Chapter 108: Hunt

With a “thunk,” Derek only felt throuhg his hands while the vacuum swallowed the sound; the last piece of the station slid into place.

Oh, thank God.

With a groan of relief that could probably be heard all the way back in Sol, Derek kicked himself off the deck plating, drifting away to get a proper look at the whole assemblage.

A hundred by a hundred by a hundred meter cube with three sizeable corridors pushing through the center of each face, granting comparatively easy access to most of the compartments.

The whole affair was also seventy percent empty at the moment, but then again, the Korolev had hauled this thing, and even the Dragonfly was not up to hauling a major, well, haul.

Spare parts, munitions, and fuel, plus a whole lot of extra comm nodes because someone had apparently gotten genuinely paranoid about the ability to sever those The Error had demonstrated.

Derek began to speak into the communicator, the weirdness of “talking” in a vacuum while the “microphone” interpreted his voice based on the motions alone still strange, all these years later.

“Captain Volkov, I believe this concludes things?”

“Da, Captain Thoma,” the other man replied immediately, the sound reaching Derek’s ears via the headset, vibrating his bones. Also something he should already be used to, but very much wasn’t.

“Good luck and Godspeed,” Derek announced by way of goodbye, then grabbed at the fabric of spacetime and began hauling himself fully towards his ship, each “pull” accelerating him faster and faster until, a mere second before he’d have face-planted against the hull, he grabbed and held on, momentum pivoting him around the anchor point …

Derek hissed in annoyance as he smashed the tip of his boots against the armor.

Missed that one by literallymillimeters…

And then an annoyed voice stabbed into his ears like a (sadly justified) icepick.

“Hey, stop kicking my ship!”

“Sorry, Mimi,” Derek replied, glancing down at the place where his boot had landed. It wasn’t really damaged; he was neither heavy nor moving fast enough for that, but the mirror sheen of the anti-laser plating was a little smudged, which could theoretically be a problem.

The plating was still intact, but if the smear of rubber remained on there, an incoming laser would turn that into plasma before it struck and was reflected by the armor, and actually inflict damage where the weapon alone would have failed.

Even if the likelihood of them getting struck at that exact place, by a laser burning at an intensity where that minuscule amount of marring made a difference, was minuscule, bordering on infinitesimal, he still cleaned it with a spell.

Because why the hell not.

He hauled himself in through the nearest airlock and marched onto the bridge, where he promptly dropped himself into his chair. And stared at the main viewscreen while [Stellar Processing] did a damn good job of threatening to cook his brain.

Well, not really, but it certainly felt like it when he was done, as he tried to calculate … a lot of things.

Really, the basic problem he was chewing on wasn’t all that complex when put into words, but mathematics had a bad habit of taking simple things and turning them into a computer-melting, brain-overheating clusterfuck of a calculation.

In this case, he was trying to figure out the best place(s) for long-range observation, with a minimal amount of repositioning required.

Two hundred thousand stars were a lot to visit one by one, but if they could just find/rule out at least a few from long range, that’d be great.

There were a lot of factors to consider.

Everything from the processing capability of the Dragonfly’s computers to stars ending up blocking their view of the ones behind them.

Something must have shown through his body language, for no one disturbed him in any way, leaving him free to give himself a slowly building migraine.

He must have sat there for a good two hours, the others having left the bridge at some point so they could talk amongst themselves, rather than suffering under the unenforced silence.

Yeah … that had probably gotten pretty annoying, pretty darn quickly. And, true to form, he hadn’t even realized until well after they were already gone.

Eventually, things just sort of clicked.

His mental image of the shrouded space began to line up, his fingers flying across his console to transfer everything into the nav computer.

There we go.

Sighing in relief, he leaned back and pulled up the description for [Stellar Processing]. He figured it had to have risen pretty high for things to resolve themselves as quickly as they had, but even he couldn’t have expected it to become his absolute highest-level [Skill], past the second threshold.

Stellar Processing (legendary, Level 21)

Do all calculations necessary to run a starship up to a hundred cubic kilometers in your head; use sensory Skills through starship sensors.

…

After countless situations where this Skill has been used to fight and win life-and-death battles against other starships, it has gained the ability to make similar calculations for up to three enemy vessels, under the above limitations, while gaining insight into the knowledge needed to make said calculations.

Nice.

Well, the [System] had, as per usual, buried the lead there, but still, nice.

Basically, it’d make predicting an enemy’s moves a hell of a lot easier, and give him a level of insight into their vessel’s capabilities that boggled the mind.

Also, the [Skill’s] description had apparently “eaten” anything to do with seeing the surrounding space in real-time, almost certainly because [Cosmic Awareness] had rendered that portion of [Stellar Processing] utterly superfluous.

