To Hell and Back (Hellworlder pirates)

Ch 76 Into the Fire Pt.IV

Into the Fire Pt.IV

It didn't take long for the Kruhur ships to reorient themselves and warp after the fleeing Astaroth, but by the time they did the Astaroth already had a huge lead. They were dumping all the extra charge in the super capacitors into the warp emitters and were pushing the reactors to their limits. The whole ship was running on emergency mode, with only the most essential systems online, so that they could pump a little more power into the warp emitters. Giving it all they had they were able to just barely hit 7.03 kilo-lights which was more than enough to give them a massive growing lead on the tailing Kruhur, especially the cruisers.

For a while it looked like they might make a clean break for it, but after a few minutes several Kruhur destroyers began to slowly inch forward faster and faster. They had coaxed enough power out of their ships to achieve a speed of 7.3 and were now closing in on the Astaroth. Astarte watched with growing concern as their enemies continued to slowly close the gap and gritted her teeth. "Prepare javelin missiles and the grav-spike, we going to drop them out of warp and hit them before their shields can kick in. I want two missiles for every ship."

A gunnery officer turned to her "Sir, we're already low on missiles, we don't have enough to hit all seven targets with two missiles each."

Astarte cursed internally and pulled up the ship's munitions log to get a better idea of what they had to work with "Then fire one javelin with three bodkins, even if they take out the javelins we might be able to do enough damage with the bodkins to knock them out of the fight."

"Aye, aye sir" The gunnery officer said with a salute as he turned back to his station.

The distance between them continued to close, and before the enemy had a chance to react the Astaroth dropped out of warp and initiated its grav-spike, creating a field of distorted space to drop the pursuing ships out of warp. They kept the range of distortion short so that the enemy wouldn't have time to react or respond to their ambush. Seven enemy destroyers were shunted out of warp, and were temporarily confused by the sudden return to relativistic speeds. They gave the enemy little time to react as seven javelins and twenty-one bodkin missiles launched out of the Astaroth's missile launchers. They even activated the remaining the signal jammers and particle emitters to blind the Kruhur destroyers.

Enemy missile defense systems filled the space with short bursts of pulse fire, but were incapable of firing quick enough to effectively handle the oncoming barrage. Pulse fire was great for reliably hitting and depleting enemy shields, but they had an abysmal right of fire and just couldn't fill an area of space with anti-missile fire quite like a railgun could. Of the seven launched javelins only six hit their targets, they struck the destroyers right in the midships and caused catastrophic damage. The remaining destroyer had shot down the javelin coming its way, but missed the bodkins which struck at its engines, antenna, and bridge.

Of the seven ships only two appeared to be well and truly destroyed, with the five remaining ships appearing to have received heavy damage. They were about to disengage the grav-spike and continue fleeing when a hostile disturbance field overlapped their own and prevented them from escaping. The well-trained crew of the Astaroth quickly identified the source of the disturbance field and focused the foremost cannons on them and quickly turned the offending ship into a floating pile of molten slag. With the enemy grav-spike taken care of they once again attempted to flee the battle space, but not before a single missile fired by the now destroyed ship hit them just aft of their rear cannons. The lights within the ship brightened momentarily as the aft cannons exploded and a back surge of electricity hit their systems.