Chapter 54: Liberation of Karazak, Part 1

My four flotillas jumped into the Karazak system in an impressive display of astro-navigation. Getting separate forces through different routes, but having them all arrive at the same place at very nearly the exact same time was a challenge. And it was a mark of how well my ships were designed, how good their computers were, and how well my people were trained that they managed it.

As the sensors recalibrated after exiting hyperspace, my sprite assistant Jeeves quickly updated me on the situation in the Krazak system in a high speed burst of data. I was met with both good and bad news. Good news? About ninety percent of the estimated total of Karazak forces were present. Bad news? We’d expected at most sixty percent to be in-system; the chance of some escaping, or of their causing casualties to my forces, was thus much higher.

All in all there were about thirty-six hundred enemy ships in the system. Most were forty to a hundred meters, small tramp freighters and transports. About five hundred were in the hundred to two hundred meter range, more significant transports and raiders capable of taking and enslaving larger settlements, sizable civilian ships or stations with populations in the low thousands. There were a hundred ships in excess of two hundred meters, relatively massive transports or heavy raiders. Two of these were Carrack-class light cruisers, or in my GSD’s designation heavy frigates. As their flagship there was a single Vainglorious class cruiser, a somewhat dated design from Rendili StarDrive that was nonetheless about twice as long and six times as massive as any of my frigates.

The enemy ships’ sizes were somewhat misleading for a comparison of force. Few were dedicated commerce raiders, designed for their mission of slaving and piracy, while even fewer were warships which sacrificed storage for more armor, weapons, and other combat equipment. The enemy were mostly retrofits of previously stolen civilian ships, and often not very good ones at that.

It’s sort of like the difference between a technical, a pickup truck with a light machinegun mounted on the back, and a properly designed armored car. They both might even mount the same gun, but the armored car is properly bulletproofed, and resistance to things like mines is taken into account. Both can easily fuck up someone in a normal car, but the armored car tends to beat the technical. Compared to them though, we’d shown up with the equivalent of tanks.

Further, what a lot of people don’t realize about ships is that the maintenance is a bitch. People think about ships as sort of like a gun, or a car. In other words, that everything generally works, and if it doesn’t it’s an easy fix and probably non-vital.

Not true (and, for the record, even relatively simple guns and cars need some tender loving care).

A ship is more like a flying city. Think about your nearest city. Power outages, pot-holes, miss-timed traffic lights, poorly thought-out roads, sewage issue, plumbing issues. All these and more. And these small issues, like pot-holes, are the equivalent in a ship to miscalibrated guns (ie, they won’t hit), or not being able to fire at all. At the end of the day, a quality crew is the sort of thing you notice by how everything just works.

Hell, back on Earth the US Navy was fairly famous for having war-games with allies where the allied ships needed to be towed back to their ports, or had all weapon systems fail, or any other fuck-up imaginable. And if you think it’s hard to keep a deep-water fleet functional, imagine doing so with a space fleet. Those ships are in an environment (or, being space, lack of an environment) which will kill you if you fuck up badly enough. The usual pirate crews of surly slaves, wash-out rejects who couldn’t manage a living in a decent shipping outfit, antiquated droids (themselves often poorly maintained) and the occasional psycho didn’t exactly make for the best maintenance crews.

Suffice to say, I’d have been surprised if they were functioning, as a whole, at sixty percent of their theoretical combat effectiveness.

Furthermore, many of these ships traveled through general Republic spaces on their way to enslave, loot and pillage. Which meant they had to keep to civilian-legal armament levels. And not “civilian-legal” like my ships, which flew under sectorial authority and with the Trade Federation’s warrant for armed merchantmen which I’d seized. No, they were “general public” armed civilian ships. Granted, typically at the absolute maximum for that category, but still. And many hadn’t been updated yet after the laws on civilian armament got somewhat laxer the year before.

Come to think of it, that may have been why they were in the Karazak system in the first place, to upgrade.

With three of my flotillas doing their best to block the exits, that left me with a single flotilla of sixteen frigate detachments and my own frigate group to engage their forces.

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After we entered the system, the slavers reacted with chaos. Which was great. A decent number tried to run our blockades, and got wiped out by my ships as a result. My standard fighter, the Hyper-Capable Light Strikecraft (HCLS), could pull forty-five hundred g’s, so the enemy had little chance of getting away. With an eight-round concussion missile launcher, a four-round proton torpedo launcher, a twin light laser cannon turret, and a nose-mounted light ion cannon, each one was more than a match against the more lightly armed slave ships.

