-Chapter Seven - A Righteous Fire-
-ISS Valley Forge, Main Bridge, That same time-
Even though a -Norway- was as long as most Cruisers, she was classed as a Frigate because of a combination of factors. First, most of her length was taken up in her sail like nacelle pylons. Second, most of her remaining hull was filled with the plethora of small craft that patrol vessels needed to ferry boarding teams to uncooperative vessels with active transport inhibitors. Third, she had an outsized marine compliment to utilize in these boarding actions, further putting a crimp on internal space. Finally, she only utilized light armament, engines and defenses. Norways were all but exclusively utilized in patrol situations, this was considered acceptable. It was also why despite her fairly impressive size, she was truly a Frigate in both form and function. A normal -Norway- would have been hard pressed to deal with even one of the Pirate Destroyers, let alone the five closing on her plus the three Battlecruisers following them. If the Pirates had been closing on a normal -Norway-, it would have been no contest. As the reality now stood, it was still no contest. It merely had the two parties reversed as to which role they were to play.
"Sir, CIC confirms that the Pirates are outfitted with military grade sensors and high mark phaser arrays." P'tel said. "While their ships are heavily armed for their size, their defenses are rather weak as a result. Since they are still using standard warp cores, they lack the surplus power to power both powerful weapons systems and strong shields. But the most intriguing part. Their ships are also faster than is the norm. Sensors say that they are hitting 85 PSL."
Ulysses scowled over steepled fingers as he stared at the pirates wrapping around his command so that they could attack it from all sides. They were using competent tactics, something normal Pirates rarely exhibited. And they were either putting excessive strain and risk of failure on their internal compensator or something else. And it was the something else that worried him. He found it hard to believe that mere pirates could succeed in enhancing the upper limit of internal compensators when the rest of the known galaxy including the Terran Empire hadn't been able to. Yet the seeming leisure that they exhibited when flying at unsafe speeds after a target that couldn't outrun them to begin with caused Ulysses brain to itch. There was just no reason to justify the risk unless it wasn't a risk at all.
"Guns, I want to take their Battlecruisers as much intact as possible. I think that they have a better internal compensator than any known model and I want a look at it. You may dispose of their destroyers as planned. And just so that they can't self destruct, beam over some KO gas once their shields and transporter inhibitors drop."
"Aye sir." Cmdr Davenport said. "They are entering extreme weapons range sir."
"Hold your course. I want them closer."
The ships began to grow large on the holo display. Finally they opened fire with their first volley.
"Torpedo separation! Incoming Quantum Torpedoes from all enemy vessels."
"That volume of fire should be enough to slow the -Norway- we are pretending to be, so make sure the computer remembers to fake that part." The substantial torpedo volley roared in on the poor little -Norway-, flaying its shields and scorching its lightly armored hull. The ship slowed as the computer decided that her impulse engines had been hit.
"Fore shields down 2%. Regenerating back to full strength now. Enemy is now entering energy range."
"Launch the fighters. Have them pretend to be debris jettisoned by the attack."
-Valley Forge, Flight Deck-
The 50 fighters spat from their catapults at small fractions of their normal speed to fall away from their mother ship in carefully planned, seemingly random vectors. With their ECM suites masking their powered down systems and their holo chameleon skins actually making them look like large chunks of debris, they were indistinguishable as threats to the Pirate's sensors.
The Cobras had been outfitted for close assault, swapping their usual standoff load out of quantums for external PPC gun packs. Now armed with 6 PPCs instead of their usual two, they could deal a massive amount of damage before they had to break off and let their capacitors recharge. The drawback was that they usually had to close suicidaly close to their targets in order to fire. But since they were hiding in preparation for an ambush, the enemy was obliging them and closing on their position totally unawares of the deadly piranha seeded into their path.
-Night Demon, Main Bridge-
"Sensors nearing full charge for a deep scan of the -Norway- sir." The sensor tech said.
"Energy weapons range sir. Capacitors are nearly fully charged." The tactical officer added.
