Chapter 105: Battle for the Core

Epsilon Eridani, UENS Arthur Pendragon, Flag Bridge

Admiral Ang Xiao of the United Earth Navy sat on his flagship’s flag bridge like a statue, eyes fixed on the cluttered mess the main screen had been turned into at his orders.

The rest of the room failed to match his level of stillness, unsurprisingly, yet few fleet command centers were even a fraction as silent as his. In fact, one could be forgiven for believing the crew didn’t even breathe.

Xiao had tried not being on the bridge, yet while removing his presence successfully lifted the dampening effect from these people’s spirits, remotely leading had a not-insignificant negative effect on overall efficiency. Otherwise, he’d have gladly led from an isolated room.

And establishing a more upbeat and congenial atmosphere upon the bridge had wound up distracting him, likewise undercutting the overall effectiveness of operations.

Yet, as the [Suzerain of Calculation], it had not been hard to figure out just how hard to push things until things were moving smoothly.

Xiao’s finger twitched, and the screen shifted, showing the enemy fleet from a new angle, yet another set of analyses overlaid the image. Another slight movement, and the image sharpened, zeroing in on the engines, lining it up with historical examples.

Controlling the computer was easy, with his [Skill]set. Being able to perfectly calculate everything, his own movements included, and having the necessary supernatural abilities to implement the results of said calculations had rapidly led to perfect control over his own body.

From there, it had taken five years, a dozen of the best programmers the navy had been able to hire, and no fewer than three battleship computer cores burning out to make things finally work the way he wanted them to, yet by the end of that journey, he had gained a level of control over the flagship that no one short of a technopath could match. And even amongst that august group, there were many he had surpassed.

A million tiny gestures, a million inputs, all leading to the rest of the flag crew becoming superfluous. Almost.

The enemy ships, the battleships, that was, were of the same design that had attacked Sol.

Their engines were burning at their demonstrated maximum.

And yet, their acceleration was a full ten percent lower.

He’d initially assumed it was a matter of increased mass, some new equipment making them too heavy to repeat their previous showing, but if that was the case, there would have been some variance in how the ship moved in response to the thrusters firing. Unless the mass increase had been carefully distributed to perfectly match the existing layout, the ships weren’t any heavier.

Instead … the issue had to be thaumaturgical in nature. Some of the ambient mana that had been going to the drives during the Battle of Sol, and was going there for all other fleets, but the force currently bearing down on the planet behind him, Aether … the enemy had to be hiding something up their sleeve.

That force could not possibly be allowed to enter orbit.

This time, the orders he gave required an entire hand’s worth of signs, forming both the reinforcements he’d brought from Sol and Epsilon Eridani’s own defense fleet into a gigantic disk as they moved out, the formation’s wide side facing towards the enemy, ships spread out wide enough to force the enemy to likewise spread out the fire from their infernal macron cannons. But not so far that they would be utterly incapable of supporting each other.

And then he followed those up with no fewer than six contingencies, most of which were focused on tightening up or splitting the formation to counter potential enemy attempts at exploiting the looseness of his fleet.

Sixty human battleships, and a hundred-forty-odd heavy and light cruisers, against sixty alien battleships, fifteen carriers, and whatever surprises the drones carried.

Both his and the defense fleets’ destroyers would be staying behind, however. They lacked the ability to meaningfully contribute while being too fragile to make their participation an acceptable risk.

It was a simple question of numbers. According to his calculations, putting them into the field would increase overall casualties by at least a third, while the only “benefit” was predicted to be a lessened degree of damage to the capital ships, yet that “degree” was not to the point where ships would remain in the repair slips by the time the next alien attack arrived.

This battle would not be clean. This battle would not be without losses. But by the gods, it would be one that would have the worst possible outcome for the chùsheng who’d dared drag humanity into a genocidal war.

“All ships, on my mark, warp.”

***

The very instant the human fleet teleported out of orbit, the Cessid fleet began to pull its drones back, storing them once again aboard their carriers before they too leaped forward, straight at the planet.

Back on the homeworld, the prime body leaned forward, watching the battle on the massive viewscreen that descended from the ceiling despite how utterly pointless the expense of constructing it had been.

In one star system, at least, the humans were properly coming out to meet him. It wasn’t quite clear what had set them off, but it was nice. No fighting amidst those ridiculously makeshift defenses they’d put into orbit.

