Starship Engineer

With the Brotherhood massing outside the Bradbury system in deep space, we immediately split the Fateweaver crew into three, sending a third to the Nero and another third to the Sunheart. We pulled in unqualified pilots from the extended asteroid training stations to fly the Slipstream fighters on board. The Academy on the planet was sending everyone they could who had completed enough certifications to show some competency. It was a scramble as we did not know when they were attacking. If we had to defend the system, we would be at a huge disadvantage against such a large force.

A message was sent to Kenji, who was waiting to respond to an attack on the Human Federation ship production facilities. Even if the message relayed between our deep space stations reached him in a few hours he was still eight days away.

I was not going to have any choice but to utilize the armageddon missiles. We were quickly drawing up a plan to attack the Brotherhood fleet in deep space. We had been fortunate that they had assumed we would not detect them that far out. After nine hours of scrambling, we finally got a clearer image of the Brotherhood fleet from a Leopard spy ship.

We were facing ten battleships and twenty heavy cruisers, all in unknown configurations. The Leopard was at extreme range for fear of being discovered and could not get our normally detailed scans. Half the cruiser-sized ships were carriers. Their hangar bays had hundreds of fighters, and shuttles were clear enough to see.

My captains and I decided the carriers were the greatest threat since they carried fighters, assault shuttles, and drop ships. The Brotherhood came prepared to assault our asteroids and planet. I was starting to worry that they had developed a way to deal with us phasing our asteroid bases into subspace. Why else would they come here? Somehow, word must have reached them about how we frustrated Rae'Ver when he commandeered the Brotherhood fleet. Fifteen years was long, and we had sent hundreds of ships into space. All it would take is a subtle handoff by a single spy. It was too late now to concern ourselves with the how.

We still had advantages they were unaware of. The armageddon missiles being the most prevalent.

Our scrambled fleet was headed out of the system to attack the Brotherhood fleet less than half a day since it was discovered. Barely trained crews, inferior pilots, partial armaments and minimum staffing were just some of the concerns. I was not confident in our ability to hold them. Three Fateweaver-class cruisers with a full flight of Slipstream fighters. The plan was simple. Arrive on an attack plane with their fleet, target their carriers with armageddon missiles first, and then move onto larger ships until we were forced to retreat.

All Slipstream fighters would be launched to do as much damage as possible to their support ships. I checked the latest updates from Leopard IX monitoring the fleet. Another tanker and two more screening frigates had arrived. How big was this fleet going to get? I turned over command of all Slipstream fighters to Captain Lucian of the Nero while I focused on the capital ships during the engagement.

We formed a line and transitioned together. As soon as we broke subspace, decoys were fired into space. These decoys used solid holographic technology to project fake Fateweaver ships. When the Brotherhood sensor operators read our transition from subspace, they would see nine Fateweavers, not three. The ruse would not last long but should give us an advantage in the initial exchange.

Our heavy fighters launched and prepared to do a simultaneous micro-jump to appear inside the support ships of the Brotherhood fleet. The Fateweavers themselves were working on firing solutions for our armageddon missiles. A second Leopard ship transitioned five light minutes away. Then, a third on the other side of the battlefield. And finally, the last one we had available had arrived, encompassing the entire sphere of predicated battle.

My sensors operator turned to me and informed me the enemy fleet was powering up shields and drives. They finally caught a whiff of our presence. I ordered the attack before they could cycle reactors high enough to transition to subspace. Subspace disruptor missiles were on standby. The Slipstream fighters micro-jumped, and then we launched our array of armageddon missiles.

We had twenty-one between the three ships and nine more in the Bradbury system, as most of our stockpiles either went with Desdemona or Kenji. I had not have fathomed a scenario where I would need more—yet here we were. The technology was so closely guarded that I had limited its production to a single facility. A single missile could tear a planet apart with an extinction event, which is why I kept such a close hold on them. Each missile only took forty-eight hours to produce at the specialized facility.

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I studied the enemy formation, and it did not make sense. Captain Lucian commed me and said it was a probable trap and that we should maintain our distance with our Fateweavers. I did not see how they would close the trap, but I trusted his instincts. The Slipstream fighters reached the enemy first, and the chaos had begun.

