Star Force: Canderous (SF16)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  Seeming to suggest that the shot was merely a test of range, the enemy cruiser fired several more bolts in sequence, all but one of which hit the destroyer. The third in the continuous salvo penetrated the shields and kissed the Herculium hull…then the others ripped/melted it apart one after another.

  The destroyer twisted around, trying to spread out the hull damage as well as to bring intact portions of the shield into play. The tactic only worked as a delaying measure, for the unending stream of plasma bolts did not relent. What was left of the shield matrix completely collapsed, exposing all of the destroyer’s armored hull to the incoming plasma. Once it ate through the protective plates it cored the ship, hollowing out the interior through a series of explosions to leave a more or less intact shell that began to fall behind as its engines were no longer existent.

  The lizards didn’t let up and continued to pound the remains until it fell out of range, then continued on out of the micro-system as the pack-like Ninja Monkey fleet loomed ever closer out ahead, fighting for speed so the target wouldn’t zip right by them.

  Instead it altered course to port, causing the Clan ships to have to redeploy and scatter their formation. First contact was made by four corvettes that had superior speed to the enemy cruiser and were able to readjust quicker to the new heading. One was killed on approach by the green plasma orbs, but the other three were able to get inside their own plasma range and fired off small streaks into the enemy’s shields.

  A second corvette was destroyed before a destroyer joined the party, firing at range with its rail gun on an approach that the corvettes deliberately avoided so as to allow the support fire. As the third corvette met its death one of the rail gun slugs got through the shields and hit the hull, doing moderate damage given that part of the kinetic energy had already been bled off. None the less, the surviving corvette noted the position of the shield impact and poured plasma into the wound.

  The destructive ‘raindrop’ fell into the crater on the hull and melted into it, carving it a bit deeper and smoothing out some of the narrow edges. A second drop fell nearby and cut another divot into the hull before the last corvette was killed, but by then two more ships had come within rail gun range and were spitting metallic shards at the enemy, who once again altered course, throwing off their aim.

  The closer destroyer fell in behind the ship and accelerated for all it was worth, inching up from behind and firing away with its larger plasma cannons. The target, it seemed, didn’t have a large battery capable of covering the aft arc, though more scattershot appeared, most of which dissipated before it even got to the destroyer’s shields.

  One blue streak after another shot out at the lizard cruiser, most of which hit the aft shields but were too dissipated to do much damage. The destroyer kept draining what energy out of them it could while a few more lucky rail gun slugs hit the target, all but one of which deflected off the shields.

  The one struck the weakened area where the corvette’s plasma had hit the hull. The matrix covering it was still replenishing and very, very thin. The slug punched through it like it wasn’t even there and delivered the first solid strike against the enemy, breaking through the armored coating and penetrating into the interior of the ship with a gush of atmosphere flying back out before internal bulkheads sealed off the breached areas.

  As if stung by a bee, the cruiser killed its forward thrust and wheeled about, heading directly for the larger Ninja Monkey ships shooting at it from outside its plasma range. It closed the gap quickly, flying in a curved trajectory that no Star Force ship could match, throwing off the rail gun targeting and keeping any more from hitting before it got within plasma range of the ambushing ships and leveled off, unleashing a torrent from multiple cannons spaced out across the bottom face of the hull, which it deliberately tilted towards the Ninja Monkey gunners.

  Normally that would have been fatal mistake, giving the rail guns such a wide target, but for the cruiser it gave four plasma cannon turrets lines of fire and the enemy ship began savaging the Star Force warships. Their thin shields held for mere seconds, maybe a salvo or two if they were spaced out, then the green plasma began eating at their hulls as they fired desperately in return, scattering in multiple directions but not moving fast enough to avoid the speed of the plasma, which was at least twice that of their own cannons.

  The Ninja Monkeys did make them pay for the bold attack, getting several plasma salvos of their own off, as well as some close in rail gun shots before those batteries were destroyed. The bottom half of the cruiser took extensive damage, but most the docked raider ships were on the top half and safe from the attack.

