Chapter 401 - Far Future Ch 111 – Break it up, Break it Up... (1/2)

A jet-black ship, quiet as a ghost, even its drives baffled and barely visible, slid past his windows, passing within fifty yards of both bioship and dreadnought. Precise saber beams hissed out, and the multitudes of organic cables, psi-enhanced and stronger than steel, were snipped off as cleanly and clearly as trimming a rosebush.

”Fire port pressors! Fire port cannons!” Admiral Colos screamed into the coms, as the black ship rippled and faded away into nothing.

Pressor beams licked out, and drove the massive bulk of the mothership and the dreadnought mutually apart. As they did, all the remaining guns that could fire opened up at point-blank range, from inside its shields.

A solid wall of explosions danced down the side of the mothership, shoving it even further away as rippling waves of flesh coursed back and forth over it, somehow managing to absorb the devastating impact without significant injury, it was so massive. Three of its four engines mangled, the crippled Glory to Dawn could only attempt to increase the distance, pitting pressors against gravikinetics and massive TK to hold the bulky Xenos mothership off while desperate crews loaded the cannons and fought the fires and spore carriers that had dropped xenosyms throughout the two-thousand-meter length of his ship.

”Glory to Dawn, this is the Bared Saber. Hold all fire for ten seconds, please,” the distinct voice of the Coronal Captain Tiffany came over the coms. She managed to sound airy and distracted even in the middle of a battle.

What? Where was she? What was she planning to do? ”Hold all fire until my Mark!” Colos' voice rang out, and the shooting and even the pressor beams going out came to an eerie halt. The enemy ship was growing rapidly, the miles of forced distance shrinking back again quickly.

A white blur shining like the sun came in from forwards and slid right along the mothership's hull, slicing along the site of the initial furious barrage from just moments ago, and split open that massive hull-hide like opening up a rotten tomato, before jetting off and beyond them and was gone from sight in seconds.

”Glory, you may resume fire,” the airy voice informed them lightly.

”All cannons, fire at will!” he shouted, staring at the massive, gaping wound sliced through the length of the enemy ship, giving his ship and her very experienced gunners clear targets to vent their ire upon.

The next momentous discharge of cannon fire didn't have to eat away at the hull to get to the real stuff inside, and the heavy cannons did horrible things to the innards of the mothership before it could rotate the massive wound away and out of their line of fire. Whole sections of scabrous biolightning emitters and glowing plasma-vomiting orifices went dark as fusion fire erupted throughout the insides of the hull, and he saw two squadrons of bombers peeling over as the mothership was rotating away to take advantage of the target. Their shouts of excitement as they swooped into line with the spinning monstrous gash and let loose their loads at point-blank range were electrifying.

Small suns blew that gash open and out, and the mothership shuddered in its death throes. His pilots were already attempting to maneuver opposite the rotation of the creature, and greet the wound as it came from the other side, rotating the ship to take the discharges still coming from the mothership on multiple shields to lighten the load. As the burning gash came around, the Glory to Dawn's eager guns came into line as well...

----

Admiral Colos clenched his fist as the Glory's guns pounded the hulking mass of the mothership into flaming, actinic ruin. Still, his engines were offline, and his ship was crippled. Their Jamming speed would be crippled, and the handful of light-minutes to Janus Prime was now nearly two hours away.

He kept one eye on the fighting and one on the battle results, and winced despite himself. Over half of the ships of the Fleet were gone. Normally, losing a crew didn't actually mean much, as the ship could be salvaged, rebuilt, and recrewed for much less than building it anew. But the way the xenosyms devoured the crew and strengthened themselvar meant they had to be denied any biomass, and so suicide explosions to take the biovores out with them once they closed meant absolute losses of both the crew and the far more precious vessels.

This battle would cripple the strength of the Imperial Fleet in this system for years, if not decades.

And it wasn't like there were reinforcements coming. Two neighboring systems were already in the middle of fights, one from raiders and internal revolution of Warp fanatics, and the other being constantly harried by a strong Goblin presence that was simply ruining all the outer defenses and mining settlements of the system in haphazard, yet enthusiastic manner. Any spare strength the Fleet could give them was already assigned.

If the Reserve Fleet hadn't somehow been activated so fast, they would have been wiped. He watched the deft movements of the force, the clear precision in movements and tactics of a truly united force, and felt a sour feeling pulling up from his belly as they moved precisely, in tight formations and unified purpose, to clear out the rest of the remaining bioships who had not wisely turn and run.

They had only given him perfunctory notice with their hails, claiming static and uncertain communications, and clearly having no desire to stop what they were doing to chat with him.

Whoever was in command of their tactics was a genius. He watched the disciplined rotation of the shooters, the subtle ebbs and flows of position that drew the bioships this way and that, and the way small openings exploded into major cracks and opportunities seized on with the ferocity of sharks eager to hunt.

Whoever was manning those Reserve ships were performing like blooded veterans of a dozen campaigns, and as they scissored and split the remaining bioships. He kept one eye on both their execution of classic flanking and broadside tactics, and some of the most subtle positioning and overlaying maneuvering he had ever seen. The bioships seemed more like willing partners into a deadly dance then the aggressive, fortified creatures that had wiped half his fleet from existence, and crippled virtually all the rest.

Just who were these captains? He pulled up their names and battle records... and just stared.

Fresh Academy graduates on their first commands?!?