Endeavour twisted in space, a flurry of white-hot steel needles punching a hole through where the destroyer would have been with a less adept helm. Her turrets spat back, red fire, needles of its own and a dozen other strange projectiles, and her sisters rolled carefully around to follow in her wake. "Hold steady," her captain muttered, "Almost there."
A gigantic Theophanic battleship floated, smug and serene, far ahead of them. Its turrets flashed twinkling like stars against the ponderous mass of its hull, and the line of ships twisted like a snake; two rounds clipped the dorsal port engine of the Endeavour, and she heaved to out of line.
Earlier (hours, days, who knows)
Is that a… monocle? Just a monocle? No half-glasses thing or weird hologram arrangement? How odd, wondered Anzu, half a sweet potato chip in her mouth. A staticky clearing of throat made her refocus abruptly, and she leaned back in her seat on the bridge of the Jotaro Kujo. She glanced over at Momo, who hadn’t noticed the monocle. There would have been words otherwise. “Ah, sure, yeah. That’s right. We’ll run a couple of scenarios with you guys and then the last engagement will be, what’s the word… free-form. If you lot are okay with that, of course.”
Thin lips pursed over the crackly screen. Of course there were other options for display, from the classic giant hologram to the high-definition front viewscreen, but Anzu happened to like small low-resolution screens with a bit of noise…
Finally, the woman on the other end of the line answered. “That is acceptable, Captain. Are you quite certain you have no other higher ranking representative I may speak to?”
“Nope,” was the cheerful response, “Rei’s busy, and I only take orders from her in combat.”
Nostrils flared and a deep breath was taken, but Vice-Admiral Countess Mathilde Coutrois de Greystoke Verte soi Hapax managed a gracious enough nod before closing the connection. Anzu waved a mock half-salute in the general direction of the Theophanic flotilla somewhere in the system, and turned around the chair to face their crew, all curious and not trying to hide it. “What?”
“Well?”
“It’s on. Call Uzumaki and tell ‘em we’re in for a bit of fun.”
Time passed, but not that much of it.
Space revolted and unnamable colors spun as the Magnatrabes Koshmar lifted ponderously into realspace from the null. Alongside it came the Neokastro Hamilcar and Neokastro Halcax, staying in its shadow.
A great, vibrantly green gas giant was behind them, and before them stretched a stony cloud. As the nullspace tear closed with a thunderclap, the Theophanic craft began reaching out with their sensors, pushing through the spectral turbulence caused by their translation with ease.
Mathilde sat back upon her command throne and lifted her chin. “Navigation. Set forth the waypoints. Steersman, forward quarter speed until the gravitational waves clear, then half speed.”
Her Protos stood up from the planning dais below and shouted, “We do not see them just yet, but we have surveys ongoing on all vectors. Boundary markers are showing up, and there’s a thousand or so observers. Shall we deploy proskopous?”
“Proceed. Stand to Beta alert, all ships. Prepare for action.”
Tall hatches at the sides of Hamilcar and Halcax slid back into the thick armour, and twin-winged craft emerged from within like infants from the womb, tiny against the great masses of the Theophanic ships. Smoke or steam hissed, and they launched forth, arcing against the stars to fly into the asteroids.
-
“All weapons report cleared for action. Main, secondary and tertiary shielding systems are enabled. No anomalies detected within the exercise area.” Anzu listened with half an ear as Momo read out the reports; she already knew the Kujo was ready for action. With a nod, she sprang to her feet.
“Signal the Uzumaki, clear for Plan A. Destroyers are to carry out Operation Shaky-Shake. HVC battery, begin ranging on the lead ship.”
There was a delay as the ship’s sensors reached out to the target. Then, a slightly longer one. Odd. Anzu pulled up a window. “They’re jamming us?”
“We don’t have a carrier,” said Momo. “Are those small craft they launched earlier responsible?”
“No carrier, no E-War,” supplied Yuzu. “Engagement range is down to seventy-five percent optimal. I don’t think it’s those… scouts, though. All they’ve done is stand off and occasionally ping us.”
Anzu shrugged. Something had been learned already, then. “Plink at them, then. Gunners go to manual until we burn through.”
The first blow struck was too long-ranged to do anything but dirty Halcax’s paint, but the response was instant.
“Enemy action! Port-fore quarter! Scanning!”
“Damage minimal! No action necessary!”
“Beat to action. All hands shall stand to!”
All hands were already stood to, but manned weapons began moving purposefully as silo covers slid aside. With a hiss of propulsive gas, kleptoi slid out of their tunnels, flocking together near their motherships, filled with troopers and sailors eager for action.
Mathilde considered a moment and then held out a finger. “Bosun. Run out the colours. We shall not have them think us shy. They will know us.”
