E-957 Gamma, February 4th 082 SDE, 2314 hours:

The ship shuddered under impact. Something screeched, and then an engineering officer shouted over the din of the controlled chaos. “Hull breach deck seventeen, sections fourteen alpha through ninety-one gamma. Emergency bulkheads not responding. Forcefields are holding for now.”

The captain did not even hesitate, “Give them three minutes to evacuate those sections and then seal the surrounding sections. Seal the deck if you have to and deploy damage control teams to fix the bulkheads.”

As they were executing the order, if they had not started beforehand, he ordered a change of heading. His tactical officer coordinated a heavy barrage on the two attacking dreadnoughts. They were outgunned, outnumbered, and cut off from a retreat. The hostile ships had projected a jamming field which prevented the stable formation of a warp field. The Collective had done well, locating them and ambushing them here after their successful attack on the now extinct collective colony in the nearby system of E-988 Beta. At the moment his ship was taking heavy damage trying to protect the carrier.

The ship shuddered heavily under a second impact, and this time he heard a familiar noise just cut out. He did not need the report to know the hit was bad. They were dead in the water, and then a new report came to his attention. “Sir, we just detected an incoming hyperwarp signature. Bearing 217 mark 13 distance 200,000 kilometers.”

“Friend or foe?”

The collective consciousness analyzed the ongoing battle. Only a handful of subroutines were focusing on the battle. It was going well, so far. The fleet had been successful in locating Species 11247 after they had made their attack. It had not been easy. Previous attempts to take advantage of their habit of stripping its worlds of usable material had not worked out well. Slipping trackers in never worked. Either because they disabled them, or something about their hulls prevented the tracking devices from broadcasting through the materials they built their hulls with. Speculation did not help it, however. It had tried a new approach this time. It had employed a massive number of probes to find them.

A number of which were discovered and destroyed. Causing it to lose its fix on them, but it was enough to get ahead of their fleet. It then positioned ships in the most likely vectors, and warp disruptor nets to catch them. Its primary goal was to disable a few ships and get aboard. It desperately needed more information on species 11247, and the only way to get it was to capture a ship. Hopefully, it would learn a crippling weakness that would tip the tides of this war in its favor. It planned to make an attempt during this battle, but its own probability assessment indicated it was more likely to get wreckage. Even wreckage would prove useful to it though. Assuming it could move fast enough to collect its spoils before their reinforcements arrived. It knew there was another fleet in the area, and knew they would move in quickly. There was always another fleet in the area.

As for why it did not think it would get an intact ship. It had made several attempts before. It had learned a few things. The biggest hurdle was 11247 was quick to self-destruct, likely a hard-coded autodestruct system. Then there was the fact that they were natural hackers and their troops deadly. The last time it had assaulted a warship, it had lost nearly 20,000 naval combat drones, and the ship ultimately self-destructed. The resulting detonation was so powerful that it lost both cruisers and the battleship that were sent to secure the vessel. There was nothing to salvage in the wreckage. It never had a chance to capture any of the escape craft that launched from that warship. As not long after that, their response fleets arrived.

At the moment one of its ships had succeeded in knocking out the main drives of a cruiser. It diverted two ships to go after the carrier it was protecting and ordered a dreadnought to move in. Suddenly, it detected an incoming hyperwarp signature before those orders could be executed. It focused a few sensors on the forming conduit and noted the signature. The signature matched that of species 11247, and it was quite close to one of its dreadnoughts. It ordered the dreadnought to reposition. It never had an opportunity to engage one of their ships as it emerged from a conduit before. The collective knew from experience that ships were vulnerable as they emerged. Hyperwarp took massive amounts of energy from the reactors to sustain, preventing ships from charging weapons or powering the shields. It had no reason to assume species 11247 was any different. Especially given that they seemed to be behind the Collective in hyperwarp technology, even if they did have a few unusual applications for it.

Moments later a single ship emerged from the conduit. Specifically a heavy cruiser, the largest class of direct combat vessel it had so far engaged. Its dreadnought immediately opened fire. Scoring multiple direct hits with its primary Metaphase disruptors. Against all probability, it weathered the barrage with minimal damage. Then it returned fire, its weapons proving stronger than expected. Vibrant purple beams slammed into its dreadnought’s shields one after another. The shields were draining quickly, the Collective began evasive maneuvers while reconfiguring the shields to better absorb the high energy particle beams.