Most of the swarm merely waited for the human to make the next move, but five carriers were sent ahead, briefly appearing to have exploded as the drones they carried were unleashed in an instant, sections of the large ships’ hull actually glowing from the plasma streams that propelled the drones onwards.

The humans made their next move, planting themselves into space almost ten light-seconds from the carriers, well outside the range of any trick they had any right to expect. And they promptly launched missiles. Not enough to break through the defense of point defense drones, but those were not the variant carried by the fleet they were facing.

Smart, but not too smart.

Two things happened near-simultaneously.

First, the rest of his ships warped in ahead of the human fleet, one and a half million kilometers, roughly five light-seconds, separating them.

Second, all of the many drones presently spreading across the battlespace triggered their payload, each projecting a light dampening field … which promptly latched onto the nearest one of its kind, the pair fusing and empowering each other, bursting outwards to reach for the next one, a mere half-second being all it took to catch the human fleet in the web.

On the very furthest extent, but it would stop Epsilon Eridani’s defenders from running just long enough for the warships in the system to activate their own fields.

Then, every single one of him on the battleships in the Epsilon Eridani system activated their vessels’ shields. Barriers of energy that guzzled mana like it was nothing, all but starving the engines, while simultaneously about to quadruple the ships’ ability to survive damage, once they were fully charged.

And thus, the trap was complete, and victory assured.

The humans could dodge. They might even be able to avoid getting into laser range.

But at the speeds they had been moving when the dampening field had gone up … they were going to have to spend close to an hour flying through the macron guns of his fleet.

And that was if they tried to avoid engaging.

Going straight for his ships would resolve the situation more quickly, but also leave the human commander running a gauntlet. One they would not survive … but most humans were nowhere near as intelligent as they seemed to think they were.

“Greatest of God’s creation,” his posterior!

***

Clever bastards … Xiao groaned internally, not that any hint of that sentiment leaked into the orders he gave.

“All ships, decelerate at maximum safe power.”

Almost immediately, the formation came apart, destroyers and light cruisers spinning like ballerinas before engaging their engines once they were aimed in the direction of travel, swiftly bleeding off momentum, dropping past the battleships before the fleet’s titans had done more than begin the turn.

That would ruin any chances at a linked missile defense, but the fact that the alien ships had the same mass distribution as Sol’s attackers meant that they couldn’t have bolted on any new modules of even moderate weight, and missiles were heavy. Too heavy to go unnoticed.

And while that was happening, his fingers began to dance, the viewscreen ablur with vectors and symbols and a general mess likely only he could properly decipher.

It took a full ten seconds for things to come together, but come together it did, and the railgun batteries lining the battleships’ hulls began to hurl enchanted steel at the distant enemy fleet.

The enemy shields were a substantial problem. However, there had been a cost involved. Not only was the enemy having to sacrifice the mana powering the mass-manipulating spells, increasing their engines’ efficiency, but merely having that option had lowered the efficacy of the engines to produce the anomaly he’d noticed earlier.

And right now, that meant that the enemy had effectively sacrificed their ability to dodge.

The plan, as overcomplicated in execution as it would be, boiled down to one simple concept: pick a target, hammer it into the debris with railgun rounds that could not be dodged without losing shield cover, then hit the next one, and pray they destroyed enough to win the clash of energy weapons.

Well, normally they’d pray. Xiao had calculated things out. He’d win. The cost, however … he knew that, too.

Pendragon finally completed her spin at that point and her main engines kicked in, beginning the long and arduous process of braking her velocity. Really, all they were doing was stretch the long-range portion of this duel.

And all the battleship’s railguns were finally able to bear on the enemy.

Destroyers were little spikes, fast, maneuverable, and able to aim their spinal weapons.

All escorts save destroyers had the shape of a rounded pyramid, or, perhaps, that of a shortened egg, built in a way that maximized the arc in which they could aim all weapons save the ones mounted on the little “skirt” wrapped around the engines, which held their chase armament.

And capital ships? Those were more like massive bullet-shaped hulks in space. Their firepower came from the massive primaries they’d been built around, and those were aimed not by the ship’s movement but by the spatial magic arrays in their bow.

