Apocalypse Redux

Story 2: United Earth Navy

2073, Earth Orbit, Colonial Construction Facilities

There were days when Commodore Ciara Hunt was ashamed to be an officer of the United Earth Navy. Not because of an ultimately inconsequential scandal, those that happened in any big organization and anyone who claimed differently was simply good at cleaning up after themselves, but from secondhand embarrassment as she watched the new recruits struggle to make their way around the under-construction O’Neill Cylinder.

Once it was finished, it would be shipped off to a new colony, which made use of its rotational pseudogravity since those lacked the spare enchanters to maintain magical artificial gravity.

But for right now, it served as the perfect environment for cadets at the Luna Naval Academy to experiment with maneuvering in air-less zero-g environments. Badly.

Hunt caught a cadet’s leg before he could inadvertently kick her in the face and hurled him across the cylinder even as she warped space to make it so he landed lightly on the war wall, feet first.

She really shouldn’t have been here at all, she was supposed to have been in command of the 11th expeditionary fleet to check out a potential but unlikely alien contact … except the ships for that hadn’t been finished yet even though she’d already gotten the bump to Commodore in expectation of that deployment. So the 10th fleet had gone.

And as for why the ships were delayed, well, it might be guaranteed to become an advantage in the long term, but right now, it was just frustrating. A simple advancement in power conduction had caused the brass to require a redesign of all future ships, as well as an overhaul of all hulls currently under construction, causing mass chaos in the shipyards, and putting several officers slated to command those ships currently unavailable in awkward positions.

So she’d grabbed the academy assignment to avoid winding up with some crap, potentially even make-work, job while waiting on her command to be, well, commendable.

But this, she’d enjoy. Oversee the next graduating class of officers, then command the UENS Exeter with its mix of old hands and newly minted officers on the vessel’s shakedown cruise.

She kinda felt for the heavy cruiser, having been stuck in a similar limbo to her. It had been finished the day the discovery had been made, and up until a week ago, discussions had raged about whether to deploy the ship as-is, or retrofit it, though since it had been finished, it would have been a ridiculous amount of work to do the latter. So she could “use” it.

***

One week later

Sadly, there were regulations about the conveyance of senior officers, otherwise, Hunt would have flown over to her temporary command under her own power, but thankfully, modern shuttles had plenty of ways to see the surrounding universe. And by warping space, she could sit stoically in her chair and still view the universe as though she were sitting there with her nose pressed against the viewport.

The Exeter looked much like every other heavy cruiser in humanity’s arsenal, six hundred meters long, a broad, rounded, wedge with a blunt bow, wrapped in glittering reflective armor that was, in turn, covered in gun turrets, weapon ports, sensor blisters, maneuvering thrusters, and a handful of radiators in case the magical heat dispersion worked into the armor itself failed.

It was a utilitarian design, unlike cruise liners, diplomatic vessels or luxury yachts, but there was beauty in that. A stark, lethal, beauty.

If she didn’t know how new it was, she wouldn’t have been able to tell it apart from a ship so outdated it had to be decommissioned. That was how starships went. In order for them to work, they had to be kept in tip-top shape, so it did not take much beyond that to make them look nice. Even pirate ships, crewed and commanded by some of the worst scum humanity had ever produced, were still presentable.

The Exeter was also heavily armed with particle beams, lasers, railguns, and a handful of missile launchers spread around the hull. All very standard, all across the fleet.

It was simple, it was boring, and it worked. Yes, there were a million different ways you could get cute with magic, [Skills] or both, and every possible combination of either with the currently existing technology, and even restricting oneself to just tech one could make so much more, so many different weapons ... but there was something to be said about building stuff that actually worked in all situations, and with all gunners.

There were some interesting anecdotes that got thrown in the face of anyone who tried to declare their new weapon types as the non-plus-ultra in armament.

So while, even being extremely strict with what qualified as a “type,” there were hundreds of types of weapons that could be used, you could count what was taken out into the field on one hand.

They could always be used, it kept the number of replacement parts reasonable, and prevented unnecessary confusion.

Of course, there were also drawbacks to this process, mainly, that these weapons could be countered. Namely, magnetic shields to disperse particle beams and reflective, magically cooled, armor to deflect lasers.

