Into the Fire Pt.IV
It didn’t take long for the Kruhur ships to reorient themselves and warp after the fleeing Astaroth, but by the time they did the Astaroth already had a huge lead. They were dumping all the extra charge in the super capacitors into the warp emitters and were pushing the reactors to their limits. The whole ship was running on emergency mode, with only the most essential systems online, so that they could pump a little more power into the warp emitters. Giving it all they had they were able to just barely hit 7.03 kilo-lights which was more than enough to give them a massive growing lead on the tailing Kruhur, especially the cruisers.
For a while it looked like they might make a clean break for it, but after a few minutes several Kruhur destroyers began to slowly inch forward faster and faster. They had coaxed enough power out of their ships to achieve a speed of 7.3 and were now closing in on the Astaroth. Astarte watched with growing concern as their enemies continued to slowly close the gap and gritted her teeth. “Prepare javelin missiles and the grav-spike, we going to drop them out of warp and hit them before their shields can kick in. I want two missiles for every ship.”
A gunnery officer turned to her “Sir, we’re already low on missiles, we don’t have enough to hit all seven targets with two missiles each.”
Astarte cursed internally and pulled up the ship’s munitions log to get a better idea of what they had to work with “Then fire one javelin with three bodkins, even if they take out the javelins we might be able to do enough damage with the bodkins to knock them out of the fight.”
“Aye, aye sir” The gunnery officer said with a salute as he turned back to his station.
The distance between them continued to close, and before the enemy had a chance to react the Astaroth dropped out of warp and initiated its grav-spike, creating a field of distorted space to drop the pursuing ships out of warp. They kept the range of distortion short so that the enemy wouldn’t have time to react or respond to their ambush. Seven enemy destroyers were shunted out of warp, and were temporarily confused by the sudden return to relativistic speeds. They gave the enemy little time to react as seven javelins and twenty-one bodkin missiles launched out of the Astaroth’s missile launchers. They even activated the remaining the signal jammers and particle emitters to blind the Kruhur destroyers.
Enemy missile defense systems filled the space with short bursts of pulse fire, but were incapable of firing quick enough to effectively handle the oncoming barrage. Pulse fire was great for reliably hitting and depleting enemy shields, but they had an abysmal right of fire and just couldn’t fill an area of space with anti-missile fire quite like a railgun could. Of the seven launched javelins only six hit their targets, they struck the destroyers right in the midships and caused catastrophic damage. The remaining destroyer had shot down the javelin coming its way, but missed the bodkins which struck at its engines, antenna, and bridge.
Of the seven ships only two appeared to be well and truly destroyed, with the five remaining ships appearing to have received heavy damage. They were about to disengage the grav-spike and continue fleeing when a hostile disturbance field overlapped their own and prevented them from escaping. The well-trained crew of the Astaroth quickly identified the source of the disturbance field and focused the foremost cannons on them and quickly turned the offending ship into a floating pile of molten slag. With the enemy grav-spike taken care of they once again attempted to flee the battle space, but not before a single missile fired by the now destroyed ship hit them just aft of their rear cannons. The lights within the ship brightened momentarily as the aft cannons exploded and a back surge of electricity hit their systems.
Despite the catastrophic explosion, the ship was still able to warp out just before several other Kruhur ships arrived. But that wasn’t the end off their troubles, a mixture of the electrical surge from the destroyed cannons and the ship pushing its warp emitters to their fullest culminated in their HV-superconductive wiring on deck three busting into flames. Causing a section of the ship to go dark, and their FTL speeds to drop significantly.
The fire alarm triggered, and automatic bulk heads immediately sealed themselves, trapping the fire, and several poor crewmen, in a room rapidly depleted of the oxygen both needed to survive. But the damage was already done, and several nearby sections also reported fires. Astarte worked as fast as she could to disable the automatic bulkheads to allow the nearby crew either a chance at fighting the fire or escaping into an unaffected section.
“Get me engineering!” Astarte growled.
Within seconds of her order she heard Heizer over a staticky com link. He coughed several times before asking “What?”
“I need a damage report.”
There was a pause for some more hacking, “not good. I think we lost the whole goddamned cable. I can get life support deck online for the whole deck, but that’s it. Portside shield emitters are fucked, and we’ve definitely lost a few warp emitters.”
“What can we do to fix this?” she asked, though she knew from his tone that there wasn’t much hope.
“Not much. Don’t have enough time to replace the cable since its buried pretty deep. I think we might be able to tap into some nearby transformers and jerry-rig some sort of power to the shields, but getting us back to full speed is impossible.”
“Sir” Kat called from the helm “At our current speed the faster Kruhur ships will catch up to us in no time. And I don’t think we can manage the same trick twice with our depleted ammo.”
