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Chapter 13

"Captain, they've found us!"

Captain Leith's dozen floating displays all jolted out of long inactivity, streaming a blinding array of information. The main screen, covering the entire front wall of the Fist of the Nascent Dawn lit up with dozens of red dots out among the field of asteroids they'd been using to hide and evade during their transmission to fleet HQ.

The enemy force had been hunting for them, after they had finally broken off the chase by flying into the asteroid field. Most ship commanders would consider it suicide for such a massive vessel as the Fist to do such a thing. Most ship commanders had no knowledge of just how powerful and state-of-the-art her vessel was.

"Ms. Anwar, what's the status of your teams?"

From the communicator mounted in her Captain's seat, the young female otteress responded, lying as she was in the bed that had been moved especially for her into Galen's quarters. It was from there that Captain Leith's injured second in command and her badly burned heroic engineer had cooked up this risky, ingenious battle plan. Captain Leith hoped the pained-sounding voice wasn't an indicator of compromised reasoning in her engineer.

"Charges are placed, teams are at minimum safe distance awaiting your command."

Captain Leith watched, straight-backed and tense, as range estimates lit up on the thirty foot tall display. All around, her bridge officers were hard at task, working up firing solutions, sending orders and receiving reports, coordinating the deployment of her fighters, and dozens of other tasks besides.

"Understood, Ms. Anwar. Wait for the first two waves to pass them, then execute. Mr. Torvals, when Ms. Anwar's charges go off, commence firing on anything that moves to assist. I want maximum chaos in the enemy's ranks. Major Thaurun, your fighters know what to do."

"Aye, ma'am!" rung out from all three throats in simultaneous cadence. The blonde human sat forward in her chair, steepling her fingers together, and waited. The enemy fleet was coming, and the Fist was massively out-matched, despite the poor individual quality of the enemy's vessels.

It was going to be a desperate fight, and she planned to throw every iota of stratagem and aggression into making the enemy pay for all they had done to her people. If things went well, she would be able to continue the long-term strategic plan. For now, however, all that mattered were the next hour or two.

"Chief Karnen, have all damage control teams at the ready. Priority is our engines and the gravity rings. If we lose mobility in this fight, we're as good as sunk."

The horse laughed through the communicator, over the sound of steaming equipment and the thrum of energy relays.

"Ma'am, we're in space, how does sinking make a difference?"

She snorted, and responded pointedly though with amusement.

"Not the time for jokes, Chief. Maintain professionalism over comms."

"Yes'm!"

It was close enough to the proper 'yes ma'am' or 'yes captain!', she figured. Chief Karnen had been repeatedly stabbed, nearly killed, nearly blown to bits, and he was still working hard on managing his people and keeping a three-quarter-finished ship operating at something close to a hundred percent effectiveness.

An alarm lit up on her console then, indicating an incoming projectile. A distant miss, she noted, well before it was near them, and ignored it as the naval rail round spiked through space somewhere several kilometers to starboard. Somewhere out there, the enemy's only real capital ship was firing off probing shots, hoping to spring whatever trap had been set.

Either that, or they weren't precisely sure of the Fist's position. With her long, sleek, slender hull, she would be hard to spot in space with any but the most modern of sensor equipment. Relying on eyeballs would be out of the question, given that the enemy's fighters had been so badly torn up in their last engagement against better-trained USF Fleet and Marine Aviator pilots. The enemy fleet had to be relying on gravitometric and particle-stream sensors, and in the mess of an asteroid belt, neither would be operating at full efficiency.

The enemy would have to get in close, sacrificing vessels to the savage punishment of the Fist's potent weaponry just to send targeting and location information back so that other vessels could attack effectively. That heavy cruiser might as well have been throwing tennis balls at her hull. With her current level of targeting information, it would be about as effective and quite a bit less of a waste of ammunition.

Lieutenant Adeling, the iguana in charge of her sensors, spoke quickly in a carrying, terse voice, tense with anticipation like a piano wire about to be struck.

"A wave of heavy cargo haulers is passing the first marker. I count sixteen ships. Three have drive-core torpedoes. I'm detecting active transmissions from all sixteen."

