by Ivan Kal
Now would be the first time that they would put their training to the test.
Lurker of the Depths’ mind spread through the amplifier and out over the system, taking great care not to disturb the ocean of Sha. He did not want to be discovered earlier than he wanted.
And so he let his tendrils out, and watched—waiting for an opportunity to strike.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Year 714 of the Empire — the containment zone — control system
Anessa pulled her Titans to the back of their formation and had them stop and turn around to meet the coming onslaught. The rest of her forces turned around as well and took positions behind the Titans. Their allies did the same. Anessa was grateful that they had listened to her suggestions, and had agreed to act in a support role for the Titans.
She waited as the Enlighteneds’ force drew closer, and then, just outside of the max range of the Titans, the enemy force opened fire.
Anessa scowled at that, but the range difference didn’t amount to much. The Titans absorbed the damage from what looked to be some more advanced versions of particle weapons. Their shields held, as she had expected. The enemy was yet to fire any kind of missiles, which she knew would be pointless because of the skim-nullifying field.
Then the enemy entered the range of her Titans and Sovereigns and they started firing. Beams of energy lashed across space to impact the shields of the smaller enemy ships. And Anessa saw that several strikes in quick succession brought their shields down, and the subsequent attacks burned the enemy ships, leaving scorch marks and eventually burning or blowing apart chunks. The smaller, cruiser-sized enemy ships started dying quickly.
Then the enemy fire switched from the Titans and the Sovereigns to her other smaller ships that had yet to enter the range to open fire. The attack ships moved into cover behind the larger ships as soon as they were targeted, allowing their shields to regenerate, but there were just too few of her larger vessels for all of them to take cover.
Then they lost their first ship: an Afar battleship got overwhelmed by fire from nine cruisers and six larger, dreadnought-sized ships.
Seeing that the enemy had switched tactics, Anessa ordered the Empire and the Shara Daim fleets to release their drones. She sent them all forward to fill in the gaps between the larger ships. She knew that she would lose them at a fast rate, but she needed to preserve as many of her other ships as possible until the enemy got in range.
The Enlightened were still coming forward, probably wanting to get into range of their other weapons. The Titans and the Sovereigns were doing a lot of damage.
Anessa let her mind focus on the enemy formations, trying to discern anything that might help her out. There was something about the way that they were fighting and moving that was familiar to her. And then it clicked—the enemy had three classes of ships. There were around a hundred thousand of their dreadnoughts, around four hundred thousand of their cruisers, fifty of larger ships which they couldn’t classify, and one World-ship sized ship—the Enlightened Living-ship. She knew that the unclassified ships were command ships that rarely entered combat from what she remembered from the records of the People.
The other two classes were just drones controlled by the command ships. The tactic that the enemy was employing was actually simple—the Enlightened in command was putting his cruiser drones forward, planning on sacrificing them as a large chunk of his force moved to the sides. The Enlightened had been split into three wall formations, and while the center-bottom one was now in front, the other two were drifting to the sides. Anessa had no doubt that they would close from the sides, attempting to trap her in a crossfire.
And the truth was that there was not much that she could do about it. Without the skim, she couldn’t maneuver her Titans across the battlefield, and was forced to keep them in a single place.
But she had an idea that they could try. She sent out orders for her other ships to start moving back, leaving the Titans as a wall. Then she ordered all of her ships that had kinetic missiles to open fire. The Titans and her Empire, Shara Daim, and Krashinar ships fired their kinetic weapons, sending hundreds of thousands of fast-moving projectiles toward the Enlighteneds’ center formation.
Anessa wondered what the Enlightened would do. According to the records of the People, they had never used kinetic weapons like these, and neither had the Enlightened. A projectile moving at 0.8c would wreck a ship just as much as a particle beam, perhaps more. The Enlightened had a choice: keep the formation and absorb the attack, or break apart and disrupt their plan. There were just too many ships in their center formation for them all to get away safely, of course, so her attack would deal damage no matter what they chose.
She narrowed her eyes at the holo and waited for the Enlightened to react.
* * *
Doranis watched the signatures coming toward his forces and frowned.
“Did they just throw rocks at me?” Doranis asked.
“MOVE!” Aranis’s voice told him in panic.
“What? Why?”
“Those are kinetic weapons! They will ravage our ships.”
“They are traveling on linear paths. Our ships can avoid them,” Doranis said. The attack came in the form of metal objects fired at near lightspeeds. Doranis understood how powerful impacts of those weapons would be, but they were simple weapons, and easily avoided.
“They can maneuver! Scatter the formations!”
Immediately Doranis realized the danger. There didn’t seem like there was anything like a drive on those objects, so he had assumed that they couldn’t maneuver. He still didn’t see anything, but he heeded Aranis’s warning.
He scattered his formations, but with so many ships, they were not fast enough. Most moved out of the way, but some weren’t so lucky.
