Onslaught (Rise of the Empire Book 6) (11 page)

Chapter Fifteen

Sol

The holo showed the Shara Daim advance taskforce clearing the debris from the trans-station using their energy weapons. The scanners recognized the weapons as a type of high-intensity lasers, about ten percent more powerful than the Empire’s of the same class.

Adrian studied the enemy from his chair in the Olympus Mons command hub. There was no point in him being on a ship when he was more defended on the planet. There were two types of enemy ships. A smaller class, 850 meters long and 200 wide and tall, and another that was a larger class, 1100 meters long and 400 wide and tall. Both classes were shaped like long pillars with weapons mounted around the hull, with a wider base where their drives were and with a narrow tip.

From the data they’d received from the Erasi, he knew that the smaller ones were destroyer class, and the other a cruiser. Veritas had encountered two more classes of Legion ships in Tarabat. A heavy-cruiser class, at 1400 meters long and 600 wide and tall, and what the Shara Daim called super battleships. 3500 meters long and about 800 meters wide and tall, its back and front looked like rectangular pillars, but its middle was wider, making them look like a hammer that had the hammer’s head lowered to the middle of the handle. Their Legions also had a battleship class, which was a smaller version of their super battleships, at 2400 meters long and 600 wide and tall, with the central part being about 1400 meters wide and 800 tall.

They had powerful ships, and Adrian knew that what he wanted to accomplish wouldn’t be easy. The Shara Daim ships finished clearing the points and moved aside, preparing for the arrival of the rest of the force. There was still debris outside of the trans-station, as the drones hadn’t had the chance to push all of it inside the trans-station, and some of that was there by design.

Twenty minutes later, a violet flash of light announced the arrival of the Shara Daim force. Six thousand and three hundred warships had just entered his system.

“Alright, people, this is it. Follow orders, remember the plan.”

He leaned into the chair, closed his eyes, and accessed the Watchtower interface. Suddenly he was floating in space between the planets of the solar system. The Legions still held position at the trans-station, and Adrian looked over the force. He had already known the composition of the force, of course; the Empire had sent their stealth ships into both the Erasi and Shara Daim territories as soon as they’d discovered them. Three Legions, and from the data Aileen had recovered, he knew that they were the First, the Third, and the Fourteenth Legions. He didn’t know who led the Third and the Fourteenth, but the First was led by Anessa. And since no ships other than the Legions had left the system she had arrived in once he had released her, he knew that she was with her Legion.

A group of ships was speeding away from Mars in the opposite direction of the incoming Shara Daim force and towards one of the outgoing trans-stations. The Erasi diplomatic ship and its escorts. It didn’t really surprise him they were ready to leave even before the Shara Daim arrived, and must’ve known about the attack.

The tachyon probes around the system were constantly scanning, giving him a real-time picture and scans of everything in-system. With a thought, he zoomed in on one of the Legion ships. According to Aileen, the ship was called Bloodbringer, and was Anessa’s flagship. With a thought, he marked the ship and sent the orders regarding it to the drone control. Then he saw the Legions start to move. Adrian waited for a moment and then sighed. It was time for the battle to start. He focused and sent the orders.

***

Two signals flew through space from Mars towards the invading fleet, its target hidden in the debris field that surrounded the incoming trans-station. The Shara Daim Legions ignored the debris, as it was no danger to their ships. The pieces of scrap floating around were inconsequential to them; their scout force had already informed them that they had caught the Empire ships that were pushing the debris in and destroyed them.

A ship at stealth received the first signal, one of 150 Specter-class stealth ships, surrounding the trans-station. The commander relayed the order, and all 150 ships released the missile pods they were carrying. Each ship carried 10 pods, attached to their hulls. A moment later, the 1500 pods got locks on their targets and fired one third of their loads towards the Shara Daim in the center, 100 missiles each. Six seconds later, they fired the second. One hundred and fifty thousand missiles sped towards the Shara Daim ships.

