The ship shuddered as a powerful energy beam raked over the hull. The hull plating easily absorbed the beam and held under the assault. As a second beam quickly followed slamming into the side with equally low effect against the heavy armor of the cityship. The beams were coming from a heavy dreadnought and enhanced version of the Cylovan dreadnoughts that the People of Sol were already familiar with. It featured improved shields that were impervious to Refuge shield penetrator devices and enhanced hull armor that could better withstand refuge particle weapons. However, the ship’s weapons had not improved over previous models in fact they were slightly weaker, as the enhanced shields required more power and that power was taken from the weapons and engines.

The great cityship Enterprise did not sit there taking the beating. Every beam array on her port side glowed briefly before she unleashed a series of full power beams of her own. Vibrant violet energy lanced across the void and slammed into the mighty dreadnought. Her shields flared as they absorbed the blast, but they were fluctuating. Thanks to an extended bombardment they were beginning to fail. However, they held for the moment. The ship returning fire again, her heavy beams raked across the cityship’s port hull armor with little apparent effect. However, that armor was also beginning to fail.

Elsewhere on the field of battle, a Refuge destroyer was barely holding together, as she returned fire on the cruiser she was engaged with. A volley of heavy torpedoes slammed into the cruiser, her shields already depleted couldn’t stop the volley and they unleashed their payload directly onto the hull. The reinforced hull of the cruiser disintegrated under the barrage. Sympathetic explosions tore through the ship and moments later there was only a cloud of debris. Another nearby cruiser swept into the field firing on the destroyer from portside. Several beams tore through her damaged hull, and she finally buckled going up in a massive fireball. A shockwave rippled off into space as she went up, and slammed into the cruiser that sunk her. The shields flared, but failed to absorb the shockwave, and buckled. Her hull already damaged from a previous engagement with a wing of frigates buckled on contact with the shockwave. The ship was torn apart in mere seconds.

Near the core of the fleet, several cruisers were engaged with the escorts of the Kingdom class carrier SFS Emperor SFR-06. The Emperor was the least defended of the fleet’s carriers and that fact was beginning to show. One of the cruisers defending her suddenly went down under. A series of disrupter beams slammed into her starboard side. The plating failed and the beams ripped deep into the battered heavy cruiser. Secondary explosions tore the ship apart.

The commander of the Emperor ordered an immediate response. The beam arrays along the heavy capital ship opened up the two cruisers responsible for sinking her escort. While freshly rearmed fighters launched from the ship to join the fray. Already heavily damaged thanks to her fighting with the Refuge cruiser the nearer of the two cruisers broke apart after only a few hits from the powerful capital ship beam weapons. Not far another flash of light signaled the destruction of another refuge heavy cruiser at the hands of a few Cylovan ships but she didn’t go down without taking an assailant with her in fact she took three small cruisers with her. With it gone the only ships defending the carrier were now gone.

The commander quickly ordered a withdraw towards the cityships. Powerful engines soon got the massive ship moving, but the Cylovans were hot on her tail. Her own fighters were able to keep them from closing, but a sudden flash of light in front of her signal a battleship moving to cut her off. The heavy ship fired upon her forward plating.

The Emperor returned fire, her own beam cannons however failed to penetrate the battleship’s shields. Her commander cursed its movement here. This fleet was mostly cruisers and destroyers, and there were only two true capital ships in the Cylovan fleet. This battleship and the dreadnought the Enterprise was fighting. Speaking of the Enterprise, at this moment it was unleashing a massive volley of torpedoes on her attacker.

She was forced to change course to avoid a collision, and this gave the pursing cruisers a chance to catch up. A chance they took full advantage of, and the quickly began to bombard the carrier. With the carrier now engaged from multiple angles, she could no longer risk opening her bay to launch or recover fighters. Fortunately, most of her fighters were already in the void. Speaking of her fighters, several wings were swarming a nearby cruisers. While they weren’t doing much damage individually it was racking up. Several fighters were conducting strafing runs of the surface and doing a great deal of damage to the more delicate systems on the surface of the hull. Namely sensors and comm arrays, but a few of the heavier fighters were punching holes in the plating and doing damage to protected systems.

Several beams from the Emperor punched through the hull of the cruiser, and a few bombers used fired their bombs into the fresh wound. The high yield explosives detonated deep within the ship doing major damage to key systems. Secondary explosions ripped the cruiser apart giving the Emperor some relief, but not enough. Worse most of the fleet was otherwise engaged with targets of their own, and could not move to assist the Emperor.

