skills and talents that were invaluable to the Hellworlder fleet. Like his calm and level head, and his keen observation of the battlefield. Skills that that he was using to their fullest potential as he witnessed the mayhem occurring within the space around the capital station.
The other captains only had just enough time to rush towards their command chairs as the first blasts tore into the station. Mooring clamps released the ships and Deck apes hacked off the thick fiber mooring lines. The hanger filled with the roar of sub-luminal engines spooling up, and Karega felt the gentle reassuring hum of the ships reactors kicking into high gear. He knew that the rumble that filled the ship was really just the coolant rushing through heat dissipators and not the rhythmic thumping of pistons, and that an ideal reactor system would make hardly any sound at all. But there something satisfying about hearing the roar of powerful engines that pleased the primitive parts of his monkey brain.
Lucifer was the first to slip through the blue atmospheric retention field, and as if they were lying in wait enemy fire lit up her bow in a red fiery explosion. But there was a reason they had called her Lucifer the undaunted. Without slowing down or shaking from the force of the blasts pounding into her bow, Lucifer pushed through the blue field and lifted all nine of her mighty pulse cannons for a retaliatory shot. Sensor feed from the Lucifer was fed to Beelzebub’s CIC and transmitted back out to the other ships in the span of only a nanosecond, allowing Karega to see near real time imagery of five Kruhur destroyers being vaporized.
Wasting no time, Lucifer activated her shields just as Astaroth and Beelzebub poked their bows through the atmosphere retention field. Kruhur pulse fire bounced harmlessly off of Lucifer’s mighty shields, which were only strengthened when the other two archdevil class battlecruisers added their own shields to the formation.
Yottabytes of analyzed combat data were steadily fed to Astaroth’s targeting computers as the CIC crunched the raw sensor data. Hundreds of ships were marked red, green, and blue, as the Beelzebub’s CIC made sense of the chaos around them. Thousands of other objects were then marked as debris from other ships that had been broken apart by Kruhur fire. Their paths and collisions were tracked and fed into the maneuvering computers to allow the helms crew to plot safe courses through the hazardous detritus.
Only seconds after Beelzebub began analyzing the space around the capital station Karega was given a brief summary of what likely occurred while they were sensor blind within the hanger. Thousands of smaller Kruhur gunboats had torn through the constant stream of commercial vessels, creating the expansive field of debris that tore through the other remaining vessel. While four distinctive fleets of Kruhur vessels began their assault on the capital, the fleet that had tried to break the Lucifer was given the identification of Kruhur Alpha, or K-A. The other fleets were randomly assigned the designations of K-B, K-C, and K-D, while the smaller swarms of gunboats were simply designated as GB-1, GB-2, GB-3, and so on until GB-2345.
An encrypted communication appeared on his command HUD “Attack plan Indigo, fleet 2 is to engage with K-B”
“Attack plan indigo!” Karega called to the rest of the bridge “Helm, chart an intercept with Kilo-Bravo, weapons crew reserve rail gun emplacements only for Gunboat targets and incoming missiles. Save our big guns for Kilo-Bravo.” he ordered calmly to his well-oiled bridge crew.
They had many different contingency plans for a wide array of combat situations. Attack plan Indigo indicated that Astaroth and Asmodeus were to break off from the main fleet with a small contingent of destroyers and drone frigates, with Astaroth taking the leading the charge. He personally didn’t like the idea of moving far from Beelzebub’s CIC, but so long as the enemy didn’t employ widespread wake-com jammers then there shouldn’t be any delay in the combat data.
The second fleet tore through any unshielded GB that strayed within their weapons range and left only an expanding sphere of warped metal and slag as they charged towards the fleet marked as K-B. As they soared forwards the enemy obviously noticed their approach as they broke off their bombardment of the capitals shields and began to angle towards the Hellworlders. Swarms of gunboats broke off their original attack vectors and began to mob the second fleet, overloading the max fire rate of their railguns.
Astaroth turned until the enemy fleet was off her starboard bow and all her pulse cannons had a firing solution, the rest of the fleet followed as well. Just before they lobed their first volley, hatches along the ventral bow slid open and large black particle emitters began their silent assault. The particle emitters blasted the enemy sensors with so much noise that they effectively created a signal blackout, rendering enemy blind to the attack coming their way. Three concentrated blasts pounded into the three light-cruisers who were leading the enemy fleet and lit the black void in a magnificent explosion that would have blinded Karega if he had been looking at it with the naked eye.
