Combat Turn 3
O why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
Like a fast-flitting meteor, a fast-flying cloud,
A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,
He passes from life to his rest in the grave.
-Mortality, William Knox
EchoThe Hiver fleet orbiting and waiting around Echo radiates a faint aura of... disappointment. Despite her losses, the Queen who commanded the fleets that struck at the Gaians scored first blood against the pestilent threat, and her deed will live on in within the Hiver consciousness for eons and eons more. When the story of victory is called to mind, it will be her burning lance and the torpedoes of her drones that shall preface the memory.
Whereas here... This Star will merely be a story of the Hive doing what it has always done. The <Takers> on the ground find little struggle - nothing that merits the word 'resistance'. The greatest threat from the void was a rock the size and shape of a larval sack that had been logged on a collision course with the Queen's vessel. Destroying it with the <Sunbeam> hadn't been necessary, but it had been cathartic. The cruiser, 'No-Fair-Fight', was living up to its name. Sadly, it was living up to that name by having no fight at all.
As such, the appearance of bore signature in the near-field on sensors is met with <Excitement> and <Anticipation>, and each order the Queen gives is tinged with the scent and thought of <Legacy>. Then more bore signatures register. One becomes three. Three becomes seven. Seven becomes thirteen.
The Liir vessels had bored into the outside of the system, and they had seen without being seen. They had observed the Hiver fleet, judged their odds, and accelerated to attack velocities - revealing themselves on the galactic stage for the first time with an intermediary jump to the near field.
The Liir ships on the attack share many of the same general characteristics. One and all, they live. Each is in constant minor motion, dotted with bioluminescence and flaring spikes of bio-plasmic thrust as they hasten through the void. Elongated and eel-like, they are something like a story of the Hiver <Deep> seas brought into terrifying life. Two of the thirteen vessels are immense in their form, known as Vala'cra'denka among the liir. They are creatures nearing a kilometer in their length, twisting to thrust with a languid motion that belies their incredible size. Both creatures are covered in massive sheets of semi-organic armor which give their sluggish motions an almost hinged appearance. The remaining eleven vessels, Val'den, are considerably smaller, on the order of a hundred feet in length. Though similarly armored, they possess a more sinuous, wormlike appearance marred only by two extended longitudinally oriented fins covered in a number of peculiar bumps and projections.
As the Liiran ships enter the near field of the Hiver fleet, the <Deliverance> destroyers begin scrambling a short run of fightercraft. At the same time, the fleet issues a strong psionic warning for the Liir fleet to discontinue its approach or suffer the full might of the Council's judgment. When the Liir ships continue to accelerate, bioplasma burning, the Hiver fleet makes a full deployment. The presence of more than six-hundred fighters is a daunting complement, and as they did against the Gaians the Hivers split a good fifth of their fighter complement to bore forwards with the <Wrath> cruiser, while sending the remainder in a pincer formation to catch the inbound Liiran vessels.
Unlike the Gaian's, however, the Liir don't attempt to engage the fighters. Instead, as the <Wrath> just begins to emerge from its aperture, the destroyers detect thirteen apertures once more in bloom - except this time between them and the <Wrath>'s new location at the inner edge of their engagement range. The bore-capable destroyers immediately begin priming bores to jump out, their faster drives winning them a decided tactical victory as their own bores open just before the Liir begin emerging from their own apertures. By the time the Liir are through, the Hiver destroyers have already bored out, and once more surrounded by their own fightercraft.
The opening maneuvers of the battle have nearly reversed the positions of the fleets, but other than that have changed little as both commanders make adjustments to their battle plans. The <Wrath> bores forward once more, seeking to get back into a stable engagement range for its weapons, while this time the <Deliverance> destroyers hang back with their fighters and wait a moment. The Liiran vessels, on detecting the aperture bloom of the <Wrath> begin opening bores of their own into its near engagement range.
As No-Fair-Fight exits its bore, it's faced with thirteen apertures in bloom, from thirteen different approach vectors, all of identical size. Two of the thirteen will be heavily armored cruisers, targets that would greatly benefit from being softened by an alpha strike while partway through an aperture. Eleven of thirteen will be corvettes that the beam likely won't even hit. The Queen makes a snap decision to wait and see, taking the risk of waiting for the first cruiser to emerge and letting the fighters handle whatever else comes through.
