Nomad Fleet

by Ivan Kal

  “ENLIGHTENED, FAR AWAY. TOO LONG.”

  Adrian thought furiously about how to convince her that she should still remain hidden. He had known from the memories of the Old Scar how hard it was to guide great beasts. And Moirai was even harder. Then a thought occurred to him. “You want to destroy our enemies? To show them everything that you can do?”

  “YES…” Moirai said slowly, with feelings of suspiciousness attached.

  Adrian almost smiled. Moirai had come to know him very well. “Well, then, don’t you want to show yourself at the right moment? To strike fear in their hearts and destroy their ships? Don’t you want your first appearance, your announcement to the galaxy, to be memorable?”

  He could feel her thinking about it. Moirai was a lot like him, and he knew that she would want to make her debut a memorable one.

  She didn’t answer him verbally, but she did send a wave of irritation and displeasure at him. Underneath all that, he knew that she had agreed. After all, Adrian was her handler, and that he had made sure that she knew from the beginning. No matter how much she complained, Adrian was certain that she would never go against his wishes. Their bond was powerful, as he had been by her side for almost every moment of her life.

  Adrian sighed and pulled his mind out of their connection. He leaned forward in the throne and noticed Iris’s form standing next to him.

  “Watching over me?” Adrian asked jokingly.

  “Always,” she said with a fond smile on her face. “I just know that you will get into trouble without me in your head to guide you.”

  Adrian chuckled at that—but she was right, in a way. He had spent his entire life with her being a part of him. It was different now, but they were still close. Adrian spent a lot of time with Moirai, and Iris was a good guide to Moirai in his absence.

  Iris had truly shined as a part of Moirai. Not many people in the Empire knew about what they had done, but Iris had been slowly growing more powerful as she spent more time in her hybrid-core. Adrian and Axull Darr were monitoring her closely, and so far none of Axull Darr fears of her going rogue had manifested—just as Adrian told him that they wouldn’t. He trusted Iris more than anyone else. She was a part of him, always had been. They grew up, developed, and lived together.

  “Anything interesting to report?” Adrian asked.

  “Nothing much. The fleet is the same as the last time you asked. Anessa has sent two messages. You missed your date night.”

  Adrian winced; he’d had a long night with Moirai going over fleet tactics and had forgotten. He was sure that Anessa would make him pay for that.

  “Anything from Axull?” Adrian asked. Axull Darr had been living as a civilian technician on Bastion, undercover, monitoring Vas. It was actually extremely easy to keep an eye on the Enlightened. There were sensors and cameras everywhere aside from private quarters, and Axull had access to them all. So far he had yet to notice any clue that would help them identify which one of the Enlightened Vas was.

  But the two of them were not really in agreement about Vas. In Axull’s mind the Enlightened could not be changed; they were monsters. But Adrian had watched Vas for a long time, had interacted with him, trained with him, shared drinks. And he did not think that anyone, not even someone like an Enlightened, could hide their true self for so long, and not from him. So far Vas had done much, and in Adrian’s opinion the Enlightened was confused. It was clear in his actions; but Axull chalked it all up to deception. Adrian felt like there was more.

  Recordings of Vas’s first fights during the war with the Erasi painted a picture of someone unaccustomed to seeing so much death firsthand; and then when Ryaana’s force was ambushed by the Erasi forces, he had saved her. Anessa’s and his analysis pointed to the fact that he had wiped out the Erasi’s forces, but also those of the Empire. That action on its surface pointed more in the direction of Axull’s thoughts—but Adrian saw more.

  Vas had saved Ryaana. And he hadn’t had to. With his power, he could’ve changed his appearance, become someone else. Sure, Ryaana had given him access to the highest positions in the Empire, but was that enough to risk revealing himself? And he knew that only one ship escaping would have assured that.

  Vas was not here to wage war, to destroy and kill. He was here to gather information. And from what Axull had told Adrian, the Enlightened had never really interacted with the other intelligent races. Yet in the Empire, Vas had. He had seen them all as living beings, and Adrian couldn’t help but wonder if that was enough to shake an Enlightened, to weaken his resolve.

  “Nothing new,” Iris responded to Adrian’s question.

  “Well then, I better get back to Bastion and face Anessa’s wrath.”

  Iris shook her head and then suddenly froze.

  “I’m afraid that it would be best if you delay that,” Iris said.

  “What is it?”

  “A message has just reached the fleet. The summit has been attacked.”

  Adrian turned around and sat down on the throne. “By who? And get me Anessa on the comms as soon as possible.”

  “The machine ships—a force of one-point-five million ships has entered the system and attacked the defenders around the planet where the summit is being held.”

  Adrian froze for a moment. That was a force that was three times the size of the Empire’s entire fleet. “Why would the AI send its ships to attack the summit? How did it even know?”

  “There is no way of knowing, Adrian.”

  “How many friendly ships are in the system?” Adrian asked.

  “There two hundred and twelve nations represented, each with an escort of five thousand ships. That puts their number at around a million ships. But Adrian, by the time the courier left the system, only a small number of fleets had actually joined in the defense.”

