Citation Series 1: Naero's War: The Annexation War (3 page)

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Automated damage and fire control protocols took over. Emergency shields sealed the breaches, for now
.

Naero scrambled to her feet, attempting to stabilize and control her flickering battle displays and
holo readouts. All she could smell at first was ozone in the ionized air and smoke.

What shape were they in?

Could they still fight?

Enemy
cannon beams had penetrated
The
Hippolyta
bridge defenses and wrecked havoc. Multiple dead and wounded on the bridge and in other areas on board. Remaining crew moved efficiently to assess and control the damage and give assistance.

Weapons still on
line and firing. Surviving bridge crew continued to operate their stations.

Engineering had their shields back up at eight percent
.

Hippolyta
shuddered again as the enemy battleship
The
Tornado
exploded .
The
Dark
Typhoon
burned out of control. All ships pulled away from it.

The
Maelstrom
attempted to withdraw, found itself trapped, and promptly surrendered.

The
Vortex
turned and fled in panic, along with the last few surviving enemy vessels.

Naero’s fleet had indeed shredded the enemy
, while they had focused all their firepower on
The
Hippolyta
.

Once
four of the five enemy battleships from the 3
rd
Khaido Fleet lay defeated, the battle was primarily won. The few remaining enemy warships that were able, broke off and attempted to flee.

“All ships, stay on them
,” Naero shouted. “Keep at them! Don’t let them jump. Take them down as they run.”

Naero op
ened a channel to the enemy vessels.

“T
riaxian forces. This battle is over. Enemy warships, power down and surrender–or be destroyed. There is no need for further loss of life. Stop fighting, come about, and give up. All prisoners will be treated fairly and with honor.”

The enemy ignored her and kept fighting and fleeing
.

Naero
and her fleet gunned them down on the run, leaving a trail of floating, burning wrecks behind them.

The rout became both desperate and deplorable
.

Once
enemy ships were clearly taken out of the fight, Naero’s people stopped firing on them and simply pushed on to gang up on the next target.

The
Hippolyta
opened its battered blast screens slightly at the flick of one finger. Naero focused intently on the remaining elements of the fleeing Triaxian fleet directly in front of her forces.

By now s
he wore a small, slap-on medpak adhered to the painfully scorched and formerly bleeding wound on her left, upper arm.

The en
emy fire that had penetrated the bridge killed two bridge crew outright–Ensign Draeden Khyber, Engineering and 2
nd
Leftenant Jisa Flynn, Life Support control stations, and one of her Marines guarding the lifts–Lance Corporal Zhon Keller.

Ten others
endured various light to moderate wounds, like her own.

Like their captain, t
hey all still served defiantly at their posts.

Th
eir comrades’ corpses lay at hand within body bags, placed off to one side.

Naero had only known them for a few months, but they
had already become her family.

They lived
, worked, and fought side-by-side.

Each loss
of one of her bridge crew felt like a dark knife, stabbed through her already troubled heart.

Back-up crew already
came up to run their stations.

If any of them fell–including herself–
others would step in to assume their duties.

Even if the main bridge was
wiped out, her XO–Commander Jaylen Maeris–waited to take over command of the ship within the separate backup bridge, well below them, in the most heavily protected core of the ship. This remained Alliance SOP on all primary warships.

Naero’s nostrils flared
. Her battered strike fleet pursued the remnants of the Triaxian fleets they had broken around Beleron-4.

Most of the enemy
forces they engaged lay scattered and burning behind her.

In
the wake of the relentless Alliance advance.

Holo readouts of each retreating vessel floated before her. Designation. Current status and heading, speed, damage reports. How close they were to jumping free of the battle to get away
.

Her bridge crew fed her a continual stream of updated battle info
.

One enemy fleet carrier, a pocket carrier, one G-Class battleship, two cruisers, three destroyers, thirty-one fighters and assorted transport, supply and support vessels
.

After the mauling they endured, half of the enemy ships were still on fire.
And one way or another, half of those would never make it into jump.

Warnings flashed critical for a split instant

The enemy pocket carrier,
The
Aspen
, suddenly went nova. Its shattered fusion drives, power core, and remaining ordnance detonated. The blast damaged the larger carrier,
The
Cottonwood
and the G-Class battleship nearby,
The
Vortex
, even further.

Naero called out over the open channel
.

“Enemy vessels. This is your last chance
; I say again–there is no need for further loss of life. I repeat. Come about and lower your shields. Power down your weapon arrays, and prepare to be boarded. Refuse, and we will resume our attack. Instantly.”

Seconds passed. Some of the smaller enemy ships
pulled ahead and jumped, if they were able.

Naero’s fighter waves stood poised on the enemy’s heels, ready to
roar in and help finish them off.