All in all, his status sheet had gained a lot of upgrades.

Name: Derek Ambrosius Thoma

Class: Cosmic Magus

Species: High Human

Level: 70 -> 74

XP: 507/37,500

Health Status: Healthy

Mana: 4,800/4,800

Fortitude 160

Perception 150 -> 155

Strength 150

Agility 190

Magic Power 480

Magic Regeneration 360 -> 435

Free Points: 0 Stat, 0 Skill

Central Skills

Aspect Hunter 11 -> 12

Aspect Integration 11 -> 13

Call of Adventure 10

Vessel of Legend 8 -> 10

Cosmic Awareness 6 -> 7

Cosmic Event 2 -> 7

Skills

Lightspeed Learning 12 -> 15

Skill Fusion 16

Knowledge Conversion 13

Branching Capabilities 8

Anima Bolt 10 -> 13

Lifesurge 7 -> 9

Predator’s Force 2 -> 4

Phantom Limb 2 -> 3

Flash Forward 15 -> 17

Fractal Beams 2

Danger Radar 3 -> 10

Energy Screen 5 -> 11

Smuggler’s Pocket 3

Starship Aspect 1 -> 3

Dance Across the Universe 1

General Skills

Bloodline of the Hellborne Survivor

Stellar Processing 13 -> 21

Spellcasting 7 (189 spells known)

Variable Weapon Empowerment 6

Phantom Armor 4

Scholarly Admiral 1 -> 4

Starship Upkeep 15 -> 16

Enchanting 13 -> 19

Alcubierre Bubble 14 -> 16

Eye of the Predator 13

Shapeshifter’s Acrobatics 6 -> 10

Superior Eldritch Spatial Manipulation 15 -> 20

Well of Wisdom’s Blessing (unranked)

Condensed Dragonscale Cranial Protection (unranked)

Aspect

Aspect Skills

Hydra

Regeneration, Redundant Organs

Poltergeist

Ephemeral Form, Spectral Flight

Least Demon Lord

Grand Hellflame, Moment of Immortality

Lord of Time and Space

True Spatial Warp, Cosmos Soul, True Spatial Affinity, And I Shall Not Be Moved

Caladrius

Healing Light, Inner Light

Fata Morgana

Hologram, Perception Block

Cosmic Leviathan

Charging to Infinity, Cosmic Gaze, Stellar Travel, Omnidimensional Maneuvering

Void Dragon

Wings of the Void, Scales of the Void, Star’s Heart, Infinite Mind

Magebreaker Specter

Internal Grimoire, Spellbreaker

The Error

Moment of Immortality, Energy Reflection, Eldritch Manifestation, Telefrag

Cessid Battleship

Heavy Laser Pulse

That didn’t really feel like much to pick a fight with an alien empire, sadly.

But it wasn’t like Derek hadn’t walked away from fights he had no right surviving before. And this was a situation where he could even choose whether or not to engage.

“Once more into the breach,” he whispered, more to himself than the others.

The universe around his ship was swallowed by the warping chaos of the [Alcubierre Bubble].

***

Two days later, the Dragonfly was once again in normal space, the difference in the surrounding stars barely noticeable.

They were in the right position now, though.

“Sensors in long-range scanning mode,” Mimi announced.

“Comm nodes are ready for high-throughput, long-duration transmissions,” Ye-in added.

“I think we’re ready to melt the Navy’s servers,” Atticus added “helpfully.”

Though Derek had to admit, the pilot’s little joke was quite as far from reality as he might wish it to be.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, grasped [Cosmic Awareness] and then just … held on for the ride.

Suddenly, every single sensor no longer showed the information carried by the light that was presently reaching them, having been hurled out into space years, decades, or even centuries ago.

No more light-speed lag.

Derek blinked his eyes back open, seeing a sky that had changed.

Everything around them had only shifted by a few years’ worth of travel, which was effectively nothing in the grand scheme of things, but with every light-decade of distance, the amount of travel time a given celestial body would have been displaced by, and things had quickly gotten quite crazy.

And then … then he began undoing the supernatural fuckery that was beyond anything science or magic would be able to achieve for the next ten thousand years.

No need to jump to all kinds of places to overtake old light, no need for further careful calculations about positioning and timing,

All he had to do was put his finger on the cosmic timeline, and push it in whatever direction he wanted.

Over the course of a second, he shifted things back, so they were seeing what had been happening a couple of minutes ago. And he kept pushing, even as their sensors vacuumed up every scrap of data, dumping it not into the Dragonfly’s computers, which, immense networks that they were, were in no way designed to deal with the level of data they were sucking in.

Local battlespace, yeah, that worked.

