by Dean Henegar
The first of the return fire began to arrive, the main gun batteries on the smaller ships firing at their extreme range. Various evasion patterns were activated, reducing the accuracy of the enemy fire and his own to a lesser extent. Enemy ships also began to attempt evading the incoming fire, but with his superior targeting systems, Slater was able to maintain a high hit percentage. Now that the incoming fire was all focused toward the Franklin, Slater fired off his last eight missiles, targeting the smaller raiders that he could hope to destroy with a single hit.
All eight missiles locked onto their targets and flew through a smattering of point-defense fire. Two missiles were knocked down, but the remaining six hit their targets. Six more raiders were blotted from space, but still, the enemy closed in. The number that could bring weapons to bear on the Franklin was increasing every minute. His shields were starting to feel the impact of so much fire, dropping rapidly to seventy percent, their charge depleting despite Slater pushing as much power as he could spare into recharging them.
The raiders continued into point-defense range as they sought to board the Franklin. Streams of kinetic projectiles and rapidly pulsing lasers from Slater’s smaller weapons reached out to meet the raiders, burning through shields and causing cumulative damage. Undeterred, the raiders pressed the attack, Slater watching as his shields dropped below forty percent. Fratricide began to take its toll as the raiders’ maneuvering occasionally brought them into the path of incoming fire from the other council ships.
With a feeling that reminded Slater of hitting his funny bone, his shields failed. The laser fire from the swarms of enemy ships began to pelt his hull, but his core-hardened armor stood up to the continuous abuse of weapons fire for the time being. Slater could detect the nearest council kill team broadcasting signals to the other ships. The two kill teams near him had kept out of weapons range this whole time, not willing to test their core-enhanced armor against his deadly main batteries. The encrypted signal eluded his attempts to crack it, but the meaning of the orders from the council masters became readily apparent as the focus of the enemy fire shifted.
All incoming fire began to concentrate on his shield generators, the combined attacks eventually burning through the armor protecting them. With the destruction of the shield generators, any hope of raising the shields again during this fight was lost. The laser fire then began to focus on his main batteries. Slater had improved on the already-robust armor protection that human ship designs had for their main guns. Even with his upgrades, systems began to fail as the continuous fire stripped away his armor one layer at a time. Once the shields were no longer capable of activating, the enemy took out his drives, which were, by necessity, lightly armored.
The main guns would be brought down eventually, so Slater put the time they had left to good use, prioritizing targets that his secondaries would have trouble with on their own, mainly the larger light cruisers that were entering the fight in greater numbers. His secondaries could easily handle the vessels, but it took far more hits to take them out with the smaller guns when a single full broadside from his main batteries was more than enough.
To their credit, his guns withstood the barrage for longer than he had expected. The laser cannon was the first to fail, which wasn’t surprising given its higher level of complexity over the railguns. It wasn’t long before the railguns followed, laser fire burning through and disrupting the necessary power connections required to operate the weapons. The fire then shifted to his main drives, the more fragile systems taking less time to destroy than his guns. The picture of what was happening was clear: the enemy was pulling his teeth in preparation to board, and he was powerless to stop it.
The Franklin continued on its current course and speed as the enemy took down one weapons system after another. Slater never stopped fighting back, taking out a dozen warships and over a score of raiders before the last weapon fell silent. Without a ship-to-ship fight to direct, Slater checked in on the dragons and the progress they were making against the council. The largest of the dragons drifted dead in space, surrounded by clouds of ship debris from the victims it had taken with it. His system counted over fifty enemy vessels that had been destroyed before the dragon was killed. Included in that number were all of the heavy cruisers the council had assembled so far. Granted, more of the larger ships were still on their way, but they would not make it into the system before this fight was decided.
