February 14, 2060
The Reaper War
The asteroid dwarfed the small nimble RIU coming up to one of it's docking tubes. Matching vectors perfectly with the finesse of a high mass/drive ratio craft. It's pod mates were circling the system, alert for any danger, a pod never re-supplied at the same time. The small critter docked was the Mobene, an older but still formidable monitor. Here to pick up vital commodities: air, food, entertainment, shore leave, and to top off their ammo magazines.
A hyperspace window opened above the ecliptic, disgorging a hive and it's escorts in rapid order.
Zara Nuey- captain of the monitor Belaqua- woke up immediately as the total systems data sharing net sent adrenalin pumping through her body via her neural network, and started for the door.
Sitrep: Thirty-seven ships of unknown affiliation (visual) have entered the system from high above the ecliptic, and are approaching the colony at significant speed; formation and deployment patterns indicate hostile intent (49% probability). They have not responded to hails.
Zara accessed the data as she reached the door less than a second after she woke up, and went over it as she rushed to her action station.
Sensors on all monitors and civilian stations are incapable of achieving a solid lock, FTL sensors appear particularly affected with almost no resolution, radar imaging is likewise useless, thermal imaging is fuzzy, but infrared and LIDAR appear unaffected.
The door slid shut behind her immediately as she jumped into the metal egg that was her station, and it started flooding just as fast. She quickly lay down on the forward leaning crash couch, laying her tail straight behind her (already sloshing in the fluid) and let the restraints unfold over her, crash netting becoming taught. She repressed the uncomfortable sensation of breathing in a liquid, and took a deep breath of the oxygen rich fluid.
The Reapers started deploying fighters, a few squads headed for the station and the ships, but most to cull the planet, a hundred and twenty total. Followed by a few destroyers and cruisers. While the hive and the rest of it's escort continued on impassively.
As the hard line connection clicked in to place behind Zara's head, linking her to the ship's main computer network, she felt the familiar disorientation, being part of the ship, the crew's colorful thoughts raced across the logical and calculating computer. A lot of officers had a problem with the neural interface, a computer is a lot different from an organic brain, it took decades to perfect a design similar enough to the Razg neural network for people to actually be able to use without going into a coma. And it still wasn't perfect; over half the dropouts from OCS were discharged with neural integration problems.
All ships report combat readiness. Updating battlefield simulation parameters. Simulating…
Komar asteroid settlement reports FTL readiness. Three commercial platforms in transit, ETA: twenty nine seconds. ETA of inbound enemy fighters: 20 seconds, ETA of inbound enemy capital ships: 30 seconds, ETA of main enemy formation: 250 seconds.
Primary Objective: Buy time for civilian population to evacuate.
Secondary Objective: Gather data on enemy technology and tactics.
Tertiary Objective: Stop the enemy from making planet fall until reinforcements arrive.
The pod's computers shared processing power, plotting the enemy ship's vectors, then the best possible intercept courses. Then re-plotted the enemy vectors in reaction to the interception, then plotted the best approach to taking out the capital ships, and so on and so on, until it had made a list of several hundred likely scenarios. Simulation complete. And informed Zara of the best way to attack.
She wasn't going to argue with the computers. She authorized the attack.
The monitors didn't bother extending their rail guns at such short range, they just loaded scattershot munitions and fired - the relativistic sand grains tore the fighters apart.
A few dozen took only glancing hits and fired off their disruptor torpedoes- too late, interceptor fire sealed the deal and knocked the missiles spinning into space.
The cruiser and destroyer formation exploded outwards, trying to flank the accelerating monitors. But meantime, the asteroid's entourage of mining ships, refineries, manufacturing, and botanical plants were secured, and the cargo sleds docked, so the entire asteroid powered up it's hyper drive, launched its AKVs, and jumped.
The AKVs drives burned brightly as Zara ordered them into waves of attack drones, interceptors, and defensive screens and armed their warheads sending them into the heart of the enemy formation.
Unlike most space navies, the Razg did not go for the heavier ship first, instead preying on the weaker and reducing the enemy's ability to outflank them. The Monitors micro jumped again, around one of the destroyers. Catching it between the crossfire of their main guns.
The destroyer shook with multiple RKV impacts, holes appeared in it's sides, and patches of the hull glowed red briefly before exploding outward where the relativistic remains punched through, until it's cold fusion plant ruptured, and the pressure split the hull from the nose down like a banana.
The monitors accelerated again, going after another destroyer, this one had a wingman, and the Mobene came in a little too close, a shot from the destroyer's top batteries impacted on an angle, the smaller ship rolled deftly, spreading the blast over a larger surface and giving the gravity stress fields longer to tear it apart, but still took damage to the shields.
The Belaqua renewed her attack immediately, swooping in to draw fire, as the Guben and Takyan covered its dash with heavy bombardments.
By now the other destroyers had moved into DEW range, and opened with their main beams. As the gravity stress projectors overlapped their beams with the enemy ones, the computers measured scatter, intensity of the enemy beam, analyzed it across the entire spectrum and stored the information.
The nimble monitors danced out of the way, except Guben, who took a hit across the top west quarter. Leaving a gash through it's wipple shield and k-foam, but bouncing off its armor.
The monitors jumped again, to the back of the destroyer pack, and concentrated fire on a single destroyer, but refraining from using their RKV guns. As they pounded it the, sensors on the monitors looked at them very closely, registering their melting temperature, their vaporization temperature, and their structural integrity where the bolts had imparted the hull with minimum refraction in massed bombardment, cataloguing the data for later reference.