The Liiran ships begin jumping in rapid series, accelerating through their apertures at maximum power. The instant the Hiver sensors recognize the breaching shape of one of the two Vala, the Queen orders both <Sunbeam> cannons to reorient and be immediately brought to bear against the creature. The blazing spears cross the intervening space in the blink of an eye, slamming into the massive creature's 'head', carving a blazing track down part of its back, and modestly destabilizing its bore so that the back half of the creature is covered in radiation burns. The vast creature screams, a soundless roar of psionic energy that sends something very much like the treacherous spectre of fear through the Hiver thoughts.
When the blaze of the Sunbeam's light fades, the Vala remains very much alive, the two scars in its armor deep - yet surprisingly diminutive when compared against the sheer bulk of its plating. More importantly, a gelatinous substrate immediately begins to flow out of the damaged regions. The substrate spreads rapidly across the injured regions, growing and hardening into yet more metallicized tissue.
The Liir vessels return fire on the <Wrath> and her <Relentless> complement with fire and fury. Each one of the smaller Val'den vessels is equipped with a quartet of beam lasers weapons, likely an unremarkable threat to large ship plating, but a distinct threat to the lightly armored <Relentless> fighters, which they target with merciless and remarkable accuracy. One Vala cruiser bears more than a dozen of such laser weapons, while her sister ship bears a scant four. Yet such small lasers are hardly the extent of the Vala'cra'denka's weaponry, and the bioluminescent stripes of the massive creatures burn as massive electromagnetic charges build at loci around their hide. Hiver sensors light up with incoming projectile warnings as a dozen bio-mechanical railguns fire from each of the Vala, launching massive spines in short salvos of two or three.
For the first time, a <Wrath> is forced to take evasive action. The gravity drives of the No-Fair-Fight are brought to full power and beyond as she maneuvers to avoid the spread of Liiran ordinance, and resonant groans echo throughout her hull as the gravimetric sheer of the maneuvers strains her frame. She returns fire with all weapons, launching counter-salvos of nuclear torpedoes as fast as the auto-loaders can supply warheads. <Relentless> fighters scramble into tight formations to achieve two-goals: drop their torpedo payload and run point defense for the <Wrath>. The first is easily achieved, fighters launching their alpha-strike wave immediately, the second is more difficult. The Liiran rail-spines are fast, heavy, and display the unnerving tendency to make sudden course corrections when they're about to miss or have been successfully tumbled by laser pulses.
A number spikes miss or are weakened and neutralized by the fighter complement, but many still slam into the No-Fair-Fight's hull, smashing through her hull plating and lodging themselves within. Yet they do not lie still. The spines have a <Voice> and they <scream>. They <scream> with the fury of the betrayed dead. They <scream> with the rage of a thousand years of slavery unshackled. They <scream> with the hatred of everything that yet lives - including themselves. They <rage>. They chew inside the <Wrath>, teeth of telekinetic energy dragging against metal, grabbing any drone unfortunate enough to be vented and ripping them apart in spray of blood and ecstatic omni-directed hatred - a hate that building into a crescendo and then detonates in an implosion of psionic energy. While it is some mercy that those spines that made corrective mid-flight maneuvers detonate with markedly less power, the damage from the bombardment is still devastating.
The torpedo barrage from the <Wrath> and her fighters meets the sweeping Liiran point defense lasers. More than two-hundred warheads go up against more than fifty of Liiran laser emitters. The bulky warheads require more than a moment or two of focus before being detonated - which the warheads make difficult even with their minor evasive maneuvers. Even so, the Liir fleet would have been able to destroy a considerable number of warheads had the No-Fair-Fight's fighter envelope not switched their laser weapons to high-energy pulse mode and begun targeting the Liir corvettes. The armor on the eel-like creatures is made of the same regenerative metallic chitin as their massive brethren, but thin enough that concentrated pulse laser fire allows the fighters to burn the creature beneath. Better still, the eel-like creatures seem to retain a sense of pain - enough laser pulses cause the creatures to recoil and twist in space, interrupting their methodical targeting of the incoming torpedo wave and causing them to strike back and the fighters with clumsy laser sweeps before jerking and twitching oddly and resuming firing on the torpedo wave.