  “Damn! We need to stop them. We need the alliance if we are to get a passage through the core.” Adrian’s anger rose. The AI was interfering, and its actions were actively helping the Enlightened. That would not continue for long; nothing could stand between him and his goal.

  “Anessa has reached Bastion’s command center. She is on the comm,” Iris reported.

  “Are you ready?” Adrian asked before he answered Anessa.

  “YES.”

  “Then we go to battle.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Year 713 of the Empire — Suvri territory — Summit system — Sovereign Remembrance

  The entire force under Johanna’s command dropped out of the skim around one-and-a-half light seconds away from the black ships’ forces, just in time to see their skim-missile salvo hit the side of the hostile formation and do very little. They destroyed a few of the smaller ships, but there were just too many of them for it to matter. The hostiles were gathered in one large formation—a massive sphere—with two types of ships. One was a large dreadnought-sized vessel, which accounted for about a fourth of their number, and the other was smaller, in the range between a cruiser and a battleship. Both were oblong prolate spheroids with weapons mounted all over them.

  Johanna couldn’t help but frown at their formation; it was a completely wrong formation for what they were doing. The black ships had already engaged the fifty thousand Suvri defenders, but their formation didn’t allow them to bring as much firepower against the Suvri as it was capable off. The black ships still held the upper hand, and would win no matter what, but they were prolonging the fight, and losing far more than they should.

  “All carriers, release drones,” Johanna ordered as she looked over the holo, assessing the situation.

  And the futility of their fight just made itself clear as she saw that most of the fleets had decided to pull back instead of fight. There were only four other fleets fighting, and only one of the core powers—the Tar’ferat, who had jumped in first. They were keeping position above the enemy sphere and pounding it from above with a quite impressive display of power. The other three were from the nations that the Rimward Alliance had never interacted with
before, but during their time here Johanna had managed to get pretty good scans. She knew that their ships were only barely in the same class as those of the black ships, at best two generations behind the Empire’s ships. They still fought, however, and for that she was thankful.

  Johanna knew that the black ships were controlled by highly advanced computer programs, not real AI, but still, their attack was poor in design. It also made little sense that they had arrived in the middle of all the other fleets in the system.

  It wouldn’t matter in the end. As Johanna watched, she saw Suvri taking the black ships down only for more ships to take the destroyed ones’ places, and the Suvri were suffering losses as well.

  “All ships, fire at will!” Johanna said as her formation settled. The Sovereigns and the Krashinar great beasts were in front, the rest of their ships behind. Their ships immediately started unloading skim missiles; at this range, the enemy wouldn’t even notice their launch before they appeared in front of them. They also started firing their energy and kinetic weapons. The dreadnoughts and the battleships fired their kinetic missiles—slabs of compressed matter metal flying at 0.7c.

  And then the Sovereigns, the Devastators, and the great beasts unleashed their powers. For a moment, the spots where the fifteen Sovereigns and several great beasts stood blazed like beacons across the system as they opened fire with all of their weaponry. Skim-missiles were ejected out of their launch tubes and their thrusters fired, reorienting and firing them toward their targets. The molecular-disintegration cannons pulsed and fired, followed by anti-matter beams and particle cannons, as massive rail-guns cycled and spewed kinetic missiles as fast as they could recharge.

  In the span of a minute the small section of the black ships’ formation in front of Johanna’s force was ravaged. That was when a change occurred in the enemy formation—suddenly, their assaults toward the Suvri lessened and they turned their attention toward Johanna and her forces.

  “All ships, one-quarter thrust backward!” Johanna ordered as she saw that the enemy formation was rippling. She couldn’t let them surround her ships.

  She cast her eyes on the holo as the black ships opened fire on her forces, only for them to be met by the Sovereign-class ships supported by the rest of her force. Very little managed to pass through. On the holo she saw that the black ships were still pressuring the Suvri, but their focus seemed to have shifted toward the Rimward Alliance. The Suvri ships and the platforms all around the system were firing constantly, but it almost seemed like they had no effect. No matter how many they destroyed, there was always more.

  And then, as if the display of the Sovereigns had inspired them, more fleets started joining in the fight. Johanna didn’t have the time to pay attention to who it was or where. The black ships were pushing her ships—the Sovereigns were wreaking havoc across the wall of ships in front of them, but there was never any hesitation in the black ships’ movements.

  They exchanged fire for a long time, fleets on all sides of the sphere that was the enemy formation each giving and getting. Johanna had been lucky not to suffer any casualties so far, but she knew it was just a matter of time. The computer-operated ships had amazingly high accuracy; rarely did any of their shots from beam weapons miss, and their deadly beams were on the verge of overwhelming her forces’ shields.

  They were lucky that their missiles were flying at sublight speed at them, but the rest of the ships in the system weren’t so lucky. It seemed that only the Empire had the technology for skim-nullifying fields—it was Erasi and Krashinar technology, which the Empire and the Shara Daim had quickly incorporated into their ships. Now it was the only thing that was still keeping her forces alive as the hostile skim-missiles launched into skim and then almost immediately dropped out as they encountered the field. Johanna wasn’t even bothering with them, as the skim missiles were built for short ranges, relying on their skim drives to cross most of the distance before burning what little fuel they had for the final push. Most of the hostile missiles were now coasting on ballistic trajectories, slow enough that her ships could avoid them.

