Drifting cold and silent and cloaked amid the tumbling orbital debris, the Widow's Bite ran the offense of the Threshold Stations mercilessly.
West and East Threshold Stations could fire in support of Back Threshold, as could North Threshold and South Threshold. Main Threshold and Side Threshold could only send out starfighters in support, and ready their own point defenses for the inevitable counter-strike. The problem was the interference in the area, and getting current coordinates of the enemy ships was lag-delayed and uncertain at best. When shooting across a hundred thousand miles of space, getting a clean shot in was rather important.
The Widow relayed all those coordinates in as close to real-time as they could get, up into Markspace and downloaded into targeting computers with only fraction of a second delays. It was all there: vectors, speed, angles of spin, ship type, shield strength...
---
The order to calibrate all the heavy lasers, saber beams, and needle beams for extreme long-range firing had been another order that had been hard for Admiral Ontiff to take... but he had watched the Rantha Protocols deliver, and seen what Colos' traditional slugfest had utterly failed to accomplish in turn.
He had stripped himself of his ranged ordnance, recalibrated his long-range guns for extreme distance, and his heavy particle cannons for short distance spreads, to fire in support of the point defenses. Extra power cables and cooling systems were in place.
If the enemy came around the planet, he could shoot them... as long as he knew where they were.
And by the Emperor, they knew where their targets were! That Umbral ship had arrived only minutes ahead of the enemy fleet, vanished into the wreckage, and was dumping a real-time datafeed that required only the most minor of adjustments for range on their side. The time from information relayed to firing to impact was under two seconds, an impossibility on a battlefield like this.
When sixteen heavy lasers from four different Stations hit the first enemy Orca-class from fifty thousand miles away and sliced it apart, the defense of Janus III took on a whole new dangerous meaning.
The lesser Threshold stations had all been set to spinning. It was usually a rather pointless task, given artificial gravity and targeting systems that would automatically compensate for it, but it had been done this time for a specific purpose. Only the top and bottom guns of the station, and those in one firing arc, could reach out the necessary distance and angles to attack the invaders. Naturally, those guns had to fire as quickly as possible, which meant they would very rapidly overheat.
But if the station rotated in a new bank of guns every minute or so, that problem was alleviated somewhat. Overclocking and running the huge guns hot was taken care of as they were spun out of arc, and cooled down as rapidly as possible with coiled rings of compressed liquid nitrogen steaming and swathing the barrels in sullen, angry mists, and even psions dousing the cannons in uttercold fields to get them back to working temperature.
Sixteen heavy guns shot off on the same target, whining across space, tiny threads of light extending like puppet's strings through the debris field, and found a Kraken-Class bioship to pierce through, slice apart, and set on fire.
-------
Azure was having the time of her life picking off the enemy Gulpers.
The bioships used a combination of electromagnetically-accelerated solid ammo, and writhing plasmic discharges. Their average biofighter was kind of fish-like, with a gaping maw that could certainly crunch down on any starfighter, maneuvering like the vacuum was a rather thin sea, and they were definitely filling the sky with black-carapaced targets.
Her MF-Class gunboat was the sixth of its kind, she had her psicrystal Yonder all plugged in, her hair was injected into the systems, and she was having a dizzying time of her life.
Every thoughtstream was in this fight. Her own sensor data was being processed, sent out, combined with other sensor data coming in from Markspace or the Widow at dizzying speed. One stream was looking at the macro view and the movement of all targets in the sphere, ready to leap on any weaknesses, another was tracking immediate space and lining up her firing targets and flight paths. Yet another was tracking her squadron and keeping them all together and in support, far faster than any comms; a fifth was handling her Focus and discharges, and the sixth was doing the 20-gravity dancing that would wallpaper a normal human as the inertial compensators screamed and her eyes didn't even narrow as she executed a turn the creatures behind her just could not emulate.
Three classic Imperial Nova-fighters drove past in one direction, strafed through the mass of creatures following her as she pulled wide and was suddenly parallel to the flock following the trio. Those vaguely squid-birds sort of looked over as the dorsal and belly gunmounts snapped over, and rotary multi-lasers staggered with Sun Shots tore into them with punishing accuracy.
A normal gunboat would have a crew of at least five, but she was handling it all. This was a Rantha MF Gunboat, designed for one of them to fly. Minimizing standard crew saved a lot of room, and allowed it to be built more compactly, almost to drone levels of sturdiness.
No normal human mind could juggle everything so effortlessly, but Int 32+ Ranthas were anything but normal by any standards.
Her previous life had wanted to fly, but the closest she'd ever gotten were drones and hovercars, and she certainly hadn't been allowed to race them. Azure was singing along to the pumping sound that was filling Markspace, and being broadcast out into the ether by more than a few Beacon psions totally digging into it.
The ether was thrumming with it. Tremble, ohhhh oh ohhhhh, Tremble, we come!
The enemy could feel it, could hear it. They were listening in on coms, thoughts, trying to divine and future-see a way out of the mess, and finding the sheer number of Nulls around, especially those Beyond Law and Chaos, turning all their predictions, calculations, and chronal peeping utterly frigging meaningless. They were in the here and the now, there was blood in the air, and the wolves, the wolves were coming for them!
Them and their squid-fish should never have left the goddamn void...
