Chapter 13: 013 A Statistical Anomaly Amidst the Fires of Hell

"This is Beacon, calling all colors. I repeat, this is Beacon, calling all colors. Your exfil route is clear. Proceed to haul ass to the rendezvous point after striking your targets. Tell me which targets were missed or require a death blow."

They had only just begun their attack runs and already the enemy was suffering huge amounts of damage.

The Heavy fighters focused their Slam Rifles and Kinetic Piercing Inertial Delay Missiles, Cupids, on their natural prey, corvettes.

The Missile strikers, making their first jump to close the range were equipped with many smaller munitions that not only ravished the corvettes, but tore through frigates with equal ferocity.

The Multi-Role fighters, loaded in large part with high velocity, high payload, Ripper Rockets directed their attention on the destroyers. These missiles could be carried by the Missile strikers, but it was more efficient for them to be equipped with many smaller missiles. The opposite was true for the Multi-roles, their neutral design favoring fewer large additions to many small ones.

The Dominoes also made their first jump in close to an enemy escort cruiser and destroyer formation, releasing their dumb munitions at the incredible velocities that their ships had reached with the addition of some solid fuel boosts and energy field assistance.

Even the fighters got in on the action, having stumbled upon the thinly armored ammo and fuel replenishment ships thanks on Don's instruction, the location given merely being the position ARC calculated them to most likely be given formation of the moorings.

The result could only be described as a scene from a nightmare.

Bodies of metal burning with the last of the escaping atmosphere, secondary explosions popping small ships apart like grapes, human shaped debris leaving the area to never be seen again, all on the background of a beautifully pale blue-green planet.

To think this was the result of only two minutes of combat, if what had transpired could be called that.

"This is Blue Leader, calling Beacon. Is that hunk of metal one of your machinations?"

"Unfortunately, that information is classified. Please be mindful of debris on your way out."

"Tch, always the secrecy with your involvement. You heard him boys, mind the metal."

Their exit was just as fast as their entrance, zooming past the wallowing corpse of the once mighty heavy cruiser and disappearing from the Noah's sensors behind the ring. Just in time too, because their three minutes were just about up and the capital ships above were more than eager to make themselves a few tons lighter again.

Don decided that the next few targets would be the carriers, following doctrinal priorities. They were the only threats at the moment, their craft capable of pursuing the fleet to report their position. He had considering eliminating that abomination of a disc battleship first, but that might be doing the enemy a favor.

"Target ready?"

"Clear to fire, my wait staff have left the building."

A few moments passed before the carrier he had been focused on was cored. The rods making impact with the weak hangar armor and ripping through it. Along with whatever remained of the deployable craft drifting away maimed was what Don took to be the primary reactor core, nothing more than a mangled mass of heavy metals leaking radiation like a shower faucet.

A similar phenomena happened with the next carrier, except this one was split in half lengthwise from the shot spread hitting the connecting hull on either end.

The final carrier exploded fantastically, one of the shots evidently setting off the ordinance for the strike craft onboard. He wondered how that might have happened, most explosive ordinances being detonated electronically as opposed to chemical reaction. He suspected some fuckery with mass traveling at relativistic speeds.

There weren't any light carriers that he could see, the oligarchs viewing them as a waste of resources.

Next were the dreadnoughts then. There were ten that fit the dreadnought standard by mass and volume readings, but their classification may be different for the Oligarchies.

Still, a sunk battleship was eight years of dockyard production and a few thousand trained crewmembers in damage.

The dreadnoughts were the epitome of toughness. Even after four consecutive concentrated salvos, it required a fifth before Donovan could be REALLY sure that it was rendered inoperable. That was only because the top half of ship was caved in. Meters of armor meant to stop extreme velocity rods did so at every angle it would appear.

It was at this point that the point defense systems of the remaining ships spooled up and started firing at incoming debris in a bid to ward it off. It didn't do much besides showing Don which ships were left alive from the raid.

Nine salvos in and already a dreadnought, a large cruiser, and a trio of carriers had been totaled. The raid could end here and the damage would already be considered catastrophic.

The next dreadnought did not hold up to damage nearly as well as the first. Only two salvos before some sort of safety structure snapped, the two halves folded in on themselves like a hot dog. The dorsal armor and internal sparring was evidently not up to the task of redirecting the kinetic impact on the level of a small moon coming in from the top.

One of the large cruisers on the periphery was starting to move, can't have that. Don ordered it executed after three minutes of down time. "Poor thing was probably preparing to go out on patrol when the attack started."

"Are you feeling sympathy for the enemy?" ARC was curious about what Donovan was talking about. He had only ever shown malice towards the enemy.

"Not for the people aboard the ship, but for the ship itself. Not its fault that it got stuck serving under a crappy government."

ARC took note of Don's tendency to consider ships as entities, not objects. Not unusual, but ARC was under the impression that most would cheer over the destruction of an enemy craft.

With the second large cruiser submitting to a fate similar the first, Don continued directing his divine fury towards the dreadnoughts. They may not be the fast enough to pursue his fleet, but they posed the biggest threat to whatever main fleet would come through to clean up afterward.

They would be deprived of both the advantage of surprise and recon that he was providing. Precious time would be lost taking them out.

By the time of the 45th salvo, all of the dreadnoughts were nothing more than deformed and/or melting masses. Coincidentally, this was the time that the missile craft of the fleet were scheduled to begin their fireworks show.

It meant nothing to him now, but one side of his three dimensional display was essentially a wall of pulsing dots. When it comes time to actually use them, he will have ARC sort them into different colors according to type.

