FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Hearth Star: The Battle for Iron Pecs

By Psion

All Rights Reserved

As her crew rested and tried to avoid getting into too much trouble over the next few days, Commander Longfoot found herself being involved as plans were drawn up and assignments were issued. The pear-shaped Lapeen was surprised at first to find that she and her crew were being temporarily reassigned from the Silver Pantry to a commandeered Crown of Thorns flying the digital livery of the GalRep navy. The humans had managed to repair the pirate warship and reprogram the Identify Friend or Foe system. A move that would help keep the humans’ new warship from being accidentally destroyed by friendly forces when they tried to use it. ‘Tried’ being the operative word as the humans suffered from a shortage of experienced sailors to capable of crewing combat vessels. Subsequently Longfoot and her crew were being granted command of the Crown of Thorns and a handful of the less experienced human sailors. Blackman’s more experienced sailors were sent to a handful of smaller frigates that had been in dry dock since the GalRep military made first contact with the humans. Once all ships were ready, they were to move out and meet up with several other Space Fleet vessels in mid-flight then attack the Wuff ship breaker yards at Iron Pecs. Having received her orders, Bael summoned her crew and began preparations. This was going to be interesting and not just because of their destination…

As her crew boarded the Crown of Thorns and became acquainted with its systems, the GalRep sailors found themselves wishing the humans had been able to spend a little more time refitting it. Longfoot grunted and grumbled softly as she squeezed her abundant backside into Captain Alyssa’s command chair, the fixture groaning in audible agony as it accommodated a girth roughly twice as wide as the taller Amazonian space pirate. And as she looked around, Longfoot realized most of her crew had chosen to stand rather then struggle with the puny Gladius furniture like the chair her broad bottom was currently beating into submission. That was the only real downside to this assignment; the human shipwrights hadn’t made it a priority to change the fittings to something more accommodating of a proper GalRep figure. At least the human sailors assigned to them weren’t having similar difficulties… at least not yet they didn’t; Bael was determined to make sure they enjoyed plenty of Cheddah’s cooking while the Crown of Thorns was on its short deployment. Assuming of course the galley wasn’t in a similar state, Cheddah might have his work cut out for him if the rumors were true that the Amazonian matriarchy somehow managed to subsist on nothing but scrawny salads. Longfoot couldn’t see how they could maintain that muscle mass without a diet rich in protein but the universe was full of stranger things. None of that mattered right now though; the station of Iron Pecs was waiting for them.

Her ample rump finally squeezed into Alyssa’s old command chair, Bael put on her best “commander” face and ordered the ship to begin casting off. One by one her bridge crew and the human sailors under her command replied that everything was well with their respective departments and the ship was ready to go on her order. Minutes later, the Crown of Thorns began to sail in formation with the rest of the coalition ships. Bargebottom’s battleship the Stout Defiance, a Star Corps troop barge, and a handful of vessels that had been coaxed back into working order by the human shipwrights. Longfoot could only hope that some of the GalRep ships that Admiral Bargebottom ordered to meet with them were of a heavier class then what the humans provided. Of the four Blackman had available, one was a heavy frigate Bael recognized as a Bulwark-class, an old GalRep design used for breaking and maintaining blockades, and three corvette-class ships of an insectoid-like design the Lapeen engineer could not identify. If she had to venture a guess, she suspected the mysterious ships were strike craft designed to perform rapid hit-and-run attacks. Given how the humans relied on the same sort of raiding tactics that were used against them, it wouldn’t surprise Bael to discover that the captains of those corvettes were going much slower then they were capable of in order to keep pace with the admiral’s lumbering battleship and the Star Corps’ equally ponderous troop barge. Only one way to find out if her luck was going to be favorable in this engagement…