Fuck, Astarte glanced around the bridge, all eyes focused on her, expecting her to find a solution to this catastrophic failure. But their wasn’t much she could do; she was just one women on a ship that was on its final legs. The best she could do right now was find them a good place to die. “Long range scanners to full, what are our options.”
The front monitor was replaced with a three-dimensional map of all the nearby star systems and miscellaneous contacts. Astarte scanned the nearby space to try and find anything that could possibly save her ship and crew. Something in the upper left hand side of the screen caught her attention, a shallow warp signature near where they had been initially ambushed.
“Focus on that contact, what is that?” she ordered and bridge techs focused their remaining scanners on that area.
“We’re getting a couple sporadic warp signatures, hard to tell this far out.” Kat reported.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
“More Kruhur” Karega mused grimly.
“No” Astarte said as a grin replaced her frown, “They knew where we were, why leave ships out in the middle of space. No, this is someone else” she said as she began to see a glimmer of hope.
~~~*~~~
Fleet leader Tharadun was very perplexed by what his scouts were reporting. They had received a report from deep space scanning stations that there had been several fission explosions detonated in this area. His fleet had only recently pulled out of the Caladon front and had been reassigned for defending the Femeri sector, and this was an ominous way to begin the first days of his patrol. The reports of growing piracy from this sector had been worrying the central council of species, and the news of a Kruhur outpost being disposed of had earned Femeri the attention of several powerful council members.
They had arrived and only just begun to scan the area, but just their initial scans eluded to something very climatic occurring here. They found wreckage from several different vessels that had been annihilated by a massive nuclear explosion that could only be the self-detonation of a desperate ship. A further search had proved fruitful in finding several vessels destroyed by conventional pulse fire, and the vessels in question were all Voidling in make and origin.
This meant that there might be a second Kruhur outpost in Femeri, and they were now brazen enough to begin openly raiding ships. On one hoof he was pleased that his deployment to this backwater sector wouldn’t prove as boring as he had first worried, on another this meant that his already war weary fleet had to mobilize once again to deal with this threat. The Kruhur had always been a threat, since the very inception on the Grand Galactic Union they had proven themselves to be a scourge like none other. Tharadun had always criticized the Union’s choice not to engage the voidlings in the dark places between sectors, it was unwise to let a menace like them grow into a real threat.
“Fleet leader” a Cék’ek bridge technician called. “We’re receiving an incoming vessel on the long-range scanners, it’s not responding to our hails.”
Tharadun set down his Uq’ot, the brew his people had gifted the galaxy with, and knuckled his way across the bridge over to the scanners “It’s moving pretty fast” he remarked.
“Yes, but its warp signature appears to be very irregular, I think its damaged.” The tech reported while pointing to a set of readings Tharadun didn’t have the faintest clue about
He stood to his full height, despite the strain it put on his back muscles, and commanded the attention of the entire bridge. “Prepare a grav-spike, ready weapons and boarding crews for the moment we net them out of warp, I want to capture this ship and interrogate its captain.”
His crew, though they from many different species and cultures, obeyed him without a moment of hesitation. They executed their jobs with quiet practiced professionalism, and he felt a swell of pride at the sight. Most Union fleets were horribly inefficient and undisciplined, some of this could be blamed on the fleet leaders, but a majority of the problem laid within the multi-cultural/muti-species nature of the Union. With so many different minds sets and attitudes to adjust to and accommodate for it became almost impossible to properly discipline anyone. But Tharadun had scoffed at the challenge and had spent decades beating his fleet into order, there was still much work to do but for now they were the most disciplined fleet in the entire Union Space Defense Force.
Ships turned their massive bulk to face the oncoming vessel and moved about to form a concave arc around where they would exit to cut off any escape. The rogue vessel didn’t slow down one bit as it approached, even as they surely must have noticed his fleets presence. They waited calmly as it closed the last few lightyears and was suddenly dropped back into relativistic speeds and got their first look at the vessel. Tharadun’s first impression was the strange shape of the vessel, most ship designers opted for a symmetrical body so that the center of gravity would be close to the ship’s center. But this vessel was only symmetrical along its vertical axis, the top and bottom were two totally different shapes. The second thing that struck him was how far off its mass differed from other ships of similar size, if his readings were correct then this vessel was far denser than should have been. And despite its great mass it was incredibly fast and nimble. From the moment it was hit by the distortion field and entered relativistic speeds it had only needed a few micro seconds to readjust itself and put on speed.
The third thing, and probably the thing he should have focused in on first, were its weapons. Two triple mounted pulse cannons fixed themselves on his ship and fired blasts as powerful as a standard Union Battleship! “Shields up-” he began to roar, but was too late. In order to conserve fuel they had been running their shields at their minimum setting, until right now they hadn’t believed that they would need to raise their shields to their power.
