General Pryor reviewed the ship, Eyrie, after arrival as the troops bolted down in anticipation of the hard run they were about to make. The transport departed, to return to his main battleship, the Exorbit. His bridge crew began exchanging strategy with the clairsentient mind of the smaller escort about how they were going to disengage from the battle.
The problem with space battles was that they advanced by the slow march of millispans of time. They were more like space sieges, and tended to last for killospans, sometimes as long as a megaspan as the counters and attacks played against each other over thousands of killoleagues in all directions.
While the rebel ships stalled Pryor's fleet just outside the hellgate, rebel forces were trying to take over the Foronikon Asty star system, closer to the core of its political seat. Pryor didn't have months to wait it out while stranded in a bubble of prohibited communications.
Eyrie's engines shook the hull hard with the full force of their nuclear combustion, propelling the ship away from the fight. Normally the fastest ship in Pryor's fleet, it struggled against a massive inertial reduction force. Spheres of hard, artificial gravity control pulled all objects in towards each of the massive cruisers in the main battle with the intent of preventing just the sort of thing that the Eyrie was now attempting. The force of the ship's hard thrust would crush the humans inside if its own artificial gravity weren't actually acting in reverse to ease the local physical forces on them.
A phalanx of rebel mechas peeled from the fray to pursue, their lower mass allowing them to gain rapidly on the escort. Their smaller arms, however were no match for the defenses of the Eyrie, and the corvette's point cannons picked them off as they orbited too close. A volley of missiles reached out from the rebel cruisers, but already they were pulling free of the artificial gravity pull of the battlefield and well out of range. They were lost to the Eyrie's vaporous tail of exhaust.
Pryor took one last look at the battlemap, and submitted the hope the the Exorbit would ultimately prevail without him.
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Hard Vacuum: Short Episodes In The Future
Ciencia FicciónSpace, spies, politics, and an ancient horror. A warrior king has just conquered the solar system of Gorm. Now he just has to hold onto it while the displaced actors of the previous regime scheme against him and each other for power. A computer ha...
