A non fanfic story?

Actually, yes. I decided to write this for everyone to see after I decided that writing things without showing people made me lose interest. As a result, this popped up. Basically, I want to professionally write science fiction. This is just a little bit of practise writing naval engagements.

Through the misty haze of a concussion, David looked around the interior of his all but scrapped bridge. He picked himself up from the floor and staggered his way over to the command chair. It was only a few metres, but it felt like a kilometre. He collapsed into it, reconnecting himself to the warship around him. Dimly, he noticed the rest of his bridge crew either returning to interrupted tasks or fighting fires that were raging from several of the consoles. David wiped his sleeve across his forehead, smearing blood across his arm and the side of his face. Finally, the chair's interface plug found it's way to the sockets on his wrists. He became one with the ship once more and checked his surroundings.

There was a massive debris field surrounding his vessel, remnants of the enemy cruiser that he had broadsided. His own ship had taken a solid battering. The shields had faded for a minute, allowing a few antimatter bombs to pass through. There were gaping holes in his ship, some venting air, others bodies. Reports of fires from evacuated areas of the ship caused him to vent those areas into space as well. A quick assessment of the situation revealed that his ship wasn't actually all that badly hurt. Physically, he stroked the arm of his command chair affectionately before returning to the damage reports. He had some time before his ship's survival was noticed.

David initiated passive scanning of the debris around him, looking out for enemy fighters or dropships. There had been damage to the central computer and some of the systems were sluggish in responding to his neural touch. He pushed harder into the matrix and found the control systems for the proximity defence weapons. They were working, but several of their primary network servers had been damaged or destroyed by the cruiser's counter bombardment. He diverted maintenance crews to the damaged servers and brought backups online to take up the strain. There were several blind spots in his scanning fields where sensor arrays had been blown away. He diverted guns from normal coverage to begin scans on those areas and deployed sensor drones into the area around his ship, communicating through narrow beam laser. They spread out and attached to chunks of metal surrounding the destroyer for a coverage net of five kilometres. It was hardly what he wanted, but it would do for now.

Meanwhile, he checked the status of the ship's generators. His shields had over loaded, but that was nothing too bad for them to handle. They had automatic shut off points. The momentary loss of protection was what happened when the ship had to change power sources. It meant that some of his main reactors had neared the red line and were disabled. Others had taken the strain, but it had taken them a while. He brought the cooled down reactors back online and transferred powered to self-repair systems throughout his ship. Nanobot emitters turned on, sending clouds of nanoscopic robots throughout his ship, repairing what could be repaired. Other, larger devices shifted around the ship and replaced what could not be repaired. Two out of every three shield generators was operational. Only half of the inoperable ones could be repaired and less than a third of the irreparable generators were replaceable.

Ammunition was ferried along massive internal corridors to the main guns and thousands of smaller rounds and missiles were brought to all of the smaller defence guns. The rearmament was proceeding rapidly and soon he would be ready to rejoin the fight. Once David was sure that his immediate surroundings were clear, he switched to active scanning to survey the battle that was still raging in his area of deep space. Full repairs to his ship would require a drydock, but what could be done within the next ten minutes would be more than sufficient to return his dented destroyer to the attack. Gently, he spooled up his engines, shifting them out of their massive debris field and into the area of the battle-proper. It was a spectacle to watch. Humans had started out building large, slow ships that could take a real pounding and dole the same out. That had changed when the Civil War had happened. All of the big ships were simply torn apart by smaller vessels intended to be support ships.

The battlecruisers and dreadnaughts of the first human fleets were ripped apart by smaller destroyers and corvettes. They were too slow and they simply could not track the smaller, faster ships with their main weapons. At the time, the little destroyers had been agile enough to dance around the missiles launched by the larger ships and simply flip past kinetic and energy rounds fired from even the medium-sized cannons. They were able so slip through the gaps in the intense fire and pelt the enemy with their own biggest guns. While they were tiny by comparison, five destroyers could swoop around a dreadnaught and rip it to pieces in a few seconds. Humanity had learned from it's own wars for once and built massive fleets of miniature ships. A few big guns on the starboard and port sides and a massive shield cracker down the central shaft. Banks of missiles, lasers, plasma beams and assault guns defended the ship from fighter wings or dropship boarding parties. Then they met the Girva.