Without saying what came to mind– that he was pretty sure the Endeavourites knew who the people in the kilometres-huge starships were– the named officer nodded and saw it done. Within moments, great flags waved in the void, bravely shining their colours against the starlight.
They didn’t have long to wait. Slowly but surely, the intensity of fire from the Endeavourite rifles stepped up as they found the range; the three Theophanic ships didn’t bother flinching (nor did they seem capable of it with their great size) away from the eroding barrage. As more and more solid slugs began to strike home upon Theophanic armour, however, the Endeavourites switched over to new, more arcane mixes - liquid-shot, turbo-shot, a misplaced Emergency Field Kitchen round - and the damage slowly started to add up, even though at this range it mainly consisted of statuary shot to pieces, flags bearing great holes, and pristine hulls becoming pitted.
“Sensors, do we have effective target markers on all opponents?” called the Koshmar’s protos. Confirmation was swift (pending a couple of distant signatures) and he turned to Vice-Admiral soi Hapax. “My lord, they are all within range.”
She nodded. “Show them our power. Fire a primary strike, and prepare a secondary with projected evasive action plotted in. Execute.”
The Protos saluted and turned. “All ships will target and fire. Salvo first at mark. Target… mark.”
From the distance of thousands of kilometres away, the Theophanic ships were still visually only dots of light when they weren’t covered by the brightness of the gas giant behind them; but the Endeavourites weren’t operating only in the visual spectrum. Those dots of light suddenly bloomed with hot gas, expanding by miles as missiles were forcibly shoved out of silos by the hundreds of steam charges blasting them outward. A moment’s hiss of retrojets to orient the vehicles, and then their primitive but shockingly effective antimatter charge fired.
“Those are fast,” remarked Momo dryly, at the same time as Anzu bellowed, “Turn! Main batteries to area defence! Now, damn it!”
The Endeavourite formation broke into two, a pair of cruisers and four destroyers, as they turned head-first into the oncoming wall of twenty-metre needles that flashed through their space. Weapons fired, cutting small paths of safety, but with so little warning there wasn’t enough time to carve a full hole. Shield gauges suddenly flared orange, then red across the fleet, and alarms rang.
Fortunately for them, as this had been an exercise the warheads hadn’t been equipped… but for all that, the very passage of such a mass of missiles was dangerous enough; the destroyer Undertaking span out across space, struck solidly at one end by a missile travelling at a significant fraction of lightspeed. Only its shields and the robust construction of Endeavourite ships kept it together, though Anzu winced at the thought of how much the crew must have been shaken within. They’d be out for a moment if this was live.
A quick review of her screens showed damage across the board; the destroyers had taken the worst, with the Undertaking forced to break off entirely. The other three reported they were okay to make their run… but all of them agreed that would be all they could accomplish.
Aboard the Koshmar, celebration was quick, but just as quickly the Protos bellowed, “Silence on the bridge! Sensors, give us solutions now!”
“Plotting, my lord… we have solutions!”
“All ships, mark solutions and *fire two*!”
The Theophanic ships bloomed with firing heat again, in contemptuous defiance of any notion of stealth. Hundreds of missiles screamed across space in an instant, their trajectories wider than the last salvo.
This time, however, the enemy was forewarned. A continuous wall of fire and steel blocked the path of the main mass of missiles, shredding hundreds and forcing others to burn fuel to evade, while lighter weapons picked off most of the birds taking a different route. On board the Jotaro Kujo, the shield indicator flashed red… and stabilised back to orange.
Aboard Halcax, the Sensor chief called, “We have further solutions on each active target, my lord!”
“Acknowledged,” responded the Kapetanios, “Relay that to the kleptoi and have them close at speed. Expect hostile boarding. Use antístrofi proséngisi and maximize your coverage of each Endeavourite craft.”
“Incoming destroyers,” Anzu noted with a wave. “And lots of them. Still think we can take this?”
Momo nodded her head. “Not enough heat generation, no major weapon emplacements… they’re those boarding craft.”
“Interesting.” Anzu leaned back. “Signal Endeavour, I think now would be a good time for their run.”
There was a brief moment of conference, the fleet forming a consensus as ship networks linked for a half-second, and then the three remaining destroyers rolled over and pushed their engines to full. Dull red flame flared outwards, brightening to orange, then blue, then into the invisibility of high-energy radiation; an observer equipped to see beyond the standard spectrum would see each ship now had an engine plume almost a kilometre long, forcing them out of their line and into a wedge attack formation. The oncoming echelons of kleptoi flashed past, some raked in the side by the destroyers’ guns, others veering into the plumes and finding themselves marked out of action, and others continuing on without having even noticed the three ships.