The grand view screen was lit up all over now, showing her the enemy's approach vectors and current locations in outlines of red dots surrounded in a sea of drifting grey-outlined debris. Barely at the edge of sight, an ugly cargo scow shaped vaguely like a bulbous toad was thrusting hard, hurtling towards her at vast speeds that, in the empty vacuum and vast emptiness of space seemed glacially slow.

Adriana chewed her lip, and drummed her fingers on the command console chair's arm. The enemy fleet commander should have led off his attack by sending in fighters, trying to scout or flush her position while limiting his losses. Then again, she hadn't had time to get information on just how many enemy fighters had been swatted down in the frantic brawl over Atria on the first day of this debacle.

It might just be that they put down the enemy's fighters entirely. The small, maneuverable things would be the logical choice for the asteroid belt, though, and even if a single one survived it would be in use now.

Lt. Adeling spoke again.

"Captain, a second wave is approaching the first marker...Uh...Between ten and twelve medium cargo ships...Wait a minute..."

Red lights blared to life on her console, and a high-pitched alarm tone strobed through the bridge moments before eight heavy naval rail cannon slugs, ten meters long and traveling nearly one fourth the speed of light flashed past the Fist's fighter cordon and slammed into her forward defenses. Six were deflected by the gravitic shield, the Fist's triple gravity rings spinning in perfect formation to create a warped gravity field in front of her that caused those spires of deadly metal to bounce off like they were hitting an atmosphere at bad angles.

The other two struck hard, and damage control alarms went off as the ship thrummed like a struck bell, and began to quake like a rolling temblor. As bridge crew grabbed for their seat belts, someone shouted out in surprised observation of the obvious.

"They put heavy naval guns on those little bastards! Are they insane?!"

Adriana tapped her console, ignoring the calls of damage to their frontal armor and minor hull penetrations from the heavy dead-on impacts, knowing Chief Karnen's teams could handle it.

"Miss Anwar, detonate the charges now."

The otter's scratchy voice answered, with relish.

"Yes, ma'am!"

Adriana looked back to the screen, not needing to give a command for evasive action. Her helmsman knew what to do, and the Fist was already spinning and banking to port with a speed that was, to her experienced warship captain's eye, plain amazing. The second barrage of rail cannon blasts hurtled from ships so small they were being thrust backward by the shots like corks from champagne bottles. This time they flew wide.

They wouldn't get a second chance.

One moment, the asteroid field was a slow chaos of drifting stone, suspended in a molasses state of energy-less torpor. Then, the otters' explosives triggered, as the signal finished transmitting to her detonators.

A wall of white lights flashed, new stars born for the briefest seconds as high-energy explosives from cannibalized torpedo warheads lit off. Before the enemy double-rank of ships could react, they were struck from behind by a tidal wave of shattered asteroids, blasted inward in a grand ring hundreds of kilometers across.

Dozens of drive cores spiked and detonated, their converted cargo ships not sufficiently armored to keep the high-energy devices shielded under such a brutal barrage. The frog-ship was speared through the center by a flying jag of meteoric nickel-iron and simply ceased to be in a soundless cerulean flash, the lives of her crew snuffed in an instant of cosmic violence that mirrored two dozen other ships trapped in the suddenly-appearing field of death.

Captain Leith's smile was nothing short of feral, as she thrust a finger forward and yelled out to her gunnery commander.

"Mr. Torvals, put two shots straight up that cruiser's nose. Show her we're not to be toyed with!"

"Aye captain!"

"Major Thaurun, keep your fighters in reserve. That asteroid cloud will tear them apart."

"Aye, captain," the grizzled old veteran conceded, though she could see the stone-hard old otter wanted to send his aviators around that field and straight into the enemy's bleeding nose.

Lieutenant Adeling's voice sounded, if anything, more tense.

"Captain, that debris field's moving right toward us! ETA three minutes! Enemy ships are moving forward to "

The Captain's grin was knowing, and she tapped the comm. frequency for Chief Karnen. Meanwhile, Lt. Commander Torval's commands had finished processing, and the Fist of the Nascent Dawn shuddered as her main frontal guns belched white light and massive rail gun slugs three times the size of what had been fired at her. Coruscating, spinning through the void, they pulled trails of asteroid dust and hurtling ship debris in their wake, forming two twin helix lines where that moment of artificial gravity yanked the chaos behind them.

