Star Ship Girl Era: My Shipgirls Are Too Overpowered-Chapter 89: Dire Situation On Larkspur Haven 2

A dark-haired officer slammed a palm onto the edge of the tactical table. "We can’t keep sitting here. Something is clearly wrong down there, and we need to go there to help."

A blond pilot standing nearby looked tired more than calm, but he still answered without raising his voice.

"And if we rush down blind and lose the station too, then what? This is still our last strongpoint in orbit."

The third one in the room, a brown-haired woman in a command jacket, had said almost nothing for the last half hour.

She had been watching the data, as she tried to understand everything so that she could make a more accurate judgment, so when she finally spoke, both men looked at her.

"We send a mech team," she said. "A proper recon wing to check out what is happening, they will go down there quickly and return just as fast, so we can tell if the planet and its residents are still functioning, and we get answers. If it’s not, we return and prepare for war."

That was the first plan that sounded like something real.

The blond man let out a breath and nodded slowly. "Knight frames, then, they are a small formation. They can break off and return under their own power."

The dark-haired officer straightened, decision already made. "Good, now that we have a plan, let’s go, let’s get a move on."

But before anyone could issue the final deployment order, the station alarms screamed.

They were not local emergency alarms

But instead of an external threat.

The room froze as everyone wore a look of dread, as something they had hoped would not happen was happening, and they had no support from their home planet.

By the time they reached the radar room, they no longer needed the screens to tell them what had happened.

The fleet outside was already visible through the observation glass, dark shapes rising from the void in disciplined lines as they made their way towards the planet.

They did not rush, but they had the ferocity of an invading force that was there for blood.

The Kharov Synod had come in person.

The brown-haired commander cursed under her breath. The blond one went pale for maybe half a second before forcing it down. The dark-haired officer did not waste time on either.

"Battle stations," he snapped. "All units out now."

The station launched everything it had.

There were only six hundred active Knight-class mechs in orbital readiness, the best force Larkspur Haven had left outside the atmosphere. Against pirates or raiders, that would have meant something. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

Against what was now closing on them, it was nothing close to enough.

The enemy had at least ten times their number. Maybe more.

And they arrived just as they had no contact with the home planet, and they are pretty much stranded.

But the dark-haired officer still made the right call. He did not scatter the formation. He did not send them out in proud little charges to die separately.

He tightened them into a defensive mass outside the station, pulling the whole orbital force into a dense formation so the enemy could not easily wrap around them all at once.

It worked, which surprised everyone, at least at first.

The station defenders fought hard. Their machines were good. Their pilots were veterans by colony standards.

In clean one-on-one combat, they could hold their own, and for the first few exchanges, they proved it.

But this was not one-on-one combat.

The Kharov force had numbers, patience, and the confidence of people attacking a target they had already softened from the inside.

They did not rush into the formation, but just slowly drowned them with numbers.

The first clash lit up the space around the station.

Mechs burned.

Missile trails crossed in tight webs.

Close-range fire tore armor off both sides.

For a while, the colony force actually held better than it should have. Their compact formation denied easy flanking, and within that narrow defensive shell, they managed to trade far more than their numbers should have allowed.

Pilots covered for each other, and units rotated out and back in with just enough rest to ensure they could fight effectively.

For a moment, it looked like they might last longer than expected.

But numbers were numbers.

Time favored the larger side.

The ring began to thin. Holes opened. The defenders had to shift more and more to cover losses, and with each shift, another point was weakened, stretching them thinner with each minute.

The dark-haired officer saw it before the others said it aloud.

He opened the command channel one last time and gave the order no one wanted.

"Break formation. Independent escape routes. Draw them away if you can."

No one argued.

At that point, staying together only meant dying together.

The surviving mechs broke apart in waves, forcing the enemy to split attention for a while. Some got away from the immediate kill zone.

Some were crippled and spun out into the dark. Many never made it clear at all.

Some tried to turn back.

Most did not get the chance.

By the time the fight was done, the station had effectively fallen.

Hundreds of defending mechs had been destroyed.

A few dozen damaged survivors escaped or drifted off with failing systems, their signals fading as they moved.

The Kharov losses were much smaller in the broader perspective, but they were still far higher than the number they had killed, with the death rate being anywhere from 1:20 or even 1:30 in a few cases.

And on the planet below, none of that even mattered yet, because Larkspur Haven was already bleeding from the inside.

The orbital station was only the second knife.

The first had already gone days ago.

The colony did not know it yet, but the fight for its survival had already passed the point where local strength alone could resolve it.

And all that was left was for the enemy to slowly take over the planet and either turn the inhabitants of Larkspur Haven into slaves or eliminate them in a massive genocide.