With the primary point defense source of the Liiran vessels occupied and distracted by the <Relentless> fighters, nearly a hundred warheads slip through. Rolling explosions detonate across both Vala'cra'denka as nuclear fire envelopes them.
But they remain.
After the energy bloom dies, sensor blooms reveal both Vala to have taken heavy damage, their armored carapace pockmarked with craters meters in depth and much of the outer layers vaporized beyond any hope of regeneration. Still, they live - and they fight. Point defense lasers sweep the Hiver fighter mass, and electromagnetic waves indicate that most of their biomechanical railguns are still ready and able to fire. Fear sweeps the Hiver drones.
The Hiver Queen who commands the <Wrath>, however, was not chosen for meekness. She was not chosen for her ability to accept death, she was not chosen to lose, and she certainly wasn't chosen to be without contingency in the event that the opening torpedo barrage failed. In this case, that contingency plan was an even larger torpedo barrage.
Three destroyers and a complement of three-hundred fresh <Relentless> fighters finish boring back into the middle engagement range of the Liiran vessels. The fighters immediately release a new storm of torpedoes, six-hundred strong, before immediately docking with the carriers in preparation to re-arm and fire again. The torpedoes will accelerate to working velocity and close with the sluggish Liiran capital ships. The Queen of the <Wrath> holds no illusions. The Wrath cannot hold against the monstrous Liiran vessels - yet neither does she expect the Liiran vessels will hold against another, even larger, torpedo barrage. The Liir have a choice. Duel to the death in a battle which will consume them all, or fall back and fight this battle again another day.
This, however, is no passive challenge that the Queen offers. As the Liir railguns continue to assault her hull, screaming with their rage, the Queen <Screams> back at the Liir ship and lets No-Fair-Fight's Sunbeam cannons blaze in harmony with her fury. Her <Scream> is not animal rage, it is not blind hate, it is a roar of defiance. The defiance born on a cracked, barren, and scoured world. The defiance of a people who had fought and killed the only beings to ever try and yoke them. The defiance of a Queen, undefeated.
Whether or not the counter-challenge is registered or not, the Liir vessels execute an obvious paradigm shift. While the larger vessels continue to focus down the torpedoes coming from the <Wrath>, the Val'den switch their lasers to a pulse mode oddly akin to that of the <Relentless> and begin firing directly on the fighters. Likewise, the pair of cruisers focus their railgun fire on the three destroyers. The <Relentless> meanwhile, focus their high-energy lasers on the corvettes.
In the resulting exchange, numerous fighters are lost, both to laser pulses and Liir missed rail spines suddenly redirecting at least destroy something. Despite the range, one of the destroyers is also destroyed by lucky spine fire, its reactor crushed by a psionic implosion. For that loss, however, eight of the thirteen Liiran corvettes burn to focused laser fire - their forms writhing and twisting to writhe no more.
The exchange, however, is not overly lengthy, as the Liiran vessel make the maneuver the Queen hoped for. Unwilling to sacrifice themselves to stay in the fight, they bore out - skipping away from the combat.
The Hiver Queen, sifting through the psionic chaos of damage reports, does not order any further engagement. Enough has been lost today. There's precious little to savor in this <Victory>, but at the very least she will not be remembered as the first Queen to lose a <Wrath> to the enemy.
Bio-Collective Losses: 8 Val'Den Corvettes
[We] Losses: 1 Deliverance destroyer, 103 (129-26 recovered) <Relentless> fighters.
OscarThe first wave of bores that split the void at the outskirts of the Oscar system disgorge a Gaian fleet, hellbent on revenge and a second slugout with the bugs. Three Expedition class cruisers, a pair of ambling Pacemasters, eight blade-like Foray class frigates, and six even more blade-like Epee class corvettes. All ships jump in on high alert, splitting immediately into a functional strike force ready to engage the Hiver defense fleet and a reserve fleet to supply losses.
Such preparation, however, is for naught. There is no Hiver defense fleet orbiting Oscar.