My orders were to, wherever possible, disable the slavers’ ships. I didn’t want to kill hostages unnecessarily. That said, if it was between escape and destruction, I wanted those ships dead. So when my light strikecraft proved insufficient, patrol boats, corvettes, and rarely even frigates would chase down the slavers who were trying to escape and disable them with ion cannons or precise laser strikes to the engines.

As my command group were watching the evolving battle, I got a private IM through my neural interface rather than over the command channel.

Jon: It’s amazing. Really, quite the mind-fuck.

Jon, being one of my oldest friends and chief lieutenants, was much more enhanced than most of my people, even my fully magical command staff. And I was enhanced even more than he was. When we wanted to, we could process faster; it gave us the time to multitask, enough to have this sort of conversation mid-battle at least. Not that we needed to pay too much attention to that anyways.

Odysseus: How do you mean?

Jon: It’s just that any one of the slavers’ ships could have taken Westeros. Hell, they could have taken the whole damned planet. Even one of the fighters would be enough to make someone a great lord, a king even if they could survive the assassins. But now, here, they’re just nuisances, no better or more dangerous than rabbits running from your hounds.

Odysseus: I know. Isn’t it wonderful 😊

Jon: Yes. But so strange, too.

Odysseus: Jon, I think you’ve just had a moment of perspective.

I could see from his glare and flash of amused annoyance that he knew I was teasing him. He pretended to fully focus on the battle-map projection as I smirked.

The slavers were concentrating their forces, warned by the fates of those who had first attempted to flee past the hyper-space distortion envelope my fleet was generating. They still had the bulk of their combat power available.

My flotilla, designated for the main combat, accelerated towards their fleet as it was still shaking itself into order. They were launching their own strike craft, a motley collection of some ten thousand fighters, haphazardly collected around their ships.

Tactical computers designated the most efficient target selection. I wished I could have kept to maximum range, whittling down their forces with laser fire as their own missed due to my higher acceleration and thus ability to dodge. But ion-cannons were much shorter ranged, and they were only way to avoid tens of thousands of dead slaves.

My own frigate, the Homer, was assigned to take on their cruiser. As the only fully magical frigate in the fleet, mine was the only ship that could match the much more massive enemy with a guarantee of avoiding friendly casualties, and we carried enhanced weapons too.

Soon, the battle-map was an absolute mess. Sixteen thousand of my fighters were engaging ten thousand of the enemy ones. My sixty four frigates matched off against the heaviest armed enemy ships, the two hundred and fifty six corvettes took on those which my frigates couldn’t engage, while a darting swarm of a thousand patrol-boats swooped in and rapidly neutralized the shoals of smaller pirate vessels.

It all happened so damned quickly. My fleet could accelerate at two thousand g’s, still have a thousand g’s to spare for dodging, and that was just my frigates which were still slower than the escorts. After a few minutes of acceleration, it meant that the time to actually fire on the enemy ships in that initial pass was vanishingly brief. But like a jouster landing his lance in that moment when he passed his enemy, we made it count.

We went underneath the enemy ships (oriented by the system’s solar plane). We used the chance to fire off a blistering mass of ion-cannons. But that was almost an afterthought compared to the massive swarm of missiles with ionic warheads that we launched.

The missiles struck like a tsunami hitting a fishing fleet. After that first pass, the vast majority of the enemy’s smaller craft were disabled, their swarm of ten thousand fighters destroyed. About two thirds of their corvette-sized fleet was down, shields broken, engines non-functional, control systems fried by the ion charges, as were forty percent of the frigate and larger sized ships. Those ships which had more civilian origins and less extensive defensive modifications fare particularly poorly. Even those ships which survived the initial onslaught only did so barely. They were all damaged if not crippled, massive banks of weapons unable to aim or charge, non-functional shield emitters leaving massive gaping holes where we could strike with impunity.

My fleet shed velocity, coming back around for another run while the few ships of the enemy fleet that still had propulsion broke and scattered. The Gangari flotilla which was blocking the closest escape direction sent half its ships out to intercept. Though it was hardly needed, it helped to strike home the message that the enemy was beaten, that their only chance for survival was surrender.

