Killy Killy

'I have a plan.'

The first thing Don read upon exiting his slumber. Normally he would think to himself 'Well I fuckin hope so' or 'How surprising' but he knew well enough that this was probably something completely different than what he THOUGHT she had in mind.

No sane Admiral begins official correspondence with 'I have a plan' and then presents some textbook maneuver.

'I need you to find four or five volumes of space clear of debris large enough for heavy cruisers that surround the pursuers. It would be ideal if they surrounded them but it is not required.'

That was it.

The whole message.

It wasn't long but it said more than a detailed explanation could ever.

"She really plans to drop heavy cruisers right on top of them."

It was so unbelievable he had to say it aloud. Warping cruisers around was already dangerous enough, but to do so into an ENEMY?

That was a step beyond the pale.

But the more he thought he thought about it the more he thought it might just work.

First off its unexpected. No rational captain is going to be taking special note of jump-scan radiation while they are pursuing. No servicemember is going to expect something bordering the line of capital ship to jump towards them.

It also provides a golden solution. No escorts are going to have to die, and the heavy cruisers are, well, heavy. They can shrug off almost anything those ships throw at them. Only the light cruisers' bow mounted railguns MIGHT cause issues. The rest could be relegated to the secondary and point defense armaments.

"ARC, think you can find some exit points for the cruisers?"

"Not from this position. We need to get in front of them."

"Too much interference?"

"Too far from the opposite side of their formation. If the cruisers are to be in proper flanking positions then we need to be in a spot capable of placing them there."

With a clear goal and an amount of time bordering on the infinite, Don and ARC got to work finding the best locations for an ambush. ARC gave constant updates on where safe spots would be while Donovan chose the ones that gave the best firing arcs and overlapping lanes of fire.

The admiral wanted four or five spots, Don was confident he could give her ten. Timing was going to be the limiting factor.

After an hour of dropping pins and picking them up after the areas they represented became unusable, Don was comfortable with his ability to manage a large number of voluminous jump-points. He had sent a message stating he would be the one to issue the jump order and that she should have ten cruisers ready.

After a few minutes of looking for clearings he was 100% confident in, ARC sent a ready command to the fleet with the positions they had in mind.

Better to let them figure out where they wanted to jump for themselves than for him to order them around and push them past their limits.

10 green checks meant 10 ships ready to move 60,000 km in an instant. Pressing the holographic button which had been ceremoniously provided for him by ARC, he watched his sensors to see them in action.

Unlike Large Cruisers, which are basically just battleships with their armor scaled down, Heavy cruisers are designed to perform multiple roles. The most common among these are strike interruption and escort suppression.

Elements designed for strike interruption do everything that the tin says, interrupt strikes. Much like the destroyer and picket classes, they have to be equipped with a great many point defense systems to accomplish this.

At medium ranges a combination of 'flak' rifles and scattershot from the primary and secondary railguns serve to dissuade enemy strike craft from approaching. At closer ranges lasers and automatic weaponry such as chain guns and swarm missiles knock out incoming ordinance and any craft that get a little too close for comfort.

The role of 'Escort Suppression' basically entails destroying or driving off lighter ships.

The primary railguns are a scaled down version of the capital class, purposefully slower in order to deal heavy damage to the more lightly armored heavy, light, and escort cruisers.

The secondary railguns are the exact same as those found aboard light cruisers, the dreaded variable acceleration railguns. Ideal for taking out light targets at any range thanks to their lower mass and the option to choose what speed the rod will be leaving the barrel at.

When ten of these mammoths finished their jump sequence over the course of 2.7 seconds, they found themselves with targets sitting within range of all of their weaponry.

Calling it a bloodbath would be underselling the brutality, execution would only barely be a fit.

Caught with their pants down and surrounded by ships who were practically designed to destroy them, the Oligarchies' formation crumbled before turning to a flaming pile of ash.

The whole ordeal took less than four minutes in total.