Chapter 24

Arion star system, outer star system.

New Arion Republic home cluster.

"Captain!" The XO called out. "We're in missile range!"

"Finally!" Roared out Crescent. "Load up our own missiles and fire everything we have on that gunship!"

"Yes sir!"

Crescent almost snarled, before carefully regaining his composure. 6 minutes. 6 straight minutes of hammering by those damned missiles. Fortunately none of the incoming volleys had been quite as bad as the first one, the debris and cooling plasma clouds from destroyed missiles and ships helping their jamming in luring them away, and the NARN had finally managed to calibrate their own counter missiles and point defence lasers so that they weren't just spraying blindly, hoping to hit something through pure luck.

Not that it had saved them. Of the 5 gunships they'd started off with, 3 were shattered wrecks or just expanding clouds of plasma. Another was barely still in the fight, valiantly firing its last laser as its energy signature fluctuated wildly, its crew desperately trying to keep the shields and grav-drive online. The last one was more or less intact, having miraculously survived several direct hits through sheer blind luck and the sacrifice of most of it's armor plating.

The converted merchant ship shook as the missile launchers finally fired at the enemy gunship. Only 26 of them were left however, the other 4 stripped by the handful of missiles that had made it through their shield. As they had refined their point defence solutions, so had the enemy refined their own targeting, allowing more and more of their missiles to target the merchant ship directly rather than wandering off, either hitting NARN gunships or going for the station, whose endurance shield had just shrugged off the hits....for now.

"Missiles are away!"

*****

"Vampire! Missile launch! 9 000 gs acceleration, grav drive propulsion, impact in 8 minutes!" Elteria turned towards Sarah. "Not bad, 9 million kilometers range."

"Indeed. And they've proven tougher than I expected." Said the captain as she leaned back into her seat. "We've thrown, what? 180 missiles at them? Only 72 have landed, sure, but they're still alive. And kicking. Honestly I'm impressed, especially as we're nearing battle laser range. Your thoughts?"

The AI shrugged.

"Our missiles will probably finish them off, but they might just live through it. In any case, they won't survive the first battle laser salvo."

"Hopefully not." That would be....problematical to say the least. Especially as they would probably be able to engage with their lasers shortly after, depending on if they were willing to let down their point defence fire or not, and given how tough they'd proven so far she'd rather not test out the power of those beams. "Still, let's be thorough. Crank up our evasion patterns-" The ship was already evading, to throw off any long range kinetic fire, whether through a hidden railgun or ballistic missiles they'd missed. "-and set the battle laser to point defence mode. Let's make sure none of these missiles make it to us."

"Aye aye ma'am. Battle laser is in point defence mode." Which essentially meant cranking the power as low as it could go and still work, which was about 1%, still considerably overkill against mere missiles, but unfortunately the fusion chamber just wouldn't work below a certain amount of fuel. "Locking onto enemy missiles and fire plan laid in."

Sarah nodded, and leaned back into her seat. There was nothing to do but wait. And acknowledge the strike reports of course.

"4th gunship down." Reported Elteria, a slight edge of vindicativeness to her voice.

"The lucky one?"

"No, unfortunately. It was the barely functioning one. It's power plant has detonated, I doubt there will be much left of it."

"Well, better than having them shooting at us I suppose."

"Indeed." The AI blinked. "And I'm in battle laser range, firing...Got one! Wow, they don't even have their ECM on, this is going to be a turkey shoot. Switching to maximum rate of fire."

Sarah smiled as she looked at the holographic plot, and her enemy's missile salvo began to positively melt under the onslaught.

*****

Crescent just stared at the screen in stunned, horrified silence.

"Who the hell are these guys?" Muttered the executive officer, and Crescent shook his head.

"Not someone we can fight. Get everyone to their evacuation stations, we're executing plan Ombre."

"Sir?" Said the executive officer, startled. "We're abandoning ship?"

Crescent nodded, his face grim. Plan Ombre was the emergency plan their boss had put into place for all of her ships, should they get cornered. It wasn't exactly perfect, but it was far better than the alternative.

"We don't have a choice. We just can't win against...Whatever that is!" He pointed an accusing finger at the icon of the lone gunship as the last of his ship's missile salvo vanished. "We need to scrap up whatever we can from this disaster, and that means getting our people out."

"And the payment." Dutifully added the officer, and Crescent winced.

"Yes, and the payment. Is the cargo container ready?"

"Yes sir. I'll have engineering double check it, but it should be able to eject and coast along as we execute Ombre."

"Excellent. Then make the preparations, and get the hell off the bridge. I'll ready the final protocols."

"Sir yes sir!" The executive officer saluted, and then began sheperding the rest of the bridge officers as Crescent opened his command interface, and started inputting the authentication codes that would reduce his beloved ship to atoms.

*****

"The merchant ship has stopped firing at us, they seem to have switched back to counter missiles."

Sarah chuckled.

"That's hardly surprising, their missiles weren't exactly making any progress."

"To say the least." Answered the AI, before blinking. "They're engaging our inbound volley. That's odd, their targeting solutions are worse than- We got them!"

"What?" Said Sarah as whipped her head around to look at her AI, before staring at the display.

"We got them ma'am. Their reactor exploded right after our missiles hit. They're gone." Elteria's smile turned positively wolfish. "I'm transmitting the order for our remaining missiles to mop up the gunship and then focus on the station."

"Right. Cease fire on our missile launchers, and coms try to get me a line to that station. They've just lost their last chance of standing against us, let's see if they're in the same surrendering mood their confederates were yesterday."

