The design and style of it was a +II, nothing fancy, if incredibly specific. A meshwork of Cyclonic and Seeking, allowing it to punch through and ignore dimensional interference by literally creating a tube of steady space to the target, and drilling right to it.

I laughed sinisterly. “Peggy,” I said in a private channel.

“I’m here,” she responded instantly.

“I just worked out an Alchemical Infusion to create a Weapon Enchantment to fire through hyperspace.”

Dead silence for a grim and deadly moment on the other end as she processed that. “Will it work on artillery?” she asked for verification.

“If I Widen it and Raise the Valence, yeah.”

“How many guns can you give me?”

“Exactly five.”

“The main gun?” she pressed. The Starholder’s primary lance was the big spike on the front of the ship, and packed an almighty punch when it went off.

“It would take all of them.”

“How long will it last?”

“Almost an hour?”

“Do the main gun. If the missiles work, we should be able to tear apart their entire fleet before it can get out of range.”

“On it.” I was almost to our position when I shifted course and shot for the front of the ship. “Scott, gonna be a short delay. Don’t let that stop you from picking a target and test-firing!”

His whole body was starting to arc and spark and have some really hissing particle effects, especially around his eyes. I was flying sideways so he could shoot up and ahead.

“Picking a lander!” he said, and his whole visor condensed to the one red central eye, which lit up and blew forward into the holo-screen I was feeding him, a single one-inch beam of very narrow focus, except it was sizzling around with a lot of Nova, electrical, and magical lightning energies being carried along by his almighty psychokinesis.

They were ~ten miles out in real terms, but his beams carried a lot further in the void, having no air resistance to cut through, overcome, and be dispersed by. Light speed is also much faster than bullets, even in hyperspace.

I stared at it with him as we reached the base of the primary cannon, and after a few seconds, there was an eruption of something going off that was probably pretty important.

“Spidey, I need that display of ship models and designs fed to me. Cyke can reach out and touch them!”

Hissing energies were pumping into him again, converging on his head as he built up kicker juice for his optic blast. If he could target their power core, the incoming ships would be crippled, and in hyperspace, that alone could be a death sentence if some other ship didn’t come to rescue them fast.

Of course, the power core had to survive a whole lot of disrupting lightning and Nova Force tearing through it, too, but that was a separate issue.

The holo began to wink up with designations for all the ships I could see, overlaying them with their ID, type, layouts, and where to freaking hit them, which I replicated over to Cyke’s shooting holo.

In the meantime, I dumped the entirety of my VIII Slots into the primary Nova Cannon at the front of the ship, chaining them together so they built and expanded, ranging up and down the entire spike, and down into the focusing and power supplies of the ship behind us, letting the magic form and take hold over all the important and relevant systems of this weapon.

I heard Peggy tell the Fixer to start the feed to the Nova Cannon, and max out the cloaks to hide the fact he was doing it. Grinning at that, power began to slowly build up in the thing below me, even as I turned around and headed back to our former vantage point.

The loss of one lander hadn’t slowed the pirates down. There was no discharge of a cannon to somehow see or sense, after all, so all they knew was that a ship was burning and had gone offline.

There were a lot of ships, big and small, coming our way. It didn’t matter that much, did it? Surely not. They were a bunch of big, bad pirates coming out of the void silently to ambush the hapless ship crewed only by a bunch of Terrans. They hadn’t even tried an intimidating radio call. We were all alone in hyperspace, coming from a backward tech world, what were we gonna do? Our Nova wasn’t even a true Centurion yet!

Well, hadn’t been.

Utter lack of visibility meant that while Scott’s optic blasts were as straight as arrows, they LOOKED like random clouds of fog, flashing sprays of light, scattered fireworks, whirligig streams of fractal colors, and other stuff light looks like when you’re at FTL and bending space. There was no discharge spray of energies relevant to FTL travel to indicate anything firing at all.

Having up active defensive shields when in hyperspace was just asking to attract all sorts of weird matter and energies to you, which is basically why drive shields existed in the first place. Put them both up at the same time, and you got some nasty interactions as the shields tried to configure themselves in a space they weren’t meant to. Bad things happened.

That basically meant that starships were amazingly vulnerable in hyperspace, and was another reason to build some really strong hulls and stuff.

The pirate fleet was closing in from all directions, and Scott just started shooting them about every twelve seconds, getting a massive charge-up from me in between.

I wouldn’t have called it a needle beam, but from a point of scale, it totally was. He was juicing it all the way up to VI in power, too, which would slowly work through his Core... but that was fine, because he was killing them as he was doing it.

