Chapter 104: Drive-by

Tau Ceti, Fire orbit, Primary Orbital Fortress

The planet below was currently presenting its most unfriendly side, half a dozen active volcanoes spewing ash into the air, laying a foundation for yet another season of bountiful growth of the verdant local plant life.

Ordinarily, Admiral Amos Santiago would be busy using the military-grade sensors to support wilderness rescue efforts at this point, because there were always a couple of dumbasses who had to go off and put themselves in mortal danger even though the “Volcano Fiesta” was basically a yearly event.

Ordinarily, there was not an alien armada bearing down on Tau Ceti’s inhabited planet.

His thirty battleships plus escorts and a freshly reinforced defense constellation against seventy-five enemy capital ships, screened by fifteen hundred drones of presently unknown capabilities.

If they carried missiles, then a mass-launch would put enough guided munitions into space to walk on.

If they carried lasers, it would be almost impossible to stop them from getting into position to destroy some of his ships’ engines from point-blank range.

And if they were merely there to enhance point defense … that would be the least dangerous overall, but it would gut the massive volleys the defense constellation had been built to throw their way.

At least there was absolutely no chance those things would be able to warp with the ships. Tactical relocation would be limited unless they were willing to leave the swarm behind.

On the screen, the alien fleet seemed to blip forward as they finally entered the fleet’s real-time scanning range, going from being shown where they had been, four minutes ago, only visible once the old light had crossed the intervening distance, to being tracked in, well, real time.

There was a plan for this situation. There was a plan for every situation; high command had spent the last two months coming up with them.

But was “win in one location, then concentrate forces via the catapults and punch out the rest of the enemy fleets one after the other” really going to work anywhere near as easily as the planners seemed to believe?

And then the alien armada seemed to combust.

***

Tau Ceti, UENS Dauntless, Flag Bridge

A hundred and fifty-three battlecruisers had remained after the battle of Sol.

Their extreme focus on real-space acceleration made them incredibly maneuverable without having to resort to warps, but the cost to their armor and, to a lesser degree, weapons, meant that using them in the same formation as battleships left them as little better than helpless targets, unable to use their greatest advantage.

As such, they’d been segregated off into their own strike force, for high-speed firing passes, when the opportunity presented itself.

It had.

Ninety of them had been held in orbit around Mercury, under the command of Admiral Kenta Miyazaki. And now, they’d been dropped into Tau Ceti, to the rear of the alien formation, a mere thousand kilometers separating them.

A tiny fraction of a light second, energy weapons striking almost the same instant they fired, the heavy beams running the length of the battlecruisers flashing through the spatial magic arrays that were their bows, guided onto carefully calculated vectors that ended right in the rear of the alien battleship’s engines.

Lasers and particle beams flashed out in an instant, missiles being actually fired backwards, putting their closing velocity below that of the warships, purely so that they would have enough time for proper target acquisition once the initial fireworks were over.

Three battlecruisers on each battleship. Ninety capital ships on thirty, even if the latter were twice as big.

In nought point two seconds, a full third of the Bastard’s forces in the Tau Ceti star system were simply gone, hulls rent open, superstructures shattered, or just plain vaporized wholesale by reactors that had failed to shut down before losing containment. Five had survived, but the idea that they might still be combat-capable was laughable.

And then momentum carried the human force through, the wall of drones melting away not under the hammerblows of the battlecruisers’ primaries but being torn apart by hundreds of secondaries and the even lighter point defense weapons.

All the while, they were already turning, sterns spinning away from the enemy while the primaries were once again getting a bead on the Cessid battleships, even as the missiles behind them zeroed in on their targets.

The enemy did the smart thing. They warped away, leaving the drone swarm behind, vaporizing away into nothingness as they were revealed to be almost entirely toothless point defense weapons.

Of course, a truly smart enemy would have kept eyes on Sol, to know when the catapults were activated, allowing them to at least try to not have their forces be sitting ducks.

The Bastard … clearly, there were certain tricks he’d missed.

And now, the alien warships had crossed a quarter of the remaining distance to the inhabitable planet, and a third of the way to the defense constellation’s missile range.

But the big weakness of warps, the reason why humanity generally tried to minimize their use, was that your enemy could typically follow. Quite easily, in fact, at least until they’d run out of [Skill]-uses.

“All ships, warp to the indicated location … now!” Miyazaki ordered; the battlecruisers hurled themselves forward, some vanishing from normal space and reappearing in the spot he’d marked, others flickering there in a series of small leaps, one ship briefly blurring into a line connecting the origin and destination before finally solidifying where it was meant to go.