At that point, minimizing their profile was a higher priority, which also had the neat side effect of allowing any weapon not located on the front of their bow to fire backwards as easily as forward.

The first missile salvo was loosed then, two thousand four hundred guided weapons flashing out from Xiao’s fleet, coming in on wide arcs, a grand and lethal embrace that was absolutely in no way efficient from the perspective of attempting to land hits.

But even with the loss of efficiency, the enemy would need to add fire from their macron guns to their defense. And the further the guns needed to turn to do that, the fewer explosive pellets would strike Xiao’s ships.

The missiles would be relegated to the role of decoys here, and Xiao could already hear the complaints from all the armchair admirals who would be tearing this battle apart in the future … but fuck them.

Suddenly, the Pendragon trembled slightly as a couple of hundred macrons skimmed off the hull. An external sensor shattered. A railgun’s exterior was scuffed up. A maneuvering thruster went dead.

And that was all; the rest had gone straight into the engines.

Unsurprisingly, drive plasma was an effective way to neutralize the enemy’s dust guns, assuming one could arrange for a situation where pointing one’s vulnerable stern didn’t turn into a one-way trip to the afterlife.

A railgun slug would have remained a problem even reduced to molten slag, but the main threat from the macrons was their explosive nature, and that wasn’t an issue when they all blew a good hundred meters off the stern.

Unfortunately, not every ship in the fleet had been as lucky. Mostly, the cruisers. The armored skirt holding their rear-facing guns sadly doubled as a perfect target against the enemy’s favored long-range weapon.

Exeter had long since had every weapon mounted there reduced to scrap, and a piece of armor had broken off, ricocheting into the heavy cruisers’ interior engineering space and taken out half the engines, while the light cruiser Fletcher had somehow ended up on the verge of a power core overload due to a spectacular case of bad luck as a concentrated salvo had bored through the hull, blasting its way through one millimeter at a time.

Xiao ordered both ships to leave the formation and remove themselves from the battlefield, knowing the enemy could not afford to spend the focus needed to destroy them.

Not that he’d put destroying them out of pure spite past a being so vile it had been titled “the Bastard” on official documentation …

It was now that the first salvo of railgun slugs hammered into the enemy formation, dozens of shells vaporizing into plasma as they splashed across the alien shields, short-lived streaks of fire burning in the black sky … yet that effect lasted for a mere millisecond before the arcane protection failed and nearly a hundred metal slabs moving at a decent percentage of the speed of light hammered into the alien starship, smashing through armor with casual ease before tumbling deeper into the vessel, the repeated impacts rapdily melting and vaporizing it, before finally splattering the inside of whatever compartment they ended up in with superheated plasma and whatever shrapnel they had launched during their short lived journey.

Over the course of not even a single second, the alien starship had been gutted.

The twenty-odd rounds that hit afterwards merely added insult to injury, the battleship cracking in half as it was sent tumbling away, the center of the alien formation suddenly having a conspicuous hole. In. I- … CÀO!

Xiao froze as he realized he’d made a mistake.

Targeting the enemy center was standard tactics when it came to kinetics, because there was no concern of interception, and there was a decent chance of taking out the enemy flagship. But to a hive mind, “flagship” was a foreign concept.

The next four salvos had already been put into space; there was no retargeting those without spending resources already spoken for.

New targets were assigned entirely at random. Well, “random.” Dispersed across the formation in a way that would make it hard for the Bastard to determine their targetting priority.

Pendragon trembled once more, another salvo of macrons raking across her stern, a lucky handful blowing against the hull while the rest burned up inside the plasma stream from the engines.

A couple of seconds passed, and the ship’s deck quivered. And then stayed like that.

The enemy had the Pendragon dialed in, now, perhaps even identified her as the flagship.

Xiao triggered [Fudged Numbers], focusing on the enemy tactical computers. The effect couldn’t be very strong; in fact, the instant anyone caught on to the fact that something had been done, the effect would instantly dissipate.

But could even a hive mind realize that the macrons were being fired at an angle that was a fraction of a fraction of a percent different, guiding the combined firepower of at least four different battleships straight into the Pendragon’s drive plume?

A second and third alien ship vanished in quick succession, the two having been poorly placed in such a way that the rounds remaining after one had been destroyed by its own reactor crashed down upon the other.