The shields lasted for less than a second before breaking and allowing the full power of those cannons to hit his ship. Had the Iron Tree been one of the newer type 9 battleships that shot would have caused critical damage. He had been very vocal about criticizing the thinner armor on the new Battleships, but the councilors who were looking to cut the costs at all costs hadn’t listened to him. When offered the chance to swap out his type 8 with a type 9 he had chosen to keep his older vessel, and that choice may have just saved them. “Damage report!”
“FTL communications are offline, along with deep space tracking and the Iron Tree’s grav-spike.”
He cursed inwardly; those were all critical systems that had to be mounted outside the main hull. They weren’t as heavily armored as the main hull which meant that an attack that powerful likely melted the whole unit. “All weapons focus on that ship, I wanted it disabled and captured!” he ordered.
The strange ship didn’t give them time to react after their first shot, instead they poured power into their sublight engines and charged directly at the Iron Tree. Their targeting equipment had trouble aiming at them with the primary sensors so heavily damaged, and the local sensors on the gun platforms had been hit with some sort of jamming wave. The other ships of Tharadun’s fleet focused their primary weapons on the ship, but they didn’t have the fire power to properly challenge the enemy’s shields.
The cruisers he had stationed at the ends of the formation began to close ranks and wrapped around the enemy’s rear, closing the jaws of the trap Tharadun had set. But while this move trapped the enemy within, it also put them out of effective weapons range, meaning he couldn’t use their stronger weapons to focus in on the little ship. But they were steadily pressing forward, and would soon be able to fire on the little ship from behind them.
The small ship took on all the oncoming fire and continued to charge forward, gaining more and more momentum. Tharadun had expected them to take some sort of evasive maneuvers, or to fire upon some of the weaker ships in his fleet. He expected them to panic or try and turn back, but they did none of that. He watched with curiosity as it continued to surge forward, it had come within a few kilometers of the Iron Tree when he realized what they were trying to do. Just as several missed shots from the cruisers streaked past the little ship and hit the Iron Tree’s shields. The combined fire from all his cruisers pushed his shield to their limits, they didn’t have a chance to recover as the little ship once again fired six beams of pulse fire at his ship. The shield collapsed before them, and the Iron Tree came under fire from their own forces.
The ship shook as all the attacks meant for the small ship missed their target and struck his ship instead. He wanted to order a cease fire, but as the bright blasts of pulse fire cleared he realized that the little ship hadn’t pulled out of its suicidal charge and was aiming its knife-like front right at his command bridge. “Evasive maneuvers!” he roared as the sight of the ship grew larger and larger in his forward window and he no longer thought of it as a ‘little ship’.
All his instincts demanded that he shut his eyes in the face of his coming death, but he overcame his primordial fear and faced his death head on. He watched with open eyes as the dented knife-like front filled the entire window of his bridge, and because he had kept his eyes open he was able to watch with astonishment as the vessel pulled out of its death charge at the last possible minute and streaked past only millimeters away from the hardened glass. And because he kept his eyes open he was able to get a brief glimpse of strange black lettering on the ship’s side. He didn’t know what the strange letters meant, but their foreign shapes were permanently burned into his retinas, and he knew that if he ever saw them again he would know.
There was no wind or drag to shake the ship as the grey ship roared past them, but Tharadun still fell to his rear, completely shocked to find that he was still alive. According to the screen displaying sensor feed the grey ship had continued to skim just above his ship’s hull, dangerously close to scarping the paint, but never actually touching. It passed by weapon systems that couldn’t turn fats enough to fire on it, and crossed over the rear thruster bank before it righted itself continued forward until it had broken free of the lesser remaining distortion fields and went to warp.
He couldn’t believe what his eyes had just seen, only moments after arriving within the battle space the captain of the grey hulled ship had taken out their long-range communications and deep space tracking, had turned their own gun fire against them, and had escaped like it was nothing. Not only had the captain outwitted a veteran fleet leader like Tharadun, but they had also done it with a ship that shouldn’t have been a match for his 8km long battleship. He stood up and watched as the grey ship left their short-range sensors, he had been about to order a few lane runners to turn about and give chase when he saw several new unknown contacts enter the vicinity.
Seven Kruhur cruisers and just short of fifty destroyers emerged into the local space and opened fire on his fleet. Tharadun then knew why the grey ship had been desperately charging right at them, they were being chased by the largest single grouping of Kruhur Tharadun had ever seen, and they had dumped them right onto Tharadun’s lap so that they could make a clean getaway. He knew that chasing them down would have to wait for another day, right now he had to reorganize his fleet and handle the greater threat before him. But that didn’t mean that he would forget about that tenacious grey hulled ship, nor forget what its callous captain had done.