A hundred and eleven hours later, I had moved along the spectrum. Now I was closer to afraid than angry as I watched the behemoths.
I had never fought the Borg before. I had always been too far away or assigned to non-combat duties. This time I was in the main attack force.
I didn't like it.
The four massive vessels had dropped out of warp well outside the system, continuing in wide formation, over ten light seconds apart. Space around them constantly swept with tachyon beams.
The vessels were still cubes, but over a third again as massive as the other cube and seemed... heavier armed and armored. They had been assigned the name of 'tactical cube' in our databases. It seemed fitting.
"Well...shit," Drake cursed from his seat next to my avatar, "I knew I should have taken that vacation to Risa."
I knew he didn't really mean that, but I nodded anyway. I understood the feeling.
Say what you want about the Borg, but adapt? Kinda what they did. We would not be able to pull the same ambush again. They were spread out enough that if we focused our forces on one, the rest could just either move around and continue on or support from their place in formation. With those tachyon beams, no cloaked ambush would work this time.
In exact terms, we were so fucked. Our best chance was to move in from one end of the formation and try to work our way in, doing our best to preserve our numbers. But the problem was that the Borg once again, adapted.
We could remodulate our beams, but there was a limited number of frequencies phasers worked on. Setting them on a random varying frequency would help, but only so much.
Torpedoes were better, you can't match frequency with an antimatter explosion. But they were just so...
Fuck that's a lot of tonnage and if they were like normal cubes, they could keep fighting with over seventy percent of their mass missing.
ROU's were many things, but made for sustained combat and durable, they were not.
The three GSV's that were built along with as many Islands that could get here in time were still busy evacuating Circle. It wouldn't be enough, he had a population of seven million. Nowhere near enough space to move that many people. Now, he was armed enough, both in hull and with weapons platforms that he could likely take a normal cube on this own, but these four?
The fleet was over two hundred strong and I was not even counting the three hundred odd ROU's gathered in that.
But that was a lot of fucking Borg... and this time they were being careful.
It was a joint operations, Starfleet and Jovian Defense Fleet. Admiral Picard on board of the U.S.S. Reliant Robin was in command of the fleet.
"Ivy... what are our odds on this one?" Drake asked after another moment of watching the display. "Honestly."
"Honestly? Slim," I sighed. "But our job is not to defeat them. Our job is to hold as long as possible. Give everyone else time to get out."
That was a rather sad objective. We were to hold the Borg back as long as we could, give them time to evacuate as many as possible and for Circle to trigger the self destruct on all the infrastructure at New Jupiter.
If the Borg didn't stop with New Jupiter, we would give the Federation as much time to initiate Operation Bugout as possible. But this was most likely it.
If the entirety of Starfleet had been here, we might have stood a chance. But Starfleet was spread out over two quadrants...and to be fair, so were most of our ships. What we had here was just what could be gathered in time.
"...Shit. At least my parents are still on Bajor, close to the Wormhole. They should make it out."
I nodded. I checked fleet deployment with Starfleet. Star was already out by Cardassian space. She and T'Ro would make it out as well. That felt nice.
When I contacted my crew, I made it clear that they didn't need to be here. I could fight almost as well without them here. Almost as well.
Jhita told me to go fuck myself, they were coming with.
I'm so proud of them. I still refused to take on the research staff as there was no need to risk them for no reason, but Jhita didn't like being ordered around and... honestly, she could be useful to help analyze the Borg shields and weapons. She was down in main engineering.
"All ships, this is Reliant Robin. Proceed with the attack plan. Cruisers lead the attack and draw their fire, lighter units follow and strike where you can. ROU's dump your torpedoes and retreat back in system to rearm. Do not return alone, wait for waves."
Ships all around me started to decloak and accelerate towards the approaching Borg. Taking a slow deep breath, I dropped my cloak as well, raising my shields before I followed them in.
Drake pressed a couple of buttons on the console on the armrest of his chair, "If we focus fire along with the Unrepressed Anger and the Account Overdraft on the same spot, we have a higher chance to break through the shield before they adapt."
I nodded, opening a channel to the other two ships, another pair of LOUs. "They agree," I told him after a second, "Unrepressed Anger is lead, we shoot the spot she shoots. If she goes down, I take lead."
"...Ivy..." Drake said softly and I spared him a small smile.
"I know."
Weapons, charged.
Shields at full.
Here we go then.
The first torpedoes lashed out, flooding the space as the fleet focused fire. The wave of antimatter warheads smashed into the first Borg cube. Its shields actually held for a couple of seconds before they collapsed and it started to take hits.
Nothing takes that much punishment and continues on. Not even a tactical cube. It was ripped into little pieces with secondary explosions before the Borg started to return fire.
One out of four down. One that had been a hell of a lot tougher than the last one we struck. Now the ROU's were out and retreated back in system to rearm. It would be at least ten to twenty minutes before they returned.
My launchers rearmed and I twisted in space, avoiding a seeking green beam before following the Anger in, opening fire with everything I had.
Some other ships were not as lucky. U.S.S. 'Let me look that up for you' was tumbling in space, half her forward hull missing as the War Island burned. Others were just turned into balls of plasma and gas as they took direct hits. Account Overdraft detonated in a fury of energy and plasma off my port beam as a ray of energy cored her from bow to stern.
Her warp core blew and the energy rocked me.
But it was not the warp core detonation that did the damage. It was the Borg Cutting Beam I could not avoid because of it.
The powerful energy weapon slashed, hitting me just behind the bow. My shields held for almost half a second as I desperately tried to evade while diverting power to the emitters. It wasn't enough. Nowhere near enough.
The beam dug into my hull, digging a meter wide gash in my hull, twenty meters deep, from bow to stern, almost all the way through my hull. Alarms screamed in my mind and if I had been biological, it would have been a lethal blow. But I was not, I was a warship, I was built to take hits. Half my engines were destroyed, I lost half my fusion reactors as they scrammed and sensor feeds dropped left and right. I lost fifteen people. But eighty percent of my weapons were still online. My shields were getting back up even with a few lost emitters.
I was hurt. Badly.
I had taken serious superstructure damage and that beam had been close enough to one of my antimatter tanks that the actual tank wall was against nothing but vacuum now.
But I could still fight at seventy three percent effectiveness and there was no time to grieve for my lost crewmen.
I returned fire, rerouting power to my remaining impulse drive and thrusters as my pulse phasers spat death towards the massive vessel. It didn't do much. They had adapted.
Barrel rolling, I twisted through space, barely avoiding another powerful beam of energy before starting to pull back to get some distance, buying time to recalibrate my weapons once more, seeking a frequency they hadn't adapted to yet.
Suddenly a brilliant blue beam slashed past me less than a hundred meters away, screaming on my gravimetric and subspace sensors. The Borg's shields popped like a soap bubble and the beam cored the Borg vessel before slicing straight up, ripping and tearing large pieces of the massive vessel, before the cube collapsed into itself, the rip in space-time closing a second later, leaving just drifting debris where the massive war machine had been.
GOU 'Plan B' had joined the fight.
AN// Big thanks to Pietersielie for betaing this section.
