It's probably best no-one ever think too hard about the timeframe this story operates on.
(Hell, I can barely keep my tenses in order, but that's more to do with my ever-loosening grip on the flow of time in real life. Or that's my excuse…)
Meanwhile, the Assertive was in orbit over Horizon, unloading.
Despite not being a dedicated cargo vessel by any means, Jarrion had brought enough equipment and other sundries from the Imperium to pack just about every available inch of space the Asseritive had and enough to make unloading a significant event. Lighters flew up and down in an unceasing relay and had been doing so for going on a day already - they were, after all, not proper vessels for the process.
But it was getting done, albeit a little slowly, and once it was finished they could then get onto proper freighters and out to where they needed. All good stuff, as far as Jarrion was concerned. He was at that moment on the bridge, mostly to see what was going on and to be seen seeing what was going on.
It was always good for a Lord Captain to be present, he felt, or at the very least a presence.
So he was variously either sat on the command throne flicking through dataslates or else mingling with whichever bridge officer looked to have a spare moment, looking interested and appearing involved. This was why he was there when something unexpected happened.
What had been mild hubbub among the crew manning the ship's augurs quickly rose to outright alarm, culminating in the ship's Master of Aetherics double-checking some trouble readings and then shouting out:
"Lord Captain! Registering an alien vessel! Same class as previously signature."
This thoroughly derailed Jarrion's train of thought, which had been trundling along to nowhere in particular.
"Again? Where? Put tactical on the vidscreen," he said, getting over his initial blip of confusion. Obligingly and a moment later a tactical overlay of the local system was put onto the bridge's vidscreen, laying out plain the disposition of everything the augurs were presently picking up and showing, true enough, the threatening red blip of an approaching vessel that had automatically been marked as hostile.
"Intercept course…" Jarrion breathed to himself, eyeing the blip, narrowing his eyes and charting its trajectory in his head - though really he didn't need to, it was charted on the vidscreen for him, predictively laid out.
Same as the last one, tonnage-wise, like the crewman had said. Judging from its angle and distance of approach it looked to have been hiding behind one of the outer planets or moons or whatever else there was to lurk around in the system, shielding itself from view and scrying sensors prior to making its move. A standard level of cunning, and equally cunning to make that move now, while the Assertive was otherwise engaged.
Perfidious xenos! Jarrion had himself performed just such a manoeuvre in the past when dealing with pirates and, indeed, aliens - it was sound tactics. But when aliens did it themselves it wasn't cunning, just underhanded. Vile filth. Everything they did was wrong. They were, in the very fabric of their being, wrong.
If nothing else this was an opportunity to rid the galaxy of a handful.
"Battle stations! All lighters in transit to the surface continue down, those returning redirect to the surface. Voids up as soon as they're clear. Break orbit, plot course to intercept xenos vessel - firing solutions!" Jarrion said, not taking his eyes off the tactical display.
"Aye, Lord Captain!" The bridge chroused back at him.
There was a lot of back-and-forth shouting and vox traffic as orders were swiftly relayed and, within moments, the telltale lurch of the Assertive accelerating away from the planet. Jarrion took to his throne and settled in. On the screen, the blips were now both approaching one another.
Out of effective range. For now.
"Voids to maximum, Lord Captain," said a tactical officer somewhere to Jarrion's left.
"Excellent. Weapons?" Jarrion asked, glancing briefly to the officer.
"Batteries…"
A pause. Given the suddenness of it all it was unsurprising they weren't quite loaded yet. An agonising few seconds passed, during which Jarrion could well imagine the furious activity of the ratings throughout the gun decks, then:
"...batteries loaded and charged, Lord Captain! Lance capacitors at seventy-three percent and rising. Tactical augurs showing hard-lock on target. Ready to fire on your word."
"Excellent, excellent."
Still out of range, though now approaching extreme range. Any fire would be ineffective at best, at least from the Assertive. He couldn't speak to the alien's weapons, but given they were holding fire he felt it safe to assume they too were also out of effective range. Tension mounted as the distance closed.
"Keep them on starboard, helm, and let's close to long range - the moment we're in range open fire. Let's get this started, eh?"
The last time he'd fought with one of these collector vessels it hadn't exactly lasted an especially long time, but then again it hadn't been an especially fair fight, either. He'd had the drop on the thing, and they'd been running to boot. He was confident, but he was also equally keen to have it finished with as soon as possible.