Elsewhere on the field of battle, a different refuge ship was in the process of distinguishing itself. Several cruisers had come out of warp to attack the carrier, SFS Queen SFR-05. Only to be intercepted by the heavy cruiser SFS Accentor SFR-09, she came upon their flank just as they dropped out of warp. Several vibrant violet beams lanced from her beam arrays, and ripped right through their unprotected hulls. The energy violently ripped through their hull plating and tore straight through multiple vital systems on all four of her targets.

The four cruisers survived the beam attack, but power was disrupted on all decks, and their shield generators disabled before they could even energize the defensive screens. This left them helpless to the heavy torpedo barrage she followed up with via her aft launchers as she swept past their position at high speed. Four brief fireballs lit up the eternal night with the intensity of a small star for a fraction an instant and marked the demise of those four cruisers.

Direct ahead of the cruiser, was a destroyer that had slipped by her sister ship the SFS Suzume SFR-25. It was firing its beam cannons into one of the Queen’s hanger bays. The door was sealed shut, but that didn’t mean it would hold forever. Fortunately, it didn’t need too. The Accentor came in on the destroyer from above firing her heavy cannons and beam arrays full force. The Destroyer’s shields were already heavily strained from the heavy fire coming from the Queen, and the collapsed quickly under the added strain. Within mere minutes the entire ship resembled swiss chess. Every deck had been breached by particle weapons, and she had lost all power. The only reason the ship didn’t explode was that the safties had worked and shut down the reactors before containment failed. A single photon torpedo impacted the ship a few moments later and the floating husk was blown apart.

The Cylovan consciousness assessed the battle unfolding in the Xur system. It had managed to mobilize quickly enough that 11257 had not been able to pull out of the system, and still had element scatter across key parts of the system. One of the carriers, for example, had been separated from the main fleet as part of a small patrol on the edge of the system. It seemed to be winning on that part of the field, and while it scored a number of kills the battle was not unfolding in a manner it liked. For one thing, it had lost far too many cruisers here, and its Dreadnought was in trouble. It had used the ship to spearhead an attack on the core of the enemy fleet. 11257’s flagship was currently engaged in a two on one battle with its dreadnought while the cruiser escorts were being held off by a pair of carriers and their escorts. Four particular ships had caught its notice especially given the way that 11257 was protecting them. Two of their smaller ships had even made suicide attacks to keep its cruisers off them. A fact that had caught it a bit off guard, especially given that it had not believed 11257 to be prone to that kind of tactic. They had never used it before either.

Then again they were fighting far more fiercely than they had in previous encounters. They weren’t even trying to retreat either which was something it had noted was the norm for them. Species 11257 was very quick to leave the field of battle, normally. This time however they were fighting with everything they have, and as a result, it was actually taking higher causalities then it would have liked. For every ship, it had managed to sink they had destroyed three and a half times that number. Unfortunately, it didn’t see itself winning this battle, and worse it was going to lose one of its new dreadnoughts. It just couldn’t see a way to get it off the field of battle before the 11257’s flagship destroyed it. Speaking of the flagship, it had spent a good chunk of its processing power analyzing it. At first, it had assumed it was a battleship, but there were inconsistencies with that theory. Ones that became quite obvious when it was compared with other ships in its fleet. Using the other ships as a base it determined that the ship did not have the firepower of a true battleship. It did, however, outclass a battleship in terms of armor, and interestingly enough speed. A fact that made sense, given what else it had noted. It had determined that it was looking at a cityship. The high armor and speed value made sense given they would want the ship to survive at any cost.

That thick heavy armor, however, was also why its dreadnought was having difficulty. Its weapons were struggling to penetrate, and both ships fighting it had enough firepower to cause significant damage if they got past the shields. Something they were quite good at it. The collective still didn’t know how to protect against their shield disrupters, but at least their range was limited. Well not fully anyway, it had figured out a shield modulation that increased how long the shields would hold against the disrupters, but it wasn’t much of an increase. That increase was worth a grand total of seventeen point three seconds. Just barely enough time to get out of range or shake off a lock, but it still occasionally lost shielding to them.

