The ships still ran gravity shovers designed to deflect high-speed debris, but some of the debris included reactor cells that generated their own repulsive gravity field. Not powerful enough to fully negate the gravity around a target ship. Powerful enough, though, to slip through the gravity shover at a reduced speed.
The impact produced a small explosion, wrenching out a crater on the otherwise sleek surface of a saucer ship's frame.
Several debris slugs might've connected with the Nassatar as well. But control of dark fluid allowed ships to instantly phase objects that were connected to their reactor cells, including themselves, from one spot to another within the confines of the godweb.
Immediately after firing its debris slugs a split-second earlier, the Nassatar had phased thousands of kilometers away in anticipation, allowing it to evade debris a fraction of a second before it would have hit.
As Ilder continued phasing to reduce the time his ship body was vulnerable, Felik felt more gratitude than ever before that humanity had seized all the tech left behind by the Minds of Errukav after their defeat.
In that treasure trove of data, humanity patented the Alcubierre drive. Among other things, it altered the Higgs field around them, so there was no sense of momentum or thrust as he shifted his footing on his command sphere. For all the effects they felt internally, he could've brought out a tray with bowls of soup filled to the brim and not spilled a drop.
Beyond the Nassatar, chaos erupted among the other ships. Oberon and Steeger's warships blinked from position to position, the combat scripts keeping them constantly moving.
Increasingly, the Nassatar's combat scripts predicted the pattern of enemy kinetically charged debris, and their ships shot them down with their own slugs.
An enemy antimatter blast scarred the silver surface of Steeger's primary vessel with a blackened streak. To her credit, she remained silent and cool on the psi.link.
Because the combat scripts transmitted commands directly into everyone's cores, the ship minds didn't have to do anything manually. They moved and deployed weapons automatically under the spell of the combat scripts, acting as their puppets, extensions of them.
Both sides acted with the intention of eliminating the other's dreadnought-class vessel. Visually, however, there was little to indicate a strategy. A human brain would struggle to discern any pattern among the chaos of ships constantly blinking around, white and red concentric blast waves, metallic glints of wandering debris, and streaks of beam weapons.
Occasionally, the enemy's combat scripts worked out algorithms that allowed for a better-than-nil ratio of destruction of four or five of Oberon and Steeger's fleet at the cost of fifty of their own. Rarely did a combat script perfectly outwit the enemy's. There were always some losses and some gains. The key was repeating those tiny gains, those tiny victories over and over consistently.
Theoretically, the simian head ship was as physically capable as Felik's. Its combat scripts acted as a throttle, however. Gradually, the Nassatar racked up more micro-gains. A successfully phased-in explosion that forced the enemy craft to phase to a slightly less advantageous position than its script would've preferred. Continued skirmishing to set up another effective exchange. Feints upon feints upon feints.
For eight minutes, the Nassatar exchanged debris and Kugelblitz bombs with the ape head ship. Each time, because of all the fallout, there were only so many effective positions to phase to. Factoring those locations in, the Nassatar's combat scripts slowly shepherded the dreadnought into a disadvantageous position next to a trap laid earlier—smart dust disguising itself as harmless debris.
As soon as the dreadnought got close, the smart dust released a tiny antimatter bomb concealed within.
Another micro-gain for the Nassatar. Not a complete gain because the ape head ship phased itself away in a picosecond, and its utility fog began resealing the structural damage.
If an enemy ship phased in an antimatter bomb, protective quick-response algorithms in the combat script immediately phased the target ship away to minimize damage. Often, ships avoided complete destruction via this method and their high-speed, hyper-energized utility fog kicked in to quickly reform vital combat components.
In addition to the debris and different bombs still flying around the battlefield, Felik noted psionic waves. The enemy would be trying to psionically hack into their ships. Fortunately, their psionic security was up to the task of repelling these attempts.
Out of curiosity, he checked the Nassatar's security logs and noticed something bizarre. Why had Juliard's core suffered so many hacking attempts over the last few weeks—shortly before Xerix had woken her from her three decades of stasis? Failed hackings, but still with the intent of serious damage. All were from high-level psionic viruses. Those were not easy to come by. Nor were they used lightly.
And then there was the fact that Juliard's core had successfully repelled so many attempts. The StarMaster's flagship was living up to the hype, especially when it came to security. Juliard had still been in stasis during these attempts, so she hadn't experienced them. Did she even know about them?
Unleashing gravity disruption bombs and razing waves of its smart dust swarm, the Nassatar scored five hits on as many ships, none fatal, but each an economical strike.
The enemy's combat scripts registered the threat, devised an ideal response then recursively tested that against possible retaliatory moves. In seconds, it ran these tests thousands of times with various factors tweaked and manipulated in order to build a better combat response.
