The Azjakanda

Battle of Azjakanda

Type of Ship
Frigate

Species
Kristang (Achakai)

Captain
Brigadier General Lynn Bezanson

Control AI
Secured Ruhar AI

Armament
Maser cannons and point defense cannons

Notable Features
Destroyer was captured by the Ruhar and provided to the Achakai

Auxilliary Craft
None

Status
Active

The *Azjakanda* was an old Kristang frigate captured by the Ruhar and provided to the Achakai. She was assigned to Admiral Jet-au-Bes Kekrando's Achakai attack fleet.
Brigadier General Lynn Bezanson had been placed in command. On the way in, she checked the ship’s status and was puzzled to see the vessel’s name had been changed to *Battle of Azjakanda*.
The Achakai gave the ship that name for Alien Legion, and to tweak the noses of the Ruhar. "*Azjakanda*" is the Kristang name for Fort Arrow, the cargo launcher base on the equator of Paradise where Sergeant Joe Bishop's team shot down a couple of Ruhar Whale transports, and held the base until the Kristang got things sorted out in orbit to take the planet back.
Before it was an Achakai ship named after a battle on a planet no longer held by the Kristang, the *Azjakanda* had a variety of names and owners. The ship came out of the Black Tree clan shipyard, built for a subclan, and therefore shoddily constructed with few of the optional niceties for crew comfort and safety. Back then, the ship had been named after the main planet of that subclan.
The frigate went through four other owners and had nearly been scrapped twice, before being sold to the Yellow Fangs. The Yellow Fangs had been notorious for neglecting proper maintenance of their ships. That is why the ship had been captured by the Ruhar; its jump drive had failed while attempting to escape from a battle that only an idiot would have engaged in. The Ruhar had offered the crew additional time to escape if the ship was not set to self-destruct, and the crew had gratefully complied.
The ship was towed to a spacedock, where systems were inspected, repaired or replaced, missile magazines restocked, fuel tanks refilled, and reactors restarted. The Ruhar presented the ship to the Achakai.
The ship's Control AI was somewhat startled. If it was astonished to learn the Ruhar had given the ship to the Achakai, its mind was properly blown when humans came aboard. Then it learned of its mission. A human named ‘Lt. Col. Emily Perkins’ had cooked up a crazy scheme to boost the Achakai to clan status, by a group of Achakai, humans and Verd-kris traitors attacking and seizing a Wurgalan planet. It was the most unlikely thing the AI had ever heard of, a plan so bold and unexpected that it decided to delay blowing the jump drive capacitors, because it simply had to see what happened.
General Bezanson ordered the Achakai crew to program a suicidal jump that would emerge the ship low over the capital city. The *Azjakanda* flared into existence with a harsh burst of gamma rays, fifty-two kilometers above the city, moving at sixty-four hundred kilometers per hour and falling like a rock. Its speed at that altitude was nowhere near enough to maintain orbit, so the crew had positioned the ship tail-downward before the jump, and the main engines were vibrating enough to crack their mounts.
The frigate had booster motors that were not yet active because using them would throw off the aim of the maser cannons. And also because those boosters were about seven decades past their 'Use By' date. The crew did not intend to ignite the boosters unless they had no other choice.
The *Azjakanda* fell through forty-five kilometers before the sensors recovered enough to get a view of the ground, then the hunt began for deadly military vehicles that looked disappointingly like armored slugs. After three failed tries, a Wurgalan tank was struck by a cannon that was designed to burn through the armor plating of a starship. The hexagonal armor tiles of the tank were no match for a maser cannon powered by the reactor of a starship. The three-hundred-meter-long maser bolt hardly noticed that the shields existed. Even before the shield projectors blew in a cascade of feedback, the bolt struck the armor tiles on the top rear of the tank. The upper tiles ceased to exist and the tiles underneath blew away from the tank’s skin to expose the mechanisms, powercells and cluster of missiles within. The maser beam itself only disabled the tank, the flash detonation of its own weapons destroyed it.
From multiple sites around the city, surface to air missiles were racing toward the *Azjakanda*, their booster motors flaring as they sought to catch the starship that was balanced on its tail, the overloaded engines having slowed its rate of descent to below the speed of sound. The navigation system predicted that the ship would bottom out at forty-two kilometers above the city, then begin a long, slow and shallow climb into orbit. The best-case scenario was for the frigate to be around the curve of the local horizon and over the western ocean before it climbed out of the atmosphere.
The *Azjakanda* avoided numerous ground missile attacks, but one missile was unaccounted for. It exploded its warhead in a shape-charge, directing the force forward at the underside of the frigate. The ship was maintaining altitude, even climbing slowly, but one of the main engines was producing less than thirty-percent power and fading. Shields were offline, with no hope they could be restored until the ship cleared the atmosphere. And a second volley of missiles was reaching up from the surface. the second volley of missiles were going to attack in a coordinated fashion. The *Azjakanda* had no defenses left.
Three Wurgalan (Achakai) frigates jumped into low orbit, provided cover fire and the *Azjakanda* soared away from the battle zone on the ground, and no missiles were detected in pursuit.

1. ↑ https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/patrick-callahan
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Mavericks Book 2: Freefall
3. ↑ ExForce 1: Columbus Day