-Valley Forge, Main Bridge-
"Energy spike, looks like they are preparing to fire energy weapons." Percy said.
"That's close enough Guns. Open fire." The stars around Ulysses command disappeared momentarily from view as nearly every weapons system on the ship vomited death.
-Night Demon, Main Bridge-
The glass of red wine that Gomorra had been nursing slipped from his hand, dropping soundlessly to the deck where it shattered into a million pieces of knife edged crystal. The quiet tinkling sound was the only thing heard on the bridge as everyone froze in mind numbing disbelief. No one seemed to even breathe as the meek, dying vessel in front of them sprouted needle sharp teeth none of them had even suspected it possessed. For a brief instant, the yellow/orange columns of its phaser beams and blue white orbs of its quantum torpedoes silhouetted the unmistakable outline of a modern Imperial Super Dreadnought of the Line. Every Pirate on the -Night Demon's- bridge, in the scant second it took for the hidden Wraith to unleash its deadly weaponry, knew that they were living on borrowed time. They would be dead before they could do anything to extricate themselves from the situation, for even with their current numerical advantage over the lone Imperial SD, they couldn't hope to do more than scratch her shields before each and every one of them was burned from space.
-Valley Forge, Main Bridge-
The -Valley Forge- had been flying backwards through space at 75 PSL, keeping her heavier foreword weapons arc towards the bulk of the enemy. But she looked like a fleeing -Norway- to the pursuing pirates thanks to her chameleon holo stealth system. The first clue they had that she was something more than that was when her weapons fire temporarily highlighted her true hull form. Her powerful phaser arrays and quantum launchers stabbed out at her targeted destroyers, rapidly burning them from space even as her fighter wings came alive and did the same. The massed beams of Type XV phasers didn't take long to punch through the light shields Pirate Destroyers mounted. Given that the pirates didn't have the energy to spare to shunt it into powerful shields, going instead for powerful weapons, they never stood a chance. Each exploded violently as gigatons of firepower washed over them like a cleansing tide.
The -Valley Forge's- ten wings of fighters shifted their ECM from deception mode to track breaking and brought their shields and weapons fully online. In the blink of an eye they shed their masks and snapped to full impulse speed. Racing back towards their two Destroyer class targets at 81 PSL the length of separation dropped with insane rapidity for the range was already short and their targets were on near reciprocal vectors pulling 85 PSL. Targeting systems locked on to the still pinprick sized balls of light that were two Pirate Destroyers. 300 individual streams of Pulse Phaser fire erupted from the fighter wings to rain lightspeed death down on the helpless Pirates. The small starships were shaken violently as the PPC bolts rapidly ate away their shields then chewed through their naked hulls. That much fire power would have overwhelmed a cruisers defenses, so the end result was never in doubt. The pirates managed to lock up and fire on seven of the fighters, turning them to energetic plasma and scattering their component atoms across space, yet every Pirate Destroyer joined them shortly thereafter. The surviving fighters broke off, racing away from the dumbstruck Battlecruisers to both allow their PPC capacitors to recharge and to gain maneuver room in case they had to attack the surviving pirates. Not that they would be required to do so, for a refit Wraith class Super Dreadnought could have squashed the entire enemy formation in its first volley had it so desired.
"Execute the next phase as planned." Ulysses said over his steepled hands in a conversational voice, yet his eyes were ice cold pits betraying his near instinctual hatred for all things Pirate. One didn't grow up on a Merchant ship without developing that, both for the criminal and the institutional versions of Pirates.
