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Phase 18: The long road to Mandalore
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Part 3
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Observation lounge
Republic cruiser Solace
Lantillies
The Separatists surprised me. So much in fact that I spent the next few seconds simply staring at the tactical plot and wondering the hell was their commander thinking. A single battle group appeared in front of us, danger close and was immediately engaged by my ships. Not a single enemy ship went after our flanks. Instead, despite all the ECM, jamming and weapon fire interference, the sensors managed to pick up a second Reaper element appearing after the first. Two more didn't vanish from the long range sensors, which meant that the last one was behind the those in front of us.
The Daggers and Silencers took a frightful toll upon the enemy Munificents, with the latter firing first and blowing apart the bulk of Reaper Three's escorts. The destroyers accounted for four more with the last one missing a wildly evasive frigate. That left four battleships flying right in the teeth of my battle line. Concentrated fire-power stripped their deflectors in a short order while the Daggers finished off the remaining Munificents and re-targeted upon the enemy capital ships. The Separatists in turn concentrated their own fire-power upon one of my Venators and burned through the cruiser's shields easier than they should have. Too much accumulated battle damage was the most likely answer, then before they were silenced, those battlewagons managed to slag close to half of the Glorious' armour and remaining weapons.
As we entered into the shattered remains or Reaper Three, Reaper Four opened fire, seeking my Silencers and daggers. The enemy's tactic was clear and effective if overly wasteful. They sacrificed a lot of their ships to locate my most dangerous units and now they were about to throw everything they had against the Silencers. Reaper Four bore at us at full military thrust with Six close on their heels. I was sure that shortly, the two formations currently held back would jump at us too.
The Silencers spoke again, more Munificents died, thus greatly mitigating the odds of a successful enemy ramming attack. The Separatist battleships concentrated their fire-power at the Brave, the super-weapon mounting Venator at the bottom of my formation. Due to relative positions and where the weapon itself was mounted, it meant that it was vulnerable. Before the cruiser could seal its hangar and thus cover the Silencer, the battleships managed to cause enough damage to cause a spot failure in the deflector and a few turbolaser bolts passed through before one of Brave's consorts managed to cover her. A single shot slipped through the closing doors and a few seconds later the status of the cruiser changed, announcing that the Silencer was out of action.
In retaliation, the Daggers and my cruisers knocked off the remaining battleships from Reaper Four. That was just in time for Reaper Six to come to grips with us and the enemy chose that moment to jump in its remaining two battle groups. They appeared on our flanks and this time they were both in the correct position.
"Cover our remaining Silencers as a priority. Emergency acceleration. We're going through the enemy in front of us and making a tactical jump."
Three Silencers weren't enough to take most Reaper Six's escorts. Not even the Daggers helped in that respect. To complicate things, we were just passing through Reaper Four's broken hulks when the enemy in front of us reached our formation. With cruisers manoeuvring to cover critical units and debris in the way, properly concentrating fire-power upon the incoming enemy became much, much harder. A Munificent slammed into the top of a Venator as the cruiser moved to avoid a wrecked enemy battleship. The collision was enough to push her into the battle-wagon's hulk and the three warships vanished as one of their hypermatter reactors went critical. When the blinding glare of the explosion cleared, only an expanding cloud of small debris remained in its wake. Close to ten thousand souls snuffed like it was nothing.
Dagger herself, the namesake and fist of the Dagger class destroyers went up next. Reaper Six's battleships concentrated their guns on her after the Silencer equipped cruiser on the top of our formation got physically covered by her consorts before her special weapon could be damaged. Dagger found herself in the worst type of fight for her, against ships that outclassed her by orders of magnitude in armour and weaponry. While her defences were respectable, at point blank range they could do little against three battleships. Her escorts tried their best, one of those Venators covered her bodily, however it wasn't enough. Her deflectors failed, the comparatively light armour boiled away and she flew away out of control with all external systems gone and most decks opened to space.
On the flanks, our escorts threw themselves at the advancing enemy with a suicidal abadon. Thirty seconds passed between the appearance of the Reaper formations around us and the time we broke through Reaper Six and could jump away. In that time, every single of our remained escorts died with no less than ten of them going for a suicidal ramming attack against Munificents determined to do the same to our cruisers. Not a single of those succeeded, however they along with the battleships in those two formations managed to pass by multiple Venators close enough for them to strip their shields from sheer proximity before shooting at each other at point blank range.
A few months ago, such a manoeuvre, provided it avoided collision would have hugely favoured our side, though mind you, it would still have been a bad, desperate idea. Today? Armour and weapons that had been patched up one many times gave under the strain, overstressed and damaged sensor clusters overloaded and one after another damaged ships lost acceleration and began falling out of formation.