Mathilde, watching the giant ologramma display on her bridge, started forward in her throne. “What the hell was that?!” Her Protos, ever on the ball, shouted, “Recalculate solutions! And all ships will stand by on point defences!”
The two attack waves reached their targets at roughly the same time; the kleptoi flipped over as one, burning their engines to match the Endeavourite cruisers’ course, while the Endeavourite destroyers simply kept burning. Hangar bay doors opened on the two Endeavourite cruisers, spilling their two squadrons of AW-7 fighters out into the void; within moments they were making slashing passes on the oncoming kleptoi. Some tried for a frontal pass, only to find their fire attenuated somewhat by the enemy drive plumes. Other, wiser pilots made passes on the beam, using their turrets and newtonian motion to fire into the relatively unprotected sides of the boarding craft, then turning and hitting more still in pursuit. The light cannons of the kleptoi returned fire, sending one of the nimble fighters out of the battle, but they simply weren’t optimised for the threat they were facing. Of the initial 68 kleptoi that had launched, only five made it past the flak screen and fighter cover without being tagged as destroyed. One, two, and then three of the survivors were tagged by point defence fire, leaving two to make the docking attempt. By unspoken agreement, they doubled-up on the Naruto Uzuamaki, trying to box the cruiser in to make the final connection. The first aimed its bow at the portside hangar, and triggered its breaching charges.
“Primary shields offline! Breaches to secondary and tertiary layers, port side!”
Captain Mara stood. “Signal the Kujo. We’re dealing with leakers, we will be rejoining the line momentarily. I want Kuro Squadron staying on defence; we’ll handle this.” Without another word, she strode from the bridge, cape flapping in the exactly perfect way she’d asked the tailor to ensure. An ORCA VToL the size of her head joined her at the foot of the stairs, escorting her down into the upper deck.
“MCV-2 is already on-site,” the ORCA reported (or, rather, the collective intelligence behind the ORCA reported… but, ultimately that was an academic detail), “Its war factory is complete and it’s amassing Scorpions.”
Mara nodded. “Just make sure they’re set to practice. There are to be no incidents today. I’ll hold here with MCV-1.”
The ORCA dipped its nose up and down.
On board the kleptoi FD-243, lochagós Hugo-33121 checked over the ammunition feed for the breaching cannon one final time. Obviously, the ship only carried practice rounds, but he wanted to be sure that it would fire. The operation depended on it. The pyrotechnics went off, simulating the breaching charges, and his company - already behind cover - turned from the door as the cannon lit off; six shells per second for ten seconds went into the “breach”, sure to suppress any first-line defenders. “Up and into them!” he called, and as one the company rose; assault suits into the breach first, thick shields and shotguns to dispatch anyone who’d survived the breaching cannon, followed by more normal-pattern suits. Hugo, for his part, was in the second echelon - it was no use him being knocked out in the first action, but there was also no point in leading from the rear.
Thus, he was in a prime position to see the Endeavourite response. His men cleared the hangar, finding nothing remaining except for a model aircraft of an old pattern. One of the assault suits pushed through the absurdly tiny door their spacers had to use to access it… only to be rocked backwards by a series of explosions. The clattering of tracks and the roar of jet engines rose above the din of a full company of Theophanic soldiery trying to file into a space fit for barely a platoon, and a strange… vehicle? appeared in the door. A gun sat atop its body, already tracking its next target.
His words upon being marked “dead” were recorded as follows: “Is that a fucking tank?”
Archfylakas Imran 43, the noncom in charge of the breach squad, was rather more on the ball. As Hugo collapsed, his warsuit automatically locking its joints to hold him immobile, Imram bellowed, “Shields up! Second unit, grenades!”
Between the cannon and thick armour of the breaching team, the remainder of the force managed to push out of the hangar. Miniature tanks, artillery, strange turrets and even aircraft made the going harder than any of the veterans had experienced, but they were able to push into the portside corridor. There, the ypolochagós currently in charge of the reduced company (from, the troopers noted, a safe command post aboard the docked kleptoi) made a decision: disable the ship’s engines, and make it easier for a second wave of kleptoi to finish the job. A brief check by an attached technognostiki showed the armour on the other side of the corridor was too thick to breach - about the same thickness as a Thorikto’s bridge sphere - so they’d have to do it the hard way.
Leaving a blocking force to hold the door to their ticket off the ship, two platoons kept up the grinding advance aftwards. Grenades, shotguns and shields faced off against a near-endless horde of miniaturised war automata, and the careful tactics of the Theophanic marines were enough to push the tide back - albeit at a cost. The lead platoon was reduced to a single squad by the time they managed to breach the next bulkhead door, and they found themselves having to set up a second blocking force to hold the stairwell leading up towards the upper deck and bridge. There was just enough time for a few soldiers to slip into the engine room and hurl a charge at a likely-looking piece of machinery before the pressure on three flanks became too much. The remains of the company, just a handful of battered warsuits, began a slow retreat back to the kleptoi and out into space.