"Aye, Lord Captai-"
"Lord Captain! Xenos vessel firing!"
And indeed it was. The tactical display showed the event in very dry terms, but the real-time pictview that Jarrion had brought up on the screen attached to the arm of his command throne (that he'd swung out because he always liked to see what was going on outside during combat) showed it much more vividly. The distant, twinkling dot of the collector vessel twinkled brighter for a moment and then a thin ribbon of dazzling energy came drizzling towards them.
The first ribbon missed, but Jarrion judged it to be a mere ranging shot. Indeed, the second shot was far longer and was right on target, raking cleanly across their voids, which flared vividly as the beam played over them. Jarrion gritted his teeth in disgust. He never got used to anyone - particularly not aliens - shooting at his ship. It made him, to put it lightly, upset.
"Report," he snapped out the instant the beam broke contact.
"Voids holding, Lord Captain," came the reply.
Barely scratched, not that Jarrion was overly surprised given what he'd seen. Imperial void shields were built for withstanding thundering volleys of thousands of shells or salvoes from multiple lance arrays. A brief swipe of an energy beam amounted to very little, in the scheme of things.
Not for the first time Jarrion mused on how differently they did things in this galaxy. On an entirely different scale, really, with an entirely different approach. Playing by two sets of rules.
"Oh well," he said. "Range?"
He could see, he just wanted to be told.
"Starboard batteries approaching medium range, Lord Captain," came the response. They'd passed long range while being shot at, it seemed. Medium could have been better, could have been worse. He saw the target was closing, too, albeit slightly obliquely. A reasonable angle. Worth taking a shot.
"Open fire," he said.
The Assertive's grav-culverin batteries opened up. Hundreds and hundreds of barrels recoiled in rippling sequence, shells each the size of a Kodiak whipping out across the void. Some had been fuzed to detonate short of the target, to scatter shrapnel, to better overwhelm shields. The rest were simply standard shells, fuzed to detonate after impact (or on impact; precision wasn't wholly necessary). All of them formed a rolling flurry that blanketed space around the collector ship. A lot missed. A lot didn't.
Collector barriers, while strong - very strong, in fact; some of the best available - had not been designed with Imperial weapon batteries in mind. While a good amount of the smaller, lighter shrapnel from the detonating rounds was deflected, the sheer mass of the other shells was such that they made a complete mockery of the shields, barely diverting in their course at all and smashing into the hull of the alien vessel with wanton abandon, where they then (mostly) exploded. Great chunks of metal and less readily identifiable material were torn loose and blown into the void.
To say nothing of the Assertive's dorsal laser battery, of course, which just ignored the barriers completely and seared superheated furrows into whatever it was the hull was made of, shearing off metal protuberances and detonating point-defence blisters. After a single volley the ship was already limping. Jarrion couldn't help but smirk.
"They appear to have made a mistake, here," he said, magnifying the visual on his pictscreen as much as it could go, the better to see the damage. He still couldn't really see it, but he let his imagination fill in the blanks. Delayed twinkles spoke of secondary detonations, serious damage. Gratifying.
"Lord Captain! There is another alie- no, two additional contacts!" Shouted the Master of Aetherics, who was having a very busy day by all accounts. Jarrion stopped imagining explosions and stopped smirking.
"What? Where?" He asked, looking up at the tactical display still on the bridge's main vidscreen. Sure enough, two new contacts where there had been absolutely nothing before. There was not even a hint of where they might have been hiding this time and for a second Jarrion was completely at a loss. Then it hit him.
They'd just literally arrived. Just jumped in. Faster than light. They could do that here.
He'd seen it before from the local vessels, just not like this. He'd found it rather a novelty, in fact, watching his expanding fleet of Kowloon freighters zipping away into space. Quite the contrast to the acceleration a warp-capable Imperial vessel usually needed to get up to speed. Here and now though there was no novelty. Here and now it was just unpleasant. With a vessel arriving from the Warp you couldn't help but notice it arrive. Here, it was like they'd popped out of the void.
In many ways he supposed they rather had.
"Keep firing on the first target! Helm! Do your best to keep the others out of range until the first has been destroyed!"