That was the flip side of the argument. Unless one ship was significantly larger than what the other was meant to deal with, modern vessels started fights virtually immune to each other’s guns and would slowly wear each other down unless a spell or [Skill] could turn the tide.

Still, Hunt had spent the last two decades of her life playing devil’s advocate in pitch meetings for more exotic stuff, and rarely had the designers had a response to her pointed questions beyond “we don’t think that’ll be an issue.”

A proper upgrade would be nice, one of these days. But until then, well, she’d learned to be utterly lethal with the weapons she currently had.

Besides, where the energy weapons fell short, you had railguns and the ship’s crew. The former because there was no hard counter to kinetic weaponry other than not being where the projectile went, and the latter because there were so many different [Skills], spells and other human-created effects that no one could effectively prepare counters for even a fraction of them.

Standardization, dependability, and power from technology, flexibility, growth, and fine control from magic. That was how modern combat worked.

Hunt left her office and stepped onto the bridge, sitting down in the captain’s chair on what would likely be her very last voyage as the commander of a single ship. Spatial magic was already sparking off her as she prepared to take the ship to FTL.

For as creative as humanity had gotten with almost every other facet of technology, they only had one useable interstellar faster-than-light travel, even counting even remotely viable prototypes, for there were none.

It was the three Aspect combination that allowed for the acquisition of the [Alcubierre Bubble] [Skill], or nothing.

Granted, their FTL coms weren’t much better, being an inherent point-to-point system based on a principle that essentially amounted to magical quantum entanglement, a process that was so complex that each ship only had a single communicator linked to the headquarters at Mercury, but there were other ideas. Nothing that was currently useable, but at least they were getting there.

“Take us out, fifty percent engine power,” Hunt ordered, addressing the helmsman. It would still be a bit before they reached the point where vessels could make the jump to superluminal speeds. n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

Once they were out in the galaxy, she’d let the other wielders of [Alcubierre Bubble] get some hours in, and learn to use the [Skill] to its greatest effect, but in the Sol system, care and control were needed, not to mention that she could jump out from significantly closer to the Sun than any of her subordinates.

All ships had to have at least one percent of their crew, or ten people, whichever was more, capable of taking the ship into FTL by regulation, though very large ships, including battleships and even the currently-hypothetical planetary assault carriers, were allowed to go on with less.

The issue was that if the ship did take damage, only one person on the crew could transport it between star systems, and that person was killed, it would doom everyone onboard to a slow and agonizing death. Admittedly, calling for a “tow” via the FTL comms was possible, but considering that each vessel only had a single communicator useable at interstellar distances and that might easily be destroyed at the same time as the living FTL drive was killed … it was an important precaution to take.

And while a multitude of commercial vessels had gotten away with only having one or two people capable of using [Alcubierre Bubble], the reason that regulation had been put in place was because of when it hadn’t. And things had gone wrong several times after that, proving to anyone who bothered to look why things were the way they were.

Soon, the Exeter passed the invisible line where Hunt was comfortable with initiating FTL and that was what she did, finally pumping the mana she had been collecting into her chair and through the enchantment that shot through the entire vessel, twisting reality around the ship, the effect spreading out and slowly wrapping the entirety of the vessel in a field of impossible energy.

The universe around the ship vanished in a blur of multicolored light, shifting into a grand tapestry of warped images and space bending in ways it was never supposed to. And they were off, to explore a few nearby systems, do some training exercises, make sure everything worked in the field the way it was supposed to and then actually complete their mission.

***

Two weeks later

Their mission wound up being as simple as it was common: pirate hunting.

In theory, piracy should have been utterly superfluous in the modern day. All it took was a little elbow grease, a willingness to kill something, and a list of easy monsters to beat and you could easily get all the resources you wanted in a reasonable amount of time.

Sure, you’d never reach the heights of Isaac Thoma or Arthur Wells unless you took risks aplenty and had some luck to boot, but you’d be able to buy just about everything you could possibly want well before that point.

Yet people still cheated, still stole, still murdered. Because it was easier. And because there was one thing money couldn’t buy: people. Slaves, specifically. Admittedly, money could buy them, but someone still had to handle the capturing and that was where the pirates came in.