A fast-forwarded, uh, quick-backscrolled? image of an entire sector of space was a truly mind-boggling amount of ones and zeroes.

Whether or not the navy could handle it … eh, surprisingly debatable. There was a lot of data storage available there, and the Dragonfly’s long-range detection capabilities weren’t the best; “survey ship” or no, tactical sensors for getting good scans on things in the same star system were the focus.

In fact, Derek was expecting the tiny channel of bandwidth they’d left open for return messaging to ping with a politely worded variant of “slow the fuck down” at any second.

As for what they were looking for, even he didn’t know. Something. Anything.

Just give me a target to hit. Don’t care if it’s the light of a prototype starship exploding, a planet changing color because you polluted the fuck out of it, a star you monkeyed with … or just some old radio broadcast sent before you realized that “information security” actually mattered … all it’s going to take is one mistake.

Relatively quickly, things began to get just a little crazy.

Not everything they saw indicated a location of actual importance; in fact, Derek was perfectly willing to claim with confidence that the star system that had seen a literal planet get torn apart by what had to be a series of carefully placed nuclear charges was not actually the Bastard’s home. But something had to be of importance.

The first reaction from the navy was drawn not by the sight of someone breaking a world, but by a radio broadcast.

Apparently, according to the analysts, that one was a trap. Full-on honeypot.

“Do not get within a light-month of that place, long-range observation only,” and all that.

Admittedly, that distance was likely to be more than a little paranoid, and definitely on the extreme side; at even a couple of light-days from the star, the volume of space that’d have to be watched and mined breached into the realm of functional impossibility. Even for a hive mind that would never have to deal with an irate populace attempting to curb wasteful military spending.

But then again, the Bastard had been proven to be more than a little crazy.

Like setting up a bunch of false “early radio broadcasts,” who the hell would fall for something like that?

Actually … Derek could admit he likely would have followed that lead, but first he’d done a long-range scan from a reasonable distance, but apparently, the broadcasts weren’t anywhere near high-quality enough to fool the professionals.

“Ooh … that did not look intentional!” Atticus burst out laughing, highlighting a particular star and replaying the clip of what he’d seen.

“Worth looking into,” Derek nodded.

***

It took them most of the day, but eventually, each and every star in the shrouded zone was back to being viewed based on “old light,” being shown the way they would without any kind of supernatural fuckery.

Finally able to drop [Cosmic Awareness], Derek let out a sigh of relief, … only for him to get pinged by a message from Navy HQ scarcely two seconds later.

Now that their comm nodes’ bandwidth wasn’t being consumed by the need to transmit all the data they were pouring into the Navy’s computers, they actually had the capability for a proper video conference.

“Stand by for a transmission for Rear Admiral Doakes,” a young lieutenant announced, the brief look into a rather generic office instantly replaced by a rotating 3d image of the Navy’s emblem, showing the Earth, Moon, and a stylized image of one of the oldest battleship designs.

“They could have waited to contact us until the admiral was re- ...” Derek began to grouse, only to cut himself off when the seal was replaced by another transmission, revealing a man he strongly suspected to be Doakes, not least of which because he bore the insignia of a Rear Admiral.

The point still stood; the previous transmission had been pointless, but bitching about it to the man’s face wouldn’t be a good idea.

“Captain Thoma, on behalf of the Navy’s intelligence division, I would like to thank you for your efforts. However, I will have to insist that your next round of scanning be preceded by a considerably earlier warning.” The Scotsman, for that was what his accent firmly declared him to be, began, managing to convey both approval and a stern warning without ever changing his tone.

“Did anything actually break?” Atticus asked before Derek could respond, though the pilot had thankfully managed to keep anything except earnest curiosity out of his voice.

“Were you trying to break something?” the admiral asked, voice unchanged.

“No,” Derek replied flatly, shooting Atticus a belated warning look. “But it would be helpful to know if we actually surpassed some kind of limit.”

“You didn’t. But you wouldn’t know that from the amount of cursing I heard from our IT people.” Doakes folded his hands on his desk. “I’m afraid I am going to have to ask for your flight plan, however. I’ll need to know what further observations you’ll be able to make before everyone else arrives.”

Then, Doakes seemed to deflate. “You will receive a proper update through official channels soon enough, but unfortunately, high command was forced to cave to public pressure; thus, our scouts are now authorized to engage in offensive operations against the Bastard once the rest of the scouting force has arrived.”

Derek, on the other hand, grinned.

Oh, sure, any time they attacked the enemy, that would expose that they had found the base in question. However … it’d be a proper counterattack, not simply calling in strikes by the Navy. And that meant both Levels and satisfaction.

The only thing that could have made it better would be having the chance to actually win the war on his own, but that wasn’t going to happen, sadly.