For now, he was content with ripping the still inert ships to shreds, continuing onto the battleships. They might actually prove to be more difficult to break, their more compact size but comparable levels of armor making them less prone to collapse. For what it was worth, they also had a slightly smaller target profile.

This quickly proved itself to not matter at all, the 46th salvo having a 100% hit rate and bending one of the battleships into a shape closer to an V than an I. There was no exit wound, meaning almost all of the momentum was transferred to the hull.

"Ouch."

The spectacle had lost all its glamour at this point. This may certainly be interesting, but seeing a dreadnought do the same only an hour earlier made it seem less impressive. Pretty cool that the keel remained intact though.

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The 50th, 56th, 61st and 63rd salvos marked the deaths of the next few battleships. The destruction of next on the 69th salvo denoted a decrease in the accuracy thanks to range, so Don shifted fire to the large and heavy cruisers that were starting to wake up.

The Oligarchs, lacking in both manpower, energy, and materiel, disdained using less armored craft such as large cruisers, heavy cruisers, and escort cruisers as they were really only meant to fill holes and were, in their eyes, a waste.

Too easy to kill, too ineffective towards their goals, and too expensive for their results to warrant too many of them existing.

Shame the rest of the fleet just got their shit rocked.

Don chose to split the fire of the fleet about as evenly as possible in order to maximize damage. Full salvos on large cruisers had proven themselves to be overkill. No need to see the result to mere heavy cruisers.

These cruisers, not heavily armored and without the characteristic hexagonal prism 'Death Box' armor scheme of the capital ships, were easy prey for the big guns.

Any that survived would soon be finished off by a literal rain of fire. He would like their point defense computers disabled while it happened though.

As the fleet neared the limits of their range, Don ordered the execution of a few of the dreadnoughts and battleships that still showed life.

How dare they try to move after losing their front half! The nerve.

Soon though, the serious bit was over. It was time for him to have fun.

He had free range over the remaining ships, and did not need to set complicated waypoint paths. The distinct lack of debris meant there was no reason to maneuver them around, and could instead direct them straight to their targets.

Some of the light cruisers and destroyers that remained untouched by the strike craft had left in pursuit of the main fleet, removing their point defense from the equation.

In their defense, how were they supposed to know that a missile strike on the level of relative volume of a sustained Katyusha bombardment was on its way? The ships firing at them were at the extreme ranges of their starbase sensors. They couldn't imagine being accurately locked from that range.

As a result, all of the remaining uncrewed or damaged ships would be doomed to die in a way reminiscent of the fires of hell. The repair facilities, base stations, mooring equipment, and sensor arrays would all be subject to his wrath as well.

It only took him a half hour for him to assign all of the missiles to targets, and then there was nothing for him to do.

He broke out the rest of the bucket of ice cream he had received, stored in a small freezer he had received alongside it, and got in position to watch the show. As the engines on the missiles roared to life for a second time, they left a grey cloud in their wake that was eerily beautiful.

It reminded him of a wave, as abstract as that may be in space.

There was no sound in space, but if there was he could be sure that the ensuing firestorm sounds like the end of the world. He imagined the roar of supersonic warheads and the subsequent tremors as the detonated. Many of the ships were not ruptured by explosions or the kinetic force, but had holes melted into them or were quite literally shaken in half.

He saw a heavy cruiser that had large thermonuclear warhead torpedoes detonate simultaneously around it snap in two. Two warheads detonated on one side, close to the bow and stern respectively, with the third detonating in the middle of the other side. The hull acted as if it had been chopped by an axe.

He saw a few of the small corvettes that were attempting escape evaporate as they made unintentional contact with some of the larger missiles.

This lasted for ten minutes.

Ten minutes of hell.

By the end, the only ships left operational were a few of the intentionally ignored battleships and heavy cruisers, as well as a group of corvettes and frigates that had been in the sensor shadow of a dreadnought's corpse. Overkill was an apt description.

He had permission to fire his railguns, but he honestly found it to be unneeded. Everything as dead already. Everything that wasn't was not going to survive contact with an actual fleet. A general charge would fuck them over.

Still he stayed put for an hour to assess damage.

His official tally of kills or those rendered unoperational for his after-action report were as follows -

3/3 Carriers.

10/10 Dreadnoughts.

12/16 Battleships.

7/7 Large Cruisers.

20/25 Heavy Cruisers. 2 Damaged to the point of questionable combat efficacy. 3 remained unscathed.

56/84 Light Cruisers. 9 Damaged to the point of questionable combat efficacy. 19 exited combat zone to pursue fleet.

4/4 Escort Cruisers.

103/184 Destroyers. 23 Damaged to the point of questionable combat efficacy. 34 exited combat zone to pursue fleet. 24 unaccounted for, whether or not they fled, were obscured by debris, or were broken up beyond recognition is unknown.

258/312 Frigates. 10 damaged to the point of questionable combat efficacy. 14 exited combat zone to pursue fleet. 10 left unscathed, seen escorting the remaining capital ships. 30 unaccounted for, whether or not they fled, were obscured by debris, or were broken up beyond recognition.

421/635 Corvettes. Estimated 100 damaged to the point of questionable combat efficacy, margin of error 12. 56 exited combat zone in pursuit of fleet. 20 confirmed unscathed and guarding the remainder of the fleet. The rest remain unaccounted for.

All of this damage, more than had been lost in the last war by both sides combined in the last war, had been achieved without a single incidence of lost life on his side.

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