by Florian Nagy
Chapter 11
The Vigilante’s weapons array drew in power allocated from the ship’s system. Its outward sections came to life and gleamed dully blue. After a second, their color intensified and a forceful discharge of polarized energy was released. The beam sliced across the thin matter of the nebula, exciting the few particles that populated the area of space immediately beside or inside the beam. The nebula was denser than regular space, which has particles spread out at great distances, but was still extremely sparse.
The task force was now upon the enemy fleet. All six ships rapidly decreased power to their engines and came to a slow drift, spreading out and encircling their adversaries. Their weapons launched ray after ray of destructive energy upon their targets.
The raiders had had only a few minutes to detect the oncoming fleet and deduce their purpose. The flagship was still drawing power from its core to become battle ready. It had been semi-adrift, in a power-economic mode, and served only its purpose as base of operations and hangar while not needed. It had now scrambled furiously to reactivate all its hull reinforcements and to awaken its ancient weapons arrays from their slumber. Its engines were powered as well, and it began to turn in order to be able to engage the enemies. Swarms of assault craft erupted from its hangar bay. They filled the space in front of it and started rushing forward in a menacing cloud, vehemently preparing to engage the attackers. There were a handful of slightly larger, threadbare ships in the vicinity that also started moving to form their own line of war against their enemy. They arrayed themselves and returned fire.
The Vigilante’s beam made contact with an assault craft, the forward side of which was seared and split into two sections. Blue energy momentarily struck through the ship’s hull, whose integrity had been compromised, and it was ripped apart in one motion as its insides burst open the walls. The void outside immediately sucked out all the loose items in the craft, and the atmosphere inside it created a small explosion of junk. The two disjointed parts were sent flying in opposite directions, spinning violently from the force of the expelled air.
The Vigilante’s right weapons battery fired again, but the opposing pilot’s velocity was too erratic and quick for the computer to accurately target, and so the beam missed its target and fired into empty space. It took a split second for the computer to quickly observe the ship’s movement and to calculate its probable location after the instant it would take the weapon to fire. The system was state of the art, but large weapons arrays nonetheless took time to fire, and this gave up just a small fraction of a second to calculation and probability. An object travelling in a line, a curve, or a changing but repetitive trajectory could easily have its location in the near future extrapolated. The computer would then fire the weapon in that direction, providing a clean hit.
A skilled fighter pilot, operating a small maneuverable ship could, however, evade these shots for quite a while. By making sure he kept his flight path ever changing and as random as possible, he could avoid the computer’s lock on him. He had to make sure to constantly change his strategy though, because if he were to start giving loops to his assault vector, the computer could catch on, and at the very least graze and disable the ship. It was a nerve-wracking way to fight, immensely more energy consuming and mentally demanding than calmly sitting at the bridge of a large warship, simply choosing targets and making sure that all systems were running and following tactical maneuvers.
If ships were shooting at a small group of fighters, the bonus agility provided by the small ship size would be severely reduced. A swarm of ships must move with much less agility and much less initiative than a single ship. One person can come up with maneuvers and spontaneous turns to avoid detection, due to the randomness and creativity of the mind. When a group of ships has the interest to move as one, they become one. They must fly similar patterns in order to avoid collision with each other. The swarm is then easily targeted, and even though the specific ship being tracked and aimed at is not shot, the beam can strike close-by, probably hitting several ships at once along its length.
That is why fighter swarms always fought as amorphous, shapeless groups. They would spread out and engage the enemy, then dive back together for just a moment to concentrate fire, and then fly out again in all directions, greatly thinning out their concentration, and thus their chance of being hit.
Larger ships such as the frigates of the Imperium and other fleets could not afford the luxuries of such maneuverability. The inertia of the sheer mass of such a ship would severely compromise the integrity of the ship’s hull, if not destroy it, if the ship was to be constantly stopping, accelerating, and turning in all directions in three dimensions. Thus, as a ship’s size increased, its mobile role in battle decreased. It steadily became a drifting vessel that had to be fitted with heavily reinforced hull to withstand a lot of damage in battle and with large weapons arrays for delivering great force to the opposing large ships. They were also fitted with several smaller weapons to deal with the smaller assault craft. The super-carriers of the EIF, which heralded the fleet in its great historic battles, barely moved at all after coming out of hyperspace. They merely stood in one place, spitting out waves of fighters and firing long range weapons and missiles.
The swarm had now reached the group of six ships, and it passed through them like a wave. Some ships immediately turned left or right to begin a second attack, some carried out their path further, whereas some flew upwards or downwards. The Defender’s guns shot rapidly and deadly as they visibly moved with each shot. Burst after burst came from the enemy swarm. The EIF’s line of war continued to expand, which gave all ships more shooting room, making sure they didn’t have to withhold shots because the computer calculated it would hit one of their own vessels.
The enemy swarm continued their attack vehemently. They collapsed in on each other, expanded, and then attacked again. They opened gaps and then folded in upon them again in order to weave a continuous web around their attackers. They flew from ship to ship, but it became apparent that they had begun to concentrate fire on the EFS Mirage.
The enemy line of frigates had also come within combat distance and had begun firing their weapons. The raiders’ ships began emitting their own dense beams of energy at the task force. Their light-blue rays of light struck hard on the hulls of the ships, beginning to fry out their reinforcements. After a few moments of a scattering display of firepower, the Ameerian ships had communicated with each other. They turned and faced inwards and closed in their fire upon the Mirage. The concentrated barrage of damage drained the ship’s resources quickly.
