Battle of Histirion Part 7: Hammer Blow

Histirion System: Carnaith Space

Stillute watched as the Capitol and Axiom forces converged on the CAE A group... they were making the most of the anomalies' advantages. His corvettes were currently in the forefront of the battle with various Tenebraen and Carnaithian frigates... he took close note of the Silent Ones' weaponry, very exotic, and effective, indeed. The various weapons fire from the CAE craft shattered parts of his ships, their small size and the fact most Shadowblade craft of that size aren't meant for head-on combat owing to that conclusion.

"Carnaithian fighter wing inbound to ambush area." Called out the on-board AI, very similar to a NVICK unit, after detection of the launch of the Carnaithian fighters.

"Launch a wing of our own." Stillute commanded, a few moments later a wing of craft deployed from the hangar of a nearby ship and began to speed towards their Carnaithian contemporaries. His was the calmer front indeed.

The next volley of missiles and tallum projectiles that hooked around the formation were subjected to a painful attrition, having to pass first through the fighter wings of the many Capitol carriers, then through the attack craft of EPA itself to finally come around towards the flotilla and its own defensive weaponry. Only when they burst into shrapnel did they become more difficult targets, soon overwhelming the point defense of four D-class cruiser and an equal number of O-class destroyers. Shrapnel passed through the fragile ships like a hot knife through butter, quickly knocking the vessels out. The clouds of shrapnel created by the impacts in turn hit other vessels in a chain reaction that affeced more than a dozen ships. The most heavily damaged ships simply shut off their engines and let themselves fall of the formation towards the relative safety of the quantum anomaly.

Paradoxically, just as they started getting hit, the ambiance onboard the vessels -or at least the flagship, as far as Nrx could see- became more cheerful and casual than ever. Regular lightning, utilities and the onboard monorail service were all enabled once more.

"Quantum normalization T minus thirty seconds, calculating outer boundary" The head of the sensors station called.

"This isn't right." Nrx pondered in confusion, looking at his food just as the doors of the operations room opened, revealing a rather large procession of crewmembers walking along two highly-adorned bulls towards the sunken center of the command room. The ceremonial knives glistened in the hands of several of them while the others waved colorful banners to the rythm of the tambourines.

Guided by the intrincate gestures of the female officer, the monolithic rows of timetables kept shifting and changing so fluidly that Nrx could only wonder what was the point of having timetables on the first place. Soon he realized that the captain, the fleet admiral and the gathering of fleet officers waere merely starting everything over from scratch, adapting and changing their plans faster -he thought- than his opponents could possibly hope to match.
The latest mutation of their plan was a fairly simple one that relied rather heavily in the juggernaut line of Capitol battleships. The EPA flagship used the Capitol vessels to both be able to see through the particle shield and to engage the enemy whereas its own fleet stood back. Target designation was quickly coordinated in the Capitol vessels. The battleships would engage enemy cruisers. Cruisers would engage enemy destroyers and destroyers would engage enemy escorts so that the Capitol ships had the upper hand in every engagement. This left the enemy battleships engaged only by long-range missile fire, a gap that the Axiomatic ships soon set off to correct.

It was then that the Blinkers opened fire. The dozen ships that hid behind the particle shield trained their redoutable batteries on the largest of enemy vessels, each one independently engaging two enemy battleships with four guns each. In total, twenty four of the CAE superheavy vessels were on their sights when they let out flashes of invisible particles. The fire control systems of the blinkers didn't want to leave the enemy ships a chance and directly targetted their powerplant, control room and engines, using the 3D scans from the sounding bombs to adjust its fire. All twelve regular blinkers fired away while Majora remained silent.

"Quantum normalization in effect, all ships on standby." The EPA crewmember asked.

Its bow somewhat battered by the enemy fire it had been ignoring, Heavy Blinker Majora suddenly became the center of a large disk-shaped fluctuation in the interdiction field projected by the EPA and blinker fleet. A couple dozen kilometers thick and a couple hundred kilometers in radius, it was like a hole in the field that ran in parallel to the particle shield.
Majora was suddenly engulfed by a wormhole, quickly bending and warping the ship a mere 12km above its former position. It then warped back. Then back again. The process repeated, each jump becoming faster and faster until the Heavy blinker was oscillating so fast between the two ends of the wormhole that it appeared as if there were two Majoras. A third mouth of the wormhole opened, and soon the ship was microjumping thousands of times per second between the three. Then a fourth, a fifth and a sixth, each one allowing Majora to "copy" itself one more time until half a dozen heavy blinkers stared down the enemy fleet, arranged in a hexagonal formation around an unused seventh wormhole. Like its weaker counterpart had done before, Majora too began charging its batteries.

