literature

Eternian Trap Ch 18 pt 2

Deviation Actions

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  Eternian Solar System

   Commander Franik waited patiently on the bridge of his battlecruiser. Reports streamed in from the attack force closing in on Castle Grayskull. The operation had been proceeding uneventfully. But based on the reports filed by General Rongar, Commander Franik knew that the enemy waited until the prime moment to strike. With the superior force bearing down on them, the Earthers would have no choice but to strike hard and fast in an effort to destroy as many units as possible before they were overwhelmed. Regardless of how valiantly they fought, the final result would never be in doubt.
   Reports of the first attacks filtered through the command circuits as the lead elements of the ground force drew within sight of the ancient castle. Chaos ensued as the enemy's unconventional tactics took their toll on the leading elements of the attack force. Despite the brazen attacks, the ground force marched onward.
   A warning beacon sounded from the sensor station, drawing Franik's attention away from the reports that were pouring in. Explosions rippled through space along the perimeter line of destroyers. Several warships died in spectacular detonations. Secondary eruptions followed as the fusion cores breeched.
   "Locate the source of the enemy fire," Franik ordered.
   Several robots hesitated momentarily before returning to their control consoles. They were not convinced it was an enemy attack. However, detailed scans of the wreckage showed traces of plasma energy, a prime indicator of Earth weapons.
   "Eternia," Franik hissed through clenched teeth. "Find that ship. Quickly!" Based on their last attack, their weapons couldn't have that great a range.
   "Commander," the robot manning the long-range sensors reported suddenly. "I have an unknown contact just this side of the fifth planet."
   "Why wasn't it spotted before now?" Franik demanded.
   "The energy signature just appeared as if they didn't power up until they were ready."
   The commander sank back into his chair, deep in thought. It didn't take him long to figure out the tactics the Earthers had used to get in this close undetected. Clever strategy to get in the first strike; he was impressed. However, his fleet still overmatched one ship a quarter of the size of a Horde destroyer. It would only be a matter of time before their entire ordinance supply was expended. Even their Etherium hull would only last so long before it was breeched.
   There was no more time to reflect as the starship Eternia made her attack run.

