Chapter One Hundred and Four - Going in Subtle

With the Sappho still slowing down, and the Jovian fleet rapidly catching up, one might have suspected that the battle between the two factions might end in a predictable manner, especially if anyone was aware of the Empress' presence.

But Ivil had heard Aurora and was actually considering what she had to say.

Going in loud--as she usually did--would be rather noticeable. The last time she'd fought a fleet engagement was...

Ivil leaned back. How long ago had it been? A long while, certainly. The Earth Alliance, near the end of the third intersystem war, had adopted a 'run-first' tactic whenever she approached. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of being 'loud' throughout the conflict was that it allowed the EAF to know where she was and avoid that sector of space entirely.

The Martian Navy used that to its advantage, of course, but by the end of the conflict she'd barely gotten a proper fight in. A few stragglers, a few Earth Alliance stations, and maybe a couple of distractions in the form of ships making a suicidal final charge, but nothing to really sink her teeth into.

She had to admit, a small part of her missed the thrill, but she'd come to the conclusion that she was maybe too old for it.

It was like how she imagined a normal person growing too old to participate in some of their favourite sports. Bad knees and lower back pain and all that kind of thing. They'd be relegated to watching from the sidelines, or perhaps coaching to improve the next generation.

She didn't want that, so she'd made a conscious effort to switch her efforts elsewhere. That's what eventually led to her having this many cute girls, so really it was all for the best.

In any case. "I'm going to try to be subtle," Ivil declared.

"Isn't it a little late for that?" Twenty-Six asked. "We blew up a cargo freighter already."

"Technically, with the payload it held, it's more like a jury-rigged missile boat," Pixie pointed out.

Ivil shook her head. "I haven't used any cores that would signal that I'm here too loudly," she said. "As long as MINT has been keeping things quiet on our behalf, the EAF have no reason to see this altercation as proof that the Sappho has anything more than a powerful core-wielder onboard."

"Ah yes, merely an A-classer rather than you," Aurora said.

"Exactly," Ivil said with a nod. Being underestimated again was kind of novel.

"There are only a few hundred A-classers, aren't there? They're all national assets," Aurora said. "That won't make them lower their guard."

Ivil hummed. "Fine. Then I'll stick to only using a few cores. Maybe they'll think I'm merely a powerful B-classer?"

She'd used a dozen space-warping cores and maybe half a hundred hacking cores to take out that freighter. She could just... keep on using those.

"Whatever you do, can you do it soonish?" Pixie asked as her hand alighted on the yoke. Her feet moved with practiced ease and the Sappho spun into a wide roll a moment before a trio of lasers shot by.

Ivil noticed a few shots from the frigate streaking out towards the Tech Maid ship. The hits splattered on the ship's rearward shield, creating a brilliant rainbow-y circle of light. The way the shield recuperated almost instantly hinted at someone onboard using a core to siphon the heat away.

That wasn't too surprising, the Adeptus Ancillia definitely had some core-wielders amongst their number.

Ivil took in their foe. She decided that, for dramatic reasons, the smart thing to do would be to allow the frigate holding Bleue to survive to the last.

She reached out, focusing for a moment. "I'm about to do something, the readings from our sensors might be incorrect for a moment."

"Huh?" Twenty-Six asked.

The three patrol destroyers fired their long-ranged laser turrets at them.

The beams flew out at the speed of light into a tunnel of shaped space that spun the light around and rammed it back into the hulls of the ships that had just fired.

"Oh! You bounced it, like with a mirror?" Twenty-Six asked as she watched the explosions in the distance.

Ivil liked the way the tiny explosions were reflected in her eyes.

"Not quite," she said. "It was more of a cusped retrograde tunnel. Like a Klein bottle, but with the ships serving as the start and end point."

The destruction wasn't so impressive. The glare of shields eating close-range laser fire was always pretty, but the beams didn't penetrate all that deeply past the shields, and so the explosions that followed weren't too fantastic.

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She could have made the light move faster, but tickling physics like that tended to be the opposite of subtle, and so she had refrained from doing so.

"We're within kinetic range," Pixie announced.

The enemy announced it too, with a salvo of rounds fired their way. Ivil traced their path through space in a blink and gently nudged them away. Then when the two remaining cargo freighters opened up with a fresh salvo of missiles, she turned her attention to controlling them, sending them careening wildly through space in a vaguely enemy-ish direction.

Soon, space was filled with confused point-defence fire, the enemy ECM was trying to batter down the Sappho to no avail, and Ivil imagined that the weapons officer in charge of all of this was ripping their hair out.

Then Pixie twisted the Sappho around and brought up the targeting system for their own guns. The Sappho wasn't exactly bristling with armaments, but it did have a nice turreted main gun, and at the moment it was pointing a little ahead of the enemy frigate. Pixie squeezed a trigger, and the entire ship thumped slightly with rhythmic regularity as they returned fire.

These rounds didn't have to contend with twisted space. Instead, they rammed into the kinetic shields of the frigate with heartbeat regularity, painting the side of the hull with cascading explosions.

Pixie started to giggle.

Ivil blinked, then smiled slightly herself. So, Pixie was one of those. The kind of woman who was... enthused by the sight of large explosions and her enemies being blasted into little bits.

The Sappho was racing through the small corporate fleet's formation, a position that would ordinarily be far less than ideal, but the fighting was currently rather one-sided.

And then the Silent Sentinel Washer at the Gates joined in with cruiser-grade heavy ordnance.

Pixie's giggles turned into all-out manic laughter as they were surrounded by a sea of explosions and shrapnel.

Ivil took over control of some of the guns onboard the destroyers and spun them around to face their allies. No one seemed to be paying much attention to it, not until she opened fire and filled the space between ships with hot leaded betrayal.

They shot past one of the destroyers. Still a couple of kilometres away, but in terms of space warfare they might as well have been kissing past its hull. The ship's reactors went up, and the entire thing turned into an expanding ball of nuclear fire even as the Sappho roared by, guns still blazing.

"Woo!" Pixie cheered.

"Woo!" Twenty-Six cheered with her, arms raised over her head.

"Huzzah," Aurora said, rather calmly, but Ivil could hear the beating of her heart, and the sight was definitely having an effect on her.

They hit a slight bit of turbulence as scattered shrapnel clattered off their shields, but they were basically gone and past the worst of it.

"Ohh, that hit the spot," Pixie said as she shuffled in her pilot's seat. "We should be good now, I think. They're in no shape to follow or cause trouble."

That was a fair assessment. The Thebe fleet was a mess in their wake. Most of the ships were likely still salvageable--modern warships were made tough--but they'd need significant repairs and weren't likely ready to retaliate in any significant way. Just in case, Ivil twisted a few barrels and ripped apart a few turret emplacements.

"Ah... okay, setting auto-pilot now," Pixie said. "I need... yeah, I'm going to take a quick break." She stood up, then paused next to Twenty-Six. A moment later, Pixie pulled the taller mechanic closer and planted a rather needy kiss on her lips. "Ah, hell yeah!" Pixie said before she sauntered off.

"Uh," Twenty-Six said.

"Don't worry about it," Ivil said. "Sometimes destroying your adversaries in spectacular fashion just has an effect on you. I've heard that it's better than sex."

"I-it is?' Twenty-Six stuttered.

"According to some. We might want to conduct some A-B testing at some point. Provided we can find enough adversaries."

Aurora sighed. "Let's not start wars just to get off, please."

"I'll take that under advisement. In the meantime, how was that? Subtle enough for you?"

Aurora stared. "You were trying to be subtle?" she asked.

Ah, perhaps not, then.

***

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