Chapter 388 - Far Future Ch. 98 – The Saber Strikes! (1/2)

Tabitha's enemy fleet had come into realspace first. The additional data locked down the arrival of the second fleet to within a one second margin of error, and Tiffany was shooting forwards to the spread point at maximum thrust, while all the capacitors on the ship were charged to the fullest.

Ahead of them, space roiled, writhed, and vomited itself open. Streaks of light were disgorged into realspace, and the area ahead of and around them was suddenly filled with dozens of motherships and scores of escort craft.

Captain Tiffany painted the targets for her crews, and the plasma cannons, torpedo launchers, and needle beams went off with searing precision, blazing with the coruscant power of mass-infused Sun Shots.

Analytical engines had devoured the ship data from Captain Tabitha and deduced the probable layouts of key ship systems and places on the living bioships. The Bared Saber lit up, and cut.

Shining torpedoes plunged into escort craft to either side, punched through their ablative hulls, and detonated massively. Plasma lances coursed out, split open transmetallic hides, and found the psychically-controlled power cores of four different vessels. Piercing needle beamers stabbed out shining strands of the sun, like golden hairs as they punched into smaller bioships and out the far side, and great beating hearts of atomic fury were sliced apart as they passed.

The main ram was already powered. The Bared Saber plunged in, the prow of the ship proudly curved in a cutting arc of rune-carved adamantine tempered by science, alchemy, and artifice to the limits possible, and the ship rose into the startled path of the lead mothership, six times the length of the incoming cruiser and barely able to react as the Coronal ship came in with its bow ablaze with Nimbus energies from over one hundred psions and a slicing prow ram over a hundred feet tall.

The mothership was miles long, and its hide was thick, but not that thick. The bioorganic mass split aside like wet tofu under the space-shredding edge of the prow, and hundreds of thousands of tons of ship drove along the xenos mothership's backside. The creature-vessel was huge and mighty, but their relative velocities meant that the actual ramming was over and done within seconds. The blazing prow erupted out the backside of the creature, gore and blood spraying wildly in its wake, while the fusion fire from its thrusters baked everything within the bioship in the fires of the sun. Whatever the invaders used for air ignited wildly green and yellow behind them, and the mothership burned.

Captain Tiffany burned the maneuvering jets as the engineers blew their Focuses to double the conductivity of the power feeds and recharge the guns. The main cannon aligned, and the railgun fired its glowing load.

The next mothership's shields crackled up and stripped off the secondary Sun Shot laid onto it by the forty gunners serving the cannon. The empowered Runes on the durasteel were unaffected as it smashed into one of the great glowing eyes of the beast at a tenth the speed of light, punched through bone as hard as adamantine, hit the inner skeleton and framework of the beast, and proceeded to fracture and drop its kinetic energy violently in all directions. Shards of metal moving at many miles per seconds pureed the forward and middle quarters of the bioship, and the mothership convulsed as durasteel shards bounced around wildly inside it, and tore its organs and passengers to shreds.

The port-side plasma lances came online as the second string of torpedoes launched. Psychokinetic shields, void barriers, and spatial shunts were crackling to life everywhere around the biofleet, but that was the job of the lances. They speared out into those shields, bent and sheared into the psionic energy control, and the glowing torpedoes shot through the gaps and into the hulls of the bioships that were finally starting to target this unexpected attacker.

Four more bioships blew apart in antiproton fire, an extremely cost-efficient use of torpedoes.

The first bioplasma charges began to reach out, and psychic nets and arcs began to discharge between the ships of the fleet in a deadly net. The diviners read the motions and facing of the ships, Insight bonuses giving up to a six-second advantage on where the bolts would pass by, were fed into Tiffany and inspired a dance of maneuvering jets as the engineers poured bursts of their Coronas into the machinery humming around them, and let it sing as it only ever had in test runs.

Needle beams stabbed out, severing tendrils exuding those arcs of power at key moments, opening holes. Biospores spewed out like railgun-launched boulders filled the void around them, the ship's kinetic shields and gravity warps sliding them around the ship proper, point-defense cannons unleashing ten Sun Shots a second from the gunner teams to blow apart the ones actually threatening the ship.

Third salvo, fourth, and the Bared Saber broke through the mass of the fleet, 'above' and behind them as they swept past, and hundreds of spinal guns and arcs tried to track the ship as the psychic energy flared over it in spatial-shifting displays, giving the bioships dozens of targets to unload on as the Saber pulled away. A coruscating web of shield tech converged on the triple engines behind it, condensing down the fusion fire of his exhaust into a long, blazing conduit of the full power of the ship's power core, and the arc the ship took flashed that saber beam across four escorts and ended amidships a mothership, boring into its head as its shields blazed wildly around it, and filled it with a small sun.

The Bared Saber hit the edge of the bigger ships' gravity well, exited tactical range, and went to Jamming speed with a roar of fire and triumph.

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It took only minor juking at this speed to foil all trailing fire, and they were outside of range of any non-psionic weapons within ten seconds, energy weapons even sooner.

”Damage report,” she said, as the triumphant crescendo thrumming in the Saber's Markspace slowly faded to an anticipatory, heavy beat.

Expenditures of ammunition and energy reserves coursed through her, hull contact from incidental fire being cleaned up by the damage control crews jetting outside before the organic growths could wreak any harm, or any living loads they carried recover enough from the impact to do damage and get inside. Several of the point-defense cannons were being retasked to lower-power hull-sweeping for just that purpose.

There were light biocraft in pursuit, crystalline wings glowing, abdomens shining with atomic fire as they winged in pursuit.