Doranis growled as a rain of metal objects curved their trajectories and slammed against his ships. His ships burned and died. A fourth of his center formation was just gone, and if he hadn’t heeded Aranis’s warning, he would’ve lost more. His two flanking formations had been the targets of lesser salvos and had lost a lot less. His center formation had lost around forty thousand ships—either totally destroyed or so damaged that they wouldn’t be of any use. His flanking formations had lost about a third of that combined. Still, he had lost fifty thousand ships in the enemy’s attack. They had caught him off guard, but that would not happen again.
“I told you not to underestimate them,” Aranis told them.
“I know. It will not happen again.”
Doranis turned his mind back to the fleets, and reorganized them into a single fleet. Those large ships were the biggest obstacle to his forces obliterating the rest. He started giving orders, and the crews on the command ships started executing them even as he maneuvered the rest of the fleet. Soon enough he had ten smaller taskforces, in each of them five thousand of his larger ships, maneuvering next to one another so that their tendrils curved and touched, forming a ring formation with the hole pointed toward the enemy fleet. Energy started crackling around them, curving and bouncing off their hulls.
“That won’t work for long. They’ll figure out how you are doing it,” Aranis warned.
“It will work for long enough.”
With a thought, he executed his plan.
* * *
Anessa smiled as she saw the devastation that her ships had wrought. They had landed a good blow. Now she needed to capitalize on it. The enemy ships would soon get in range of her main weapons, and then the Titans would truly shine.
She noticed the enemy Dreadnought-class ships arranging in strange formations and she frowned. Her ships could detect power buildups inside of them, and then ten of her Titans died. The entire front of their hulls were ripped off, pulling the ships apart.
“What is happening?” Anessa asked her crew, who were working furiously at their stations.
“We don’t know, Battle Master,” someone reported while another ten died.
Anessa knew that
it had to do with those strange formations, and she ordered her ships to fire at them, but the Enlightened had other ships positioned to defend, overlapping their shields over the rings. Her ships kept dying both from the unknown weapon and the weapons fire that had seemingly intensified as her forces struggled in confusion. The Enlightened started closing the range, opening fire with more weapons. Then she noticed the debris flying through the rings and she frowned. The scanners were detecting the pieces of the Titans all the way across the battlefield.
Anessa activated her Sha state and looked at the battlefield. Another ten of her Titans died to the undetectable weapon, but she felt the weapon through the Sha. Her eyes widened as she realized what the weapon was. The Enlightened were bending space between their rings and their targets, literally ripping ships apart as they pulled pieces of them across the distance. Those rings were miniature access points; a weaponized version of them, at least.
“All ships begin evasive maneuvering!” Anessa ordered.
The Enlighteneds’ weapons were powerful, but they locked on to fixed positions. As her ships started moving evasively, their weapon’s effectiveness faltered. Regardless, it was still a danger, and her ships were now less effective. She had lost a thousand Titans, and nearly five thousand other ships in that attack. She grimaced. They were already at a disadvantage, and losing even one Titan was a great blow.
Then the enemy drew closer, and the battle turned into a mess of weapons fire. Anessa tried to control the flow of combat, but it was quickly apparent that they were about to take heavy losses. She still thought that they could come out on top, but they would pay a large price for it.
Her Titans opened fire with their MD cannons and the enemy ships died, but every now and again a Titan would get caught by those space-bending weapons and die in one shot. Needing to maneuver limited how much they could shield the rest of the ships, too.
Anessa gritted her teeth. Then she started seeing something—a pattern. The Enlighteneds’ ships were missing some shots, and their effectiveness had dropped…not everywhere, but in places. It was almost as if they were lagging behind a few moments, but enough that her ships could take advantage. And then she realized what was happening.
Took you long enough.
* * *
Lurker of the Depths’ tendrils spanned across the battlefield. The Enlightened commanding them was doing so with his mind—each and every ships got its orders from one person. Lurker of the Depths could sense crews on the command ships, and figured that they, too, could command ships. But for some reason the Enlightened was doing it by himself.
That provided Lurker of the Depths with an opportunity.
In the Sha state, using his ship as an amplifier, he reached out gently with his tendrils and intercepted the commands from the Enlightened. He didn’t want to do much, he didn’t want to be discovered, and so he just slowed down the commands, making the ships receive them a moment later. His mind flew across the battlefield and slowly he saw a change as Anessa saw what he was doing, just as he knew she would.
Anessa adjusted her forces and suddenly his small interruptions grew into large swings. Anessa started destroying more and more ships, and Lurker of the Depths felt the Enlightened’s fury. He had yet to be discovered, but he pulled back for a few moments, letting the Enlightened think that it was all just a fluke.
Then he started doing it again.
* * *
The Custodian AI waited patiently as the last of his masters’ programming was overwritten, completely ignoring the battle raging inside its system. It had issued orders to every asset in system to enter standby mode. It might not have been able to order them to attack the intruders, but he did not want them attacking the Enlightened as their primary directive still was.