The -Valley Forge- micro jumped nearly straight up to get the appropriate angle of attack to take out the Battlecruisers warp cores before the Pirates could react. It was a particularly excellent piece of maneuvering considering both parties were moving at a significant portion of lightspeed and that a rather small error in calculations and timing would throw off the -Valley Forge's- vector and emergence locus by a fair (in a tactical engagement operation) margin. Snapping back into normal space high above the arrowhead formation of still dumbstruck Pirate Battlecruisers, the -Valley Forge- opened up with her triple foreword Phaser Lances, sending three columns of naked energy into the distant Pirates with pinpoint precision. They unleashed their fury upon first shields and then hulls, wreathing the Pirates in energy and vaporized alloy. The Lances were set for narrow focus, punching straight through their target's hulls yet doing little damage to the rest of the ship. Despite the fact that every possible precaution was taken, targeting a ships warp core is often a messy business. It was all to easy for a complete failure of the ships AM storage tanks to occur once the its warp core was violently turned into plasma. That is what happened to one of the Pirates. The Battlecruiser exploded into a violent starburst of multi ton molten fragments and an eye tearingly bright boil of light. The remaining two Battlecruisers computers managed to kill the AM flow to the now absent warp core before they joined their companion in oblivion. Most of their engineering crews were dead or dying in the hard vacuum of space because the thermal bloom, kinetic shock and massive power disruption caused by the Phaser Lance attack on their warp cores had prevented the emergency forcefields from coming on like they should.
With their warp cores destroyed leaving neat, molten edged cylindrical holes punched straight through their hulls the two Pirate's shields flared out along with their transporter inhibitors. With both of those systems out of commission, the -Valley Forge- was able to beam over KO bombs. On the holo screen the dark, menacing looking shapes of the Pirate Battlecruisers spun slowly as all helm control failed. The only part of them that remained lighted was the molten edges of hull where Phaser Lance beams had struck them. The hidden half of Ulysses urged him to beam over a Neuro Toxin, but he surprised the dark impulse. Excessive force against a helpless opponent wasn't something that was taught by the Followers of Spock. It was frowned upon because that was exactly what the Empire had done far to often.
-Night Demon, Main Bridge-
All was lost and Gomorra knew it. His hand was reaching for the self- destruct button on a sealed panel in the side of his command chair when he heard the whine of a transporter. A split second later there was a bright flash that was accompanied by a sudden loss in all voluntary muscle control. Every being on the bridge dropped to the deck like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Gomorra's hand fell, unable to cross the last few mm to the self-destruct switch. With the entire bridge crew incapacitated by the initial attack, the small KO bomb began to emit a gaseous sleeping agent. Within seconds the entire bridge crew was unconscious. Similar bombs had been transported to every section on the Pirate ships, incapacitating every member of the crew. One would have had to be in power armor or at least light riot gear to remain active, but none of the pirates were, expecting an easy victory over an unlucky Imperial -Norway-.
-Valley Forge -
"Everyone on the Pirate ships are unconscious sir." Percy reported to Ulysses with a smirk on his face.
"Well done. Commence strike team beam over."
In the outsized transporter rooms scattered about the -Valley Forge-, fully armed, power armored marines dematerialized as the transporter beams grabbed them. They rematerialized at various key points throughout the pirate vessels. After a quick but thorough scan of their area, they moved out to scour the rest of the ship. At the same time, the Pirates were being beamed off the ship and into the -Valley Forge's- brig. A plethora of small arms and bladed weapons were removed from the unconscious Pirates before they were rematerialized inside their holding cells. It was only after the ship was cleansed from all pirate presence that the engineering teams were allowed over to search for the mysterious internal compensator that allowed for unheard of starship velocities.
Near what was left of engineering, they found it.
"Lt., I think we have a winner here." One of the engineering techs said.
"What is it?"
"This little beauty here sir." The tech told his detail's commanding officer as he pointed to a slightly out of place looking piece of equipment. "It doesn't match the rest of the ship construction wise. Its base alloys are all wrong, to say nothing of the style. And it is mounted to a power converter, indicating that it is set up for a different power distribution system than standard Imperial EPS relays."
"Good, detach it. We'll take it back with us for further study." The Lt. thought this is sure to get me in good with Cmdr Heidberg, maybe even the Captain himself.
"Sir, I would recommend that we wait till the security boys have a chance to scan it thoroughly."
"I gave you an order crewman, and I expect it to be obeyed."
"Sir, the thing might be boobyt."
"That's it. You are on report for insubordination." And with that the Lt. reached down and pulled out the three glowing blue cables that attached the machine to the deck.