They arrived in a formation he would have called more than acceptable had he not seen the enemy pull off something bordering on perfection a mere second later. And seven ships hadn’t even made the jump, being left behind.

But the rest had now appeared a quarter of a light second behind the enemy, ready to repeat the previous firing run.

This time, the enemy had had slightly more time to plan, or at least not been caught so completely off-guard that they’d chosen the emergency escape option.

Instead, they warped half a light second backwards, reversing their respective positions, and granting the enemy a clear and effectively free shot at the human fleet’s sterns. In the quarter of a second it would have taken to cross the intervening distance.

“[The Abyss Swallows All],” Miyazaki hissed, as he glared at the screen.

And behind the human fleet, the universe dissolved, vanishing behind a black void that began to sprout tentacles a split second later, eating the heavy lasers that had been slashing across the void towards them, clouds of macrons, nigh-incalculable numbers of tiny nuclear explosives vanishing without a trace as they touched the wall of darkness.

Missiles were already being pumped out by every remaining battlecruiser, taking guidance from satellites in locations that very much could get a bead on the enemy, transforming ragged salvoes that would have mere seconds to acquire target locks into coordinated storms of nuclear fire … or they would, assuming the enemy failed to move from their current location.

And despite the wastefully suicidal tactics their opponent was using, the Bastard was far from dumb.

The alien armada warped forward once more, a third of the remaining distance to the planet surmounted, macron clouds already being hurled backwards, a constant stream of explosives no sane admiral would want to jump into.

The next jump would take them into missile range of the defense constellations, and the one after that would drop them straight into orbit.

Miyazaki dropped a new waypoint into the tactical network, one that would lead them onto a slashing firing run past the enemy.

Another warp dropped them to the rear of the enemy, slightly above the system’s ecliptic, and far enough to the side to pass past the mess the enemy had seemingly expected them to teleport into.

Once more, pure momentum carried the human fleet past, bows turning towards the enemy not to bring their primaries to bear, but to take their engines as far out of the enemy line of fire as possible.

Around Miyazaki, the entire battlecruiser seemed to hum as her primaries fired, the targeted alien battleship staggering sideways, a trio of massive holes in its armor.

Then Dauntless rang like a bell, the deck trembling as alarms howled through the ship. And a moment later, the entire ship was sent spinning as though struck by a giant’s hammer-

Going through the alien formation had caused them to flash past too quickly for the enemy weapons to track.

Flying past, even with identical relative speeds, on the other hand … they were taking fire.

And the enemy was once again proving just how superior his coordination was.

The first return salvo had been an automated scattering across the human formation, the enemy computers reacting before the crew could.

The second was focused with lethal intent, spread across a mere five human battlecruisers.

Invincible was simply wiped from the face of the universe, vaporized so thoroughly one could scarcely tell whether it had been the enemy fire that had destroyed it or her own reactor.

Audacious was torn open like a tin can, air, debris, and personnel sucked into space in an instant; those torn free by the evacuating air paradoxically proven the lucky ones when her reactor too lost containment a moment later.

Courageous and Inspire were slightly more fortunate, “merely” shattering from the hail of enemy laser fire.

And Dauntless herself … the ship was still intact. Technically. Dark energy sealed the gashes in her hull, black portals were already manifesting to bypass damaged areas, and once he realized he’d managed to extinguish the fusion reactor in time, Miyazaki managed to get his heart to stop attempting to smash his ribs to pieces.

Deep breath in, deep breath out.

He bit his teeth to stop himself from barking orders. Damage control was the captain’s job; his was to coordinate the rest of the fleet.

That was when the main display froze. And the comms panel lit up with enough warning lights to be mistaken for a Christmas tree.

Taking a brief moment to switch fully to Party-communication and sent a quick message to the captain, the content simple: “Retreat from the battlefield; I will be relocating to a new flagship.”

[March Across the Void] swallowed the flag bridge, taking him and the entire cadre of officers manning the consoles to Daring.

Courageous had been the original backup flagship, but she wasn’t in any shape to do so, and neither was Invincible, the third in line.

As such, it took a few seconds for the dustcloths to be swept off the consoles, and the interface to finally accept that yes, it would now serve as the fleet commander’s access to the network, but it acquiesced nevertheless, revealing a situation that had managed to get far worse in the brief time he’d been away.

There were seventeen ships missing from the enemy force, bringing them down to twenty-eight, but the wreckage of another eight human battlecruisers trailed his own flotilla, many of them having managed to warp clear of the battlefield and presently limping towards clear space.