There was a short collective cheer as Kat report three confirmed kills. Their revery was short though, as the sensors began to detect the approach of several Aunviry ships coming to aid K-B. The veteran bridge crew saw the Aunviry reinforcements aft of the fleet, they noted the new enemies and rearranged the fleet accordingly.
Karega watched the practiced actions of his crew and settled into his chair for the long battle ahead of him.
~~~*~~~
Alice, and the rest of Temperance squad watched the spectacular explosions all around them from the exterior of the station. They couldn’t perch directly on the Igrathoth like she would have liked since the Aunviry had posted actual patrols along the freighter turned battleship’s exterior, who the hell did that anyway? There was almost never going to be a manned assault on a ships exterior, and posting people to stand around in spacesuits holding guns just in case it ever happened seemed stupid to her.
They were technically preventing her from sabotaging the ships mooring clamps, so she guessed it wasn’t so useless. But as soon as the battle began outside the guards had all rushed to the exterior hatches to avoid being thrown off the disembarking vessel, which gave her and her squad all the time they needed to EVA across the capitals hull and disable the mooring clamps release functions. Locking the saucer like Igrathoth to the capital where Charity squad had brought plasma cutters to break into the Igrathoth.
As soon as the crew within realized that someone had sabotaged their docking clamps, those same guards from before began poking their heads out of the hatches. Which made it really easy to pick them off.
Of course they couldn’t shoot every exit across the whole expanse of the massive 2.6-kilometer-wide flying saucer, and small squads began to assemble behind the one of the ridges that divided the ship into seven wedges. But they took so long to assemble that Temperance squad, and Lucifer’s own Loki squad, had more than enough time to erect some cover.
Kate signaled to Alice that her work was done, and only an industrial grade plasma cutter could undo what she had just done. That meant half of her job was now complete, and they could now fully focus on defending her handy work. They would need to hold this position until the boarding parties had fully cleared the Igrathoth, and hope to all the saints that no one ordered an air strike on their exposed position.
~~~*~~~
Kazlum ripped apart the last inferior pest blocking his way and wedged his three clawed fingers into the heavy doors before they could fully close. He pulled with all the power his perfectly crafted muscles could until the mechanism that was resisting him snaped with a loud metallic clatter. He pulled even harder until the doors were wide enough for him to just barely squeeze through, and he charged down the halls that were just barely tall enough for him to run through with his head ducked.
Everything was going according to plan, for the most part at least. He hadn’t been expecting the little Hellworlder girl to expose all his plans so effortlessly, he had thought he buried his illicit deals deep enough. And she had only been on this station for a very short time, not long enough for an investigation to bear fruit. Someone else had given her that information, someone who had been watching Kazlum very closely. When he was king he would have to uncover the fool and make an example out of them and their whole home world.
He had been hoping to snare Astarte’s loyalty before the trial, she would have been a great asset to his new empire. He had studied the history of the first Aunviry warlords and had learned from their mistakes, he would not rely on fickle armies of his own people who would always be searching for a chance to usurp him. Instead he would raise a slave army of Terrans to begin his conquest.
So far all his experiments with human slaves had failed, they had either broken so completely that they lost the will to live, or had resisted him to the bitter end. He had learned that any human who was strong enough to serve him, were also incredibly spiteful and would endure the torture while cursing his name the whole time. The ones he thought were properly broken had only been quietly biding their time until they found a chance to stab him in the back. Of course they were so small that they could only ever reach as far as his ankle.
But now he had a new idea, he would instead offer them little rewards for good service rather than just threatening them with pain and death. He had heard how cruel and greedy humans were and he planned to let them sate their basic violent instincts under his thrall. Astarte was the greediest and cruelest one he had found so far, so he had ordered his two sons Ograx and Ithix to capture her alive while he dealt with the fool king.
He entered the massive throne room were the king’s private guard had set up an ambush with plasma cannons and gauss turrets. Kazlum glared at the army before him and was pleased. These puny creatures were the only thing that stood between him and his empire.