Dark Fate, Chapter 233

Chapter 233 – First Blood

(Cinder Leader, Incux Food Resource System 3)

Slave-Squadron Leader Lelia ‘Heretic’ Carollo took a deep breath to steady her nerves. A ‘mere’ four light-hour hop at 20c was still a twelve-minute jump. Twelve minutes that they could be detected. Twelve minutes that the enemy could spend, getting shields and weapons ready, launching fighters.

Sure, she knew the science of it, or at least the surface level. Bow-shocks from FTL were easiest to spot when it was coming straight at a target. If you were off a couple degrees, then you needed either a larger run-up, a bigger ship, or a group of ships to be easily discovered. Though it was still possible.

“Ready on those torpedoes, Puritan?”

Flight Lieutenant Israel ‘Puritan’ Zorita grinned. “Both torpedoes hot and ready. Get us lined up, and I’ll deliver them right on target.” Then he got serious. “What about you, Heretic? Ready on the stick?”

“Always, Puritan,” the Apocalypse Succubus grinned. They’d jumped up to Tier 2 thanks to blowing up a truly insane number of people. Not really something to smile about, but it was interesting to see that she’d gotten a Super Rare racial variant. Her class and profession of Bard and Combat Pilot had also gotten a boost, stepping up to Legendsinger and Deathwing. One of the benefits was adding her already impressive CHA to Luck, and another that added Luck to… pretty much everything when she was controlling a vehicle.

Her gunner had improved, as well. Now a Doomforged High Human Blackshield Bastard and Master Gunner, he was a solid hand in a fight, if it ever came to hand-to-hand, but in that gunner’s chair he was a terror to anyone downrange. It was a little sad that he hadn’t gotten any rare classes or professions, but the rare race was a good boon.

Actually, most of the fleet had qualified for racial upgrades like that when they hit Tier 2. Blowing up every population center they could find on a planet would do that, apparently. Of course, everyone in the fleet also got the Genocider title. Because the System did not judge good or bad, it just reflected your actions, and rewarded them accordingly. Not everyone had taken the ‘doom and gloom’ races, but those that did agreed that the power was worth the change in their looks.

“Coming up on time,” she said, and they snapped back to business mode. Neither of them needed to be reminded of the plan. They were professionals, after all. “Ten seconds. Five, four, three, two, one!”

She gripped the flight controls with one hand, the other pressing the warp drive controls, pulling them out of FTL, and into realspace. Right where they were supposed to be. “Swarmship 3 on sensors, range ten thousand kilometers, heading, two degrees port.”

They had come in at a thirty-degree angle up from the ecliptic, two degrees off a direct-line heading for their target. She saw the rest of her squadron appear as well, all of them effectively right on top of their targets. She adjusted her heading, so that Swarmship 3 was in the line of fire. “Lined up!”

“Firing.” Puritan said, quietly. The pulse torpedoes fired. The magnetic containment fields holding the antimatter did not move at light speed, but they were damn close, roughly half the speed of light. At this distance, that meant they took roughly two blinks of an eye to cross the difference.

“Adjusting course, warp drive warming up.” Heretic said, as she turned back, out of line with the ships, still headed thirty degrees down angle from the ecliptic. “Ten seconds to jump.”

“Good hit!” Puritan called as he scanned the sensor data. “Swarmships 1 through 8 are all heavily damaged. Not complete destruction, but it looks like power is offline, and they’re falling into the planet’s atmosphere. Truehive 1 has suffered four direct impacts from the slugs. It’s breaking up!”

“Jumping to warp!”

(Bridge, CRN Vulture, Interstellar Space)

Eight hours after the attack, Captain Andrew Grant took a deep breath as he walked back on to his bridge, having had a chance to shower and sleep while his Vulture and the other ships involved in the assault made their way to the rendezvous point. They’d made a series of warp jumps, limiting the time of each jump, and moving at different angles. Each jump shed the particulate matter that collected in the bowshock when moving through space, making their travel harder to detect if you weren’t looking straight on at them. The change in directions also kept any observers from correctly predicting their destination, unless they were close enough to be observed in turn.

Second shift was in their seats for most of the bridge. He clapped his XO on the shoulder as she stood from his chair. “Get some rest, Lieutenant.” The young elf woman gave a tired acknowledgement (fitting, since she’d been on station for ten hours), and left the bridge. “Helm, status report.”

“We’re at the rendezvous point as intended, Captain. All systems reporting normal.”

“Very good. Sensors?”

“No sign of pursuit, Captain. Mercurial is right where she is supposed to be, thirty-thousand kilometers ahead. I’m showing Invader, Promise, and Demon’s Roar all in their targeted positions. Cinder Squadron just dropped out of FTL, and looks to be returning to Mercurial.”

“Comms, anything?”

“Fleet is reporting no damage to any of the assault ships. Flight crews are preparing to do maintenance on Cinder Squadron’s warp drives, to ensure there are no problems. Captain Griboyedov on the Mercurial has sent a status update to all ships. Good strike, all the way around. Eight swarmships disabled. They fell into the planet’s gravity well, and crashed. No data on whether they are recoverable, or what damage they did to the world. Truehive 1 is dead, the shots ripped it apart.”

“Excellent,” Grant nodded. It was always satisfying when everything went according to plan. However, he knew better than to get complacent. The first attack run only worked because they had the element of surprise, and had run before the Incux could respond. They wouldn’t get a chance like that again. At the very least, the surviving capital ships would have their shields raised, even if they weren’t maneuvering. The foodseekers and hiveships would be patrolling, looking for prey.