Somewhere off in the distance, a flash of light gave Adriana a shock of adrenaline that spiked from her gut upward, and she resisted the urge to pump a fist and yell out in triumph at their direct hit.

Adeling reported, fingers flying over the sensor panels, checking dozens of scan frequencies to counteract interference from the caroming, dancing, bouncing pinball chaos of ships and rocks and exploding RT drives.

"Captain, direct hit with one of two! The enemy heavy cruiser is showing signs of power failure...And...Incoming enemy ships!"

The Fist's main screen showed dozens of new blips appearing, white outlined red circles telling Adriana the enemy was bringing in more vessels, from risky short in-system jumps. Black balls of purest darkness hurtled towards them, falling short as the miniature black holes absorbed too much asteroidal debris to reach them, detonating as they achieved their own critical mass well before reaching the Fist.

Nice try, whoever you are. No wonder you didn't send in your fighters. You were planning to Torpedo Run me, and didn't want the light little things sucked into the event horizons.

"Forty new vessels! Enemy force estimated at sixty remaining ships. They're deploying fighters!"

"Chief?"

"Yes, Cap'n?" The horse's voice was full of anticipation. She could see, in her head, the skinny dappled Appaloosa dancing in his jumpsuit, and it almost forced a laugh to bubble out of her.

"In thirty seconds, I want you to reverse our gravity rings. I don't want a shield, I want a shockwave!"

The horse nickered out a laugh, and she heard the sound of a wrench striking hard against some offending bit of metal as something ground dissonantly, loud enough she had trouble making him out for a moment. No doubt Chief Karnen was tens of yards deep in some lethal piece of high-power whirling machinery, fixing something as he ordered his crew around like maddened insects in a giant hive full of flesh-crushing hundred-ton whirligigs.

"Aye, reversing the polarity of the graviton flow, Cap'n!"

She blinked at the console, momentarily stumped, until a recent remake of ancient pre-space colonization television shows popped up to fill the mental gap.

Then a throb flew through the ship, felt deep in her gut and in the dizziness between her ears. She swayed to the side, virtually in a unified motion with her crew, as the shifting gravity rings changed the vessel's internal equilibrium. Equally unperturbed, she called out a command as the grav ring readouts on her display began to show their activity slowing and reversing.

"Major, have your fighters go on the attack as soon as the shockwave is clear."

"Aye, captain."

Linked into his fighter, the star pilot sometimes felt like there was no longer a place where he stopped and his ship began. As a combat ace and ten year fighter veteran, he'd been picked for an experimental integrated neural link system, and he'd never felt better about a decision in his life than at that moment.

There wasn't a clever name for his kind - No 'Whip' nickname that sounded to him vaguely like some sort of childish fetish sex nickname. He preferred it that way. The ancient traditions of his deadly craft needed no such additional pretention. All he needed was his call sign, Void Shadow, stenciled on the exterior of his matte-black Asp-class space fighter.

As he plunged through the void in endless, glorious free-fall, the pilot felt bodiless. Or rather, as if his body were a six ton, sleek, viciously maneuverable and brutally armed winged wedge of metal. Skimming through the asteroid field, dancing along like a night-black dragonfly past the lilly-pad asteroids, headed toward the blossoming explosions like will-o-wisps and fireflies in the distance, he registered his home to starboard.

The Fist of the Nascent Dawn. Upon first seeing her, some weeks ago, he had laughed with fellow pilots about how stupid her design seemed. 'Pocket Battleships' hadn't worked out so well back in the centuries of surface navies, and nobody had thought the Fist would change that bit of history on her particular ship class. They had been wrong.

He watched with a sense of pride and no small amount of pleasure as the monstrous mother ship, dwarfing him like a whale to a minnow, seemed to dance in a terribly graceful way, like the reaper waltzing with his scythe. A blurring silver flash caromed off her gravitic shields just an instant before the cloud of incoming asteroid debris was due to strike.

In his mind, as if by telepathy, the CAG spoke in her dulcet come-hither tone, dripping with lust for battle.

"Void and Hammer wings, break port fifteen degrees and prepare to ride a gravitic shockwave."

