Mutara Nebula
USS Enterprise
Bridge

The viewscreen showed the swirling, slowly moving gases, magenta, purple of the Mutara Nebula. There were veils of luminescent materials and through all an interlace of unpredictable electrical charges. Like lightning, these intermittent great flashes illumine whole sections of the nebula. The ship shook and the red lights began to dim as the Enterprise headed into the purplish gas and disappeared into a cloud bank of the stuff.

"Emergency lights." Kirk quickly ordered.

Spock tapped a switch, and the emergency lights came on, returning normal lighting to the bridge. Thrawn took a look at his console, seeing that while the phaser banks were fully charged the phaser lock was inoperative, likely because of interference from the nebula.

Mutara Nebula
USS Reliant
Bridge

A moment after the Enterprise entered the nebula, Reliant appeared, pursuing the Enterprise into the gloom, also disappearing. The picture on the viewscreen was squirrelly purple, breaking up. The ship shuddered and the lights dimmed for a moment.

"Tactical!" Khan ordered.

Joachim tried but failed. "Inoperative."

"Raise the shields..."

Electrical forces raging without were also reflected on the circuits within. It was bumpy, on top of everything else with the sound of electronics whining.

"As I feared, sir. Not functional. I'm reducing speed." Joachim stated.

Khan glanced at him but did not argue.

Cautiously Reliant emerged from a massive 'cloudbank' with electrical discharges abound. Barely moving, the ship 'felt' its way forward alone. With scanners barely functioning, neither ship could notice the Enterprise was above and behind Reliant. Then the Enterprise made a soft turn and glided into Reliant's rear.

Enterprise
Bridge

Reliant's image was breaking up even though they were slowly gaining on her.

"Phaser lock is inoperative, sir." Thrawn spoke from the tactical console.

"Best guess, Mr. Thrawn. Fire when ready." Kirk replied.

Thrawn switched over to manual targeting, having anticipated Kirk's order and did his best to target Reliant. Targeting sensors were about as tactical and visual sensors but he angled the targeting lock as best as he could, then fired just as an electrical disturbance bounces the bridge. The bounce caused Thrawn's phaser shot to go wide of Reliant, amid crackling discharges.

Reliant
Bridge

The bridge shook, causing a few of the bridge crew to stagger and roll from the near-miss concussion, along with Khan himself. "Aft-torpedoes fire!"

Reliant was wide of the mark with a Photon torpedo. Just as the shot missed, there was blinding electrical discharge. When it cleared, the Enterprise appears to be alone.

Enterprise
Bridge

On the viewscreen, there was nothing but magenta amid picture breakup.

"Hold your course. Look sharp..." Kirk said, a bit of sweat trailing down his brow.

"At what?" Saavik asked.

Kirk didn't answer and for the next few moments, all peered into the lousy picture with occasional electrical flashes. Still the Enterprise moved forward as there was a large flash followed by a sudden glimpse: Reliant boring in on collision course!

"Evasive starboard!" Kirk immediately ordered.

The Enterprise immediately angled starboard to avoid colliding with Reliant, but not fast enough. Reliant fired its phaser banks. One bank missed but the second phaser shot hit the Enterprise's torpedo room on the dorsal fin area of ship.

Torpedo Room

An explosion rocked the room, burning and killing the assigned crew before they could even blink.

Bridge

The bridge rattled from the explosion below; Sulu is thrown from his chair and Saavik leapt to her post.

"Phaser bank one, fire!" Kirk immediately ordered.

The Enterprise fired a phaser and delivered a raking shot which ripped along the side of Reliant's primary hull just behind the bridge.

Reliant
Bridge

The left turbolift exploded and most of Khan's bridge crew were killed. Joachim himself ended up being crushed under a beam. Khan rushed over and with his enhanced strength was able lift the beam off of Joachim.

"Joachim!" For the first time, his friend wounded, Khan hesitated, but held him.

"Yours... is... the superior..." Joachime managed to utter before he succumbed to his wounds.

Khan held his dead friend's body tightly. "I shall avenge you."

As this happened, Reliant veered to one side with the impact and disappeared into a deep purple mass.

Enterprise
Engine Room

"Damage report, Mr. Scott."

McCoy was present in the engineering, helping some crewmen. The Reactor Room flashed a red warning light and glowed with a blue light. The air was heavy with smoke but the doors, damaged earlier, still held.

Scotty made it over to the console to answer Kirk. "Admiral, I've got to take the mains off the line. The energizer's shaken loose and I can't get in there to fix her…radiation…"

Scotty stuttered and slumped over but luckily McCoy caught him in time.

