Chapter 51

Hyperspace.

Approaching the Divinium Mine.

"Hyperspace emergence in 3...2...1...Emergence!"

Sarah leaned forward as the bridge's central display blanked out, before starting to update. Except that unlike in most emergences, the display was a haze.

"Status?" She asked Elteria as the AI paced on the bridge.

"We have arrived in our jump zone, 3 000 kilometers from the center. As for the rest...this place is hell. I can confirm that all of the Dominion ships appear to have made it with us, but that's it. There is a large mass 30 million kilometers away, but even for that I'm having trouble with the scanners. Not surprising, since it's probably a giant pile of divinium, but still."

"The hyperspace beacon?"

"Hold on, one second...found it, exactly where it should be." Which would be a solid 60 million kilometers behind them. "I'm also adjusting the scanners for the interference from the nebula. Fuck this is hell. Alright, I can roughly see what is in the sheltered area, but everything else is hashed to hell. It'll get better as time goes on and I refine the filtering protocols, but I can't guarantee how good it'll get."

Sarah nodded. They'd decided to execute the jump with the planetary mass, presumably the Divinium mining site, between them and the blue hypergiant that had turned this space into such hell, thus hiding in its shadow. Not only did it make hyperspace calculations vastly easier, but it also lowered the danger for the ships, especially for the Dominion's poorly shielded gunships.

Connie lifted her head up from her console.

"Captain? Incoming call from admiral Soliensky."

"Put it through."

Soliensky's image appeared, replacing the system display. He was, interestingly enough, giving them a wide view of his flag bridge behind him, rather than restricting the view to simply himself, which was a pretty clear sign of trust.

"Captain Ciel. It is good to see you made it."

"Admiral, thank you, although I will freely admit I was more worried about all the ships under your command surviving the jump."

The admiral winced slightly. There had been a small, but very real chance that one of his ships' hyperdrive would straight up fail when attempting to exit hyperspace into such an area, although beyond ordering a full maintenance check and pre-emptive part replacement on the hyperdrives there hadn't really been anything they could do about it.

Although fortunately that seemed to have failed to happen.

"Fair enough captain. I do hope however that you have a better picture of this place than we do. Currently my sensor departments is telling me we maybe -maybe!- have a significant gravitational signature where we expect the divinium mine to be. They're barely able to just confirm the presence of all of my ships through IFFs."

"We are still resolving the finer details, but we have confirmed the presence of what appears to be a large mass of divinium, as well as the position of the TRF's hyperspace beacon behind us. Other than that it appears that all of their surface installations are dormant, and thus practically undetectable in this current medium-"

"Belay that! Registering active sensor scans! A lot of active sensor scans!" Barked out Elteria as her hologram froze and almost disappeared due to the AI refocusing elsewhere. "Well, that answers what they had for sensors. And if they saw us."

"What have they got?" Immediately asked Sarah.

"A full military grade system sensor array. And I mean full. Low Verge tech, probably from the Dominion Navy, sorry admiral."

Soliensky shook his head as Sarah hid a wince. A system sensor array was the kind of gigantic station you stuck around a star to monitor an entire star system in the inner Periphery.

"It's fine lieutenant Elteria. I am fully aware some of my comrades are helping these rebels and have betrayed their oaths. Regardless, are they capable of seeing us?"

"They very much are. They won't be able to see much detail but with enough sensor stations they can get enough to at least shoot at us." Elteria blinked. "And we have a drone launch. Reading a hundred...scratch that, five hundred drone launches!"

"So far so good."

One day, Sarah was going to learn not to say things like that.

"Vampire! Missile launch! 140, no, 150 thousand incoming! 300 gs acceleration, grav drive propulsion, impact in 1 hour and 15 minutes!"

Sarah's mouth snapped close as she looked at Elteria.

"Three hundred gees? That's...cruise missiles?"

"Yep." Said the AI, before wincing. "Just scanned them, definitely two stage cruise missiles. Don't know if they'll make it, but they had to think they'd actually do some damage or they wouldn't have launched them."