The flotilla jumped without incident, arriving in sight of a blue star ringed by a large cloud of asteroids to meet with the other Space Fleet ships. Longfoot exhaled softly as the bridge crew gave their reports and she tried to avoid looking nervous. To say that she really was nervous was an understatement. Her first command of a warship and her first real assignment since that debacle with Cyptal Bargebottom, even if it was only a temporary posting she was still a maelstrom of emotions. Barely an hour later, two destroyers and a drone carrier arrived in-system and hailed them. Admiral Bargebottom replied in kind and after a few moments, the human captains did as well. The senior Space Fleet officers on the arriving ships regarded the alien humans with reactions that were becoming obligatory by this point. All Fleet ship captains had received the same intelligence update that Longfoot had but reading about a new sapient species and meeting them first hand were two entirely different things. The destroyer captains of both the Saber and the Valiance regarded the furless primates with polite curiosity while the Buk captain of the drone carrier the Lumbering Thunder was halfway through wondering how the newcomers could be so skinny before he realized he was voicing his thoughts aloud. Admiral Bargebottom’s disapproving scowl over the video communications was significantly less menacing thanks to the humans’ laughter echoing over communications. First impressions out of the way, the combined flotilla jumped again. When they returned to normal space, they would be driving the Wuffs out of the sector…

When they emerged out of hyperspace a second time, the fleet arrived surrounded by mothballed Space Fleet vessels. Many of the abandoned ships still looked like all they needed was a crew and they would be fit to sail. Others were obviously in the process of being gutted and dismantled, the barely visible spark of a cutting torch signaled to the attacking captains that someone was actively at work here. Ahead of them was a cleared path leading straight to a hollowed out asteroid where the Wuffs had erected a shipyard. Several shuttles for salvage crews stood in standby, a handful of ships flying the digital flags of various pirate groups gathered around the station proper. Everyone seemed to think that the attacking fleet was just another cluster of mothballed ghost ships to salvage…

Bargebottom drained a large bowl of soup as she watched the attacking fleet slowly crawl into position from the comfort of her hover sofa currently parked in the Stout Defiance’s Command and Control module deep within the heart of the ship. The holographic projector displayed a three-dimensional representation of the imminent battle. Space Fleet and allied ships were in blue; the pirate ships that were just starting to realize something was wrong were colored a nice red. They were lucky, the immense dollop of blubbery feline considered as she caressed her chins, the coalition outnumbered the present number of enemies two to one. Yet according to Blackman the number of pirate ships could reach three times that amount during peak periods. They were lucky but they needed to press their advantage if they wished to keep it. “All ships, move in to engage!” She ordered, the module echoing with affirmations from the other vessels.

Outside, in the cold blackness of space, the flotilla of meaty GalRep ships lumbered along. The carrier deployed several wings of drone fighter-bombers as the Stout Defiance and Crown of Thorns moved into firing range with the other warships. The human Bulwark frigate remained in escort position with the Star Corps troop barge while the three corvettes broke away from the main attack group just as the pirates got into range. Silent explosions blossomed like exotic flowers as the metallic leviathans exchanged plasma, laser, and magnet-propelled railgun fire. Energy shields buckled, wreathing warships in halos of blue light, as their armored hulls blackened and scorched from lucky hits with energy weapons. The pirates put up a fierce battle but the GalRep navy simply had too much firepower in this fight. Bargebottom and her captains focused their fire on several key ships while the human raiders, smelling blood in the water, began picking off smaller vessels focused on repelling the Space Fleet ships or escaping the firefight. The open channel was flooded with pirate captains trying desperately to get a hold of the situation or get clear of the chaos. None of the pirates doubted who lead the GalRep ships to the hidden breaker yard though; the panicked cries for help were punctuated with screams of “FUCKING HUMANS!”

Aboard the bridge of the Crown of Thorns, Commander Bael Longfoot gripped her chair as the cruiser buckled under the impact of another hit. On reflex she brought up the ship’s engineering report, they had taken some damage but it was nothing that couldn’t be repaired right in the field after the battle was over. They were still in the fight as far as she was concerned. And fight they were going to do if she had anything to do about it. “All guns, concentrate fire on the enemy flagship!” She ordered. Whether or not the pirates really had a flagship she could only guess but the heavy destroyer trying to rally the remaining brigands for a counter-attack looked as good of a target as any.