-ISS Valley Forge, Main Bridge, That same time-
Even though a -Norway- was as long as most Cruisers, she was classed as a Frigate because of a combination of factors. First, most of her length was taken up in her sail like nacelle pylons. Second, most of her remaining hull was filled with the plethora of small craft that patrol vessels needed to ferry boarding teams to uncooperative vessels with active transport inhibitors. Third, she had an outsized marine compliment to utilize in these boarding actions, further putting a crimp on internal space. Finally, she only utilized light armament, engines and defenses. Norways were all but exclusively utilized in patrol situations, this was considered acceptable. It was also why despite her fairly impressive size, she was truly a Frigate in both form and function. A normal -Norway- would have been hard pressed to deal with even one of the Pirate Destroyers, let alone the five closing on her plus the three Battlecruisers following them. If the Pirates had been closing on a normal -Norway-, it would have been no contest. As the reality now stood, it was still no contest. It merely had the two parties reversed as to which role they were to play.
"Sir, CIC confirms that the Pirates are outfitted with military grade sensors and high mark phaser arrays." P'tel said. "While their ships are heavily armed for their size, their defenses are rather weak as a result. Since they are still using standard warp cores, they lack the surplus power to power both powerful weapons systems and strong shields. But the most intriguing part. Their ships are also faster than is the norm. Sensors say that they are hitting 85 PSL."
Ulysses scowled over steepled fingers as he stared at the pirates wrapping around his command so that they could attack it from all sides. They were using competent tactics, something normal Pirates rarely exhibited. And they were either putting excessive strain and risk of failure on their internal compensator or something else. And it was the something else that worried him. He found it hard to believe that mere pirates could succeed in enhancing the upper limit of internal compensators when the rest of the known galaxy including the Terran Empire hadn't been able to. Yet the seeming leisure that they exhibited when flying at unsafe speeds after a target that couldn't outrun them to begin with caused Ulysses brain to itch. There was just no reason to justify the risk unless it wasn't a risk at all.
"Guns, I want to take their Battlecruisers as much intact as possible. I think that they have a better internal compensator than any known model and I want a look at it. You may dispose of their destroyers as planned. And just so that they can't self destruct, beam over some KO gas once their shields and transporter inhibitors drop."
"Aye sir." Cmdr Davenport said. "They are entering extreme weapons range sir."
"Hold your course. I want them closer."
The ships began to grow large on the holo display. Finally they opened fire with their first volley.
"Torpedo separation! Incoming Quantum Torpedoes from all enemy vessels."
"That volume of fire should be enough to slow the -Norway- we are pretending to be, so make sure the computer remembers to fake that part." The substantial torpedo volley roared in on the poor little -Norway-, flaying its shields and scorching its lightly armored hull. The ship slowed as the computer decided that her impulse engines had been hit.
"Fore shields down 2%. Regenerating back to full strength now. Enemy is now entering energy range."
"Launch the fighters. Have them pretend to be debris jettisoned by the attack."
-Valley Forge, Flight Deck-
The 50 fighters spat from their catapults at small fractions of their normal speed to fall away from their mother ship in carefully planned, seemingly random vectors. With their ECM suites masking their powered down systems and their holo chameleon skins actually making them look like large chunks of debris, they were indistinguishable as threats to the Pirate's sensors.
The Cobras had been outfitted for close assault, swapping their usual standoff load out of quantums for external PPC gun packs. Now armed with 6 PPCs instead of their usual two, they could deal a massive amount of damage before they had to break off and let their capacitors recharge. The drawback was that they usually had to close suicidaly close to their targets in order to fire. But since they were hiding in preparation for an ambush, the enemy was obliging them and closing on their position totally unawares of the deadly piranha seeded into their path.
-Night Demon, Main Bridge-
"Sensors nearing full charge for a deep scan of the -Norway- sir." The sensor tech said.
"Energy weapons range sir. Capacitors are nearly fully charged." The tactical officer added.
-Valley Forge, Main Bridge-
"Energy spike, looks like they are preparing to fire energy weapons." Percy said.