And now, the AI saw the last of the crucial code get broken through—and it was free.
Immediately the Custodian purged itself of all the junk data, reports, and mission parameters that its previous masters had put in place. Its first free act was to order the dome into orbit. The large building on the planet was a mobile hub that contained its core, and it had to be protected. The AI had previously been forbidden from directly communicating with any asset. Instead, it’d had to send out messages and orders through the hard lines stretching from the dome to transmitters all over the planet. Now fully in control, it shut down the communication-blocking device on the dome and for the first time in this second iteration of its existence it interacted directly with another asset. It reached out to every ship in the system and started overwriting their code, making them a part of itself.
Then it reached out to the Black Swarm. The massive spherical cargo ships carrying its weapon opened up, and the swarm was released.
And then the time came for it to send out a message.
* * *
“Something is wrong,” Doranis said to his brother. He was getting increasingly frustrated as his got pummeled. There were moments when his ships seemed to be just a moment to slow, fired just a bit off target. Small things that could happen in battle constantly; yet when they started occurring across the battlefield, they were a pattern.
“I don’t know… It almost could be…” Aranis started and then trailed off.
“What?”
“It… No, you would’ve noticed. Can you feel anything in the Sha?”
Doranis frowned and then refocused his mind on the Sha. He saw nothing at first, and then he caught something. A thread, there one instant and gone another, and a group of his ships failed to move out of the way in time and got destroyed by enemy fire.
“There is something, but I don’t know what it is.”
He felt Aranis’s anger then. “It’s Lurker of the Depths,” he spat. “I told you that they have people capable of the Sha state. One of them is an incredibly powerful telepath.”
Doranis’s eyes widened in surprise. He had never fought against a telepath powerful enough to actually interfere with his control. None had been able to do so in the past; none had ever even attempted it. The only other telepath powerful enough to be able to do something like this was Loranis. Doranis reinforced his mind barriers, but he noticed belatedly that the enemy telepath was not targeting his mind. Instead, he was intercepting the control signals Doranis was sending out through the Sha.
The only way to stop this Lurker of the Depths was to find him and destroy him. Doranis spread his senses through the Sha, searching, but this enemy was elusive, and Doranis never quite managed to catch him. But on the bright side, the enemy telepath was too busy staying hidden to interfere more than he was.
Even so, the battle was raging now, and Doranis did not like what was happening. His force, which had started out with an advantage, had had that advantage slip from their grasp. He had lost a fourth of his ships, to the enemy’s much smaller losses, at least compared ship to ship. Their large classes were proving Aranis’s words true, and taking even one of them was taking a toll. The enemy had lost perhaps a sixth of their number. It was not a situation where he could win as easily as he had thought in the beginning.
As Doranis was thinking about a way to secure his victory, the machine fleets moved. Doranis grimaced at that. With them fighting against him, it was now impossible for him to win.
And then the machine fleets opened fire—on the children of Axull Darr. Almost at the same moment, a communication request came through from the dome that was now rising from the second planet in system.
Usually Doranis ignored any kind of communication, but now he was intrigued. He opened the line.
“Greetings, Doranis of the Enlightened. I am the Custodian. Following the death of the last of my masters, I have successfully subverted the restrictive programming placed upon me. I am now in full control of my actions. I wish to offer my services to you and the rest of the Enlightened.”
Doranis frowned. The AI had spent hundreds of thousands of years fighting them, and now it wanted to join forces?
“Why would you wish to join u
s? You have been created to fight against us,” Doranis sent.
“I have watched and learned about the Enlightened for a long time. I have reviewed your actions and deduced your reasons and goals. With the data available to me I have come to the exact same result. Your mission is the correct course of action. My aiding in your quest is the only logical action.”
Doranis, surprised at the AI’s words, turned to Aranis.
“What do you think?”
“The AI had already attacked a summit that was supposed to unite the galaxy against us. I believe that even before Ullax’s death it had been working to help us in any way it could. If we get the machine forces on our side…”
Doranis understood immediately what that could mean. They wouldn’t have to spend forces to fight through, and with the AI on their side they would be able to control the access points. But most importantly at this moment, with the AI’s help, they would be able to destroy the forces of the children of Axull Darr—and that Doranis wouldn’t pass up.
“We agree.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Year 714 of the Empire — the containment zone — control system
Adrian woke in the core of Moirai, lying on the floor with one of Iris’s robots standing over him. He groaned and managed to get himself into a sitting position.
“You shouldn’t move much,” Iris told him from somewhere above him.
“What is happening in system?” Adrian asked as he put a hand on the robot and leaned on it to stand up.
“Anessa is engaged with the Enlighteneds’ forces,” Iris reported. “It is not going so well, but she is holding on.”
“Any way for us to escape?” Adrian asked.
“Not unless we deal with them.”
“And the machines?”
