The Power Of Ten: Sama Rantha 400 Far Future Ch. 110 – And The Aliens Love Us Back

Happily, Anatolia also had the other mental gifts of a Rantha in the form of high mental Stats and enhanced emotional understanding and finely refined instincts. So, she had long perused the personality profiles of the Fleet commanders, provided by certain nameless shadowy parties, made her a.s.sessments, and filtered them past sisters really, really good at mucking with people's heads. She had then altered her plans to account for the fact that Admiral Colos was an authoritarian gloryhound happy to see the whole Fleet pounded to hamburger and sc.r.a.p if it meant he could live to get away with an awesome battle report of doing all he could.

As a result, there'd been some battle group requests and a.s.signments, and the somewhat more heroic and admiring of the Fleet captains, who'd been open to working with this crazy Coronal, had Marked gunners and Signals people feeding in a very current and seconds-more accurate positioning and targeting feed than the other s.h.i.+ps in the fleet.
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Seconds meant a lot in s.p.a.ce combat. It allowed convergences of fire, dodging enemy fire, coordinated a.s.saults and withdrawals, more accurate positioning, and all the like.

The enemy was trying to do the same, what with the ma.s.s telepathy from those huge s.h.i.+ps, but the ether was alive with just as much psionic disruption as gravity wells and EMP distortions, and their coms weren't any faster or surer than standard Fleet systems as a result. The Marks.p.a.ce feeding data back and forth was giving them an edge Anatolia could exploit, and so when the mysterious master tactician was giving out orders, the captains who paid attention and followed them were having great success on both ends.

Which didn't help the rest of the battlefield, which had turned into a messy, chaotic slugfest of alien s.h.i.+ps and raging imperial guns, with all the soup of sensor feeds and psychic static turning s.p.a.ce into a real killzone.

Some s.h.i.+ps were working well together, some were arrogantly taking the lead for kills and credits, and some were getting pounded and battered and beat to s.h.i.+t by selfless, obedient bios.h.i.+ps without egos perfectly happy to sacrifice themselves to wipe their attackers, and coordinate to do just that.

There were bios.h.i.+ps burning in nuclear fire, and wrecked metal hulks tumbling and disintegrating through s.p.a.ce, blasted by arcs of biolightning and plasma vomit, pummeled by spore cannons, and torn apart from within by xenosym raiders they hadn't been able to repulse. Some were unlucky enough to come to grips with a s.h.i.+p and had actually been crushed and mangled by ma.s.sive tentacles, or even chewed on while boarding spikes directly injected limitless numbers of xenos into the s.h.i.+p.

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Sun Shot breacher rounds slammed into the Shark-cla.s.s midsize bios.h.i.+p in front of her, and Tiffany pulled out, point defenses dealing with the volley of boarding spores while the Saber's s.h.i.+elds counter-resonated the field of bio-lightning thrown in front of them, shattered the electrokinetic grip on it, and turned it into normal free electrons which the magnetic ramscoops sucked in greedily and applied towards the plasma cannons with cheery goodwill.

As she veered off, the converging lasers and plasma cannon rounds from the four Fleet s.h.i.+ps trailing her punched through the hole she'd made and into the s.h.i.+p beyond with split-second timing that should not have worked in such a battle scene. The lasers opened up the holes, the plasma rounds went within and detonated with fourth state of matter fun, and another bios.h.i.+p convulsed in its death throes.

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Anatolia's alert that the remnants of the first Swarm were swooping in to flank the Fleet forces was not welcome news, and Tiffany and her squadron were turning even before it was relayed through the Fleet, since the approach vector clearly indicated those s.h.i.+ps were coming this way. The Reserve Fleet was coming in behind them, but would certainly not be able to intercept for at least twenty minutes, restrictions to their Jamming speed and all.

Obviously the Swarm-mind had registered the unusual performance of her and her short squadron. It hadn't been able to get any performance data about exactly how she was killing stuff, as the targets were dying messily rather quickly, but it was still pretty clear that it wasn't slowing her down much, and her damage output was considerably higher than her damage taken, especially for the size of her vessel.

Torpedoes were being launched repeatedly and in force as the trailing Widow's Bite tracked the converging enemy fleet closely, keeping their vector locked on, and repeated computations of the erratic gravity wells current. Where the two converged together is where the incoming bios.h.i.+ps would appear, and that location is where the torpedoes were heading.

They hadn't learned the lesson about coming out of warp and stuff being there to greet them, or perhaps just the slaughter of that ground station wiping them out was fresh in their minds. Here, past the orbit of Ja.n.u.s II and only a few light-minutes from III, there weren't any floating asteroids, meteors, comets, or debris to hide such nasty surprises behind, and surely the forces concerned wouldn't be able to pay too much attention to an attack coming in from a new vector.

Ten different s.h.i.+ps, including those engaged with other bios.h.i.+ps actively, still managed to contribute a few torpedoes to the cause. Only the extra four in her squadron were able to deploy to greet them, building up power and charging guns for that first initial hit which had to save them all.

Tiffany slid into medium-range and turned broadside, the crew locked in focus, and Nimbus effects flaring up and ready on all the guns as capacitors screamed and were ready to be loosed.

Blurs of s.h.i.+ps at Jamming speed flashed in, hit the gravity well, and decelerated to standard kinetics.

Fifty torpedoes flashed past the Bared Saber in fiery streaks, and her cannons blazed like stars, one after another in series in under three seconds. The breacher rounds slammed into the forward psychokinetic fields of a dozen vessels and ripped them open to greet the incoming torpedoes.