Thankfully, the theoretical nightmare scenario of System-enforced slave ownership had never materialized, but there were still plenty of ways around that, and Hunt had sadly seen most of them in action during previous anti-pirate operations.

Repeated checking of someone’s status sheet, truth-telling abilities, the limited mind control the System did allow, on top of all sorts of manipulation tactics and some enchanted jewelry to shock or otherwise disable a slave when they “acted up” … It was bad. Always.

A lot of the time, the pirates didn’t even try to justify what they did, but there were plenty who made the attempt anyway, occasionally even claiming to be on some kind of divine mission or having godly “permission.”

You see, the System had caused quite a lot of religious discussion and debate.

Various established religions had caused shitstorms by claiming that their deities had created it, pointing at certain references to their religion in one [Class] or other but that was only the start of it.

The smallest facet of a titanic issue.

No, the largest issue was the various people who decided that the System was a divine revelation meant to show humanity the “right way,” and depending on what shape that “right way” took, things could be fairly okay, bad, or really bad. j

It had started with the Children of the System, born days after the initialization and destroyed only a few months later after they’d tried to assassinate various researchers on the grounds that uncovering the secrets of the System was “heresy.”

But things had only escalated from there. Some of the religions were based on “good” ideas like perpetual self-improvement and the like. However, there were also a lot that were highly problematic. This started out as what was functionally worshipping Social Darwinism, but eventually escalated into worshipping any kind of improvement. Mainly the kind that came at the cost of people who failed to grasp power for themselves.

Pirates, mercenaries, and other criminals might have always existed, justifying their actions with ideas such as “well, it was easy,” or “if it’s so wrong, then stop me,” but now, they had an actual religion with actual “signs” to follow.

Those who followed various new System-inspired religions weren’t necessarily worse or more cruel than those who didn’t, but they certainly hesitated less before committing horrific acts of brutality.

And pirates did exactly that.

“This is our mission,” Hunt announced, illusions flickering to life above the conference room table, showing seven passenger ships, two merchant vessels, and three cruisers. “A pirate band has created a base somewhere between Earth, and the three furthest coreward colonized systems of Triumph, Ithica, and Terra Nova the Twenty-seventh.”

That last name was about as ridiculous as system names got, but the only ones who laughed were the recent graduates in the room. Everyone else was used to stuff like that. Star systems got an alpha-numeric designation until they were colonized, and then, the colonizer could choose the name with very few restrictions. It couldn’t be outright unprintable, and had to be unique, but beyond that? It could get very, very ridiculous.

“To date, they’ve taken nine ships, using at least three four-hundred-meter cruisers, or potentially light cruisers, unfortunately, the scanner data provided is rather lacking.”

That was civilian scanners for you. They kept you from running into asteroids, and would usually tell you if you were about to fall into a star, but beyond that, you’d probably be better off just crushing your nose against a viewport.

As for the ships, well, despite how the term had been used in science fiction before space travel had become reality, “light” cruisers weren’t smaller cruisers, they just had less armor. Just like how it had worked on Earth’s ocean.

Of course, depending on the class, a cruiser could be anything from 150 to 500 meters in length, covering a whole lot of purposes, but all cruisers were designed for endurance, long-range travel, and having at least some degree of heavy firepower.

As a heavy cruiser, Exeter was larger than any medium cruiser, had much heavier armor and weapons, though not quite to the point where fighting the known hostile vessels was going to be an easy affair.

Where destroyers were used for short-range patrols and reconnaissance missions, and regular cruisers for anything that required a longer range, heavy cruisers were never dispatched unless combat was expected. Often accompanying true capital ships, but sometimes, like now, there were no battleships available, or even battlecruisers.

“I don’t have to tell you that piracy is a perpetual problem on the frontier, and it takes far too long for a sufficiently strong force to be dispatched. The frontier bases might have their cruisers and destroyers, however, pirate pursuit needs to be done with a powerful force lest our ships are captured and used by the pirates.”

Pirate ships were, normally at least, far weaker than navy vessels. It might have been literally impossible to keep the plans for working warships completely out of the public hands. With all the allowances made for civilian self-defense, some weapon blueprints had to be at least semi-public and it didn’t take too much effort nowadays to cobble together a combat-capable vessel from those and general warship design principles.

