by Ivan Kal
“What was that?” Narrasak asked furiously.
“I have never seen such a weapon,” Anessa said.
“Me neither, and the way the attack was executed was ingenious,” Garaam added, a hint of respect in her voice.
“I want their commander captured alive; I’m going to rip his heart out myself,” Narrasak said through his teeth.
“First we need to reach the planet,” Garaam said.
“Their defenses are insignificant, and that trick will only work once. We are going forward,” Narrasak said, and closed his link. Garaam remained, looking at Anessa.
“You know their commander. Should we expect more difficulties?”
Anessa took time to choose her words carefully before responding, “Before he released me, he seemed confident that they could defeat us. I disregarded his words because he is not Shara Daim, but yes, he will have more plans.”
“It sounds like you got to know him a lot more than what you let on. Is there anything that we should know about him?” Garaam said.
“He is like…” Us, Anessa almost said, but managed to stop herself. Even if Garaam was more open-minded, saying that an enemy, an alien, was equal to the Shara Daim was heretical. Yet I almost said it, Anessa thought. She shook her head and continued speaking. “He is smart. Do not trust any opening that you see, even if it appears like it was made by their mistake. He will try to manipulate you to where he wants you.”
“I will keep your words in mind,” Garaam said, and closed her link. Orders arrived from Narrasak, and the three Legions adjusted their formation, with the Third Legion taking the central position and Garaam’s and Anessa’s surrounding it.
Another alarm brought Anessa’s attention to the fourth planet, and the ships that were just now coming from behind it. She waited until all of them were visible and she was sure that no more were coming, and then she looked at the scans.
There were exactly 4500 ships, and all were the same size and shape: 760 meters long, 380 wide and 180 tall, shaped like boxes and smaller than her destroyers were. The scans showed them moving slowly to engage her fleet, probably intending to keep the Legions away from the planet for as long as they could.
But their enemy must’ve known that those ships couldn’t stop the Legions; not even ten of those destroyers together could stand a chance against even a single one of her heavy cruisers, not to mention the battleships. They were simply in a completely different class.
The enemy soon entered range, and both forces opened fire.
***
The Shara Daim ships fired their missiles just a few moments before Adrian’s drones, and dark blue proton beams reached out to smash into the drones’ shields. The drones returned fire with their less powerful laser beams. Adrian started sending orders to the drone control teams, assigning targets, choosing to focus on the Shara Daim smaller ships and those whose shields had taken a hit in his previous attack.
His drones might have been a bit smaller than Shara Daim destroyers, but they were drones and had no need for living quarters and other areas that were necessary for a manned ship. His drones also had almost twice as much firepower than the Shara Daim destroyers. They could continue to function for as long as they were receiving signals from control, and most importantly, they were expendable.
The drones were being controlled from Olympus Mons, using signals sent through both hyperspace and normal space, with thousands of signals blanketing the space to prevent any attempts at hacking the control signals. Usually the drones would have been controlled from command ships, at least in fleet actions. But the drones had been designed for system defense long before the fleets that existed now. And Warpath had built a lot of them in the nineteen years since the end of the war with the Sowir. They had been updated a bit since then, of course, but Adrian knew that they didn’t really stand a chance against the Shara Daim Legions. But then again, he wasn’t trying to simply win. He needed to make a point. He used the Watchtower interface to guide the flow of battle, using the drones to a devastating effect.
***
Anessa moved the Bloodbringer and her other heavy ships in front of the formation to shield her smaller ships. The enemy’s small ships were firing with laser weapons, something that the Shara Daim hadn’t been using in a long time for anything other than point defense, but they could keep those beams of concentrated light for longer periods of time on her ship’s shield, eventually overloading them. She had already lost six destroyers to the enemy ships’ lasers and missiles.
The enemy ships would coordinate their fire in order to interrupt defensive fire around a single ship, then gang up on it until it lost its shields and eventually a few missiles found their way through the defensive fire, destroying the ship. The missiles were powerful, but even her smaller ships could usually take a few hits and survive. The problem was that they also focused their lasers on the ships, weakening the hull enough for the missiles to do more damage. And the number of missiles that the enemy had fired was impressive for ships that size; already the individual ships had fired more than the loads on her destroyers and showed no sign of running out.
The Legions were winning the exchange, even though they were losing some of their smaller ships. But although the enemy was losing ships fast, they were still closing the range. She watched the movements of the enemy ships, noticing them moving in strange patterns; damaged ships would move in front of those still unharmed, and some ships would sacrifice themselves in order to give the other ships a chance to destroy one of the Legions’ ships. Anessa frowned. She looked at the scans of the enemy fleet, noticing a strangely high amount of traffic between them. She called two of the Va Sun from the communications and sensors to her.
“What am I looking at?” Anessa asked them.
“That is strange,” said the Va Sun in charge of sensors.
“It looks almost like…but no, that’s impossible, there are too many of them at the same time,” the Va Sun from communications said.
“What?” Annessa said.