The Bastard’s fleet warped again. Into missile range of the satellites, which promptly launched, even knowing there was no way in hell their targets would still be there by the time the weapons crossed the intervening distance.

Then they launched a second salvo.

And a third.

By the time the fourth was carving its way across the star system, the firing pattern had become clear. Area denial. Even with close to three thousand missiles a salvo, saturating even the relatively small area the enemy could reach with the two warps they had remaining was impossible, but forcing them away from certain areas certainly was.

He bit his lower lip as he scanned the battlespace. His formation’s next jump needed to be perfectly timed.

Too soon, and they would lose several more capital ships during the resultant extended exchange.

Too late, and the enemy might no longer feel the pressure of their pursuit.

His fingers began to dance on one of the few blank spots on his armrest as he used the sounds of the tapping to find the proper timing. The target position relative to the enemy had already been set, far enough for the power of the weapon to massively drop off; the calculations had already been made, and even though the enemy was conducting evasive maneuvers, the firing solutions that had been programmed in would doubtlessly reap a vicious harvest …

“Warp!”

The order came out as little more than a hissed whisper, yet it was heard clearly all the same, resonating across the fleet as Miyazaki infused it with the [Word of Command], taking the fleet’s coordination from “well-trained” to “utter perfection.”

This time, a mere half-dozen enemy starships ate the entirety of the human fire, a mere fraction of the heavy energy weapons successfully boring through the defenses to damage the hulls below. And yet still, three of the enemy vessels blew apart in an instant; one spun away, pure happenstance having seen it cleaved in half without its reactor going critical, and the last pair were “merely” damaged to the point of uselessness.

A half-hearted spray of lasers was all the response the enemy offered, weakened by distance and the brevity of the time in which the firing solutions had been made.

Then, the enemy warped again, straight into orbit of Fire.

And they couldn’t simply follow; jumping into orbit at their current velocity would end with them crashing into the planet.

They were moving too quickly, carrying too much momentum, to reverse through the acceleration provided by the battlecruiser’s engines alone. And while [Skills] would have been an option, that would have required every member of the fleet with the applicable ability to be aboard his fleet. And they weren’t.

Even so, the defense constellation wasn’t entirely helpless at point-blank range.

Eight orbital fortresses were spaced equidistant around Fire, equipped with every weapon in humanity’s arsenal save missiles.

Lasers that made those aboard Dauntless look like flashlights, particle beams compared to which a battlecruiser’s were more akin to a high school student’s engineering project, and railguns that basically shot half a shuttle at their target.

Furthermore, not being starships, they did not require the vast enchantments manipulating mass, gravity, and inertia needed to allow those very same vessels to accelerate at reasonable speeds.

And being military stations, there were no morons trying argue against trying to use all the ambient mana that freed up to shield the ship.

But the battlestations would only have been able to achieve a Pyrrhic victory had they been alone. As things stood, they mostly just served to cover their actual Sunday punch.

Because while nowadays, being able to casually wipe capital ships from the face of the universe was something any S-Ranker could do, having the space-based mobility to use said abilities was hardly a requirement.

So now, the enemy had found himself forced straight into the middle of the defense constellation, and was now face-to-face not just with some of the nastiest battlestations ever built by human hands, but also several dozen angry powerhouses.

Overkill, really.

The remnants of the alien armada died within two seconds of entering orbit. It took ten for the sensors to regain the ability to resolve anything from the utter cataclysm that had been unleashed.

And by the time the space where the enemy had been stopped trying to imitate a dying star, the largest piece remaining was about the size of a car.

Miyazaki realized he’d partially risen from his seat, surged upwards to be closer to the screens … and more than a few bridge officers had noticed and were giving him looks.

Using a [Skill] in lieu of a seatbelt was already atypical, not having shown he was incapable of sitting down, ahem.

Miyazaki let himself drop back down into his seat, a new issue finally becoming the priority now that the fighting here was done.

No one had properly shared the information they’d just gathered from the drones.

And relying on the rest of the fleet to be watching and having drawn their own conclusions was a recipe for a fatal miscommunication somewhere down the line.

The navy was a professional organization.

It was an organization staffed by trained personnel.

And it had been continuously improving since its inception.

However, the closest thing to an actual war they’d fought to date had been various skirmishes against pirates, with enemies that were barely coordinated and battles that happened one at a time, with more than enough time in between to reorganize and adapt.

“Admiral Xiao fleet reports facing drones that functioned as dampening field emitters.

… And thus, the other shoe had dropped.

A brief check revealed that they were half an hour out from being able to jump to the next system with the catapults unless they burned some more warps.

And unfortunately, they had to.