Three Square Meals Ch. 078

***

Warboss Magaruk guffawed as his cruiser sailed unopposed through the Ashanath lines, shooting with careless abandon at the the circular ships. "The little runts are too scared to even fight!" he chortled with glee.

His crew cackled along with him and the sound of their hacking, braying laughter filled the Bridge with a horrible cacophony. They blasted an Ashanath destroyer as they charged past one of the silver battleships, raking the smaller vessel with purple beams and slicing it into three glowing pieces. Normally being in the vanguard of any assault meant a swift but glorious end, but today it seemed they'd be able to meander through the Ashanath lines and take their pick of enemies. Magaruk had been delighted to have his ship upgraded with the Dark One's armour, but at this rate it wasn't even going to get a scratch.

"What's the plan now that Vekrok's dead?" his engineer asked curiously, referring to the shocking sight of the supposedly unstoppable dreadnought getting shot to bits.

"Nothing changes," Warboss Magaruk replied with a fang-filled grin. "We wreck every ship the Greys have got, then take our time getting fat from gorging ourselves on their homeworld!"

The crew cheered at that, salivating at the thought of munching on tasty Grey flesh.

***

Leader Linnaeus sat stunned in his chair as he felt the psychic aftershock of the High Council being torn from the telepathic command web. He lifted a trembling hand to his temple and did his best to quell his rising sense of dread.

*Our shields are down to twenty-four percent!* Engineer Batiri exclaimed in a panic, as their cruiser was flayed by half-a-dozen purple beams.

Navigator Cadimus continued his wild evasive manoeuvres, desperately attempting to rotate towards the back of their cruiser formation. Despite his best efforts to escape from the black Drakkar cruiser which had fired upon them, they had already been struck multiple times.

*Leader Linnaeus, we must fire back on that black cruiser!* Tactical Officer Pallari pleaded. *We will not last for much longer otherwise!*

*Maintain fire on the grey-hulled vessels,* Leader Linnaeus replied distractedly. *We must follow our orders.*

The worried Tactical Officer shared an unblinking look with Engineer Batiri but they did as Linnaeus commanded, focusing on their stations. Their silver disc ignored its pursuer and added its red beams to that of the other cruisers in the formation, pouring fire into one of the grey-hulled Drakkar battleships which had closed within range. The combined weight of fire knocked out its shields, but there was no celebrating for the Ashanath aboard Linnaeus ship.

They were hit by another volley of beams from the Drakkar cruiser snapping at their heels, the pulsating columns of energy carving glowing lines through their scorched hull. Rocked by the impact, the crew clung to their chairs as warning klaxons sounded off throughout the Bridge.

***

Jade narrowed her eyes as she aimed the Raptor's shoulder-mounted Photon Lasers at the closest of the Drakkar cruisers. Jinking the gunship to starboard, her targeting reticle was placed squarely over the hull on the first of the six cruisers, when her thumb pressed down on the firing button. A stream of pulsed beams lashed into the flank of the Drakkar vessel, the shots lancing out in three long separate pulses. Her face lit up with a broad grin as the last pair of bolts overloaded their shields and went on to strike the armoured hull itself, using the last of their strength to melt five-metre-long troughs in the port flank of the cruiser.

A red icon flashed next to her weapon loadout display, signifying that the heatsinks were rapidly venting excess heat and the Photon Lasers would be unable to fire for ten seconds. Her left hand had pushed the throttle to the maximum and at the incredible speed she was travelling, she closed the distance to medium range in just over three seconds.

The optical targeting system followed her retinas as Jade marked the point on the engines she was aiming at, the auto-tracking turrets pivoting to follow her line of sight. Holding her finger down on the trigger, the six Pulse Cannons fired a cascade of blue laser bolts at the Drakkar, with barely a second's pause between each three-round-burst. The torrent of laser fire hammered into the rear of the ship as she strafed her shots over the engines, with well-placed weapon fire burning through the armour and scorching the engine itself. She spotted a number of satisfying secondary explosions and the cruiser began to slow down as she destroyed half of its propulsion systems, scattering a trail of melted armour plating in its wake.

"You can finish that one," Jade said kindly to Dana's holographic image. "I've slowed it down a bit to let you catch up."

"Hey! I don't need your castoffs!" the redhead protested, frowning at the Nymph's well-meaning gift.

