Ravens of Eternity

Basically, it was one giant sensor cluster that was composed of a multitude of smaller sensor clusters. Each and every single one was fully enclosed and armored. But nowhere near as thick as the ship’s main armor plates.

“Holy hell,” Xylo exclaimed. “This thing’s gigantic!”

Raijin leapt up to the largest enclosure at the base of it, and pointed to a spot on top of it, right where it met with the rest of the sensor tower.

“I need this ripped open,” said Raijin. “As carefully as possible. The primary targeting cluster is under here.”

“Why not just wreck the whole thing?” asked Freya. “If we tear it down, they won’t be able to see, right?”

“It would not be enough,” replied Raijin. “There are secondary and emergency sensor clusters deep inside. We will need to take control of the entire sensor circuit first, if we are to do anything else.”

Freya then stepped next to Raijin, then aimed her beamcannon right where she was pointing.

.....

“Say no more,” she said. “How big a hole d’ya need?”

“Large enough for me to shoot the cluster with an electrobolt.”

Alerts rang on all their screens just as Freya began to cut into the robust titanium armor. On their MFDs, the signatures from the Peacekeeper mecha came closer and closer to them. Then, they watched as they flew up, then landed on the other side of the destroyer, almost 500 meters away.

The Peacekeepers immediately began firing their rifles at them, even as they charged forward.

“How long do you need?” asked Lucifer.

“Dunno,” answered Freya. “Half a minute?”

“We’ll cover ya. Xylo, Kali... Let’s kill us some Peacekeepers.”

Lucifer then sped off towards the incoming Peacekeepers, with Kali and Xylo right behind. The three of them split off slightly from each other, then wove left and right as they evaded incoming fire.

Streams of bullets and rockets came flying in and hammered the area around the three Ravens. Many rounds bounced harmlessly while multiple rockets pounded into the destroyer’s thick hide. The force of the blasts pushed the Ravens around a little, but they were hardly slowed.

Lucifer fired first, and riddled the closest Peacekeeper with a partially-charged burst. They softened and slagged the armor across his chest, which began to glow a dull red. Xylo followed up with her own burst.

She tore through the softened armor and ripped through to the structure and the core underneath. All of her rounds tore the pilot inside to bloody pieces, which caused the mecha to stagger backwards before it fell on its back.

Xylo then fired a fully-charged sniper shot at the next closest Peacekeeper. Her slug punched through its left hip and blew the leg completely off.

With its thrust balance completely off, the mecha was thrown down to the ground,and tumbled and rolled on the ground violently. Pieces of his armor tore off as his structure warped from the force of every impact.

Xylo followed up with a tight burst into his chest. They punched through the weakened armor and tore the pilot inside to pieces.

Kali charged far faster than the other two – she aimed to get right in the thick of things as fast as she could, and do as much damage as possible.

She almost completely ignored the majority of rifle fire that struck her. Their bullets mostly bounced off her A-ranked armor easily, though they left dents everywhere they struck.

Not that she cared very much, and instead fired back with her own machine pistols.

She held down the triggers and sprayed down all of the Peacekeepers as she approached.

Not that she did much damage herself – her pistols did little more than leave a bunch of dents and scratches. What she wanted to do was simply steal a bit of their attention. Taunt them a bit, that sort of thing.

Kali then ejected her empty magazines, and let them clatter behind as she sped towards her target. Fresh magazines popped out of her thighs, which she slipped her weapons over until they CLICKED into place and reloaded them.

And when she got close enough, she reared back with her other arms and swung her axe forward with overcharged arms. Her blade dug right into a Peacekeeper’s chest armor, through the structure, and just barely into the core.

She wrenched the blade away violently, and tore the gash open further. The pilot inside was immediately filled with terror as he became exposed to all the combat outside. The smell of burnt ozone and nitrate filled the air. The booming of the destroyer’s cannons shook him deep, and caused his eyes to blur.

Kali brought her machine pistol right up to the gash then fired a burst right into the core. The pilot was liquefied in an instant.

She fired her other pistol at the next nearest Peacekeeper, then charged him without any hesitation.

Like Kali, Lucifer charged towards the Peacekeepers fearlessly. Ze too had A-ranked armor, and could easily shrug off their B-ranked rifles. Sure, they did some damage, but not fast enough to rip hir armor apart suddenly.

Ze still attempted to weave and evade as ze approached – there was no sense in getting hit regardless. Damage was damage and it accumulated on any battlefield.

Lucifer aimed hir weapon and fired another burst at a Peacekeeper and ripped open his armor. As it slagged and melted and softened, ze hit a toggle on hir weapon MFD, which caused hir rifle to shift and change in hir hands.

