There is a difference between a battle survived and a battle _defined_, and the Frontier learned it twice over the Strike Groups. The first crossing had been a lesson written in attrition. The second was a sentence already finished before the enemy understood it had begun.
Three banners came in concert this time — FSS, SCA, and a contingent of M3 Industries — fifty hands, six hulls of weight, and a sky thick with fighter craft. The breach belonged to an SCA _Redeemer_, which threw itself at the installation and held there under fire until the structure did not so much fall as _unmake itself_, its destruction the work of a crew that refused to be moved.
What the enemy raised against them, the line answered in kind. The anti-capital _Tiburons_ of the SCA went hull to hull with an enemy Perseus, its Hammerheads, and its Paladins, and pried each of them apart before they could ever bring their weight against the _Tranquility_. The Idris-P held her station because others made certain she could — and when _anti-capital_ Ares, the Inferno and the Ion, slipped in to bleed her flanks, the FSS-Knightmare turned to meet them and would not give the lane.
The fighter wings were a single thing by then, FSS, SCA, and M3 folded into one another, and they spent themselves over the friendly _Gabe_ — screening, baiting, dying forward — until the captive tore free of the wreckage and ran clear. No one ship carried that rescue; it was carried by all of them at once.
So when the Vanduul capital ship finally tore into realspace, it arrived to a battlefield already decided. Every gun that could be turned, was, and they turned together. The Vanduul hull came apart under the weight of three banners acting as one, and with it the last pretense that this had ever been a contest.