There was a brief pause as the commandeered cruiser powered up weapons then raked the pirate destroyer with a full barrage of plasma and laser fire. Cannons and turrets tore into the enemy’s broadside. Scraps of metal flew away in a cloud of debris as a chain of explosions tore the enemy ship in two. With the captain of their most heavily armed ship out of the fight, enemy resistance soon faltered and broke.

Quickly losing their ground, the surviving pirate ships left their disabled and destroyed peers behind and retreated post-haste but not before the Wuffs on the station sent a distress call for reinforcements. While Longfoot mopped up with the other Space Fleet vessels, the human warships broke off and joined the Star Corps troop barge in forcibly boarding the station. One of the corvette captains could be heard shouting orders to his boarding party. “Alright, once we dock get in there and grab everyone you can find then help the Troopers wire the place to blow. Do not stop for anything else, ANYTHING. If someone answers that call, we need to be halfway home by the time they get here.”

As the battle outside started to slowly die down, the Star Corps forcibly boarded the station. Major Hopper held his gyrojet BFR as he lumbered out with the rest of the weighty Troopers under his command. The GalRep soldiers flooded the main level of the outlaw shipyard like an olive green blob as they quickly overwhelmed the station-side guards in a hail of rocket-propelled gunfire. Hopper wondered if the Wuffs would ever wise up and use firearms of some kind but fortunately that day was not today. Human slaves either dived for cover or tried to keep working while keeping their heads down as the Troopers waded into battle with station security. As the Wuffs rallied and tried to charge the Wobbly Green Wall with their power swords drawn, the meaty report of Star Corps BFRs were joined by the more fast-paced burst of human submachine guns. Several squads of raiders from Lighthouse Station joined in the fray with a screaming war cry as they peppered the lupine pirates with automatic fire, only accepting the invitation to join their enemy in melee combat once most of them had been torn asunder by incoming bullets. Power sabers clanged and sparked against the humans own eccentric collection of swords and blades as the two groups clashed in close-quarters-combat. The fighting was too congested for the Troopers to fire effectively but this was the specialty of the humans attached to the Corps assault force and it showed. Locked in near constant combat with the Wuffs aboard the tight confines of the Hearth Star’s lower decks made the human raiders brutal masters of fighting with close-range submachine guns and fighting with a sword and gun in each hand.

Seeing their peers fighting had an emboldening effect on the human slaves either hiding or futilely trying to keep working in the middle of the firefight, several promptly turned their tools on their masters in bid for freedom. Diamond-coated metal saws and plasma torches tore violently into Wuff flesh, causing horrific injuries and littering the metal floor with blood and charred tissue as the slave laborers decided to cast their lot with the attackers. Most of them would end up being badly wounded for their troubles but their presence gave the invaders the advantage to quickly crush the remaining resistance. The fighting over, the human raiders began to move with a purposeful urgency that Major Hopper didn’t like the look of at all.

“What’s going on?” He asked one of the senior-look human militia as Troopers militia alike began moving to medi-evac wounded and break open cell doors to free imprisoned slaves. Even with a non-standard assortment of uniforms, the officers of Blackman’s irregulars were easy enough to spot for a fellow military officer. That being said, Hopper couldn’t wait till the humans either joined the Republic or adopted a standardized uniform of their own.

“Wuffs sent out a distress call shortly after you busted in; more of them are coming to crash the party. Don’t know what you have planned but our plan was to be gone before they get here.” The militia officer explained as he struggled to pry a cell door open with a crowbar.

Major Hopper needed barely a second to process the information presented to him before using his broad girth to push the human aside and rip the crudely welded door right off its hinges. The satisfaction of knowing he still had it quickly gave way to the urgency of the task at hand. “Go! Get to the ship!” He shouted at the confined humans in simplistically translated Universal, pointing in the direction of the Star Corps troop barge.

