Phantoms of the Present ch2

"Damn, Jimmy. You've been holding out on me."

- Tychus Findlay remarking on Raynor's flagship, the Hyperion.

Phantoms of the Present

Chapter 2

Storm over Shili

The Yamato cannon; the single most advanced weapon in the Terran arsenal, and it likely always would be.

It was a weapon of unimaginable power, a sphere that contained enough energy to tear a pie slice out of a star. The science behind it was just barely understood by even the brightest US scientists. Even in the old days of the original Behemoth-class battlecruiser, when you requested air support, everyone knew what you really wanted; the Yamato cannons.

Terran armor has always been known to be extremely hard to pierce, even to their own weapons. The Yamato was designed to combat that. Even with a weapon of this magnitude, however, a lucky battlecruiser could withstand three shots from these. Titan-class battlecruisers were even more resilient, courtesy of regenerative bio-steel. Protoss vessels were found to be weaker than normal to the Yamato, as the high concentrations of plasma degraded their shields far faster than their armor.

Obviously, the Republic were far behind the Protoss when it came to shield strength, nor did they have the advantage of advanced armor to accompany it.

The first salvo alone from the United Systems fleet would turn into a slaughter.

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Republic Fleet

Flagship Argent Dawn

"Sir, there's a massive energy spike coming from the enemy fleet!"

The cry came from the tactical station on the bridge. As if it was needed, as the clone found out the moment he looked up from his console.

Admiral Yularen's mouth was hanging slack as he gazed through the Argent Dawn's main view screen.

A great sphere of golden energy was steadily growing at the bow of nearly each and every one of the Terran ships. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what they were going to do.

"All ships, take evasive action!" He roared.

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Like a pod of great, lumbering whales, the Republic ships began to split apart, desperately trying to escape their coming fate.

It was no use.

The void surrounding the Terran fleet began to cackle with glee as bolts of excess plasma arched through it. The screaming that echoed through the power conduits on each ship, flowing through them to the "eye" on the bow, began to reach a crescendo.

For a moment, the void quieted. Everything seemed to be in stasis.

Then the chains were broken, and the hounds of war raged forth.

The titanic shock absorbers on the "neck" of each battlecruiser groaned in agony as the ginourmous force of the Yamato was force-fed to them. Each ship seemed to crumple from the middle momentarily, before slowly becoming normal again.

Meanwhile, the teardrop shaped plasma rounds roared out into no man's land. The arrowhead shapes of the Republic fleet were facing every which way, desperately trying to evade.

All to no avail.

The first round struck the bow of an Imperial-class ship that had too little room to evade properly.

The great shields of the vessel held for less than a second before the concentrated force that rivaled the sun rammed into metal.

The metal did not melt. It did not tear. Nor was it punctured or burned. The vast, seemingly impenetrable armor just…disappeared. The shot continued unhindered through the entirety of the vessel, searing the entire vessel in half. The two slowly spun in opposite directions as explosions spotted their surfaces.

That was only the first shot.

About thirty other spheres of plasma and energy had yet to hit. Seeing the danger speeding toward them, fighters and bombers swerved toward the fleet's perimeter with shouts of dismay and shock. They were supposed to defend the fleet, but there was nothing they could do against weapons like this!

Not all of the Yamatos hit their mark. However, each one did damage at the very least. The fleet was simply too close together for any of them to miss completely. In many cases, a single bolt hit multiple vessels, passing through one and moving right on to the next.

In every case, the ships that suffered direct hits were outright destroyed, leaving little more than floating halves, sometimes not even that.

Then came the second blow. A small pod of Ripwave Missiles screamed into the scattered fighters, exploding into sub-atomic pieces. These peppered the formations, tearing holes into the light frames used by fighters and bombers alike. Then another wave struck…and another…

In the aftermath of the barrage, the fleet was left out of formation in a field of its own debris. The Republic ships struggled to get back into formation as fighters strained to recover and surge forward. Meanwhile, the Terran ships had not budged an inch, except to point themselves straight again after taking aim with their Yamato cannons. Even the Wraiths, Spirits, and Bears remained still. Only the score of Vikings was in motion, weaving their way back into formation.

In low orbit behind the fleet, mechanical monstrosities were roused from their slumber.

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Gods and Demons above and below!

It didn't matter that Anakin had been present for the first battle of Shili, to see such a display of power a second time put a jolt of shock through him.

Anakin's bright yellow Eta-2 fighter bucked in his grip as he attempted to reign in the craft and direct it back to its current course.

Reports were shouted into his ears by ragged voices, which had been so confident of a Republic victory moments before.

"Stay on course!" Anakin ordered. "We need to find the flagship so we can end this, quick and easy."

That was the goal of the jedi's squadron: find the flagship, capture or kill the fleet's commanding officer, and end the battle before it begins.