Several powerful beams raked over the Emperor’s hull. One punched through the plating protecting one of the starboard hangers. Nothing detonated though as the bay was empty, the fighters normally on the deck were already in the void swarming a nearby cruiser. Several beams quickly followed the first slamming into the punctured hanger plating.

The Emperor entered a roll as she returned fire from her numerous beam arrays, scoring several scathing hits on her attackers, but the battleship remained impervious to her fire. One of the cruisers harassing her exploded thanks to a hit that penetrated her core. The beam having disrupted the containment on several antimatter containment capsules. The escaped antimatter reacted with the surrounding material and ripped the ship apart in a violent explosion that let off a massive shockwave. Fighters too close the wave were thrown about, some were even torn apart.

At the same moment, a wing of fighters made an attack run on the battleship. Two additional wings covered them and kept the Cylovan fighters that moved to intercept off them. As soon as the fighters were in range, the opened fire with their electro cannons. The powerful shields of the battleship collapsed in a bright flash after several seconds of bombardment.

The Emperor took full advantage of the opening and fired several powerful beams into the hull. Violet energy streams raked over the armored hull burning deep furrows into the plating but failing to penetrate. The ship returned fire, its heavy disruption rays lancing across the void struck the carrier in the wounded starboard side. Something exploded and triggered a number of sympathetic explosions in the ship, that claimed twelve hangers along the starboard side of the ship.

Suddenly a heavily damaged Cylovan cruiser accelerated towards the Emperor. Her weapons array already destroyed from fighter attacks, and her hull buckling the collective decided to use it in a ramming attack. The Emperor’s engines kicked in full force to avoid the collision, but it was too close. The ship plowed into the side of the port nacelle on a course parallel to the hull. Metal buckled as the ships scrapped against each other, and then the cruiser slammed into the rear of the primary hull. It broke apart on the hull and shredded numerous modules along the port half of the ship. A cruiser firing on the port side of the ship redirected its fire to the wounded plating. Several hits were scored along the nacelle and the port aft quarter of the ship. Something else exploded in that part of the ship, and yet she was still fighting.

The carrier with its large mass and heavy construction was not going to go down easy even if it was surrounded and its plating failing. More beams lanced out from her hull at targets of opportunity. She even scored a few more hits on the battleship, as it fired another salvo of its own. The battleship scored a few penetrating hits of its own, but none of them pierced deeply enough to actually sink the ship.

Elsewhere on the battlefield, the Enterprise was unleashing another volley of heavy fire in the Cylovan Dreadnought. Several beams of violet energy raked across its hull punching deep into the plating, and they were quickly followed by a series of high yield AMF torpedoes. In an instant, a bright flash of light completely engulfed the massive warship. When the light returned to normal all that remained of the mighty warship was an expanding cloud of debris. The Enterprise itself had taken some damage during the fight, including a few hull breaches but none of it was serious. Her smaller Sistership the Avenger had also taken some damage during the fight, but again none of it was serious.

Neither ship stayed put for long and instead moved to relieve the cruisers protecting the nearby core fleet carriers. Cruisers that were actually in a fairly good position, and so the addition of a pair of cityships quickly changed the local balance in favor of the refuge.

Meanwhile back with the Emperor, she was taking heavy damage in the extended fight, and a number of her fighters had been forced to break off for refueling and rearm. However since the Emperor couldn’t allow them to land on her decks, they were trying to reach the main fleet group. Ahead of those fighters were one of her escorts along with the mining ships she was escorting back to the fleet. The destruction of a cruiser, however, created an opening for the Emperor, and she accelerated straight for it. Several beams from the battleship raked over her heavily damaged hull, and one of them scored a lucky hit. Several containment bubbles failed around some of the ships antimatter fuel pods and the fuel escaped before the safties could compensate. A massive explosion rocked the ship and began a massive chain reaction. Before the collective could even register the danger a powerful shockwave ripped out from the dying carrier. Of the eight remaining Cylovan ships attacking the carrier the nearest a battered cruiser was the first to be hit by the wave, and it was ripped apart. Quickly followed by a second cruiser, then a destroyer. The battleship was also quite damaged from numerous bomb and torpedo hits, and countless beam impacts. Her shields were already on the verge of failure again and failed to stop the powerful shockwave from ripping into the hull.

When the flames of the detonation dissipated only one of the attacking ships, a small cruiser had survived, but she was heavily damaged. Not long after it along with the remaining Cylovan ships retreated from the field of battle leaving the Refuge to lick their wounds.