The main display was aglow. Every bright spot of red and green marked a vessel or a swarm of fighters until it was a constellation of Zeon and Federation might. Points begun to mingle as
Titan glowered from behind a wall of escorts. A web of exhaust trails and curling anti-air fire turned vacuum into a mute lightshow. Then, as if simply to give the Zeon another target to shoot at, Tianem's lone escort accelerated past with a handful of fighters.
The Salamis-class was headed for the red Zanzibar-class on collison course. Beam guns firing, anti-air streaming, it plowed right through the exhaust trails of missiles leaping from tubes. The game of chicken between Zanzibar and Salamis drew into the tens of seconds, the Saberfish clinging to it erupting into plumes of rocket fuel and cooking munitions.
"FULL THRUST, 45 degrees port, thirty degrees down bubble!"
"Firing countermeasures!"
"—you're clear to launch from starboard hangar. Go kill some Feddie bastards for us."
The retros on the Zeon carrier's nose flared and spun it around, giving the Federation vessel a broadside sight picture before darting downward, 'sinking' below the deck. Three MS-06s lit from the hangar and scattered around the Salamis-class, darting in and around it.
Once the Salamis had been stripped of its escorts, the Zaku IIs closed in like a pack of hounds. The two wingmen split off and cut into the circling Saberfish with bursts of automatic fire. The formation leader twitched around the battlefield with an erratic meter that could have been mistaken for a symptom of a malfunctioning balancer. He carved a path straight through the expanding net of anti-air and loosed off bazooka rounds like pistols shots, striking the belly of the beast point-blank.
His machine was nearly swallowed up by the bursts of detonating shells, and the fire that consumed the main deck from a half-dozen craters. The Zanzibar held fire as the crippled machine passed overhead, spewing fire as a final rocket to the bridge finished it off. The Federation vessel listed past the Zanzibar's starboard side, more a cloud of flame than vessel.
Now abreast with a pack of Musai-class cruisers, the red Zanzibar aimed its nose squarely at
Titan. The crew fired off a laser-comm, the space between yet to be polluted with the Minovsky particles that followed the principality's battles.
"That's a third Salamis-class for the lieutenant, sir."
"Hell of a pilot."
"Reel in the Zakus for rearming."
"Yes sir!"
"Sir, they've received our laser ping."
"Broadcast this: Admiral Tianem, you are surrounded. Power down your main weapons and surrender at once!"
In the short moments that followed, the comms were entirely silent. Saberfish stayed close to the admiral's flagship, guns swiveled mute among the stars. It lasted until the squeal of new contacts filled the bridge.
"Sir, additional contacts approaching from behind the Titan! I detect two ships and a dozen smaller heat signatures... mobile suits among them!"
"What the hell are you waiting for? Order the assault force to take them down!"
Blinking dots on the horizon became smears as thrusters ignited all around the fleet. Musai cruisers loaded mobile suits onto catapults in partial states of re-armament. Yet the Federation fighters darted, corkscrewed and blew past the skirmishing mobile suits and Gattle fighters. They closed the distance in a few short seconds, making a run right for the red flagship.
It was charging straight into the jaws of death. For a moment, the fleet didn't react. Anti-air fire was sporadic. Then one of the Musai-class cruisers was hit with a miniature sun, the incredible flash of light boiling away armor plate, blotting the vessel's signature right off the main displays. The crippled vessel listed over spewing atmosphere and fire, and a moment later the waves were filled by the frienzied voices of several hundred Zeon personnel all trying to say their last words at once.
A few trickles of anti-air thickened into a lightshow of mega-particle beams, missiles and bullets. Titan lurched forward into the fray, and right on the heels of the Saberfish head long in their suicidal attack, the battered escorts that had held out for so long joined with their own fires.
The Zanzibar was in a state of chaos as another missile had smashed across the hull and radioactivity warnings spiked all throughout the vessel. Men and women fumbled with helmet-seats and lashed down the thousands of little objects that could become fatal projectiles during an evasive manuver. Somewhere in that disarray, the lieutenant's lone MS-06 lined up on the catapult deck.
"Those were nuclear weapons! The Feddies are fighting back!
"Sir, the catapult deck reports that the ensign is armed and hot!"
"And the wingmen?"
"They just refueled, sir. They won't be armed for another two minutes."
"—all ships, Lady Kycilia has ordered a general withdrawal of the fleet. Lord Dozle is to handle the Feddies while we withdraw."
"Like hell we are! Tianem's in our fingertips. Flank speed! Give me that vessel!"
The zanzibar lurched once more, coming about with guns swiveling. A moment, later the second missile impacted the hull and swallowed up most of port-side living quarters in a growing ball of fire and light, a constellation of dust and metal pinpricks scattering out the side of the Zanzibar. As the flagship begun to list and Zeon pilots were slammed into bulkheads, the other missiles came all at once.
One missile crashed into the very nose of the zanzibar, the rolling cloud of atomic fire crashing into the meter-thick glass of the bridge and turning it into yet another stretch of slag. Without a working brain to guide it, the Zanzibar's guns swiveled blindly, a striken silence pervaded the vessel.
It seemed a graveyard until the lone Zaku smashed open a jammed hangar bay door and slung into space on its lonesome. Radio chatter aboard the striken vessel picked up in the pilot's wake.
"Engineering? Get us turned the fuck around, we just lost the entire CIC!"
"Who just launched?"
"Fuck, I don't know."
"Ridden? It was ensign Ridden!"
"Poor Feddie motherfuckers. I hope he makes them burn."