The second signal found its target as well, and a simple command turned it on. All over the debris field, large missile-like devices powered up and received targeting solutions from Olympus Mons and the stealth ships. A moment later, their drives sent them on their way towards the unsuspecting ships, following only two seconds behind the first wave of missiles.

***

Anessa watched as the Legions slowly advanced. The trans-point was located between the orbits of the third and the fourth planets, and it was fairly close to the fourth planet in its current orbit. There wasn’t much in the system, at least not on the scale of an older colonized system. Most of the traffic in system was between the fourth and fifth planets and the asteroid belt in between them. A few faint returns came from the orbit of the sun and from the ring of the gas giant, but they were obscured and too far away to be seen clearly, so she focused on their target. There were several stations in the orbit of the fourth planet. And around twenty objects that her ship’s sensors recognized as Erasi defense platforms.

Anessa frowned at that. The Empire couldn’t have purchased the plans for those platforms because the Erasi didn’t sell their military-grade technology, even if it was outdated. Which could only mean that they had given it to the Empire, and since the Empire used it, that meant that they didn’t have anything better. And that didn’t make sense. She hadn’t seen any of their technology in action, but she was positive that they had taken at least one Ra’a’zani world, although she didn’t know the particulars of that action. The Empire could’ve lost a lot of ships, or the Ra’a’zani force could’ve been small, and easily outnumbered by the Empire.

She was still musing about that when alarms started sounding around her command. Red blips started appearing all around the three Legions, and lines appeared connecting them to their likely targets.

“Incoming missile fire!” the Va Sun at the sensors reported at the same time.

“Establish the net and move us above the formation,” Anessa ordered.

No one wasted time to acknowledge her orders, they just executed them. All the ships in the attack force instantly made connections, synchronizing their defensive fire. As soon as the missiles entered the range of point defense, lasers opened fire, burning and blowing them up.

The enemy missile count was high, and the missiles were powerful, only ten percent weaker than those of the Shara Daim, and more than one hundred thousand missiles came from the debris field. Anessa watched the holo and the scanners trying to find their source, but they were unable to, which meant there were either stealth ships or the missiles had been mixed in with the debris and powered down. Immediately, several possibilities went through her mind. She knew how Adrian liked to fight, never using more power than what was enough, always maneuvering his opponent into position that worked in his favor.

She realized that the debris field was never intended to cripple the Legions; he had placed only enough so that when they sent scouts, it would appear as if the danger was gone. He had placed the Legions at exactly the position he wanted them. It was a valiant effort, Anessa acknowledged grudgingly, but it wouldn’t be enough. If he had used that number of missiles against a single Legion, he might’ve had a chance of doing some damage, but with three working in concert to take down those missiles, almost nothing would pass through, and those few that did wouldn’t even drain their shields.

“Secondary launches!” the Va Sun reported a few seconds after.

Anessa watched as the first missiles died. Their evading capabilities were impressive, and she revised her conclusion: some would pass through, but still not enough. Even with the second wave coming behind it.

She watched her holo and tracked the progress of the defensive fire, when she noticed something odd. There were two types of missiles among the first volley; the majority of them gave off regular missile readings, but the sensors had a problem penetrating the shielding of a small percentage of the volley. Those strange missiles were larger than their ordinary ones, and somehow no defensive fire was directed at them. She checked the projected trajectories for those missiles and realized that they ended in space between the ships; not one was on a trajectory toward a ship. That told her why they hadn’t been targeted; the defensive fire gave priority to the missiles on direct trajectories to the ships.

The missile volley reached the Legions, several passing through the defensive fire and hitting the shield, doing almost no damage. The Bloodbringer took a hit from four missiles in quick succession and took only a 0.7% dip in their shield strength. She glanced to see if the second missile type would change trajectory now that they were inside the formation, and saw no change.

***

The two thousand Icarus-class missiles entered the Shara Daim formation, then their drives shut off and disengaged, leaving only the spherical canisters that were 10 meters across floating in space between the Shara Daim ships. A moment later, gas thrusters placed the spheres in a gentle spin.

Two circular holes opened on two opposite sides of the spheres, and harsh blue light shone from the openings. A second later, the powerful capacitors in the spheres started draining as intense ion beams exploded out of the spheres.