Or crippled. Or was just not in any position to shoot back anymore. But that part didn't need saying. There was another lurch as the Assertive manoeuvred, rolling to keep its batteries on target as it curved to try its best to split the difference between staying in range of its target while keeping out of range of becoming a target itself.
The new arrivals closed. They didn't have that far to close, in all honesty, having dropped in comfortably inside firing range, if not ideal firing position. Jarrion could see that, while they'd arrived together, they'd arrived from two separate angles. A pincer to his rear. To fire effectively on them, Jarrion would have to stop firing at the first ship and let it get away, even turning to one of them he'd be splitting the bulk of his fire. Smart bastards.
"Fire as soon as the batteries are reloaded," Jarrion said, keenly aware of the few seconds remaining before the new arrivals opened up on them. The first ship was facing full away now, presenting a small target but also, perhaps unluckily, presenting its engines. When the Assertive fired again it was the alien's engines that took the shots.
"Target well hit! Engine damage! First vessel showing diminishing energy signatures, decay in acceleration, listing. First vessel is - yes, vessel is showing as a hulk, Lord Captain."
"Switch targets! My mark! That one, that one!" Jarrion shouted, furiously jabbing at his screen, trying to get his point across. Before anyone could act on his orders the two other collector ships got into position and both fired together.
There was a sound just on the edge of hearing that rose in pitch and volume briefly, like a vast swarm of buzzing insects rattling down a metal tube. It put Jarrion's teeth on edge. Then it stopped.
"Voids holding!"
This was true. Whether this would remain true in the circumstances was less clear. Against a single vessel it was likely the Assertive could have been borderline invincible, at least in this galaxy. Against two at once? When they were - as Jarrion could now see, looking at the readouts - plainly concentrating their fire together on a single point of the voids?
Well, she was only a light cruiser, after all…
"New target! Fire! Fire!"
The angle was bad, but it was better than nothing.
"Target hit. Target showing…light damage, Lord Captain."
Again the aliens fired and again came the furious buzzing sound, louder this time, with a definite throbbing crackle towards the end when the beams ceased.
"Voids - voids h-holding, but showing fluctuations. Capacitors one through seven reaching maximum. They might not-"
"They will hold!" Jarrion spat through gritted teeth.
The aliens were very near now, apparently having decided - not without cause - that to keep distance from the Assertive would be an unwise move and that getting in as close as possible would play to their agility over the Dauntless. One of the ships was sweeping in from the front, the other having swooped to come in front the rear, still on two sides.
Jarrion could see what they were doing, working to present two different targets and not to let fields of fire overlap. It was the one moving towards the prow that caught Jarrion's attention, because while it was obviously trying hard to keep out of the arc of fire of the Assertive's lances, it wasn't keeping so far out of the arc that a quick adjustment wouldn't solve the issue.
"Helm! Burn retros and come to new heading! I want that ship where the lances can hit it!"
"Yes, Lord Captain!"
There was a violent lurch as thrusters roared to life to arrest the Assertive's forward momentum, others kicking in a moment later and sending everyone listing to the side as the ship struggled against the inertia to haul its bulk around. Fortunately for the Assertive, it had been built with this sort of agility (such as it was) in mind, and while everyone on board felt the effort, the effort bore fruit. The collector ship came comfortably into the prow arc and full view of the lances.
"Lances, now! Now! All arrays! Fire!"
And fire they did, all three of the Assertive's lances fired at once, at full capacity, and at a range where they would have had trouble missing. They didn't miss. They all fired together and all fired such that their beams converged on a single point - a single point that the collector vessel flew straight through.
Jarrion was put rather in mind of a cousin of his, who, while driving a very expensive (and very delicate) landcar of prestigious and exclusive manufacture, had hit a lamppost at considerable speed, somehow managing to almost perfectly bisect the vehicle from front to rear bumper. The sight had stuck with Jarrion for years, and came to him again now.
Though while his cousin had managed to limp away from that particular calamity, Jarrion very much doubted any aliens would be coming away from this one. Not alive, at least.
The lance salvo ended before the alien ship had taken it the full length, but what it had taken was more than enough. The energy beams had furiously torn through side to side from the prow almost all the way to the stern, and the ship carrying on moving forward was enough to finish the job. The ship ripped into two pieces.
"Enemy ship crippled, Lord Captain!" A crewman yelled, presumably to clear up any confusion. It did rather make Jarrion grin. The lances tended to have that effect on him.
