She didn’t have much time to make a decision with which ship to aide. They were both under attack, and she had to hope other ships would be able to aid the Columbia. As her ship was closer to the Enterprise and therefore she was best able to defend the Enterprise at this moment. Giving the order to set course at maximum speed.

As soon as they were in weapon’s range, she had them open fire on the nearest dreadnought. Just as the one furthest from her position exploded from a penetrating torpedo hit fired from launchers on the Enterprise. Blue-green plasma streams lept from her hull and slammed into the rear of the dreadnought. Her aft shields flared absorbing a significant chunk of the beam. The remainder of the beam struck the aft plating scoring it, but doing relatively little damage.

Her second hit did a little more, as it struck a shield emitter. The damaged emitter resulted in a very slight drop in shield strength. They weren’t close enough to do more than sting than massive warship, but those hits had gotten her attention. The warship came about and stopped firing on the Enterprise providing her a little more relief from the barrage. Her guns quickly locked onto her cruisers and opened fire. Not the full battery, but unlike the smaller ships in the Delkari fleet the dreadnoughts mounted long-range guns in the form of Coherent Particle Beam Cannons. In other words, particle lasers. The orange-red particle streams hit her shields and were absorbed with little effect.

Her shields weren’t all that special, but they made up for it with sheer available power. Now that her power generation was freed up she had diverted a good chunk to the shields. This gave her some extra protection, especially against the antimatter guns her opponents favored. Those were good against armor, but they suffered against even half-decent shields. Not to mention they had terrible range. Likely why their bigger ships carried batteries of particle lasers to supplement their antimatter cannon batteries.

At this range, they could shoot at each other all day and not sink the other. Her beams were penetrating the dreadnought’s shields, but they were losing too much power doing it. As such they couldn’t also penetrate the armor. Glancing to the helm, she ordered the close the distance and then gave tactical an order to load the forward tubes. Her officers quickly carried out the orders.

As the ship closed they concentrated their forward fire, at a single point. Then they fired torpedoes. Blue bolts of energy streaked across the void and impacted the dreadnoughts shields at the point of impact. The ever-widening disruption allowed the entire volley to slip through at that point, and slam into the thick armor amidships. The resulting detonations tore apart its side armor. The shields flickered and failed. Plasma streams ripped through the hull, and something vital must have been hit. In an instant, the entire warship went up in a massive flash killing the entire crew with all hands aboard, and more importantly, drawing the attention of the remaining four dreadnoughts attacking the Enterprise. One of them was a bit busy dodging torpedoes, so the other three came about to close the distance on her approaching cruiser.

All three focused their guns on her ship. The shields flared as streams of particle fire, impacted the energy barrier. Fortunately, the shields continued to hold, and she ordered evasive maneuvers. Against three dreadnoughts the shields wouldn’t hold that long. Then suddenly one of the few battleships in the fleet fired. It was one of the older Spectre class battleships, and despite its age, it was one of the biggest warships in the Alliance fleet. The Alliance had a few dreadnoughts, but they didn’t really build many of them. In the entirety of the fleet, there were only about fifty dreadnoughts. Designed mainly to act as defenders for their important cityships, and industrial vessels. The Spectre class was the oldest battleship design in the fleet. First designed and constructed in 912 SDE the ships proved very effective for the fleet. Many of the were still in service today mostly employed as raiders. The Spectre class like many ship designs in the fleet lacked shield generators and instead relied on her heavy armor, and a cloaking device. She is also very fast for a battleship and can outrun some light cruiser designs. The Spectre was intended to fight primarily while cloaked, and her speed came about as a design requirement. The Spectre was actually designed to spearhead raiding missions on heavily fortified worlds. This meant a fast ship with the speed and stealth to get in and out before an effective response could be mounted. She also needed the firepower to punch through heavy defenses, and protection to withstand a beating if she needed it. The result of these design requirements was the very first battleship class to be employed by the Alliance. As for why the ship didn’t have shields, the answer was simple. There just wasn’t space for both the high yield beam cannons and shield generators. Shields were not added, and the space used for systems needed to support high-yield PPBs.