Cautious, the Gaian fleet completes braking maneuvers and bores into the system. The line 'It's quiet... Too quiet...' is repeated so often between crew members that it practically becomes a superstitious talisman. Except among the Pacemaster crews, who are careful to keep up the regulation amount of noise in order to keep the air-circulation system from deciding that no humans are left on board and turning off. A serious problem when the boot process is long enough that asphyxiation would be a real threat.
No hidden fleet emerges to challenge the Gaian expedition, however, and the Pacemasters are able to drop reinforcements into the few secured areas remaining to the Gaian ground forces without undue difficulty. From there on it's just a matter of preparing the battlespace in the event of an incursion, dropping sensors and sequestering reinforcements.
Preparations which are, thankfully, not made in vain. A Hiver Queen, piloting a <Wrath> cruiser (inexplicably designated 'Free Trade' by the Gaian sensors), and her retinue of five <Deliverance> destroyers jump into the system edge, followed shortly by another <Deliverance> destroyer. The Queen, as happened at the first coming to Oscar, experiences a moment of <Chagrin> at seeing the Gaians already present. <Chagrin>, however, rapidly becomes <Wariness> as she surveys the sensor readings coming in. The arrayed Gaian fleet consists of three cruisers, six frigates, and another six unknown corvettes not before identified by Hiver vessels. Still, she has a full complement of fighters in tow, a reasonable degree of information available regarding Gaian tactics, and a mission to complete.
Once more, the Gaians detect the Hiver attack fleet after its jump deeper into the Oscar system - the Terran commander noting that this Hiver cruiser, while identical in form to those previously engaged, appears to have been upgraded with a notable amount of fluidly curving armor. Both sides immediately scramble fighters, three Gaian cruisers massing upwards of five hundred of the small, flat Hornet fighters, while the five Hiver destroyers that originally bored in with the <Wrath> deploy more than six hundred fighters in response. The Hiver fighters divide themselves between assembling a hundred-fifty strong defensive envelope for the <Wrath> and breaking into two pods for forward deployment.
The Gaians, meanwhile, once more seem to take a waiting game approach holding their scrambled fighters steady while they wait for the telltalesignatureof Hiver apertures in bloom. Only when the Fair Trade's aperture is detectable at engagement range do the Gaian ships begin deployment.
The Fair Trade bores into engagement range of the Gaian cruisers, immediately registering two apertures at the nearer edge of engagement already in bloom from the Gaians making short-range bores forward to intercept. Fightercraft prepare to engage on those vectors, while the <Wrath> herself fires her Sunbeam on the first Expedition cruiser she can get a targeting lock on. Capacitors whine briefly, and the firey beam leads off the Hiver-Human engagement as it once did.
This time, however, the Gaians are more prepared. While all the cruisers have their bore-drives already spooling and can't make an assisted interception, the targeted Expedition has its bore shield apertures running and placed a moment before the beam hits - prepared this time for the gamma pulsing. The Sunbeam strikes, and this time is devoured as planned - although the short time available to create the shield and the inherent chaos of the Sunbeam makes a meaningful redirect impossible. The defense bore holds for a moment, then destabilizes and the Sunbeam skips past to strike the Expedition's hull - but more defensive apertures are placed so that the Sunbeam's path keeps rolling over defensive bores. The defensive bores never last long, and they don't always fully envelop the beam, but the end result diminishes the efficacy of the Hiver beam weapons by nearly half and converts the burning paths of the Sunbeams into halting and broken lines.
Shortly thereafter the Gaian ships complete their initial bore calculations and the cruisers slice open geneses to the Hiver cruisers. Their entire fighter complement, three frigates, and their six corvettes slide through on reactionless drives, leaving the Gaian cruisers defended only by a trio of frigates. This suits the Hiver fighters just fine, who ride one of two <Deliverance> generated bores into the same two-pronged attack that once killed a Gaian cruiser - despite its defensive fighters.
