The salvo lit up the entire side of the Citadel, and went burning past the encroaching Compact Fleet. They could only turn to watch it, calculate vectors, and do what elder races do when it’s time to curse.

Three motherships sitting back there had completely no time to react, even hive-mind telepathy had time delays in space without proper enhancements, and awareness of the attack, where it was going, and getting the shields up and in place while they were dealing with the attack from the rear was just something they couldn’t do in time. They could only look up as a full barrage from the Ruk Citadel’s main guns reached way, way out, and patted them on their slimy little heads.

Space and matter burned, and the bulky motherships lit up from within as quintajoules dumped into their interiors and did naughty things there.

The psychic traffic coming from them went away rather quickly, and coordination among the fleet elements in front of us naturally suffered for it.

That meant they did something stupid, like turn around to meet us, and let us cross their T.

Anything in front of us that turned to fire broadside was getting the forward guns of all the ships. The ones turning to come to the aid of the motherships were getting layer after layer of broadsides as we came streaming in, and the Unforgotten was happy to give us a wave of gravity to help pull us, and yank the Compact out of position.

We blew right down the length of two Compact strings as they were desperately trying to coordinate maneuvers and firing arcs between themselves, getting in one another’s way, and generally making a mess of things as individual priorities began to rise in absence of transpathic coordination.

The Corunsun Fleet blew a burning path through them, and the Unforgotten was already rotating to bring cooled guns into line as more Very Current Firing Data was made known to them... and lots of ships with shields powered up in the wrong directions.

The follow-up salvoes were entirely murderous, and could even take out two or three ships with one shot as I played Penetrating Shot games with the guns of a flying mountain. Gunnery Sergeant Krom Rinhkidor had the record with a nice mass of flying anti-quarks that blew through five different ships, and sent one of them spinning into a sixth, to detonate in a Weird Matter eruption that didn’t do it any favors, before a fusion warhead contributed an extra gigaton or two of yield to the excitement going on.

He was going to get a medal for it, and almost managed to smile at the thought.

Pulled in by the mass-driving gravity manipulation of the Citadel, we blew out of a ring of tumbling, burning Compact ships into the no-man’s zone between them and the Citadel. We were chased by a considerable but very disorganized array of fire, even as more Citadel guns rotated into place and picked off the displeased Compact ships behind us.

There were explosions occurring all over the sides of the Unforgotten that were not returning fire, the first serious attacks it had taken in this fight... which meant it was pretty much ignoring them as the human fleet came in at full bore, and the Citadel’s gravity manipulators combined with tractor beams and really fast hands and calculations going on... and at full burn the entire fleet drove into the North Hangar of the Unforgotten.

The hangar had been emptied of atmosphere and anything that could get in the way, leaving only various tractor beamers, pressor beamers, and the gravity field generators of the Citadel there to grab and push.

Broadcast power fields spread over each ship, they drank in the juice from the massive generators of the Citadel, cycling their gun banks, and they emerged from the Citadel twice as fast as they’d come in along a heavy gravity chute, right back up along that still-cleared mass alley.

There’d been two motherships out there, but they’d simply been shifted past and ignored. Riding the additional momentum of the railgun-like launch of the Citadel, the Corunsun fleet cleared the no-man’s zone once again at high speed, and then Harmonic-shifted again, a remarkable amount of various unhealthy energies and kinetic loads ripping the air behind them as they were suddenly past the ships ready to shoot them.

The Compact suddenly remembered that the Citadel’s guns could reach out a long, long way...

The waves of breacher missiles hit the frantically rising shields of the motherships less than one second before the full salvo of the Unforgotten proved that it hadn’t forgotten those motherships were there, it was just saving them for the second go-around.

The human fleet roared past the exploding shells of the hive vessels, adding some desultory discharges for insult into all the escape pods as they did so, and then kicked in the full Harmonic Drive, flashing into Jam as angry Compact ships boiled after them. Before the Compact ships could exit the mass shadow of the Motherships, the Tachyon Drive went up, and they were out of sensor range.

The Compact could well predict what was going to come next, as ten seconds later the whole Corunsun Fleet flashed out of Jam directly behind the Second Fleet, every ship lined up with broadsides and all guns hot.

It was exactly five seconds of overwhelming firepower, breacher rounds flaring shields, explosions erupting over the massive hulls of the elder race’s bulbous, unclean ships, wrought with inhuman geometries and principles, dipping into other dimensions and impossible physics.

But it was a lot of hot and very energetic reality that was driving into them all at once. They thought they could outmaneuver the incoming shots from the Citadel, and then learned that they really hadn’t needed the Corunsun fleet to calibrate their shots, as there were some passive sensor nodes embedded on some floating rocks coordinating a Dark Matter web of sensor arrays in this particular area. The Ruk had fired before the Fleet even arrived.

They were just starting to fire up their engines when the salvoes pounded in, and their defenses blew out as they were hammered from both sides and crushed like exploding potatoes.

