Helicity Boson swept her sensor arrays over the chaos of the battlefield around her, she could not shake the feeling of 
being a sitting duck. Her Typhoon class battleship, a bizarre and gnarled vessel of Minmatar design was unable to move.
The cynosural field generator she was tasked to run for the fleet was running, and the temporary gravitic singularity it generated as a focal point for the jump drives of the reinforcement, were locking her in place with their massive power.
So far the trap had worked, they had jumped into the system and scared off two huge carrier vessels attempting to repair the damage to their starbase, damage which the Shadow Cartel had done the night before.
A small bait fleet of Shadow Cartel pilots was now hammering away at it’s failing shield with their weaponry. Two unbelievably huge Dreadnought class vessels had jumped to Helicity’s Cyno field and were tearing away at the defenseless tower like structure with their powerful capital class weapons.
Soon, they would come.
The tower belonged to the Ares Protectiva, a sizable alliance of corporations local to the area. Cartel intelligence had discovered that they had several Nyx supercarriers. And while Helicity doubted they would bring them onto the battlefield, a contingent of heavy interdictors was just one jump away… just in case there was a Nyx that needed to be held in place.
The Cartel had eyes everywhere, some of the local pirates, naming themselves “The Unwilling” had joined the fleet and were serving as eyes in various surrounding systems. It never paid to be careless when fielding capital ships afterall.
After a few tense moments one of the Unwilling reported an enemy cynosural field going up in the adjacent system of Futzchag, we had expected this move.
“Local count rising, 40… 50….60….70 pilots in Futzchag!”
A quick subtraction of the number of pilots we knew to be in that system prior to the cyno estimated the hostile fleet at roughly 60 pilots. Helicity frowned, they outnumbered her forces, but she was fairly confident that the Shadow Cartel fleet heavily outgunned the Ares.
“They are moving to the gate, hostiles inbound”
As the scout’s information came through, things were already in motion. W0wbagger recalled the scout, and he and his corporation were put on standby to warp in to assist after the enemy fleet had engaged. The Archon carrier on the field prepared for triage. Moments later, a massive battleship fleet landed right on top of Helicity’s typhoon, having locked onto the active Cyno field.
“Fraggin’ SHIT!” Helicity flinched in her pod as a hostile nearly slammed into her “What in blazes are these fuckwits doing?”
The enemy fleet was composed mainly of Amarr armageddons and abaddons, supported by no less than four carriers. And they were right on top of her. Helicity started locking up the primaries being broadcast over fleet comms while engaging her powerful energy neutralizers to start draining the enemy carriers of their vital energy supplies.
For a while, the whole battle hung in an odd sort of stasis; While the destructive energies released by both sides were of terrifying magnitude, neither side was able to overcome the repairs offered by the carriers on the field.
Until the reinforcements jumped in.
With a teeth-rattling displacement shockwave the rest of the Cartel’s dreadnoughts entered the field via their powerful jump drives. They spelled doom for the Ares.
With their station already disabled, and their fleet engaged against a better equipped and organized fleet, their morale broke with an almost audible snap. Their first Archon carrier was engulfed by a massive fireball as it’s internal atmosphere burned up, swiftly after three more of the mighty Archons were annihilated in nuclear fire. Their last carrier was unable to engage it’s jump drive in time and it too was consumed by the guns of the Cartel.
By now the sub-capital support of the enemy was trying desperately to escape, making a bee-line towards the erratically flickering shields of the failing station tower, in hopes of engaging their warpdrives while shielded by what little defenses the tower had left.
Many of the Ares pilots never made it to the shield, only two dozen of the sixty or so ships they had arrived in were still in working order and managed to make good their escape.
Helicity relaxed as the sensor sweep completed. Only a few stragglers remained and were being chased down by the Cartel fleet.
“Enemy fleet has fled, we hold the field. Casualties?”
Only two friendly vessels had been sunk, both belonging to the plucky pilots of The Unwilling. A small price to pay for such a devastating victory, but the Fates will always exact their toll. The cold darkness was filled with glittering bits of spaceship hull and dotted with burning wreckage, yellow-red flickers on the vast ocean of space.
“Tomorrow we return to Goinard, tomorrow we go home” she told herself, and grinned.
