OT: Hell is For Heroes.

[AgentZero]

And yet again, more! Figured it was time for a little more boom boom.


Admiral McArthur gripped his command chair tightly to avoid being ignomiously dumped out of it as his station shuddered from another direct hit. As he turned his head, the station's attacker disappeared in a flash of light, utterly annihilated by a blast from the fortresses main battery that continued onwards to cripple an enemy dreadnought. Still, crippled or not, it still took another four hits to finish the ship off completely. They were built tough, the admiral noted, not quite as tough as Terran ships, but tough nonetheless. And there were a lot of them. More than a lot, a veritable horde of warships swarmed about his command. Still, the network of battle stations built around the jump nexus had been designed to hold up against the entire Tauran Navy, and while several of his stations had taken severe damage, he'd yet to lose one yet. Although, he had to admit, part of that was down to the fact that once a station had been damaged to the point where it no longer posed a threat, the unknown attackers shifted their targeting to a station that was actively firing. And, McArthur thought, despite many reminders as to the downside to that strategy, they continued to follow it. He grinned as one such reminder wiped out an entire battlegroup as Station 37 got her short range weapons back online and proceeded to tear apart anything near her with vengeful fury. His chair lurched again, and this time he barely managed to hang on. Looking up at the damage display, he was confronted with a sea of red. The station's forward shields had failed completely, her armor had been shredded and barely a quarter of her weapons were still operational. Her aft section, however, was another matter.
“Rotate one-eighty,” ordered Admiral McArthur. “And shunt power from forward weapon's systems to shields and damage control.”
“Aye, sir,” the helmsman confirmed. “Rotating one-eighty now.”
A furious babble erupted on the bridge as gunnery stations that had been idle due to lack of guns to co-ordinate suddenly became active again, and the gunners began tossing targeting priorities around their section with all the casual banter that went with it. To a less informed ear, it sounded terribly unprofessional, as actual target priorities seemed to get as much, or even less attention than discourses on the personal hygiene of the gunners mother, yet in truth all of what was said was a code known only to the gunners themselves, and more to the point, it was a brutally efficient code. As no doubt, the crew of an enemy dreadnought squadron would surely attest, had they been more than a cloud of vapour following a particularly crude description by the chief gunner of his second's father's genitalia.
“Tachyon spike!” one of the sensor operators cried over the din. “Almost off the scale, something massive is coming in!”
Despite knowing that there was no possible way reinforcements could be coming through that jump node, part of McArthur couldn't help but hope, that maybe, somehow the new arrivals might be something other than violently hostile. Moments later, his hopes were crushed as a vessel of unimaginable size forced it's way into normal space.
“By the Nine Divine Whores of Kantarl,” whispered the McArthur.
“Ship configuration seems to match that of hostile forces,” the sensor officer reported. “But it's just much, much bigger than anything we've seen so far.”
“Station Ninety-Seven, code Omega!” called out the comms officer. And seconds later, “Station Ninety-Eight, code Omega!”
McArthur grimaced. The two dying stations held only a small crew, being more lookout stations than actual fortresses, and had been passed over by the enemy in their desperate bid to break through the system's defenses. The new arrival, however, seemed more than willing to spare a little attention to them.
“Station Ninety-Six, code Omega!” cried a different comms officer. “Station Ninety-Five reporting heavy fire.”
“Well,” McArthur murmured. “Looks like they've finally played the ace up their sleeve. Now it's time for us to play ours.”
Turning to the comms officer, he instructed, “Contact stations Two and Three, order them to target the new arrival and fire when ready.”
The two stations flanking McArthur's command station, untouched by enemy fire given the fact that they were the only stations not actively firing, and the fact that neither of them sported any discernible weapons, aside from a few rows of point defense turrets, began to move slowly. At first, they only seem to be rotating to point their narrowest end towards the colossal enemy ship, but as they did so, pieces of the stations began to rearrange themselves, moving outwards, upwards and downwards until both stations had taken on the unmistakable shape of two singularly massive guns floating in space. Their movement slowed as they stopped orienting themselves and began tracking their target. Soon, their movement had slowed to the state of being barely perceptible, and far at the back of the stations, massive capacitors began to glow red, becoming brighter and brighter until they glowed a blood-tinged white. The stations soon were became completely engulfed in light as more and more power was poured into their single main weapons system. And then, abruptly, the light vanished. An observer would have just enough time to wonder exactly where the light had gone to, before the answer became abundantly clear to all as a massive white beam of energy blasted its way out of the barrel of the two space stations, casually cut a swath through anything in it's way, and slammed into the alien juggernaut. For a moment, but only a moment, it looked like the behemoth was going to hold up against the vast torrent of energy being poured into it, but then, inevitability, it broke, and the twin beams of light tore through the ship and out the other side. They then began slowly moving about, carving the goliath apart until they hit something critical and the entire ship blew apart in a galaxy-shuddering explosion that wiped out scores of alien ships that had been flying too close.
Almost as one, the surviving ships turned and ran, but the route back to the jump point was a gauntlet of battle stations all waiting for their turn to tear into the attackers, and barely a quarter of the ships made it to safety.
McArthur sat back heavily in his chair. “Status report,” he called into the sudden, eerie silence.
There was a moment of frenzied activity as individual stations rushed to complete preliminary damage reports, and a few minutes later his bruised and battered exec handed him a list of the damaged, destroyed and dead.
“We took heavy losses this time, sir,” he said quietly. “Given a few days to make repairs, we might, maybe weather another attack if we're extraordinarily lucky.”
“Reinforcements?” McArthur inquired.
“The Raezel is en route, along with the entire Fourth and Fifth Fleets, but they're still four days off. The Ninth Fleet should be here tomorrow, but they've taken heavy damage from running engagements and will need the better part of a week for repairs before they could be considered combat-ready.”
“Well,” McArthur mused. “We hurt 'em bad this time. That's the first time we've seen one of their planet-killers come through here. Hopefully we've given them enough of a bloody nose that they'll hold off on another assault long enough for us to get our legs back underneath us.”
“Sirs? If I may interrupt?” Lieutenant Commander Gomez, a small, petite blonde from Intelligence approached the admiral, a datapad in hand. “Station Twenty-Four managed to get some in depth scans of the hostile ships done while her weapons were out. We've just finished the analysis and though you might want to have a look.”
She handed the pad to McArthur, and stood in silence as he read the report. As he reached the end, his eyes jumped ahead to a single word, the only word, really, that the report needed to contain.
“No...” he whispered.
Gomez nodded. “It's confirmed, sir. They're back.”