At first the freed slaves hesitated then ran in the direction the major pointed. Satisfied, Hopper lumbered back to overseeing the rest of the mop-up operation. If this was true, then they needed to hurry on setting those explosives on the station’s reactor.

Back on the Crown of Thorns, Longfoot brought up the ship’s engineering reports with a sly smirk as the battle concluded. It was over, the pirates had either fled or were destroyed. The handful of smugglers that didn’t escape the system in time were being forced to hand over cargos of slaves to Space Fleet sailors and human reavers. And according the shared sensor network between all allied ships, the Star Corps had taken over the station’s primary levels and should be finished mopping up soon. Which meant this was either going to be another resounding victory for the Galactic Republic or something was about to go horribly wrong.

“Ummm, Commander Longfoot ma’am?” The junior officer assigned by Blackman to help Lt. Synth man the sensor arrays spoke up from behind his console.

“Yes ensign?” She replied habitually before she could even stop to remember if that was his actual rank. Blackman’s sailors used a rank structure similar to Space Fleet’s but the humans’ navy still did not have a standard uniform or rank insignia as of yet.

The human officer that had her attention was turning a ghastly pale that Longfoot was sure wasn’t a normal coloration for his species. “Long-range sensors just picked up the profile of a massive ship dropping out of hyperspace…. It’s the Hearth Star ma’am.” Longfoot’s smile quickly turned into a frown as she listened to the report. So much for a crushing victory against the enemies of the Galactic Republic, looks like they were going to have to work for their happy ending here.

The effects of the Hearth Star’s arrival were instantaneous though thankfully not as disastrous as Admiral Bargebottom may have anticipated. Any fears that her furless allies in the fight might have panicked turned out to be ill founded. They were obviously shaken but did not let it impact their ability to retreat in an organized fashion. The four captains Blackman had sent started barking orders to their away teams to return to their respective ships and to leave safe-guarding the rescued civilians to the Star Corps as they broke away from the Wuff shipyard to cover Major Hopper’s withdrawal. This may have been a major setback but it was one the humans knew how to deal with. The resolve of her Space Fleet captains was a slightly different story.

Until this point, no one in the Fleet had fought the Hearth Star directly, not even Admiral Bargebottom herself. Being the underdog in battle was an alien sensation she needed to get over quickly unless she wanted the Stout Defiance to become the Fleet’s most impressive debris cloud. The captains of the Lumbering Thunder, Saber, and Valiance began to form a textbook fighting retreat that probably wouldn’t work without them suffering significant damage. And then there was Cmdr. Longfoot demonstrating a creative amount of initiative that left no wonder in the admiral’s mind why her daughter Cyptal felt so threatened by the pear-shaped engineer.

“This is the Crown of Thorns to the human captains. Does the Hearth Star have any structural weaknesses you are aware of?”

There was a second of silence that felt far, far too long for the stout officers of the Galactic Republic as their allies tried to quickly consider the question, the lumbering Hearth Star dwarfing Bargebottom’s flotilla on the tactical overlay as it crept within striking range. If Major Hopper didn’t finish up and cast off right now the Wuffs would be on the task group in minutes.

“The underside.” Came the answer at last. “The main guns are fixed in a thirty-degree cone and the turret arrays on the underside have been broken since the Wuffs sacked Earth. There should be some access to the Star’s systems down there.” The answering captain explained excitedly, seeing exactly where Longfoot was going with this.

So was Admiral Bargebottom. “All ships, adjust position to a minimum of sixty degrees beneath the Hearth Star’s firing arcs and concentrate fire on the worldship’s underside on my mark.” She ordered. It would be far too much to hope for them to be able to destroy the Hearth Star with a task force this small but even if they only managed to damage it… well, the Wuffs lost the ability to repair the Hearth Star ages ago if they had it at all. Any damage they did to it would essentially be permanent.