  The smaller and faster Clan ships were able to flank the cruiser, taking damage as they went. Two corvettes began attacking at the knife edge of the ship while a frigate crossed over and targeted the top side…only to be hit by the large cannons in place there, getting off just three plasma shots before being destroyed. The dorsal shields held on the cruiser, but the rim damage the corvettes were inflicting began to add up and a few got through weakened shields enough to destabilize the ventral areas enough that three sections of the shield cover on the cruiser’s bottom half completely went down, though there were few Ninja Monkey ships remaining to exploit that weakness.

  The corvettes blasted away at the rim at point blank range, trying to stay out of the firing arcs of the main cannons until the bigger ship twisted about faster than they could adjust. They took the brunt of the plasma attacks at their most concentrated and lethal efficiency, with the explosive results shredding the smaller ships. Unlike the others at range, their Herculium armor didn’t hold up to the explosive destruction, allowing the small warships to pop like piñatas when the massive amount of plasma ate through to the densely packed interior of the unmanned warships.

  Back in the Canderian command center the expressions on the Archons’ faces were bleak. The enemy ship had just torn through 13 of their own and was still intact and heading out away from the planet…a fact which they could now verify, given that the target had begun to show up on sensor scans during the battle.

  “Anders,” Harrison said after a long moment of silence. “Keep a ship close so we can track it.”

  “I’ve got three on the way,” he said, looking at the marker on the hologram as it continued to accelerate away from the planet.

  “We’ll need an escort on the jumpline from Alpha Centauri to protect the next jumpship,” Mara pointed out.

  “3 weeks?” Jaime asked.

  “And then at least 8 more before we can get any reinforcements,” Harrison said, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully. “Priority defense should go to the jumpships, then shipyards. If they go in atmosphere we can organize a defense on the ground, but we can’t let our ships get spread out again. Only a fleet action is going to be able to stand up against that.”

  “Where do you suppose they’re heading?” Raines asked, still watching the hologram.

  Harrison glanced at the Arc Tribune, but Anders answered him first.

  “How many more of them are out there, you mean? If they’re running back to their buddies we’ll find them…unless they can get that hull damage patched up to evade our sensors.”

  “You think it was the armor?” Jaime asked. “Not some countermeasure?”

  “The ship is reading like a corvette, so I’d say we’re just picking up the surface damage, which means something is still shielding the rest of the hull, so my money’s on the armor.”

  “Good point,” Harrison granted. “Calculate their current track. Let’s see how coy they’re playing this.”

  The Canderians punched up the navigation program with ease and had a lazy arc around the system’s central star marked on the now system-wide hologram…no planets or moons intersected it, nor did any even come close.

  “So much for that,” Mara commented.

  “Guess we have to wait and see,” Anders said, watching the icons for his ship trail the enemy, keeping it within their sensor range but well
outside of weapons. At the moment they didn’t want to provoke another attack, just follow and observe.

  Four days later those three ships did come under attack, but not from the ship they were trailing. Two more enemy cruisers, sensor ghosts as far as telemetry was concerned, jumped the leading ship and destroyed it before the controllers knew what was happening, thanks to the signal lag of being so far out from the planet. The other two were far enough back that they were able to go evasive, one flying off at a 90 degree angle to their flight path while the other one accelerated hard forward, increasing speed and blowing by the two new contacts. Given that the ship was a frigate its maneuvering speed was greater and it was able to outrun its pursuit, drawing them away from the larger destroyer escaping off to the side.

  The frigate amassed enough speed to catch up to and overshoot the damaged cruiser, passing far ahead of it before a mass of contacts lit up its sensor screen. The just updated combat protocols in the frigate automatically returned fire before the sensor telemetry even made it back to Corneria, targeting the incoming fighters with high powered lachar cupolas…a combination laser and charged particle weapon that fired at light speed, but they didn’t pack enough punch to take one out with a single hit so the frigate was quickly overwhelmed and picked to death by the fighters’ small plasma cannons.

  The more distant destroyer succeeded in escaping, but within two hours of running from the enemy its signal winked out, having been caught and destroyed by one of the carrier/bases before it could even begin its slingshot trajectory around the sun to return to Corneria.

  Upon a detailed review of the frigate’s sensors and visuals, transmitted back live and bounced around the system via relays, the source of the fighters was located and then magnified as much as possible, resolving into a blurry image calculated to be more than 15 kilometers long and at least 3 kilometers wide. Indistinct as it was, the brief visual made one fact abundantly clear.

  The enemy had a jumpship insystem.