Behind them, the main body of the Reaper fleet opened fire, catching them in a crossfire, but the advance force now had to split it's attention between the RIUs and the incoming AKVs, who were starting to scatter sub-munitions, a bright cone of fire formed between the Repaper ships and their attackers as sub munitions and energy bolts sought each other out and annihilated, lighting up space and blinding sensors.
Zara had timed it perfectly, the distraction was all that was needed for the pod to finish off the enemy with their main guns and change vectors to jump. This time far out, it was time for a strategy change. Zara relayed new orders to the pod. As they took a few precious seconds to plan, thirty two metal spikes separated from their collective hulls, cloaked and went wising off towards the enemy, to arrive in a few minutes once they'd accelerated to their maximum velocity.
Again, the pod jumped, this time right into the enemy formation, relatively speaking. They were still many miles from any ship on either side, but this was considered knife-fight range for space combat.
They moved erratically now, seemingly without purpose, using their main guns before their victims could turn on them with the particle beams, and changing direction dodging the slower energy bolts.
The next few minutes Zara's body went through every hell an organic mind could think of, the acceleration was massive, even with the liquid suspension, physical reinforcements, and all, she would still come out of the metal cocoon bruised and aching all over. The mental stress was equally great, the pod was puling multiple unsynchronized micro jumps to get them clear of danger, and this placed enormous computing loads on everyone, the crew was part of the ship's computer network, command saw no reason not to make use of the augmentations that amounted to an early 21st century (non SG) earth supercomputer. The ship's painkillers would see a lot of use later.
By now, only the interceptor screens had remained, and the separate Reaper formations had blended together into a massive ball. The RIUs guns bit into any hull they could turn on, in a complete free for all, the captains of the RIUs picked targets by the angle changes to the main gun needed to reach them. The destroyers fell one by one, their small, weak hulls, no match to the penetrating power of RKV rounds. The bigger capital ship on the other hand were more of a problem, their sheer size meant the RIUs could turn them into the Razg equivalent of Swiss cheese and they would still function. 200 cm holes were almost negligible, even the resulting relativistic plasma and internal damage didn't hinder them overly.
The monitors were also taking damage, Belaqua's shields extended suddenly and levered an energy bolt out of the way. The Takyan lost one of its inertial dampeners as the hive's beam pierced deep into its hull.
It was time for a change of plans; the monitors accelerated brutally- closing on one of the remaining destroyers, limping weakly into the hive's defensive envelope. The destroyer's DF flared, spreading out excess energy over the hull as the RIUs speared it with interceptors, wearing down it's defenses, spewing atmosphere as it's windows cracked. Its muzzles were melted off, and it's sensors blinded.
Then the Hive shook, it's armor actually rippled as shockwaves traveled through it, thirty two relativistic munitions, smashed straight through it's glacis plate, with a velocity difference of just over 99 PSL. Relativistic plasma blossomed into it's interior, patches of armor started glowing red as the plasma traveled along the inner surface. Power surges ran rampant; several guns had their barrels fused by the charges.
In their protective armored spheres every crewmember of the monitors started to spas violently, trashing limbs, arching their backs and heads. The restraints tightened, to secure them and the computers were about to jump away as protocol dictated when they caught the fault. Their brain waves were off the charts, totally off, more importantly they didn't match the scans in the database, which means the computers pointed a finger at the only suspect, telepathy. And activated a series of programs developed some time ago by the more paranoid spooks at O.I.I. Telepaths couldn't read computers, and the nanites in the crewmen's' brains were fully operational, they filtered out the alien brain waves, erecting any and all force fields around the crew compartments to interfere with the enemy broadcasting.
Zara's body trashed but he restraints held, the first thing she was conscious of was screaming, it blocked out everything and she trashed around trying to clear her head until it subsided as more blocks went into place over her mind, blocking out the thoughts of a thousand aliens out to kill her.
Mobene shook as it was hit by a blast from one of the reaming cruisers, bringing everyone's attention back to the situation at hand. Even so, there were…Zara struggled to place the feeling into understandable thought…gaps-in the TSDS net. The bio readout showed two of her crewmen were unconscious; the ship had sedated them as they had been affected the worst.
The monitors started their dance again, avoiding weapons fire. But their ability was greatly diminished, Zara made some quick and dirty calculations, with the crew loss and therefore computing power decrease on all vessels, plus the damage taken already, and the resilience of the ships they would not be able to win the fight. Event the massive mother ship, damaged as it was, was still firing, it's resolve to blow them out of the sky clearly undiminished -trying to pin them down with crisscrossing beams.
An urgent omni directional burst from the planet informed her the last civilians were evacuating, that was all she needed to make up her mind, a good commander knew when to retreat, and there wasn't a better example in the book than this for when to do so
The RUIs micro jumped -slower than usual due to their loss of computing power- around one of the previously damaged destroyers; the RIUs converged on it rapidly. They impacted roughly, using their external gravity fields to absorb the impact. They shot out high-powered clamps, piercing the bio-armor with tips made to burrow into rock for better purchase. One on the bottom, between its engine pylons, one on top resting between the same pylons and the remaining spike, and two on each side of its' head.
Before the ship's partners could come to the rescue, the monitors synchronized hyper drives, and forced it into their window with their combined acceleration. Leaving behind the antagonized fleet.