The Girva were a race of extremely xenophobic herbivores. They had survived on their own world by developing weapons to fight the massive carnivores and flying predators that filled the jungles and mountains of their home planet. The first time that the two species had met, the Girva had colonised a system. Their living requirements were slightly different from humanity's, but they crossed over enough to want the same planet. The humans missed the Girva colony during their first scans. They had built it underground and were coming up at night to avoid the natural predators on the planet's surface. Humans dropped their landers on the other side of the planet and immediately set up a colonization base. It required a large military installation to protect the colonists from the large monsters that roamed the planet's surface. The Girva did not take the believed invasion very well.

They had warships of impressive size. The problem was that while humans had perfected their weapons on their smaller ships, the Giva had perfected weapons for defending their big ships. The swarming destroyers of human fleets tended to take casualties. The slightly larger corvettes were hit even more quickly. Soon, an all-out war had broken out between two interstellar empires. Both races had met other intelligent species, and both had made allies and enemies. The main issue was that while humanity and it's allies could manage resources better, the Girva simply had more allies. Each discovered race for both species had their own advantages and disadvantages. Weapons that they specialized with or were particularly weak against.

David nudged his patched ship out from his debris field and activated all systems at once. His ship leapt forwards like a pouncing predator. The massive barrel of his shield cracker preceding his ship into the thick of the main battle. The scale of it would have baffled an untrained human, or anything else for that matter, and David was one of the best captains in the 3rd alliance fleet. His destroyer darted between massive explosions and kinetic projectiles, moving deeper and deeper into the enemies' primary formations.

"Glad you could make it, we thought that we lost you." came a familiar voice over the comm network.

"Couldn't leave you behind could I. What would happen to the universe?" replied David. Another destroyer formed up on his port side. It was his usual wingman on his quasi suicidal runs.

"What is our target today?" asked Captain Andrew, powering up his shield cracker and his starboard gun array.

"Dreadnaught class at point 7-3-18." replied David, sending the statistics of the designated vessel. The two destroyers flipped around a ship with flickering shields and let loose a few bursts from point defense weapons. Two trails of explosions tracked in the wake of the two small attackers as they sped past.

"Plan of attack?"

"Break a hole over the bridge then flip ninety and take it to pieces."

"Sounds good, lets do it." replied Captain Andrew. The two ships rounded a torn hulk and came into view of the target. They readied their shield breakers and amped up the power to their maneuvering thrusters. David relayed targeting coordinates to Andrew down their comlink. The two ships were heading straight for the dreadnaught. Suddenly, they both fired their shield breakers, twin streams of particles blazed across the intervening distance and splashed across the dreadnaught's shields on exactly the same place. The destroyers did not let their aim waiver as the sped in. Their maneuvering thrusters gently turned them, even as their main engines flipped offline. Their inertia was still pushing them straight at the massive ship before them, but the contact point of the particle guns never changed. Suddenly, the beams broke through the shields, overloading the generators on the inside of the massive ship.

"FLIP NOW" roared David, turning his ship rapidly so that his port guns faced straight down the hole that the two had just burned into the shields of the leviathan. Andrews imitated the maneuver, bringing his starboard guns to bear. They kept moving in the same direction, this time coming in side-on, and unleashed their main weapons. Antimatter was useless on shields, but when applied to an enemy ship, the annihilation of matter and antimatter meant that each hit from a cannon was devastating. Particle guns just never did the same kind of damage.

An antimatter shell was launched once every second, each following the previous through the hole in the shields and tearing it's way deeper into the ship than the one before. The Dreadnaught began to drift, it's hull appearing to bubble from the massive internal explosions. The two destroyers activated their main engines, rocketing off in opposite directions and each finding new targets as the flagship of the enemy fleet disintegrated behind them.

Let me know what you think.