Gaian particle cannons fire and the 'Free Trade' Queen prepares for damage reports on the new armor - but the Gaians are instead targeting the deep back line. Bore assisted particle beams lance toward the destroyer group. The distance means shots are slow and the aim imperfect, but the relative aperture size means it's quite difficult for the Hiver destroyers to detect the apertures in bloom before the Gaian Death Ray emerges. Blazing spears lance among the Hiver ships, biting deeply when they do manage to strike. As [We]'s ships adopt evasive maneuvers, the rate of impact decreases dramatically, but it's still a constant threat as the three cruisers put down steady fire. That particle cannon fire, however, is the only engagement that the Gaian ships seem interested in, as all three cruisers and their frigate escort power their own gravity drives to full and begin accelerating away from the Hiver fighters - magnetic shatterguns pounding out a defensive screen of shrapnel. The Hiver fighters burn hard, chemical engines out-accelerating the Gaian gravity drives as the fighters launch waves of nuclear torpedoes and score the Gaian vessels with high-energy laser pulses. The Hiver laser weapons, while powerful by the standards of fighters, lack the penetrative depth to inflict more than external damage on the cruisers, and the thin laminate armor of the Foray is likewise enough that even the coordinated fire of the fighters inflicts only limited damage beyond armor disruption.
The nuclear impact that should lend teeth to the <Relentless> attack run, however, never comes. The Gaian cruisers and their frigates open bores, one for each cruiser, and one for the escorts. It's a short-range jump, a bore hop, but it's enough that the torpedoes are left slicing through void - and the <Relentless> fighters left trying to reorient on the now distanced Gaian vessels and pepper them with even longer ranged pulse laser fire until their carriers can retrieve them. The Gaian ships, however, don't slow after their short-range jump. All six vessels continue to push their gravity drives to the limit, accelerating and making erratically timed bores carrying them into the near field at wildly changing vectors.
The <Wrath> is feeling somewhat harassed during this process, with the full weight of the Gaian small craft brought to bear against her much smaller fighter retinue. Their diminutive shatterguns fire early, creating a moving screen of shrapnel as the fighter wave advances. Other than that, however, they lack the weapon loadout to immediately engage the Hiver vessels. Outnumbered 3:1, the fighter envelope of the Fair Trade has no dearth of target availability. Low-power laser pulses constantly stream out across the black, flashing like tiny stars when they strike a fragment of shattergun ammunition or burn through the fragile frame of a Gaian Hornet. The <Wrath> waits for the distance to close enough for the <Relentless> fighters to launch their anti-fighter LRM payload before beginning to accelerate away from the enemy fighters. This reveals a rather key detail.
The <Wrath> at max power has considerably better acceleration than all her pursuers. Under emergency power, her gravity engines are capable of an acceleration close to twice that of the faster than the gravity drives on either the Gaian Foray frigates or the Gaian Epee corvettes, and considerably faster than the Hornet's drive. The <Relentless> envelope burn their engines and stick tightly to the <Wrath's> gravity wake, keeping pace but burning fuel to do so. It's not a sustainable flight, as the <Wrath's> hangars simply don't have enough capacity to land and refuel fighters as quickly as they're burning it, but the constant thrusting does keep the <Relentless> laser capacitors firing. The <Wrath> itself, while competing against the significant runup possessed by the Gaian fighters, is quite able to launch waves of its own torpedoes at the Gaian frigates, as well as continue to track the bore-skipping Gaian cruisers in the near field with its Sunbeam turrets as best it can.
As the Hiver LRM wave approaches, the Gaian frigates fire for the first time. Each is equipped with a dorsal turret that, put simply, is a really big version of the magnetic shatterguns used by the fighters. Magnetized canister rounds slammed out at high velocity and steady rate of fire, exploding into clouds of shrapnel that create sensor shadows by virtue of sheer density. The three frigates ply these weapons with great effect to neutralize the incoming torpedoes from the <Wrath>, diverting secondary (and considerably less effective) attention to intercepting the denser patterns of Hiver anti-fighter LRMs. Two additional weapons system on the Gaian frigates, one attached to each 'flat' of their bladelike form, each launch quartets of sleek LRMs of their own - considerably larger than the anti-fighter missiles carried by Hiver fighters, but likewise considerably smaller than torpedoes.
Curiously, the Gaian fighter formation begins to bunch up as the missiles approach, clustering around their escort frigates. The reason why becomes immediately apparent as bore signatures are detected around each frigate - fast short-range jumps which split the Gaian attack vector, gain them ground, and bring them out of the LRM's retargeting radius.
