Outbound towards Grand Coreward Trunk
Its name was a derivative of the Great Thug, a massive paddleboat steamer ship from the antiquities of Bragulan histories displayed in a museum on Bragule itself. It was a vessel from a time before Bragulankind had discoverd the might of the almighty atom and instead relied on shoveling copious amount of coals into steam engines (in some worlds, they still did this, actually). Some said that it was on that ship that the great Imperator was born in a manger centuries ago in the first-ever Bragsday, others said that his father was a steamboat captain who lurked in the bayou whilst raiding and drowning the bourgeois enemies of the revolution, while a few even dared to venture and say that the antique vessel had nothing to do at all with the Imperator for it was a paleotechnofossil hailing from prehistoric times. Either way, the Arbitrators didn't bother stick-beating people for these idle speculations so long as their thought contents remained ideologically inoffensive (although stick-beatings were also used to examine thought contents), but the main point was that the gunskimmer Grand Thug was named after something big and important currently festooned on someplace on the Imperial capital of mighty Bragule itself.
Those in the Imperial Space Fleet subscribed to the notion of the Great Thug having raided enemy shores during pre-Cambrian times, back in the geological era when the continents of Bragule were united in one Pangaean mass unmarred by plate tectonics or continental drift. Sometimes, it was said that Byzon's father captained the ship, other times it was said to be the Imperator's mother when she was pregnant with him, but most importantly the Grand Thug, like its historical pseudo-namesake, was also constructed for the purpose of raiding enemy places in the name of mighty Bragule.
They just did that back in the Reisenburg system, Umeria's very own capital, though not in a physical attack but a psychological one, making the Umerian space command shit their pants. Though upon seeing the size of the Umerians' big honking space guns, the crews of the Grand Thug also felt that very same urge. Which was the whole point of it all. For aside from surprising the Umerians by going 'boo', and delivering a number of vegemite-encrusted nuclear weapons right on time, the Grand Thug was also festooned with all manner and forms of sensor arrays, from hyperspatial ones and primitive radars, to even passive-aggressive phased arrays mounted on mechanically scanned arrays (to fool puny humans into thinking Bragulans used mechanical arrays, when there were phased ones mounted on them, in a feat of clever bragskirovka). Thus, with these, they were able to gauge the defense capabilities of the Umerians there in their own capital, thus allowing them to extrapolate a measure of the humans' general defensiveness as a whole.
With their mission accomplished, the Grand Thug was now heading home. It was not going to fly straight through Umeria, bypassing French space and making a direct line back to the K-Zone, no. The ship had the unique opportunity to explore the Spinward Expanse, the Spin Zone, a place seldom, if ever, patrolled by the Bragulan Space Fleet. It was going to take the scenic route instead. It would fly in the clear black areas near the shoals between Umeria and the Regency of the Engine, and make a narrow pass by Elysian space and then by the Prussianoid territories as well (traveling in the thin patch of international space between Prussia and the Regency of the Engine), before making a stop at friendly Altacar. As the Thug took its joyride, its sensor arrays scanned the whole area of space and took in everything it could within its detection radius. It was no CEID spystar, but still, it did not have to hide under cloaking fields or scatterscreens, and was free to turn its sensors on to active scanning while it sailed with the Bragulan flag held high. No fool would dare attack a warship of the Bragulan Star Empire. No one would be stupid enough to tempt Koprulu Zone rules, 'cause they did everything to the eleventh degree over there, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Right?
Wrong.
"As most of you may know, we're not home yet. We're noway there. The Thug interrupted our journey for she's programed to do so unless things change. Things have changed. It seems that she has... intercepted a transmission of unknown origin. She got us up to check it out." Captain Yurgi Raghwarinoff explained to the assembled crew. The Commissar was with them too, eating a bronto-burger voraciously. Strangely for a bear with such appetites, he remained thin and quite lean.
"A transmission? Out here in remote space?" commented Ryply, their female electronic warfare officer.
"What kind of a transmission?" asked Bragbert, another female, the engineer.
"Acoustical beacon. It, uh... repeats at intervals of 12 seconds." Captain Yurgi replied.
"S.O.S.?" an acronym standing for 'save our shits'.
"I don't know." Yurgi answered.
"Human?" Ryply asked.
"Unknown."
Niva-class Gunskimmer Grand Thug
Deep Space, Somewhere in Sector T-7
The Thug dropped out of hyperspace and approached the source of the distress signal, a derelict spacecraft that had crashed into a planetoid. It was a mass primarily composed of ice and dust, perhaps a large piece of ejecta discharged during the formulations of some solar system. The vessel had crashed right into it, plowing into the solid chunk of ice, so it was in pretty poor shape, with a damaged hull that was broken in several places. There were several possibilities as to how the vessel ended up the way it was, though none of them were pleasant. One, it could've collided into the planetoid while traveling through hyperspace, in a freak accident. Two, perhaps there was an emergency and it had to return to realspace and crash land into the planetoid. Three, it had crashed there after suffering an attack - by pirates, raiders, or the warships of someone's navy.
