chapter 214

To this day, my mind has yet to reconfigure itself to understand how long it can take for fighting in space to start. Space is freaking large, and most weapons don’t have a long effective range.

Lasers diffuse, even if they can hit quite fast across long distances. Projectiles trying to hit ship-sized objects that are in constant, varied motion are basically useless, especially if the ships have decent enough sensors. Finally, there are missiles, the third of the three most common types of weapons.

Technically, missiles could work at any range. The problem is that they are also easy to detect unless you build them for stealth, and even then, nothing is guaranteed. Another problem is that they can only have so much fuel. This gives you some capability for manoeuvring, but the faster those missiles move, the more difficult it is, as you can’t simply turn left like you can with your car.

Any time your missiles need to adjust, they would be easily detectable and would come under enemy fire. All of this basically meant that, up to a certain distance, there was no reasonable way you could attack another ship and do any damage to it.

Stations were different in that they were a lot larger in most cases and pretty stationary. This allowed for the tactic of long-range bombardment. It was the most annoying way of fighting. Worst of all, it was burning a lot of our valuable time.

The station was well equipped to handle this, but the two days that had already gone by, where all we had done was help the station defend against incoming projectiles, had annoyed me to my limit.

“FH, I’m tired of this. The shell is waiting for us on the station. I want to get the hell out of this system.”

“We have identified multiple enemy clusters. They are keeping themselves tight enough and in large enough numbers that attacking any of them is not the best course of action.”

“Show me the numbers.”

“Of course, Captain. Displaying them now.”

They indeed were not the best numbers. We would most likely win against any of the clusters, but they were also close enough to each other that it would take them less time to support each other than it would take us to reach one of the clusters. That meant we would fight double or triple the original numbers, which our shields couldn’t handle.

“Let’s advance to our maximum engagement range. That gives us the option to retreat if needed or move in closer for a more devastating attack. I am counting on all of you,” I finished saying to all the AIs that helped run Forward Horizon. Only their expertise could help us pull this off.

The ship lurched forward, and immediately we received messages from Fleet Command asking about our actions. FH was the one responding to them.

“We are moving into long-range engagement range to harry the enemy.”

“Negative. Move back to your defensive position,” came the response.

“I wasn’t asking. I was telling you what we were doing.” There was a long pause after that. They were most definitely arguing with each other.

“Proceed,” was finally said from their side. The person saying it sounded like they were being forced at gunpoint to say it, the word stretched out.

“Captain, what is it that you wish to accomplish with this? The enemy numbers seem too great for us to change the odds,” Dean asked, as every crew member was in the command centre, ready for when FH needed to pull from us to make the ship stronger.

“They seem to have a stupid number of ships, nearly eight hundred, but I don’t think most of them are actual warships. What we need, and what I’m hoping for, is that we trigger an assault. Otherwise, this siege might take months.”

“Wouldn’t an assault be bad for the station at this scale?” I looked towards Lola, who seemed worried after she asked that. Bob also seemed worried. That was a bit out of character, but I guessed we still had unfinished business on the station that he was responsible for.

The station itself was also not at peace. There was plenty of infiltration that the campers had accomplished. Because of this, the station was on full lockdown. There had been a few attempts to attack power relays or shielding stations. None were successful, but it was worrying nonetheless.

The screens changed to show more incoming fire heading towards us. It seemed that our moving away from the formation had caused a reaction from our enemies. It was easy enough to dodge the incoming projectiles, as they flew in from so far away, or simply let them get destroyed by our turrets.

It was incredibly satisfying watching incoming red dots disappear or change to yellow as they were now going to miss. It took hours upon hours for us to move away from the station, getting ever closer to the clusters of enemy ships.

I wondered how they looked at us. A singular ship moving away from an extremely defensible position to seemingly take on the entirety of an enemy fleet.

As we expected, two of the clusters near the one we were approaching started to move towards our target. Two hundred and twenty-eight ships altogether would be up against our singular ship. Most had more tonnage than us, with defences quite comparable to ours. The difference was the attacking capabilities of both sides.

Our singular ship probably outputted more damage than twenty of theirs combined. None of us, however, could use such capabilities from our current positions.

While our turrets were constantly firing, they were doing so to reduce the chances of us getting hit by the railgun projectiles that had been fired towards us. If we put enough effort into dodging, we could have probably avoided ever being hit by any of those, but because of the volume of fire concentrated on us, it was better to play it safe than to stupidly start wasting our shield heat loads.

Our side engines were already slowing us down even when we passed the 10,000-kilometre mark. It made our approach even slower, but it gave us the option to run away at a moment’s notice if needed.

It was a bit nerve-racking continuing to approach the wall of incoming projectiles, knowing that the closer we got, the more accurate they would become. At 6,000 kilometres, our long-range turrets opened up. The first shots hit their targets, but that success was short-lived.

The enemy ships now started to dodge as well. This did two things. One, we were now barely hitting anything, but more importantly, the enemies were also now less accurate. This meant that we could continue to move forward.