No, all they’d done was get a successful first strike. Taking out nine of the eighteen capital ships was a major blow, but they wouldn’t be able to count on doing something like that again. The easy part was done. Now came the hard part.

(Main Bridge, CRN Mercurial, Incux Food Resource System 3)

Captain Griboyedov Ivan Tikhonovich let out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding as the last of Cinder Squadron touched down in the hangar bay. It was, by all metrics, a flawless surprise attack. A dramatically smaller force went in, took out twice their number in warships, and exponentially more in tonnage than what they threw at them. And then, they got away, without even scratching the paint. But it was going to get harder from here on in.

His eyes turned to the tactical readout on the main viewer. They were still four light-hours out from the local star, and further from the cattle world they were looking to destroy. That would normally mean that any tactical data their passive sensors could obtain was at least four hours out of date. Normally, but not now. Now, the Incux were blasting the inner system with active sensors, looking for stealth ships.

Every ship in the system was lighting off tachyon pulses, leaving very few areas within thirty degrees above or below the ecliptic that weren’t covered by the particles that played fast and loose with the rules of Einsteinian physics. His ships were well outside that limit, so no problem there. However, even if he wasn’t the one lighting off the pulses, his sensors could still read them. Which meant that he had actual, real-time positional data on every Incux ship.

That was the good news. The bad news was that all four swarmships had dumped their fighters into space, and the fighters were now swarming around the remaining capital ships, trying to provide a screen against incoming attacks. Worse, the hiveships and foodseekers were clearly moving in a ‘search and destroy’ pattern, rather than the patrol routes they’d used before. That was going to make follow-up attacks far more difficult.

However, it wasn’t all bad news. The capital ships appeared to be keeping a relatively stationary orbit, though they did bring up their shields. The analysts were saying that, most likely, the capital ships had been in some kind of hibernation state, and fully waking the ships was time and power intensive. And if they were trying to limit how much they needed to eat…

They could use this. Oh, it wouldn’t be easy, but it was certainly do-able. The first step would be setting up another ToT attack. Hitting the truehives probably wouldn’t work, but if they could nail one of the swarmships with all four rounds from his flotilla’s Hellfire Cannons, then they would at least cause significant damage to the ship. The question was, how to ensure the fighters didn’t get in the way?

They needed bait. Something they could use to draw eyes away from the swarmships. It didn’t have to be a big distraction, just enough to make sure that the Incux saw it as a threat, and were forced to respond. Not the Cinders. Flight Boss wanted a few hours, at least, to ensure they got their maintenance in, and the crews needed some time away from each other. But Cinder Squadron wasn’t the only arrow in his quiver.

With that thought in mind, he sent a message to the flight crews, and his captains.

(Pilot Lounge, CRN Mercurial, Interstellar Space)

Slave-Squadron Leader Isis ‘Goddess’ Saliba looked over the message from the Captain, and nodded once to herself. It was the kind of plan you’d expect from someone in the Ceresan Royal Navy. Bold as brass, and completely insane when one thought about the risks. However, the CRN specialized in fighting above their weight class, and they had the string of victories to prove it.

She was a Hellsworn High Elf with the Hellfire Sorceress class and Star Reaper profession. Hellsworn apparently came from her being the personal pet of a demon who had unleashed all sorts of hell on people, and her original Flame Sorceress class had upgraded to give her hellfire, which was nice. But it was the Star Reaper which she would get the most use out of, since it was a direct evolution of her Combat Pilot profession, specifically for people who flew fighters and got into dogfights.

Either way, her girls were about to get their chance to play with the Incux. Which was good. Her Angels had mostly been taking on ground-based Incux fighters so far this campaign, or helping to disable or destroy enemy resources and infrastructure. They hadn’t had much chance to actually go hunting, and the girls (Angel Squadron was still an all-female unit, despite the replacements they’d gotten) were itching for a fight.

Looking around the ready room, she saw all her pilots were here, watching movies, playing games, catching a nap, or otherwise doing what they could to pass the time as they waited for the boredom to give way to a few minutes of utter chaos. She whistled loud enough to get their attention, and called out, “Angels on me! Skipper has given us an opportunity to stretch our wings!”

Flight Lieutenant Grace ‘Bookworm’ Austin moved to sit on the couch next to her. “What’s the sitch, Goddess? We aren’t going to try and fight a few hundred fighters on our own, are we?” The tone was teasing, her voice just loud enough that all the girls could hear it. Just as a good XO should do, saying something that the girls would be distracting themselves with if they didn’t get it out of the way first.

“Hah! No, the Skipper knows that, despite how good we are, twenty-to-one is terrible odds, and he’s not that kind of gambler. We get to go play with the foodseekers in the outer system. Our goal is to dive in, blast them with missiles to either disable or destroy the ship, and skip out of there before all hell drops on us.”

She held up a hand to stop any questions. “Now, I know you’re asking yourselves, ‘Why us, and not those Beasties?’ Well, the answer is simple. We’re not sticking around for a slugging match. Our interceptors might not have torpedoes or be as sturdy as the hunters, but we’ve got speed. So, even at sublight, we have a good chance of avoiding enemy fire, and outrunning any fighters that do happen to get too close.

“Still, we need to hurt one of the little ships, and we need to be seen doing it. With luck, we’ll distract the Incux enough that the Demon’s Roar and her sisters can use their big-ass guns to fuck up another of the swarmships. We want them looking every which way but trying to find who is throwing very fast rocks at their houses. Understand?”