Tabitha’s enemy fleet had come into realspace first. The additional data locked down the arrival of the second fleet to within a one second margin of error, and Tiffany was shooting forwards to the spread point at maximum thrust, while all the capacitors on the ship were charged to the fullest.

Ahead of them, space roiled, writhed, and vomited itself open. Streaks of light were disgorged into realspace, and the area ahead of and around them was suddenly filled with dozens of motherships and scores of escort craft.

Captain Tiffany painted the targets for her crews, and the plasma cannons, torpedo launchers, and needle beams went off with searing precision, blazing with the coruscant power of mass-infused Sun Shots.

Analytical engines had devoured the ship data from Captain Tabitha and deduced the probable layouts of key ship systems and places on the living bioships. The Bared Saber lit up, and cut.

Shining torpedoes plunged into escort craft to either side, punched through their ablative hulls, and detonated massively. Plasma lances coursed out, split open transmetallic hides, and found the psychically-controlled power cores of four different vessels. Piercing needle beamers stabbed out shining strands of the sun, like golden hairs as they punched into smaller bioships and out the far side, and great beating hearts of atomic fury were sliced apart as they passed.

The main ram was already powered. The Bared Saber plunged in, the prow of the ship proudly curved in a cutting arc of rune-carved adamantine tempered by science, alchemy, and artifice to the limits possible. The ship rose into the startled path of the lead mothership, six times the length of the incoming cruiser and barely able to react as the Coronal ship came in with its bow ablaze with Nimbus energies from over one hundred psions and a slicing prow ram over a hundred feet tall.

The mothership was miles long and its hide was thick, but not that thick. The bioorganic mass split aside like wet tofu under the space-shredding edge of the prow, and hundreds of thousands of tons of ship drove along the xenos mothership’s backside. The creature-vessel was huge and mighty, but their relative velocities meant that the actual ramming was over and done within seconds. The blazing prow erupted out the backside of the creature, gore and blood spraying wildly in its wake, while the fusion fire from its thrusters baked everything within the bioship in the fires of the sun. Whatever the invaders used for air ignited wildly green and yellow behind them, and the mothership burned.

Captain Tiffany burned the maneuvering jets as the engineers blew their Focuses to double the conductivity of the power feeds and recharge the guns. The main cannon aligned, and the railgun fired its glowing load.

The next mothership’s shields crackled up and stripped off the secondary Sun Shot laid onto the cannon round by the forty gunners serving the cannon. The empowered Runes on the durasteel load were unaffected as it smashed into one of the great glowing eyes of the beast at a tenth the speed of light, punched through bone as hard as adamantine, hit the inner skeleton and framework of the beast, and proceeded to fracture and drop its kinetic energy violently in all directions. Shards of metal moving at many miles per second pureed the forward and middle quarters of the bioship, and the mothership convulsed as durasteel shards bounced around wildly inside it, tearing its organs and passengers to shreds.

The port-side plasma lances came online as the second string of torpedoes launched. Psychokinetic shields, void barriers, and spatial shunts were crackling to life everywhere around the biofleet, but that was the job of the lances. They speared out into those shields, bent and sheared into the psionic energy control, and the glowing torpedoes shot through the gaps and into the hulls of the bioships that were finally starting to target this unexpected attacker.

Four more bioships blew apart in antiproton fire, an extremely cost-efficient use of torpedoes.

The first bioplasma charges began to reach out, and psychic nets and arcs began to discharge between the ships of the fleet in a deadly net. The diviners read the motions and facing of the ships, Insight bonuses giving up to a six-second advantage on where the bolts would pass by were fed into Tiffany and inspired a dance of maneuvering jets as the engineers poured bursts of their Nimbuses into the machinery humming around them, and let it sing as it only ever had in test runs.

Needle beams stabbed out, severing tendrils exuding those arcs of power at key moments, opening holes. Biospores spewed out like railgun-launched boulders filled the void around them, the ship’s kinetic shields and gravity warps sliding them around the ship proper, point-defense cannons unleashing ten Sun Shots a second from the gunner teams to blow apart the ones actually threatening the ship.

Third salvo, fourth, and the Bared Saber broke through the mass of the fleet, ‘above’ and behind them as they swept past, and hundreds of spinal guns and arcs tried to track the ship as the psychic energy flared over it in spatial-shifting displays, giving the bioships dozens of targets to unload on as the Saber pulled away. A coruscating web of shield tech converged over the triple engines behind it, condensing the fusion fire of his exhaust into a long, blazing conduit of the full power of the ship’s power core. The arc the ship took flashed that saber beam across four escorts and ended amidships a mothership, boring into its head as its shields blazed wildly around it, and filled it with a small sun.

The Bared Saber hit the edge of the bigger ships’ gravity well, exited tactical range, and went to Jamming speed with a roar of fire and triumph.