"Scotty?"

Bridge

"All right, we'll do the job with auxiliary power." Kirk muttered.

The bridge door opened; Chekov, faintly, stood there as Kirk turned around. "Could you use another hand, Admiral?"

Kirk glanced over to Thrawn. "Mr. Thrawn, do you have any objections to Mr. Chekov manning auxiliary weapons control?"

"No, sir." Thrawn shook his head. "In fact, I more than welcome him."

Kirk looked back at Chekov. "Man the auxiliary weapons console, Mr. Chekov."

David and the others reacted to Chekov taking his place quietly but Kirk had no time for that as he looked over to Spock's station. "Spock?"

"Sporadic energy readings port side, aft. Could be an impulse turn." Spock said, lifting his face up from the scanner.

"He won't break off now. If he followed me this far he'll be back. But from where...?" Kirk pondered.

"He's intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two dimensional thinking..." Spock suggested.

Kirk looked at him, smiling for a second before he returned to his chair. "Mr. Saavik, all stop."

"All stop, sir." Saavik complied.

"Descend ten thousand meters. Mr. Chekov, stand by photon torpedoes. Mr. Thrawn, will man the phasers." Kirk ordered.

Thrawn carefully considered the admiral's plan. Spock's suggestion of two-dimensional thinking made him think about how space combat was fought in his home galaxy. From what he had read up, the method of fighting in space back in his home galaxy demonstrated two-dimensional thinking as well, with ships almost always facing each other or attacking each other from the side, much like battleships on the oceans he had read from the conflicts of ancient Earth.

Evolving from water navy engagements and in turn the earliest orbital battles, space warfare became a high technology affair that often defined the outcome of the galaxy's most important conflicts. The strategy adopted by a space navy defined what tactics were used in battle. Some tactics were universal: the most basic tactical principle was to maximize the damage one's fleet did to the enemy while minimizing one's own. Other tactics were more suited to certain strategies: space denial, space-sniping and hit-and-hype raiding were generally best suited for a force pursuing an asymmetric strategy, while beam baiting might be adopted by an enemy trying to combat that force.

In general capital ships fought other capital ships, and starfighters fought other starfighters. Exceptions included starfighters equipped with proton torpedoes or other warheads, and capital ships, like the Lancer-class frigate, which were designed to fight starfighters. However, most capital ships were equipped with anti-starfighter cannons to aid their fighter escorts or to serve as the primary defense against fighters in the absence of an escort.

A universal tactic in space battles was maneuvering warships so that they brought more weapons to bear on the enemy than vice versa, as well as presenting a narrower profile for the enemy to shoot at. Thus, battle formations typically took the form of long lines of ships, hence why capital ships could also be called 'ships of the line,' to exchange fire with the enemy. A fundamental choice all commanders had to make was whether to engage at long- or close-range. Ships optimized for broadside battles might attempt to cap the enemy's 'T', namely, engage them while they were in a line-ahead formation so that only the lead ship in the enemy formation could respond.

They might even rush straight into the enemy's line in the hopes of breaking it, which typically resulted in a chaotic, close-range brawl with ships engaging each other in groups of two or three at most.

Then of course, there was the starfighter combat.

Starfighter combat had a huge variety of tactics in its own right, though broadly speaking they could be divided into two groups: those tactics designed to be used against capital ships, and those tactics used to defend capital ships. Historically, the former role had generally been taken by bombers, large, complex and heavy craft built around powerful sensor arrays, large missile payloads, and days-long mission profiles, designed to track down enemy fleets and launch surprise attacks. Naval wisdom held for centuries that this was the only scenario in which torpedo runs could penetrate defensive fighter screens and flak defenses. The latter role was typically taken by interceptors, extremely light, fast and maneuverable starfighters that were minimally armed and were designed to shoot down attacking bombers, or to escort bombers to their targets and defend them from enemy interceptors.

In battle, fleets would typically deploy their interceptor escorts in front of them in a 'starfighter screen,' where they could engage enemy fighter squadrons before they could close in on the larger vessel. Alternatively, they might move aggressively with their starfighters in a tactic no one might expect. Here, the superstructure of the starfighter-carrying vessel would turn to face the oncoming enemy's vessels, allowing the starfighters to launch without risking attack. The starfighters would then launch attacks over each side of their ships' hulls on to the flanks of the attacking squadrons, who had become pinned against the defending ships.