While this had been happening, the attacking destroyers had been far from idle. Twisting and rolling through space, relying on asteroids and debris to help shield their approach, they had closed the distance of space between the two lines of warships within moments. Their rifles spat fire into the void, savage but ineffective, and the occasional Theophanic missile was thrown their way in return, slowly eroding their shields and armour. All the while, however, they had kept their claws hidden, waiting for the right moment to strike.
That time was now.
As one, the dorsal and ventral launchers on the three Endeavours turned, tracking their chosen target with minute adjustments. Within the blocky turrets, the crews made final adjustments, and then pulled the launch levers with a synchronisation that would have made professional dancers blush. Four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two sleek torpedoes entered the void, aetheric turbines whirling to propel them through space without the need for reaction mass.
The Theophanic ships picked them up nearly immediately - it was hard to miss the heretofore silent turrets suddenly deciding to track, after all. “Counter-fire on those tracks!” Mathilde ordered, and the flotilla’s lighter weapons switched targets to the oncoming ordnance.
Before the first counter-missile could land, the enemy ordnance exploded. Mathilde had just enough time to wonder if they were decoys before the Neokastro Hamilcar flashed from “active” to “out of action” on her command sphere.
Moments prior, the thirty-six Endeavourite torpedoes had reached their pre-set running distance, and carried out the instruction that had been wired into them at birth weeks ago at habs across Endeavour. These being the training models, that instruction was to flash a laser across their firing path, send their data on the observer channels, and then explode.
Had they been the live model, however, the chain of events would have been somewhat different, albeit with a similar ending. First, several magnetic bottles charged with antimatter just before launch would have injected around three-quarters of their contents into the priming tube, itself a magnetic bottle. Then, the remaining quarter would be fed backwards into an antimatter reactor, stripped to the bone of all safety systems except those required to gain one split second of power from the inevitable reaction; this was channelled forwards, into an equally stripped-down turbolaser array. For one brief instant, each component would have worked beautifully, turbolaser bolt wrapping around antimatter and launching towards the target. Thirty-six (plus or minus failures and misses) lances of death would spear towards the hapless target, each beam’s turbolaser wrapping piercing through armour to allow the antimatter charge to detonate within. These weapons were built to annihilate ships of immense scale and durability, and had they been live, this is what they would have done.
Since this was an exercise, and it was generally considered bad form to vapourise one’s opponents in such a friendly game, the first version of events is what transpired. Of the thirty-six Endeavourite torpedoes to launch, three had simulated failures, four were judged by the automated recording systems to have missed, and twenty-nine simulated beams of blue flame speared the Neokastro Hamilcar. Computer systems on the Theophanic warship, on the rest of both fleets and on observer ships and stations around the exercise zone calculated the theoretical damage, weighing theoretical and observed performance data of armour and weapon, and judged the Theophanic ship to have probably been disabled.
As Hamilcar’s Kapetanios hastily communicated apologies to the Koshmar, Mathilde frowned fiercely. “Protos. Please tell me the Avtokratoris are ready to launch.”
“By your command, my lady.”
She nodded, her attitude beginning to return. “The command is given. And by Theoua, they’d better get the job done this time…”
Aboard Endeavourite destroyer Endeavour, Captain Flashheart leaned forward. “I say. What’s going on with the big ship?”
“Dunno, Cap’n,” responded The Stalker of The Abyss, “but it looks like she’s giving birth…”
“They identify their ships as masculine, thank you very much, but you’re not wrong…” He trailed off. “Signal the big boys. We’ll handle whatever new parasites these imperialists have to show us.”
Gigantic kilometre-wide hatches had opened at either side of the Koshmar, and slender gantries slid out. Between the struts emerged a type of Theophanic craft the Endeavourites– and indeed many Theophanics– hadn’t encountered yet, the Avtokratoris destroyer.
A surprisingly small and slim design by comparison to the other ships, it exhibited touches of Theophanic flair, from the swooping prow at the bow of the craft to the carefully scrolled curves at its stern. And a surprising turn of speed, as the first one broke away from its mother-ship to orient itself towards the destroyer flotilla. Another one was behind it swiftly, and two more from the other side of the Magnatrabes…
—
[Somewhere in the distance, there was a exclamation:
“Hey! Is that allowed? You can’t just spawn a bunch of new capital ships!”
“Why not? You do the same thing.”
“They’re fighters! It’s not the same thing at all!”