"Putting it mildly. That is very satisfying to see," he said.
Jarrion felt fairly confident in writing off that ship as a threat. Just left one.
"Firing solution on the last target, if you please. Uh, where is it?"
Its position was not immediately obvious, at least not that he could see.
"Final vessel - final vessel is below us, Lord Captain!"
This sort of thing happened sometimes in space, but so rarely Jarrion had momentarily forgotten about it. He got over his shock in short order.
"Bring the batteries to bear! Turn! Roll!"
"Energy spike in the alien ship, Lord Captain! It's - that doesn't make sense, how is-"
Jarrion could see this, too, and he too was confused by what appeared to be an impossible and self-destructive level of energy suddenly surging through every system in the ship. But before he or anyone else could puzzle this out or even voice their puzzlement, someone else shouted:
"Enemy is accelerating! Hard! Distance closing!"
That snapped Jarrion back to the moment.
"Accel-? They're going to ram us! All hands! Brace for impact! All hands-!
There was a horrendous lurch to the side as the ships collided, the inertial-dampening systems of the Assertive struggling with the sudden and forceful impact. Jarrion went sideways over his throne and he wasn't the only one. An ear-splitting scraping noise tore the air and every surface juddered violently. No consoles exploded.
The collision felt like it lasted a long, long time. It didn't, but it felt like it did. Once everything had stopped shaking and rumbling and the noise had stopped, Jarrion leapt to his feet. Across the bridge others were doing likewise, or helping others do likewise. Someone groaned, but that was inevitable in the circumstances.
Alarms were blaring, but fewer than he might have expected, and not as loudly as he might have feared. He'd need to hear a proper assessment, but he could tentatively guess that maybe damage wasn't as awful as it could have been.
"Report," he said, slicking his hair back and wincing as he belatedly noticed he'd bitten the inside of his mouth in the impact.
"Damage seems to be largely confined to the lower decks, Lord Captain, and largely localised around the point of impact. Some scattered reports of hull breaches are coming in from further out but nothing to suggest the structure of the ship is in danger."
"And the alien ship?"
"Crippled, Lord Captain. Readings show total systems failure and massive structural damage."
The Assertive was made of considerably sterner stuff than the alien ship, it transpired, and had held up much, much better. This was good.
"Good, good…" Jarrion breathed.
There was one issue, though.
"But, uh, Lord Captain…"
"What?"
"It is stuck."
"Stuck?"
"The alien vessel is stuck on the Assertive, Lord Captain."
Jarrion thought about this.
"...bugger," he said, having run out of anything else to say.
I have given far, far, FAR too much thought to space combat as regards how 40k and ME might stack up and if I'm not careful I would ramble at length and just say a lot of things that no-doubt would still not make a whole lot of sense and no one would agree with anyway.
Suffice to say, they're two different franchises going for two different things, and ultimately all of this is mostly about taking my toys and mashing them together to make what I want to happen, happen. So here we are. What would be the point if 40k showed up and the result was 'Oh, they're a bit rubbish actually'?
And as much as I enjoyed all the space combat you see in the games, it did always rather bum out that BioWare laid out this rather interesting, fairly comprehensive background material on how fleets function in Mass Effect - all this emphasis on manoeuvre and frigate pack tactics to take down barriers and laser cooldown times and lots of nice little details like that - and what you tend to see is, you know, ships so close they might as well be shaking hands.
But that's videogames, right? Who wants to see a dreadnought firing at something you can't even actually see?
(Although the one thing I WILL say is that I'm always low-key annoyed that 'weapon batteries' on Imperial ships are invariably depicted as just these big ol' cannons in racks of four, because that's what the BFG models had - nevermind that this was just for modelling reasons and so you could easily see what a model was equipped with! Nevermind that the rulebook specifically states that Imperial ships are FESTOONED with gunports and weapon batteries are these are vast arrays of hundreds of guns! Nevermind that, on a vessel that's pushing seven kilometres, just having FOUR barrels would make them IMPRACTICALLY ENORMOUS even by 40k standards! Nevermind-
…see? This is why I shouldn't get started about it. And no, Dauntless's don't usually have dorsal weapons, at least not in the tabletop rules, but they do in BFG:A2, and it's 40k, just about anything goes. It's a different model, whatever.
I've spoken too much.)