Yet, despite this, the Hivers learned well the lessons taught in the last conflict - not one fighter carries torpedoes, and no fighter emptied its LRM racks in the first volley. The lost munitions are painful, considering the limited resupply, but the fighters still utilize their energy surplus to keep up a withering barrage of low-power pulses in order to catch and damage as many of the frail Gaian fighters as possible.
The Gaian return LRMs are small and agile enough each wave of twenty-four sees a few slip past - yet those that make it through appear to be having targeting issues as they miss the Hiver fighter envelope and the Free Trade entirely, detonating in space well long of the Hiver ships.
A barely detectable ripple on sensors is the only warning the Hiver pilots have before their fighters begin breaking apart. Lacerations criss-cross hulls, bisecting engines in detonations of burning fuel and slicing open pilots in billowing waves of pale blood-snow. Refined sensor images reveal thousands of monomolecular microwires drifting through space, released in some manner by the Gaian missile batteries, and barely visible as they lash through the Free Trade's escort. Thin slices dance across the hull of the <Wrath> as well, patterning her surface with a spiderweb of microscopic razor slashes but it seems that the wires slow and break apart before penetrating significantly into her battle armor. Insignificant as the threat is to the cruiser, it forces her fighter envelope to scatter and stop using the wake of her gravity drive to supplement their engines.
At this point the Hiver Queen takes a leaf from the Gaian notes and begins priming a genesis of her own, boring away with her damaged fighter envelope. Her jump isn't overlong, enough so that she can lick her wounds for a moment and take extended range shots at the Gaian cruisers, who are themselves busy trying to take extended range shots at the Hiver destroyers. Respite, however, is brief. The frigates sent as part of the Gaian wave begin opening more apertures of their own, oriented to turn their pursuit into a three vectored intercept. Immediately the Hiver Queen orders another bore made to prevent the interception, queuing it to a distance where the <Relentless> can still operate their lasers with some efficacy.
Minutes tick by, and despite the Gaian fighter mass taking unending casualties from relentless <Relentless> batteries, they get closer with each bore. The Gaian drivers are just barely faster, and while the Hiver Queen keeps plying her superior engines for all they're worth, her ship's acceleration begins to level off as she approaches ten kilometers per second. Bore after bore she makes, each time trying to keep her Sunbeams in position to take shots at the Gaian cruisers, each time trying to keep her fighters in a position to whittle down the Gaian fighters. She'll be forced into a stand soon, but the Queen has enough time and guile to choose her ground.
The Hiver destroyers, meanwhile, have been having a hellish time. The bore skipping Gaian cruisers keep constant pressure on them, Death Ray beams constantly lancing across them from long-range targeting bores. The only blessing is that the Gaian cruisers keep constant acceleration, and the relative velocities between their generated termini and the Hiver destroyers means that they either have to align their bores with the axis of their own acceleration, making them easier to predict and dodge pre-emptively, or they end up streaking across their targets and diminishing their power. However, against the space-optimized Deliverance, even such grazing blows burn deeply and threaten hangar bays and delicate internals. As the Deliverance destroyers jump to reclaim their fighters, the Gaian ships take special note of the ships generating the bore apertures and focus fire.
The inaccuracy of the bore-assisted beams is the sole thing that saves the destroyers from complete annihilation. Spears of light impale ships, igniting fuel reserves and forcing the Hiver ships to vent entire sections of their vessels in order to preserve the whole. Non-bore-capable destroyers interpose themselves in protective positions, accepting damage and, in one case, obliteration, to save their jump capable peers. As the destroyers complete their harassed jump, all but one are immediately swarmed by fighters returning to hangars to rearm, refuel, and prepare for immediate jump. That one breaks off, heading into deeper orbit to deploy troops.
The constant bombardment from the three Gaian cruisers, however, is unrelenting. Bore calculations from one <Deliverance> are severed abruptly as a particle beam lances through its reactor, secondary detonations consuming the rest of the vessel as containment fails. Another deliverance succumbs to sheer overwhelming mass of fire, ruptured fuel reserves and munitions blowing out a section of its hull and leaving it dark and dead for but a moment before a final blossom of nuclear fire consumes it entirely. The final bore-capable destroyer manages to complete its bore, taking itself and the remaining <Deliverance> through.