Then, all you needed was someone to build it, and it did not take much more to make a ship that could fight than one that could not.

Navy vessels, in the meantime, were built using cutting-edge tech, by expert craftsmen who imbued all sorts of additional effects. All of them would start out at the lower levels, building non-critical components while gaining experience and XP, then eventually moving on to more complex and important parts until they eventually either reached the point where they could build a reactor with their bare hands in an afternoon, or left for the civilian sector.

“We will be dropping by Zheng He base on the way and picking up some additional vessels.” Hunt finally concluded. That had been a recent addition to her orders, when the third distinct cruiser had finally been identified.

***

One month later

It had taken them a long time, a lot of searching, a lot of scanning, but eventually, they’d jumped into the correct system and at that point, it had been quite easy to spot their target. All their little fleet had had to do was get deep enough into this particular star system to see the star-facing side of one of its gas giants, where the pirate was located.

“Uh-oh …”

Hunt, very deliberately, did not take note of who’d said that. She couldn’t blame them, unfortunately.

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Because what they were facing was a foundry.

With how many parts had to be practically handmade, and with how many people had to be involved, making a warship was a complex, involved, lengthy, process. So even if the seemingly-impossible scenario of having enough high-Level crewmembers to crew more ships than the navy had were to come true, it would take a while to build those ships.

However, it was also possible to go in the other direction. To automate the entire process of making a warship to the greatest degree possible, and then automating those warships to the point where a good ninety-nine percent of their strength came from their technology, rather than their crew or creators.

Granted, the ships still needed someone with proper [Skills] to take them to another star system, or even another point in the same star system in any reasonable amount of time, and if the ship was bigger than a destroyer, it also needed to be enchanted, but other than that? You could build and build and build warships to create a massive force of mediocre vessels … that would eventually break down as automated maintenance systems slowly failed over the years.

But for a while, you could create a force of incredible, nay, ridiculous power from asteroids alone,

Which was why they were currently seeing not just three cruisers and a smattering of destroyers that had been expected, but a whopping twenty cruisers, four heavy cruisers that were still in the drydocks but could probably fight at least somewhat, and nearly fifty destroyers.

Each of Hunt’s thirteen ships, the Exeter and the reinforcements they’d picked up, four cruisers and eight destroyers, was more than twice as strong as what they were facing, pound for pound.

But as the old quote went, quantity had a quality of its own.

Yeah … the UEF should have sent a battleship.

But the United Earth Fleet only had sixty of those, and that was counting the twenty-one currently still being built, and they were perpetually stuck guarding important systems, only dispatched in cases of extreme emergencies.

Or at least a battlecruiser, but there were even fewer of those and they were all locked into long-range exploration missions despite the fact that they were designed to obliterate smaller ships … and run away from anything bigger.

The correct choice would have been to retreat, inform fleet command, stop all traffic through the area until a force of appropriate size could be dispatched to clean this all up.

But while Hunt doubted the pirates had enough Alcubierre Aspects to move all those ships between systems, there were certain [Skills] that could allow for shorter hops and those were a lot more common, sadly.

“All hands, battle stations,” she ordered, then began using the fleet’s command party to shoot off the more complicated formation orders. If nothing appeared in the next few minutes, such as if the pirates lacked any detection abilities not limited to the speed of light, they’d be able to retreat back out of the local star’s gravity, jump to FTL from there and she’d be happy having been wrong, but she doubted they’d be that lucky.

Warp-type [Skills], as they were known, were simply too common. Oh, sure, there were a million variations, some always put you behind an enemy vessel, others had a range based on the effective range of either your or the enemy’s weapons, then there were those who effectively allowed its wielder to “skip ahead,” teleporting to a point one could have reached in a given span of time … but they all had the same fundamental property of allowing for short-range teleportation.

“Short” for space, that was.

Sure, any Warp-type [Skill] started out with a range greater than the diameter of many planets, that was nothing on the scale of a star system. Heck, you could fit every other planet in the solar system just between the Earth and its moon.

