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  “Target out of range,” she reported, then zoomed back out keeping an eye on other targets. As she waited and watched the Nestafar warships turned off, allowing the remaining allied vessels to reach safety, including several that were limping along behind the pack.

  The bulk of the enemy fleet, however, was still on approach, with the forward elements merely circling around out of range and waiting for them to join up, now that they knew the Human station was not a soft target.

  3

  With the cleansing beams firing off white streaks and the all but invisible rail gun rounds pounding the approaching Nestafar fleet, half their ships opened up with missile fire, sending firefly-like glowing green streaks spiraling in towards the seda along with a few heading to the flanking warships. The missiles didn’t fly a straight line as most things in space did, but rather corkscrewed around a linear trajectory in a way that made Legat Orion wonder what the purpose was and why they would waste space on the missiles for the extra maneuvering capability.

  He got his answer a few moments later as the missiles heading for the warships abruptly turned and passed by the first few, zigzagging between the defensive fleet until they found the targets they wanted…all Calavari ships. Some of the fireflies went down to anti-air fire while the rest impacted the warships’ shields, sucking large chunks of energy out of them but with none of their destructive force getting through to the hulls.

  The bulk of the missiles that were headed for the seda never got through as anti-missile lachar batteries opened up what looked like a shooting gallery and sniped the fireflies before they could hit the shield. Those handful that did get through were stopped short by the protective energy barrier, then the Nestafar fleet entered plasma range.

  Red globs shot out from all their ships, raining down on the battle station looking like elongated teardrops. The shields held up against the torrent briefly, then began falling in sections where the incoming fire was the strongest. The weapons batteries exposed beneath them had secondary shields covering them while the armored hull began to explosively soak up the excess damage.

  A few moments later the enemy fleet entered the seda’s plasma range and blue orbs began flashing out back towards the Nestafar fleet along with the rail gun rounds and cleansing beams. From his position on the bridge Orion couldn’t see the spectacle, for he was staring at the battle hologram that was displaying damage graphics rather than live pictures. Other than the missiles and rail gun slugs being exchanged it didn’t show any weapons fire…though the amount of projectiles passing back and forth on the hologram was impressive enough.

  The view from the backside of the seda was equally impressive, as you had the moon-like station winged by weapons fire being exchanged between the Alliance warships and the unseen foe. Though she was seated within a control room on the seda, Sandy-K903-10 saw through hologram the perspective of her Ravager-class starfighter as it floated in between two Star Force transports. Her orders had been to stay put until called for or until the enemy came to her and she didn’t like it one bit. Her ship had plasma weapons, four type-3 shipbuster missiles, and a lachar that she could have been using against the Nestafar but no, she and the other pilots had to sit back and wait…typical.

  As she watched a Gardeen warship, looking like a spindly needle, broke apart from a ferocious plasma attack along its midsection just before the cruiser that killed it appeared crossing the horizon on the seda, trailing smoke as it came but was still pouring out plasma damage and firefly missiles into the warships and completely ignoring the station.

  The seda, however, wasn’t ignoring it. As the cruiser worked its way around the perimeter it brought itself into range of more weapons batteries that couldn’t reach the main group, which then gave the ship their full attention.

  Plasma orbs covered it like rain, then two plasma streamers reached out and cut into the ship like a fire hose cutting into mud. Before those hits could register one of the backside cleansing beams fired off and cut straight through the heart of the ship, hitting in a section of already damaged hull and disappearing within for a second before blasting out the opposite side. When the beam abated the plasma covered the corpse of the ship with debris plumes, partially obscuring view of the warship.

  Sandy whistled approvingly, wondering just what was happening on the far side where most of the fireworks were happening…then her fighter’s sensors picked up more enemy contacts coming around the station.

  “Finally,” she whispered in her control cubicle as she thrusted ahead and flew around the bow of the leftmost ship as she took her ravager out to confront the enemy fighters…Valeries no less. They were skipping through and around the Alliance warships, making it almost impossible for the seda’s weaponry to hit them without resulting in friendly fire, though she did noticed a few contacts disappearing from pointblank anti-air fire coming from the warships.

  “This is it,” she heard another of the pilots seated next to her yell, but she focused on her ship’s telemetry and tuned out the occasional chatter. Orders would come over her earpiece, so any other sounds were meaningless, though she did share his sentiment.

  Sandy brought the ravager’s plasma cannons online but didn’t bother with the lachar, knowing that Valeries had energy shields that would eliminate the penetrating nature of the weapon. She set the modular intensity of the cannons high, knowing that taking down Valeries was going to be very different from their anti-lizard simulations, but she was anxious to show the Alliance what the Canderian starfighters were capable of.

  She wasn’t the first to move to intercept the fighters coming in on the left. There were two other ravagers ahead of her with others following up while about half of them took off the other direction to counter the enemy advance on the opposite side of the seda. None were coming up or under the station, given that there were no warships stationed there that they could hide amongst.