One of the kill teams was among the dead ships, taken by the smaller—yet still battlecruiser-sized—dragon that had attacked him previously. The dragons had been extremely powerful yet had been hampered in the fight by their lack of multiple weapons systems. With only melee strikes or a single breath attack, the dragons had to fight one target at a time, whereas Slater was able to easily engage a half dozen at once. The remaining dragon was battling the swarm of light cruisers and raiders that had helped defeat its larger kin. One by one, the dragon was taking down ships, but it wasn’t fighting smart. Enraged by the nonstop pinpricks of laser fire burning into it, the dragon just attacked the closest enemy. While the dragon had been wounded, it was still very much in the fight. Each vessel it destroyed was one less that Slater had to deal with.
The enemy ships then concentrated fire at various points on his hull. While the fire could eventually punch through his armor, the time it took allowed Slater’s repair drones to seal off the affected compartments, limiting the amount of damage. The volume of fire abated as the first pair of raiders docked with the Franklin. They weren’t stopping there; several more vessels latched onto various sections of the hull, setting up flexible docking collars and attempting to bore through the hull with laser torches.
Cutting torches proved no match for his hull design, and the ships attempting the maneuver soon gave up, opting to wait their turn at the two boarding hatches instead. With a dull thump, the first raiders sealed onto his ship and the boarding hatches began to spin open. Slater unveiled the first of his surprises as the raiders completed their connection; the starboard boarding hatch exploded outward, destroying the docking collar along with the attached raider. He left the other boarding hatch intact. He needed the boarders to have an easy path to board; otherwise, they might just opt to spend days pummeling him to pieces. His hull was incredibly powerful, but it would eventually succumb to nonstop battering. Instead, he let them board. The other races wouldn’t retreat once they started boarding. It was “take the ship or die trying” for most of the opponents involved here.
“Here they come,” Private Harris said flatly. Slater felt defeated. He was sitting with no thrust and no external weapons and had—with his last count—over fifty raiders and sixty other ships waiting to board. Still, he would not give up. His survival was seeming less and less likely, but his attention was fixed on the projected location of Task Force Vengeance. He would fight the enemy here, on his ship, with all the preparations for slaughter he had devised. He would fight here and buy the rest of his fleet the time they so desperately needed.
“Let them come. Here they will only find death,” Slater said.
— 28 —
The boarding hatch snapped open and a swarm of gnomes from the first raider vessel poured onto the Franklin. They didn’t pause and slowly clear his ship. Instead, they relied on numbers, speed, and aggression to win the day. It was obvious the gnomes were being pressured to move quickly by the queue of ships waiting to offload their own forces. Their haste made it even easier for Slater to draw first blood. Just inside the boarding hatch, a turret popped down from the ceiling, and the new and improved machine gun it mounted began tearing into the enemy with a continuous stream of fire. The heavy armor-piercing rounds easily defeated the simple protective suits worn by the gnomish boarders, and the explosive tips made nearly every hit a fatal one.
When the flow of enemies stopped and the remaining gnomes took cover behind the hatch coaming, Slater unveiled his next surprise. With the turret still chugging out rounds—the ammo storage for the weapon he
ld over ten thousand rounds—small panels opened in the ceiling and a pair of the upgraded blast rats dropped down. The gnomes were focused on avoiding the deadly turret fire and didn’t notice the two diminutive shapes scurrying past their feet. Slater could see out of the rats’ eyes as he guided them toward the large clusters of gnomes still waiting on the raider. Each rat detonated its two grenades, sending fragments of steel, bone, and flesh in all directions. Over a dozen boarders were scythed down, the explosions stunning several others who staggered back into the deadly fire the turret continued to unleash.
The gnomes must not have expected this much resistance to greet them. Their morale sapped; they broke and tried to re-board the raider. A gnome leader made an appearance, shouting at his soldiers to continue the assault. Half obeyed and turned back to the fight while the other half swarmed the gnomish officer, killing him as they retreated to their ship. The attackers the leader had rallied charged back into the boarding hatch area while bravely yelling their battle cries. All were cut down before they made it five steps into the Franklin. Shots were heard on the raider as the mutineers took over and detached the ship.