The gunskimmer neared the space hulk. It was quite hard to tell the age of wrecks like these, in vacuum or near vacuum a hulk wouldn't rust, and any cadavers floating in orbit to the thing's gravity well would be mummified by the cold and vacuum, making any attempt at collision scene investigation and forensics moot. Space was the ultimate preservative, after all. So the vessel's crew began smearing the derelict spacecraft with active sensors, while using the gunskimmer's optics to visually inspect the craft with their space microscopes.
Upon further inspection, they discovered several things. The vessel had a horrible-looking design, with rounded edges and a Gigerian aesthetic replete with looping intestine-like structures that made it resemble an organoid. It had only one marking on it, which the Bragulans did not recognize, namely a six-pointed star. And, lastly, its hull had been damaged by weapons fire.
Meanwhile, the signal pulsed on.
They had sent down an away team to inspect the vessel. Not really because they were concerned for any survivors, but because the derelict was of an unknown category and perhaps there was something useful inside it. If not technology or hardware to be salvaged, then there were always supplies. Space was the ultimate preservative, everything from bronto-burgers to Freedom Beefs could last for thousands of years in the vacuum and still remain edible. The Commissar, still reeking of Zigonian incense and experiencing profound hunger, demanded an expedition to be sent. He did not specifically demand that they find him additional foodstuffs (because at the rate of his consumption, they would run out of supplies midway through the trip), but merely encouraged them to exercise their initiative on this, their longest ever independent patrol. After all, crews in independent patrols were expected to take risks, and gather new information through a myriad of means.
There was some worries about encountering a Karlack-infested space hulk, or finding a Karlack clutch of xenogauntlingmorph eggs and getting someone implanted with larvae, but they were too far out from Karlack space for fears of spawned broodlings to be realistic. Still, some of the crews were uneasy.
"Bash, that transmission... the Thug's deciphered part of it. It doesn't look like an S.O.S." Ryply told the weapon's officer, the aptly named Bash.
"What is it, then?" he asked.
"Well, I... it looks like a warning. I'm gonna go out after them." Ryply replied, obviously worried.
"What's the point? I mean by the, the time it takes to get there, you'll... they'll know if it's a warning or not, yes?" Bash shrugged.
Before Ryply could reply, she was cut off by the blaring of proximity alarms. Something was coming in from hyperspace. Ryply looked at her telescreen display and saw that there were many somethings, at least two of them.
"Shits! We have incoming!" she shouted. "Two contacts, medium-sized, they're fast."
"Everyone, man your battle stations. Get our people back on board and get us off this rock!" Captain Yurgi barked. The commands were relayed, and in record time the away team scrambled back into the ship. Then, with a jolt of igniting liquid uranium/liquid plutonium boosters, the gunskimmer lifted off the planetoid. "I want shields up and all weapons systems online now."
Bash acknowledged his captain's orders and started barking instructions to the gunners manning the K-bolters, missile racks and torpedo tubes. Afterwards, he reported that barely half of the gunskimmer's weapons were functional.
"Shits!" Captain Yurgi cursed. This was nobody's fault, since part of their mission to Umeria was to deliver a shipment of missiles - which happened to be the gunskimmer's own warload of vegemite-encrusted nuclear weapons. So all the encrusted missiles were literally sold out, and the only weapons they had were nuclear missiles of the non-encrusted variety as well as the eighteen medium K-bolters stuck on the gunskimmer. Craps. Yurgi regretted not mounting the extra missile tubes on the external hardpoints on the ship's hull, but there was little he could do since part of the Bragulan directives when sending ships out to diplomatic visits to other polities was to not mount extra missiles on the hardpoints but to mount things that looked like several dozen giant lawn chairs riveted to the hull for some inexplicable reason instead. That inexplicable reason was bragskirovka, to confuse the enemy into wondering what the purpose of the extraneous add-ons were, when in fact they concealed hardpoints for extra missiles to be used in wartime. But sometimes, just sometimes, in cases like these strategic doublethinking was not all it was cracked up to be. "When are the incomings due?"
"In a minute." Ryply replied. She was the electronic warfare officer, but the sensor arrays of Bragulan ships counted as electronic weapons. "Orders?"
"Hurm..." as in any combat situation, there were two options. First choice was to run, to tuck tail and flee like a frightened cubling in front of all these Spin Zoners, to bring dishonor upon the Bragulan Star Empire in a pathetic showing of its Space Fleet. No one would hold it against them, they were outnumbered and quite possibly outgunned. Second choice was to fight, and as the Imperator once said 'There are alternate ways out of our present situation than by forging a road toward our objective, violently and by force, over a sea of blood and under a horizon blazing with fire. But this way is the Bragulan way.' So there was no choice. "As soon as the first vessel emerges from hyperspace, I want you to initiate standard attack protocol #543. They outnumber us, and they think they can take us, so they might outgun us as well. But its too bad..."