And not every captain in the fleet could escape in an instant. In fact, only she could, and that would be dooming everyone else.

This would be ugly, and it would almost certainly come down to tactics and the crews’ [Skills].

“Broadcast a demand to surrender,” Hunt belatedly ordered. It almost certainly wouldn’t work, considering the penalty for the crimes the pirates had doubtlessly committed and the power difference, but it was worth the attempt.

Give the pirates a couple of seconds to listen to the demand, and if they so much as pointed a laser pointer at Hunt’s fleet, that was that.

The first pirate ship to arrive was a cruiser, on a trajectory past Hunt’s formation, but not in any way that denoted a plan. It’d be close enough to bear the full brunt of their energy weapons but not so close to effectively use its kinetics, which would have at least made some degree of sense.

Close in firing run, punch holes in everyone with railguns, and pray your defenses were good enough to handle the energy weapons. It was risky, and pointless considering the pirates’ numbers advantage, but it would at least have been an explanation for why someone would do that. Other than incompetence, that was.

Between the clearly aggressive trajectory, and the fact that all weapons were fully powered, no one would even complain they fired first.

Energy poured out from their fusion reactors, metal prisons containing the full fury of a star sending power crackling through their ships’ grids and into the countless weapons they were bristling with, and was finally hurled into space with lethal intent. Out into the void.

But the beams of particles accelerated to near light speed and coherent photons traveling at that speed only spent a tiny fraction of a second in motion before hammering into their target, a pirate cruiser severely lacking in defenses.

Magnetic fields tore apart particle beams, dispersion them into a scattered shotgun blast of ions that splattered fairly uselessly against the armor, while the first salvo of lasers bounced large harmlessly off the mirrored hull.

The first one. And while the Exeter’s heaviest beams were still recharging, all ships had weaker weapons with a much shorter cycling time. And when the ragged second salvo arrived, it melted straight through the cruiser’s hull.

Hunt grinned viciously as she saw the entire front side of the cruiser vanish in a burst of light and metallic slag. So … the pirates hadn’t properly enchanted their hulls. Sure, mirrors were great against lasers … at first. But they heated up quickly and without the normally ubiquitous magical cooling systems, held up quite badly against sustained fire.

“Cease fire,” she ordered. “If they move, put a railgun round through their reactor.”

As per usual, complex maneuvers were ordered through her [Fleet Command] [Skill], however, and Hunt’s little fleet swung around, maneuvering to ensure that, whether the enemy emerged from their warps with their old speed or at an orbiting velocity suitable for the celestial body they emerged above, they’d only be in range of each other briefly.

“Prioritize laser fire against any new targets, use particle beams on any vessel that has lost its shielding. Target any ship with reduced maneuverability using railguns,” Hunt continued. With the lacking armor, taking down the generators for the magnetic fields that dispersed particle beams would be a piece of cake, making the usual tactic of “use energy weapons against hull until something fails” rather unnecessary.

And as for the railguns, they technically had infinite range, their projectiles simply kept going until they hit something, but at the same time, their effective range, outside of which an intact ship could easily dodge, was fairly short. Hence the focus on damaged vessels.

Three more cruisers warped in at a greater distance, safe from getting obliterated like their fellow had, and a smattering of destroyers appeared as well, manifesting behind an incandescent field of magic meant to refract and reflect energy weapons.

[Warp Blast].

The cooldown [Skill] was all but invisible as it flashed from the bow of the Exeter, only perceptible by those eagle eyes who noticed how the stars on its other side twinkled slightly, but no one did.

No, instead, it flashed straight through whatever shield the pirates had erected and twisted space to yank all enemy ships towards it as it detonated, then sent them flying back in random directions, spinning, twisting rolling out of control. Not forever, but for long enough that they went careening out from under the shield and ripped apart concentrated fire. Lasers to rip through the insufficient armor and fry the defensive field generators, particle beams to finish the job.

Hunt groaned internally. They were already starting to burn through their [Skills] and they’d barely even made a dent in the enemy numbers.

And that was when the enemy’s entire mobile force warped as one, aiming to manifest before her flotilla. If she let it happen, that was. But she wouldn’t.

[Pernicious Pandemonium].