Six seconds after the fighters engaged, the armageddon missiles struck. Three cruisers were instantly shredded, debris clouds expanding and hopefully interfering with other nearby ships. The second wave of three missiles repeated the same destruction, and I started to relax. It looked like this was going to be another lopsided victory for the Fateweavers.

I had spoken too soon. The next series of missiles missed, and my weapons and sensors officers scrambled to find out why. The next salvo missed their targets as well, all three missiles. The self-destruct activated rather than let them head into deep space.

Shara, the young Tirani, figured it out. She overlayed along the data from the Leopard ships and pieced it together. The only thing that made sense was they had our phasing technology! They were essentially moving into subspace to avoid being struck by solid objects. Shara figured it out by seeing massive mass fluctuations from our gravimetric scanners.

It was not an exact copy of our technology. Objects we phased completely disappeared. The Brotherhood tech kept a gravity shadow that showed up on our gravimetric sensors; just the mass was almost nothing.

The Leopard ships said whatever they were doing was requiring a lot of energy as the reactor readings were nearly off the charts. We had gotten lucky to get the missiles into them before they spun up the reactors and initiated their defenses. It appeared only the capital ships had the technology as our fighters were tearing through their support and screening ships without mercy.

The Brotherhood fleet was not idle as one fighter after another was destroyed. Heavy beams of ranged energy weapons target our Fateweavers. Normally, we would not be concerned at this distance, but they were focusing fire on one ship. The first ship was a decoy drone, which they destroyed in short order. Things were turning in their favor very slowly.

Was destroying six carriers enough? They had four more, and their fleet was still immense. I commed the other captains, Lucian and Hercule, to discuss, and we did not take long to agree we should retreat. The enemy had suffered significant losses, and we could form a better defensive line in the system, and maybe we delayed them enough for Kenji to return.

But it was already too late. Leopard IX reported the gravity distortion first. Each battleship was acting like a subspace disruptor. I had never seen the like. All our Slipstream fighters were trapped, unable to micro-jump. The heavy fighters were in a growing sphere of enemy fighters and anti-fighter enemy fire from screening ships.

Three battleships transitioned behind our line of Fateweavers. Three new battleships. Where had they been? And how did they know where and when to appear? Their subspace disruption was already blasting our ships. It was strong enough to prevent us from jumping. The good news was we had superior speed, and running the plots we should be able to evade them—as long as no more cut off our escape routes.

Shara did not have an answer other than they must have been already sitting in subspace, waiting for us. We could have scanned for them ourselves but had been focused on our battle prep. They had been waiting for us, and Lucien was right about it being a trap.

They had underestimated us. It was time to retreat before our losses became too heavy. I ordered the remaining armageddon missiles fired at clusters of support and screening ships. Maybe the debris cloud could damage other ships nearby.

The Slipstream fighters were on an escape vector, but half their number was gone, and more were not likely to make it out. After destroying another decoy drone, the enemy fleet had focused fire on the Nero. The Nero had lost most of its shield emitters and sustained modest damage from focused ranged energy attacks. The Brotherhood was smart, only targeting one ship.

I ordered the three Fateweavers to fan out in case we had more surprises in store. The Nero only lasted fifteen more minutes before succumbing to thirteen battleships targeting it at extreme range. All hands were lost as no escape pods were detected. Our ships were not invincible, and these Brotherhood ships had nearly twice the expected effective range. All fire shifted to the Fateweaver, my ship. We had time, as it had taken almost an hour of combat for the Nero to be destroyed.

I checked on the damage the Armageddon missiles had done and was satisfied. Preliminary reports that twenty percent of the support fleet was destroyed and another 35% damaged. I would have to hope this was enough to have them pause in their plans to invade the Bradbury system. Only seven Slipstream fighters made it out of the gravity envelopes, six of them were from my Fateweaver.

Twenty-six minutes later, they gave up on firing on my ship. We had escaped their effective envelope, and they were wasting resources. The Sunheart had escaped as well and was planning an intercept vector with the seven remaining fighters. The Brotherhood was not finished with us.

Shara, from her sensor station, turned and said the subspace disruption had been ended from the battleships. It had been abrupt, unlike the slow fading of a normal disruptor missile. This meant only one thing. Shara confirmed it; a Brotherhood battleship had micro-jumped and was now in front of us on our escape vector. I knew we had to jump immediately before the battleship powered up its subspace disruptor again….

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