The First Swarm ran head-on into fusion eruptions in the void, repeated two and three times, and psychic death roars rippled through the ether and secondary explosions lit off to accompany the bombardment.

Tiffany heard the engineers s.h.i.+fting the Nimbus effects to the conductors and heat dumps, could feel the ma.s.sive venting of the overheated cannons taking place as she kicked in the fusion drive and moved hard laterally to the incoming bios.h.i.+ps, spinning over to present her other side and the rail guns requiring a lot less power there, also with preloaded breacher rounds ready to go.

Three bios.h.i.+ps were in pursuit of her as the missiles and their psi-disrupting loads splattered cerulean glory over their forward s.h.i.+elds and hulls. Perhaps the cerevores riding them slapped their gnurly false-brain bodies as the waiting guns of the ready squadron filled the glowy cloud in front of them with much brighter and more intense light, letting them know that oops, probably wasn't the best idea to grab the easy prey with cooling guns.

One did manage to range ahead of the rest, gravitic manipulation and plasma waste spewing out wildly behind its flaming wounded body as it swept down on the Saber, great arcs of neobone extending out to pincer and ram the retreating s.h.i.+p.

Tiffany calmly spun her s.h.i.+p, a thousand feet of steel abandoning pure acceleration as it spun on its long access, presenting its long, high, and narrow prow to the incoming enemy.

Power built in the drive core as Tiffany saw it swooping in on her, those claws poised wide to clutch, tear, and start the boarding of xenos onto her s.h.i.+p.

She rolled her eyes, shook her head of pink hair, and kicked on full drive... to brake them.

With a terrible and ominous crackling, the prow of the Saber lit up with a Sun Strike of its own, while their forward momentum dropped precipitously. Distance narrowed between them and their pursuer shockingly fast, and the bios.h.i.+p didn't have time to adjust its tactics as it slammed right into the middle of that reality-rending prow.

The Saber was still moving backwards, but much slower than the bios.h.i.+p, and getting slower by the second at full burn. The Saber bucked and kicked as it plowed through the bios.h.i.+p thrice its size, past the pincer-lock before they could close, mountains of flesh and fluids streaming past them and then burning in the starfire heat of their fusion drive.

The plasma furnaces of its guts blew up around and behind them, and the Saber rocked and protested the treatment as it blew out the far end of the bios.h.i.+p in a fiery swathe that extended for hundreds of miles behind it as the bios.h.i.+p split fully open and vented hungry nuclear flames into the void.

The Saber had lost a good chunk of his forward momentum, but he was already turning, while organic goo alternately froze and was blasted off the hull, and the techs were cras.h.i.+ng dozens of fried Vakker circuit boards and putting new ones in place.

The Hymnal, Paen, Ode, and Overture rapidly came in to support, putting a few finis.h.i.+ng beams into the gutted bios.h.i.+p, and covering against the slow circling of the remaining bios.h.i.+ps who seemed to be hesitant about closing in and coming to grips with them.

The Bared Saber spun again, lined itself up, and adjusted course as it came around, picking up speed nicely. The Song Squadron lined up with active rotation, vectors constantly adjusting and turning to give the bios.h.i.+ps something to think about, s.h.i.+fting course minutely towards one s.h.i.+p, than another as courses changed, an electric and organic dance of who could concentrate and converge on who.

The Reserve Fleet came out of Jamming at precisely the wrong time, too far out of alignment and in the middle of the bios.h.i.+ps maneuvering for position. Layered volleys came down in concentrated volleys less than five seconds after coming out of Jamming, and extreme long-range fire that should have been absolutely useless against bios.h.i.+ps in the middle of multiple maneuvers crashed home with layered force enough to overwhelm their s.h.i.+elds and rupture their hulls catastrophically.

The six bios.h.i.+ps remaining naturally turned to scatter and draw off their attackers, splinter their forces, and buy time, while venting every thing they could in short order to keep them back.

The Saber and the Song Squadron politely swooped in on one flank to let them know that wasn't going to be working too awful well. Two of the s.h.i.+ps were pincered and pounded to death quickly, and the Reserve Fleet was fully capable of dealing with the additional four.

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The Glory to Dawn was about to die.

Ma.s.sive tentacles were wrapped around her, the creaking protest of her hull traveling the length of the s.h.i.+p. The bulk of the swollen enemy carrier was right up against her guns, and ma.s.sive discharges of biolightning were flaring through the hull, frying circuits and playing havoc with communications.

Admiral Colos stared in hatred at the bulbous eyes of the thing latched onto his s.h.i.+p. Postules in its hide were opening, boarding capillaries were extending forth like lampreys, ready to bite onto his s.h.i.+p and disgorge a ravening horde into its decks and galleries. He grimly prepared to order the self-destruct, although he didn't know if the linked explosions would all be going off, sparing his crew from a horrid end and rebirth as a xenosym slave.

"Glory to Dawn, this is the Widow's Bite. Prepare your pressor beams to repel the enemy. Tentacles will be severed in ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven..." came a smooth and unconcerned woman's voice over the coms.

"Prepare port pressors!" Admiral Colos howled into the coms, and could only pray the command was heard. They were non-vital arrays and hadn't been targeted by the enemy, they might have just survived.

"One." A whisper pa.s.sed through the hulls, a creaking that stopped halfway in confusion.