-Colos is an effing moron,- Captain Tiffany Rantha /huffed, and Anatolia just /sent a twinkle of a :rollseyes: back.

Happily, Anatolia also had the other mental gifts of a Rantha, in the form of high mental Stats, enhanced emotional understanding, and finely refined instincts. So, she had long perused the personality profiles of the Fleet commanders, provided by certain nameless shadowy parties, made her assessments, and filtered them past sisters really, really good at mucking with people’s heads. She had then altered her plans to account for the fact that Admiral Colos was an authoritarian gloryhound happy to see the whole Fleet pounded to hamburger and scrap if it meant he could live to get away with an awesome battle report of doing all he could.

As a result, there’d been some battle group requests and assignments, and the somewhat more heroic and admiring of the Fleet captains, who’d been open to working with this crazy Coronal, had Marked gunners and Signals people feeding in a very current and seconds-more accurate positioning and targeting feed than the other ships in the fleet.

Seconds meant a lot in space combat. It allowed convergences of fire, dodging enemy fire, coordinated assaults and withdrawals, more accurate positioning, and all the like.

The enemy was trying to do the same, what with the mass telepathy from those huge ships, but the ether was alive with just as much psionic disruption as gravity wells and EMP distortions, and their coms weren’t any faster or surer than standard Fleet systems as a result. The Markspace feeding data back and forth was giving them an edge Anatolia could exploit, and so when the mysterious master tactician was giving out orders, the captains who paid attention and followed them were having great success on both ends.

That didn’t help the rest of the battlefield, which had turned into a messy, chaotic slugfest of alien ships and raging imperial guns, with all the soup of sensor feeds and psychic static turning space into a real killzone.

Some ships were working well together, some were arrogantly taking the lead for kills and credits, and some were getting pounded and battered and beat to shit by selfless, obedient bioships without egos perfectly happy to sacrifice themselves to wipe their attackers, and coordinate to do just that.

There were bioships burning in nuclear fire, and wrecked metal hulks tumbling and disintegrating through space, blasted by arcs of biolightning and plasma vomit, pummeled by spore cannons, and torn apart from within by xenosym raiders they hadn’t been able to repulse. Some were unlucky enough to come to grips with a ship and had actually been crushed and mangled by massive tentacles, or even chewed on while boarding spikes directly injected limitless numbers of xenos into the ship.

---

Sun Shot breacher rounds slammed into the Shark-class midsize bioship in front of her, and Tiffany pulled out, point defenses dealing with the volley of boarding spores while the Saber’s shields counter-resonated the field of bio-lightning thrown in front of them, shattered the electrokinetic grip on it, and turned it into normal free electrons which the magnetic ramscoops sucked in greedily and applied towards the plasma cannons with cheery goodwill.

As she veered off, the converging lasers and plasma cannon rounds from the four Fleet ships trailing her punched through the hole she’d made and into the ship beyond with split-second timing that should not have worked in such a battle scene. The lasers opened up the holes, the plasma rounds went within and detonated with fourth state of matter fun, and another bioship convulsed in its death throes.

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Anatolia’s alert that the remnants of the first Swarm were swooping in to flank the Fleet forces was not welcome news, and Tiffany and her squadron were turning even before it was relayed through the Fleet, since the approach vector clearly indicated those ships were coming this way. The Reserve Fleet was coming in behind them, but would certainly not be able to intercept for at least twenty minutes, restrictions to their Jamming speed and all.

Obviously the Swarm-mind had registered the unusual performance of her and her short squadron. It hadn’t been able to get any performance data about exactly how she was killing stuff, as the targets were dying rather messily and quickly, but it was still pretty clear that it wasn’t slowing her down much, and her damage output was considerably higher than her damage taken, especially for the size of her vessel.

Torpedoes were being launched repeatedly and in force as the trailing Widow’s Bite tracked the converging enemy fleet closely, keeping their vector locked on and repeated computations of the erratic gravity wells current. Where the two converged together is where the incoming bioships would appear, and that location was where the torpedoes were heading.

They hadn’t learned the lesson about coming out of warp and stuff being there to greet them, or perhaps just the slaughter of that ground station wiping them out was fresh in their minds. Here, out past the orbit of Janus II and only a few light-minutes from III, there weren’t any floating asteroids, meteors, comets, or debris to hide such nasty surprises behind, and surely the forces concerned wouldn’t be able to pay too much attention to an attack coming in from a new vector.

Ten different ships, including those engaged with other bioships actively, still managed to contribute a few torpedoes to the cause. Only the extra four in Tiffany’s squadron were able to deploy to greet them, building up power and charging guns for that first initial hit which had to save them all.

Tiffany slid into medium-range and turned broadside, the crew locked in Focus, Nimbus effects flaring up and ready on all the guns as capacitors screamed and were ready to be loosed.

Blurs of ships at Jamming speed flashed in, hit the gravity well, and decelerated to standard kinetics.

Fifty torpedoes flashed past the Bared Saber in fiery streaks, and her cannons blazed like stars, one after another in series in under three seconds. The breacher rounds slammed into the forward psychokinetic fields of a dozen vessels and ripped them open to greet the incoming torpedoes.