The [Skill] had its limits, she could not mess with their teleportation to the point where they leaped into a gas giant or the local star, nor could she scatter them all over the place, but what she could do was pull most of their enemies closer. Much closer. Past them, even, a few kilometers to the rear of Hunt’s formation.

Modern warships were built to fire forwards and to the side, not backwards. There was something of a “skirt” built to curve around the stern, shielding the engines from attacks from most angles and creating a place for rear-facing armament to sit, but in the end, the only point a warship could bring all its guns to bear on was in front of it, and the area hardest to target was behind it.

Then there was the fact that warships generally needed a brief amount of time to analyze their surroundings after a warp, separate friend from foe, and generate firing solutions.

By the time they passed out of each other’s range, the enemy would barely have fired a shot while the navy ships had had at least some forewarning, had guns already rotated into position, and since all allies present had known locations, any new contacts were automatically hostile and could be fired upon.

But as the saying that had stood the test of time went, the enemy got a vote too. And they were in such close quarters that dodging railgun rounds was functionally impossible.

The destroyer Thunderous suddenly went spinning as a railgun round slammed into its stern and sent it tumbling, engine down and bleeding atmosphere. The Mogador was outright shattered as it was struck by two kinetics near-simultaneously. And the Yukikaze was nearly ripped in half by a perfect shot that had gone right up its engine and into the reactor, only the quick reactions of one of her engineers in shutting down her fusion core, preventing her from turning into a short-lived star, though they’d have to retrieve the crew sooner rather than later.

And the damage didn’t remain limited to the destroyers. A series of explosions wracked the Kirov, her rearmost cruiser, costing her enough engine power to make her fall back and completely taking down her rear-facing deflector fields.

That cruiser was doomed. And her captain realized it, initiating his own warp to leave the local area in the hope that the pirates wouldn’t hunt him and his crew down before they’d beaten the rest of the navy’s flotilla.

Even so, their enemies hadn’t got off scot-free either. Half a dozen destroyers had been battered into wrecks by energy weapons, while all of Hunt’s railguns had concentrated their fire on the cruisers. None that dealt fatal damage, actually breaking the ship, but railguns simply could not be blocked by anything short of magic and left massive craters in the enemy armor, making its reflective properties even more terrible than they already were and shattering any magnetic field projectors that might have been beneath the point of impact. In the next exchange of fire, those would be annihilated.

However, Hunt hadn’t stopped there, because she’d left some ships where they’d originally intended to appear … all alone. At the mercy of every gun that could not fire at the fleet behind them.

Four cruisers, quite literally, melted under the concentrated fire of the naval flotilla.

Behind them, the pirate fleet dissolved into chaos as they attempted to turn around, and, well, things got chaotic. Then again, if they’d been disciplined, they likely wouldn’t have become pirates either.

“Fire missiles, empty the magazines,” Hunt ordered. Between the Exeter’s twelve missile tubes, the remaining three cruisers’ eight each, and the twenty found across all five destroyers, they could only fire fifty-six a salvo, every thirty seconds.

That was nothing in the face of an equivalent flotilla, let alone the pirate fleet that still outnumbered them … but that was all assuming that the defenders properly coordinated defensive fire and were in a proper formation, precisely none of which applied to pirates in general and definitely didn’t apply to these pirates.

And by the time the pirates had managed to fully turn around, and bring their guns to bear … Hunt had her flotilla warp away, leaving them to face all the missiles they’d already put into space. While the navy appeared right where Hunt had already spotted the heavy cruisers being readied for departure.

Her [Stellar Sight], much like most FTL sensory [Skills], including the one wielded by the Exeter’s operations officer, allowed her to see what the sensors would have shown, had they been able to display what was happening in real-time, rather than via whatever arrived with light-speed delays.

The physicists might be constantly arguing about whether the effect should be qualified as precognition or scrying, but the actual classification actually didn’t really matter. It worked, that was what was important.

Now, half of Hunt’s flotilla might be stuck there, the ships’ captains out of warp [Skills], but the same had to go for many of the pirates. And while facing four heavy cruisers was a tall order for what she had left, these ships were hardly finished.

