How Do You Even Desert From Here?
They say if you've got five people, one of them is trash.
Following that ratio, two trolls out of ten were either planted right where they sat, hammering away at repairs with zero regard for whether their allies lived or died—or they'd bolted so far off the map they might as well have been in another system, because getting shot at was simply not on their agenda.
Naturally, watching a display like that was enough to rattle anyone's nerves. Even the teammates who'd been clinging to their composure by their fingernails started snapping under the sheer absurdity of it all, convinced the whole squad was about to collapse on the very first match.
I shook my head at the mess, then contacted the Naranjara I'd already sent out in stealth and ordered it to plant three or four torpedoes into each of the carriers sitting at the rear of the enemy main force.
If you've got five people, one of them is trash. (2)
What followed was, frankly, simple.
Out of nowhere, three of the eight carriers at the rear went down, and the remaining five had their engines wrecked into sitting ducks. The enemy main force ground to a halt in a flurry of panic—and that was the opening my Hresvelgr and Kraken had been waiting for. Missiles, strike craft, and every allied carrier's air wing slammed into them in a merciless bombing run.
Right on the heels of that came an enormous gunnery duel between both sides' battleships and heavy cruisers, beams the size of hulls themselves flying wild across the battlefield. Light-cruiser-led flotillas of small craft charged straight through the middle of it all. As they closed in, weaving through the storm of fire as best they could, the supers aboard those small ships punched through in boarding pods and spilled onto enemy vessels—locking into brutal close-quarters brawls with the supers defending them.
In other words: just another ordinary day of combat in that absolute dumpster-fire of a game, Astral Lagrange.
Of course, the allied small craft took catastrophic losses on the approach—literally getting shredded—and that did nothing good for the players' morale.
Even without the Kraken, I had more than enough variables to control the situation—and the confidence that came with that was on full display as I issued proper commands in the chat. The rest of the players held their morale together and pressed the fight against the enemy with real discipline.
As a result, our small craft lost a full twenty percent on the approach… but they closed the distance anyway, scattering supers and assault troops across enemy decks while opening up a savage torpedo brawl at point-blank range.
The enemy battleships clearly never expected us to charge in eating that much damage. They took hit after hit completely unprepared, damage stacking up ship by ship.
Of course the enemy wasn't about to just sit there and watch. The various small craft behind their battleships came swarming in to re-engage—but as I'd already mentioned, we had more strike craft between our carriers and light carriers combined. Enemy small ships couldn't even get close under that air cover.
And if they dropped their AA formation and just charged in anyway, they'd run straight into the Kraken's bio-torpedo bombers armed with light torpedoes and missiles, plus every other strike wing that had swung around for the flank. Over a hundred thousand craft descending in a single wave. A few hundred small ships simply could not push through that.
Sure, if they'd eaten the losses and rammed home regardless, our close-range fleet would have taken serious damage of its own…
KWAANG! PUH-UNG!
"And that, ladies and gentlemen, is when the Naranjara appeared."
"Uh… it did appear, yeah?"
Obviously a single ship couldn't put out enough firepower to sink enemy carriers and their escorts outright, so the kill count itself was pretty underwhelming. But the Naranjara wasn't limited to those subspace torpedoes that only materialized a few seconds before impact—functionally impossible to intercept, but weak on raw damage. It also carried standard heavy torpedoes, light torpedoes, and missiles. As far as the enemy could tell, they were just taking fire from something hidden out there. The idea that they were being hit by subspace torpedoes from a Naranjara lurking in Subspace never even crossed their minds.
On top of that, in the middle of this chaos, the occasional strike craft still managed to push all the way to the enemy carriers and land a few missiles. Figuring out what our Naranjara actually was would take them considerably more effort.
"Report from the Naranjara. Engines and catapults on all eight enemy fleet carriers confirmed destroyed… one light carrier took an engine hit but they've already repaired it and it's moving again."
"Hmm."
"Commander, the Naranjara is requesting permission to close further with the fleet and make full use of its armament…"
"Absolutely not."
I wasn't about to hurl the Naranjara into the middle of the enemy formation. Think about why a Naranjara becomes completely immune to enemy fire the moment it enters Subspace. Because it effectively ceases to exist in this world.
The problem was the flip side of that: once it was in Subspace, it was completely cut off from our reality too. Without a separate sonar buoy-slash-periscope straddling the boundary between Subspace and realspace, it had no way to deliver accurate fire into this world from inside.
That periscope was tiny compared to the ship itself, so at long range—hammering them one-sidedly the way we were now—the odds of detection stayed low. But if I sent it charging into the middle of a fleet the way it wanted?
That small, fragile periscope would get smashed to pieces, and the Naranjara would go blind as a bat. That much was obvious.
Now, if the situation were so desperate that the Naranjara had to grit its teeth and draw aggro, that would be a different conversation…
KWAAAAAAANG!!!
"Ooooh."
"Enemy battleship sunk. Exact class unknown, but it looks like it came out of Dimension Causal Fixing."
"Hell yeah."
The enemy fleet found itself suddenly split in two, unable to cover each other, getting carved apart piece by piece.
And on top of that…
"Turns out our troll was a political commissar all along."
"Ah…"
One of the guys who'd peeled off to repair his battleship had grabbed the one who'd just tried to desert after his mental snapped—well, more precisely, he'd broken the deserter's capital ship at the ankles, put a leash on him, and dragged him all the way back to the front lines. And that still wasn't enough.