Outside in the endless blackness of space, engines glowed with a white-hot light as ships maneuvered into position. The Lumbering Thunder’s drone pilots sat in their cushioned chairs aboard the carrier’s flight control unit and assumed control of wings of automated fighters and bombers flying in formation towards the mammoth world ship. In her too small command chair aboard the Crown of Thorns, Longfoot began to empathize with the human sensor tech’s barely controlled terror as the Hearth Star filled up the cruiser’s view screen. Saints alive, she heard the world ship was massive but seeing it for herself, she could easily imagine how an entire colony of over a thousand humans lived unnoticed on the lower decks of the ship. And here she was flying under its blind spot, waiting for an attack that wasn’t coming. The Leflin twins were at their post powering up weapons in preparation for the admiral’s order. Soon… soon, just a few seconds more.

“All ships FIRE!” The order echoed across the flotilla network as bolts of plasma, laser beams, and neutron missiles collided with the underside of the Hearth Star with a satisfying chain of explosions dancing across the metal hull of the massive world ship. It was a beautiful display of pyrotechnics that at first seemed to have no effect. Then a few second later, the initial salvo ignited a chain of secondary explosions. Even with space being a silent vacuum, Longfoot imagined she could hear the Wuff world ship rumble as its metal hull groaned under the stress of being torn apart from within. Then, the display stopped, the artificial leviathan continued to groan in the Lapeen commander’s imagination as it turned ever so slowly away from the mothballed fleet. Bael braced herself and her crew for a counter-attack of some kind but one never came. Not even the independent privateers likely on the ship disembarked and cast off to engage the Space Fleet ships, instead the Hearth Star jumped back into hyperspace once it was clear of the system and a trail of wreckage leading to where it opened its window into the dimension where relativity did not apply. Now, the Galactic Republic had earned its victory…

Major Hopper watched the battle between the Hearth Star and the rest of the flotilla from the bridge of the Corps troop barge as the Iron Pecs breaker yards exploded in the distance. Hands resting on his enormous protruding stomach, the Star Corps officer smiled as he contemplated the outcome of the mission. Below, dozens of freed slaves huddled together in one of the cargo holds as the barge returned to Lighthouse Station. Hopper sighed, that right there was the only thing that could spoil his mood like a bad appetizer before an otherwise excellent meal. They destroyed the shipyard in a lightning raid, managed to drive off the Hearth Star despite being caught off guard by its sudden arrival, and likely did some permanent damage to the pirates’ world ship. Hopper and his Troopers had every right to feel good about themselves right about now yet even being somewhat prepared for it by now, the rotund space marines still couldn’t get entirely over seeing how the Wuffs treated the slaves. Still, on the positive, there was likely going to be plenty of time for evening chow before they arrived at Lighthouse Station…

Admiral Bargebottom sighed as she chased down her soup from earlier with a large fruit glazed pastry. Today was a greater day then she could have imagined but there was still a lot left to do. The Wuff shipyard was destroyed but there was still the matter of assessing the damage to the ghost fleet and reclaiming the ships that were still fit to sail. Engineering vessels would need to be diverted to the area to get the task done before opportunistic outlaws could steal more military-grade hardware. And then there will be the Senate inquiry regarding the incident and her request for more funding to bring the remaining mothballed ships back online. And there was the matter of the humans, regardless of their stance on joining the Galactic Republic; they were still going to have to begin official relations sooner or later. Those rumors that the IPA was investigating some sort of conspiracy only muddled things more then they needed to be. And of course there were obvious projects that the humans would rather concern themselves with then GalRep politics. Finding their home world and founding a colony or colonies plural on something more viable then a cramped space station were two things that Bargebottom predicted Blackman was going to be working on now that some of the pressure had been taken off of his people. As much as she may have wished otherwise, convincing the Senate to help resettle a vagrant race on a habitable world was difficult and impossible without the support of the civilian government. Exploring uncharted space for a planet that might as well be a myth for all telemetry data the humans had on it on the other hand was part of Space Fleet’s mission statement. A joint expedition could be quietly assembled without Senate approval if she kept her contributions modest enough.

No, this was not the end of things; it was only the beginning of more arduous challenges. But all things considered, she couldn’t ask for a better beginning…