The two emerge near the <Wrath>, deploying fighters as soon as they are able. All Hiver ships push to normalize their velocities and becoming something close to a cohesive group as what remains of the Gaian fighter group converges.
As the Free Trade finally prepares to make her stand, the three Gaian frigates open bores to come at her from three directions. Their greatly diminished fighter mass pours through, seemingly undaunted by the fact that they're now outnumbered.
Once more, the Hiver fighters fire staggered volleys of LRMs into the oncoming waves, but this time there's neither enough time to for the Gaians to bore away, nor the inclination. For the remaining Hornets, the final approach is a meat grinder. They've built up speed, and their blinks lend them uncanny maneuverability, but Hiver lasers and the staggered waves that (in total) put more than six anti-fighter LRMs on the trace of each Hornet takes its toll. The hornets armed as such dropped their torpedoes as soon as they bored in, but by the time the remainder get within SRM and shattergun range, they're reduced to less than 20% of their original number.
Monowire missiles fly as the distance closes, slicing Hiver squadrons to ribbons. Gaian shatterguns of all sizes fire steadily, gauss accelerators hurling metal fragments to sandpaper, cripple, and intercept missiles. Hiver lasers chew steadily through Gaian fightercraft, intercepting their few torpedoes, heating the frontal armor of the corvettes to a burning glow, and even drilling into the armor of the Foray frigates with burning pulses. The <Wrath>'s torpedo batteries launch volleys, the decreased number of the point-defense available shatterguns and the increased proximity forcing on the Forays to utilize their bore shields to neutralize the incoming projectiles. It's not perfectly successful, and one of the Gaian frigates is enveloped in light as a slight juke from a Hiver torpedo causes the missile to slip past the bore made to intercept it. While the single torpedo might not have completely killed the frigate, the four that immediately follow on its heels are more than enough to reduce the Foray to debris.
The Gaian small craft group is losing, badly. Vessel after vessel reduced to so much debris, and yet they continue to fight. The new Alate armor cladding of the Wrath drinks in shattergun fire, with only somewhat more damage inflicted by heavy shatterguns fired by the Forays. Aside from fighter casualties, the only significant damage that occurs is due to the Gaian shatteguns sandpapering one of the Sunbeam turrets to the extent that the gunners need to shut it down and recalibrate.
The Gaian corvettes are the anomalous factor. While their bladelike design is akin to that of the foray, they appear to lack weapon mounts of any kind. Though they travel with and in the fighter wings, they appear to lend them no defensive utility. The only thing they do well is absorb point defense fire, as their frontal armor seems capable of handily tanking even high powered pulses from the <Relentless> fighters. Experimentally, as the Gaian wave falters and stalls, the Queen of the Fair Trade redirects several fighter groups to focus fire on one of the corvettes.
It does not die. Oriented as the Epee is, its profile presents a small target that forces the Hiver pilots to target its blade. The blade heats, and sections of armor slag and strip, but the frontal armor is thick. Thicker than the armor of a Foray. Thicker than it has any reason to be. The few remaining Hornets on the attack run begin blinking in breakaway vectors, the local interdiction strong enough that they have to redirect now risk slamming into the Wrath. The corvettes, however, do not.
The Queen of the Free Trade experiences a moment of <Dread> and <Realization>. The suicidal attack run in the face of overwhelming odds. The corvette screen. The frigates keeping the pressure on even when doing so destroyed them. The Gaian corvettes aren't corvettes.
They're missiles.
The Free Trade's structure screams as the Queen orders emergency maneuvers, multiple emergency power gravity wells twisting her in different directions as she desperately twists to evade some of the Epees. Two miss barely, one actually grazing the Free Trade's armor as it skids by, but four strike home. Rippling fractures spread immediately across the Hiver cruiser's armor as the corvettes pierce her from all directions, great chunks of Alate armor drifting away as the Gaian corvette's velocity drive them home. The two that miss don't get a chance for a second run. They attempt to blink around and come about instantly, but they're too close to the Free Trade for the maneuver to be quick, and the Relentless envelope shreds their weaker rear armor and guts them.