Scratch that, most pirates were out of charges. Hunt saw several pirate ships at the sight of the previous battle rabbit, wildly zapping away to save themselves but massively weaken the defenses of those who were unable to escape. Three cruisers vanished under the hammer blows of the missiles’ nuclear warheads, becoming visible again as twisted wrecks once the light had faded. And the destroyers, well, they were tiny, and unenchanted.

A direct hit atomized them, and even a series of near misses could severely damage them as the radiation fried their systems, leaving them sitting ducks for any follow-up missiles.

In the end, twelve cruisers and nineteen destroyers were left, scattered halfway across the star system. More than enough to win against what Hunt had left in a straight-up brawl, but the enemy advantage was currently melting away like ice on a hot day.

Then, the cruiser Ajax lurched out of formation as an incredibly heavy beam smashed into her bow, followed by a couple more as the other two pirate heavy cruisers closed in.

Spinal weaponry, shit. Hunt bit back a curse. A gun built into a vessel’s spine was, by default, the biggest, heaviest, most powerful gun that could fit on a given warship, but that didn’t necessarily make it a good idea to install one, and that went doubly so for any vessel bigger than a destroyer, since you had to turn your entire ship to aim and doing so with bigger vessels was hard, and doing so left you unable to accelerate in any direction save straight at the enemy.

But if you managed to pull it off … spinally mounted guns could hit hard.

And as though things weren’t bad enough, two pinpricks of light were shooting towards them from the furthest-out heavy cruiser, on the far side of the foundry.

Hyperians. Fourth Evolution warriors with space flight, FTL, and light manipulation powers, a build-type developed by the UEF and several System scholars to create humans that could go toe-to-toe with warships.

Not well, not at the Levels she saw, but each of them was worth a destroyer in terms of raw firepower, easily, and the concentrated nature of their power meant that they could, rather easily, land on a ship and burn their way down into the reactor. And, on top of that, since their [Skill]set often contained a significant element of “light,” they excelled at blocking or deflecting lasers.

Yeah, time to break out the proverbial big guns and empty the equally proverbial clip.

[Gravity Well] to the left of the three cruisers in front of them, yanking them off course and fucking with their aim, [Twist Reality] to ensure that any hostile teleport effects into the area would drop out their users far enough that the navy could react, oh, [Spatial Warp] to deflect a rather predictable attack by one of the Hyperians into the station, hand off command of the effort against the cruisers to Captain Renard of the Belfast, and finally, use the second charge of her warp [Skill].

[Not Here, There].

And suddenly, the Exeter was right in the path of the first Hyperian, the one who’d unleashed the attack, less than five centimeters from the woman’s nose. But considering that they were moving at nearly three kilometers a second, relatively, that distance did not remain for long … yeah, Hyperians might have little difficulty landing on ships, but they had to match velocities to do that.

With this kind of head-on collision, it wasn’t the question of whether the human participant would survive. It was which poor bastard drew the short straw and had to clean that up.

The second Hyperian looked to be about to unleash his big attack, but Hunt warped again, using her third charge, and planting the Exeter side-on with the enemy cruiser, and with the Hyperian on the opposite side of the pirate.

A broadside duel between similarly-sized cruisers, even if one clearly was a few sensors and point defense weapons short of being finished and severely lacking in the armor department, was not a short affair. Certainly not short enough that the Exeter could finish this before the Hyperian got a bead on it.

Except it could. [Reality Fold].

And space twisted in a way that seemed capable of breaking the mind of anyone who saw it. The pirate heavy cruiser could only bring about half its guns to bear. The Exeter, on the other hand could target it with every single gun it had. Also, incoming fire was distributed across every part of the navy cruiser’s hull, thoroughly spreading out the impacts and preventing anything more than cosmetic damage, while the navy vessel was able to concentrate its power and burn a path straight down into the reactor. And when that went, so did the vessel … just in time for the Hyperian to appear, flashing past the pirate with both hands wreathed in energy.

[Not Here, There], penultimate charge.

The Exeter appeared behind the Hyperian and unleashed its full firepower. As expected, the lasers were outright nothing, and the particle beams were dispersed almost as easily, but the railguns, well … Hyperians had to be fast, perceptive, and have a ton of magic, which failed to leave many Stat points for Fortitude, especially at the Fourth Evolution.