"Realspace reentry in five seconds."
"...Because nobody can outgun Bragulans." Yurgi growled.
Haunebu V-class saucer-disc destroyer
Deep Space, Somewhere in Sector T-7
They had set up a trap, an ambush. After downing a ship full of those they deemed undesirable, they waited in hyperspace for whoever would answer the shipwreck's distress beacon, and when someone came to take a look, the wolves would attack their unwary victims. The Volkslander disc-destroyers were space wolves and hunted in packs or in pairs, singling out easy prey, isolating them and coming in for the kill. They worked with ruthless efficiency, befitting their heritage. They were cold blooded killers. They showed no mercy, no remorse.
And they would get none.
The Grand Thug was no mere defenseless deer doe, no mere entrapped elk. Unable to recognize the strange signatures of their would-be prey, the Volkslander wolves ended up pouncing upon no normal animal of the wilderness of space. It was not a docile grazer, not a harmless hare that would keel over and die to the predator's tooth and claw. What the Volkslander wolves had happened upon was a bear. And as it rose from the half-buried carcass strewn on that forsaken planetoid, the grizzly beast roared in the fury of its discontentment.
The hunters had become the hunted.
The Thug's atomic pulse engines exploded into action, detonating it at backbreaking velocities towards the closest saucer-disc, the one that had hypered out first. The saucer-discs did not expect this, perhaps they had gotten used to their prey fleeing like frightened trees, and did not think their prey would fight back in such a fashion, but to their credit they reacted quickly despite the initial surprise. The discs began maneuvering while bringing their big guns towards the gunskimmer. But the gunskimmer did not slow down, it didn't even maneuver, it just accelerated, pumping power into its engines while going straight for the disc it had marked as its target. It opened up with its massive K-bolters, spewing emerald-green bolts at the enemy, riddling it with acid bullets, gatling-cannons spinning while discharging projectiles coated in K-residue at hundreds of rounds per second.
The saucer-disc fought back. As its shields flickered with each and every K-bolt strike, it steadied itself and brought its gun to bear on the bears. Its sensors began acquiring its target, but the process was made more difficult as the gunskimmer's passive-aggressive arrays had switched to active aggressive-aggressive mode. The subnuclear-pumped sensors were overpowering the Volkslanders' own arrays, radiating them and making target acquisition troublesome, to say the least. But the gunskimmer was traveling at a straight path, predictable, and the Volkslanders returned fire. The massive railgun on top of the saucer-disc's hull roared and sent a chunk of depleted uranium into the Thug's face.
The round clanged against the skimmer's shielded hull. Then another round, and another, clanging and clanging as they struck dead center, right in the Thug's face, threatening to rip its shield generators off their moorings. But the brute ship took it, and as it came closer and closer it intensified the power of its forward batteries. Like space shotguns, its K-bolters spat relativistic buckshot, K-coated of course, towards the enemy ship in an attempt to break the cohesion of its shield fields.
The saucer-disc met the Thug's challenge and decided to charge the gunskimmer head on in a game of space chicken, all while blasting away with its primary and secondary cannons. The saucer and the skimmer came closer to each other with each passing second, both of them accelerating at ludicrous speeds.
Meanwhile, the second Volkslander saucer-disc fired at the gunskimmer as well. It was coming up the gunskimmer's flanks so its sensors were unblinded by any attempt at jamming. Solid slugs slammed to the side of the Bragulan ship, and as its shields were primarily focused in the front, the railgun rounds penetrated the shield fields and struck the gunskimmer's hull. Despite the strength and thickness of Bragulan steel armor, a clean hit from a railgun had a fair chance of penetrating, but the applique armor of the gunskimmer withstood it. Plates of explosive reactive armor detonated and blew the railgun rounds aside, protecting the actual hull of the ship under the ERA.
"Shits! Captain they hit us!" Bragbert cried out as the external explosion rocked their ship. She was unharmed, shaken but not stirred. She was buckled and fastened on to her seat and was fully decked out in standard space suit, with a brass diving helmet protecting her head. It was standard protocol for Bragulan crews, so even when the ship was extensively damaged and the compartments were depressurized (either due to hull breech, or through venting air to stop fire), they could still man their stations in an airless environment. "ERA absorbed it, but our shields won't be lasting much longer, pretty soon they'll get ripped off their mountings!"
"Ryply, maximize the output of our sensors! Burn their eyes out if you have to!" Captain Yurgi growled.
