Chapter 400 - Far Future Ch. 110 – And the Aliens Love us Back (1/2)

-Colos is an effing moron,- Captain Tiffany Rantha /huffed, and Anatolia sent just a twinkle of a :rollseyes: back.

Happily, Anatolia also had the other mental gifts of a Rantha in the form of high mental Stats and enhanced emotional understanding and finely refined instincts. So, she had long perused the personality profiles of the Fleet commanders, provided by certain nameless shadowy parties, made her assessments, and filtered them past sisters really, really good at mucking with people's heads. She had then altered her plans to account for the fact that Admiral Colos was an authoritarian gloryhound happy to see the whole Fleet pounded to hamburger and scrap if it meant he could live to get away with an awesome battle report of doing all he could.

As a result, there'd been some battle group requests and assignments, and the somewhat more heroic and admiring of the Fleet captains, who'd been open to working with this crazy Coronal, had Marked gunners and Signals people feeding in a very current and seconds-more accurate positioning and targeting feed than the other ships in the fleet.

Seconds meant a lot in space combat. It allowed convergences of fire, dodging enemy fire, coordinated assaults and withdrawals, more accurate positioning, and all the like.

The enemy was trying to do the same, what with the mass telepathy from those huge ships, but the ether was alive with just as much psionic disruption as gravity wells and EMP distortions, and their coms weren't any faster or surer than standard Fleet systems as a result. The Markspace feeding data back and forth was giving them an edge Anatolia could exploit, and so when the mysterious master tactician was giving out orders, the captains who paid attention and followed them were having great success on both ends.

Which didn't help the rest of the battlefield, which had turned into a messy, chaotic slugfest of alien ships and raging imperial guns, with all the soup of sensor feeds and psychic static turning space into a real killzone.

Some ships were working well together, some were arrogantly taking the lead for kills and credits, and some were getting pounded and battered and beat to shit by selfless, obedient bioships without egos perfectly happy to sacrifice themselves to wipe their attackers, and coordinate to do just that.

There were bioships burning in nuclear fire, and wrecked metal hulks tumbling and disintegrating through space, blasted by arcs of biolightning and plasma vomit, pummeled by spore cannons, and torn apart from within by xenosym raiders they hadn't been able to repulse. Some were unlucky enough to come to grips with a ship and had actually been crushed and mangled by massive tentacles, or even chewed on while boarding spikes directly injected limitless numbers of xenos into the ship.

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Sun Shot breacher rounds slammed into the Shark-class midsize bioship in front of her, and Tiffany pulled out, point defenses dealing with the volley of boarding spores while the Saber's shields counter-resonated the field of bio-lightning thrown in front of them, shattered the electrokinetic grip on it, and turned it into normal free electrons which the magnetic ramscoops sucked in greedily and applied towards the plasma cannons with cheery goodwill.

As she veered off, the converging lasers and plasma cannon rounds from the four Fleet ships trailing her punched through the hole she'd made and into the ship beyond with split-second timing that should not have worked in such a battle scene. The lasers opened up the holes, the plasma rounds went within and detonated with fourth state of matter fun, and another bioship convulsed in its death throes.

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Anatolia's alert that the remnants of the first Swarm were swooping in to flank the Fleet forces was not welcome news, and Tiffany and her squadron were turning even before it was relayed through the Fleet, since the approach vector clearly indicated those ships were coming this way. The Reserve Fleet was coming in behind them, but would certainly not be able to intercept for at least twenty minutes, restrictions to their Jamming speed and all.

Obviously the Swarm-mind had registered the unusual performance of her and her short squadron. It hadn't been able to get any performance data about exactly how she was killing stuff, as the targets were dying messily rather quickly, but it was still pretty clear that it wasn't slowing her down much, and her damage output was considerably higher than her damage taken, especially for the size of her vessel.

Torpedoes were being launched repeatedly and in force as the trailing Widow's Bite tracked the converging enemy fleet closely, keeping their vector locked on, and repeated computations of the erratic gravity wells current. Where the two converged together is where the incoming bioships would appear, and that location is where the torpedoes were heading.

They hadn't learned the lesson about coming out of warp and stuff being there to greet them, or perhaps just the slaughter of that ground station wiping them out was fresh in their minds. Here, past the orbit of Janus II and only a few light-minutes from III, there weren't any floating asteroids, meteors, comets, or debris to hide such nasty surprises behind, and surely the forces concerned wouldn't be able to pay too much attention to an attack coming in from a new vector.

Ten different ships, including those engaged with other bioships actively, still managed to contribute a few torpedoes to the cause. Only the extra four in her squadron were able to deploy to greet them, building up power and charging guns for that first initial hit which had to save them all.

Tiffany slid into medium-range and turned broadside, the crew locked in focus, and Nimbus effects flaring up and ready on all the guns as capacitors screamed and were ready to be loosed.

Blurs of ships at Jamming speed flashed in, hit the gravity well, and decelerated to standard kinetics.

Fifty torpedoes flashed past the Bared Saber in fiery streaks, and her cannons blazed like stars, one after another in series in under three seconds. The breacher rounds slammed into the forward psychokinetic fields of a dozen vessels and ripped them open to greet the incoming torpedoes.

The First Swarm ran head-on into fusion eruptions in the void, repeated two and three times, and psychic death roars rippled through the ether and secondary explosions lit off to accompany the bombardment.

Tiffany heard the engineers shifting the Nimbus effects to the conductors and heat dumps, could feel the massive venting of the overheated cannons taking place as she kicked in the fusion drive and moved hard laterally to the incoming bioships, spinning over to present her other side and the rail guns requiring a lot less power there, also with preloaded breacher rounds ready to go.