Jade shrugged and said placatingly, "I'm just trying to stop them from reaching the carriers. I'll keep disabling the others so you can destroy them with your quad-mounted guns. By the way, you'll love the Photon Lasers, they're amazing!"

Dana blushed, realising the Nymph was just trying to protect the Ashanath and said contritely, "Sorry Jade, I was being a dick."

Jade winked in return, a broad smile on her face as she replied, "Don't worry, I still love you!"

Rolling the Raptor and pulling back on the stick, the Nymph swung the nose of the gunship around to point at the next Drakkar cruiser. A quick glance at the weapon loadout showed that the Photon Lasers had cooled, so this time she lined up her first shot on the engines before showering the Drakkar cruiser in rapidly-pulsed beams. Just as before, the twin weapons were potent enough to burn through the cruiser's shields, the final shots slicing into the central engine and causing it to vent a black spume of debris.

Dana watched in frustration as her Mech trundled along, still thirty seconds away from the Nymph who was joyfully hobbling the Drakkar ships. In fairness, the Valkyrie was still moving faster than the Invictus, but compared to the Raptor, it felt like she was swimming through treacle. "I'm gonna need bigger engines," she grumbled to herself, tightening her grip on the weapon controls as she aimed her targeting crosshair right in the centre of the Drakkar ship.

She was fairly certain their power core was roughly located in that area, but she was also well aware that Calara's infallible marksmanship made ship-to-ship combat seem trivially easy. Dana knew that shooting out specific ship components was actually extremely difficult and certainly much harder than the Latina made it look. As she watched the floundering Drakkar cruiser, the redhead mused that perhaps shooting at crippled Drakkar ships might not be that hard after all.

Holding her breath in anticipation, she gently squeezed the triggers on both joysticks and the quad-mounted Photon Lasers lost their combat cherry in a glorious pulsing surge of light. All twelve laser bolts struck home, burning huge rents in the Drakkar's steel-plated hull and disembowelling the cruiser as they scythed through the superstructure. The front section was shoved aside as the rear section tumbled onwards, the remaining engines still providing feeble amounts of thrust to the hapless wreck.

Dana let out a happy sigh of contentment, then grinned at Jade as she said, "Now that was fucking awesome!"

"Do you remember how terrifying these ships were, the first time we fought them?" Jade mused, as her pulse cannons hamstrung the second Drakkar cruiser by shooting out the rest of its engines.

Dana laughed and replied, "Now it's our turn to be the badasses!" She pivoted the Valkyrie around, heading towards the next cruiser that Jade had immobilised and added, "These evil-fuckers must be shitting themselves!"

Realising the mortal danger that they were now facing, the remaining four Drakkar cruiser Captains were indeed doing exactly that. With their curious anatomy consisting of two of everything, being downwind of a terrified Drakkar was not a good place to be.

Halting their charge towards the Ashanath carriers, the angular Drakkar cruisers began to bank around, adjusting their course at a rate that seemed implausible in such bulky vessels. Each of the ships was armed with sixteen front-mounted Beam Lasers and as soon as they managed to swing their fire-arcs around to overlap the Raptor, the four ships opened fire. Performing a lazy roll, the gunship avoided all but three of the sixty-four hastily fired beams, but they still struck with enough power to overwhelm the Raptor's limited shielding.

"Jade!" Dana cried out to the Nymph, her heart in her mouth as she stared at the gunship. She could only watch helplessly as it was enveloped in virulent purple beams and masked from sight.

Jade's holographic face beamed a gleaming white smile at her as she said soothingly, "I'm fine, don't worry. Athena reshaped the armour plating so much, the Raptor's immune to laser fire, remember?"

Dana nodded in relief, then murmured to herself, "Get Athena to make the Valkyrie immune to laser weapons..."

After adding yet another upgrade to her mental checklist, she squeezed the trigger to shoot her Photon Lasers and watched the burst of laser fire strafe through the stationary cruiser. The Drakkar ship was torn to pieces in a remorseless hail of blueish-white beams, the subsequent reactor breach attempting to compete for the most blinding flash of light. Dana watched the Raptor take out the shields on a third cruiser, and wondered exactly how she was going to get Alyssa mad enough to let Athena take over again.