  There were plenty on the rear side though, and as soon as Sandy got to the enemy they were darting around in between the transports, Human and others alike, with the Valeries firing into every shielded ship they came across. Eventually they split up enough that the Canderian had one of the enemy fighters all to herself, which she was chasing all the way to the back of the transport formation.

  Whenever she got a clear shot with a backdrop of black space she fired off the ravager’s blue plasma cannons, managing to hit the Valerie twice over the course of 30 seconds, but it wasn’t enough to take its shields down. The pilot was doing a good job of going evasive in the limited maneuvering space he had, and was using the ships to block most of her shots by making hard turns to form blind corners that she had to follow him around. Several times he almost got away from her, but each time she reeled him back in but couldn’t get a clear series of shots.

  That was until he flew out the back of the formation and began to loop around to reenter…only he didn’t. Instead he curved his loop inward even sharper and tried to fall in behind the ravager.

  “Oh no you don’t,” she said, twisting her ship around, much like the skeets would do in atmosphere, and pointing her nose and cannons at the Valerie. She didn’t have a shot at it due to its angular speed, but sooner or later it was going to have to line up for an attack run or break off. If it chose to flee she’d drop in on its tail again. If not then they were going to swap some plasma.

  The Nestafar chose the latter and swung around at high speed on a direct line for her ravager. She responded by drifting the ship to the right to throw off any computer targeting program the Valerie might have, and continued erratic lateral maneuvers as she fired off the ravager’s plasma cannons in sequence, creating a rapid fire effect that leapt out towards the narrow profile of the incoming Valerie.

  It in turn responded with scattergun fire, almost none of which made it to the ravager until it came within close range, then it began to wear down her shields like a sand blaster. A flash of motion later and the Valerie had passed her by.

  Sandy flipped her fighter o
ver and began accelerating to pursue the Valerie, which was when she noticed that it was smoking. It broke off and dove back into the rows of ships, leaving behind a visible trail for her to follow.

  She accelerated hard to get after it, eating up its lead faster than she expected due to the engine damage her plasma had done. Just as she was catching up to it down a row of warships it turned a hard left and brought her around into the face of another Valerie that smashed a blast of plasma into her forward shields.

  The second fighter flashed by and Sandy cursed herself for not reacting quicker. Diagnostic indicators on her display said she’d lost a cannon and a good chunk of the forward hull after the shields were breached, meaning that the second Valerie hadn’t been using a scattergun…but had hit her with a bombardment orb, meaning it must have been waiting in ambush for her.

  “Teamwork?” she mumbled, tracking the smoke trail through the ships and seeing one of the Gnar transports with an active hull breach spewing out atmosphere. She wondered what the Valeries were carrying that could do that when another red bolt of plasma came down through a gap in the formation and dug into the same spot.

  Up above she saw a Nestafar corvette taking scattered fire from the weapons on the transports, then she saw a bright white light blossom on the side of the winged ship, overstressing its shields to the point where the transports’ weapons were able to breach them at several locations, registering minor hull damage on Sandy’s hologram of the enemy warship.

  Letting the damaged fighter go she pulled up hard on the controls and took her ravager in at the enemy capitol ship that had snuggled itself down into the transport lines in order to avoid drawing fire from the seda. With its shields down she knew she had a chance to do some damage if she could get in close enough.

  Ducking under another transport and trying to approach from cover the Canderian raced forward, intent on getting within range before the shields could regenerate. So long as the transports kept up their fire that shouldn’t happen but she wasn’t going to squander the opportunity while she had it. On approach, running lateral alongside a row of ships and just before she was to make a sharp left turn and head into the target, she activated the four shipbuster missiles located in a pair of armored storage racks on either side of the ravager, opened their sheaths, and steadying her hand on the launching trigger after reconfiguring the fire control to loose all four simultaneously.

  She banked the ravager around the wide nose of a Star Force transport, pulling up at the same moment and coming into sight of the corvette that was just above her down the line. Spurts of tiny red anti-air plasma directed her way but she rolled her ship around erratically, much like the Nestafar missiles did, and survived long enough to get up under the ship where the shields were down and some small craters on the hull were forming. She hesitated a heartbeat to give her missiles a better chance of making it to target then pulled the trigger as the ship grew alarmingly big on her hologram.

  As soon as they were away she depressed at the greatest angular turn the ravager could make and skimmed the hull below where all four missiles impacted, creating a huge ball of plasma that ate into the ship like a hungry blob. Half the weaponsfire from the warship cut out and the decompression nudged the corvette to the side, with stabilization thrusters working overtime to kill the list before it drifted into one of the transports.

  Sandy missed the damage but didn’t turn around to get a better view, instead she pushed on ahead, knowing that with no more missiles there wasn’t much she could do against a capitol ship. Soon she crossed over a diffuse smoke trail and turned to follow it, hoping to catch up with the Valerie she’d damaged and finish it off.