Mutiny had the same punishment across the galaxy, and the raider vessel had been underway for only seconds before fire from the rest of the council fleet blew it to pieces. While the enemy was distracted, Slater released three teams of construction drones onto the hull. One team was tasked with repairing the drive units, doing everything possible to mask their work. The other teams were tasked with getting some of the secondary batteries and point-defense weapons back into action. They were to strip material from the most heavily damaged weapons and use it to repair the others. With the enemy fleet focused on the boarding action, Slater felt that he had a good chance to get some weapons and thrust back.
Another raider then attached to the Franklin, its boarding team also rushing headlong into his guns. The turret alone was able to stall this ship’s attack, much like it had the first. The raider vessels typically held anywhere from sixty to eighty boarders; the first thirty seconds of action had killed over forty. A rousing speech from the leader of this boarding party got them moving again without a mutiny, allowing Slater’s turret to grind up the rest of the raider’s complement of troops. The raider’s flight crew must have been monitoring the fight and realized they would rather be elsewhere and detached, leaving the hatch clear for the next ship.
There was now a respectable pile of bodies in the boarding area, nearly blocking the entry. Slater couldn’t let all that salvage go to waste, so he ordered a group of drones to rush in and gather bodies and, more importantly at this point, weapons and gear for salvage. One of the drones was tasked with refilling the ammo hopper for the turret and repairing any damage that it might have sustained. So far, there had been no damage to the turret, but with all the ships waiting their turn to board, some gnome was going to get lucky eventually.
It took the gnomes three more raiders full of boarders before they got lucky. Some enterprising gnomish commander led the way with a volley of grenades, and a fragment from one happened to get lodged in the feeder mechanism for the turret, stopping its fire. Slater had planned for when the turret would be put out of action and his response went into effect. A pair of upgraded reapers clanked around the corner, their heavy machine guns laying down even more fire than the turret had. Also, Slater had been able to attach a grenade launcher underneath the reapers’ weapons. The grenade launchers coughed out the three grenades in their magazines, spacing their fire to get the best possible coverage.
The string of grenade blasts pushed the gnomes back to their vessel, and Slater ordered the reapers to press the attack, firing their main weapon and using the shield in their other hand to cover any vulnerable points. His reapers made it on board the raider just before the hatch closed and the ship detached. Upgraded signal booster tech allowed Slater to keep control of the reapers, directing them toward the bridge, where a half dozen unsuspecting gnomes looked on in horror as the reapers began to shower them and the entire bridge area with fire. The ship continued on the course it had laid in, one that led straight toward an orcish corvette. Not realizing the approaching raider was out of control, the orcs waited too long to try and get out of the way, and the vessels collided.
It wasn’t a bad return for Slater: two ships at the cost of only two reapers. He called up another pair of reapers from his reserve to take the place of the ones he had lost and waited for the next raider to approach. His repair drones had been working this entire time, fixing the defensive turret and gathering more salvage. The Franklin’s boarding area now resembled a slaughterhouse, and he ordered the drones to leave some of the bodies as an impediment to other boarders and to demoralize the enemy. Replacements for his lost reapers and blast rats were being printed up by drones on the third deck. So far, the supply of resources gathered from the gnomes was proving to be more than enough to replace his losses.
Seven more raiders boarded and were cut down like the others before the enemy tried something different. Slater had been expecting another raider to attach to his ship and figured the gnomes would unleash something like the death contraption thingy at some point. Instead of more gnomes, a trio of orcish corvettes cut in line as the next to board. Slater didn’t mind some variety, and the extra time the orcs took in muscling the gnomes out of the way enabled him to make further repairs topside and to top off the ammo supplies for the turret and reapers.