She watched the Spectre fire her main guns, and they struck the dreadnought dodging torpedoes amidships from below. The blue-green stream of plasma ripped right through the ventral plating it ripped out of the ship’s dorsal plating. The shields at that range were punched through like paper and did nothing to stop the powerful battleship grade PPBs. The resultant damage was quite severe, and the ship lost power for a couple of vital seconds. Those seconds proved critical as moments later a volley of heavy torpedoes caught up with the warship. Without power, the torpedoes hit her aft section without interference and detonated with lethal force. The entire aft section disintegrated during the resulting explosion while the forward sections past the hit from the battleship went tumbling off into space. Fortunately in a direction where it was unlikely to hit anything.

Those guns may have been old, but they were impressive. Moments later the ship began to accelerate as her engines activated. Now that she had revealed that she had power to weapons, she needed to move. The dreadnoughts ignored her, but a new battleship had just arrived. The ship opened fire on the Spectre class battleship. Within moments a duel between battleships was underway, but she didn’t have the time to focus on it. Instead, she focused on dealing with the three remaining dreadnoughts. One of them was just now entering knife range, and sure enough, she began firing her antimatter cannons. With the shields up they didn’t do much, but they were taxing them.

Naturally, they returned fire with a full force barrage of PPB fire. Vibrant streams of plasma ripped across space, and tore into the side of the attacking dreadnought, just as she unleashed a fierce volley of antimatter torpedoes. Every tube on the dreadnought was launching the high yield antimatter weapons. One of the torpedoes was hit as she was leaving the tube, and detonated. The high energy detonation rocked the mighty warship but dealt only minor damage to her hull. At this range, her shields held but only for a few moments. Then beams began to punch through the shields and plating. Punching holes through the hull, and explosively decompressing entire sections. Suddenly a tube exploded after a beam punched through the hull, less than a meter from the tube. Plating blew outward, and a large hole opened in the hull. One of the shield generators must have been damaged from the blast, as suddenly the shields failed completely.

Fortunately for her, another ship came between her, and the firing cruiser. Who was by this point also busy dodging torpedoes. Her energy webs had stopped a number of hits, but a few had also struck the shields. Draining them rather significantly with each hit. Melia knew not to count on the rather unremarkable shields she carried, but she wasn’t going to let a wound warship limp away.

Avoiding another volley of torpedoes, she ordered her ship to head straight for the two dreadnoughts. The one was already firing on her, but her commander was wisely not unloading his torpedoes on her. At this range that was as likely to backfire as to help. While the wounded one was trying to gain distance. With a burst of speed, her cruiser slipped under the dreadnought blocking her line of fire, and then she fired several torpedoes from the forward tubes at the dreadnought.

The blue bolts tore into her aft section and exploded with deadly force. Sympathetic detonations tore the limping ship apart, and the other ship opened up on her with everything it had. The cruiser rocked violently as the shields finally buckled, and bolts tore into the damaged plating. They returned fire with equally devastating impacts. At this range, their weapons were doing massive damage to the other, and defenses didn’t mean much. Ultimately her armor proved to be of a tougher make, shrugging off more hits, and giving her the time to score a fatal blow. One beam managed to punch through the dreadnought armor and cut a swath through the engineering deck. Doing massive damage to her power systems. The reactor containment systems failed, and antimatter flooded the surrounding deck. In an impressive fireball, the entire ship went up. They were so close that her dorsal plating was cooked a little by the blast, and the ship rocked, but she had no time to relax, as the last dreadnought dumped every torpedo she had in her tubes.

She immediately ordered evasive maneuvers and ordered tactical to return fire with the aft tubes. The blue bolts steamed from the launchers, as violet ones flew across the void tracking her cruiser. In the distance, an explosion marked the Spectre’s victory over her opponent. She spared a glance at the heavier allied warship and noted that she looked relatively unscathed. Unlike her own ship, that likely resembled swiss cheese by this point. Her indicators said the armor was still holding, but it was under fifty percent. The shields were cycling, and that last exchange had depleted the PPB capacitors to under twenty percent. The guns would need some time to fully recharge. Thankfully not as long as the first time now that full power was available for the defense systems.