******

   When the Eternia exited hyperspace just inside the boundary of the Eternian star system, all systems were immediately shut down and the ship went into a submarine equivalent of silent running. Before doing so, Captain Majourny risked one active scan for targets to program into the plasma torpedoes. Once they were secure from enemy detection, plans were formulated to get the remainder of Colonel Markson's command dropped into the planet's atmosphere to reinforce those left behind days ago.
   Lieutenant Denton came up with a way to do that. By taking a quick active scan, they could plot the locations of the enemy warships, programmed the inertial guidance on salvos of plasma torpedoes, and jettison them using air pressure. This would allow the weapons to have fuel to adjust their trajectory on their terminal runs to their assigned targets.
   It would take hours for the torpedoes to drift within range of their targets, so the crew put those hours to good use as the Eternia drifted in-system, unpowered behind the released weapons. Lieutenant Satori proposed an idea for dealing with the more powerful heavy corvettes identified in the quick scan. The reaction warheads were essentially electromagnetic pulse weapons, so the idea was to take the devises out of the torpedoes and place them in the mines.
   A speed run past a heavy corvette while launching the mines could have the desired effect of disrupting the warship's shields long enough to get a few plasma torpedoes in. The trick would be to survive enemy fire long enough to get in close to make the attempt. That was the reason for the ejection of the early salvos. Hopefully, those would cause enough chaos to drop off the remaining half of the Guardian Force before engaging the Horde fleet.
   Satori's mine modifications were completed slightly behind schedule due to a few compatibility issues, but the delay was minimal. All the preparations for combat were finished on time, including the quick training of replacements for the quad guns. All sections reported ready for action as the numbers wound down to zero hour.
   At zero hour, the torpedo salvos engaged their active sensor packages, lit off their drives, and blasted into their assigned targets, which were still conveniently holding station. Shields overloaded and collapsed. Hull armor boiled away, leaving bare vital systems. Power grids overloaded from the devastation leading to catastrophic meltdown of the fusion reactor, and a terminal detonation obliterating the warship.
   A total of three destroyers died in a fiery, plasma-induced blaze. A fourth was mortally wounded, though the fusion reactor did not overload.
   Eternia screamed through the vacuum on full burn straight for her namesake planet. Battlecruisers and destroyers lit off their drives and sluggishly began maneuvers to intercept. Getting thousands of tons of warship moving in a vacuum was an agonizing process because inertia had to be overcome before maneuvering thrusters could be employed along with the sub-light drives. That fact of physics, coupled with the instant chaos caused by the attack, gave Eternia all the time it needed to get in close enough to execute a high-speed drop run identical to the one they had performed several days ago.
   Powerful lifting arms held the remaining pair of dropships over the open drop bays as the engines spooled up and landing struts folded up into the belly. The arms lowered the ships into position on the drop pads, disengaged, and rose out of the way for the thick bay doors to seal above. The coming drop didn't bother Hohiro Takamora as much as the concept of the high-speed combat drop did. Despite the success of the first drop, there was still an element of danger for both the dropship and the mother craft.
   Usually, troops conversed and joked with one another to take their minds off the coming action, but knowing their companions were probably in serious danger on the ground left little room for the usual antics. The troops sat locked into the troop seats, anxious and fidgety. Captain Takamora conversed quietly with the dropship pilots and Lieutenant Kent Howard, who was commanding Delta Platoon, in the other ship.
   Thanks to the starship's inertia dampers, the soldiers could not feel the sudden acceleration. When the near misses from enemy laser cannons began blossoming along the Eternia's flight path, however, the cramped troop compartment became a very bumpy place to be if you weren't strapped down.
   Ace tried his best to avoid the enemy fire, but the trajectory to the drop point didn't allow for much room to maneuver. All available power was shunted to the engines and shields. The closer Eternia drew to the planet, the more the laser fire intensified. Several direct hits to the shields blasted the starship momentarily off course. Ace struggled with the manual controls to bring the ship back, finally succeeding after a few tense seconds. Sweat beads littered his brow as he scanned the void ahead. They weren't going to get into high orbit without taking a few more nasty hits.
   Take them, Eternia did. She seemed to shrug off the green lances of destructive energy with only minimal internal damage. Ace squeezed through the maze of plasma lightning to make a mad dash at the atmosphere. Enemy fire tracked the starship, but was a fraction of a second behind.
   A fraction was all Captain Majourny needed.
   Eternia rotated ninety degrees, dropped her ventral shield arc, and opened the drop bay doors. Three seconds after the doors dropped open, two dropships plunged into the atmosphere. Eternia soared away, bays sealed, shields raised, and weapons charged. Ace pulled up hard, followed the planetary curve until he crested the northern pole, and then leveled out facing the oncoming enemy starships.
   A flight of reaction and plasma torpedoes jetted from the forward torpedo tubes as the ship's engines ratcheted up to full sub-light power. Three destroyers backed up by a battlecruiser were attempting to pin Eternia in her namesake planet's gravity well, where she would have limited mobility. Captain Majourny anticipated the move and had issued orders to Ace and Harley to maneuver and open fire on the enemy without her orders. That confidence and autonomy was one of the traits that would allow them to beat the Horde.