“Those look like control signals, for unmanned vessels. We use them for controlling our mining crafts in asteroid belts. But, Dai Sha, to control so many of them at the same time, you would need extremely fast and powerful computers. And they can be hacked easily…but there are so many of them…” the Va Sun said.
Anessa looked at the holo and the battle, and it clicked—that was what she was seeing. The ships were smaller than her destroyers were and had more firepower. They moved to sacrifice themselves with no hesitation. That was because they were unmanned. Anessa keyed her comms to send a message to Narrasak when new alerts started appearing on the holo.
***
Adrian was losing drones at an alarming rate; he was already down to two thirds of their original number, with only about 3100 remaining. But he had expected that; the drones were not up to par with the rest of the Empire’s ships of the line. The drones were an older generation; they had no advanced weaponry that the other ships had, still using lasers as their main weapons. They had shields, although they were much weaker than those on the newer ships that were close to their size, simply because they didn’t have the room to put stronger energy shields in them. Their missiles were the only piece of technology that was up to par to the true fleet ships, and since they had no wasteful space, they could have larger missile loads than other ships of their size. Their purpose was not the same as that of the other ships. They were meant to be a cheap and expendable way to occupy the enemy.
But the drones had one more advantage. Unlike the newer ships that had abandoned the regular kinetic weapons that the Empire had used before, the drones hadn’t. The new-generation kinetic weapons were ship killers, single-shot monsters that had more power than their older versions. The use of kinetics had become very limited, especially now that the ships they were encountering could achieve speeds of half that of light.
But as Adrian’s martial arts teachers had once taught him, the usefulness of any weapon depends on the
situation. And Adrian had just positioned the Shara Daim into a situation where the drones’ kinetic weapons could shine.
The drones closed the range. The space between the two forces was filled with missile explosions, as both sides took down the opposing missiles. Still, a lot of them passed through, mostly on the Shara Daim side. Their beam weapons destroyed the shields on his drones, and the missiles finished the work.
With a thought, Adrian opened a channel to his people at the Jupiter facility. An image of Lurker of the Depths appeared standing beside him; it was a manifestation of his mind and not a real hologram, as he was inside his own mind while using the Watchtower interface.
“Send them,” Adrian said simply.
“Understood,” Lurker of the Depths said, and then disappeared. He didn’t really say the words, but the interface used and translated his thoughts into words.
Then he sent an order to the drone control. The drones suddenly increased the rate of their missile fire, doubling the number of the missiles on their side as they expended all of their missile ammunition. Then their rail gun turrets locked on to the enemy ships and fired. Thousands of ri-steel rounds exploded out of the drones on their way towards the Shara Daim just as new signatures appeared all around the Shara Daim force, exiting out of their skims.
He knew that, alone, those kinetic weapons wouldn’t finish that force. If they hit, they would hurt. The energy shields were great at stopping missiles and energy weapons—slabs of metal traveling at fractions of speed of light, not so much. The shields would be able to stop a lot of kinetic fire, but would also be drained faster. And Adrian knew that his enemy’s ships could move out of the way easily, even at the distance they were now.
Which was why he needed to keep them in position. Forty of the largest freighters that the Empire had in use appeared around the Shara Daim force. Their cargo containers opened and released the newest of the Empire’s defense platforms. They were spherical in shape and 100 meters across, and each of the 6-kilometer-long freighters carried fifty of them. Suddenly the Shara Daim force found itself surrounded by 2000 defense platforms, each armed with three dreadnought-class proton beams and laser point defense, making it hard for the Shara Daim to maneuver and evade the incoming fire from his drones. The only available action for them was to move back towards the trans-station.
Then, just as the Shara Daim forces realized that, a massive station skimmed and moved to just outside the trans-station, at the position it had occupied before Adrian had had it moved. All of their newer stations had skim capabilities now; it was the only way they could move them quickly across the Empire from the areas where they were constructed. The station was a prolate spheroid seven kilometers tall and four wide and deep, with four fin-like extensions on the two sides and top and bottom that stretched another kilometer from the core station. It was a jointly designed and constructed by Warpath and the Sowir, meant to protect trans-points in important systems.
The Shara Daim knew that they were trapped, and their super battleships started firing missiles towards the station. The station started sending its own missiles at the enemy and firing its powerful proton beams. The station’s laser point defense took down a lot of Shara Daim missiles, but some still managed to sneak through, and those exploded inexplicitly. Adrian knew that the station had started using the new weapon that he’d had Lurker of the Depths and his people install—the GPW, or graviton projector weapon. It used artificial gravitons to create localized gravity events. It required a lot of power, but was effective as both a defensive weapon and an offensive one.
The station’s operators targeted one of the Shara Daim heavy cruisers, and Adrian watched as one of its ends suddenly crumpled in on itself in a bundle of twisted hull, and the ship exploded. Adrian checked to see how Anessa’s ship was doing and found it on the front of the Shara Daim formation, shielding the smaller ships from the drones’ attack. He resent the order for that ship to be left alone, unless it was a danger to the station that had people on it. Then he started giving orders to the drone control that would make the most of the situation.
