LOCATION: INTERSTELLAR SPACE

SYSTEM: BJORN'S REACH

DATE: 2403

Vitor monitored the overall battlespace from the tactical center. Normally, the room was used for ground forces, but Alex had reconfigured the holos to allow for an overarching view of space.

He could have done the same thing from the bridge of Vanguard, using the tac-display, but Captain Vargthane was in charge of the ship, while Vitor kept track of the overall tactical environment.

The BSE fleet was arrayed in formation just outside the system, and what a fleet it was. Vanguard was the only cruiser amongst the collection of ships, joining Tempest as the only BSE destroyer. Normally, the lack of capital ships would be a cause for alarm, but the fleet also had six Orcas, and those frigates hit almost as hard as Tempest, and certainly packed more punch than an STO destroyer.

Visible on the tactical screen, only because Vitor knew they were there, were eight of the Swordfish stealth corvettes, and the Fox, ready to be a nasty surprise for the Xin forces.

Add in the three Eden frigates, a dozen Shark-class corvettes, and forty Stingray gunships, and it was an impressive array of firepower.

Seventy-plus ships were a sizable force, and that didn't even include the support ships carrying resupply materials and a much larger repair and construction yard that could be assembled in under an hour.

All of the manned vessels had their own repair and printing capabilities, but having the larger unit packed away in the Fishbone freighter was a welcome addition. The goal of the mission was to push into Xin territory as hard and fast as possible to draw as much enemy attention their way as possible.

The BSE fleet wasn't alone in this endeavor. Katalynn Char had also gathered a sizable fleet and was pushing forward from a separate location. A third fleet, consisting of the ships that had been defending the Union border, would be joining from yet another system.

The plan was to link up deeper inside Xin space, or at least make it look like that was their plan.

Info was a bit spotty now that the stealth satellites only updated when the Xin's systems emptied of ships, but it was clear that the enemy was also gearing up for the offensive.

"The BSE fleet is prepped and ready," Vitor said to Lagertha Char over the comm connection.

They would be disabling the comm nodes as soon as they jumped, to prevent the Shican from locating their fleets or possibly intercepting their communications. Resorting to pre-FTL ship communications would impact their organization slightly, but it was a risk they would have to take.

"My fleet is ready to go as well," Char responded. "What about you, Jarl Bergson?"

"The defensive fleet is still waiting on a few stragglers. We will be ready in another six hours or so, going by their jump timing and last communications."

Lagertha Char nodded. "Your next jump is shorter than our own, so we will not be waiting. May Odin's strength shine down on us all," she said before cutting the connection.

Vitor huffed in annoyance at the brusque dismissal before signaling the bridge. "Captain Vargthane, the mission is a go. Prep the drive and get us lined up to jump."

"Orders received, Admiral."

Vitor quickly notified the rest of the fleet, not that they wouldn't already be aware that something was happening by the fact that Vanguard was maneuvering, but it was good to make sure everyone was on the same page.

Their first jump would be into Bjorn's Reach. The one-hundred-strong enemy fleet had taken the system during the early parts of the war and had never relinquished it.

The Asgardians could have driven the enemy off, but there was nothing left to salvage in the system, so the Union simply allowed the Xin to stage there as a way to keep an eye on the enemy's activities.

Vitor would have preferred hitting the enemy fleet with the stealth ships until they were gone, but the objective was to let the enemy know they were coming, not whittle them down without ever exposing themselves.

Some ships were going to be destroyed, but Vitor hoped it was only the unmanned ones.

The background hum of the warp drive settled, and he knew they were jumping even before looking at the updating tactical display.

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Seconds later, they reappeared, and the enemy was already in disarray as the Stingrays all jumped to surround the enemy formation. The slightly modified Stingrays projected their much larger sphere of gravity to prevent the enemy from jumping, while they angled toward the Xin fleet and opened fire.

The rest of the fleet opened up from beyond the enemy's effective range, but well inside their own. Laser fire flicked out, and Xin ships began to die.

Then the enemy missiles started to explode.

A Stingray winked off the tactical as it was destroyed by an enemy missile. Then two more dots vanished off the tactical map.

Those three ships had cost the enemy thirty, and Vitor watched as the Xin frigates and corvettes moved to cover the destroyers. It didn't do them much good as Vanguard and Tempest's beams sliced through the corvettes and into the larger ships. The frigates managed to stop the powerful beams, but only once.

Three more Stingrays vanished before Vitor gave the order for the smaller vessels to retreat.

