Federation Calendar, Year 58
The asteroid belt's jagged maw loomed in the void, a graveyard of colossal rocks tumbling in eternal silence, their pockmarked surfaces scarred by eons of cosmic grit. Hidden in Sector 279's lethal embrace, the Orcus Imperial Fleet crouched like predators in tall grass—208 warships, sleek and predatory, their hulls painted in the matte black of stealth alloys, nestled behind asteroid bulwarks. They waited, engines idling to a whisper, sensors hungry for the telltale ion trails of Federation prey stumbling into their web.
But the hunters became the hunted. From the rear flank, in the shadowed lee of a dense asteroid cluster, the 101st Combined Squadron exploded into motion—a phalanx of 144 vessels surging forward like a swarm of hornets from a kicked hive. Thrusters flared in controlled bursts, painting fleeting azure streaks across the black canvas, and the void ignited. Main batteries thrummed to life, capacitors whining as they discharged in a synchronized storm. Crimson lances of particle beams stabbed through the emptiness, converging on the Orcus carriers like vengeful specters. Explosions bloomed in silent fury, orange fireballs erupting where shields buckled and hulls rent open, venting atmosphere in ghostly plumes that froze into glittering debris fields.
Per Adrian Vale's ironclad directive, every gunner with a firing arc locked onto a carrier—prioritizing the fat, vulnerable behemoths that birthed Orcus's drone swarms. The barrage was surgical savagery: cruisers' spinal lances punched through armor like hot knives through foil, while destroyers' rapid-fire railguns stitched lines of tungsten fury across carrier flanks, shredding launch bays and crumpling flight decks. Alarms wailed across the Orcus net, a cacophony of klaxons and frantic shouts flooding comms channels as crews scrambled, their world shattering in a hail of relativistic death.
Aboard the Orcus flagship *Shadow's Fang*, Ninth Prince Doron Orcus sprawled in the command throne, one elbow propped on the armrest, chin in hand—a picture of bored entitlement. Fresh from the Empire's elite First Military Academy, where simulations and theorems had crowned him a prodigy, Doron had arrived at Jupiter's front with imperial sanction: "breathe the air of war," the Emperor had decreed. But Doron hungered for a notch on his belt, a tale to dazzle the court. Seizing command from the grizzled Rex under the guise of "strategic oversight," he'd orchestrated this ambush to etch his name in glory. Theory was his battlefield; reality, a mere stage.
"Report!" a sensor tech's voice cracked over the din.
Doron blinked lazily. "Speak."
"Hostile fleet—massive signatures astern! They're firing—shields failing on multiple vectors!"
"What? Astern?" Doron's composure cracked like thin ice, his hand dropping as he lurched forward. Through the bridge's panoramic viewport, a nightmare unfolded: fireballs blossomed to port, a frigate's hull erupting in a cataclysmic bloom of plasma and shrapnel, its wreckage spiraling into the asteroid it had sheltered behind. The blast wave—silent in vacuum but felt as a shudder through the deck—rattled the bridge, red emergency strobes painting the crew's faces in bloody hues.
"Fire back, you idiots!" Doron bellowed, slamming a fist on the console, his voice pitching high with panic. "What are you waiting for—a invitation?"
The bridge froze, a tableau of stunned silence amid the holographic chaos. Officers exchanged haunted glances, sweat beading on brows under the flickering lights. Rex, the veteran commander, stepped forward, his face a mask of grim resolve. "Your Highness, our primaries are forward-facing. We can't engage rear threats without repositioning."
Doron's eyes bulged, veins throbbing at his temples. "Then charge! Swing wide and flank their ass—basic envelopment! Do I have to spoon-feed you?"
Muttered curses rippled through the crew. Charge? Straight into the asteroid wall they'd hidden behind? It was a death sentence, hulls crumpling against unyielding rock in a symphony of screeching metal and explosive decompression.
Rex overrode the madness. "All ships, execute left pivot—full attitude thrusters! Accelerate clear of their arc!"