At the same moment, it scanned the new cruiser. What it revealed would have been shocking if it was capable of that emotion. Its sensor scan told it a few interesting things. The armor had been upgraded with a neutronium lattice. 11247 had never used neutronium before. It could only conclude that they had somehow managed to adapt what they had learned from that research facility they hit a few months back to their technology. It had no idea how they had upgraded the weapons though. That adaptation was worrying in its own way, their hulls were already tough enough to penetrate. Now it had to deal with neutronium reinforced hulls from them. Perhaps it was time that it developed a new more powerful weapon, something metaphase, but ...

Kirk felt the ship shudder as it came out of the conduit. Already enemy fire was raking over her hull. She was aware that exiting hyperwarp so close to the battle was risky, but unlike their Cylovan counterparts, they were not vulnerable on exit from a conduit. While their power generation was inferior, they made up for it with superior power storage techniques. The drives drew all their power from the capacitors, and this freed up power to keep critical systems online. They were also able to draw all the energy they needed to maintain the conduit while traveling through the energy absorbers in their hull plating. It was why the armor was actually somewhat overcharged on exit from a conduit just like after dropping to sublight speed from warp speed. The conduits after all were tunnels through hyperspace, and at those depths, there was a massive amount of energy available. However, like their counterparts, they could not raise shields while in a conduit. As such on exit, her armor was absorbing the full brunt of their weapons.

She glanced at the indicators and watched the AIF was draining rapidly. Faster than during the shakedown tests so far. Making this a real test of the generators. After a moment, an officer reported that they had a fix on the ship firing on them. She shouted orders to return fire and glanced back to the indicators holding her breath. Still staring at the indicators, she issued orders for evasive maneuvers to the helmsman.

The shields came up just as the AIF dropped below sixty percent, and with them up the armor started to absorb the blasts better. She felt a bit of relief with that, as she did not want to test the hull without the strength boosting benefits of the AIF. Sure even without it, the new plating was a lot tougher than Titan II plating, but that did not mean she wanted to test how well it held up under fire. Especially on the day after she got her command. Well technically the same day, but midnight wasn’t far off. Now with the shields up though, incoming beams were weakened by a quarter, and that helped significantly. Already the armor integrity field was regenerating faster than it was being taxed.

Then she noted a fluctuation in the port shields of the dreadnought they were engaging. “New course, one six zero mark two four. Divert all available power to the weapons.”

The crew scrambled to carry out her commands, and the ship changed course. The Collective ship responded by rotating her facing. Attempting to keep her port shields out of her arc of fire. It worked for a few moments, but then her fore shields started to fluctuate. The heavy bombardment starting to strain them. Taking advantage of it she gave the order to fire torpedoes.

A volley of blue bolts sailed across the void, and slammed into the forward shields. The first two were photons that failed to penetrate. The resulting detonation was just enough to overload the forward shields of the dreadnought. Allowing twenty AMF torpedoes and two hundred photons to slam into the hull in the brief moment before the shields compensated for the failed emitters. A number of brilliant detonations occurred along the outer hull, and then a few more detonated against the shields. Some torpedoes even penetrated after the shields came back up to explode against the hull.

When the dust cleared it was evident that a few had even penetrated the armor, but the ship was far from dead. Her forward shields however were critically weakened. The follow up particle barrage brought them down, and several high energy particle streams lanced through the hull. She had known her weapons were enhanced, but this really showed how the extra power had improved the weapons. Within seconds the beams had cut deep through the armor. A few strikes from her main batteries even punched out the other side of the hull. For good measure she had a few torpedoes fired into the hull. They penetrated a breach in the armor, and sailed deep into the ship before they detonated with enough force to rip the dreadnought apart. One down, four more to go.

The other four were already on an intercept course for her ship. The one having abandoned its attack on the carrier, which had sustained heavy damage during the brief minutes she had been engaged with the first. The carrier was venting atmosphere from a number of hull breaches along her port side, and had lost power. Kirk knew the captain though, and had a feeling she would get things under control quickly enough, and her one escort while dead in the water was fine. That cruiser had launched a number of shuttles to the carrier along with a fighter escort. She had no doubt that it was a team of techs to help restore power.

That ship had already reported that they would be able to restart their drive in about seven minutes. The carrier might take a little longer. They had to repair their damaged power systems after all. In the meantime, she had four dreadnoughts to deal with. Dreadnoughts that still had full shields and had sustained minimal damage. The real battle was about to begin.