The only ship capable of engaging Crimson during his trek towards Raum was Raum himself. Titan would drop in on occasion and fire a kinetic volley. The fights would be intense.
There wasn’t much warning either. The lens would open and the craft would arrive before tracking warnings even registered. It would fire its cannons while venting CKRO, the kinetic shots barely noticeable. A single impact would devastate for several megatons and shake Crimson’s entire hull, even if his koveran shield grounded out the majority of the kinetic and explosive energy behind the shot. He could have sworn that they were slightly koveran-based, however, since shrapnel would always seep through his defences and scar him a little every engagement.
Before Crimson could get a firing solution, the carrier would already be turning about, getting out of range and readying another volley. Crimson would follow alongside, matching speeds and firing violently. They would both have their warp fields inactive, allowing their shots to travel to one another with no relativistic distortions, allowing instinctive ballistic calculations to be done with ease. Crimson had been getting better at negating warp effects in his firing solutions, but this wasn’t the time to put that practise into use. Combat was generally sublight anyways.
Titan was a big ship, and had an even larger presence in Crimson’s psyche. It was the only craft that put him at unease. It being big also made it heavy, which made it difficult for it to come about. The craft would slowly spin while maintaining its vector, using its distortion field to bring its fore weapons to bear. Crimson rarely ever saw this alleged command carrier deploy fighters. Crimson didn’t either.
It was strange, their first encounter wasn’t as much of a surprise as Crimson thought it would have been. The fact that it hadn’t been destroyed in the gravimetric shot was natural. The villain only ever died at the end.
Matt and Raum would speak, on occasion, taunting one another on radio channels. Crimson never heard any orders being transmitted as Raum spoke, but the ship seemed to change its tactics even without direct orders from its Captain. The officers were obviously very well trained, Raum had probably rehearsed the entire battle beforehand, knowing exactly what Crimson would do. Not that he didn’t try to be unpredictable, but physics still prevailed, and he was still bogged down by inertia, even if he had the ability to deploy distortion fields at certain vectors for navigation. How Raum knew the maximum magnitude at each vector befuddled him, but then Crimson remember Carmine. Crimson wondered how much data had been stolen from her.
The thought of her brought him up a notch. He pulsed his distortion field again, giving him a boost of acceleration that brought him behind the carrier, it began vectoring itself around towards him again, but the carrier was too slow. Crimson was in position for a fatal shot now, he began firing at the command carrier’s weak stern with his AHC. It jumped out, and Crimson was right in its gravimetric wake, having been right behind it.
The sudden gees nearly ripped him apart, his distortion field barely countering in time. It would take him several days to recover from these injuries.
He hated Titan.