The Shara Daim formation was dense, and the Icarus missles close. The majority of the beams struck the Shara Daim shields point blank, the spin of the sphere sending the beams across multiple ships during their 3-second firing time.

The ion beams were specifically designed to punch through the shields. A large number of Shara Daim ships suddenly found themselves with their shields gone or extremely drained. Just as the Empire’s second volley arrived.

***

Confusion reigned among the Legions as the Empire’s beam weapon wreaked havoc among them. Ships were reporting losing their shields and some even reported damage. Bloodbringer itself had caught one of the beams for its full charge and had its shields dropped to eighty percent. But Bloodbringer was a super battleship, and they had the strongest shields out of their ships. The rest were not so lucky.

However, there was no time for them to figure out what had happened—the second volley of missiles entered their effective range. The defensive net had suffered in the confusion, as many commanders tried to evade the hellish beams. And now many of the missiles passed through to hit the ships of the Legions. The missiles seemed to be targeting those ships who had lost shields or whose shields were close to failing.

Anessa watched in horror as the first Shara Daim ship exploded.

Chapter Sixteen

Olympus Mons

The Shara Daim ships exploded as thousands of missiles struck at targets of opportunities. But soon the Shara Daim defensive fire put an end to the Empire’s attack.

“Nice targeting,” Adrian said, and Iris appeared in front of him.

“Thanks,” she said.

It was she who had used the Watchtower interface to control the missiles. Adrian could’ve done it, but she was better at going by percentages. And this was a perfect example of when an AI could be deadly. She had targeted only those ships that they had the chance of destroying with the number of missiles that had passed through the Shara Daim fire.

“That will piss them off for sure. They don’t like being used as target practice,” Adrian said.

“Yeah, but that is what you wanted,” Iris said.

“Yeah, I did. Well, it’s time for the next phase.”

***

Anessa read the reports. Six hundred and fifty-four ships—four hundred and ten destroyers, one hundred and eleven cruisers, one hundred and thirty-two heavy cruisers, and one battleship. The Legions had lost six hundred and fifty-four ships in a span no longer than a couple of minutes. They had not lost that much in such a short period of time for centuries, certainly not during Anessa’s lifetime. She couldn’t even remember the last time a single Legion had taken such losses, even when fighting overwhelming numbers.

Her comms chirped and Anessa turned on the privacy screen, then accepted the request from the flagship. A moment later, a livid Narrasak and a hard-looking Garaam appeared in front of her.

“What was that?” Narrasak asked furiously.

“I have never seen such a weapon,” Anessa said.

“Me neither, and the way the attack was executed was ingenious,” Garaam added, a hint of respect in her voice.

“I want their commander captured alive; I’m going to rip his heart out myself,” Narrasak said through his teeth.

“First we need to reach the planet,” Garaam said.

“Their defenses are insignificant, and that trick will only work once. We are going forward,” Narrasak said, and closed his link. Garaam remained, looking at Anessa.

“You know their commander. Should we expect more difficulties?”

Anessa took time to choose her words carefully before responding, “Before he released me, he seemed confident that they could defeat us. I disregarded his words because he is not Shara Daim, but yes, he will have more plans.”

“It sounds like you got to know him a lot more than what you let on. Is there anything that we should know about him?” Garaam said.

“He is like…”
Us
,
Anessa almost said, but managed to stop herself. Even if Garaam was more open-minded, saying that an enemy, an alien, was equal to the Shara Daim was heretical.
Yet I almost said it,
Anessa thought. She shook her head and continued speaking. “He is smart. Do not trust any opening that you see, even if it appears like it was made by their mistake. He will try to manipulate you to where he wants you.”

“I will keep your words in mind,” Garaam said, and closed her link. Orders arrived from Narrasak, and the three Legions adjusted their formation, with the Third Legion taking the central position and Garaam’s and Anessa’s surrounding it.

Another alarm brought Anessa’s attention to the fourth planet, and the ships that were just now coming from behind it. She waited until all of them were visible and she was sure that no more were coming, and then she looked at the scans.