Now started a game of cat and mouse. Some of the enemy ships stopped dodging so they could fire at us more accurately. Our shields lit up for the first time in this fight, but our turrets were already prepared.

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They concentrated fire on those ships that had stopped moving as much to focus their fire. Their shields held up for the first couple of volleys from the combined attacks of the larger turrets we had. As soon as the shields dropped, we fired our main railgun.

Approximately six seconds later, the first enemy ship was torn apart by its own reactor exploding. Dozens of ships then started to accelerate towards us. They probably expected us to show our vulnerable backside, but instead our side engines kicked into reverse and were then boosted by FH, giving us nearly 13 G of backward acceleration.

While this didn’t allow us to match the incoming ships, our acceleration also wasn’t too far off. The accelerating ships blocked the others’ lines of sight, reducing the incoming fire on us, which allowed us to concentrate more fire on the approaching ships.

It didn’t take too much longer for the enemy fleet commanders to reassert control. Those ships that had been approaching flipped around, now showing their vulnerable back.

When the enemy fleets reformed, they were twelve ships weaker. Like this, hours went by as we continued to pick off ship after ship. If the turrets had been operated by human minds, they would have long ago started to waver, but we held our ground as well as we had at the start. Perhaps even better, as everyone was constantly learning.

The only problem was heat, but right now our shields didn’t need to do enough work for FH to become overwhelmed, thanks to the skills we had managed to get. Theoretically, we could keep going for as long as we wanted in this current engagement.

Unfortunately, the enemy commanders did not allow us to do so. They were moving three other clusters in a way that would cut us off from the station.

“Full reverse, without skills,” my voice rang out, and immediately the side engines complied. Calculations appeared on the screen. We would be able to get back in range of the station before any of the enemy ships cut us off.

Those calculations changed over the next ten minutes as some of the faster ships pushed their engines to outpace the rest of the fleet. I simply continued to observe the incoming ships, which made everyone else quite nervous.

“Captain, should we do something?” Sam nervously asked.

“No, let them come,” was my only response.

Hours went by before the ships got into range, but the turrets were already pointing their way, waiting. The enemy attacks were supported by the original three clusters we had engaged with, and the volume of railgun projectiles heading towards us tripled.

That meant we needed to use nearly 90% of our point defence turrets to stem the volume of incoming projectiles. Otherwise, they would overwhelm our shields.

FH had other skills she could use to help us in this fight, but I did not want to reveal them just yet. Although things didn’t look good for us, that was only on paper. There were some curious things that I had noticed during this fight, things that I was counting on.

The turrets fired after the incoming ships crossed an invisible line. The sensor AIs reported back their findings. It brought a smile to my face.

For some reason, every ship, depending on its size, seemed to have a similar power output. However, they were making their fusion cores, they were only making a couple of standard sizes that could easily be figured out by simply calculating the sizes of the ships in question.

The more powerful engines the current ships rushing us were using meant that they had weaker shields. They were more manoeuvrable, but our turret AIs were good at predicting ship movement patterns.

We were ripping the incoming ships apart, but it wouldn’t be enough. There was a second reason why I was so confident. We weren’t fighting this battle alone.

The incoming ships opened fire. Our point defence was overwhelmed almost immediately because of the combined fire of all the enemy ship clusters that were now in range.

While our first layer of defence was overwhelmed, our shields could handle a lot of punishment. Fortunately, they didn’t need to hold out for long, as the accelerating ships that had broken their formation around the station had come into range.

Hundreds of ships opened fire, destroying the fast-moving ships that were heading our way.

“Bleed off your acceleration and use our shadow to keep yourselves safe,” FH communicated to them all.

We acted like a tank, absorbing all incoming fire from the three forward clusters and as much as possible from the still-approaching clusters that were coming from closer to a 45-degree angle.

We couldn’t stop all the fire from those clusters, but the ships that had come to help us weren’t helpless without us. We eventually got back into the defensive range of the station. We expected the enemy ships to break off their attack, but they didn’t.

What followed was a defensive nightmare as the enemy ships performed flybys, dropping bombs and missiles to blanket our defences. They did fly close enough that each time they lost ships, but for the first time, they were doing proper damage to the station’s defences.

“Overseer, this farce has gone on long enough. Surrender now, or the station will be wiped from existence,” the leader of the campers announced to everyone in the system.

“Only took him a week to snap,” Bob commented.

“I will never surrender the station to you. You have lost half your fleet, and you’re running low on ammunition. Your threats seem quite hollow,” the Overseer answered.

“So be it. I will accept your surrender when you see it.”

Another massive flyby was detected. This one contained a few ships that hadn’t shown themselves in the fight. They were a lot bigger than any of the other ships in the enemy fleet.

Commands were given by the Overseer himself. A few dozen squads were ordered to start accelerating in the same direction as the enemy ships conducting the flyby.

It seemed that the Overseer had seen a chance to bring the fight to the enemy. They were using the station as cover, but the enemy leader should have known about this manoeuvre, as communications in this system were instant.