***

Alyssa rolled her eyes and smirked as she listened to her friend's good-natured scheming. The smile soon dropped off her face as she concentrated on keeping the Invictus steady for Calara, who was carefully lining up a shot with the Nova Lances. They were firing at extreme range - triple that of a normal Beam Laser - and with the dense mass of ships involved in that sprawling melee, the Latina didn't want to take any chances. Seconds ticked by as the Invictus cut through space at tremendous speed, rapidly closing on the Drakkar forces.

Darting a look at the brunette, Alyssa asked playfully, "Are you planning to wait until we're at point-blank range?"

"Hold on a few more seconds, just letting an Ashanath cruiser clear the shot..." Calara murmured, her hands grasping the weapon controls with a steely grip.

"That battleship on the left is clear, why not just take that out?" John suggested, wondering exactly what the Latina was up to.

With her hawk-like gaze noting the destruction of each and every spacecraft, along with the accompanying shift of the battle lines, Calara finally called out, "Firing Nova Lances!"

She squeezed the trigger, unleashing the dreadful power of the two throbbing spheres of blinding white light that had coalesced before the prow. Those pulsating orbs flared even brighter as they were channelled into an incandescent column of energy, the huge beam dissecting the lines of battle and striking a Drakkar battleship in the prow. Its shields were disintegrated in an instant, but astonishingly, Calara seemed to have missed her target! That terrible beam of destruction arced downwards instead of being swept across the length of the battleship.

"You missed!" John exclaimed, gaping at the Latina in shock.

Calara didn't respond. Her face was set into a mask of intense concentration, hands deftly moving the weapon controls down and to the left.

Looking up at the Tactical Map John started to ask, "What're you doi-" until his mouth fell open in stunned amazement.

He had turned back just in time to see the Nova Lance beam wink out of existence, having maintained its continuous throbbing deathray for several seconds. Instead of just disintegrating a single battleship in a gratuitous display of overkill, Calara had clipped the first to knock out its shields, then strafed the beam across a second, neatly dissecting it amidships. In the final seconds before the beam dispersed, she'd guided it into a third black-hulled battleship, its deadly caress stripping that vessel of shields as well.

"That was a beautiful shot, gorgeous," Alyssa said with a grin, knowing full-well what the supernaturally accurate gunner had been planning.

Calara turned in her chair to smile at John and explained, "We needed their shields down to leave them vulnerable for the Singularity Driver."

"Speaking of which," Alyssa said with a fierce grin, "we've been waiting weeks to properly unload this monster. I think we've had more than enough foreplay!"

Inside the Singularity Generator, the spherical lattice of Tyrenium rotated at immense speed as vast gravitic forces struggled to contain the power of the miniature black hole bound at its centre. Ammunition feeds went to work to line up the weapon's compact rounds, each poised and waiting to be launched into the chamber and accelerated down the pair of four-hundred-metre-long barrels.

Alyssa lined up the prow of the Invictus with the first of the black battleships, the huge muzzles of the Singularity Drivers now pointing directly at the Drakkar's glossy onyx hull. Holding her breath with anticipation, she squeezed the new trigger that Dana had built into the Pilot's flightstick and then watched in awe as the weapons went to work.

The first slug rocketed out of the Singularity Driver barrel, accelerated to immense speed by the magnitude of the forces involved. It slammed into the bow of the Drakkar battleship with a thunderous detonation that left the vessel trembling, a huge cracked crater marring the black armour plating with concentric rings rippling out from the point of impact. The debris hadn't had time to clear before the projectile from the other barrel crashed into the hull a second later, the incredible force of that strike on the already-weakened spot tearing a huge chunk from the front of the ship. Shattered armour plating was ripped off the craft in brittle ribbons, purple banding blown clear along with the remnants of the fore shield generators.

Inside the ship, terrified Drakkar were knocked off their feet as the battleship was violently buffeted by one slug after another. The Invictus sent an unrelenting stream of fire into the vessel and with the armour plating irreparably smashed, each concussive blast tore deeper into the ship, tearing it apart a piece at a time. One section after another was depressurised as it was shredded by explosions, with flailing Drakkar crew sucked out into space through those breaches in each deck. The inner substructure was weaker than the sturdy outer-hull and the destruction progressively worsened as the Singularity Driver rounds pounded into the ship. The explosion from each strike was echoed by secondary blasts as missiles or ammunition stores betrayed their own vessel, adding to the catastrophic damage it was sustaining.