“I beg your pardon. Space capable ship leaves another space capable ship. It seems quite similar to me.”
“Now look here you hoity-toity nobleborn arsehole–” ]
A gigantic Theophanic battleship floated, smug and serene, far ahead of them. Its turrets flashed twinkling like stars against the ponderous mass of its hull, and the line of ships twisted like a snake; two rounds clipped the dorsal port engine of the Endeavour, and she heaved to out of line.
Earlier (hours, days, who knows)
Is that a… monocle? Just a monocle? No half-glasses thing or weird hologram arrangement? How odd, wondered Anzu, half a sweet potato chip in her mouth. A staticky clearing of throat made her refocus abruptly, and she leaned back in her seat on the bridge of the Jotaro Kujo. She glanced over at Momo, who hadn’t noticed the monocle. There would have been words otherwise. “Ah, sure, yeah. That’s right. We’ll run a couple of scenarios with you guys and then the last engagement will be, what’s the word… free-form. If you lot are okay with that, of course.”
Thin lips pursed over the crackly screen. Of course there were other options for display, from the classic giant hologram to the high-definition front viewscreen, but Anzu happened to like small low-resolution screens with a bit of noise…
Finally, the woman on the other end of the line answered. “That is acceptable, Captain. Are you quite certain you have no other higher ranking representative I may speak to?”
“Nope,” was the cheerful response, “Rei’s busy, and I only take orders from her in combat.”
Nostrils flared and a deep breath was taken, but Vice-Admiral Countess Mathilde Coutrois de Greystoke Verte soi Hapax managed a gracious enough nod before closing the connection. Anzu waved a mock half-salute in the general direction of the Theophanic flotilla somewhere in the system, and turned around the chair to face their crew, all curious and not trying to hide it. “What?”
“Well?”
“It’s on. Call Uzumaki and tell ‘em we’re in for a bit of fun.”
Time passed, but not that much of it.
Space revolted and unnamable colors spun as the Magnatrabes Koshmar lifted ponderously into realspace from the null. Alongside it came the Neokastro Hamilcar and Neokastro Halcax, staying in its shadow.
A great, vibrantly green gas giant was behind them, and before them stretched a stony cloud. As the nullspace tear closed with a thunderclap, the Theophanic craft began reaching out with their sensors, pushing through the spectral turbulence caused by their translation with ease.
Mathilde sat back upon her command throne and lifted her chin. “Navigation. Set forth the waypoints. Steersman, forward quarter speed until the gravitational waves clear, then half speed.”
Her Protos stood up from the planning dais below and shouted, “We do not see them just yet, but we have surveys ongoing on all vectors. Boundary markers are showing up, and there’s a thousand or so observers. Shall we deploy proskopous?”
“Proceed. Stand to Beta alert, all ships. Prepare for action.”
Tall hatches at the sides of Hamilcar and Halcax slid back into the thick armour, and twin-winged craft emerged from within like infants from the womb, tiny against the great masses of the Theophanic ships. Smoke or steam hissed, and they launched forth, arcing against the stars to fly into the asteroids.
-
“All weapons report cleared for action. Main, secondary and tertiary shielding systems are enabled. No anomalies detected within the exercise area.” Anzu listened with half an ear as Momo read out the reports; she already knew the Kujo was ready for action. With a nod, she sprang to her feet.
“Signal the Uzumaki, clear for Plan A. Destroyers are to carry out Operation Shaky-Shake. HVC battery, begin ranging on the lead ship.”
There was a delay as the ship’s sensors reached out to the target. Then, a slightly longer one. Odd. Anzu pulled up a window. “They’re jamming us?”
“We don’t have a carrier,” said Momo. “Are those small craft they launched earlier responsible?”
“No carrier, no E-War,” supplied Yuzu. “Engagement range is down to seventy-five percent optimal. I don’t think it’s those… scouts, though. All they’ve done is stand off and occasionally ping us.”
Anzu shrugged. Something had been learned already, then. “Plink at them, then. Gunners go to manual until we burn through.”
The first blow struck was too long-ranged to do anything but dirty Halcax’s paint, but the response was instant.
“Enemy action! Port-fore quarter! Scanning!”
“Damage minimal! No action necessary!”
“Beat to action. All hands shall stand to!”
All hands were already stood to, but manned weapons began moving purposefully as silo covers slid aside. With a hiss of propulsive gas, kleptoi slid out of their tunnels, flocking together near their motherships, filled with troopers and sailors eager for action.
Mathilde considered a moment and then held out a finger. “Bosun. Run out the colours. We shall not have them think us shy. They will know us.”
Without saying what came to mind– that he was pretty sure the Endeavourites knew who the people in the kilometres-huge starships were– the named officer nodded and saw it done. Within moments, great flags waved in the void, bravely shining their colours against the starlight.
