Admiral Vaslow watched the battle unfold from the enormous holographic display aboard the Tatyana, the flagship of the two Strike Forces. Unlike the similarly gargantuan display that Verloff gazed upon, this one showed significantly more detail. Whereas his fellow Admiral had to keep watch over squadrons, task forces, capital ships and escorts, Vaslow saw the ability to look upon his entire force, down to the tiniest attack craft as a necessity. The display fed massive amounts of data as every singular fighter, bomber, drone and platform was tracked. Scanners hungrily stretched their reaches towards the stars and drank in the reports offered to them by their further off brethren. Wings, squadrons, flights, hunter groups, bomber units, even transport craft with personnel ranging from aggressive boarders to engineers were out there flying towards their targets. Their goals ranged from simple destruction and escort duty to boarding enemy vessels or landing on damaged allied ones to supplement their depleted crew roster with fresh personnel.

His weary, old eyes were still sharp and glittered with excitement as he took in the rapidly evolving battle. Fighters hurled themselves through the debris and whisked past corvettes, bringing relief to the stressed out men and women manning the vessels. The Novican task forces, seeing the rapidly encroaching danger, launched what few attack craft they possessed, only to see them be shot out of the sky by the fast-paced Imperial attack. Pinpricks of light flashed through the void as the well trained pilots proved the superiority of both training and fighter alike. Vaslow's leathery face split open in a gentle smile as he saw the rapid pace with which enemy icons winked out. The Novicans had underestimated the rough speed of his light fighters and had launched their own craft pitifully late. The poor blokes on the other end never had the time to get into proper formation before his own men were upon them like bloodhounds.

While the light Stribog-class fighters were generally seen as an ill-equipped fighter to tangle with capital ships, Vaslow had learned long ago that this weakness could easily be covered by making them work in close conjunction with other craft. Or, if you wanted to rely on their near logic defying speed, their multi-role missile load-out. It was a solid rule for fighter combat that weight, while having no effect on your inertia, defined your acceleration and as such heavier attack craft, such as bombers, gunboats, missile tugs, troop transports and boarding craft had to pick up their speed well before engaging the enemy. Fighters, on the other hand, could play with their acceleration and thrusters, making them difficult to get hit by anything that wasn't another fighter or a dedicated point defence system. The downside of their incredibly agility was that the fast ships simply did not have the load-out to take on even lighter escorts, and had to avoid them at all costs or risk being torn into shreds.

Speed was of the essence. He had known that for ages and while it held up for most space forces it was the main rule in the book and he had written that damned thing half a century ago when he was but a young whippersnapper going up in the ranks. Now he saw the results of decades of diligent study, wargames and constant practise pay off. As soon as the first wave of fighters had either destroyed or chased off the enemy, the second wave came in, only marginally slower than the first. The difference was so minor that it could easily be blamed on a difference in launching time rather than the second wave possessing a different load out. He could only tell the difference because he knew. To an outsider it was all but invisible.

As the Novican destroyers took to the front, screening their capital ships, their point defences spooling up and beginning to unleash deadly barrages of short ranged pulsar fire. Squadrons broke up and rolled away from the incoming fire, engaging the Novican computer systems in a battle of probabilities. Their movements were tracked, databases were plundered and the cannons adjusted their aim and opened up with pre-programmed firing patterns, hoping to catch the fighters in a trap by predicting their flight path. On the other side of the cold, merciless equations were hot blooded fighter pilots, braving G-forces as they pulled aggressive stunts with their craft. Shots whizzed past cockpits, armour plates and engines as the brave men and women bought time for the second wave to arrive.

They opened fire in return, their feeble weapons unable to overwhelm the shields. Light missiles were launched, originally intended for anti-fighter use and while they were nimble and hard to track, the disruptor field on top wasn't strong enough to penetrate the thick screens of a warship. Yet they were fired in large numbers, forcing the automated defences to switch targets as their systems prioritised the unmanned missiles over the living pilots. Many shots flew straight past the fighters, their energy quickly disappearing into the black void and becoming harmless, but some hit home. A singular shot was of no concern, for as feeble as a Stribog's shields were, they still provided the light craft with sufficient protection. Yet a singular shot was a rare occurrence, the rapid-firing pulsar cannons launching thousands of shots per minute. Shields struggled as a pilot desperately tried to pull out of the field of fire, narrowly succeeding but not before his left wing and thruster array were blown clean off, sending him tumbling into the void as a non-threat. Others weren't so lucky and their small craft went up, tiny explosions dotting the emptiness of space.

Then the second wave struck and they opened fire with their Gae Bulg missiles, two contrails streaking away from each fighter towards the destroyer. With the point defences already occupied with the hundreds of fighters, the second wave had an easy time flying in and picking off their targets. The missiles flared to life as they approached their target, their limited thrusters capability letting them dance gracefully between the incoming pulsar rounds. Despite the close range the Novican systems, working far faster than any human could, rapidly classified the incoming missiles as a major threat and the pulsar cannons pivoted in their mounts to engage the new targets. Dozens were shredded by the constant streams of fire. Hundreds went through, disruptor fields flaring to life to smash a tiny, temporary hole in the shields to allow their deadly payload safe passage.

True to their name the missiles slammed into the hull, lightly penetrating it. Turrets, missile tubes, point defences, sensor arrays, all had been painted as targets and all were shredded as the tiny plasma reactors that served both as the drive and the payload of the missile lost containment and violently exploded, blasting superheated shrapnel all over the impact zone. Tiny scars dotted the damaged destroyer as its larger guns swivelled around frantically in a desperate attempt to acquire a target lock. The engines still flared up and their thrusters were still functional, but the ship itself had lost the majority of its sensors and nearly all of its anti-fighter defences. What the shrapnel hadn't outright destroyed or damaged beyond use, had been disconnected from the network by the heat melting the neural circuits. Now the escorts were easy prey for the incoming bombers, who did carry the right payload to make light of shield and hull alike.