"Rex—" Doron snarled, rising halfway from his seat.
"Your Highness," Rex interrupted, voice like tempered steel, "discipline me at Jupiter. Right now, I save this fleet—and you."
Doron's face twisted in humiliated fury, the implication a slap: his "genius" would doom them all. If Rex could read minds, he'd affirm it without hesitation.
The fleet groaned into motion, vector nozzles firing in staccato bursts, hulls creaking as they wrestled inertia. But warships weren't nimble fighters; they were behemoths of alloy and fusion fire, their turns a ponderous ballet requiring three to five agonizing minutes. In that window, the 101st's onslaught was unrelenting—a tempest of beam fire and kinetic slugs that turned the void into a gauntlet of death. Frigates vaporized in instantaneous flares, their crews flash-frozen in the blink of an eye; cruisers listed, venting plasma like arterial blood, secondary explosions rippling through their guts as magazines cooked off.
On the *Vanguard's Edge*, Adrian leaned into the holotank's glow, the feed a ballet of destruction: enemy signatures winking out like dying stars. "They're pivoting left—right on script. Pour it on, especially the carriers. We gut their wings before they slip the noose."
"Affirmative!" Lena's voice was a whip-crack, her optic assigning fire lanes with lethal efficiency. Beams converged like a noose tightening, Orcus carriers shuddering under the deluge—shields flaring violet before collapsing in cascades of ionized gas, hulls buckling with thunderous cracks audible only in the crews' dying screams over intercepted comms.
Rex's bridge was a hellscape of alarms and acrid smoke from sparking consoles, the air thick with the ozone bite of overloads. Three minutes in, 52 ships lost—framed readouts flashing crimson as carriers fell like dominoes, 10 of 12 reduced to spinning wrecks, their bays spewing half-formed drones into the void like gutted entrails. *Why the carriers?* Rex's mind raced amid the chaos. *They're stripping our air cover—funneling us into a grinder.*
"Turn complete!" a helm officer gasped.
"Max thrust—break their range!" Rex barked, sweat stinging his eyes.
"Yes, sir!"
The fleet surged, but the math was merciless. Tactics officer's projection: five minutes to speed, ten more to escape. Losses? Projected 50%—104 ships to the scrapyard, crews atomized in the cold.
Rex hissed through clenched teeth. Doron's ego had carved them hollow. Only annihilating this Federation pack could salvage anything back at base. *Get behind them with what's left—even 100 hulls can flip the script.*
"Enemy carriers remaining?"
"One, critical damage!"
Adrian's grin was feral on his bridge, the holotank a canvas of flickering wrecks. "All batteries on that last bird—end it."
"Yes, sir!"
Three minutes of hellish fire later, the final carrier detonated in a spectacular nova, its reactor breach birthing a secondary sun that lit the belt in stark relief, asteroid shadows dancing like specters.
Five minutes on, the Orcus survivors hit flank speed, arcing left in a desperate bid to loop behind the 101st.
"Enemy arcing for our six," Lena reported, her voice steady amid the bridge's controlled frenzy.
"No sweat," Adrian replied, eyes gleaming. "Keep hammering—bleed them dry before they clear." He paused, optic pinging a subtle query. "Mechs' nuke traps set?"
"Affirmative—all per your specs."
Lena's thoughts whirled, the earlier "odd" order crystallizing: mechs embedding penetrating nukes deep into asteroid cores at precise coordinates. Nukes in vacuum were blunt tools—blast waves diffused without atmosphere, harmless unless kissed to a hull. But *penetrating* warheads, buried in rock? And the Orcus arc slicing right through in thirty minutes? Carrier purge to deny drones, forcing a predictable flight path...
It snapped into focus: a daisy-chain of doom, each layer herding the enemy deeper into Adrian's web. Shock rippled through her—admiration, reluctant and raw—as she stared at him, the full scope of his predatory calculus unfolding.
The void held its breath, the 101st's guns singing a requiem as the Orcus fleet barreled toward their uncharted grave.