Sarah nodded. Cruise missiles were an...odd technology. They were in essence a very simple drone used as a first stage, long range 'booster' for the missile itself, who once in range was released and did a more conventional attack run. On paper it was a simple and elegant solution to missile range issues, but in practice the price, targeting issues and sheer volume taken by them meant that only fortresses and some capital ships used them. But here...

"They're limited by the environment. They're using cruise missiles because the silos get royally fucked whenever they launch, right? Since the launchers is going to get destroyed, and they functionally have an infinity of volume to spare, they can afford to use cruise missiles."

"Agreed. But their targeting solutions are going to absolutely suck. Hell." Elteria gestured at the display, and admiral Soliensky's image shrunk as the system display reappeared. "I'm already seeing some drop off from the pack. I don't think their cruise missiles were very well made, or that those were military grade schematics."

"Well, that will help. Admiral? I would heavily suggest deploying your parasite crafts."

Soliensky nodded from his tiny image.

"Already on it captain. Still, thank you for the heads up. We'll expedite launch procedures so everyone is in place on time." The admiral looked to the side as someone evidently addressed him from off-screen, before turning back and clearing his throat. "Ahem, should we position you in the gunship screen? Since you are essential to the operation, some of my staff have suggested putting you at the core of our formation."

For a second Sarah's mind bungled at the thought of her gunship being effectively escorted by a fleet of battle carriers, before chuckling.

"I appreciate the offer admiral, but front and center is where we'll do the most good. Besides worse comes to worse we can take a hit much better than your gunships can, and we can fall back if necessary."

"Of course. Very well then, my staff will transmit you your flight path and assigned slot. Good luck captain, and may the stars be with you."

"Thank you admiral, we won't need it." Sarah turned towards Elteria. "Are you retransmitting the sensor feed to the Dominion?"

"Appropriately redacted, but yes. I'm beaming it to every battle carrier, frigate and cruiser. They can handle sending it to the gunships and corvettes." Elteria blinked. "Speaking of which, have you seen our slot?"

Sarah shook her head. It must have barely been transmitted, how could she? But sometimes the AI forgot she was dealing with, how did she call it? Ah yes, 'meat-speed humans' and not other artificial intelligences.

"Well, here we are." Continued Elteria, replacing the system display with a formation schematic.

Sarah idly noted that the admiral hadn't quite been truthful with them, they were indeed assigned in the screen of lighter ships forming in front of the larger motherships, but they were part of the corvette layer, not the gunship one. And even then, the corvettes were suspiciously arranged to protect them most effectively, and not the larger ships behind the screen.

"Any issues?"

"No, everything checks out." Elteria looked at her captain, and they exchanged smiles. They had both picked up on the corvettes' placement. "I'll just prepare some calculations so we can surge forward if necessary."

"Just don't push our drive too hard. Wouldn't want an accident to happen. Especially with all that plasma around."

Elteria winced but nodded. Their shields had been taking constant hits since they'd raised them, and some of the Dominion gunships, now emerging from their battle carriers, seemed to be having some issues as well. Still, the most worrying was if the concentration of matter in their drive plume passed above the safe level, at which point they would risk their dimensional interference drive destroying them. According to even their scans for the hyperspace jump the concentration was far below that level, but their drive was old, and Sarah would rather err on the side of caution.

"Aye aye ma'am. I'll watch the drive, just in case."

"Leave it to Normensk, he can handle it, I need you focused on the enemy."

"Aye aye ma'am!"

Sarah leaned back into her seat as she looked at the display, who reverted back to the system display, and the giant swarm of missiles slowly approaching. 'Hurry up and wait' indeed.

*****

"We have a ship launch!"

Sarah blinked and turned away from Connie's console. She'd been in a muted conversation with the communication officer concerning getting sensor updates directly to the gunship squadron leaders, as the Dominion was having transmission issues between the motherships and the gunship screen. It had been thirty minutes since they'd emerged from hyperspace and the TRF had fired their cruise missiles at them, who were thus 45 minutes from impact.

"How many?"

"Three. All of them are light cruisers."

"Did you get the launch hatches?"

"Yep. There might be more however."

Sarah looked at the cloud of approaching missiles, and the ever growing swarm of drones between them and the divinium mine.

"We can't afford to wait. Dial them in, two missiles per hatch, and fire."

"Aye aye ma'am!"

