The first hint that the pirates got that they wouldn't be nearly a successful with this raid was when a fusion lance destroyed one of their carriers. Before they could react to that, a massive barrage of laser cannons destroyed three cruisers. After that, well, the fight quickly descended into a mess. Try as they might to stop me, their forces barely managed to dent the hulls of my ships. Oh sure, they did manage to disable a few of my orbital interceptors, but those losses were trivial in the grand scheme of things. Besides, I had plenty of backup on the way. These guys were as good as dead.

Though, I must give credit to them for trying to fight back. When they realized that they were up against a well armed opponent, they realigned their ships to use broadside blasts on me. My scanners indicated they had enough firepower on a destroyer to cripple an omega, but only if they could hit it in the engines. Unfortunately, I easily outclassed them in the firepower department, and I also had the range edge. Only two broadsides connected with my ships before the opposing force scattered from massed fire of my forces, and those barrages ultimately did negligible damage to my ships. Points for trying, I'll give them that.

While my orbital forces, as well as the newly arrived fleets of my allies, continued to engage the now scattered enemy fleet, I sent some ground units down to help out the colony. See, the pirates could threaten to bombard the planet from orbit to get what they wanted, but that ran the risk of rendering it uninhabitable and convincing the colonists to take their chance fighting rather than giving the pirates tribute. Those outcomes were not ones pirates wanted to deal with, so normally they just used a small invasion force to terrorize the locals and convince them to be compliant. While a colony could normally repel a pirate force, continuous raids would exhaust the defenders until the planet was easy pickings for raiders. Why space pirates didn't decide to move onto easier targets after losing the first few times was beyond me. That was besides the point though: there were pirates on planet and I needed to drive them off.

As soon as my ground troops made planet fall, the fabbers began setting up a base while my combat units launched an assault on the pirate invaders, relieving the desperate colonists from the raiders' wrath. While I tried to take them down non-lethally, I wasn't too concerned if they died - hacking their transmissions proved that the raiders didn't really have any resource shortages that had forced them to resort to piracy, they just enjoyed beating up those weaker than them. If they really were motivated by desperation, I would have tried to be gentler to them, but these people were just scum and deserved to be punished. Those that I caught alive were forced into a makeshift prison until they could be formally imprisoned, tried and punished (hopefully not in an absurd way, I didn't hate them THAT much).

Back in space, the pirate fleet was starting to route - they were already losing, but the arrival of my allies had convinced them it was better to cut their losses and run, not that I would give them the chance. As one of their ships made a break for it, I used a harmony cruiser with its stealth systems activated to sneak up on it, then blow its engines to smithereens. As I watched the light show, I mentally noted how powerful the stealth system I'd purloined form Chungsu was - near-perfect sensor counters, perfect visual camouflage, and hyper-efficient heat sinks made any ship I equipped with a stealth system invisible and untraceable. The only issue was that a ship using the system was still vulnerable to sensor detection if it got too close to an enemy vessel, because the giant hole in you sensor network was a pretty obvious target. I could probably fix that, though.

Oh, and a ton of fighters were showing up to harass my forces, since the retreating ships were mostly carrier and a fair amount of the fighters were drones. Impressive tactic, but it was ultimately futile. I locked several Artemis cannons on the carriers and fired, reducing the carriers to rubble. With their command vessels gone, the fighters either went offline or panicked, making them easy pickings for my own fighters. The remaining ships, meanwhile, were being taken apart by my fleet and those of my allies, with a few at the rear of their fleet puling out. I managed to put a tracker on one of because there was no way I was going to just let them get away without trying to figure out where they were heading.

On the ground, well, things were going much the same as they were in space - the pirate forces were getting crushed, mine weren't even taking losses, and some of the pirates were trying to bail, except they had nowhere to go. Adding to the difficulty they were facing was that the colonists, who had initially been too scared to react, had rallied to my side and forcing the raiders to fight a battle on all sides, leaving them with nowhere to retreat and regroup. I was eventually able to surround the last of the pirates, at which point reason finally overcame pride and fear, for the pirates quickly surrendered. For a moment, I thought I'd have to defend them from the vengeful colonists of Centauri 45, but to my surprise, the colonists accepted the surrender and settled for taking all of the pirates prisoner. That they treated the prisoners a little roughly was something I was willing to allow as a for of restitution, so long as they didn't resort to torture or worse.

The situation was the same in orbit: some ships had fled, while the rest had surrendered. The colonists of Chiron, much to my surprise, had encircled the pirates' flagship, which had quickly surrendered, decapitating the fleet's command structure.

Overall, it was an interesting battle, if both brief and...boring, in all honesty.

Wow, I can't believe I'm agreeing with Melissa here. Hopefully this didn't become a trend I'd be making.

"Well, it didn't, but not for the reasons you'd think).

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AN: Apologies for the lackluster battle. I just wanted to get it out of the way, and overall, the pirate didn't stand a chance, so the curb-stomp was inevitable.

Read and Review! This is Flameal15k, signing off!