The snubfighter lay between the interceptor and the bomber in terms of armament and speed, developing a wide variety of tactics that allowed them to destroy much larger capital ships. These included the nova flare, which involved massed barrages of proton torpedoes fired from starfighters and aimed at specific points along the shields of a capital ship. The tactic called for two starfighters to fly extremely close together as they approached a capital ship, so close that the larger ship's targeting computer would detect the two fighters as one approaching ship. At very close range, the two fighters would split apart: one fighter would continue on a strafing run of the capital ship, while the second would draw fire away from the first.

The attacking fighter would have about five seconds to cause damage on the capital ship before it was clearly identified as a second ship. Even so, those five seconds would allow enough time to cause serious damage to the larger vessel. A comparable tactic was space-sniping, used by forces defending a star system against a planetary assault. The strategy consisted of hiding starfighter bases in gas giants, within asteroid fields, on planets with large oceans, or on planets with thick cloud cover within or around the planetary system to be defended.

Starfighter groups would operate in tandem from these bases, attacking isolated ships during the orbit phase of a planetary invasion. Starfighter tactics could also extend to smaller capital ships light corvettes or gunships attacking larger ones. Slashing the deck was a tactical maneuver used against enemy capital ships developed by the Dark Lord Kaan at the First Battle of Ruusan during the New Sith Wars. The technique involved any number of smaller ships, usually ranging from snubfighters to corvettes, that would fire all their guns while cutting in along a vector that minimized the amount of guns the enemy capital ship could bring to bear against them.

When the enemy capital ship tried to change direction to bring more guns about, the smaller ships would pivot and double back for another pass along a different vector to inflict even more damage. However, the tactic focused heavily on speed and the element of surprise and was almost useless if the enemy could call upon the support of other ships.

However, ship combat in the Milky Way was different.

For one, Starfleet and the surrounding powers were not heavily reliant on starfighter support, mostly because their weapons and shields were too powerful and even too precise for starfighters of any kind to be a threat. During his time at the Academy, Thrawn had created several simulations of starfighters trying to swarm a Federation ship of the Enterprise's class and each time the fighters suffered heavy casualties while inflicting little damage on the Federation ship. The phasers were not only precise but could be modified to short burst proximity blasts that could blast an entire swarm of fighters easily. They could even use the detonation of photon torpedoes coming upon the swarm and hit by the phasers of the very ship that fired said torpedoes.

That rendered starfighter combat very little effective, though Starfleet could use modified shuttles and runabouts.

The next difference between the two galaxies was that Starfleet ships were much more maneuverable than ships of their size would be in the Skyriver Galaxy. This allowed them the advantage of dodging the majority of weapons fire from a capital ship. Using controlled fusion reactions for speed along with a combination of an Inertial Dampening Field and multiple thrusters, a single Starfleet ship could outmaneuver an entire line of capital ships.

Especially with three-dimensional thinking.

Thrawn mused that a ship like the Enterprise could easily slip below or behind a line of capital ships, moving too fast for the fighter screens to catch it and easily strike from below or behind where there would be a lack of weapons. In fact, one torpedo strike could travel through the ion engines and destroy a ship like Republic Star Destroyer instantly. Thrawn knew of people in the Skyriver Galaxy who while admitted that the Federation was advanced, they were mostly so in areas like transporters and power generation. They had very little understanding of the weapons used by Starfleet, its tactics and how they could defend themselves.

Like right now.

Thrawn himself was experienced in the space warfare of his own galaxy but since arriving here in the Milky Way, he had come to understand the three-dimensional thinking that Starfleet employed, even studying it through three-dimensional chess which he enjoyed against skilled opponents like Spock. It allowed him to understand the tactic Kirk was attempting here. He was playing on Khan's inexperience and two-dimensional thinking, banking on the Reliant moving over them and where they could strike from behind.

A clever move.

Space
Mutara Nebula

Reliant in a purplish mass, banked slightly, completing a long turn, then boring ahead. As Reliant emerges from the dark blue mass into a clear almost tranquil place. Reliant, moving slowly, stops, as if looking around.

Reliant
Bridge

The screens were empty as Khan waited patiently for any sign of the Enterprise. Despite his patience, Khan tilted his head slightly, wondering where in God's name did the Enterprise, where Kirk was.

Space
Nebula

Reliant slowly moved through the swirling gases and flashing lights. As this happened, from behind Reliant and from below, like a great whale rising from the depths, Enterprise rose vertically, slowly turning to face the unsuspecting enemy.

Enterprise
Bridge

A firing switch emerged from the auxiliary firing control.

"Torpedoes ready, sir." Chekov reported.

Kirk leaned forward, staring intensively at the screen. "Look sharp."

Saavik lifted her eyes up at the screen, just as a distorted image of Reliant rear side was shown.