He laughed, though back in that silly corporeal flesh of his, no motion could be seen. Obedient to the last, albeit free-spirited, he accelerated and took the designated course, finding his view of the Fist going further and further to his peripheral vision. Instead, he was now looking at the cloud of glittering lights trying to array themselves into some semblance of a fighting line as more and more continued to war in, disgorge fighters, and attempt to reconstitute a fighting formation after the sudden death of so many vessels.

At least they didn't panic and run. Got to give them that.

His wingman spoke, as if they shared one mind, though the star pilot knew his partner wasn't wired in. It was a strange one-way total communion. He wondered if this might be a psychological side-effect of the direct link, and thought to mention it later to his CAG.

"Jesus, Bill, how many fighters do they have out there?"

He laughed, hard, in the nether-space his consciousness occupied, and flexed his wings like an exultant bird of prey. His words didn't register in his own ears, but he knew his partner would hear them as if they were spoken aloud. Another wonder of the neural link.

"Don't tell me you're pussying out, Randy!"

The laugh he received in return sounded nervous, but they'd flown together into all sorts of terrible situations before, and Void Shadow, once just a squirrel named Bill Verman, knew exactly what sort of mettle he could expect from Randy Kerrick, called Solomon Sign, another ace, nephew to the very Admiral they served. Namely, all of it - The lizard would fly in nervous as hell and fly back out sounding like he needed a post-coital cigarette.

They would probably get around to that cigarette a few hours later, assuming they could find a place to fuck where they wouldn't get caught. Flight adrenaline could take hours to wear off sometimes, and it certainly added spice to the otherwise dull existence of being out of his Asp.

"Pff, alright then, I'll consider that a challenge!"

With a growl to her voice, the CAG cut in on their little chat.

"Are you professional pilots or squabbling children? Head in the game, and stay off the line unless it's critical."

"Yes ma'am," both intoned, with no small degree of irony.

If only this really was telepathy...Then we could bitch at each other all fight long. Nothing could be more fucking perfect!

An uninflected, artificial female voice warned him of the incoming shockwave, which he quickly picked up in his virtual vision. It was like watching a perfectly clear lake on a moonless starry night, as someone tossed in a stone. The debris rippled in wave patterns, first moving towards the Fist, suddenly accelerating to murderous speeds as the waves reversed course at the whim of those massive gravity rings. Smashing the asteroids together like stones in a rock tumbler, the intense gravitic shockwave then ejected the millions of jagged hunks of space debris back into the oncoming Atrian star fighter squadrons.

Explosions dotted across space like strings of firecrackers, as dozens of fighters were slapped aside and crushed to bits by the onslaught of artificial gravity shockwave, ship wreckage, and asteroid debris hurtling at thousands of clicks per hour away from the Fist's insanely powerful gravity field.

"All wings, weapons free, engage enemy bogeys!"

He laughed again, and yelled out a whooping war cry only he could hear, as his asp took motionless commands and engaged its after-thrusters. He skipped through the outer edge of the shockwave like a surfer on kiddy waves, never bothering to wonder how the engineers had managed to keep most of the debris directly in front of the ship and not ejecting in all directions. Then Void Shadow and Solomon Sign were plunging into the panicked, evading, formation-broken enemy flyers, with all the politeness of plunging eagles and pouncing cats.

With all the stealth his moniker implied, Void Shadow spiraled out of the nothing and pounced on two fighters that had managed to make free of the projectile-filled debris field and come to a stop, likely in rookie-pilot shock as they tried to re-evaluate their surroundings. It would be their first and last mistake, one which he had no remorse in taking advantage of. The first fighter dissolved in a spray of molten metal and atomized corpse as his twin particle cannons slammed super-heated subatomic particles through the enemy ship. As he continued to shallow his dive, the second fighter came into sight, and actually managed to attempt a sudden acceleration to escape, before being blown apart from nose to tail.

Void Shadow hurtled through the blasted debris clouds half an instant later, laughing at the top of his lungs with the thrill of the fight as he pulled into an elongated S-curve in the attempt to draw more fighters onto him.

Sure enough, he heard the woop-woop sound of someone trying to lock him. Void Shadow twisted his body left and down ninety degrees in less than a second, making a pinpoint dive that utterly ruined the rookie pursuer's attempted lock. An instant later, Solomon Sign hit the attacker from a blind side, and slagged the Atrian fighter pilot before the fur could even begin to react.