There were exactly 4500 ships, and all were the same size and shape: 760 meters long, 380 wide and 180 tall, shaped like boxes and smaller than her destroyers were. The scans showed them moving slowly to engage her fleet, probably intending to keep the Legions away from the planet for as long as they could.

But their enemy must’ve known that those ships couldn’t stop the Legions; not even ten of those destroyers together could stand a chance against even a single one of her heavy cruisers, not to mention the battleships. They were simply in a completely different class.

The enemy soon entered range, and both forces opened fire.

***

The Shara Daim ships fired their missiles just a few moments before Adrian’s drones, and dark blue proton beams reached out to smash into the drones’ shields. The drones returned fire with their less powerful laser beams. Adrian started sending orders to the drone control teams, assigning targets, choosing to focus on the Shara Daim smaller ships and those whose shields had taken a hit in his previous attack.

His drones might have been a bit smaller than Shara Daim destroyers, but they were drones and had no need for living quarters and other areas that were necessary for a manned ship. His drones also had almost twice as much firepower than the Shara Daim destroyers. They could continue to function for as long as they were receiving signals from control, and most importantly, they were expendable.

The drones were being controlled from Olympus Mons, using signals sent through both hyperspace and normal space, with thousands of signals blanketing the space to prevent any attempts at hacking the control signals. Usually the drones would have been controlled from command ships, at least in fleet actions. But the drones had been designed for system defense long before the fleets that existed now. And Warpath had built a lot of them in the nineteen years since the end of the war with the Sowir. They had been updated a bit since then, of course, but Adrian knew that they didn’t really stand a chance against the Shara Daim Legions. But then again, he wasn’t trying to simply win. He needed to make a point. He used the Watchtower interface to guide the flow of battle, using the drones to a devastating effect.

***

Anessa moved the Bloodbringer and her other heavy ships in front of the formation to shield her smaller ships. The enemy’s small ships were firing with laser weapons, something that the Shara Daim hadn’t been using in a long time for anything other than point defense, but they could keep those beams of concentrated light for longer periods of time on her ship’s shield, eventually overloading them. She had already lost six destroyers to the enemy ships’ lasers and missiles.

The enemy ships would coordinate their fire in order to interrupt defensive fire around a single ship, then gang up on it until it lost its shields and eventually a few missiles found their way through the defensive fire, destroying the ship. The missiles were powerful, but even her smaller ships could usually take a few hits and survive. The problem was that they also focused their lasers on the ships, weakening the hull enough for the missiles to do more damage. And the number of missiles that the enemy had fired was impressive for ships that size; already the individual ships had fired more than the loads on her destroyers and showed no sign of running out.

The Legions were winning the exchange, even though they were losing some of their smaller ships. But although the enemy was losing ships fast, they were still closing the range. She watched the movements of the enemy ships, noticing them moving in strange patterns; damaged ships would move in front of those still unharmed, and some ships would sacrifice themselves in order to give the other ships a chance to destroy one of the Legions’ ships. Anessa frowned. She looked at the scans of the enemy fleet, noticing a strangely high amount of traffic between them. She called two of the Va Sun from the communications and sensors to her.

“What am I looking at?” Anessa asked them.

“That is strange,” said the Va Sun in charge of sensors.

“It looks almost like…but no, that’s impossible, there are too many of them at the same time,” the Va Sun from communications said.

“What?” Annessa said.

“Those look like control signals, for unmanned vessels. We use them for controlling our mining crafts in asteroid belts. But, Dai Sha, to control so many of them at the same time, you would need extremely fast and powerful computers. And they can be hacked easily…but there are so many of them…” the Va Sun said.

Anessa looked at the holo and the battle, and it clicked—that was what she was seeing. The ships were smaller than her destroyers were and had more firepower. They moved to sacrifice themselves with no hesitation. That was because they were unmanned. Anessa keyed her comms to send a message to Narrasak when new alerts started appearing on the holo.