"Fire." Kirk immediately said.

Chekov pressed the firing switch, firing a torpedo from the undamaged side of the ship's torpedo launcher, hitting and destroying Reliant's weapons pod on top.

Reliant
Interior

Explosions rocked the interior of Reliant, Khan's crew being caught in the blast.

"Fire."

This time Thrawn fired, the forward phaser banks firing two times. The shots both hit Reliant's port nacelle, causing explosions along the engine that vented plasma out into space. The explosions traveled all the way to Reliant's engine room, killing the crew Khan had placed there. Chekov fired another torpedo, blasting Reliant's port nacelle off into space, debris scattering.

Reliant
Bridge

Explosions devastated the bridge, Khan was blown from his chair and all was quiet.

Enterprise
Bridge

Reliant was now a scarred, battered hulk, her main hull still intact, but dead in space. Despite their victory there were no cheers from the bridge crew, just deadly professionalism.

"Cease fire. Look sharp." Kirk stated.

"Power levels quite low, sir." Saavik stated.

"Uhura, send to Commander, Reliant: prepare to be boarded." Kirk then said.

"Aye, sir."

Reliant
Bridge

Amid the smoke and ruins, there was initially no signs of life as Uhura's voice came over the speakers.

"Commander, Reliant, this is Enterprise. Surrender and prepare to be boarded. Repeat..."

Then chillingly, Khan rose up by the main console. He was horribly burned, and it was clear that he was clinging to life by his will. He pulled himself over to a special console that had been brought onto the bridge, one of his hands hanging useless by the side.

"No... Kirk. The game's not over." Painfully, with one good arm, he activated the console that was in fact the Genesis console.

Reliant
Transporter Room

In the transporter room sat the Genesis torpedo, lights starting to blink in response.

Bridge

"To the last I will grapple with thee!" Khan muttered and then activated the device and, on the console, Khan could see the countdown begin.

Four minutes…

Enterprise
Bridge

"Admiral." Kirk glanced over at Spock upon being called. "Scanning an energy source on Reliant. A pattern I've never seen."

David peered closer over Spock's shoulder, reacting in fear. "It's the Genesis Wave!"

"What?" Kirk froze before he came over to the science station.

"They're on a build up to detonation!" David said as his father stood next to him.

"How soon?" Kirk asked.

"We encoded four minutes." David answered.

"We'll beam aboard and stop it-" David cut Kirk off mid-sentence.

"You can't!"

There was a brief stunned moment, then Kirk hit the intercom. "Scotty, I need warp speed or hyperdrive in three minutes or we're all dead!"

Static was all he got.

"Scotty!"

Spock leapt from his place and disappeared through the bridge doors.

"Mr. Sulu, get us out, best possible speed!" Kirk continued, not having noticed Spock's disappearance.

"Aye, sir."

The Enterprise backs away from Reliant but her speed was painfully slow.

Engineering

Spock rushed into engineering, seeing McCoy tending to Scotty. After sizing up the situation, Spock headed for the dilithium reactor room, only to be stopped by McCoy.

"Are you out of your Vulcan mind?" McCoy questioned. "No human can tolerate the radiation that's in there."

"As you are fond of pointing out, Doctor, I am not human." Spock said, attempting to move past McCoy stopped him again.

"You are not going in there." McCoy said with finality in his voice.

Spock stopped. "…Perhaps you are right. What is Mr. Scott's condition?"

McCoy looked at Scotty. "Well I don't think that he-"

Spock gave McCoy the Vulcan nerve pinch when he wasn't looking, catching him as he fell. "Sorry, Doctor. I have no time to discuss this logically."

He knelt McCoy down softly and then grabbed Scotty's gloves as the engineer began to stir and placed a hand on McCoy's face. "Remember."

Spock then pressed the access button and entered the Reactor Room, a separated area behind radiation-proof glass and metal, red lights flashing and an iridescent blue glow within.

Scotty got up and rushed over, stopping in front of the glass. "Spock, get out of there! Spock!"

McCoy managed to get up and turned around to see Spock inside the reactor room. "Spock, get out of there!"

Bridge

As this happened, the Enterprise continued making its way out of the nebula.

Kirk leaned over the science station. "Time from my mark."

"Two minutes, ten seconds." Saavik answered.

"Engine room! What's happening?!" Kirk barked into the intercom.

Engineering

"Spock!" Scotty shouted out.

"Good god man get the hell out of there!" McCoy shouted.

Spock ignored them as he staggered to the main console and lifted the top of the dilithium reactor and the chamber was immediately flooded in glowing radiation.