Then it was Solomon Sign's turn to take lead of their murderous stellar tango. As usual, Randy's nervous demeanor vaporized like plasma flung out of a cyclotron once the fight was on. The lizard had transformed from a bundle of nerves, and now was all balls and aggression, a death-spitting green and silver god of war, hurling himself into an oncoming wing of five enemy fighters, forcing their formation to break in an awkward panic as he downed two with streams of gold-white light that lanced through the endless black to splash them apart like water struck by a child's hand.

They were badly outnumbered, Void Shadow knew. With three of their wing-mates out of commission since the last battle, his entire wing was just him and his well-loved wing brother. Sixteen other fighter wings had deployed from the Fist in the hours before Captain Leith's brutally cold trap had been sprung, hidden throughout the asteroid belt to cut off retreat.

With that said, the enemy had four times their fighters, and as Void Shadow splashed another enemy fighter from behind as it tried to pick on his favorite friend, the squirrel's consciousness looked ninety degrees to his left. Out there loomed a tempest of angry vessels, many of them equipped with point defenses they were straining to gain range in order to use. The second those things got in range, they would start spitting pinpoint-accurate slugs into his little dance, ruining his fun...Not to mention his bird and his life.

Solomon Sign was alongside him, then, as they broke free of a cloud of enemies. In wordless agreement born of many hours flying together, they split in opposite directions and toward different vertical angles before performing twisting 180 turns no pilot could withstand in atmosphere. As they drifted backwards a moment, both of them spat out hundreds of deadly spheres of light, dispersing and further panicking the enemy's rookie pilots.

Other pilots were calling out to one another - The newer, fresher Marines and Naval aviators still needing to communicate verbally, unlike Void Shadow and Solomon Sign. Not all of them were doing so well.

"Mayday mayday, I'm breaking u~"

"Two of them on my six! Someone get them off me!"

"Splash one, splash one! I got one!"

"Stay calm, kid, don't get cocky..."

"Omega wing, move to cover Gamma wing's withdrawal. Void and Hammer wings, press the attack four grids straight ahead."

"Yes, ma'am!" they both called out, echoed quickly by Hammer wing's four salted veterans. In an instant, they were disengaged from the rabble and rubble they'd left of an enemy squadron in those furious first minutes of the blistering dogfight.

A blast of light and mass lanced from the darkness, so massive and powerful it jerked Void Shadow backwards against her own momentum, despite missing entirely in the empty void of space. Void Shadow was vaguely aware of a warm, wet sensation along his physical face, and grimaced in his mind. Such a reaction could only mean a rail cannon had almost spread his atoms across half the star system - It wasn't a wake he'd felt, it was relativistic gravity. The bastard must have missed by inches.

"Holy shit, you okay, Bill?"

"I'm fine, Randy, keep flying! They're trying to scare us with naval rail guns."

"No shit."

There, looming out of the darkness, Void Shadow was first to spot the offending vessel. It had been among the lucky, surviving that initial thunderous execution so many of its compatriots had suffered, evidently thanks to a hulking metallic asteroid twice its own size and ten or more times its mass. The thing was fractured, still being struck with blobs of stony asteroid chunks.

"It's in our sector. Do we kill it, Randy?"

It was rhetorical. The lizard didn't even bother speaking a response, instead snorting at him in amusement. As one, Void Wing opened up with pulsing blasts from their particle accelerators, strafing the big, ugly up-armored cargo vessel as they blasted past it before the thing's turret-mounted point defenses could properly lock on. Their attacks left white-hot craters on the ship's hull, some of which immediately began belching matter as the ship's damage control systems tried to fill the gaps with foam to prevent decompression.

A moment later, as Void Wing was spinning to make another pass, all four numbers of Hammer Wing swooped in, flying a missing-man chevron as they dumped twice the firepower into the area just softened up by Void's opening attack.

Not nimble enough to evade, the enemy ship just tried to tough out the attacks, stalwartly sucking up the intense punishment its civilian hull wasn't built for, armor or not. Smoke was belching from somewhere inside now in greasy bulbous zero-gee clouds, as its point defense cannons started belching out tens of thousands of conventional ammunition rounds in an attempt to screw with their flight paths.

