The Fall of Brem Ect

The Ivory Fleet jumped in close, the Zodiac Rex leading with its escorts fanned wide to screen the approach, and Sarecotes moved fast enough that the asteroid field's traps never got the chance to spring cleanly. What looked like drifting rock was a base in disguise: perimeter turrets, hidden fighter wings, an admiral who had already promised his own sensor officer a meat shield's death if the enemy made it aboard. "Welcome, intruder. We were expecting the Empire. But we'll cut our teeth on you first."

Sarecotes answered with the register he'd walk into every exchange that followed: crude, unbothered, and precise where it counted. His Specter Wings picked fighters out of the ambush before they could commit, the Zodiac Rex shouldering through the bombardment while its escorts covered the transport in the rear. "Sup bitch. Please kindly put all of your valuables in a pile nearby when we get there, to save us the trouble of looting your corpses." On the command deck of Brem Ect, Sk'rieg had no answer ready for that. His weapons officer didn't offer one either.

The base's drifting-asteroid disguise held for a while, laser fire dissipating harmlessly across hulls that had learned to expect it. Sarecotes broke the stalemate with canisters of Dragon Snake Nebula flammable, walls of napalm forcing the mobile turret platforms to burn or scatter. Sk'rieg blocked what he could and answered with the base's main cannon, personally shoving his own weapons officer aside to realign the shot himself. It found the Zodiac Rex's shields and left a mark. Sarecotes didn't flinch. He sent the Agape Hound bomber straight down the throat of the cannon that had just hit him, and the detonation that followed lit up the core of the field.

What came after was attrition, not tactics. Sk'rieg's dampening fields failed one platform at a time, his fighters burning up trying to buy time nobody was sending reinforcements to fill. On the Ivory Fleet's side, the Safe Harbor took fire meant to flank the whole formation, and Sarecotes peeled his combat ships back just far enough to keep it standing while the Zodiac Rex kept grinding the base down without slowing. Both sides landed a critical strike in the same exchange, matching damage for damage, and neither of them called it even. "Do not allow his fighters to outmaneuver us. Pummel them. Burn them down."

By the end, the base's main shield generators had overheated past saving, one spitting sparks into vacuum as Brem Ect's defenses came apart around it. On the command deck, bodies had piled at Sk'rieg's feet, and the sensor officer he'd threatened to use as a shield had already fled the station. "Fighters... keep them off us... target their support ships... clog the approach..." Sarecotes gave the order that ended it without raising his own voice any higher than it had been all afternoon. "If you surrender, my people will be gentle. If you choose to fight, you will be executed."