   Jo-jo watched the flight of torpedoes streak through the vacuum, straight into the teeth of the destroyer directly ahead. Its shields collapsed under the onslaught of electro-magnetic radiation, and were consumed in a series of fiery explosions. Ace plowed into the heart of the flaming vapor cloud to evade enemy fire. It was the one tactic they did not expect. Who in their right mind would continue flying toward an enemy still fielding an overwhelming taskforce?
   The Earth starship ripped through the other side of the dying cloud 'under' the battlecruiser. Jo-jo studied the sensor scans on her right-hand panel. After a few seconds of intense searching, Jo-jo found what she wanted.
   Transferring target coordinates to Ace's panel, Jo-jo said, "There's the target, Ace."
   Sparing the briefest of glanced, Ace answered, "Got it."
   The target in question was one of the two heavy corvettes. Fighters scrambled from the corvette's many launching bays and quickly swarmed in Eternia's direction. Harley opened up with every offensive weapon the starship had. Forward laser guns poured coherent bolts of light into the night. Railguns flung eighteen-inch titanium shells out at close to light speed. The quad gunners had more success destroying or damaging fighters because of their ability to track their targets. All the forward weapons could do was throw up a screen of energy bolts and projectiles in the hope that something flew into it.
   The enemy commander made the mistake of packing his warships in a little too tightly because the closer Eternia drew to the center of the Horde's defensive formation; the harder it was for them to hit anyone other than themselves. This allowed Ace to get in close to the heavy corvette to lay the modified mines.
   Ace skimmed the invisible outer boundary of the warship's shields at break-neck speeds. Eternia's ventral shields occasionally glanced off the Horde ship's barrier, releasing a blazing shower of sparks. Mines ejected from the launch bay, just forward of the number two engine. Their guidance computers were active at the moment of launch, and they engaged thrusters to keep them from impacting the corvette' shields.
   Laser fire from the surrounding capital ships ceased for fear of hitting their own ship, but the fighters dogging their trail had no such inhibitions because of their vastly weaker weapons. Red laser bolts flashed past the Earth ship, sometimes splashing against its shields. Most of the wild fire hit the corvette's shields without doing any damage. Amazingly, none out the mines took a hit during the entire seeding operation.
   Ace cleared the mammoth ship in seconds. In that time, Harley released half of the total inventory of modified mines. The ship had barely reached minimum safe distance when the signal to detonate was transmitted. At the same moment, a flight of four plasma torpedoes was launched. The weapons soared ahead for a thousand meters and pulled up sharply reversing their flight path.
   Electromagnetic energies splashed against the powerful Horde shields all along the corvette's port side. The shield array couldn't handle such a widespread assault at point-blank range. Plasma torpedoes zeroed in on a detonating mine concentration a hundred meters down from the bow. That group of mines shorted out the shield emitter, opening a three-second gap before the other overloaded network began to compensate for the damage. That lag was enough to allow two of the weapons to streak inside to impact the thick hull plates. The others were caught outside were their detonations further destroyed the entire shield array.
   Hull armor vaporized, atmosphere vented into the cold, hard vacuum of space taking robots and a few sentient being along for the ride. The power grid collapsed when a major distribution hub literally vaporized in a boiling cloud of plasma fire.
   The last Lieutenant Satori saw on her sensor panel as the Eternia threaded her way through a collection of destroyers and one battlecruiser was a severely damaged heavy corvette floating dead in space, and beginning to tumble out of control due to its inertia.
   The closest destroyers disgorged their small complement of fighters and formed a protective cordon around the heavily damaged corvette. Several wings of fighters formed up, engaged full thrusters, and blasted off in pursuit of the Earth starship fleeing into the outer system.
   Through the entire run, Lieutenant Satori attempted to make contact with Colonel Markson's platoons on the surface when she had a free moment to transmit. As the ship raced past the Eternian system's fifth planet, she finally made contact.
   Static erupted from the bridge speakers for a moment before being replaced by the colonel's voice. "Well, it's about time you showed up. You waiting until we're on the brink of being wiped out before getting here?"
   "We stopped off at Etheria for lunch, since we still had some time to kill," Jo-jo replied, stifling a slight smile. "What's your situation?"
   "Bad. We hurt them, but we just don't have to firepower to repel them. Some friends of Corporal Frost's have shown up, but I don't think it'll be enough."
   "Hohiro is on his way with the remaining platoons, and stocked with munitions," the captain replied, switching her gaze between the left and right-hand control panels.
   Explosions in the background drowned out any reply the colonel might have had. It could be the dropships had finally arrived.
   "We're a little busy just now. Call back later."
   "We're engaged with a Horde fleet up here, Colonel. We'll try to join you as soon as we can," Jo-jo said grimly.
   "Understood," Colonel Markson acknowledged.
   The line went dead with the echo of more explosions.
   Captain Majourny tapped a control buzzing the engine room. "How soon can we affect repairs?" she demanded.
   Chief Engineer Santana responded immediately. "We're working as fast as we can. Give me thirty minutes and we'll be ready to re-engage the Horde ships."
   "You have fifteen. Our people on the ground may not have thirty minutes." Jo-jo's tone left no room for argument, and Lieutenant Santana had a habit of inflating his repair estimates.
   "Aye, captain," Santana replied, closing the comm channel.
   Jo-jo didn't like waiting even one minute, but it wouldn't do Colonel Markson any good if Eternia got blown out of the stars because she didn't take a few precious minutes to get her ship back into some semblance of fighting condition.

******
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