“Request backup! Get these ships off of us!” a voice spoke from the Mirage. Trein and the other four ships were still engaged with the assault craft around them. The Defender turned slowly and reenergized its weapons. “Fleet, target the centermost ship of the line, aim primarily for its weapon arrays.”
The Mirage withdrew slowly backwards out the line while the two ships to its right closed in leftwards to cover its place as they faced the opposing frigates. The Vigilante, Keeran, and Defender turned rightwards, from the left side, and commenced the counter-attack. The solid blue beams erupted from the five ships at almost the same time, creating five glowing contact beams for a few seconds. The vibrant energy discharged upon the lower half of the front of the opposing ship.
The front of its short, rectangular shape crackled and crunched in upon itself after glowing brightly in defiance for a few seconds. The beams dissipated, and the ship’s bottom half remained a charred, destroyed block. The Defender fired its dual mounted beams directly between the weapons array section and the upper half. The two beams made contact, and the ship’s anterior was crumpled and forced inwards. There was a momentary crackle and flash of energy around the ship, and then, with its hull compromised, the ship exploded, releasing all of its contents to the outside. The atmosphere in the ship flew outwards and thinned out into the nebula.
The ships fired continuously at the other r
aider frigates. Beams of energy flew back and forth, but the poorly fabricated raider ships could withstand much less punishment and so gave way more quickly.
Two more ships had been neutralized and destroyed; their hulks were drifting away silently. A third was now consumed by an electrical fire that ate away its side. The Imperium ships’ turrets fired continuously, hunting down the fighter craft. They loosened their formation and arranged themselves in a large pseudo-wall. The electrical fire aboard the raider frigate was aggravated with a final bolt of energy from the Vigilante. The ship was pierced and exploded in a dazzling display of blue and yellow.
“Hull reinforcements are out of power. We are losing hull strength,” the Mirage reported. Swarms of fighters were flying in and out of its left side, puncturing a hole in it. The hull started to buckle under the force. The Imperium’s ships turned and returned fire to deal with the threat.
The Ameerian pilots were much too dedicated. Seeing the fate of the battle all but sealed, with almost half their fighters gone and only two frigates remaining, they tried to cause as much damage as possible. Their energy discharges crashed onto the hull of the ship, and it twisted apart.
The contents of the room within the wall surged outwards from the immense difference in pressure. The fighters launched missiles into the gap, and the ship started to crumble from the inside. Shouts and loud crashes were heard on the communication stream from the Mirage. It fired as many shots as it could into the swarm surrounding it. Scans revealed that half of the interior was destroyed, and a large part of the exterior was visibly destroyed as well.
The ship fired its emergency engines and flew a quick path into the heart of the fighters. It managed to catch a few ships on its hull and crush them on its way. They tore holes through the hull of the ship, and its interior broke apart. The other ships executed emergency maneuvers and flew away before the Mirage’s engines were affected and the small portion of antimatter was destroyed. It created a strong blast that obliterated all of the ship. Several fighters were caught in the explosion as it expelled matter in all directions. Bits of material rained heavily on all the ships around it. The attack fleet turned upon the raiders with renewed vigor.
Space was ablaze with the vivid crossfire, but the superior ships of the Imperium had clearly consolidated their upper hand. They dispatched the rest of the frigates and then spread out to finish the fighters. All ships had exhausted their energy reserves, and the Defender IV had already reported two hull breaches. These were quickly sealed with emergency airlocks that closed over affected sections of the ship.
The computer had drawn a calculation of the total casualties incurred. There had been fifty-five deaths from the Mirage, and a total of thirty six from the other ships. Darius had suffered only four upon his own ship, from a blast from a broken power transfer conduit. That was too much, he thought. This was not a war or a skirmish, simply a raider clean up. All conflicts suffered casualties, but the numbers should have been low against such unprepared adversaries. The defining factor, he thought, was the unexpected presence of the large ships. They had not counted on finding large frigate chassis vessels.
Captain Trein’s thoughts followed a similar route. Maybe it had not been worth the results to launch the attack as planned. A few reinforcement ships could have surely been spared, and would have reduced the casualty count if not even saved the EFS Mirage. There would have been too long a wait though. The ships had flown all the way to the edge of colonized space to fight this fight. More ships would have taken again so long. This pack of pirates, which was clearly organized and significant, would have been able to escape and grow even larger until they resurfaced or were dug up again. The harassment against Tyrll would not have abated. But, did the ends justify the means?
He turned his attention back to the battle. Only a few raiders still flew through the battle zone. They had given up and were starting to kamikaze into the remaining frigates. The EFS Freelancer took the brunt of the assault. Its bottom left engine was rendered immobile, and several of its components were compromised or destroyed. When the number of enemy fighters had almost dwindled out, it reported more than half of its crew compliment deceased.
The raider flagship had started preparing itself for a hyperspace escape during the last phase of the attack. It closed its hangar bay and all extended parts and deactivated its weapons. Its power core was running smoothly, and it was moving away from the epicenter of the battle.
Darius Targen had noted its state. Only one wave of attack had been thrown upon the flagship; it had not been a severe threat in the battle and so it had been left almost ignored. It now took advantage of its almost complete state and moved away from the battle. The Vigilante immediately gave pursuit. The other ships came together and started firing upon it.
Their beams struck hard upon the flagship’s hull. It reverberated with the vibrant discharges of energy. Its power flew through its walls, dulling the incoming damage with diminishing capability. “Concentrate fire on aft engines!” Trein shouted desperately at his crew. The flagship’s engines shone brightly for a second, and then it vanished off the screen.