***

Adrian was losing drones at an alarming rate; he was already down to two thirds of their original number, with only about 3100 remaining. But he had expected that; the drones were not up to par with the rest of the Empire’s ships of the line. The drones were an older generation; they had no advanced weaponry that the other ships had, still using lasers as their main weapons. They had shields, although they were much weaker than those on the newer ships that were close to their size, simply because they didn’t have the room to put stronger energy shields in them. Their missiles were the only piece of technology that was up to par to the true fleet ships, and since they had no wasteful space, they could have larger missile loads than other ships of their size. Their purpose was not the same as that of the other ships. They were meant to be a cheap and expendable way to occupy the enemy.

But the drones had one more advantage. Unlike the newer ships that had abandoned the regular kinetic weapons that the Empire had used before, the drones hadn’t. The new-generation kinetic weapons were ship killers, single-shot monsters that had more power than their older versions. The use of kinetics had become very limited, especially now that the ships they were encountering could achieve speeds of half that of light.

But as Adrian’s martial arts teachers had once taught him, the usefulness of any weapon depends on the situation. And Adrian had just positioned the Shara Daim into a situation where the drones’ kinetic weapons could shine.

The drones closed the range. The space between the two forces was filled with missile explosions, as both sides took down the opposing missiles. Still, a lot of them passed through, mostly on the Shara Daim side. Their beam weapons destroyed the shields on his drones, and the missiles finished the work.

With a thought, Adrian opened a channel to his people at the Jupiter facility. An image of Lurker of the Depths appeared standing beside him; it was a manifestation of his mind and not a real hologram, as he was inside his own mind while using the Watchtower interface.

“Send them,” Adrian said simply.

“Understood,” Lurker of the Depths said, and then disappeared. He didn’t really say the words, but the interface used and translated his thoughts into words.

Then he sent an order to the drone control. The drones suddenly increased the rate of their missile fire, doubling the number of the missiles on their side as they expended all of their missile ammunition. Then their rail gun turrets locked on to the enemy ships and fired. Thousands of ri-steel rounds exploded out of the drones on their way towards the Shara Daim just as new signatures appeared all around the Shara Daim force, exiting out of their skims.

He knew that, alone, those kinetic weapons wouldn’t finish that force. If they hit, they would hurt. The energy shields were great at stopping missiles and energy weapons—slabs of metal traveling at fractions of speed of light, not so much. The shields would be able to stop a lot of kinetic fire, but would also be drained faster. And Adrian knew that his enemy’s ships could move out of the way easily, even at the distance they were now.

Which was why he needed to keep them in position. Forty of the largest freighters that the Empire had in use appeared around the Shara Daim force. Their cargo containers opened and released the newest of the Empire’s defense platforms. They were spherical in shape and 100 meters across, and each of the 6-kilometer-long freighters carried fifty of them. Suddenly the Shara Daim force found itself surrounded by 2000 defense platforms, each armed with three dreadnought-class proton beams and laser point defense, making it hard for the Shara Daim to maneuver and evade the incoming fire from his drones. The only available action for them was to move back towards the trans-station.

Then, just as the Shara Daim forces realized that, a massive station skimmed and moved to just outside the trans-station, at the position it had occupied before Adrian had had it moved. All of their newer stations had skim capabilities now; it was the only way they could move them quickly across the Empire from the areas where they were constructed. The station was a prolate spheroid seven kilometers tall and four wide and deep, with four fin-like extensions on the two sides and top and bottom that stretched another kilometer from the core station. It was a jointly designed and constructed by Warpath and the Sowir, meant to protect trans-points in important systems.

The Shara Daim knew that they were trapped, and their super battleships started firing missiles towards the station. The station started sending its own missiles at the enemy and firing its powerful proton beams. The station’s laser point defense took down a lot of Shara Daim missiles, but some still managed to sneak through, and those exploded inexplicitly. Adrian knew that the station had started using the new weapon that he’d had Lurker of the Depths and his people install—the GPW, or graviton projector weapon. It used artificial gravitons to create localized gravity events. It required a lot of power, but was effective as both a defensive weapon and an offensive one.