Chapter Seventeen
Bloodbringer
Anessa had known that this had to have been a trap all along the moment those ships appeared and those platforms exited them. And she had been made certain of it the moment that that large station appeared behind the Legions, in a place where she knew it was always supposed to be. How had it not occurred to them that they could use their FTL technology to move such large stations? Adrian had allowed the Legions in; not only that, he had manipulated two empires, the Shara Daim and the Erasi, making them both think that their system was undefended. All those times when she had seen things that she wasn’t supposed to, had felt his emotions and thoughts slip past his blocks, all those had been planned. He had wanted them to attack his system before they had greater numbers.
The unmanned ships in front of the Legions fired thousands of kinetic shells. Anessa knew what those primitive weapons were; the Shara Daim had encountered a few races that used them, and all had perished against the Legions. Now those primitive weapons would shred the Legions; there was no space to maneuver. The platforms were firing energy beams that even her ship’s shields felt, and at the back of their formation was the massive defense station that was mauling anything that came close enough.
The kinetic shells hit the front of the formation. Her and Garaam’s Legions fared better; the two of them had their larger ships in front, and their shields could take the hail of fire. However, Narrasak had his destroyers and cruisers up front taking the kinetic fire, while his heavy warships were in the back being destroyed by the large station, and his ships were losing their shields rapidly, the platforms surrounding their formation picking off any ship without them.
She was losing ships fast. Already she had lost almost a quarter of her Legion, and the losses of the other two Legions were even worse. But they still had the numbers advantage, at least in heavy warships. If they reorganized and punched through, they might be able to escape this death trap and defeat the enemy.
Anessa ordered her cruisers and destroyers forward, away from the station at their back, but she knew that they had to do something; if they stayed on the defensive for any longer, they wouldn’t have the numbers to attempt anything. Then she noticed Narrasak’s ships tightening formation and moving ahead towards the unmanned drones. She checked the holo and saw that there had been no orders from the Ravager. She tried to open a channel, but Narrasak ignored her. She knew what he was doing; he was trying to push through the front and get to the planet. But she also knew that in the process he was going to lose a lot of ships.
Anessa opened a channel to Soulsworn. Garaam appeared her eyes determined.
“That idiot is going to kill us all,” Garaam said.
“Close the hole his fleet makes, and let’s move away from the station and towards the platforms. We should be able to break through while Narrasak keeps them busy,” Anessa said.
“So we are running,” Garaam said, her voice bitter.
“We can’t win, Garaam. With Narrasak, perhaps; without him, we would certainly lose almost everything, and if losing our Legions is the cost for taking this system, then I don’t want it,” Anessa said forcefully. She was angry—at Narrasak for going off on his own, at herself for hearing alien words in her mind, and at that alien for tricking her and proving his words true.
Garaam’s eyes flashed. “Alright, and I hope that they smash that moron to pieces. At least his idiocy might buy us enough time to get out of this.”
***
The Empire’s defense platforms fired dark green proton beams at the Shara Daim, even as they returned fire with their own versions, which painted the space around them in dark blue lines. The platforms were taking down Shara Daim missiles that were targeting them, but a few passed through their defensive fire only to impact against the platform’s shields. The drones were firing with their lasers and kinetic weapons, as they had expended thei
r missiles.
Adrian noticed the Shara Daim ships changing formations. One of the Legions, the one in the central part of their formation, moved in front and set a direct course through his remaining drones. The other two were closing the hole that that Legion made, and changing course towards the wall of platforms, away from the station and the Legion trying to push through the drones. He saw Anessa’s ship among that formation, and sent out orders for the platforms closest to that formation to target the damaged and smaller ships of that formation. The rest of the platforms he pointed towards the foolish Legion that was trying to break through his drones.
Unfortunately, all the Legions had moved out of the range of the station’s gravity weapon, and were on the edge of the range of its proton beams. However, the station had already exacted a terrible price to those ships that had been in its range; hundreds of burned or crushed hulls floated in front of it. The enemy ships were still in the missile range, so he ordered the station commander to send his missiles towards the single Legion and allow the two that were trying to push through the platforms to get away.
He focused all the firepower he had available at the single Legion. Its commander was putting its smaller ships in front and sacrificing them to the kinetics of his drones, but Adrian’s platforms and missiles from the station were wreaking havoc on them from all sides.
Adrian focused the platforms on the Legion’s super battleships, even as he moved the drones to prevent their passage. The Legion commander must’ve realized what Adrian was doing, but it was too late, his ships were already on intercept courses.
The first drone sped up and smashed into one of the Shara Daim ships, a cruiser, the resulting explosion blowing pieces of it into the other ships. The Shara Daim ships died from the fire of the station and the platforms, the debris field in front of it damaged any ship that tried to pass, and the platforms around the planet finished them. Whoever was in command of that Legion hadn’t realized that his ships were drones and that he could use their hulls as weapons too, that they were expendable—or else the commander was willing to sacrifice his ships just for a chance to get to the planet.