The orcish corvette’s boarding hatch banged open, and instead of a swarm of angry orcs flowing out, several canvas bags were thrown into the boarding compartment. Then the hatch on the orcish vessel sealed once more. The entire compartment seemed to heave as each bag exploded. The orcs had used satchel charges, a weapon from Earth’s past and something Slater hadn’t expected. Packing a large batch of high explosives into a bag that could be set or tossed at a fixed defensive point proved as effective now as it had in the past, and the blast stripped the turret from the ceiling. This time, there would be no easy repair between attacking waves for the turret.
Wasting no time, the orcs reopened their hatch and charged aboard. They wore heavier armor than the gnomes, and their laser rifles were larger and looked more modernized than the others he had seen. The orcs had been counting on the concussion of the blast to stun Slater’s reinforcements. Unfortunately for the orcs, reapers couldn’t be stunned. A pair of defenders scuttled around the corner and into the boarding compartment, weapons already spraying bursts of fire with the occasional grenade to liven things up. The orcs were up for a fight, returning fire and hardly faltering in their advance while taking tremendous losses to close with the reapers.
To slow their advance, Slater decided it was time to unleash some of his magic. Continuous magic blasts knocked the orcs off their feet and allowed his reapers to dominate the fight. A pair of orcs did eventually make it into melee range with the reapers, slinging their rifles and drawing various melee weapons. Thankfully, the armored reapers were hard to damage up close, and their bayonets proved more than a match for orcish fury. It also helped that the orcish corvette held far fewer crew than the stuffed-to-the-gills gnomish raiders could pack in. Only thirty-five orcs had boarded the Franklin, all of which were now piled in a bloody heap on the floor.
The next two orcish ships docked in turn, and their boarding parties met a similar fate as the first. The gnomes resumed their offensive after that, Slater and his MOBS easily handling the next two shiploads of attackers. Next, an orcish light cruiser docked to the Franklin. As the cruiser approached, Slater noticed that the other vessels had all closed in, not wanting to give up their chance to board. His construction bots had cobbled together repairs for two of the five-inch batteries and a single secondary laser battery. Both the railgun turrets had only one working weapon, the bent barrel of the second gun lending to the illusion that they were out of action. In addition to the three secondaries, he had a pair of point-defense railguns ready to engage.
With his unspoken command, e
ach of the weapons selected targets and began to fire. Confusion reigned among the tightly packed gnomish raiders and orcish ships waiting to board as railgun fire and beams began to hit them. A light cruiser was hulled by several railgun rounds, the shields collapsing under the combined fire. The point-defense guns both targeted one of the gnomish raiders, overloading the shields and digging into the vessel as multiple hits from the small weapons proved too much for the thinly armored ship.
The Franklin was able to fire off three volleys before the stunned council ships began to return fire. After three volleys, the light cruiser he had been targeting limped away, damaged but not out of the fight. The raider hit by the point-defense guns also was out of action, and each of his weapons sought out new targets. The incoming fire from the council fleet was intense but inaccurate. As Slater had hoped, much of the incoming fire missed as he activated a pair of maneuvering thrusters the drones had repaired.
He continued to evade as much as he could. His minor movement inadvertently brought several of the ships queued up to board into the line of fire of the ships positioned farther out. Normally, a fleet would have a protocol in place to avoid friendly fire, but the cobbled-together nature of the council’s armada gave Slater the impression they were not used to working as a unit. Unexpected maneuvers and frantic return fire did more damage than Slater’s repaired guns could have hoped to do on their own.
With the amount of incoming fire, it took only a short while before the enemy fleet was able to silence the Franklin’s guns once more. The light cruiser attached to his ship had cast off, trying to evade fire and failing at this task. All told, Slater’s guns had taken out a light cruiser, an orcish corvette, and three of the gnomish raiders. The friendly fire had seen to the light cruiser that was attempting to board and another three raiders.
“Slater, I grow tired of your games and your pathetic attempts to avoid your inevitable defeat. We come for you now, and nothing you can do will stop us,” the troll from the kill team said over an open channel. Slater could see no purpose in replying; bantering back and forth would achieve nothing at this point.