The 1st Destroyer Squadron had been dispatched to the Stevenage system, after an unarmed exploration ship detected three of the robotic vessels known to sometimes attack explorers. Dealing with them had become routine by this point, and the rest of the fleet was needed elsewhere.
Even before it reached the coordinates of the previous contact, a single vessel was detected near one of the system's Lagrange points. It immediately began to flee and the fleet pursued; even though they were slower than the hostile vessel, perhaps it would lead them to its fellows. Then, as the fleet approached the Lagrange point, everything went wrong.
An enormous fleet of enemy vessels abruptly jumped into the Lagrange Point well inside missile range. It was far larger than the paltry three vessels the squadron was expecting, and outmassed the ships many times over. The Squadron immediately started rapid launching their missiles while coming around and running for the jump point. They could return later with reinforcements, if they survived the next few minutes.
Soon incoming missiles were detected as well, over one hundred and eighty missiles per salvo again far outnumbering the squadron's measly thirty six launchers.
The first Terran salvos to reach their target proved mostly ineffective against the massed point defense, but the followup salvos used MIRV missiles designed specifically to thwart those defenses. First, though, the squadron had to deal with their own incoming.
Fortunately, the advanced tech of the squadron seemed up to the challenge. Of the 182 missiles, 80 were shot down by point defense and only 26 of the remaining 102 hit, no doubt due in large part to the advanced ECM systems they carried. Each missile was also less than half as powerful as the warheads carried by Terran missiles, and the 26 hits hardly scratched their target.
The first 36 Morningstar missiles reached the designated distance from their target and split into 144 small Dart missiles that began closing in at over a sixth the speed of light; they would be much harder targets.
Not only did the results thoroughly quash any hopes of turning the tables, they also convinced the squadron commander to abandon any thoughts of coming about and closing for a beam engagement.
Additional missile contacts, suddenly appearing after several minutes of quiet, also proved that the first salvos had just been an attempt to gauge the fleet's missile defenses.
Once again, the squadron performed beyond expectations against the missiles - each time, nearly half were shot down and three quarters of the remainder failed to hit their targets, but that still left more than two dozen successful impacts every few seconds, and every single missile homed in on the squadron's only jump ship. It was unlikely their foes realized it was the jump ship, of course, but they may have detected it was the source of most of the squadron's point defense fire. For whatever reason, the enemy fleet launched over a thousand missiles with it as the sole target.
The first four salvos took down the shields. Three more salvos and a lucky hit penetrated the armor, taking out the ship's jump drive and stranding the squadron in the system. But that wasn't the end of it, and after two more salvos the ship catastrophically exploded. The rest of the missiles vanished from the squadron's sensors, having lost their target.
With sensors clear of more incoming, the remaining ships of the squadron stopped to pick up lifepods and then moved to disengage, the enemy fleet appearing slightly slower and seemingly unwilling to detach faster ships to engage them. They had no way out of the system, but if they could disengage they simply needed to wait for reinforcements to arrive. At the very least, they were alive.
(I just want to thank Steve for an AI that truly surprised me several times. Despite a large disparity in tech and ships designed specifically to deal with them, the AI managed to turn the tables on me and inflict a serious reversal.)