The battleships were treated similarly, hundreds of fighters flocking towards them and massacring the meagre mobile defences before a second wave swept over them, dealing less damage than the first but that wasn't needed as the capital ships were lacking in anti-fighter capabilities anyway. Some Novican captains struggled to properly divide their attention between the Paris battlecruisers and the fighters and more ships were lost to the black as the Imperial fleet never let up the bombardment. Dozens of Imperial fighters were lost to friendly fire as the battlecruisers had no way of alerting their allies of the rounds' trajectory, but the fighters still dove in, heedless to the danger. They had all been trained well, knew that in war the cold equations reigned supreme, accepted them and went on with their duty. Time to mourn would come later. Victory had to be attained first.

Vaslow switched his attention from the ongoing battle and looked towards the incoming enemy fighters, who were rapidly approaching his bomber formations from the side. Aside from being outnumbered, the overall position of his own units was simply a nightmare. Tactical common sense dictated that a flanked unit was a dead unit. In space, where inertia was a damned bitch and sharp turns annihilated any velocity a craft had, that held even more true. Once an enemy got onto your rear, you were dead. An iron clad rule that had withered centuries of combat. Fighters, more than any other naval class, relied on speed, which was natural given their lack of armour and the close range they fought at. Fighter pilots died from all sorts of causes, from being actually blown apart to asphyxiation as their craft or canopy gave out under unforgiving G-forces, colliding with debris and space dust or by accidentally dodging in the same direction as an ally or opponent. They were vulnerable, flies compared to the juggernauts that ploughed the space lanes, but they had their purpose, one the Empire had denied them for years, citing that very lack of protection as a reason to not maintain a proper fighter force. He could sympathise with that belief, sharing their dislike for losing good soldiers. It wasn't until the Kra'lagh showed up that things had changed. The massive, long range plasma weapons tore through capital ships with ease and all of a sudden the Strike Forces found themselves swamped with requests to join the prestigious Battle Groups, their fighters being able to approach the Kra'lagh ships while taking significantly lower losses than their larger counterparts. That those losses still lay in the thousands was seen as a moot point, given that the destruction of a single capital ship led to tens of thousands being lost in a single explosion.

It had also, finally!, freed up the necessary funds for him to start mass producing the Triglav-class Heavy Fighter. A marvel of technology and engineering coupled with a disgustingly high manufacturing cost, it was his dream project that had taken him three decades to develop. He had tried, in vain, to sell the prototypes to the higher ranks, to get them produced in a large enough quantity to field a few squadrons. He had been rejected, time and again and his own funds fell pitifully short of what he needed. Now, two decades after that he had shelved his dreams and hopes, he was going to field them. Not just a squadron, oh no. He was going to throw a full five thousand of them at the Novican forces. He saw his own reflection in the gleaming metal of the console in front of him and wasn't overly surprised that he was grinning like a child. He looked around the bridge and found that sentiment mirrored in most of his officers. They were all elderly folks, the Strike Forces finding few eager recruits in the academies, but as a result they were a tight knit bunch and all of them had fought, tooth and nail, to bring the Triglav into reality. While all of them would have loved to fly it, they would have to settle for seeing it in action.

Vaslow leaned in closer and pinged Triglav-lead. Several hundreds of thousands of kilometres away a young man flying a large craft that looked like a reversed fork with a short handle stuck in a ball, opened the channel. Flight-Commander Stephanos, grandson of Admiral Vaslow and the only pilot in the Imperial Navy with more than ten thousand flight hours logged on the Triglav, smiled at his grandfather. 'Flight-Commander Stephanos, at your orders sir.'

The young man glanced around his cockpit. It was a tight fit. The heavy flight-suit itself was already heavily pressing in on him, but the memory-foam of his seat exuded an even worse pressure, completely locking his body in, leaving only his limbs somewhat free to do the actual piloting. He couldn't even turn his head inside the very uncomfortable craft. Some pilots disliked the Triglav because of that, even while understanding the necessity of it. For Stephanos, who lived to fly at death defying speeds and for the thrill of close combat, it felt like the hug of a lover, even if, to make the analogy truthful, he was nursing broken ribs at that point. He smiled as he saw the metal bars that formed a circle around his craft and that smile became a grin as he saw the warning symbols flash to life as thousands upon thousands of Novican light fighters were approaching his position from the side, mistaking his signature for that of a bomber. Given that he was the only Triglav amidst a bomber wing, he didn't blame them for it.

'The enemy is approaching your position. Bombers will break off in twenty. You know the drill. Make me proud, Steph. And don't die,' the old Admiral whispered to his grandson, feeling no minor bit of jealousy. Flying fighter craft was in their blood. His own father had tracked down their family genealogy and he had not been surprised to discover that he could count the infamous Night Witches amongst them. Now it was his grandson's turn to continue that tradition. He suppressed the emotions running hot in his chest and looked directly at his grandson's face, praying silently that it would not be the last time they spoke. 'Flight-Commander, commence operation Wrecking Ball.'

Stephanos' face split open in a wide grin as he acknowledged the order. 'Aye sir!' He ended the connection and saw that the bombers were peeling off, flying away to meet up with the other heavy fighters a bit aside. Now it was just him and the two dozen fighters in his squadron against several hundreds of light fighters that were barrelling down on his position.

The poor bastards wouldn't know what hit them.