Series: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
Outside Agitators Part 10: The Battle of Khazara Part 3
2323 Q3M1
With seven and a half Breen J.II-type battleships on the field, withdrawing was easier said than done.
An Aehallh, locked in a duel with a cruiser, lost shields and took some hull damage under a series of well aimed shots before striking back against a second cruiser and narrowly dodging a capital ship moving in for the kill. A Khellian finally finished off the persistent little Breen frigate, blasting a hole straight through part of the engineering section. A Bird of Prey landed a good shot on one of the worse-off Breen cruisers. It was hard to keep track of everything happening at once.
The crippled Breen J.II turned to face the Kelsatha again, armor still glowing with heat and a faint trail of hot gas and debris following it. A beam lanced out to touch the Kelsatha's shields for an instant before it died just as suddenly as a large chunk of the ship visibly lost power before coming back up seconds later.
"Shields holding at 15.8%."
They were probably still outmatched, but Ferash liked this fight quite a bit better.
The IRW Tresdan collapsed a cruiser's shields with a spray of disrupter fire. The Stormwind, trying to withdraw, was knocked out of warp before the field could even form by a subspace pulse. A cruiser closed in on it and blasted the shields twice. A Bird of Prey struck at the cruiser that had been dueling the damaged Aehallh, cutting a gash into the hull. A third cruiser hit the outpost with a torpedo, but shields were holding for the moment.
As the damaged Aehallh landed a shot on its opponent, the now badly damaged cruiser had visibly turned its most intact side to face its attackers. Ferash saw an opportunity.
"Gryer, give us a pass on that cruiser. Bimak, fire at will."
Their phasers struck the cruiser, digging deep. The ship was still holding together somehow, but systems seemed to be on the edge of failing.
As they tried to come around for another pass, the two Birds of Prey were ganging up on one of the other more damaged cruisers, cutting into the hull and severing something important in the impulse engines.
The ruined hulk of the Breen battleship struck at the Kelsatha with a lower power beam, their power holding this time. Their shields flared with the blast, but they were holding well.
"Shields at 14% and holding."
They could take this for a little while longer, but needed to hit back if they wanted to win.
A Khellian, trying to cover the attempted retreat of a pair of Aehallhs, took a whithering series of hits from a J.II. The Stormwind dodged a torpedo from one capital ship before landing one of its own on a second battleship. Shields seemed to be holding, unfortunately. Another capital ship ripped at one of the Birds of Prey, disabling sensors and weapons.
"Phasers on that battleship!"
Their beam was stopped cold by its shields, but it was distracted long enough for the Bird of Prey to escape.
The IRW Tresden landed a disrupter shot in a cruiser, which turned and fired on the Kelsatha as they passed.
"Shields at 8%!"
A cruiser which had just been just been hit by fire from the outpost suddenly disappeared in a brilliant explosion. Probably a warp core breach. A capital ship returned fire several times, doing significant damage with shield burn-through. A shot from the Karethvaek did little to discourage it.
The Stormwind, trying to escape again, lost reaction engines to a carefully aimed hit as they tried to get out of subspace pulse range. The most heavily damaged Aehallh, now trying to escape the same way, lost power under sustained fire from a pair of J.IIs.
One Bird of Prey fired on a pair of capital ships, distracting them as another fled the battle at impulse, cloaked and ran for the outer system. The first ship was away.
The Kelsatha came around for another attack on the crippled cruiser, but just before they could fire one of the two remaining Birds of Prey cut deep into it with disrupter fire, finally silencing it.
The smoldering, half-ruined battleship that had been after them from the start took the opportunity to send another shot their way. It drained their shields a bit, but it was manageable: they still hadn't fixed whatever damage was limiting their power.
"Shields at 7%."
They couldn't take much more of this. If the J.II kept hitting them or another ship joined in, it wouldn't be good.
Around them, a cruiser and an Bird of Prey exchanged fire while a battleship struck at the outpost, its shields finally starting to weaken as a second J.II joined in. Yet another poured fire into the crippled Aehallh, exposing several decks to space.
Gryer sent the ship jinking and twisting to avoid another shot from the crippled battleship, disrupting their attempt to line up a shot of their own.
Using the ongoing fight between the lighter Romulan forces and the Breen cruisers as a distraction, the Stormwind and Tresdan repeated the Bird of Prey's trick, fleeing on impulse, cloaking and scattering to the outer system before warping away. A J.II tried to hit them with their subspace pulse weapon, but they were long gone.