As Void Shadow spun around, he saw something that made him laugh out loud again. The cargo ship was clearly civilian, albeit with added blocky armor plates. However, welded to its back, nearly as long as the ship itself, was a naval-grade magnetic rail gun. The chop-job was so shoddy that it was being physically reloaded by a pair of furs in EVO suits, both of whom were now staring at him in dawning, frozen horror.

He was too experienced at this to hesitate, though he did feel the slightest tinge of guilt. His long burst vaporized the two loaders, then stitched fire up the rail guns rear, blasting clouds of superheated debris away as the thing's lights suddenly shut off.

"Its main cannon is down!"

A few breaths later, Solomon Sign responded.

"I've brought down her point defense gun."

A third voice spoke, and won grins from both pilots.

"Roger that, ball is inbound."

Void Shadow and Solomon Sign knew the signal and broke off, following Hammer Wing back into the fracas of scattering debris and dancing fighters. Behind them, Void Shadow watched as a blockier, slower vessel swooped in on the damaged enemy ship. It was a tactical bomber, Orpheus-class, and had been following their formation along with half a dozen other tactical bombers, waiting to pop off torpedoes or heavy cannon blasts at disabled enemy ships.

While its weaponry was too heavy and targeting systems too poor for dogfighting, the Orpheus' heavy torpedoes were perfect for taking out the slow and unwieldy cargo ships they were up against, once the point defenses were down. Their tactical bomber didn't even stick around to watch, once its torpedoes were loose, pulling away and boosting to high speed in order to avoid any fighters coming around looking.

As Void Shadow dove into a skirling cloud of dogfights, he heard the computer report his previous target was shattered and breaking up moments later, torn to pieces like so much metal confetti by the heavy torpedo's high explosive warhead.

Then he was immersed in dogfight, and the squirrel let himself flow into the link, meditatively focused on the glories of the fight, the thrill of the dodge and evade, the partnership with his fighter and his wingman as they did the dance of death and pirouetted amongst the stars.

Dozens of duels came and went, some ending in another fur's life snuffing out in a puff of plasma and molten metal, others in a frantic mutual parting, still others in calls to help another warrior in trouble. Time had no meaning there, lives flashing in heartbeats, clocks an utter frivolity alien to his warrior-mind. Years could have passed there, in the frenetic skirl, whirling and firing, dancing and weaving, calling and counter-calling signals.

Finally, as all things must, the meditative state he lived for ended. The enemy fighters were withdrawing, so many fewer of them than had come, most limping and damaged, their waves and formations shattered apart in the chaotic brutality inflicted on them by the superior tech and training of their vastly outnumbered foe.

In the background of his preys' retreat, though, he saw that they might not have been retreating due to defeat. Large enemy ships, cargo haulers and bigger, were finally beginning to enter the fight.

"All wings, this is Commander, Air Group. Enemy sub-capitals are heavily armed with point defense and anti-fighter weapons. You are to disengage and withdraw back to the second phase line. Alfa and Beta wings, you are to pick up the otters and land aboard the Fist. All other wings, form on Hammer and Void."

Void Shadow looked out across the vacuum void, and saw through his partner's transparent canopy. The alligator lizard was scratching at the stripe of red scales that ran from behind his eyes, over his ear holes, and eventually down his neck. They met eyes, after a sense, though Void Shadow knew his real body hadn't moved.

The lizard shrugged, sighed with a slump of his shoulders, and turned away from the fight. Void Shadow stayed off to his right but on his tail, as the other wings formed and followed.

As the fighter screen withdrew, Captain Leith was stretching her legs, walking back and forth on the raised catwalk that passed over her command bridge. From here, she could see the tops of everyone's heads down below, yet still hear and respond without need for electronics. The catwalk was there mostly for bridge-defense reasons, but she found it all too perfect for walking off some of the strain of combat command.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Anwar and Commander Forza's planned trap had worked out better than expected, turning nearly a third of the enemy's projected forces to dust and space wreckage, before the Fist's partially depleted fighters had even engaged. What was more, it had made the enemy commander overcautious, fearful of losing more ships for zero gain.