  Orion watched the battle progress with displeasure as some of the enemy warships were able to make it into the transport lines and effectively shield themselves from the seda’s considerable firepower. Half of their weapons batteries on the front side had been destroyed, with more gradually rotating around into range but the back half still had most of their active firepower and they couldn’t use it for fear of hitting the Alliance ships.

  The allied warships weren’t putting up much of a fight either, though some had come to them already damaged. After having spent years studying Hycre battle data Orion had gotten accustomed to their level of proficiency in naval warfare and had somehow assumed the other alien races out there were similarly equipped. He’d been wrong, grossly wrong. Even Star Force’s fleet would have fought better than this, and they were supposedly the new kids on the block.

  The good thing was the seda was holding its ground. Even though their weapons were being sniped by the Nestafar, the sheer bulk of the station and the thickness of the armor on its surface meant that at best the enemy was going to have to disable it before they destroyed it, and they’d have to commit an insane amount of plasma over multiple hours, if not days, to do so.

  The Nestafar fleet was also a shambles, but they were holding together better than the allies. The transports were holding their position, thankfully, and keeping the damage incurred to a minimum while his fighters were causing a good amount of havoc. Canderous had always said that adding starfighters to their defenses was common sense, though Orion admitted that Mark’s caveat about them having to be remotely piloted craft was also proving to be correct. They’d lost 16 of their ravagers in the fighting, yet those pilots were safe and secure inside the seda, available to go into battle again at a later date once new craft were given to them. Had Canderous originally had their way of things, those pilots would have died in the field.

  That said, remotely piloting the craft made his pilots even more aggressive, which he liked. Take fear of death out of the equation and they were in it to win it. They’d already disabled two enemy warships harassing the transports, one of which three of the fighters had rammed when they ran out of missiles, racking up enough kinetic damage to take the frigate out of the fight and thus shielding multiple transports from the firepower it would have continued to throw down.

  That was a tactic that no sane living pilot would have used, but using remote pilots was turning out to be a whole other ball game and Orion mentally made a note to look into extending the same practice to their surface craft if they could get the lag issues dealt with.

  Suddenly the disposition of the enemy fleet on the bridge hologram changed, with the ships moving in all different directions. Orion didn’t know what they were planning, and he really hoped they weren’t going to try to ram the station because that was something they couldn’t defend against. The armor would provide a little defense, but that much mass thrown in at decent speed…the mathematics were undeniably destructive, though the sheer size of the station would offer some protection.

  Fortunately that wasn’t the Nestafar’s aim. They intended to preserve their remaining ships, not destroy them, as they ordered an immediate retreat. Their ships scattered in all directions, taking the most direct routes away from the station as it continued to fire on them as they ran off up until they were out of weapons range.

  Their fighters went with them, zipping out of the transports like flies with several ravagers going after them.

  “Recall the fighters,” he ordered, blowing out a slow breath. “Inform the hangar bays to prep search and recovery teams for our damaged ships, Alliance only. Let the Nestafar survivors breathe vacuum, their recovery is not a priority.”

  “Is that a ‘do not recover’ order for the enemy,” one of the bridge officers asked, “or a ‘leave till last?’”

  “Leave till last…and check with the Star Force transports to see how much of their equipment is operational and include it in the recovery efforts. Tell them I’m assuming command of their possessions until Mark overrides me. Any contact with the surface?”

  “Scattered reports of an ongoing assault on the base, but nothing from our people.”

  “Hmmn,” Orion muttered, rubbing his goatee as he thought. “Keep trying, but for the moment there’s nothing we can do to help them. I don’t think the N
estafar are going to be back our way, unless they get reinforcements or try something tricky, but we need to stabilize the situation in orbit before we even think about landing troops on the ground. Contact all other Alliance ships in the system and inform them that we’ve secured a safe haven and that they need to get their asses here immediately. Make them understand that we don’t have any warships in play, so if we’re going to protect them they have to be at the station.”

  He turned back to the hologram as another thought occurred to him. “What happened to the second Hycre destroyer?”

  “It’s still showing on sensors,” another officer said, enlarging the hologram to show the entire area. “It’s heavily damaged and the Nestafar are disregarding it.”

  Which suggested that it was dead.

  “Give me a drift plot.”

  A few seconds later a dashed line appeared along with a section of Daka beneath them as the orbital path of the damaged destroyer was highlighted. According to the map it was on an outbound trajectory that would cross altitude with the seda prior to it catching up with them in its lower orbit.

  “Organize a salvage team. I want that ship caught and towed over to us, just in case there are survivors onboard.”

  “We can’t bring them onto the station.”

  “No, but we can get them away from the enemy. And even if they are all dead, I don’t want the Nestafar laying claim to the ship and reverse engineering their technology.”

  “But…we might?”

  Orion put his hands on his hips, still staring down at the hologram and visually tracking the movements of the retreating enemy fleet. “That’s not my call to make. The Archons control our alliance with the Hycre and they’ll decide what to do with the wreckage…if they’re not all wiped out,” he added before dropping silent for nearly a minute as his mind raced through various tactical scenarios.