at this point in the engagement, the silent ones had divided their small numbers into three contingencies. the largest, surrounding the central node of their collective entitiy groups had maintained its position nearly a hundred Au from the main engagements. towards the inner orbits of the systems planets as it maintained operations of the two smaller divisions of destroyer sized vessels and lesser entities and entity groups commanding the larger vessels and their fighter sized drones as they engaged both the Allied A and B groups. the smaller drones interspacing as they engaged the formations of fighters in group A. While the missiles launched by group B finally began to contact their intended marks among group B as it moved to intercept and join up with the other allied CAE group. the first of the Shadow lances impacting their targets with bursts of shadow-like implosions surrounding the hulls of the impacted ships.

The shift in blinker majora with its tactic of jumping rapidly to disperse its targeting and its firing positions drew some attention from the commanding entities as their destroyer sized drones began to snipe lances and 5 second duration fire at the corvettes and launched missiles coming in their direction, and targeting the battleships under heavy fire from the combined axiom and capitol fire.
The arrangement of the engagements of ships received lesser amounts of attention.  they had followed both factions engagements during the first period of conflict known as the First ancerious war during its closing years. and the interest of trying to engage their vessels with larger class sizes had been run through simulations so many times the number had reached absurd scales. and had ultimately proven to be useless, too many commanders had held the experience of engaging immortal empire ships vastly larger then them, and their empires had taken the measurements of adapting their weaponry to those titans of space.

What had drawn their attention was a line of thought that had diverted from that comparison of class sizes and engagements. Capitol vessels did not have the resiliency of immortal empire ships, which tenebrean shipshad been adapted to combat with heavy penetrating weapons and ship crippling systems. Tier 2 weaponry, they had dubbed them, if their proxies had learned the correct intel. According to many lines of logic. The tenebreans had been battle hardened enough to have caused much more damage then they had.
why then, had they not? And with such small numbers? they could have easily "Steamrolled" as they had heard some commanders put the term for engaging with overwhelming power. their forces if they had sent more numbers with the carnaithains.

Something with the combat situation was deeply off, and they were surprised that the other forces had missed it.

the entitiy groups within the main contingency in the center of the anomaly, began to divert portions of its logic towards the reviewing of this line of thought. Something, wasn’t adding up.

The enemy fire rained in, and as it did, Raztae watched as the read-outs for the battleships alone took fire in the same manner as at Tau Volaris... obviously, the enemy was utterly unfamiliar with the Carnaithian terms 'fleet battleship' and 'fleet carrier'. As reports from the battleships swarmed in, such as severe damage to their primary drives and powerplant as well as numerous deaths in the CICs, amongst reports from various other craft in the fleet taking tachyon hits, Raztae let out a battlegroup-wide announcement.

"All C.O.E. forces, enact formation J4! Battleship AI drives take immediate control of the battleships, all carriers launch your fighters and begin flanking maneuvers, CHARGE!" He called out, then waking out of the room to relocate... he didn't want to be in the CIC after the enemy found out what Carnaithian Syphoners were capable of. Mass swarms of fighters and drones began to flood out of the carriers, grouping up and going 'left' and 'right', away from the combat groups. As the forward element of the APP forces began to push out of the anomaly, the drones moved to their flanks and began to hook around. immensely faster than even the fighters due to the fact they were built like missiles with guns... speaking of which, the fighters began to engage the Silent Ones' craft, smaller missiles and solaris fire spraying between the craft as some losses were tolled amongst the wings. The battleships and missile cruisers began to fire their missile batteries, and the entire fleet once again glowed with the light of charging EMACCS, the spinal ones of the weapons firing... the Syphoners carrying three each, and the Palanx-classes carrying four each, all of the spinals unleashing their three-shot bursts of solaris-coated projectiles. Raztae, flanked by four guards, fastwalked down the hallway as he sent the enemy a message;

"Capitol scum! You want a fight? I give you one! I invite you to come at my fleet, you obviously have the upper hand, so why should you be scared?! Come, satisfy any bloodlust you have, or be labeled cowards!" As this message was sent out, he pinged Jaseron to ready re-enforcements immediately, as the Carnaithian ships in battlegroup A's engines went to full power, sending out six hundred kilometer-long exhaust streams that could count as a particle laser, accelerating the ships to massive speeds as they began to charge and separate into three main groups resembling large arrowheads. He then sent a message to group B to get there ASAP for assistance... now, to wait for the response of the Capitol Captains... hopefully, some of them were idiots.