It morphed from a long autorifle, and turned into a short scattergun within the space of a few seconds – the barrel shortened significantly, and the entire body became stouter.

Ze charged right up to the Peacekeeper ze just shot, then fired a partially-charged blast of shrapnel right over its already-weakened armor with a BLAM. The glowing shards of razor-sharp tungsten carbide tore through everything it came into contact with, and turned it all into a bloody mess of metallic fragments.

The mecha itself was thrown back a half dozen meters from the incredible force, and struck the mecha behind him. The weight of it caused the second pilot to scramble as he fought to retain his balance.

Lucifer immediately charged forward and slammed into them shoulder-first, then followed up with a powerful push kick.

The pilot behind the dead one immediately stumbled and fell on his back ingloriously. It crashed onto the destroyer heavily, which warped some of his armor from the impact. Just as he pushed his dead comrade’s mecha off him, Lucifer shoved hir scattergun at his chest and fired it point-blank.

The shards tore through the armor, into the structure and core, punched out the back, and embedded themselves into the destroyer below. Their glow dulled as they cooled. The Peacekeeper’s mecha slumped a split second later, its pilot torn to pieces.

“This is the best!” Lucifer cried out happily.

“I know!” Kali replied with equal enthusiasm.

Back at the sensor tower, Freya focused her beam and deftly controlled its energy output. Molten titanium sagged around the hole she was carving out, which finally fell through as she completed her cut.

She immediately cut power to her beam and let it all cool down. The bright orange glowing titanium began to dull as the seconds passed.

“That good enough?” she asked Raijin.

The girl peered down at the hole and used her sensors to measure it.

“It is plenty,” she replied.

“Then I’m gonna leave the rest to you,” Freya said. “Those three are, uh, outnumbered slightly.”

“Just admit that you are missing out on the fun.”

“Okay, fine.”

Freya grinned as she stepped out from behind the central tower, then blasted off towards the fighting.

Raijin chuckled happily before she took Freya’s spot and peered down the dull red hole. She could just barely see the sensor cluster underneath, which was an array of different diodes, echo signalers, magnetoreceptors, and more.

Each and every signal type was incredibly redundant, and had multiple sensors pointed in every direction. They were all connected via multiple branches that terminated in a single endpoint at the very bottom.

She could barely see it.

Luckily, it wasn’t what she needed to fire a bolt at. Instead, she adjusted her sight over to the side, where a branch filled with signal processors sat. She carefully aimed her electrostun pistol at it, then fired a single bolt.

The bolt hit the signal processor easily, then discharged electricity straight into it. Although it wasn’t enough to disrupt the entire array, much less the destroyer, it was plenty to cause a temporary hiccup within those processors themselves.

And it was within that hiccup that Raijin slipped a dataworm through and infected the cluster. Just as it gained a foothold, she entered her machine trance and connected directly to the ship’s targeting intelligence.

As always, she let her Truesight and Oversight Engines loose, then crept around the circuit’s nodes disguised as a replicated command.

She watched as her code tore through the enemy’s code, and took it over line by line. While it fought against the automatic defense systems and datacoders, she peered at the data that the sensors were collecting and sending through to the weapons systems.

Since she didn’t have full control yet, she simply did something cheeky – she altered all of the target location data ever so slightly. A digit added here, a digit removed there. It was all mere degrees off the actual location.

And that translated to massive misses on the part of the gunners. The altered data came in as normal – they never even noticed anything was different. Their screens flickered with such speed that they barely noticed.

Their reticles looked as though they were exactly where they needed to be.

Each of the gunners lined up their shots and fired as they had been thus far. But found that this time, none of their shots hit. Worse, their shots veered so much farther off than before. Some were immediately alarmed and sent their reports up to the bridge.

There, the officer in the captain’s chair was absolutely irritated by their inability to hit the corvette.

“Sir!” said the gunnery chief. “My boys are reporting that their guns need to be recalibrated – their shots are starting to drift out.”

“Are you insane?” the commanding officer cried out. “We can’t just perform a recalibration in the middle of a firefight! And besides, we did a full recalibration just last week!”

“Regardless, sir, they’re all missing. Terribly.”

The officer was immediately incensed, then realized that it was likely they were being jammed. Or worse. He thought about contacting That Idiot to update him on the situation, then realized that would have been a mistake.

He was simply going to yell at them, perhaps even curse them for their incompetence.

“Prep the AA cannons,” he ultimately said. “Let’s fill the air with flak. Let’s see how that ‘vette’s armor can handle all that shrapnel.”