They didn’t have long to wait. Slowly but surely, the intensity of fire from the Endeavourite rifles stepped up as they found the range; the three Theophanic ships didn’t bother flinching (nor did they seem capable of it with their great size) away from the eroding barrage. As more and more solid slugs began to strike home upon Theophanic armour, however, the Endeavourites switched over to new, more arcane mixes - liquid-shot, turbo-shot, a misplaced Emergency Field Kitchen round - and the damage slowly started to add up, even though at this range it mainly consisted of statuary shot to pieces, flags bearing great holes, and pristine hulls becoming pitted.
“Sensors, do we have effective target markers on all opponents?” called the Koshmar’s protos. Confirmation was swift (pending a couple of distant signatures) and he turned to Vice-Admiral soi Hapax. “My lord, they are all within range.”
She nodded. “Show them our power. Fire a primary strike, and prepare a secondary with projected evasive action plotted in. Execute.”
The Protos saluted and turned. “All ships will target and fire. Salvo first at mark. Target… mark.”
From the distance of thousands of kilometres away, the Theophanic ships were still visually only dots of light when they weren’t covered by the brightness of the gas giant behind them; but the Endeavourites weren’t operating only in the visual spectrum. Those dots of light suddenly bloomed with hot gas, expanding by miles as missiles were forcibly shoved out of silos by the hundreds of steam charges blasting them outward. A moment’s hiss of retrojets to orient the vehicles, and then their primitive but shockingly effective antimatter charge fired.
“Those are fast,” remarked Momo dryly, at the same time as Anzu bellowed, “Turn! Main batteries to area defence! Now, damn it!”
The Endeavourite formation broke into two, a pair of cruisers and four destroyers, as they turned head-first into the oncoming wall of twenty-metre needles that flashed through their space. Weapons fired, cutting small paths of safety, but with so little warning there wasn’t enough time to carve a full hole. Shield gauges suddenly flared orange, then red across the fleet, and alarms rang.
Fortunately for them, as this had been an exercise the warheads hadn’t been equipped… but for all that, the very passage of such a mass of missiles was dangerous enough; the destroyer Undertaking span out across space, struck solidly at one end by a missile travelling at a significant fraction of lightspeed. Only its shields and the robust construction of Endeavourite ships kept it together, though Anzu winced at the thought of how much the crew must have been shaken within. They’d be out for a moment if this was live.
A quick review of her screens showed damage across the board; the destroyers had taken the worst, with the Undertaking forced to break off entirely. The other three reported they were okay to make their run… but all of them agreed that would be all they could accomplish.
Aboard the Koshmar, celebration was quick, but just as quickly the Protos bellowed, “Silence on the bridge! Sensors, give us solutions now!”
“Plotting, my lord… we have solutions!”
“All ships, mark solutions and *fire two*!”
The Theophanic ships bloomed with firing heat again, in contemptuous defiance of any notion of stealth. Hundreds of missiles screamed across space in an instant, their trajectories wider than the last salvo.
This time, however, the enemy was forewarned. A continuous wall of fire and steel blocked the path of the main mass of missiles, shredding hundreds and forcing others to burn fuel to evade, while lighter weapons picked off most of the birds taking a different route. On board the Jotaro Kujo, the shield indicator flashed red… and stabilised back to orange.
Aboard Halcax, the Sensor chief called, “We have further solutions on each active target, my lord!”
“Acknowledged,” responded the Kapetanios, “Relay that to the kleptoi and have them close at speed. Expect hostile boarding. Use antístrofi proséngisi and maximize your coverage of each Endeavourite craft.”
“Incoming destroyers,” Anzu noted with a wave. “And lots of them. Still think we can take this?”
Momo nodded her head. “Not enough heat generation, no major weapon emplacements… they’re those boarding craft.”
“Interesting.” Anzu leaned back. “Signal Endeavour, I think now would be a good time for their run.”
There was a brief moment of conference, the fleet forming a consensus as ship networks linked for a half-second, and then the three remaining destroyers rolled over and pushed their engines to full. Dull red flame flared outwards, brightening to orange, then blue, then into the invisibility of high-energy radiation; an observer equipped to see beyond the standard spectrum would see each ship now had an engine plume almost a kilometre long, forcing them out of their line and into a wedge attack formation. The oncoming echelons of kleptoi flashed past, some raked in the side by the destroyers’ guns, others veering into the plumes and finding themselves marked out of action, and others continuing on without having even noticed the three ships.
Mathilde, watching the giant ologramma display on her bridge, started forward in her throne. “What the hell was that?!” Her Protos, ever on the ball, shouted, “Recalculate solutions! And all ships will stand by on point defences!”