"I'm trying, I'm trying, but we're not exactly that hard to acquire! We're flying in a straight line, for Brag's sakes!" Ryply snapped back. Their arrays were already active-aggressively radiating the enemy's sensors. But still, at this high level of sensor output, they were burning out vacuum tubes almost faster than they could replace it. It was only thanks to the lightning fast belt-fed rotary-gatling autoloader that they were able to jam in fresh tubes just as the used ones burned out.
"I know!" Yurgi roared. Any second from now and it would be time. They were closing in on the saucer-disc, the game of chicken would end. The Grand Thug would blink, it would chicken out, but they would make the stupid puny human enemy ship explode. "Bash, when I give the order, fire all missiles."
"Da, kapitan!" Bash acknowledged. The ship rocked again and again. The saucer-disc in front of them was smashing their faces in, but the intensified shields were dealing with it so far. But the saucer-disc at the side, it was coming in as well and the exposed side of the Thug was vulnerable. They would not last much longer.
Captain Yurgi stared at the telescreen, watching the numbers ticked down, as the distance closed between the gunskimmer and the saucer-disc destroyer. Any second now and they would be in point blank range of the saucer. Any second now, any second... Now.
"Now! Fire all missiles!" Yurgi roared.
"Fire all missiles!" Bash shouted to the gunners.
"FIRING ALL MISSILES!" the gunners howled in patriotic Byzonist unison as massive missiles the size of automobiles were vomited out of their torpedo tubes all at once, flying forth into space whilst leaving behind dazzling contrails of combusting liquid uranium and plutonium. The gunskimmer shuddered as more railgun rounds pelted it, but the saucer-disc in front of them stopped as it attempted to retarget its weapons towards the incoming missiles. But that was too little, too late. The tactic used by Captain Yurgi was that prescribed for gunskimmers engaging superior dispositions of enemy warships while maximizing the potency of Bragulan thermonuclear missile salvos, namely by charging head on into the enemy ship/s guns blazing and only launching the missiles when they had reached the minimum envelope of engagement, when it was too close for the enemy's point defenses to engage the incoming missiles.
Which was the case now, as the entirety of the Thug's remaining compliment of unencrusted missiles smashed into the saucer-disc destroyer right in its kisser, its own forward momentum only exacerbating the deep impact in the microsecond before the warheads erupted into thermonuclear blossoms. The kinetic strike buckled the saucer's shield generators while the intense outpourings of radiation threatened to overwhelm their capacities. The Volkslanders reeled.
The gunskimmer jerked to the side at the last minute, narrowly avoiding crashing headfirst into the saucer.
"Blow all the bragboard ERA!" Yurgi barked as he madly spun the wheel of the ship, sending the gunskimmer twisting against its own momentum. Then suddenly, all of the appliqué armor on one side of the gunskimmer detonated. The hull explosive reactive armors, the HERAs, blew up in a flurry of micronuclear explosions that - together with the ship's own atomic thrust vectoring - spun the gunskimmer on a dime, sending it tailspinning to a perfect 180 degree about face. It was a maneuver that, by all means, should have snapped the gunskimmer into two.
It was a maneuver that brought it right up the saucer-disc's behind.
"All K-bolters, fire at will!" Yurgi bellowed. The gunskimmer shuddered again, not from the blandishments of puny human railguns, but from the mighty recoil of more than a dozen Bragulan K-bolters pouring forth thousands upon thousands of seed soaked in unholy residues. The gunskimmer rocked in a violently rhythmic motion as its discharges violated the saucer-disc's behind. The vessel's forward-focused shields had already been taxed by the torrent of K-bolts and the sudden climax of missile fire, worn and used, wearied, its unprotected rear could not withstand against the deluge. Shields flickered briefly before they were overcome, and the acid bullets began punching holes through the hull, spewing ultra-toxic Bragulan corrosives into the interior compartments. Damage control teams were dissolved like simple sugar carbohydrates exposed to gastric juices. The K-residue ate through the decks as more and more rounds came, until they reached the vital systems, the engines and reactors, the magazines - and liquified all of it. The first saucer-disc died from the inside out.
The second saucer-disc hovered menacingly in the distance. As it saw the demise of its partner, it seemed to consider its options. The wolf and the bear regarded each other. Like Captain Yurgi, the Volkslander captain had to consider his choices.
Except, Yurgi made the choice for him.
"All hands brace for impact!" bellowed the Bragulan captain. "Prepare for RAMMING SPEED!"
The atomic pulse engines roared to life once again. The gunskimmer was facing the saucer-disc destroyer. Though the Thug was now completely out of missiles, it did not matter. Flying at maximum speed, in a straight line, the gunskimmer itself became a giant missile propelled by the thrustwaves of nuclear explosions.
[TO BE CONTINUED. Please do not disturb.]
"
- PeZook