The first round tore off an arm, the second slammed into the man’s stomach and sent him flying amidst a cloud of blood, gore, and bone fragments, and the third tore blasted through that, leaving behind just a rapidly expanding cloud of offal.

[Not Here, There], final charge.

Even just during that incredibly short duel with the fourth heavy cruiser, Hunt’s flotilla had lost more ships.

The Ajax was breaking apart, the destroyer Glowworm was just gone, and the Fletcher was currently breaking up, but the pirates had lost a second heavy cruiser, a third was currently being battered into scrap, and the fourth, well, Hunt’s ship had just appeared right behind it and sent over a dozen railgun darts up its tailpipe while its lasers had taken out any weapons that would have a good bead on the Exeter at the instant of arrival.

Because if your warping [Skill] was precise enough, you could make those kinds of preparations ahead of time.

The enemy cruiser lurched forward like a drunken pig, all power dying as the reactor went offline, either due to damage or as a precaution, it didn’t matter. Because even while the Exeter turned to reinforce its allies, its point defense weapons burned off everything on the pirate ship that could be used as a weapon, systematically pounding it into scrap metal.

And the last “intact” enemy didn’t last much longer either.

Victory, for now.

And as all this had been happening, Commodore Ciara Hunt, Level 150 [Conquerer of the Shattered Skies], had sat in her command chair and barely moved a muscle, not even turning her head or giving verbal commands.

Now that this part of the engagement was over, she allowed herself to fall back into a more relaxed pose, and sighed internally. Yep, she desperately needed a fifth Evolution [Class] with more fleet-focused and large-scale [Skills]. Because a commodore couldn’t normally rush off like that, and an admiral, if she ever reached that point, sure as fuck couldn’t either.

“The remaining pirates are running, Commodore.”

Hunt sighed. As expected. It meant they had won, but it also meant some poor bastard would be stuck having to chase them down.

On the other hand, this left them free to conduct S&R and retrieve the crew of the Kirov.

***

Three weeks later

“Well, that was ... something, Commodore Hunt,” Rear Admiral Sun commented. They were both in his office, aboard his flagship, the battlecruiser Yi Sun-shin.

“That’s the polite way of phrasing that, admiral;” she replied. “With all due respect, someone screwed the pooch, probably Navy intelligence. Setting up a foundry out here should have left a paper trail, and if there was even a hint of a possibility we’d run into something like that out here, I should have been dispatched with either three times what I got, or a proper capital ship.”

“You know, some are going to say you should not have taken your entire command so close to the star you cannot use [Alcubierre Bubble] to get out,” Sun commented.

“Which would have flown in the face of established naval doctrine and sentenced whatever warships were sent in to certain death,” Hunt replied, flatly. “And I’ll tell the same to anyone who claims otherwise.”

Sun grimaced. “I agree, but you know these things shake out. You’ll have to make that case, several times, most likely.”

“Can I count on your backing?” Hunt asked, certain that that was where this was leading.

“Of course, I’ve also already made that opinion clear with our superiors,” Sun said. “For all the good that will do. However, before anything like that can happen, you’ll finish what you started.”

“Sir?” Hunt asked, not quite sure what he was getting at. She suspected, btu was nowhere near sure enough to voice her guess.

“Like you said, someone screwed the pooch, probably Rear Admiral Hayes at Zheng He, which is why he’s being ordered back to Earth for … debrief. I’m his replacement. Depending on this conversation, I can either take this place after the pirates have been hunted down, or right now, and you can take the reinforcements to bring the rest of the pirates to justice.”

She didn’t even have to think about it for very long.

“Thank you, admiral. I’d like to finish this.”

Four days later, a freshly reinforced and repaired fleet left Zheng He base, ready to go hunting.

Sixteen cruisers, four heavy cruisers, thirty-two destroyers, and one battle cruiser.

Even if the pirates had somehow gotten back to the foundry, repaired all the damage the navy had done before they left to prevent something like that, and had it running at full burn, they’d still be so screwed it wasn’t even funny.

Actually, considering some of the shit the Marines had uncoverd on that station, it was very funny.

And, one month later, the entire region was officially pronnounced pirate free once more.