The fear from the surrounding clones was easily felt through the force. As was it from another source, his padawan.

No, there was no time. There was a battle to be fought. It was now kill…or be killed.

The small, buzzing hive of Terran fighters approached, their shining, black carapace bedecked in blue appeared almost gold in the waning light of Shili's afternoon sun.

That's when that feeling hit him again, that feeling of utter…void that he had felt during the first fight. Was it the Dark Side? Were these Terrans a part of the Sith's plans after all? No, it was not dark, it was just…empty…not dark or light, but void of anything at all.

That was when Anakin realized it. He could not feel the Terran pilots in the force. There was no flicker, no light or dark, just…nothing…

"Sir, another energy spike! This one's from low orbit!"

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The Terrans were hardly blind to the Yamato's effectiveness. They also noted the lack of purely defensive orbital stations. Space Platforms were useful, but were simply too concentrated to properly defend a whole planet.

So the Bismarck had been born.

Being little more than an automated targeting system, sublight engines, and a specialized Yamato cannon, it was by no means the most beautiful thing that the United Systems made use of, but there was one fact that could not be denied about it.

It was pretty damn effective.

Within the station's armored frame lay twin Titan reactors, both split between powering the engines, bio-steel, and its main weapon. But this was no normal Yamato, this was a Type-XIX Ark-class cannon. Not only could the weapon fire with all the fire and fury of a Yamato, but it could switch to a "grapeshot" mode, where it acted like a huge shotgun.

However, for now, the normal mode was needed.

"Admiral, the enemy is within Bismarck range. All cannons are prepared to fire."

Horner's eyes flicked from target to target on the viewscreen, then to the blips on the tactical layout on the star map.

The young admiral faced the young man at the comms station.

"Put them on autopilot. Order all ships into Beta attack formation after the first salvo, understood?"

"Yessir," the man replied.

The Admiral allowed a small smile to invade his otherwise stoic demeanor as the triangular blips on the star map began shifting and glowing brighter, each choosing its own target. He couldn't help but think of the Protoss Immortals' favorite phrase.

"Let darkness be parted."

What better way to part the darkness than with the sun?

Horner did not have to wait long, yellowish orange bolts swung by, screaming silently toward the Republic fleet. With his orders already in place, there was nothing more that he needed to say. The fleet began to move of its own accord even as Republic ships were wrenched apart by pure heat and force.

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Consciousness returned slowly to Yularen. It started as just blurs of color and warped shouts. Slowly, it cleared into the tanned face of a clone.

"Admiral? Admiral! Are you alright, sir?" he shouted.

The Admiral waved him off with a wince and got up. "I'm fine. What's our status?"

Strange. Yularen had expected to awaken to a battered, smoldering bridge littered with broken bodies and scurrying medics. Instead, besides a few broken panels, it seemed none the worse for wear.

"It's not good, sir. Those energy shots took out a better fifth of the fleet, mostly our Venators. There were also two Imperial casualties, and four Acclamators. Our fighters have now engaged the enemy, but we're losing, bad. Those long range missiles they fired into our forces haven't helped."

Yularen pinched the bridge of his nose, only partially because of his massive headache. A fifth of the fleet…gone before they had even engaged the Terrans. The Admiral had just one more question.

"How did I get knocked out?"

The clone gave a humorless smile. "It was the energy shots, sir," he explained. "Magnetic turbulence hit the ship and knocked you off of the command deck. You hit your head on one of the consoles, sir."

Figures.

"Have we engaged the enemy-?" Yularen began. The ship rocked and thundered underneath him. That answered his question.

"Get me tactical," The Admiral ordered, still cradling his head lightly. But he still had a battle to fight.

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The battle was far from being in the Republic's favor, despite their superior numbers. Their fighters proved no match for the Terran craft, and Venators began falling left and right.

That did not mean that the United Systems were not taking losses. But it did mean that they were winning nonetheless.

Winning or losing, Mobius 1 couldn't care less. He was in the zone, the zone that a Viking pilot had to be in to survive. The twisting metal of a Viking's variable geometry systems could easily kill a man who was less focused.

For Mobius 1, he was the Viking, and it was him. The wings were his arms, the thrusters were his legs, the missiles and gatling cannons were merely his fingers on the trigger of a gun.

No features could be seen on the pilot's face as a V-wing blew to pieces in a storm of subatomic fire from a trio of Ripwave Missiles. Maybe he smiled, maybe he didn't, it was impossible to tell.

The Viking was tough, but it was far from being the fastest, or the most maneuverable fighter in the US fleet. Nonetheless, in the hands of a graduate of the Valhalla Corps, it was deadly.