"That's close enough Guns. Open fire." The stars around Ulysses command disappeared momentarily from view as nearly every weapons system on the ship vomited death.
-Night Demon, Main Bridge-
The glass of red wine that Gomorra had been nursing slipped from his hand, dropping soundlessly to the deck where it shattered into a million pieces of knife edged crystal. The quiet tinkling sound was the only thing heard on the bridge as everyone froze in mind numbing disbelief. No one seemed to even breathe as the meek, dying vessel in front of them sprouted needle sharp teeth none of them had even suspected it possessed. For a brief instant, the yellow/orange columns of its phaser beams and blue white orbs of its quantum torpedoes silhouetted the unmistakable outline of a modern Imperial Super Dreadnought of the Line. Every Pirate on the -Night Demon's- bridge, in the scant second it took for the hidden Wraith to unleash its deadly weaponry, knew that they were living on borrowed time. They would be dead before they could do anything to extricate themselves from the situation, for even with their current numerical advantage over the lone Imperial SD, they couldn't hope to do more than scratch her shields before each and every one of them was burned from space.
-Valley Forge, Main Bridge-
The -Valley Forge- had been flying backwards through space at 75 PSL, keeping her heavier foreword weapons arc towards the bulk of the enemy. But she looked like a fleeing -Norway- to the pursuing pirates thanks to her chameleon holo stealth system. The first clue they had that she was something more than that was when her weapons fire temporarily highlighted her true hull form. Her powerful phaser arrays and quantum launchers stabbed out at her targeted destroyers, rapidly burning them from space even as her fighter wings came alive and did the same. The massed beams of Type XV phasers didn't take long to punch through the light shields Pirate Destroyers mounted. Given that the pirates didn't have the energy to spare to shunt it into powerful shields, going instead for powerful weapons, they never stood a chance. Each exploded violently as gigatons of firepower washed over them like a cleansing tide.
The -Valley Forge's- ten wings of fighters shifted their ECM from deception mode to track breaking and brought their shields and weapons fully online. In the blink of an eye they shed their masks and snapped to full impulse speed. Racing back towards their two Destroyer class targets at 81 PSL the length of separation dropped with insane rapidity for the range was already short and their targets were on near reciprocal vectors pulling 85 PSL. Targeting systems locked on to the still pinprick sized balls of light that were two Pirate Destroyers. 300 individual streams of Pulse Phaser fire erupted from the fighter wings to rain lightspeed death down on the helpless Pirates. The small starships were shaken violently as the PPC bolts rapidly ate away their shields then chewed through their naked hulls. That much fire power would have overwhelmed a cruisers defenses, so the end result was never in doubt. The pirates managed to lock up and fire on seven of the fighters, turning them to energetic plasma and scattering their component atoms across space, yet every Pirate Destroyer joined them shortly thereafter. The surviving fighters broke off, racing away from the dumbstruck Battlecruisers to both allow their PPC capacitors to recharge and to gain maneuver room in case they had to attack the surviving pirates. Not that they would be required to do so, for a refit Wraith class Super Dreadnought could have squashed the entire enemy formation in its first volley had it so desired.
"Execute the next phase as planned." Ulysses said over his steepled hands in a conversational voice, yet his eyes were ice cold pits betraying his near instinctual hatred for all things Pirate. One didn't grow up on a Merchant ship without developing that, both for the criminal and the institutional versions of Pirates.