Alyssa took thirteen seconds with her volley of shots to systematically demolish the Drakkar warship, leaving it a hollowed-out hulk by the time she was done with it. That area of space was left awash with debris, a storm of jagged shards of metal sent spinning away to strike nearby ships.

She beamed at John and said, "I fucking love this gun!" Her cerulean eyes sparkled and sounding eager, she added, "Now for the next battleship!"

Calara frowned disapprovingly though and said, "Ripping them apart from prow to stern might be fun but it's not very efficient. Start aiming for their power cores, you'll either destroy them instantly or turn them into lifeless derelicts."

Alyssa nodded as she recalled their ill-fated jaunt into Overlord Okug's battleship and the location of the Power Core room, positioned towards the aft and centre of the bulky ship. Calara had already neatly dissected the second battleship by burning a hundred-metre-wide incision through its middle, so she skipped that wreck and focused on the third vessel. Pushing forward on her flightstick, the Invictus' prow tilted downwards until she was squarely lined up with the next Drakkar battleship. It was flagged red on her targeting display, indicating that it currently had no shields.

The beautiful blonde was oblivious to Warboss Gixukeg's frantic efforts to rally his quaking crew. However, she could see the battleship desperately attempting to turn in an effort to hide behind a heavily damaged Ashanath saucer, intending to use the ravaged silver disc as cover. It was a good plan, but Gixukeg hadn't taken into account the Invictus' impressive manoeuvrability. Alyssa simply rolled the ship to starboard and pulled back on the flightstick, clearing the rim of the Ashanath saucer faster than the Drakkar could conceal themselves behind it. She eventually rotated the battlecruiser through one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and pulled up the nose, not only having cleared her line of sight but also lined the Invictus up with the rear of the evading vessel.

When Alyssa clamped down on the trigger with a slender finger, ammunition was pumped into the Singularity Driver then blasted out the long barrels, following a regular second-long tempo. The rippling explosions to the rear of the huge Drakkar vessel marked out that beat and Alyssa began battering the battleship from the stern this time. It took six hyper-accelerated slugs to punch through all the armour and excavate the rear of the black warship, before lucky number seven tore through that ragged wound, striking the power core chamber. The Drakkar technicians were slain instantly and the blast ruptured the power core, initiating a critical meltdown in the reactor.

"Nice shooting, honey!" John exclaimed, astonished at how fast they were ripping through the Drakkar battleships.

Nodding her approval, Calara watched as bright shards of energy speared through the buckling hull in a dozen places until a colossal explosion annihilated the mangled battleship. "Now bring us in closer while the Nova Lances recharge, I'd like to field-test the Heavy Cannons."

"Whatever you say, Commander," Alyssa said, with a playful smile on her face. She rotated and lifted the prow of their battlecruiser, pointing towards the remaining group of three battleships that had formed the dreadnought's escort.

"Get ready," John warned Irillith, making eye contact with her.

She smiled at him confidently. "I'll take the one at the back, it's lined up nicely."

The Invictus roared through the battle lines, retro-thrusters flaring a bright orange along the length of its hull as Alyssa swept under a burning Ashanath battleship. She pulled up to rush past a group of three black Drakkar cruisers that were harrying a formation of six disc-shaped cruisers, two of which had already been mauled by purple Beam Laser fire.

"Faye, take the one on the right," Calara ordered firmly, pulling the trigger and firing the Beam Lasers on the Invictus' underbelly. The Latina aimed four sizzling azure beams at each of the two Drakkar ships she'd targeted, their shields collapsing as they were overwhelmed by the throbbing columns of energy.

"Will do, Commander!" Faye replied, a serious expression on her purple-hued face.

Aiming at the marauding Drakkar cruiser allocated to her with thirty-two Pulse Cannons, Faye immediately opened fire. A solid sheet of blue laser bolts rained down on the unsuspecting black warship, causing the shields to convulse as it was struck by nearly one-hundred bolts with that preliminary burst alone. The shimmering field couldn't withstand that level of abuse and it failed abruptly, letting the blue bolts strike the glossy-black hull. Capacitors built into that onyx surface harmlessly absorbed the rest of her fire though, leaving the Drakkar cruiser completely unscathed.