The two attack waves reached their targets at roughly the same time; the kleptoi flipped over as one, burning their engines to match the Endeavourite cruisers’ course, while the Endeavourite destroyers simply kept burning. Hangar bay doors opened on the two Endeavourite cruisers, spilling their two squadrons of AW-7 fighters out into the void; within moments they were making slashing passes on the oncoming kleptoi. Some tried for a frontal pass, only to find their fire attenuated somewhat by the enemy drive plumes. Other, wiser pilots made passes on the beam, using their turrets and newtonian motion to fire into the relatively unprotected sides of the boarding craft, then turning and hitting more still in pursuit. The light cannons of the kleptoi returned fire, sending one of the nimble fighters out of the battle, but they simply weren’t optimised for the threat they were facing. Of the initial 68 kleptoi that had launched, only five made it past the flak screen and fighter cover without being tagged as destroyed. One, two, and then three of the survivors were tagged by point defence fire, leaving two to make the docking attempt. By unspoken agreement, they doubled-up on the Naruto Uzuamaki, trying to box the cruiser in to make the final connection. The first aimed its bow at the portside hangar, and triggered its breaching charges.
“Primary shields offline! Breaches to secondary and tertiary layers, port side!”
Captain Mara stood. “Signal the Kujo. We’re dealing with leakers, we will be rejoining the line momentarily. I want Kuro Squadron staying on defence; we’ll handle this.” Without another word, she strode from the bridge, cape flapping in the exactly perfect way she’d asked the tailor to ensure. An ORCA VToL the size of her head joined her at the foot of the stairs, escorting her down into the upper deck.
“MCV-2 is already on-site,” the ORCA reported (or, rather, the collective intelligence behind the ORCA reported… but, ultimately that was an academic detail), “Its war factory is complete and it’s amassing Scorpions.”
Mara nodded. “Just make sure they’re set to practice. There are to be no incidents today. I’ll hold here with MCV-1.”
The ORCA dipped its nose up and down.
On board the kleptoi FD-243, lochagós Hugo-33121 checked over the ammunition feed for the breaching cannon one final time. Obviously, the ship only carried practice rounds, but he wanted to be sure that it would fire. The operation depended on it. The pyrotechnics went off, simulating the breaching charges, and his company - already behind cover - turned from the door as the cannon lit off; six shells per second for ten seconds went into the “breach”, sure to suppress any first-line defenders. “Up and into them!” he called, and as one the company rose; assault suits into the breach first, thick shields and shotguns to dispatch anyone who’d survived the breaching cannon, followed by more normal-pattern suits. Hugo, for his part, was in the second echelon - it was no use him being knocked out in the first action, but there was also no point in leading from the rear.
Thus, he was in a prime position to see the Endeavourite response. His men cleared the hangar, finding nothing remaining except for a model aircraft of an old pattern. One of the assault suits pushed through the absurdly tiny door their spacers had to use to access it… only to be rocked backwards by a series of explosions. The clattering of tracks and the roar of jet engines rose above the din of a full company of Theophanic soldiery trying to file into a space fit for barely a platoon, and a strange… vehicle? appeared in the door. A gun sat atop its body, already tracking its next target.
His words upon being marked “dead” were recorded as follows: “Is that a fucking tank?”
Archfylakas Imran 43, the noncom in charge of the breach squad, was rather more on the ball. As Hugo collapsed, his warsuit automatically locking its joints to hold him immobile, Imram bellowed, “Shields up! Second unit, grenades!”
Between the cannon and thick armour of the breaching team, the remainder of the force managed to push out of the hangar. Miniature tanks, artillery, strange turrets and even aircraft made the going harder than any of the veterans had experienced, but they were able to push into the portside corridor. There, the ypolochagós currently in charge of the reduced company (from, the troopers noted, a safe command post aboard the docked kleptoi) made a decision: disable the ship’s engines, and make it easier for a second wave of kleptoi to finish the job. A brief check by an attached technognostiki showed the armour on the other side of the corridor was too thick to breach - about the same thickness as a Thorikto’s bridge sphere - so they’d have to do it the hard way.
Leaving a blocking force to hold the door to their ticket off the ship, two platoons kept up the grinding advance aftwards. Grenades, shotguns and shields faced off against a near-endless horde of miniaturised war automata, and the careful tactics of the Theophanic marines were enough to push the tide back - albeit at a cost. The lead platoon was reduced to a single squad by the time they managed to breach the next bulkhead door, and they found themselves having to set up a second blocking force to hold the stairwell leading up towards the upper deck and bridge. There was just enough time for a few soldiers to slip into the engine room and hurl a charge at a likely-looking piece of machinery before the pressure on three flanks became too much. The remains of the company, just a handful of battered warsuits, began a slow retreat back to the kleptoi and out into space.