  What surprised her was that the black ships still fired them even if not one of the skim missiles had reached their targets. Johanna wondered if that was because of their programming, thinking that perhaps they couldn’t adapt to the things that they didn’t know about. She knew that the black ships had watched the Empire, but their ships hadn’t been seen during the war with the Erasi, and in any case it had been a longstanding practice to destroy the machine ships when they entered any Empire system. They hadn’t been hostile, but there was no way that the Empire was going to let them spy on them. Now it looked like that had been prudent.

  “Load the Helios s-missiles, one for every one hundred standard,” Johanna ordered and waited as her orders were relayed to their forces.

  She checked the holo and saw that there was an all-out war happening across the system as many of the fleets joined the fight. She couldn’t tell how many, but there still didn’t seem to be enough. The Suvri defense fleet had suffered a lot of losses, almost a third of their numbers, and many platforms around the planet. Thankfully the planet itself had a planetary shield which hadn’t been breached, but the Suvri were struggling. Their force had been hit the hardest, fighting against a force that was five times their own size. Comparably, Johanna’s force was currently facing maybe half as many ships as the total of her force. Not an impossible task, but the problem was that with each kill her force got, another took its place.

  She grimaced when she finally saw one of her ships get destroyed. She should be grateful that they had held out for so long before that happened, but it still hurt. A battleship that had been protecting a group of cruisers got hammered from a group of ten black ships at the same time in order to bring its shields down, and then a second group of ten destroyed the battleship less than a second after its shields fell.

  Then she saw that starting to happen all over. The black ships had changed tactics, and were now firing in sequence: ten ships focusing on one, and another ten firing almost immediately after.

  It was an amazing display of coordination, one that only highly advanced computers would be capable of. She wondered how they came up with the idea; they had to be programmed to do that if some conditions were met. But their tactic would leave them a bit more open to fire from her force, not that they needed to bothered by that.

  Damage reports started appearing on her holo.

  “Helios s-missiles loaded, Fleet Master.”

  “All ships, fire!” Johanna ordered.

  * * *

  “They are not doing so well,” Tomas commented, his voice tense.

  “There are too many of the enemy—” Kane started.

  “—even with every fleet in the system fighting they would be at a disadvantage,” Vaana finished.

  Vorash crossed both sets of his arms and growled. “Those cowards, half of them aren’t even fighting. Some have even run away from the system!”

  Tomas didn’t comment; he felt much the same. About a third of the fleets in the system were standing to the side and watching the other half fight, while the rest had already escaped. “I know that many have a great fear of the black ships, but they must’ve seen that they can be destroyed. Their own people on the planet will die if they don’t join in,” Tomas said.

  “It won’t matter—” Kane said.

  “—as the other fleets are suffering too large of losses,” Vaana said. Tomas wanted to disagree, to say that together they had a chance, but he knew that Kane and Vaana had far more experience. They had been Dai Sha, after all.

  “It’s been an hour since the fighting began and we are still holding,” Vorash argued.

  “We need Father’s fleet,” Vaana said.

  “Ten thousand Titans will be enough to turn the tide,” Kane finished.

  Tomas turned to one of the staff members working on the holo gathering information. “Assuming that Johanna sent out a message immediately, how lo
ng before the Nomad Fleet could get here at the earliest?”

  The staff member looked on the holo above his wrist unit and swiped a few windows. “Assuming that she sent a message through hyperspace, and that the Nomad Fleet set off immediately upon receiving a message, four hours at least. If the Fleet Master had sent a courier through the trans-lane, two hours at least.”

  “Two hours,” Tomas whispered as he watched the fleets of so many star-nations get ravaged by the black ships.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Year 713 of the Empire — Suvri territory — Summit system — Sovereign Remembrance

  Johanna watched as a new salvo of her s-missiles left her force in a flash. The s-missiles crossed the range in a moment, and then dropped down to sublight speeds. Most of the s-missiles went toward their targets, but several among them pushed past the first line of the enemy formation. The much larger missiles were not really missiles at all; the larger s-missiles activated their payload as they entered a mass of enemy ships, and then six large orbs were released from the rocket that had carried them. The large orbs activated and the bomb readied its beam weapons. Anti-matter explosions focused beams of incredible power in four directions from each orb. The beams pierced through shields and entire ships to strike those behind their first targets. In an instant, ten thousand enemy warships were either destroyed or crippled by the attack of the Helios s-missiles.

  “Focus fire on the damaged ships! Take them out!” Johanna ordered as the aftermath of their attack left a hole in the formation of the black ships, one that was quickly being filled by more ships coming in.

  Johanna noticed a slight change: more and more ships had started moving toward her forces. We probably just gotten bumped up the priority queue, Johanna thought to herself. It was clear after a while of battle that the ships here were following programming; every decision they could take was preprogrammed.