The fleet kept pushing through and hammering every single enemy unit that came into range. Reaper Six's battleships got to worst of that exchange, however by the time our formation stripped off their weapons and most of their armour, they managed to damage multiple cruisers as they had to pass to close to them.
Finally, we jumped away, breaking the engagement and buying ourselves a few minutes of respite. I checked the clock. Five minutes until the supply ships arrived. We had to engage the enemy at least one more time to buy them the time they would need to go into position for a transit to Gizer.
"Joanna, give me a status of the fleet, ASAP." The tactical plot was radically changed. While we reduced the enemies present in the system to a third of their original numbers, our escorts were gone and almost a quarter of our battle line was left behind due to battle damage. Numerically, our forces were about equal with us having the advantage in tonnage. However, two Silencers were out of action and I didn't even notice the second being taken out. One Dagger was gone with another suffering enough damage to knock out her railgun until she saw a dock... and every single ship we had left had suffered some additional damage.
If another enemy force arrived, we might have to abandon the supply ships to fend off for themselves and in that case, the loss of the only people experienced in producing the Silencers was going to hurt.
I glared at the tactical plot. This was why I hated close range engagements. They tended to be short and very bloody for everyone concerned, even when the enemy didn't have a fetish for ramming your ships.
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Part 4
=RK=
Observation lounge
Republic cruiser Solace
Lantillies
I listened with half an ear as damage reports continued to arrive. The little staff we hadn't cannibalized for command personnel was busy refining the information and thus steadily the friendly icons on the tactical plot changed coloration and when zoomed in now displayed a brief summary on how badly my fleet got mauled. A great deal of the progress fixing damage during the respite after Bothawui got erased with a long list of new broken things in need of fixing sooner rather than latter added to the DC parties to do list.
"We got hurt, badly, General." Joanna spoke from the CIC. "We can take the remaining enemy forces, perhaps what they have at Gizer too, however when that's done, this fleet will be spent, there's no doubt about it."
My eyes flickered back to the tactical display. Joanna was right. There was no way in hell I could justify bringing what would remain of the fleet to Mandalore. Perhaps a few ships in better condition and after some extensive emergency repairs at a proper naval facility, the two remaining Silencer equipped ones and the Daggers came to mind. If I could preserve them until we reached safety. I would need more ships to liberate Mandalore.
It wasn't until this moment that the truth sunk in. A few minutes of vicious fighting guaranteed that any hopes I had of heading back to Mandalore soon would at best be contingent on what forces could be spared when we got to a Republic naval station. It was a bitter, infuriating realization. It made my blood boil in impotent fury.
"Bringing our support ships back safely just become that much more vital." With the mobile dock and its experienced crews we could have a new production run of Silencers ready much faster than otherwise and that was something that suddenly jumped up on the top of my immediate priorities list.
"The Silencers." Joanna immediately concluded. After all, she just witnessed first hand how useful they could be even in tactical situation that didn't play to their strengths.
"Correct. We're engaging the remaining Separatist forces in system the moment we complete our turn, then the fleet will fall back into a defensive formation along with the support ships escorts. If practical, we'll request that our forces at Gizer and Taanab launch a raid to recover as many of the damaged ships and crews we're leaving behind. Those able are to head for Lantillies and try landing in friendly territory."
"We aren't staying to recover survivors?" Joanna frowned.
"We can't take the risk. For all we know, heavy enemy reinforcements are on the way here as we speak." I didn't need to point out that we weren't in a position to handle a large fresh force. The Separatist fleet supposedly raiding Gizer would be a stretch if we had to face it in case our forces there hadn't bloodied it.
She wasn't happy about my order. I wasn't happy either – leaving people behind was bad for morale and fleet cohesion. It was what many a Sith I despised would have done without a second thought.
"Shift formation to Besh Three and have a jump calculated for Reaper One." I ordered. That formation was a modified phalanx meant to cover the Silencers and Daggers by placing them in the centre of our fleet. It was the best I could do with the assets I had left. The total destruction of our escorts during the previous engagement was going to hurt now. The only silver lining was that the enemy hadn't deployed swarms of small craft. Initially, that wasn't much of a surprise. The Separatists Vultures lacked hyperdrives and that made them much harder to utilize in conjunction with sub-formations making constant hyperspace jumps all over the battle-scape. The time it would take to launch and recover them could add an unacceptable delays unless said Vultures got abandoned after first deployment, not to mention that the Guardian system was in place to mitigate their effects anyway. As it turned out, even if they wanted to, the enemy in system couldn't throw swarms of the pests at us, at least according to Commander Nabi. All enemy small craft were deployed planet side as air-superiority and support assets, which was a small mercy for us, though the local PDF and any clones down there would disagree, possibly violently at that.