Yet the damage is done. Of the four embedded corvettes, one finds itself to be critically damaged by the impact, the other three corvettes analyze the battle outside and calculate that there is essentially no chance for a successful retraction and further attack runs. As one, the corvettes arm and simultaneously detonate their nuclear magazines.
Sections of the <Wrath> simply vanish. Entire segments of the Queen's extended consciousness are erased in a flash, and countless others are lost as the secondary effects of the explosions burn through the Free Trade. When the Hiver Queen is finally able to aggregate a sensible report, it is with a feeling of some surprise that there is enough still left to report on. Life support is basically gone, power is sporadic, weapon systems are barely functional, and only one gravity drive still functions.
Her fighters still surround her, tearing apart the last of the Gaian vessels and giving her a little breathing room. Yet that relief is frail indeed, as the Gaian cruisers redirect their artillery fire to target the crippled <Wrath>. As the Gaian particle beams cut into her already compromised hull, the Queen relaxes. The eased breath of one who, now certain of death, no longer fears its possibility. As she prepares a <Requiem> for herself, a message to send back to the Council to inform them of her demise and explain her failure, she gives a single order to the remainder of her fleet.
<Run>
And run they do. The Gaians do scramble pursuers, Foray frigates pulled from reserves, but the Hiver destroyers have the lead on them - evading until they can make it to the system edge and cover of infinite possibility. The Gaian cruisers, meanwhile, execute the dying <Wrath> from afar. They stick beyond the effective range of its Sunbeam, pelting its damage sections with fire until, at long last, the Free Trade's power system finally fails her. She's still for a moment, then a spark ignites in her core. A last nuclear detonation, reducing her derelict to nothing but fragments.
A Gaian victory, if one had at great cost.
Gaian Regime Losses: 6 Epee Corvettes, 3 Foray Frigates, 382 (510-128 recovered) Hornet Fighters
[We] Losses: 3 Deliverance destroyer, 1 Wrath Cruiser, 375 <Relentless> fighters.
On the GroundThe Gaian reinforcement transports are hailed with relief - though more than one among the GREAT infantry already on the ground is a bit distressed that it isn't an evac run. The improved munitions that roll-off those transports, however, do quite a bit to change their minds. Tripling their effective force numbers certainly doesn't hurt either.
For the Hivers, their transport merely adds to their numerical superiority, disgorging yet more thousands of ready Alpha and Beta <Takers>.
As the armies clash once more, it's readily apparent that the Gaians have gotten an upgrade. Not only are they no longer hilariously outnumbered, but they appear to have brought out much heavier man-portable munitions. Squad assault versions of their coilgun rifles, indirect fire grenade launchers, a smattering of seeker missile launchers, and a surprising number what appear to be greatly modernized anti-tank rifles. While such weapons are far from universally deployed, it's enough to allow Gaian infantry to respond to Alpha attacks a degree of tactical versatility. Which is a grand improvement over the previous preferred approach of suiciding construction drones into the monstrous Hiver drones.
Still, the Hivers continue to have a massive numeric advantage, and the Gaians are forced to pick and choose their battles
very carefully. The fact that both the Gaian rocket launcher and anti-tank coilgun are capable fo killing an Alpha finally leaves the bumble the opportunity to be the lovable mechanical insectoid combat engineer it was made to be, and that is the edge that keeps the Gaians from being completely pushed back. In short order, forces of bumbles drones can land in area, prep the site, and construct fortifications from a mixture of native materials and their own pre-fabricated reserves. Done properly, this allows the Gaians to always be fighting from the relative safety of favorable fortifications. While Hiver laser cannons do their work, the loss of the Alpha as an effective battering ram to drive through the Gaian line takes its toll.
The Hiver princes adjust to the altered battlescape a bit slowly, giving the Gaians a short window to recoup lost ground and regain their breathing room. It's a small loss, and one that can be returned easily if the winds of battle blow the other way, but it's still frustrating and shaming to have come so close to crushing the animals and their robot toys and been rebuffed at the last moment.
This contest is now in coin flip territoryGaians have gained 1 dominion at Oscar
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Topic: GalactiRace Core Thread | Turn 5. It's Laaate... (Read 11738 times)