Harmonic drives kicked in, and the Corunsun fleet zipped outside the mass shadows of the ships, kicked into Jam, and were gone before the Compact could chase.

-Your Majesties, the Celestial Messenger is almost there,- I tried to /say without smiling, and couldn’t. They really wanted to smile, but didn’t really know how. They settled for adding deep basso hums of expectation to the chanting going on.

The Great Elder had offered up a dozen stanzas for the Chant going on, and other Ruk were solemnly putting in their couplets. Chalice was vetting them with me for inclusion.

Trembel, oh ohhh oh, Trembel, vir kommen...

------

Forward planning.

There was a comet coming towards the fighting area. Standard Kuiper belt object, few zillion tons of frozen gases, water, maybe some weird Energized elements, moving slowly through the void on its orbit.

The Compact had certainly seen it, it being one of the larger and most obvious sources of moving mass around. The fighting had been going on for hours at this point, and they’d seen and plotted out everything about it within minutes of entering realspace out here. It was a comet, it was coming this way, easy to predict, just a hefty bunch of matter they couldn’t really do anything about at this point. The Unforgotten’s gravity mastery would be able to divert it away if they tried to redirect it, so it was just an obstruction they could use to advance closer in the shadow of as they finally realized that if those big guns were set for long range... they were useless at short range!

The comet came in at its placid miles/second pace along the mass-free zone, just a normal part of its long, slow orbit, and some of the brighter Compact ships began to fold into the shadow of it, lining up quickly to use its mass to shield them from the guns of the Citadel and get inside the danger zone of its cannons.

The Citadel naturally realized what they were doing, and was soon laying down fire skimming the surface of the comet, picking off the ships that weren’t in proper position, forcing them closer into that shadow, occasionally shots skimming and cutting into the comet and raising massive plumes of instant gases blooming in the void.

There was one volley of shots as the comet entered the no-man’s zone, going to pass within a hundred miles of the Citadel proper, and give up supremely desirous positioning to the Compact ships flooding in behind it eagerly...

Hundreds of cubic miles of space were covered in ice chunks and freezing gases... and then fires lit up in the darkness.

Lots and lots and lots of fires...

Within that comet was seeded Storm-launched Macross Missile Massacre tubes, except these missiles were the size of ICBM’s. The psychic reverb and some weird elements had sporked any deep scans of the thing, and they hadn’t seen anything of what was coming until that whole cloud of gasses lit up with fire, and out of it came twenty waves of death from literally thousands of launch tubes.

It was an expensive piece of ordnance. The Ruk definitely wanted to get their money’s worth, and with all those ships in tight formation behind it, they definitely did.

The Compact’s First Fleet was mauled with overwhelming firepower, an armada’s worth of missile fire dumped on them all at once, each wave less than a second apart, and finding hundreds and hundreds of targets to choose from.

The front of the First Fleet basically disintegrated under the barrage, and they couldn’t even tell in the expanding clouds until the horrific size of the volleys came pouring out of the gases and into their shields, turning hundreds of miles of void into a massive fireworks display.

When the last missile was fired off, there was a rumbling as the ‘comet’ literally blew in every direction, launch tubes fracturing and spilling away as, their purpose done, they went tumbling and dispersing.

This left a panicking, dispersing fleet of burning, blasted ships right in front of the Ruk’s main guns, and not quite inside their arc of effective fire.

All the banks that could fire did so as those guns rotated into the arc, and shot until they could not do so. Shredded Compact ships spilled out through the void, burning in strange colors as stranger energies bled out of them, and scything blasts of starfire hurtled past and through them, punching through two and three of them at a time.

They turned around to run... and realized that in the middle of that obliterating wave of missile fire, the Corunsun Fleet had taken up position behind them, all guns on broadside, and once again happily giving the Citadel’s long-guns real-time positioning for their shots... except this time, the range was well within a light-second.

The Citadel’s frantic salvoes instantly smoothed out into precision sniping on massive scale, while the Corunsun’s opened up with everything from pressor beams to standard armaments into the face of the desperately evading Compact ships, keeping them in a tight killbox where all the Ruk guns had maximally viable targets, thank you.

Fleets Two and Three tried to move into support, and the Citadel’s guns started firing up from every side, returning to continuous rotating fire in all vectors as the Compact ships closed in.

The scattering Fleet One didn’t really manage to move into position to assail the Corunsun Fleet, either outright fleeing the battle, or abandoning position to join up with Fleet Two in a desperate move for cover.

The Corunsun Fleet withdrew out of the mass shadow, flashed into Harmonic, and was out of sensor range of the Compact within seconds. They could only watch the flash of their drives vanish, still in the mass shadow and taking precious long seconds to get out of it.

Elements of Fleet Three that had withdrawn and were attempting to come in behind the Corunsun Fleet flashed out of Jam, less than twenty seconds late. As they did, the Corunsun fleet materialized right in the positions the invaders had abandoned on the far side of the mass shadow, facing the now-underpowered Fleet Three that had already seen them ravage through its formations twice, and was now looking at facing them again!