"Aye aye ma'am!" Answered Connie, before bending over her console with renewed energy.

Sarah looked to the side at Elteria.

"Well, this simplifies things at least."

"Indeed. I'll start targeting the station with the battle laser, just in case."

"Sure. And prepare to reverse our acceleration, it looks like we might end up having some people to board after all."

Probably the station, she thought grimly, as the last NARN gunship suddenly found itself the only target in the area....and it's luck finally ran out as 6 missiles jumped on it and annihilated it.

"Aye aye ma'am. I'll warn Hector as well."

*****

"Sir. We appear to have successfully avoided detection. Should we try to retrieve the cargo container?"

Crescent shook his head.

"Negative. Our margins are already too tight as it is. The retrieval team can take care of it. Just get us out of here."

"Sir yes sir!"

The stealth shuttle, it's launch hidden by the merchant ship's ECM and spectacular death, started creeping away from the battlefield, leaving behind a single, equally stealthed container.

*****

"High admiral, you sent for me?" Said the young woman as she stepped into the station's command center.

The high admiral nodded, and turned around to face the new arrival.

"Indeed. Unfortunately, we have been unable to repel our assailants. All of my gunships have been neutralized...and Crescent's ship has been destroyed. To safeguard the lives of those under my command and protection, I have no choice but to surrender."

The young woman slowly nodded.

"I...see. You're saying that Crescent's ship was...completely destroyed?"

"Yes. It's fusion reactor overloaded, or was breached. Either way, the ship was annihilated."

"Ah. Very unfortunate." The young woman relaxed a fraction.

The high admiral went on, blithely unaware of the young woman's furious activity on her implants.

"Since you are our main contact with the Thaumor Revolutionary Front, and thus too precious to be captured, at least while they know your identity, I have ordered a uniform and set of credentials fabricated and integrated into our database. As such, we will be able to pass you as a lower level technician, and hopefully you will pass through the net without too much issue as they try to sort through myself and my officers. There is not much I can do for all the material on the station, although I have ordered demolition crews to start posing charges on the frigates and shipyard slips. If nothing else, our oppressors will not get the fruits of our labor!"

The young woman smiled sadly.

"Thank you high admiral, that's very thoughtful of you. And indeed, they won't taste the fruits of our labor....or be able to trace it back to the TRF."

The fatalist, sad tone of the woman finally percolated through the high admiral's mind, and she had a fraction of a second to begin frowning and open her mouth before the young woman triggered the bomb she had installed in the station's central fusion core, and the world disappeared in a flash of light.

*****

Silence reigned on the Eternal Seeker's bridge.

"What....the fuck just happened?" Finally said Sarah.

Elteria slowly shook her head.

"Fusion core breach. Purely internal, no external detonation. Looks....Looks like a self destruct ma'am."

"Stars damned fanatics." Muttered Normensk, and Sarah exchanged a look with Elteria.

"No. This...Doesn't fit what we've seen so far. They wouldn't have offered to surrender if they were intending to blow themselves up, at least not without trying to get us into range to try and catch us in the blast first. For that matter their gunships wouldn't have surrendered if they were fanatics, and even most zealots would at least hesitate at killing that many civilians." Sarah looked at her AI. "Something is wrong here. Go back over your sensor records, every damn piece of it. If there's something we missed, I need to know it."

The AI nodded, and Sarah leaned back into her seat. If nothing else, the check would come in useful as the inevitable inquiry happened. Nobody would have questioned her about blowing up the gunships or the merchant vessel, or even denting the station a little, but it had been a civilian station first and foremost.

Which meant that at least a hundred thousand innocents, and perhaps many, many more, had just died.

And she was fairly sure the damned system's government was going to try to pin it on her.

*****

"Ma'am. We...we have received a code Epsilon from Crescent."

Eterna, better known as Eterna Deepstar, mother of Allira and Annalisa Deepstar, looked up from the paperwork on her desk, and frowned.

"A code Epsilon? Where was he again?"

Her majordomo bowed briefly.

"He was in the Arion system ma'am. His transmission indicated that all of his crew is alive and well, and awaiting retrieval in the outer system, as well that the payment was still secure, although he was unable to take it with him and will require separate extraction."

"Good, that's something at least." The payment she could live without honestly. Okay, it was a very nice payment, the TRF paid very well, that was why she worked with them despite their...more bloodthirsty than usual nature, but loyal people were even more expensive, and long term retainers like the kind that crewed her blockade runners were a pain in the ass to find. "Anything on what caused him to trigger the Ombre protocol?"

"Ah, yes ma'am. According to him, a single gunship somehow rolled up the entire rebellion in Arion...and crushed his ship. The name of the ship was...hold on..."

The majordomo's eyes closed as he searched in his implants, and Eterna felt a sinking feeling. She already knew what that name would be.

"Ah, there! It's the Eternal Seeker ma'am."

"....Stars damn it all. Gregor?"

"Yes ma'am?"

"Get me a line to whoever is up in the intelligence branch. I think it's time we put a little bit more priority on finding out quite who those people are."

"Of course ma'am, right away!"

Eterna leaned back in her almost sinfully comfortable seat, and frowned. She'd already ordered her people to dig on that ship, but she'd been unable to find much. She had contacts throughout the Know Universe, some quite highly placed, and she'd managed to at least identify where the crew was from...which hadn't helped at all. Her enquiries had just hit a neoconcrete wall, as all of their records had been sealed under an authorization level that would make admirals sweat.

Just who the hell were these people?