Fiction Friday: Series 4 - Part 22

Previously:
Prologue Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13
Part 14 Part 15 Part 16 Part 17 Part 18 Part 19 Part 20 Part 21
 
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 "Sure, she will probably engage and play with targets on the undock, but how can we keep her there long enough to kill?" Greyhound asked skeptically while signally the waitress for another ale. 


"We could cyno in our dreadnoughts," Max suggested. "We can probably get four or five together easy."


I frowned. "That still wouldn't be enough to get through her shields and then armour before she was cleared by station control and allowed to dock." I took a drink of my beer before continuing, "we need some way to get her to commit longer than she would normally."


Greyhound leaned forward with an evil glint in his eyes. "Or we don't show our entire hand right away." 


"Yeah!" Max jumped in as he understood what his friend was getting at. "We send in some battleships, cruisers, enough to work down to her armour..." 


"But not enough that she decided to disengage," I finish. "Her arrogance will lead her to believe we are incompetent at launching a trap instead of really setting her up for the real one."


"Once the armour is leaking we drop the dreads and they work with the subcaps to finish the job before she can get clearance." Max beamed  a big friendly smile. "That might even work!"


Greyhound got serious again. "It will still be tight, we won't have much in the way of margin of error. And besides, she might decided to bug out with just the sight of the subcaps." 


It was my turn to smile. "I think I can help out there..."



As the subspace beacon was generated by one of the battlecruisers, and innocuous Ferox of all things, five pilots in various nearby low sec systems locked on to the signature and activated their jump drives. They entered their own personal wormholes that delivered the huge capital ships to Teshkat with a crash of subspace interference announcing their arrival. A Moros, three Phoenixes, and a Revelation.

The Archon's fighters immediately aborted their attack runs on me  and began to return to the carrier. "Overheat guns!" Grey shouted into comms. "Dreads, siege is green, siege is green!" The Dreadnoughts moved into siege mode and their weapons opened firing with blistering effect. The already damaged Archon's armour plates began to fly off in chunks as the Citadel torpedoes crashed into it and exploded with blinding flashes.

"She's de-aggressed!" Max called out on comms from one of the Phoenix dreadnoughts. "But she's going down fast! Its going to be close."

The armour was almost all gone and my ship's sensors started to pick up venting gases and plasma as the target's internal structure was compromised. Seconds now. Just seconds. That's all we needed.