Mobius 1 shuddered as he felt laser bolts slam the blast plating at the rear of his ship. The HUD in his helmet immediately identified the fighter behind him. It didn't identify it by name, neither he nor the ship knew it, but after only a handful of seconds, the name was irrelevant anyway. The pilot had figured out the weakness of the ARC-170, and that was all that mattered.

Halving his ship's main thrusters, he began to initialize the Viking's transformation process, but halted it less than a second after it began. His hands moving like clockwork, Mobius 1 altered his main engines, arching them "down" in relation to his fighter. In response, the ship spun in the empty void to face the heavy fighter and slowed down.

The clone pilot and gunner in the Republic ship hadn't expected this. It was the Aggressive Reconnaissance fighter's main weakness; proximity. The heavy blaster cannons it wielded could only rotate but so much, and as close as the Viking was, concussion missiles were out of the question.

Vikings had no such inhibitions.

Mobius 1 ignored the startled faces of the clone pilots and mashed the lower trigger on the controls. Flaps swung open on either side of his ship's cockpit, revealing the fighter's multi-barreled gatling cannons.

The ARC-170 was torn apart in a storm of spike rounds. Tin foil-like metal and splats of blood burst into the airless space around it.

With stiff, robotic motions, The Viking's armor shifted as it righted itself and sped off toward the battle once again. There was a war to be fought, and Vikings were always at the center of it.

The pilot's lips curled into an unseen smirk.

"Fortune favors the bold."

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Ashoka's demeanor had changed drastically in the last few minutes. Her master had been right…again…Terran warships and fighters were not pushovers by any means.

But that was not all. No matter what she tried, she could not feel the Terrans. It was like they just...didn't exist...But that notion was thrown out the window the moment her Eta-2 interceptor's side was holed by a passing tracer. The Terrans were real, obviously, but they weren't connected to the force. How was that possible? The force existed in all things! Maybe it was less present in some beings and places, but it was still there.

No, this was not the time, nor the place, to think about this. It was fight or die, now. Added to that was her mission. The V-wings that escorted her were to aid in making way for the Acclamators and Venators to make planetfall.

The teenage Togruta gave a light snort, seeing an Acclamator I burst in to flames off to the side, its port side torn open by a battlecruiser's burst lasers. Survival itself was in doubt at the moment, let alone victory.

"This is Chrome, somebody get this bogey off my six!" a clone voice shouted. It was Chrome, one of Ashoka's squadron.

In the raging hailstorm of tracers, burst lasers, missiles, and blaster fire, her interceptor spun towards the source of the call.

"Chrome, I read you," the padawan said into her headset. "I'm on route, now." She could see the bogey...and it was no normal fighter.

It was larger and thicker than the others. Gigantic missile racks stood out in high relief on its back. Equally large thrusters drove the massive thing at a respectable speed. Ashoka knew better than to trust its bulky, unwieldy appearance.

"Negative, sir," another, calmer voice said. "I'm on him now."

An ARC-170 settled in behind the strange fighter, striking the rear of the craft with its heavy blaster cannons.

What the? Ashoka had seen armored CIS bombers crumple from an Aggressive Reconnaissance fighters potent ordinance. But this fighter? The extent of the damage it received were mild burns!

Suddenly, the whole thing began to shift. Armor that seemed stationary a second ago changed shape, as though it was about to fall apart. Two of its four thrusters suddenly shifted their facing, swiftly turning the craft.

Just before it turned around, three missiles screamed from its overhead rack and shredded Chrome's fighter. He didn't even get the chance to scream.

Then the fighter slowed its speed drastically, coming practically nose-to-nose with the clone craft. Twin flaps opened up underneath the missile racks.

"Wha-?"

That was all the clone pilot had a chance to say. His fighter, body, and copilots were engulfed by a storm of yellow tracers. Soon nothing was left but scrap pieces and wiring floating weightlessly.

The jedi's sharp, almost vampiric teeth gritted together. She was getting tired of this. Soldiers were dying needlessly against single opponents, her soldiers!

With a yell, she mashed the firing stud on the controls of her fighter. Red blaster bolts shot from the wings of the craft and struck at the cursed fighter.

The fighter did something that she did not expect. It dodged. The bulky, unwieldy looking fighter spun in a corkscrew motion and sidestepped all of the shots in the burst. Without even a momentary lapse, it immediately spun around and raged forward, completely ignoring her, instead going after a Y-wing as it was making a pass on a smaller, blocky Terran ship, which was in turn unleashing a torrent of red projectiles on an Imperial-class ship.

Ashoka snarled and prepared to go after it, but something caught her attention. The chase had led her a ways away from the thick of the battle. She had compared the Terran formation to a buzzing hive before, but now she realized...that was exactly what it looked like! Their fleet was a swirling mass, always rotating with each other (probably to avoid to much damage), all except for one ship...the ship at the center of the hive.