The D-7 struck at the crippled capital ship, taking down the faint traces of a shield they had just managed to restore. For their part, the Kelsatha took an opportunistic shot at one of the other capitals, striking it again shortly after.
The damaged Aehallh took a hit to main life support. With no weapons, a rapidly failing ship and a limited air supply, they were almost out of options. The Aehallh's captain did something normal doctrine absolultely prohibited: they cloaked while under fire. With neither shields nor weapons but power to spare, they had nothing to lose and anything that might prevent another hit was worth a try. They burned towards Khazara under impulse and deorbited, choosing the risk of burning up on reentry due to their extensive hull damage over certain death at the hands of the Breen fleet. Ferash wished them luck.
With more and more Romulan combatants fled or disabled and damage adding up, the situation was looking worse every minute. Around them, the D-7 took a hit that almost took down their shields, while a Bird of Prey wasn't so lucky, suffering a significant hull breach as shields collapsed. The outpost was doing only a little better: shields were finally gone, and a large gash in the hull exposed the ruins of some kind of engineering space.
"Orders coming in! We're to form up around the Karethvek to cover for a retreat!", Forgyr shouted from the comms station.
Ferash wasn't happy about it, but he could hardly expect the Romulans to throw away Romulan lives when there were Federation ones that could do just as well. The trick, now, would be making sure it was Breen lives instead. "You heard him. Bring us around!"
In moments, the chaos of the battlefield rearranged itself, with Romulan ships pulling away from their individual fights and breaking off into two groups, one burning for the outer system and the other, lead by the mighty IRW Karethvek, doing their best to delay the Breen for a few, crucial minutes. Two Khellians, an Aehallh and a Bird of Prey trying to get away, while they held the line along side another Khellian, a D-7, and an Aehallh and Bird of Prey of their own. Whatever cold calculus of positioning, capability and value to the war drove this particular breakdown, the Romulan commander had to know that some of the ships covering the retreat would not return.
As the Karethvek moved to stop a capital ship and cruiser from pursuing the fleeing ships, the Kelsatha swerved to avoid fire from another cruiser, striking back with their phasers, burning a gash into its armor. A pair of Breen battleships and a single cruiser, not having yet reacted to the mass retreat, continued slowly destroying the outpost.
The retreating ships, now out of effective weapons range, cloaked, split up and headed for the edge of the Breen subspace pulse weapon's range as fast as they could. Just a little longer and their job would be done and it would be their turn to try to escape.
Two capital ships, the half-wrecked hulk and one other, seemed determined not to give them the chance. A spray of weak beams from the ruined J.II found them, one after another, as they tried to use it to block the other J.II's firing arc.
"Shields at 6.5%! 6%!"
The second capital ship managed to get a shot on them, but it spent most of its energy heating up the plume of gas and debris that the ruined ship was leaving in its wake, hitting no harder than the other beams.
"5.5%!"
Another hit from the ruined J.II: "5%!"
The fleeing ships took that moment to go to warp, first one, then two more, then a fourth warp field collapsing before it could form as a subspace pulse hit it. One Khellian had cut it too close.
The more intact of the two battleships instantly broke of from its fight with the Kelsatha to try to run down the stranded Khellian. Gryer took this as an opportunity, maneuvering aggressively to keep them on the side of their remaining attacker where the magazine explosion had scoured the hull clean of all weapons mounts.
Behind them, one of the capital ships attacking the outpost hit it twice, blowing a chunk out of it with some kind of small secondary explosion. A cloud of escape pods started to drift away from it on litle jets of cold gas: the outpost's commander could tell how the battle would end for them.
The cruiser they had been fighting with earlier was back. Swinging around the capital ship they were now hiding behind, tried to line up a shot before they landed one first, exposing two decks to space.
At the edge of the system, a warp field formed. A subspace pulse went out, but the warp field held. By some miracle of luck or skill, the stranded Khellian had recovered much faster than usual, evaded the capital ship that was hunting it and gotten away.
The battle wasn't over, but their role in it was. All that was left was to try to disengage themselves.
Around them, the outpost continued to take fire and the a Breen cruiser burned a ragged gash into the trailing edge of the remaining Bird of Prey's wing. The outpost continued to take fire, escape pods re-entering in Khazara's atmosphere bellow.
The remaining Aehallh, swooping through the battle, launched a torpedo at the ruined capital ship. Ferash barely noticed in time.
"Gryer, give us some distance!"