Then a fourth went spinning away, its bow riddled with craters and an entire broadside reduced to scrap metal when it had been turned into the path of the back end of the salvo that had wrecked it, but it had remained “intact,” for a certain definition of the word.

That would be the maximum capacity of the enemy shields, then, Xiao decided, throwing out yet another firing solution. The last one, unless the enemy had another card to play.

Three more of the hive’s ships were knocked free of the formation, bleeding atmosphere, the shield vanishing as the magic required to fuel it was diverted back into the engines as it fled to the rear of the alien fleet.

Yet those would prove to be the last to survive a strike intended to destroy.

The next four came apart in rapid succession, two destroyed by their own reactors, the third shattering into a cloud of debris, and the fourth somehow managing to snap in half as the Bastard tried something.

Unfortunately, that was when their enemy found his range for a second time. By having the vessels around the edge of his formation train their guns on the human ships on the opposite side of Xiao’s flotilla, the weapons were able to just barely get past the shield of drive plasma.

Across the hundreds of thousands of kilometers that still separated them, that small difference in angle did not translate to much … but his capital ships were still slowly being ground to pieces, even the armor itself beginning to fail.

A new set of orders, then Xiao triggered [Loss Consolidation], instantly repairing every ship that remained with Xiao’s main formation. All save the Galverino and Caterina Svorza, which seemed to be peeling; the outer layers of the massive battleships disintegrated and flew past their stern, no longer affected by their deceleration, rather spectacularly burning up as they fell into the drive plume.

The macron guns had been built to destroy gear built atop the hull, not tear through a battleship’s armor … but anything could be taken to and often subsequently past its logical extreme. And a truly absurd number of hits had been transferred to the two “sacrificial” battleships.

Anyone in the exterior compartments was doomed at that point, and many deeper in, yet all those places were empty. For the orders that preceded his activation of the [Skill] had been simple, straightforward, and followed immediately: “Evacuate anyone not in the bridge or main engineering by any means.”

The two ships in question began firing their maneuvering thrusters while continuing to burn their engines at full power, their deceleration being reduced while they began to push clear of the main formation.

A couple of seconds later, once the damage had been fully assessed and taken into account, their engines went from “full sustainable power” to “emergency acceleration.” It’d be murder on the crews, surpassing the inertial compensators’ capacity to dampen the acceleration by such a degree that even their enhanced bodies would be feeling the strain, and even the ship itself would eventually give out if they kept that up for more than a few minutes …

But it would take them well clear of Xiao’s flotilla.

If the enemy were to focus on the ships currently swinging wide, they’d have been able to inflict massive damage. To kill far too many of his subordinates.

But then again, the flotilla was currently pulling together, forming up into a gigantic hammer poised to smash clean through the enemy’s increasingly ragged formation, that could not be ignored.

They could hurt his people, and yet, they couldn’t. He’d made himself too big a problem, too immediate a threat, and bluntly, too annoying an opponent.

His iron self-control finally cracked as Xiao glared at the screen.

That’s right, zázhǒng. Come at me, and die!

And yet … for all that, the battleships were mostly still intact; the escorts were being obliterated almost by accident, caught up in sweeps of the alien long-range guns. The worst part was that, with his fleet presently decelerating to keep the range open, any ship that took propulsion damage inevitably wound up drifting ahead of the flotilla, all but helpless as they ran into the enemy’s laser weapons.

Certain personnel-transfer [Skills] continued to function despite the dampening field, but anything that would have brought the ships out of danger refused to work.

Not that they had the time to try anything else either, for they were beginning to reach energy weapon range.

The first enemy lasers were licking across his flagship’s hull, long-range fire harmlessly splashing off reflective armor … but that was merely a prelude to the hell that was about to come.

“In ten seconds, initiate Overture,” Xiao ordered, triggering the final step in the plan. The one that would hurt.

And when those ten seconds ran out, all across the human formation, maneuvering thrusters lit off simultaneously, slowly turning ships even as their engines were still burning at full, the carefully spaced spread of starships coming apart as the continuous thrust suddenly pointed in a different and constantly shifting direction began to push them elsewhere.

That had consequences.

First, it took them out of the path of the streams that had been dialed in on their location for the past several minutes.

Second … for the first time since they had started shooting at each other, the Bastard’s fleet had something to shoot at other than drive plumes.