The rail cannons her foe had secreted on those little ships had been a nasty surprise, but not done enough damage to be worth the price they'd paid. Still, if this turned into a battle of attrition, the Fist wasn't going to win. Especially if more of the enemy ships had jury-rigged heavy weaponry.

She watched, in the few spare minutes she would have before they reached engagement range, as dozens of Atrian ships approached. Chief Karnen had been over dozens of schematics with her in the last few days, examining the weaknesses and trying to figure out how they would be armored, trying to find vulnerabilities.

The simple fact was, direct hits from the Fist's guns would cripple and destroy the things in a hurry, but there were too many of them for a stand-up turret match. Even with the Fist's massively superior maneuverability, they simply couldn't weather the amount of firepower possessed by the opposing commander. Even if they managed to shove the asteroid field away to make room, which at the moment wasn't a smart move. They would need all three grav rings to keep hits off of them.

"Captain, we should be in range in...Two minutes."

Adriana nodded and leaned her arms on the railing, staring at the view screen hoping some miracle of tactics would present itself. Her brain wasn't cooperating - She'd already played her best cards, and now all she could do was fight like hell and hope to disable enough enemy vessels to withdraw again and look for some way to repair any battle damage quicker than the enemy could replace their cheap, disposable vessels.

Three steps took her to the steep steel ladder that ended the bridge catwalk, and another fifteen paces brought her to the bridge's burnished, traction-textured floor. A short walk carried her past the caracal girl manning communications equipment and coordinating with the CAG and others, tail whipping through the slot in back of her chair, nervously. It took her past Thaurun as well, the gruff old Major's flapper of a tail staying in the same proper and at-duty posture as his spine.

Commander Forza's spot was still empty, the wolf having only hours ago been cleared for duty again. He would be leaving his quarters about now, she figured, leaving Ms. Anwar to rest now that her part in the battle was done. Adriana hoped her heroic engineer was going to survive - The doctor had been guarded and neutral about her chances, given the severity of burns she'd suffered saving the ship from some shipyard manager's bumbling.

Still, for a potentially dying woman to be working so hard, through the pain and drugging, felt like a good sign to the captain. As she sat and prepared herself for what was to come, she took strength from the very idea. A wounded young woman, small and crippled by injury, had almost single-handedly given her the tools to wipe out a third of her enemy's forces.

She was grinning as the first enemy vessel turned from orange to red on the front view screen, indicating it was now in range.

"Chief, I need maximum forward deflection from the gravity rings."

"Understood Captain," the horse's voice rang out from her seat's speaker.

"Mr. Torvals, I want to make them timid. Use our main guns on that first ship to show the others what's waiting for them."

"Yes, Captain!"

Silvery lines flashed, instantly there and gone, as the twin main guns hurled two massive cylinders of heavy nickel-iron through the gulf at blinding speeds. The enemy's vanguard ship, a huge cargo vessel shaped roughly like a surface navy oil tanker, had been massively up-armored, likely with this specific use in mind.

Having detected their target lock, the enemy ship was already spitting out thousands of flak rounds from at least two dozen small turrets, likely thinking they'd been targeted for a torpedo strike. Torvals' shots flew right through the cloud, utterly oblivious to the hot explosive rounds that might have fooled a torpedo's guidance systems.

The impact made no noise, of course, but she imagined a satisfying crunch as the cargo tanker lurched downward from the impact, like a boxer hit in the snout with a massive downward punch. Instead of blood, though, it was geysering debris as multiple flashes visible through the gaping hole in its hull told her of secondaries inside.

Lt. Adeling's iguana crest went up, and he called out.

"Scanners are showing multiple internal explosions. She's breaking up!"

So much for up-armored civilian ships. Going to have to write about this for textbooks, I bet...Assuming we make it through.

"More incoming, from below!"

"Mr. Adeling, activate floor screen."

The iguana swallowed and nodded, voicing his acknowledgment as a few buttons were pressed. A moment later, the floor shimmered, as the displays built underneath the bridge's floor began to activate. Suddenly, they were standing and sitting atop a sea of stars filled with careening debris and carefully arrayed defensive fighters.

Captain Leith was too experienced to suffer the vertigo some would feel at such an activation. The disorientation could be too much, at times, for newer officers - Which was why they normally left all screens but the frontal one turned off until need presented itself.

