Quoted By:
Rolled 5, 6, 4, 1, 1, 4, 1 = 22 (7d6)
"Assist the Buujan with destroying the corvettes," you order. "Do what you can to help them minimize losses. "Otherwise continue to evade and fend off these bombers."
On the tactical screen, the three corvettes have made contact with the drone swarm the Buujan deployed as a screen for their remaining fighter craft - the scant five that survived previous Taidan attacks. The drones, as far as you know, are a direct adaptation of Taidan's own drone technology: little more than an engine with a gun, a control module, and some basic sensors, all covered in plates thin enough that they'd have trouble stopping infantry weapons, never mind those mounted on spacecraft.
And while their small size and numbers are usually to their advantage, multi-gun corvettes are platforms specifically designed to defeat swarms of nimble strike craft - and on top of that, the "swarm" barely qualifies as such - the Buujan were only able to muster ten drones for their attack.
The space ahead lights up with tracer fire and almost immediately half the drones simply evaporate, some before they're even able to fire back.
But that is the purpose of these drones - to soak up weapons fire and attention while the more valuable strike craft controlled by even more valuable pilots move in to flank. Which is exactly what the Swarmers - unmistakably Kadeshi craft - do when they come in screaming on tight parabolas, discharging projectile cannons and some kind of unfamiliar energy weapon into the corvette formation.
Even as the last of the drones are wiped out, so does one of the corvettes suddenly become a cloud of rapidly expanding gas as one of the energy lances pierces through the top armor of the engine section, breaching and detonating the fuel tank.
But already, the remaining two corvettes are pivoting toward the Buujan craft that dealt the killing blow, weapons specifically designed to deal with the nimblest of strike craft tracking the swarmer with inexorable indifference.
<span class="mu-i">Naqam</span> hums with the resonance of charging particle accelerators. The main battery has the corvettes locked.
Twin beams of ion particles lance through the blackness of space with the speed of light. But, in the same moment, the Buujan craft is struck by a burst of autocannon slugs that have left their barrels a split second earlier.
Even as one corvette is cut in two and the other spins away wildly, venting atmosphere after being clipped by one of the beams, But on the display, the swarmer becomes a brief fireball, leaving a trail of ignited fuel as it spirals wildly for a few moments and explodes.
A handful of seconds later the last corvette meets its end from one of <span class="mu-i">Naqam's</span> helix turret, the weaker beam still more than sufficient to gut the already damaged craft. But even as a bloodthirsty cheer goes up among the bridge crew, your gaze still lingers on the tactical display and on the small triangular icon that is no longer there.