Let alone Naero’s white hot big guns on all of her main ships
.

The limping enemy battleship came about
.

But its captain’s message to her roared defiance
.

“Filthy, bloody, s
packs. We’ll die in flames before we let you enslave us. And we’ll take you with us. For Triax! Death to the Alliance!”

The link broke off
.

“All ships
, dispersal formation Kilo-November-4!”

Her
sharp new pilot, Enel Maeris, broke in from the helm.

“Captain, enemy shields full front.
Powering jump drives!”

Naero snapped in sudden anger. “I see it. Emergency wide dispersal
, Kilo-Oscar-9. All weapons, fire at will. Cut that ship down!

She rounded on her subordinate. “Ensign…interrupt me again when I am calling orders in a fight, and I will kindly shoot you in the goddam head.”

Her new pilot paled and began to apologize.

Naero stopped him with one
raised hand.

“I can see what they’re doing. Let me run things.”

“Y-yes, sir. S-sorry, sir,” Enel muttered.

Just before
The
Vortex
activated its jump drives close in to commit suicide—and blast a path of destruction through them—an intense barrage of concentrated Alliance naval fire punched into it.

Direct hits tore the enemy ship apart and stopped it in mid-charge
.

Then the gigantic quad guns of
The
Hippolyta
finally
cut loose.

All four
16 meter beams lit up the entire sector, blinding blue-white.

And blew the enemy battleship and its crew and captain straight to perdition
.

Only two lesser enemy ships staggered away into jump
.

All the rest came about and stood down, crying out in panic to surrender
.

Naero glanced back over at the body bags on the bridge
.

And they was just three KIA
.

Naero clenched both her fists.
It was all she could do to resist the urge to wipe out all of the enemy at their mercy.

Such was her contempt for Triax and the ways it conducted itself and its forces during the campaign
.

They attempted to question the prisoners about the
bizarre, twenty enemy fleets that had jumped out just before the other two fleets arrived.

The remaining officers of the 3
rd
and 7
th
Khaido fleets stared and blinked at them in confusion.

They obviously knew nothing about the phantom fleets, or what such large enemy forces had been doing in the middle of nowhere
.

It would have been a different story completely if Naero and her fleet had lost the battle
.

Unlike the Alliance
, Triax took no prisoners.

They brutalized their own worlds and were not above sacrificing them and their populations
, for little reason–
just like they did at Heaven-7
.

Anything to slow the Alliance advance
.

To her mind, after all that
Triax had done to her people, their allies, and especially her family and her Clans–they did not deserve consideration. Let alone the crimes against their own people. Triax could not be crushed hard enough, or fast enough for Naero’s liking.

And she remained hell-bent and determined to see that mission through to its bloo
dy conclusion, whatever the costs.

Triax, the first Gigacorporation
, and by far the worst of its vile kind, desperately needed to be wiped out of all existence. That purpose never left her thoughts.

Yet she had to continually remind herself that many of Triax’s long-suffering people were little more than pawns, dupes, and slaves themselves. Taught for generations to fear and hate
‘spacks.’

That
very term was an ultimate affront, a guttural, racial smear against Spacers from the days of the first, desperate Spacer War.

Most of the
landers probably didn’t know any better than the lies fed to them. Most landers never even met a Spacer. Yet they couldn’t all be rabid fanatics like the captain of that battleship.

She wondered how his crew felt, being dragged into suicide with that lunatic
, corporate zealot.

Damn it. All of those people c
ould have lived.

Spacers upheld the laws of war
, and took prisoners who surrendered.

Th
at crew could have all survived the war and gone home to their families afterwards.

Hundreds. Such a waste. Poor people
.

“Captain Maeris,” Leftenant Surina Marshall called out from her com station
.

Naero snapped her head around
.

“What the hell is it now?”

Surina, a fine officer and
abani
by now. Even she blinked.

Naero winced, lifting her fingertips to pinch the bridge between her eyebrows and above her slender nose
.

“My apologies,
leftenant. I did not mean to sound cross. Please speak.”

“It’s all right, sir,
” she said quietly.

“No, it’s not. Again, my apol
ogies, Rina. Report.”

Surina smiled slightly
.

“
Reinforcements will arrive shortly. Awaiting your orders to send our Marines out to board and pacify the enemy ships. And our recovery teams to collect and transport the enemy escape pods to the POW freighters. Thousands of them back there.”

Naero nodded. “Orders given. All ships and crews, well done. Let the recovery proceed. You know the drill by now.
Collect our people first. Elements not involved in the recovery, fan out and patrol the area in defensive sphere formation Delta-Zeta-15.”

She watched her fleet go into action, tracking their coordinated movements on her h
olodisplays.

“Fixer cloud control
, after you help put out those burning enemy ships, refit our own damaged vessels first.”