-----------

It took only minor juking at this speed to foil all trailing fire, and they were outside of range of any non-psionic weapons within ten seconds, energy weapons even sooner.

“Damage report,” she said, as the triumphant crescendo thrumming in the Saber’s Markspace slowly faded to an anticipatory, heavy beat.

Expenditures of ammunition and energy reserves coursed through her, hull contact from incidental fire being cleaned up by the damage control crews jetting outside before the organic growths could wreak any harm, or any living loads they carried recover enough from the impact to do damage and get inside. Several of the point-defense cannons were being retasked to lower-power hull-sweeping for just that purpose.

There were light biocraft in pursuit, crystalline wings glowing, abdomens shining with atomic fire as they winged in pursuit.

The Saber’s engines were already on, and the compression field of the Saber Beam spun into existence again. A long and steady beam of fire sped down their back trail with incredible cohesion, and the swarms chasing them five light-seconds back ran into it and were swatted away like gnats in long arcs and pulses. Three-quarters of them were dead before they braked and turned back to get out of range.

---

“Sixteen probability attacks still ongoing against the circuitry!” announced Senior Technician Patrik Ghominelli, stepping around dozens of shredded and fried circuit boards in the nearly three-hundred degree primary relay chamber. He had four other boards in his hands, and followed a cascade of power as it jumped across the lights of the vak-tubes, stabbed a finger into a board, and the psionic-powered overload ran into his Focus and was blown back in a cascade of sparks and melting crystal. Somewhere off in the mindscape, some freak of a TK was howling from the feedback shredding its mind, and Ghominelli ripped out the board, inserted another one to replace it, and ignored both the heat and crunching beneath his feet as he pounced on another attack on the systems with his team. “Fifteen!”

Fried circuit boards were falling like hail, ignored by everyone, but there was no change in the performance of the ship. Numbers were coming up, and then the pshields spiked in power, harmonized to the circuitry, and rapidly supercharged the feedback applied when the circuits were blown. If humans had been trying to push this attack forward, then the attacks on the control circuits and power relays would now be blowing apart their skulls.

The surges of light and areas of darkness gradually stopped dancing about, and a gusting wave of cold swept through the control cores spread through the ship, finally neutralizing the heat spike and plunging the cores back into subzero temperatures, which the Vajra’d crew also ignored.

Ghominelli looked at the dozens of fused and shattered vak-boards littering the ground, calculated just how much damage the assaults could have done to the ship’s systems if the attacks had actually reached any of the systems they were trying to, and sighed in relief. “Systems clear!” he shouted, getting a whoop from his team and a cheer from the rest of the ship.

First blood in combat, the Bared Saber of the Coronal Guard!

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Word of the Coronal ship’s attack on the incoming enemy fleet, coming as it did with word on their numbers and deployment, was both electrifying and dreadful. Nobody knew where the Coronals had gotten such a terrifyingly effective ship, but the combined numbers of the two fleets coming in to threaten Janus III from above and below the solar plane were just daunting.

Admiral Ontiff looked at the information, and shook his head to himself, allowing no expression to leave his face. He was doomed.

The Rantha Protocols shifted and his eyes turned to them, wondering what this Twilight-authorized injunction was going to make happen now.

[Activate all Reserve Fleet Assets.]

He blinked, and turned his attention to the windows that displayed the Sleeping Arm of Threshold Station.

One of the command decisions of Sector Fleet HQ had been to move the reserve fleets closer to material supply stations, easing the logistics load for keeping them maintained. The minor degrees of upkeep and supply required could easily be attended to by station personnel in outlying areas, as long as the systems had access to sufficient technology to make repairs. Even upgrades could be sent in with routine shipments, freeing up space and skilled workers at the primary ports.

Security generally was not an issue. While the mothballed and out-of-date ships might seem a tempting target to pirates, all such vessels were rigged to blow if unauthorized personnel attempted to flee with them, and their very nature meant that it would take days to get ready, even with a skeleton crew. Where would they possibly find the people to man them in such a short period of time?

His jaw slowly dropped as the first set of running lights came on, the Pride of Dolthmar coming to life slowly and smoothly before his eyes, out of a sleep that had lasted more than a century.

“Captain Melvin Briggs of the Pride of Dolthmar, acknowledging Rantha Protocol. Threshold Station, we will be good to go in one hour,” a very deep and firm voice cut in through the links as he hastily connected.

Next to the Pride, the cutter Vane of Andromeda winked up all at once. “Captain Kelba Rantha of the Vane of Andromeda, acknowledging Rantha Protocol. Threshold Station, we will be good to go in fifteen minutes.”

“Captains of the Pride and the Vane, this is Admiral Ontif of Threshold Station!” he messaged directly, a contravention of protocol he only undertook because of extreme agitation. “Who are you? Where are you from?” Admiral Ontif asked quickly, shocked. A quick query did not list them among any of the Captains of the Imperial Fleet in his records!