Storm 2021: Donnerschlag-IV

Three battlecruisers and four raiding cruisers accelerated toward the battleship UNSC Ajax and the destroyer screen on its flanks. Thirty-five lesser missile ships were already engaging the battleship and its escorts, and these seven attackers had murder on their minds. All they had to do, they told themselves, was close range and fire everything at the Ajax, and not even the massive battleship’s unequaled point defenses would withstand them. 
They plunged on, as though from above, missiles and guns primed and ready. At two hundred meters out, the long-range silos of the Ajax blew open and a dozen Aggressor missiles launched towards the incoming Frieden cruisers. The point defenses of the battlecruisers Zielgerichtet, Zyklon, and Feuersturm easily destroyed the feeble deterrence, but the cruiser Kondor took two missiles to her prow and blew instantly to pieces, taking her four-hundred-fifty crew with her. 
One hundred meters out, the UNSC Ajax unleashed hell, a fusillade of one hundred Vanguard missiles, but the Frieden ships plunged on, desperate to land the killing blow against the implacable battleship. Zyklon fired her arsenal to intercept the Vanguards and fired her emergency thrusters in an effort to cover her sisters from the oncoming missiles. Zyklon exploded seconds later, a thousand sailors with her, and still hundreds more missiles on their way. 
"Maximum range achieved," glowed in blood red letters on the screens of five cruisers, but they made no attempt to course correct. No escape was possible now, but a chance at fatally wounding the dreaded Ajax was worth dying for. The battleship’s guns roared to life, pounding out shells that joined its missiles as they raced towards the surviving Frieden ships. 
Adler never got a missile off before she blew to fragments; Greif broke in half after just two successful launches, and Feuersturm followed Zyklon, burning like an artificial sun as its unlaunched missiles detonated within its unarmored frame. Well inside minimum safe distance parameters, Zielgerichtet fired everything it had, every long-range and short-range missile, autocannon, and point defense gun, at the mass of the Ajax; Teufel followed suit just seconds later. 
Her reactor critical and her engines overheating, the heavy cruiser UNSC Bagration slammed into the incoming missiles and shells at her top sub-light speed, her entire forward superstructure ripping apart as Frieden weapons blasted her into oblivion. 
Behind the shattered and dying Bagration, the guns of Ajax thundered in fury, avenging the battleship’s protector just a second later.
Category:The Weekly