At this point, however, they couldn't take risks on account of comfort. Seeing the incoming ships, too far away for vision but outlined in orange, she spoke more crisp commands.

"Give me one thousand times magnification, Mr. Adeling. Mr. Torvals, when the enemy fleet is in range, fire a full spread of torpedoes. We have plenty of them, no sense in letting them get dusty."

"Aye Captain, flooding all tubes."

She hoped twenty simultaneous torpedo launches would terrify them into panicking. A smart admiral running such a fleet would use the point defense screen such a massive group of ships could create to swat down most of the fish before they could hit. She was banking on the fact that the enemy admiral seemed smart, but the ship captains seemed individually poorly trained and undisciplined.

The vessels coming at them from beneath, though, her torpedoes couldn't do much about. They were flying in a dispersed double chevron formation despite the asteroid field, using point defense systems to swat drifting space boulders aside. Her enemy's plan was becoming clearer now.

He had first split his fleet into three, including a main force that had been deployed to occupy the Fist's attention, fighters, and main guns. The ships she had fought so far had been essentially decoys, cheaply up-armored and probably the most badly damaged and slowest vessels. He had gone so far as to outfit some with naval rail cannons, to add credence to the idea they were a main assault force.

Her adversary likely predicted that she would react with the same aggression she'd shown in their last encounter. He'd wanted her to charge into that formation trying to break it apart, and thus had his second battle group set up to jump in and blast her to bits with the black hole torpedo effect that came with emerging from RT drive.

This third battle group must have been comprised of his more veteran ship commanders and crews, if their formation and fire discipline was any indication. Likely, their assigned task had originally been as a backup and cleanup group in case other plans went awry. As the magnification focused in and cleaned up, the fuzzy orange-outlined blurs were resolving into an image of 10 blocky, elongated vessels, painted in matte black that would have made visual identification difficult for any of her fighters.

In their first encounter, his objective had been to assault, board, and commandeer the Fist of the Nascent Dawn. This time, he intended to blast her into submission. Or into blasted wreckage, depending.

Good to know you're taking us seriously this time.

"Torpedoes out!"

She felt the Fist move, pushed slightly backward in space as the torpedo tubes ejected a full score of massive ship-busting missiles. Seconds later, as dozens of ships were turning red on the front screen, the vicious torpedoes fired their engines as one, and plowed through the shimmering void propelled by strobing stars of light from their rears.

"Helm, I want us facing towards the threat below. Give us a ninety-degree incline and one-half forward velocity. Mr. Torvals, target them with our rail guns and fire at will. Major Thaurun, please direct your fighters to attack those..."

Shit. Real Naval vessels...

The magnification was finally good enough, with the shipboard computer's enhancement, to make out the shapes coming from below despite their coloration and anti-sensor equipment. Frigates and corvettes were several size classes below the Fist of the Nascent Star, but nonetheless a threat - Real naval ships, as opposed to the modified and half-armed garbage they'd been pot-shotting until now.

The front-running enemy ship's nose belched a flare of heat, resolved as red light on the monitor's visual enhancement. A moment later, alarms began beeping on her console, indicating an incoming heavy torpedo. A second alarm, far more chilling in its blurting screech, warned her of the real threat.

"Belay that, Major! Fighters are on torpedo interdiction!"

"Aye! CAG, direct your fighters to intercept incoming ballistic missiles!"

Adriana swore under her breath, and grabbed the captain's chair hand rails as they began to pitch downward. The torpedo streamed towards them, as her console labeled it on-screen with the information that had made her heart suddenly clench. Where they had gotten paws on multi-warhead fusion torpedoes, she wasn't sure, and had no time to find out.

The whole of her massive vessel upended like a cork floating in stormy seas, and despite the lack of inertia in space, she nonetheless felt the gorge-rise of sudden descent in her gut.

Then they were diving through space on a pillar of plasma vented through their engines, storming forward like a prizefighter charging his foe, front-mounted rail cannons spitting silvery pylons of destruction into the face of their foe.

The frigates and corvettes didn't break, panic and run. They returned fire, with a withering hail of torpedoes, rail guns, energy pulse cannons, all while fighters emerged in a cloud from behind a massive space boulder, their carrier unnoticed until that moment.