The landers and troop transports were really eating it, that line of ruby wound with whole bunches of excitement punching into them and just venting in all directions as Cyclops nailed their power core and his beam continued out the far sides. Internal explosions as Nova energies and lightning did their frying dance of destruction of safeguards and internal systems followed, and ships blew.

Still, they were pretty eager, these guys. The capital ships all drew in closer as the first of the landers touched down, and the rams came hurtling into the hangar bay doors to split them open and allow the landers in.

We’d already vented the atmosphere in the place, so there was no explosive decompression as the hangar’s containment field collapsed, mostly because it was turned off. What we did have was an EMP disruptor field.

The ships coming in through the rent doors sparked and fried and lost their shields. That allowed them to come crashing and skidding across the metal floors in some surprise, while looking ahead as the hardpoints ahead lit up with some pretty nice explosive shells coming in off some hot autocannons and Xandaran explosive charges.

Well, that was the port side. On starboard, Mister Grimm had the Boarding Hammer.

That, naturally enough, was a massive thirty-foot tall warhammer weighing fifty tons.

Yes, it looked totally ridiculous. The physics about it were crazy. It should have been impossible for him to lift by the handle, let alone swing effectively.

He Heavyfooted himself to the hangar deck, hefted that thing, and brought it down on the landers.

There’s nothing like seeing something made of solid metal as heavy as a main battle tank coming down onto your piloting deck at hundreds of miles an hour to ruin a pirate’s day.

I was told the impacts were ear-crunching, and the hammering blows sent the troop carriers gouging down into the hangar deck, or spinning madly into the walls as the troops inside bounced around like basketballs.

Concentrated fire to the midsections or engine core with cannons, rockets, or even mines tossed into place did the rest.

Around the rest of the ship, landers were coming down atop airlocks or thinner sections of the hull, and boring their way in with heavy plasma drills.

Peggy was on top of them all, and especially on top of the fact we were rapidly clearing whole sections of them away on the outside.

Kismet was totally capable of blowing a lander right off the hull from close range, and then ripping it open to the void. Jewel was blowing out their landing rigs and the deployment tubes with her Nova beamer cannon, often opening them up for a one-shot follow-up from Kismet.

The two of them were darting across the hull from place to place at Peggy’s orders, their pattern freeing up squad after squad of internal defenders to collapse on incoming troops from both sides.

Having the advantage of internal sensors, there were a lot of grenades getting tossed. Also, there was the Iceman.

With great speed, he sealed off passageways that the pirates then had to blast through, or simply froze whole squads in place long enough for a marine squad to coolly pick off the multi-racial invaders with headshots, or to set down a grenade in the middle of them and watch them die as their suits were fragged and hard vacuum did its thing.

At this point, the only places in the ship with atmosphere were the sealed quarters and workrooms. All the corridors were vacuum, which raised the deadliness of the fight by an order of magnitude if the lightly armored pirates weren’t aware of it.

It was also nasty on our side, but our boys were wearing heavier armor.

In short order, Peter and Richard personally joined the show. Peter had his handfangs out again, and was ripping suits open and popping helmets in passing, moving with a deadly speed and agility through the ranks of the enemy.

He’d seen the videos of the worlds razed and the fates of those who’d been ‘conquered’ by this Zorr. Zorr was killmarked by every valid government in known space for a damn good reason, a brazen and unrepentant conqueror from a race that delighted in brutal conflict and slaughter.

Gwen and Cindy stayed up with Peggy, running coms and sensors for her, the three competing with their incredible reflexes on who could keep up the information flow the best. Peggy was also managing all the skirmishes and hull action in her head at the same time, and waiting for it, waiting for it...

A pirate group made it down to Engineering, promptly ran into the Beetle and a lot of flying claymore drones, and died messily.

“Firing! Full recharge on the Nova Cannon, Engineering! Iceman, cool the main gun systems!”

The main problem with the firing rate on the main gun was venting the excess energy and waste heat so the systems didn’t fry. That problem was suddenly not as much an issue with the most powerful cryokinetic in the galaxy available.

Her finger stabbed down, and five missile launchers opened two tubes each, spun, oriented, and launched.

With a crackle and a really, really powerful blast, the energies of the main cannon collected on the spike point of the Starholder, and shot away and up into the Endless Conquest.

The immensely powerful blast tore the luphomoid star carrier wide open, ripping through the thick metal of the hull like paper and setting off hundreds of internal eruptions. It immediately lost power and started to yaw as the storm’s power took it.

As the other capital ships were panicking, five pairs of quantum warheads launched at railgun speeds survived for 1.86 seconds, happily less than the two seconds their drive fields were able to give them, slammed into five separate engineering sections, and went off.