While this had been happening, the attacking destroyers had been far from idle. Twisting and rolling through space, relying on asteroids and debris to help shield their approach, they had closed the distance of space between the two lines of warships within moments. Their rifles spat fire into the void, savage but ineffective, and the occasional Theophanic missile was thrown their way in return, slowly eroding their shields and armour. All the while, however, they had kept their claws hidden, waiting for the right moment to strike.
That time was now.
As one, the dorsal and ventral launchers on the three Endeavours turned, tracking their chosen target with minute adjustments. Within the blocky turrets, the crews made final adjustments, and then pulled the launch levers with a synchronisation that would have made professional dancers blush. Four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two sleek torpedoes entered the void, aetheric turbines whirling to propel them through space without the need for reaction mass.
The Theophanic ships picked them up nearly immediately - it was hard to miss the heretofore silent turrets suddenly deciding to track, after all. “Counter-fire on those tracks!” Mathilde ordered, and the flotilla’s lighter weapons switched targets to the oncoming ordnance.
Before the first counter-missile could land, the enemy ordnance exploded. Mathilde had just enough time to wonder if they were decoys before the Neokastro Hamilcar flashed from “active” to “out of action” on her command sphere.
Moments prior, the thirty-six Endeavourite torpedoes had reached their pre-set running distance, and carried out the instruction that had been wired into them at birth weeks ago at habs across Endeavour. These being the training models, that instruction was to flash a laser across their firing path, send their data on the observer channels, and then explode.
Had they been the live model, however, the chain of events would have been somewhat different, albeit with a similar ending. First, several magnetic bottles charged with antimatter just before launch would have injected around three-quarters of their contents into the priming tube, itself a magnetic bottle. Then, the remaining quarter would be fed backwards into an antimatter reactor, stripped to the bone of all safety systems except those required to gain one split second of power from the inevitable reaction; this was channelled forwards, into an equally stripped-down turbolaser array. For one brief instant, each component would have worked beautifully, turbolaser bolt wrapping around antimatter and launching towards the target. Thirty-six (plus or minus failures and misses) lances of death would spear towards the hapless target, each beam’s turbolaser wrapping piercing through armour to allow the antimatter charge to detonate within. These weapons were built to annihilate ships of immense scale and durability, and had they been live, this is what they would have done.
Since this was an exercise, and it was generally considered bad form to vapourise one’s opponents in such a friendly game, the first version of events is what transpired. Of the thirty-six Endeavourite torpedoes to launch, three had simulated failures, four were judged by the automated recording systems to have missed, and twenty-nine simulated beams of blue flame speared the Neokastro Hamilcar. Computer systems on the Theophanic warship, on the rest of both fleets and on observer ships and stations around the exercise zone calculated the theoretical damage, weighing theoretical and observed performance data of armour and weapon, and judged the Theophanic ship to have probably been disabled.
As Hamilcar’s Kapetanios hastily communicated apologies to the Koshmar, Mathilde frowned fiercely. “Protos. Please tell me the Avtokratoris are ready to launch.”
“By your command, my lady.”
She nodded, her attitude beginning to return. “The command is given. And by Theoua, they’d better get the job done this time…”
Aboard Endeavourite destroyer Endeavour, Captain Flashheart leaned forward. “I say. What’s going on with the big ship?”
“Dunno, Cap’n,” responded The Stalker of The Abyss, “but it looks like she’s giving birth…”
“They identify their ships as masculine, thank you very much, but you’re not wrong…” He trailed off. “Signal the big boys. We’ll handle whatever new parasites these imperialists have to show us.”
Gigantic kilometre-wide hatches had opened at either side of the Koshmar, and slender gantries slid out. Between the struts emerged a type of Theophanic craft the Endeavourites– and indeed many Theophanics– hadn’t encountered yet, the Avtokratoris destroyer.
A surprisingly small and slim design by comparison to the other ships, it exhibited touches of Theophanic flair, from the swooping prow at the bow of the craft to the carefully scrolled curves at its stern. And a surprising turn of speed, as the first one broke away from its mother-ship to orient itself towards the destroyer flotilla. Another one was behind it swiftly, and two more from the other side of the Magnatrabes…
—
[Somewhere in the distance, there was a exclamation:
“Hey! Is that allowed? You can’t just spawn a bunch of new capital ships!”
“Why not? You do the same thing.”
“They’re fighters! It’s not the same thing at all!”
“I beg your pardon. Space capable ship leaves another space capable ship. It seems quite similar to me.”
“Now look here you hoity-toity nobleborn arsehole–” ]
Statistics: Posted by Elheru Aran — 2024-01-13 07:18pm