Azure howled into the Mark as she led her squadron on a corkscrewing, madly jinking flight towards one of the two remaining Crawler-class motherships, which already launching multitudes of spoor landers in such quantities that the Threshold Station's point defenses couldn't possibly pick them all off, nor could the swarming flights of starfighters possibly shoot them all.
Putting a light ATS missile in each of those launching tubes could certainly slow things down. They made good mini-nukes here, after all.
Gravity drives spun, rocket ports flared and whistled as the heavy engines spewed thrust, and the Blue Yonder seemed to be moving in three directions at once as the axial cannons spat from the top and bottom, and the primary missile launchers between the main guns forward began to cycle.
Shield emitters and bioelectric obelisks blew away as she spun and danced through vomited plasma and raging lightning, painting and shooting with a seething accuracy and timing no AI system could pull off in the psychic hell of the battlefield. Seething electrons with psychic life danced across the hull of the Yonder, were vented and wormed down into the heart of the ship, and then lunged up towards her through her seat.
And faded to impotent nothing, as Ranthas past Six were immune to lightning, and the psychic shit could only squeak in disbelief against her Null as it was flattened and went away.
Superconductors fed immense amounts of heat against her back, and her skin was cherry-red back there as she took thousands of degrees of heat without batting an eye.
Ranthas were immune to heat. That had some very interesting cooling applications here...
"Suck me!" she screamed, as the Blue Yonder spun sideways, and mini-missiles zipped out of her batteries in constant streams, plasma and hot lasers dancing around and eliminating targets of opportunity as her squadron went high and low around her.
They banked around the edge of the tentacle-legs, dropped off a couple bombs to blow one of them out by its roots, and turned the corner to run right into a group of Gulpers that thought they had the drop on the humans, and instead ended up running into a shitstorm of hot and hard light.
The Novas of her flight screamed after her MF-Class gunboat, splitting and weaving with the assurance of people who'd flown hundreds of hours together, as all that time in the Warp Zone built up with the practice time in orbit here, Azure's absolute confidence, and that thrumming music made them believe they could do anything.
The wolves of Janus III plunged once more to the hunt, and life was hot and good and flashy.
----------
-Niles, your left!- Fyr /pointed out, and the messenger boy whipped his turret around at the lumbering hulks crashing through a garage down a side street.
His railgun boomed, and a supersonic round slammed through one of them, picked it up and smeared it up and through the plascrete wall behind it. The horns on its companion lit up as it looked in his direction, and he swore and scrambled, hauling ass sideways as his fans howled and got him behind cover as a very unnatural looking plasma bolt as thick as his thigh seemed to fuck the air next to his tank and gave the building behind him a terminal case of artistic non-appreciation.
-Hup!- he /heard, and dipped his rear flat to the ground, a dangerous position that exposed his underbelly, but allowed him to elevate his cannon... or make his tank a convenient ramp for his main.
Fyr and Joy zipped over him, went right over the corner of the building, and as turbine fans whined and the creatures in the street tried to shift aim, one rail gun boomed, one heavy laser whined, and they weren't a problem anymore.
Joy slammed to the ground, yet never actually hit it, whining along an inch above the surface as she vented momentum, skidding forwards as if greased up along the narrow road the enemy Sloggers had approached along, turrets spinning as they cycled...
She crossed and fired, letting them really fast reflexes do their thing as she put the railgun AP round right down the middle of the path, and the heavy laser pulsed and followed.
The xenos were lined up nicely, and Mach 10 rounds of heavy durasteel punching through them was not appreciated, nor the heavy laser doing some follow up extravaganzas.
Niles drove up right on top of her, and the two rearmost Sloggers who had managed to avoid any harm got to look down the long barrels of his cannons before his gunners let go, and boom, boom, two more xenos motile artillery kills.
He backed up off Joy with a roar of turbines, and she slid away as if greased. "Nice shooting!" Fyr told them, completely ignoring the fact she didn't have any gunners at all, and so did they. She was a Rantha, and Rnathas were all sick in the head somehow.
She looked at the tactical feed, and snarled. "PG in trouble a street over!"
Niles saw the tac feed and targeting, and lifted his eyebrows. "There's a Legionnaire on overwatch?"
"Feed him four GTG presents." Niles obligingly fed the Thunder Bull four missiles from his stern launchers, shooting upwards into the sky like mortars and arcing over the buildings. The Legionnaire painted the targets without batting an eye, and the anti-infantry rounds came down in a firestorm spread of shrapnel and fire that coated acres of the scuttling Xenos there with incendiary death.
The two cannons of their tanks were next to useless in a real infantry fight, and the scuttling minor Xenos shooters, looking like rabid eyeless chicken-beetle-lizard things, were hardly viable targets for them. Shifting that power supply to the twin-linked pintel-mount lasers, on the other hand, could generate some rapid results very quickly.
"Cowcatcher up!" Fyr smiled, and the short lasers at the sides of the hovertank lit up, surrounding the skirt of Joy with a bright light of cutting beams. With a roar of fans and gravity drives, she cleared the corner and bulled right through the center of the formation, hard cutting lights playing in front of her, and anything and everything rolling beneath her was sliced apart. Yellow-green hyperacid hissed and bubbled against the durasteel anti-corrosives as xenos exploded. Autolasers pulsed in all their enthusiasm for the fight, and that sym up there with a 'vore riding it didn't seem to like it when a couple hot-shots blew it apart like a pinata.