It took seven-point-two seconds for Pendragon to turn her bow far enough that her spatial targetting array could ram her primaries down the enemy’s throat, ten-point-three seconds for her to go entirely bow-on with the alien formation.

In that time, his flagship lost over a third of everything on the exterior of her hull, torn off by enemy fire, the same scene playing out over and over all across the fleet, the flag bridge’s display in a continuous state of flickering; the sensor feed was forced to endlessly draw in information from new sources to replace the sensors as they were being burned off … and that was with every them burning every [Skill] possible to protect their ships.

Sixteen alien battleships had died to humanity’s railguns during Xiao’s approach.

Two human battleships had had to retreat due to damage.

As the human flotilla’s ships turned, a storm of energy crashed down upon their foes, eight of their enemy’s vessels of war all but melting beneath the oppressive power of Xiao’s Ascendant-class battleships.

And then, mere seconds later, the enemy’s lasers finally ranged on them and began to truly reap their bloody harvest, armor that had already been shredded by macrons only able to turn aside lasers by virtue of having to be vaporized before the alien beams could reach the internals of the ship it was protecting.

The Charlemagne was blasted to pieces in an instant, struck by so many lasers it was hard to identify at what point her reactor had exploded. And she was only the first battleship to die; the massive human warships rapidly coming apart as their wrecked armor proved to be only slightly more effective than cheap clay at keeping out lasers.

All the while, the alien vessels’ shields flickered and flared under the return fire; only the fact that they were at a range where Xiao could actively take advantage of spot failures prevented this from being a one-sided slaughter.

He watched the Gaja Madah split open like a tin can as alien energy weapons drilled into her bow, unable to do anything save coordinate the evacuation, his [Skills] oh so helpfully providing a precise casualty count for all that he did not want to know yet.

Their primaries finished recharging moments later, a new firing plan to fill in for the ships lost or damaged melted away another seven alien vessels … just as the Hrolf Kraki came apart in the middle of the human fleet.

And throughout all that, the two formations continued to move towards each other, the human formation still accelerating, now aiming to shorten the time spent in a knife-range energy weapon duel, nigh-crippled ships pushing onwards regardless, hoping, no, prayingthat the engines’ location on the rear of the ship would keep them safe even as everything else burned.

It also had the unfortunate side effect of energy fire growing more and more intense with every kilometer of distance crossed, both fleets appearing to be on fire even to the naked eye as hundreds of thousands of sapient beings sought to kill each other.

A mere two seconds before the two formations interpenetrated, the human primaries fired yet again, six alien warships erased from the face of the universe, the entirety of the enemy flotilla’s center simply gone, burned away by humanity’s weapons.

For a brief instant, the battle almost resembled the naval warfare of the Age of Sail, man-built titans unleashing broadsides into each other before they parted once again, the alien chase armaments suddenly able to fire into the human ships’ propulsion units even as they were once more rotating in space, turning their sterns out of the line of fire, both sides continuing to pour fire into each other as they drifted apart.

Xiao continued to shift things around, pulling damaged ships away from the focus of the enemy’s fire, doing his damnedest to ensure that even ships that had been battered into a state that was barely better than an outright wreck stayed at least in a repairable state, while the enemy vessels were “just” reduced to the point where their fire cut off before the next ship became the focus of his fleet. Those would just have to be hunted down later.

Yet when the bastard’s final combat-capable vessel in Epsilon Eridani finally became the target, it was utterly vaporized, torn to shreds by the combined primaries of no fewer than twenty-one battleships, blown to pieces before its power core could even finish exploding, the belated blast of plasma released by the cracked-open fusion bottle only serving to underline the sheer level of overkill that had torn apart the ship.

A few more orders shifted around his fleet to separate out those of his ships too badly damaged to continue to engage in combat operations, and those that could hunt down the enemy cripples.

Eighteen were in the former category, bound for the repair slip the instant the dampening field was down.

Twenty-three were in the latter, but being in “better shape” was hardly saying much.

And nineteen of the ships he had commanded were gone.

From any mathematical standpoint, having obliterated seventy-five alien capital ships while losing only those nineteen was a victory. A costly, yet resounding one.

But there was one thing Xiao did not have to “calculate” to know: he’d be seeing the faces of the men and women who had marched into hell alongside him in his nightmares for the rest of his life.