Most of the Delkari torpedoes flew wide of her hull, but a few were stopped by the energy webs, and they came about. This time unloading their forward tubes on the dreadnought. At the same moment, her last volley was slamming into their shields. Bright flashes signaled the impacts on the shields. A few penetrated the powerful shielding and tore into the armored hull. Plating melted, and the hull ruptured with several of the impacts. The ship, however, withstood the blows. She had expected it to withstand the impacts. These Delkari ships while weaker than comparable Alliance designs were still quite tough and competitive. The Alliance had to chief advantages that had played out to her favor here. The first was superior construction techniques. As a result, most Alliance ships were better built, and this meant they were far more resilient under fire than a comparable Delkari model. The other was superior power systems. She simply had more energy available at any given moment, and her systems used it more efficiently than Delkari equivalents. The Delkari just had more ships.

An officer reported that another battlegroup had warped in, but they were too far away for her to worry about. Fortunately, they were also not near either cityship, and the few ships in the vicinity had already brought some defense systems online. Namely their torpedoes and hull plating. The nearby Spectre Battleship was not moving to aid her, but to intercept a second dreadnought group closing on the Enterprise. Not counting on further aid, she ordered a follow up on the new torpedo volley with the main guns.

Her beams scored several hits amidships dealing moderate damage, and the dreadnought returned fire while also changing course in an attempt to evade her torpedoes. The blue bolts however easily tracked the slower capital ship. Several particle beams scored her hull, doing light damage to the plating. A couple even hit breaches, but the energy was stopped by internal armor.

She didn’t return fire and waited a couple of seconds for her torpedoes to hit. The blue bolts slammed into the ship mostly in the aft quadrant. This time they weren’t so lucky, and the entire vessel was ripped apart in a series of explosions. This gave her a little time to relax and look around. Only to notice the ships protecting the Columbia weren’t doing so well. Apparently, while she was dealing with the ships attacking the Enterprise, nine additional dreadnoughts plus their escorts had joined in on the attack on the Columbia. There were four active battleships, plus heavy torpedo fire from both cityships attacking the group, but the Columbia was taking heavy damage. Her sensors told her that the cityship’s plating was failing, and it had already been breached on several decks.

She gave the order to set course for the Columbia. There were fewer attackers here, and the Spectre class Battleship in the area seemed to have the only threating battlegroup under control. Having already disabled or destroyed three capital ships, and sunk twelve of their escorts. More importantly, her comm officer informed her that the Enterprise would have her beam weapons online in two minutes. This was very welcome news, both cityships dwarfed superdreadnoughts in size, and beam weapons grew exponentially more powerful with the size of the ship. More so than kinetic or torpedo weapons did, and this was due to the increase in available power that came with a larger hull, the PPBs on the Enterprise and her sistership the Columbia were powerful enough to vaporize dreadnoughts in a single hit, and SDNs wouldn’t last much longer without sufficient protection. As for where all this power came from, well that would be the massive reactors needed to fuel her engines, and cloaking shields. Unlike other races that had difficulty cloaking a light cruiser, the Alliance were masters of stealth and had no difficulty cloaking the planet-sized ships. Something that was actually their chief defense against attack.

They had made it less than halfway to the Columbia when suddenly a dreadnought rammed itself into the aft section of the massive cityship. The sheer velocity of the capital ship drove it through several decks before it lost containment and exploded. The shockwave ripped apart a massive chunk of the ship and set off numerous secondary explosions. The entire ship collapsed in a matter of seconds as the immense energy it was channeling into hyperspace lost control. The backlash created a spatial anomaly right where the ship was. The anomaly shredded any ship unfortunate enough to be too close to the anomaly. The entire cityship was ripped apart along with several Delkari escorts, and two dreadnoughts. Three Solean cruisers were ripped apart as well, and a battleship was in the area of effect, but she managed to escape but her hull was badly damaged.

Just then a blue box appeared before her telling her that an objective had been failed. Then a new one appeared saying that she had a new primary objective. To defend the Enterprise against the remaining attackers until she could escape. She ordered a minor change in course to intercept ships heading for the Enterprise. On her bridge, the entire mood had changed. While the Columbia wasn’t their city, it had been home to billions of their kind. A mix of sadness and rage filled the room. None had ever dared to sink one of their cityships before, and she knew they couldn’t let this act stand unchallenged.