The First Swarm ran head-on into fusion eruptions in the void, repeated two and three times, and psychic death roars rippled through the ether as secondary explosions lit off to accompany the bombardment.

Tiffany heard the engineers shifting the Nimbus effects to the conductors and heat dumps, could feel the massive venting of the overheated cannons taking place as she kicked in the fusion drive and moved hard laterally to the incoming bioships, spinning over to present her other side and the rail guns requiring a lot less power there, also with preloaded breacher rounds ready to go.

Three bioships were in pursuit of her as the missiles and their psi-disrupting loads splattered cerulean glory over their forward shields and hulls. Perhaps the cerevores riding them slapped their knurly false-brain bodies as the waiting guns of the ready squadron filled the glowy cloud in front of them with much brighter and more intense light, letting them know that oops, probably wasn’t the best idea to grab the easy prey with cooling guns.

One did manage to range ahead of the rest, gravitic manipulation and plasma waste spewing out wildly behind its flaming wounded body as it swept down on the Saber, great arcs of neobone extending out to pincer and ram the retreating ship.

Tiffany calmly spun her ship, a thousand feet of steel abandoning pure acceleration as it spun on its long axis, presenting its long, high, and narrow prow to the incoming enemy.

Power built in the drive core as Tiffany saw it swooping in on her, those claws poised wide to clutch, tear, and start the boarding of xenos onto her ship.

She rolled her eyes, shook her head of pink hair, and kicked on full drive...to brake them.

With a terrible and ominous crackling, the prow of the Saber lit up with a Sun Strike of its own, while their forward momentum dropped precipitously. Distance narrowed between them and their pursuer shockingly fast, and the bioship didn’t have time to adjust its tactics as it slammed right into the middle of that reality-rending prow.

The Saber was still moving ‘backwards’, but much slower than the bioship, and getting slower by the second at full burn. The Saber bucked and kicked as it plowed through the bioship thrice its size, past the pincers-lock before they could close, mountains of flesh and fluids streaming past them and then burning in the starfire heat of their fusion drive.

The plasma furnaces of its guts blew up around and behind them, and the Saber rocked and protested the treatment as it blew out the far end of the bioship in a fiery swathe that extended for hundreds of miles behind it as the bioship split fully open and vented hungry nuclear flames into the void.

The Saber had lost a good chunk of his forward momentum, but he was already turning. Organic goo alternately froze and was blasted off the hull, and the techs were crashing dozens of fried Vakker circuit boards and slamming new ones in place in blurs of frantic motion at the psychic blow-through.

The Hymnal, Paen, Ode, and Overture rapidly came in to support, putting a few finishing beams into the gutted bioship, and covering against the slow circling of the remaining bioships who seemed to be hesitant about closing in and coming to grips with them.

The Bared Saber spun again, lined itself up, and adjusted course as it came around, picking up speed nicely. The Song Squadron lined up with active rotation, vectors constantly adjusting and turning to give the bioships something to think about, shifting course minutely towards one ship, then another as courses changed, an electric and organic dance of who could concentrate and converge on who.

The Reserve Fleet came out of Jamming at precisely the wrong time, too far out of alignment and in the middle of the bioships maneuvering for position. Layered volleys came down in concentrated volleys less than five seconds after coming out of Jamming, and extreme long-range fire that should have been absolutely useless against bioships in the middle of multiple maneuvers crashed home with layered force enough to overwhelm their shields and rupture their hulls catastrophically.

The six bioships remaining naturally turned to scatter and draw off their attackers, splinter their forces, and buy time, while venting everything they could in short order to keep them back.

The Saber and the Song Squadron politely swooped in on one flank to let them know that wasn’t going to be working too awful well. Two of the ships were pincered and pounded to death quickly, and the Reserve Fleet was fully capable of dealing with the additional four.

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The Glory to Dawn was about to die.

Massive tentacles were wrapped around her, the creaking protest of her hull traveling the length of the ship. The bulk of the swollen enemy carrier was right up against her guns, and massive discharges of biolightning were flaring through the hull, frying circuits and playing havoc with communications.

Admiral Colos stared in hatred at the many, many bulbous eyes of the thing latched onto his ship. Postules in its hide were opening, boarding capillaries were extending forth like lampreys, ready to bite onto his ship and disgorge a ravening horde into its decks and galleries. He grimly prepared to order the self-destruct, although he didn’t know if the linked explosions would all be going off, sparing his crew from a horrid end and rebirth as a xenosym slave.

“Glory to Dawn, this is the Widow’s Bite. Prepare your pressor beams to repel the enemy. Tentacles will be severed in ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven...” came a smooth and unconcerned woman’s voice over the coms.

“Prepare port pressors!” Admiral Colos howled into the coms, and could only pray the command was heard. They were non-vital arrays and hadn’t been targeted by the enemy, they might have just survived.

“One.” A whisper passed through the hulls, a creaking that stopped halfway in confusion.