They lurched away, desperately trying to keep clear of the blast. The explosion rocked the ship, but rather than the cataclysmic warp core breech he'd been fearing, the Breen battleship merely crumbled into three chunks and a cloud of smaller debris. There was a bit of a light show as they were bombarded with hot plasma and scraps of hull material, but their shields held without a meaningful drain.
It was well and truly time to leave.
The holding action was soon devolving into a pair of running battles, the Kelsatha and the D-7 running one direction pursued by two cruisers and a capital ship, while the Karethvek and its escort of an Aehallh and a Bird of Prey headed in the opposite direction followed by three battleships and a cruiser, the remainder continuing their single-minded demolition of Khazara outpost.
A shot from the D-7 carved a hole straight through one of the cruisers, somehow managing to miss anything truly vital. It was shrouded in a plume of leaking air and EPS plasma and looked to be barely holding together, but it was still operational. Unable to keep up, it turned back towards Khazara and the outpost.
Breezak abruptly spoke up from the sensors station. "Their subspace pulse weapon isn't charged!"
Finally a stroke of good luck. "They must have already used it. We can go to warp when we're out of range of the other capitals. Forgyr, tell the Inydar the good news."
The two ships redoubled their efforts, the D-7 pushing their impulse drive to the limit. Painfully slowly, they seemed to be outrunning their perusers. Neither ship should have been faster at sublight than a Breen cruiser, but they could make slightly better speed than the battleship, and the Breen seemed hesitant to send the cruiser forward against them alone.
They'd pulled ahead past the edge of the Breen's effective weapon range, and were now finally getting close to the boundary of the subspace pulse weapon's effective range for the ships finishing off the outpost. Perhaps seing their chance slipping away, the Breen cruiser accelerated. Their lead wasn't going to last much longer.
The Breen battleship stopped trying so hard to catch them, instead focusing on lining up a few extreme-range shots. Most went wide, but two of them struck the D-7, collapsing its shields in a cascade of overloads and ripping into the impulse engines. The cruiser would catch them before they could safely go to warp.
Ferash wasn't going to let that happen. "Bimak, be ready on tractors! We're taking them with us!"
They cut thrust and swung around closer to the stricken D-7, taking it under tow and then bringing their impulse engines back up at full thrust. He knew the inertial compensators were handling it, but Ferash could swear he felt a slight lurch when the tractor beam connected.
As they finally closed in on safety, the cruiser was just reaching the edge of its own weapons range. A shot lanced out at them, striking their shields with a flash of light. Their shield visibly wobbled, on the edge of bursting like an over-sized soap bubble, but it somehow held.
"Take us to warp! We're close enough!"
The expected subspace pulse fired off almost at once. Their field wavered, but they were able to stabilize it. Oddly enough, the D-7's warp field was rock solid from the start.
When they realized the Breen weren't following, he let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. They were away. The tension on the bridge started to melt away.
Out of nowhere, Bimak started giggling, first a bit nervously and then with genuine mirth. He shot her a look, but left it at that. He'd seen that kind of response to getting out of a stressful situation alive before, and he could forgive it easily enough.
"It's just..." She snorted. "Shields are at 1%."
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The rendezvous point was a nameless, cold, dead gas giant that had been ejected into interstellar space billions of years ago. With a handful of equally nameless, cold and dead moons and a sparse ring of rocky and metallic debris, it was just like any of tens of thousands of similar objects that had been cataloged, unusual only in that wiurizite deposits in the rings interacted with the rouge planet's magnetic field to create exotic radiation that helped obscure long range sensor readings. A minefield provided fixed defenses, while a pair of sensor platforms in a distant orbit provided advance warning. Not exactly a fortress system, but a well prepared and well chosen fall-back point for a fleet that made heavy use of stealth. Ferash wondered how long this had been here, and which enemy it was set up to prepare for. The Breen? The Klingons? The Federation?
They hid it well, but it was clear everyone was a bit surprised to see the two oldest ships in the fleet, especially while the others remained unaccounted for. Still, after updating the leadership and other captains on the events at the end of the battle, there was nothing to do but wait.
Finally, a single ship came out of warp. It was the Karethvek, shields gone, hull battered and scarred. Beaten, but unbroken.
No more ships returned.
A/N: Apologies for the delay.
I stuck pretty close to the logs, or at least my own notes on the highlights, for these three segments. Yes, the Kelsatha really ended at 1% shields. I couldn't believe it either. I did try to tie things together into a cohesive narrative, though, and have fluffed things to fit and in a few cases even slightly tweaked timing of unrelated events. But basically, this is what happened.
This is my first time writing up a fleet battle. Hopefully it doesn't show too badly.