The Queen...or was it the King, in this case?

Ashoka lightly touched her headset.

"Master? I think I found the flagship."

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Anakin blinked.

"You sure about this, Snips?" He asked warily.

"Positive, master," she immediately replied. "It's kind of obvious."

Anakin grimaced, that it was, at least from an objective viewpoint.

"Alright Snips, change of plans, you're coming with me."

"What?! But master!"

"No 'buts,' Ashoka. I'll need you more than Master Taan will. He can handle the attack on the surface. But we'll be the ones in the thick of it on the ship. I need every hand I can get," Anakin said sternly.

Who knows what they'll have in store for us, Anakin added silently.

"Yes, master," his padawan intoned with resignation.

"Right," her master said, switching his tone toward his squadron. "Echo squadron, form up. It looks like we've found the mothership."

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As far as battles went, the Republic could have been better off...much better off.

The Terran armada and tactics were simply proving to be too much for them.

The Titans within the fleet would hammer away at groups of vessels with covering fire from nearby Bears and sporadic artillery shots from the further away Behemoths. When the strain on them became too much, they would begin to retreat, rotating in a circle, bringing a fresh ship into the fray. By the time the Titan rolled around again, most (if not all) of the damage was "healed" by their regenerative bio-steel. All the while, Gremlin fighters from carriers at the rear of the fleet and the Bismarck cannons swarmed and grapeshot-ed the enemy ships whenever the opportunity arose. The Terrans had a specific name for this tactic, used many times against the Dominion by Raynor's Raiders in the latter stages of their rebellion.

The Ahriman's Eye.

It had proven useful on many fronts, especially against the unadaptable Protoss. The Republic, like the Protoss, had a rigid structure for battle, with their ships remaining in neat formations throughout the fight. All this did was provide easy targets for Yamatos and Bismarcks. The smaller Acclamators were utterly defenseless against Gremlins. Eventually, the Republic began to understand that the carriers needed to be neutralized for the fighters to stop coming, but that required them to barge their way through an oscillating wall of battlecruisers, brave the constant long-range missile, plasma torpedo, and Yamato fire of Behemoths, and survive the constant swarming of carrier craft.

It was simply beyond their ability. The fact that they could not neutralize it also meant that their assault ships would be forced to land under this withering wall of fire.

Yularen knew already that it would be a disaster.

As he watched the Acclamators and Venators of the assault force separate from the fleet, many of them with burns and punctures in their armored hides, he knew that many, many of those clones would never make it to Shili's surface.

"Have all available fighters form a covering force," the Admiral commanded. Then he hesitated.

"How...how many of the planned covering force do we have left?" he asked tentatively.

A clone officer talked into his headset, waited a moment, and turned to the Admiral with a haunted look in his eyes.

"Only-...only two of the five wings have checked in, sir."

The Admiral cursed and slammed his fist onto the top of a nearby command console. Two of the five wings were available to provide cover fire, it was worse than he thought! He had known that there would be losses...but this?

The battle had only recently begun, but the whole thing had already gone to hell...

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The girder groaned underneath the Spectre. A gloved hand caressed it, as though soothing the great vessel.

Sabrina waited in the girders of the main hangar. For what? Only she knew. She gazed at the object in her hand.

Like nearly all Spectres, Sabrina was exceedingly proficient with the bailisong knife. Like the others as well, she had customized the one she was given to suit her own personality. The two-part hilt of the weapon held no decorations but a golden hue. It was the shape that gave it character.

The shape of a cross.

The reasons why she had chosen such a design were unfathomable to anyone but another Spectre, and no normal soldier had the courage to ask why she had chosen it. Some thought it was that she was religious. Perhaps that was true, perhaps not. One would never know.

An irritated spirit jabbed at her mind.

Patience, Wayland. Wait a little longer. She admonished mentally. The red conduits of her suit grew brighter as she drew on its power to transmit her thoughts across such a long distance.

Patience? An annoyed voice responded. Wait? I'm tired of waiting. I want in on the fight. I should be up there with you.

The female Spectre gave a small smile. You know that Horner would not have tolerated that. Relax, the fight will come to you soon enough.

The smile faded somewhat. Besides, I did not stay here to be a part of the fight sooner, rather than later. I am here to protect the Admiral. The Republic are going to try something, I can feel it.

Oh? the male Spectre responded back in a lighter tone. It sounds more like you have it hots for him to me.

Though nothing changed visibly about her, Sabrina sent Wayland a psychic jab. Certainly not hard enough to hurt him, but he got the message. His mind receded from her's.

Now it was back to...wait...

The Spectre's milky white eyes narrowed. So her hunch had been correct, after all.

Red flashed around her as she began to disappear. The last thing about her that was visible was the twirling of her cross-shaped knife.

The fight had come to her.