“Defensive flotillas are to move to stage two,” I ordered.

Stage two was for after their main naval threat was reduced or contained. It included pacification and landings on the system’s peripheral space stations, mining outposts and the like as well as disabled ships. Half of the each of the three flotillas broke formation and began to scan over the asteroids with a fine toothed comb to make sure no hidden redoubt was missed. Meanwhile troops prepared to land everywhere the slavers were located.

My flotilla was back in range. This time, we closed slower, concentrating our firepower and one-by-one reducing the still-functioning enemy ships to floating tombs with all their electronics knocked out.

My own ship was fairly clearly the flagship, broadcasting a much greater concentration of messages to my other ships. The enemy was concentrating fire on me, hoping to take me down and cause an opening, but to no avail. My ship’s pilots not only operated in a perfect gestalt of mind and machine, but were also enhanced with precognition, as were the point-defense droid-minds. We were hardly hit at all. When we were, my magical projectile defense shields, anchored to a living vessel three hundred meters long, weathered the attacks with ease. It would have taken orders of magnitude more firepower to stress my ship’s defenses than that damaged, aged slaver cruiser had.

Moments later, the Homer’s ion cannons, heavily enhanced with magic, spoke out and the slavers’ Vainglorious cruiser finally fell silent.

It was time for some fun.

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I did what I could to make my marines the best troops available. When they joined up, they got genetic enhancements, chemical treatments, even implants, all as necessary and possible to improve their performance. They could hear and see better, react faster, think more clearly even in the most chaotic environments. They could out-perform Olympic athletes in endurance and strength, and could keep fighting even with an arm blown off. Improved coagulants and other modifications improved survivability, so unlike old-school berserkers they even had good odds of surviving the experience.

They were equipped with a variety of armor and weapons enabling them to meet any challenge. Typical marine infantry units were in a mix of General Infantry Powered Armor (GIPA), and Support Weapon Armor – Quadruped (SWAQ). A GIPA included a third of a ton of armor, carefully sloped, laminated and padded to maximize survivability, and all using magically-processed materials. A SWAQ had over a half ton of armor on its bulky, intimidating, beast-like frame. Both came with deflector shields, and could move at forty three kilometers an hour (26mph) pretty much indefinitely, with a powered jump of up to thirty meters, or over seven meters vertically. In short bursts, they could triple that speed.

A GIPA could carry what would typically be a crew served weapon, or one mounted on a light vehicle, as well as two small shoulder mounts that could each carry a grenade launcher, several small rockets, or a single missile. The SWAQs had a modular weapon mount capable of mounting a support weapon (eg, a light cannon, or missile pod), as well as two independent light anti-personnel turrets. Both came with vibro-claws to get into difficult to reach places, or engage at melee. Enhanced sensors interacted with neural interfaces and thus the marines; they didn’t just wear the armor, they were the armor, and had full access to all its computational power, combat programming, and other enhancements.

They had extensive training and hypno-implanting. Then they went through months of simulated combat scenarios.

By the end of all that, they were crazily lethal, capable of striding across battlefields like death-dealing gods, slaughtering any ground or ship-security force that any other nation or PMC fielded. Transported by APCs, backed by armor and fast-moving assault vehicles, they were man-for-man the single most lethal force available. Of course, a lot of that was because a single one of my marines cost about as much as an old Trade Federation tank platoon.

The best of the best qualified to be Paragon templates. Similar to my original Paragons, who were largely based on Barristan the Bold and then magically enhanced to serve as my praetorian bodyguards, I had expanded my Paragon units to include all the specialties needed to fully staff my personal frigate and its escorts: praetorian bodyguards, pilot aces, various sailors and naval specialists, marines, etc. The Paragon Marines (which still included some Barristan-templates for CQC specialists) were the absolute best marines that I could manage. Massively enhanced physiques, flesh tougher than durasteel, capable of regenerating from most any damage, precognitive, magically shielded in a myriad of ways and more, going all out they were basically unstoppable short of orbital fire.

Then I stuck them in similarly improved armor, and equipped them with improved weaponry.

I had needed to figure out a limiter so that they didn’t get complacent with easy victory.

And I took a four-thousand strong regiment of them with me to clear the slavers’ Vainglorious cruiser.