A few seconds passed, then the display updated as the Eternal Seeker's launchers spat out six missiles. A rather common occurence...except that these missiles were six of the thirty-six remaining Freelancer missiles they had, which they had taken from the Alterian Directorate when they'd left.

They might not make it...but out of all the missiles in their arsenal, they were the ones with the best chance of succeeding. They had more than enough range to pull it off, and they were smart enough to shrug off an ECM their enemies could throw at them.

"Uh, ma'am?" Said Connie. "We're being hailed by the commodore in charge of the corvettes. He sounds...agitated."

Sarah smiled, and shook her head. Since she'd hatched the plan with Elteria while in hyperspace, she hadn't taken the time to warn her Dominion allies about it.

"Patch him through. I'll explain it to him."

*****

Overall, the commodore, and then Soliensky once he was made aware of what had happened, took it surprisingly gracefully. Sarah had known her fair share of pompous officers who would have defecated a brick covered in barbed wire and spikes if one of their officers, much less a mercenary, had tried to pull off a trick like that, or hell, even just displayed the slightest hint of initiative!

The admiral had been more amused than anything really, he'd clearly been expecting something like that, which was fair given their interactions so far, and the commodore had just been terrified that the ship a tenth of the tonnage of his own flagship had just fired six missiles that had sped off at, oh, a bit over three hundred thousand gs, and would hit the divinium mine in a bit more than two minutes after their launch.

There was no need to worry the poor commodore further by mentioning that Freelancer missiles carried a bomb-pumped laser warhead whose 'bomb' part had a yield just shy of a gigaton. Still, it should be more than enough to render the ship hatches inoperable, provided they hit them.

"Ma'am?" Politely said Elteria as Sarah talked to Soliensky. "The missiles are approaching engagement range."

"Ah, thank you. If you'll excuse me?" Soliensky nodded, and Sarah cut off the communication channel as she refocused on the system display. "Status?"

"21 seconds from impact, passing the 7 million kilometers limit...now."

Sarah watched as the display remained unchanged...then brutally the drones all went to maximum acceleration, before disappearing behind a cloud of jamming and ECM, followed a split second later by the three guard ships. The missiles activated their own counter measures, and the display became an incoherent mess of false returns and distorted readings, then-

"Detonation! Confirming, six gigaton range detonations!"

The missile's jamming vanished abruptly, and the Eternal Seeker's sensors began once again making heads and tails of what was happening.

"Status?"

"One...no, two entrances destroyed! The third one appeared to be functionally intact however. One of the light cruisers must have realized what was happening and put itself between the missiles and the entrance. At the speed they were moving at, there was no way to dodge past it and get to the hatch." The AI gestured at the display, which zoomed in and a hologram of the planetoid appeared. Two craters, still spewing debris and gases were clearly visible, as well as the rapidly disintegrating hulk that had once been a light cruiser. The lasers from the missiles had purely and simply shredded the ship. It was a miracle the reactor hadn't been hit and destroyed what was left of the cruiser, if nothing else. But the entrance behind the ship appeared to indeed be intact.

"That's...not optimal. But I'll take what I can get. I assume they're repositioning?"

"A bit hard to tell behind the jamming, but yes. The drone swarm is definitely moving to protect the last entrance, and so are the guard ships. They're also dispersing the swarm, probably to enlarge their engagement range."

Sarah nodded, it made sense. Against Dominion missiles they'd have a second or so to engage the missiles in the final leg of their attack phase, but against Freelancers missiles launched from that far away they'd have fraction of a seconds at best. They were giving up massed firepower for engagement time, but it was the right call in this case.

Of course she didn't intend to launch another volley -freelancer missiles were good, but not 'shoot past ten thousand point defense drones waiting for them' good-, but they didn't know that, and now they very much had to honor the threat.

Plus, they had just wrecked a light cruiser anyway, the TRF commander had to be extremely worried right now.

"Forward the report to Soliensky. Oh, and append a note, 'all part of the service.'"

Everyone on the bridge laughed.

"Aye aye ma'am!"

Sarah smiled, before refocusing on the display, her smile disappearing as she looked at the missile swarm inbound. That had been their one hidden sucker punch. Now it was time for them to withstand the enemy's.