Except that the Nassatar's scripts were too damn good. Just when the enemy's calculated a strategy that threatened to disrupt the Nassatar's streak of micro-gains, its combat scripts adjusted and implemented a countermeasure that had already predicted that strategy and a way to best it.
Sure enough, Felik noticed a shift in the battle outlook on his holodisplay—a series of charts, combat statistics, and 3D-prediction tree models indicated they would win. He had heard of fleet battles that lasted for weeks. A dance of enemy combat scripts and their warships over and over, constantly trying to outwit the other. Those long, drawn out battles usually involved fleets with equally efficient and performant scripts, physical capabilities, and numbers. This was not such a battle.
Due to several influxes of the remaining Yimyur Federation fleet ships, it took almost two hours to successfully wear down the dreadnought enough for a decisive blow to land.
Suffering successive antimatter blasts, the simian head ship's hull hadn't repaired itself yet, leaving several teeth and an eye knocked out, and the interior portions exposed. Layers of armor still protected the command chamber and drives, but the openings were obvious weaknesses.
The Nassatar's combat scripts must've calculated the trajectories of everything leading up to this moment. Because, just then, two stray pieces of debris hurtled through openings. Neither were harmless pieces of metal, but clumps of smart dust containing antimatter bombs.
The ensuing explosion exposed the dreadnought's drives. The one that followed ripped apart the vessel in a dozen ways.
A barrage of kinetically charged slugs reduced those pieces further, rupturing whatever remained of its core. With the ape head ship's reactor cells now hopelessly scattered among those chunks, its godweb simply faded away.
The physics of godwebs meant that, without the ape head ship, the other Yimyur Federation vessels would lose the atomic aura boost it had provided. An update in the psi.link confirmed this change.
The Nassatar's combat scripts finalized measures to complete a secondary mission objective—capturing as many enemy ships as possible.
At once, through Ilder, the combat script froze the enemy ships with gravity binds. Even as a few attempted to fly off. The gravitational distortion around each prevented their drives from creating a warp bubble. The ships and their crew were prisoners of the Watchers network now.
A rush of excitement channeled through Felik. It had been his first true b
attle and he'd not only survived but thrived.
At that, Steeger removed herself from their psi.link.
That was probably the closest they ever got to being friends. War did that. Though this was only a military operation. One not yet over.
A streak of green on his holodisplay drew his attention to the Green Devil, Steeger's prized mecha. Equal parts edgy and sinister, it was a space marine's idea of a pissed-off crab battle armor. Powerful, painful, and best to avoid.
Damn, the Green Devil's a fast one, Felik thought to himself. For as bulky as its legs and shoulder armor, it cut through the cosmos like a ravenous shark.
Mecha frames hadn't been a primary weapon in decades. Ships were so much more versatile and sustainable as weapons and tools. Even now, mechas were treated as nothing more than expendable fodder, only capable of slightly shifting a battle in one's favor. They didn't even use godwebs or Alcubierre drives.
But Steeger's was something different. It swept through the battlefield, reducing every ship it touched to dust within seconds. He bit his lip.
He couldn't get a read of its specs even though the Nassatar's sensors should've been able to determine a lot more. And its movements weren't logging on the psi.link's combat recorder. Steeger must've spared no expense to make the details as unreadable as possible.
He had to slow down live footage to get a real glimpse of the mecha's mobility and armaments. There was something mesmerizing about watching the Green Devil slice through the clusters of debris, ships, and combat peripherals, freezing for a split second to unleash a Kugelblitz bomb on an enemy then resuming its rush.
The machine's maneuvering was nothing short of amazing, and he could've continued watching its dance for hours. The whole scene was almost enough to make him forget how cold-hearted the situation was, given that Steeger was executing them without any tactical reason.
He shook his head in confusion. Sparing them? How did that make any sense?
Steeger simply sent him a data node.
Apparently, Watchers network surveillance had acquired enough footage up to this point to spin the operation in their favor. Even as Saganerio network and independent media streams and indices posed different narratives, Oberon's consort's network would ensure a generally positive story about preventing an uprising from the Wraiths.
They would also smear contradictory streams as propaganda and fakes. Felik had no doubt it would work. The method was tried and true according to what Landi had shown him. It both disappointed and vindicated him to know that his suspicions of the media indices had been correct all along.
A big part of him wanted to release his gravity hold on the enemy there and then. Of course, he would lose a lot of karma if he did.
Then a massive dark blur appeared on the holodisplay—Yamh'agduh. With a sinking sensation, he wrestled against a consuming trepidation. Oberon must've known the battle was already finished. Felik's eyes dimmed. This was overkill.
The Scion Mother used to show him scary sims of Yamh'agduh when he was young. The entity was one of the last remaining Elder Ones, the size of a small moon, capable of manipulating all forms of matter within its orbit, psionic attacks, and a form of immortality.