The automated ships broke ranks and fled in such a disorderly fashion that the enemy failed to land a killing blow on any of the retreating vessels. By that point, the enemy had lost over half their ships.

Even then, the Xin fleet hesitated to retreat, but that's when the FE rounds and stealth missiles arrived.

Only twenty of the enemy ships managed to jump after the short but violent battle, and not a single Xin destroyer survived the altercation, thanks to Vanguard, Tempest, and the six Orcas targeting them.

Standard missiles were loaded into tubes and used to finish off any lingering vessels. It was too dangerous to send strike teams aboard, and thanks to the captive, Kaela had turned over, they now knew that the Shican had taken DNA samples from all of the human crew under Grand Admiral Xin's command.

Based on that, and what Alex had learned about the aliens, it wasn't hard to figure out why Xin had so many forces under his command, or why they were so comfortable throwing their lives away.

A massive slave empire would have been more palatable to digest than mind-controlled clones, but reality didn't conform to Vitor's wishes.

Vitor glanced at the little dot that represented Kaela's ship. She was here, commanding the rest of the stealth vessels. He chuckled quietly, knowing she likely hated the assignment given her nature to throw herself headfirst into combat.

That's what she gets for not disclosing everything she learned before running off to do something even more dangerous.

***

SYSTEM: Z1C-9H3

Katalynn's fleet appeared in the system with little fanfare. The enemy quickly spotted them and moved to engage. Her new ship, Grimnir's Fang, was up to the challenge, though. The heavy battle cruiser was loaded with tech and design improvements from both the Asgardians and BSE. It sported three layers of what Kane called corporate armor, but it was the upgraded lasers she was most curious to test out.

Valkyrie's lasers had been powerful, but this new generation of lasers from Kane was even stronger. Eight deadly beams flashed across space, carving through the enemy fleet like butter.

Those eight ships fell, but the enemy had nearly eighty in the system, and her fleet was the smallest of the three alliance fleets engaged in the operation. That didn't stop her small force of twenty from decimating the enemy numbers before they could even get within range to fire back.

By the time the Xin ships realized they were outmatched, only five vessels remained. Those five quickly jumped away to alert the next system.

The two Valkyrie-class cruisers, seven destroyers, and ten Stingray gunships accompanying her quickly cleaned up the enemy missiles before sending their own toward the tumbling wrecks.

It was safe to say Fang was a marked improvement in combat capability over the Valkyrie-class, and also complete overkill for dealing with Xin's outdated fleet of destroyers, frigates, and gunships. Then again, maybe not. She despised the man even more after learning Xin had made a deal with the Shican, so fuck him and his clone fleets. If overkill was what it took to wipe Xin and the Shican out, so be it.

What she hadn't mentioned to anyone was that she had four of Kane's stealth missiles, modified and tipped with nuclear warheads. They were a backup if things went wrong with Kane's plan.

***

Ylva suppressed her giddy excitement as the jump counter neared zero. She rubbed her hand over the armrest of her chair. She couldn't feel the smooth surface through her gloves, but just the act reminded her of how awesome the new ship was.

Her new command vessel was only a destroyer, since the orbital infrastructure around her home world wasn't sufficient to build cruisers, but that didn't matter. Stormraven was easily twice the vessel her previous flagship had been, despite it being only a destroyer, while her old flagship had been a cruiser.

Kane had been nice enough to help her with the design and implementation of the construction methods needed to build the vessel, ensuring it was the best ship she could produce locally. It hadn't come free, but it was worth every credit. She knew she could have gotten an even better ship if she had let the new Jarl build it for her, but her people were far too independent for that.

She liked Kane; she even trusted the man with her life, but some things you just needed to do yourself. Her fleet had two more of the new generation of destroyers, but that's all she had time to build for her personal fleet. The two ships that survived the Harlow battle had been repaired and flew alongside her today, bringing her personal fleet count to five vessels.

If that's all she had, she would have still done her duty and attacked the Xin fleet, but she wasn't alone. Three more Jarls had joined her, along with all of Kane's fleet assets that he had sent to the border for defense prior to this operation. That swelled the size of the fleet that she was in charge of to nearly a hundred and fifty vessels.

Most of the vessels were old and outdated, but they had been more than enough to go up against Xin's even more antiquated ships. She hoped it was enough, because her target was the Xin staging ground, just beyond the old Asgardian border. As of their last intel briefing, there were over two hundred enemy vessels in the system, along with a military dockyard.

Her job wasn't to take all the enemy ships out; it was to whittle them down and pull them away from the station before the other two fleets arrived.

She could do that. "Send the command to jump."