I concentrated on the two remaining Separatist formations. They declined to combine in a single larger fleet, which while a double edged sword was ominous. Ever since I became a part of this war, the enemy usually went with simple, basic tactics. It was to be expected. It has been a very long time since anyone had the reason, means or resources to throw around fleets as large as seen in this war. Maintaining big standing forces was expensive, training them to the standards needed for a proper galaxy wide war with all that entailed, more so.
A vital edge of experience had been lost in the last thousand years of peace, perhaps longer than that. Unfortunately, the enemy was learning. I only hoped that the Republic navy was doing the same, because if they didn't and continued to rely on the single ponderous formations that were the golden standard when I arrived, the Separatists would gain a vital tactical edge if what I was seeing today was anything to go by. To my experienced eyes it was clear that the enemy was still stumbling his way into properly utilizing multiple battle groups for well organized and coordinated highly mobile warfare. Most damning, even as they suffered losses, their commander didn't revert to simpler tactics, instead they continued to try make things work and they were improving. Hopefully we would be able to destroy the enemy force in this system and it would be even better if the Separatist commander not only did go down with their fleet but failed to transmit tactical information of this battle to his or hers superiors. However, that was a wishful thinking I couldn't count on. I had to assume that the enemy was going to learn from everything that happened and was yet to happen today and I would have to be prepared for them to demonstrate the benefits of those lessons at Mandalore and any consequent battle of the war.
We managed to complete our turn a bit faster than the enemy thanks to our Venators being more agile than the Separatist battleships. While that fact bought us less than a minute, even such a small window of time could be precious if you had the tools to utilize it right.
"Calculations in. Entering hyperspace." Joanna announced.
A brief flicker of stretching stars and a glimpse of the energy realm allowing us faster than light travel and we appeared at Reaper One's flank, putting them between us and the other enemy battle group.
"Engage at will. Emergency deceleration. Shift vectors as needed to keep Reaper One between us and their friends." I rattled a string of orders. The Silencers spoke and multiple Munificents broke apart in multi-coloured explosions. More died targeted by the Daggers and seconds later under a turbolaser barrage. The enemy wasted no time and accelerated, with Reaper One showing the same suicidal determination as the rest of the Separatist fleet in this system. In another time I would have respected those crews durasteel discipline and belief in their cause. Almost any conceivable organic force would have balked and likely broken after suffering over sixty percent casualties in minutes. The droids on the other hand? They didn't have such a problem. They would keep coming as long as they were ordered to.
As the range fell to point blank and Munificent swarmed towards us coming in to ram, I unleashed the missile stocks we got from Gord. The distance between the fleets was negligible now, munition flight time measured in seconds at worst. Jamming, interference produced by shields and both sides fire-power in such a confined space served to further degrade PD performance. Crude, yet powerful fusion and proton tipped missiles flew at the approaching frigates and while counter fire swatted a lot of them out of space anyway, only a few needed to slip through to ruin a frigate's day. Nuclear detonations boiled away armor, fried sensors and irradiated hulls. Weapons got fused to the hull if not outright blasted away, engines went critical and blew away in sympathetic explosions, railgun rounds sheared through light ships as if their armor wasn't even there.
It wasn't enough. The enemy gave as good as it got on the way in. Shield emitters that saw one too many engagements without replacement malfunctioned, deflectors weakened, manifested spot failures before their control systems could compensate or failed outright. Armour belts patched up multiple times broke under barrages that they would have been able to handle a few months ago and weapon emplacements lost in previous battles compromised the ability of ships to fend off the incoming kamikazes. It was at this point that our dead escorts would have shined, distracting, engaging and physically intercepting the rushing enemy, if all else failed.
Ten Munificents broke through everything my battered fleet could throw at them. Half of them got swatted away by last ditch defensive fire if not from their targets, then by their consorts. The remaining five, damaged, burning and dying, managed to reach an equal number of my cruisers and all but a pair of them vanished in short lived pyres of mutual annihilation. Only a single Venator got lucky, with the Munificent intent or ramming her breaking apart moments before collision. The resulting impacts totalled her whole dorsal side, yet a lot of the crew lived to reach any and all available escape pods and shuttles.
The Silencers and Dagger softened up the enemy battleships and we lost "only" four more cruisers as battered wrecks that could no longer be useful in fight. Then the last enemy force in system jumped right on top of us and all hell broke loose.