How Oberon had come to command the Elder One was anybody's guess. But if the rumors were true, he'd tamed this entity or at least formed some pact with it. And now it served him.
Staring at the horrific mass, he struggled to imagine it serving any sapient. He couldn't help thinking that sometime billions of solar cycles ago, a giant space octopus from another dimension had squirted its seed into a volcano and birthed this monster god.
Every second, vents on its asteroid-like body belched noxious purple gases and pools of blood-red liquid spun in huge craters. Then he realized those were eyes. And its countless tentacles weren't tentacles at all. They were gigantic streams of violent, churning gas and debris given form by the Elder One's mind. If you watched closely, you could see tiny cephalopod critters twisting among balls of lightning in them.
He didn't think he'd ever pity the Wraiths, but here he was feeling sorry for them. Because the Elder One was likely here to consume the minds of the Yimyur Federation. Oberon must've offered them as sacrifices.
His feed showed an electromagnetic signal with a surrender message encoded in Basic. Which suggested that the Elder One was blocking out the Yimyur Federation's psionic messaging signal.
The Watchers network took its name from the humans who'd resisted the Anunnaki invasion of Old Terra centuries earlier. They were supposed to value universal justice and morality. Funny how actions strayed so far from ideals. Or perhaps this was just Anunnaki justice. Death for leaving the Union Omega.
Juliard glared at him from the command sphere's flower garden. "You're willing to be a part of this?" It wasn't what a Chief Philosopher would do.
That decided it for him. The Watchers didn't require the Nassatar. Not for this butchery. He watched the Elder One ravage the enemy's fleet, sweeping its "tentacles" and dragging ships into them, forever prisoners of its essence. Felik shuddered and removed himself and his crew from the psi.link.
He checked, and she was right. But then was the enemy tricking them? Would they really go so far as to let themselves get destroyed? He was as confused as sapients thought his neural virus made him.
Steeger had ordered him not to accept chat requests, but that didn't prevent him from sending them. He compiled a message and sent it out as electromagnetic waves to all the Yimyur Federation vessels.
Thirty seconds later, he received a translated response from a G'hajupan.
Felik's eyes narrowed. He didn't believe it, but he was willing to. He gave Minerva an inquiring look.
"It's possible they're being honest—in their minds they never intended to fight, so they aren't technically surrendering," she said. "But I don't think it makes the situation any simpler. We need specifics at the very least."
To the Yimyur Federation, he responded,
He was skeptical and assumed that the G'hajupan would claim it didn't have the time. Instead it replied with electromagnetic waves full of data. The Nassatar's security cleared the response, and he parsed through it. The information detailed the enemy's claims.
"What do you think?" he asked Minerva.
"It looks legitimate enough, but there's always a risk that this is their last resort plan."
Memories of public sentiment turning against him acted like a plague. After his disagreement with Oberon, he'd worried his older brother might attempt to sabotage him in some way. Now he realized subversion would come in the form of marr
ing his public image. Oberon must've planned for him to suffer in the same backlash as Steeger and the Elder One for this savage assault. Fortunately, this time he knew how to avoid Oberon's trap.
In the Scion Mother's sims, the only thing that could beat Yamh'agduh were the Sacred Mecha—ancient mecha frames created by an unknown species. Even the Nassatar's mecha wasn't that powerful, and he didn't want to fight the Elder One directly. But he didn't have to.
"Release the gravity bind on them," Felik told Ilder. Then he messaged the Yimyur Federation that he was freeing them.
"I don't think Yamh'agduh will be happy. But you're the captain," Ilder murmured.
Across the battlefield, only a couple hundred Yimyur Federation vessels remained untouched and intact. After a few seconds, each ship flew off FTL in a different direction.
Felik was relishing the idea that soon they'd be safe, spread across the cosmos, when he noticed the Elder One shift its position. The monster god had warped closer to some Watchers fleet ships.
There, it swept a limb of swirling gas and battle fragments and squid-like creatures in the direction of half a dozen Watchers vessels. Moving at a couple hundred kilometers per second, it would reach them in less than five. From the distance, he watched, horrified, as the Elder One's limb scooped them up in slow motion.
Chapter 28
KAI
From the steps, they emerged at the top of a large butte that overlooked a rainforest. A mass of violet and magenta nebula clouds, like some sort of plasma storm vomited up by an Elder One, blossomed overhead, a stark contrast to the otherwise raw orange sky. No doubt another of the Engineers' distortions of reality.
In front of them, a black monolithic structure rose thirty feet from the butte's peak at a seventy-degree tilt. It emanated an ancient, eerie quality that unnerved her. The formation was roughly rectangular, except with raw, rounded edges and one-foot jagged protrusions running along an uneven surface of bends and folds.
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