--//--

In group B, Selic saw the message and immediately turned to her own comms.

"Fire all engines, we need to get to group A before they all die." She said with an annoyed tone. Hopefully, they wouldn't be dead before they arrived. Their own engines went to maximum, the fighters being recalled from their poking into the signals ahead. It was then that the Silent Ones' weaponry impacted some of the ships under her command. The ships impacted began to lose system control and power in the areas they were hit, and even worse the Shadowblade missiles came online, one of them swinging in and vaporizing the fighter wing that was on its' way back to their mother craft, the rest arcing towards the capital ships. Immediately, the forward ships began to fire CIWS to prevent any massive damage.

"Keep going, we can't let those ships be lost!" she called out, the ships continuing on their course... of course there had to be a gods bedamned ambush!

--//--

On the frigate's end, the small 'border' conflict was going hotter than expected, the frigates beginning to launch their meager fighter compliments, who made extremely sharp turns to avoid the solaris flow released by the destroyed frigate. Others began to take hits from the silent ones, yet another lucky hit by the enemy catching the upper half of a spinal EMACCS, causing the bottom magnet to fling the projectile upwards, it shredding through the upper mandible of the craft and obliterating the bridge. The gauss fire, shadow lances, and other weapons interchanging location with the EMACCS and missiles of the frigates.

--//--

Jaseron turned to his comms unit, immediately calling into it to ready the Union forces.

"Union commander, begin getting those five hundred ships I told you to ready over there, things are turning into a hellhole and we need to help them out." He said calmly, cycling his dreadnaughts' FTL drives and getting one of the assault task forces ready to follow him.

Meanwhile, Jan continued to watch as Glacian listened to classical music from Earth...

"Sir incoming communication from Histirion" The bridge of the Quarrel class battleship Dawnbringer was somewhat awash with activity, mostly garnering the status of the region of space and keeping up with not only the events in the Carnaithian sector but also in Alpha Ceti and of course back in the Unions home sector at Mirach. Harkon had greaved at the loss of the quantum gate and at the losses which were to surely accompany the battle at Mirach, he and his crew longed to fight alongside their own people. But alas had been ordered to stay here and protect their allies intrests. With the combined APP forces invading Histirion and the current communication... It looked like such order was clearly justified.

"Status?" Harkon replied, his slender form denoting him as an elven Cylaurian, unusual as they normally commanded their own ships. But Harkon had never liked sit back and shoot tactics, he preffered the human vessels.

"Seems like we have been called in sir. They need reinforcements"

"Damn. Looks like things arnt going our way... Alright This is Fleet Captain Harkon of the Union of Worlds, we read you. The attack signal is go, Union reinforcements are on the way hang tight. Helm plot us a course and engage Slip Engines!" He replied then sent over in reply. The Union fleet as one charged its jump engines with a whine and with a flash of light disappeared towards the battle of Histirion.

"Sirs" Nrx spoke up in the middle of the feast, having finished the 'entrée' which was already larger than most family meals he had ever had in his life. The main course was yet to come, in fact, it was still alive and being adorned with collars of flowers and fingerpaint. The EPA orderlies led the two bulls to the sacrificial altar, readying their blades.

"Tau field projection imminent. Wormhole reorientation in process, all ships adjust for frame-dragging." The feminine voice of the admiral's aide sounded softly over the command room.

"Sirs" He repeated as everyone was rather busy to pay attention to him. "As my stations have been taken over by autopilot, I will in all modesty take some time off to go meditate on the observation deck. May you enjoy your celebrations."

He made sure to use the right words in the right entonation and order. Changes so subtle they didn't really make a difference in most of the languages of the galaxy, though the cult of E Pluribus Axioma had taken those languages and unfolded them into an overwhelmingly complex meta-language rife with minute details and syntactical structures overlaid on top of it. In the pseudo-axiomatic language most words had opposite definitions differentiated only by a subtle change in context or a grammatical suffix, so Nrx paid close attention to what he was saying, lest he ask to stay even longer in the increasingly hectic confusion of the bridge. The buzzing of the officer next to him, intercut with english words, let him know he could leave.

He walked out, stopping to look back once a transmission was patched in, apparently from the enemmies.

'...Come, satisfy any bloodlust you have, or be labeled cowards!' Said the energetic voice of the enemy commander.

The fleet admiral and the captain simply looked at each other silently.