The -Valley Forge- micro jumped nearly straight up to get the appropriate angle of attack to take out the Battlecruisers warp cores before the Pirates could react. It was a particularly excellent piece of maneuvering considering both parties were moving at a significant portion of lightspeed and that a rather small error in calculations and timing would throw off the -Valley Forge's- vector and emergence locus by a fair (in a tactical engagement operation) margin. Snapping back into normal space high above the arrowhead formation of still dumbstruck Pirate Battlecruisers, the -Valley Forge- opened up with her triple foreword Phaser Lances, sending three columns of naked energy into the distant Pirates with pinpoint precision. They unleashed their fury upon first shields and then hulls, wreathing the Pirates in energy and vaporized alloy. The Lances were set for narrow focus, punching straight through their target's hulls yet doing little damage to the rest of the ship. Despite the fact that every possible precaution was taken, targeting a ships warp core is often a messy business. It was all to easy for a complete failure of the ships AM storage tanks to occur once the its warp core was violently turned into plasma. That is what happened to one of the Pirates. The Battlecruiser exploded into a violent starburst of multi ton molten fragments and an eye tearingly bright boil of light. The remaining two Battlecruisers computers managed to kill the AM flow to the now absent warp core before they joined their companion in oblivion. Most of their engineering crews were dead or dying in the hard vacuum of space because the thermal bloom, kinetic shock and massive power disruption caused by the Phaser Lance attack on their warp cores had prevented the emergency forcefields from coming on like they should.
With their warp cores destroyed leaving neat, molten edged cylindrical holes punched straight through their hulls the two Pirate's shields flared out along with their transporter inhibitors. With both of those systems out of commission, the -Valley Forge- was able to beam over KO bombs. On the holo screen the dark, menacing looking shapes of the Pirate Battlecruisers spun slowly as all helm control failed. The only part of them that remained lighted was the molten edges of hull where Phaser Lance beams had struck them. The hidden half of Ulysses urged him to beam over a Neuro Toxin, but he surprised the dark impulse. Excessive force against a helpless opponent wasn't something that was taught by the Followers of Spock. It was frowned upon because that was exactly what the Empire had done far to often.
-Night Demon, Main Bridge-
All was lost and Gomorra knew it. His hand was reaching for the self- destruct button on a sealed panel in the side of his command chair when he heard the whine of a transporter. A split second later there was a bright flash that was accompanied by a sudden loss in all voluntary muscle control. Every being on the bridge dropped to the deck like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Gomorra's hand fell, unable to cross the last few mm to the self-destruct switch. With the entire bridge crew incapacitated by the initial attack, the small KO bomb began to emit a gaseous sleeping agent. Within seconds the entire bridge crew was unconscious. Similar bombs had been transported to every section on the Pirate ships, incapacitating every member of the crew. One would have had to be in power armor or at least light riot gear to remain active, but none of the pirates were, expecting an easy victory over an unlucky Imperial -Norway-.
-Valley Forge -
"Everyone on the Pirate ships are unconscious sir." Percy reported to Ulysses with a smirk on his face.
"Well done. Commence strike team beam over."
In the outsized transporter rooms scattered about the -Valley Forge-, fully armed, power armored marines dematerialized as the transporter beams grabbed them. They rematerialized at various key points throughout the pirate vessels. After a quick but thorough scan of their area, they moved out to scour the rest of the ship. At the same time, the Pirates were being beamed off the ship and into the -Valley Forge's- brig. A plethora of small arms and bladed weapons were removed from the unconscious Pirates before they were rematerialized inside their holding cells. It was only after the ship was cleansed from all pirate presence that the engineering teams were allowed over to search for the mysterious internal compensator that allowed for unheard of starship velocities.
Near what was left of engineering, they found it.
"Lt., I think we have a winner here." One of the engineering techs said.
"What is it?"
"This little beauty here sir." The tech told his detail's commanding officer as he pointed to a slightly out of place looking piece of equipment. "It doesn't match the rest of the ship construction wise. Its base alloys are all wrong, to say nothing of the style. And it is mounted to a power converter, indicating that it is set up for a different power distribution system than standard Imperial EPS relays."
"Good, detach it. We'll take it back with us for further study." The Lt. thought this is sure to get me in good with Cmdr Heidberg, maybe even the Captain himself.
"Sir, I would recommend that we wait till the security boys have a chance to scan it thoroughly."
"I gave you an order crewman, and I expect it to be obeyed."
"Sir, the thing might be boobyt."
"That's it. You are on report for insubordination." And with that the Lt. reached down and pulled out the three glowing blue cables that attached the machine to the deck.