The ships conducting the flyby didn’t change their course, which worried me. Once again, we needed to wait hours, but they should already have dropped some bombs, and some ships were past the point where they should have fired off their missiles.

Ships started to receive fire. Our turrets wanted to focus on the large enemy ships, but the smaller ships were acting as screens, absorbing all the incoming damage. Many of them couldn’t handle this much fire, but each time they fell behind or were destroyed, new ships replaced them.

Then all was revealed as the largest enemy ship launched a huge ball of mass. Immediately, our sensors gathered as much data as possible, displaying it on the screens in front of us. The ball was a bit bigger than our ramp door in diameter. It had a solid outer surface, but our scans penetrated deeper, past the metal shell.

Warning lights bathed the entire command centre. The entire inside of that ball was made of smaller balls of radioactive material. It was a cluster nuclear bomb.

If we fired at it, it would break apart into hundreds of smaller nuclear bombs, which were all estimated to be forty megatons. Those were some really powerful nuclear weapons for their size.

“Don’t fire at it!” I yelled into the fleet command channel at the same time the Overseer yelled the same thing.

At its current trajectory, it would miss the station, but not by much. So that was the surrender condition. If the Overseer didn’t give up control of the station, they would trigger the cluster nuclear bomb. The smaller bombs would fan out enough to blanket the station, and even its shields wouldn’t hold up against that.

“Smoke projectiles to cover our approach. Full acceleration towards the incoming nuclear cluster bomb.” A small mental command connected me to the Overseer’s channel.

“I’ll take care of it.” Then I immediately cut it off, as we needed to do everything perfectly.

“FH, merge some of your inventory spaces and open up an entrance on the surface of the ship at the spot where the cluster bomb is going to hit us. Open up a doorway underneath me, big enough for me to deposit my nano machines into it.”

Beneath my feet, a door opened up, and from my inventory, I dumped all my stored-up nano machines into FH’s inventory space.

“Captain, what the fuck are we doing?” Bob asked.

“We’re going to catch that bomb. Sensor AIs and everyone in charge of electronic warfare, make sure that bomb can’t be triggered until it’s inside FH and cut off from the outside world.”

“Wait, wouldn’t it have a failsafe trigger if it lost its signal?” Dean said.

“That would have happened a second ago, after the electronic warfare kicked in fully.”

“If that’s the case, then we can simply let it fly by!” Lola yelled. “We don’t have to take this risk!”

“Estimate how long we can keep the electronic warfare up and prevent them from communicating with the bomb.”

“Approximately twenty minutes, after which they will start to get signals through. There will only be for a brief moment, but that would be enough.”

Everyone’s eyes landed on one of the screens that displayed the bomb’s current pathway and the timings. It was going to hit the station in thirty-eight minutes, and we would be able to intercept it in twenty-one.

Most of us cursed as we all realised what that meant. That wasn’t my biggest worry. While FH’s inventory space would lower the incoming speed of the bomb by a lot, it would still be a bit much. Hopefully, the literal tonnes of nano machines I was dumping from my personal inventory could handle the rest of the deceleration.

At the twenty-minute mark, we all held our breath, but the cluster bomb did not open up just yet. The last of our projectile turrets now fired all around us, covering the area in smoke. It was a curious compound that expanded a lot but then held its shape, meaning that even in a vacuum, it would hide what we were doing.

Even our sensors were having a difficult time tracking the bomb inside the cloud of smoke, but the bomb didn’t have any thrusters, so even if we couldn’t see outside for the next couple of seconds, it wouldn’t matter.

FH pulled from us as deeply as she could. The bomb closed in, not yet triggered. Then, when it was only a couple of metres away, the outer shell broke apart in a series of controlled explosions.

A signal had gotten through.

Immediately, FH widened the doorway into her inventory space as wide as she could from the belly of our ship. Shields activated, blocking the metal pieces that had formed the shell of the bomb.

Their mass and the speed at which they were moving overwhelmed some of our shields. They did manage to slow them down enough that our armour managed to block the rest of the damage.

FH managed to catch all the smaller nuclear bombs. If it had exploded only eight metres earlier, we would have missed a dozen of the nuclear bombs. It would have been enough to protect the station, but if they spread apart in a certain way, some might have hit us, and then it would have been over.

The nano machines quickly changed shape, catching all the incoming nuclear bombs. None were triggered.

When we were out of the smoke approximately ten seconds later, the cluster bomb was gone, with only some of the shell pieces flying out and no additional explosions happening. FH had also closed the door on the surface of the ship, so no one would know what had happened.

“Accelerate towards the enemy flagship. Destroy it,” I said in a steady voice, which surprised me. That had been way too close. But we managed it. Now we have approximately 1.1 thousand tons of additional highly radioactive materials.

In the next ten minutes, we defended against the incoming fire of the flyby fleet and managed to cripple one of the flagship’s engines. The rest of the station’s fleet broke formation to start chasing down all the remaining enemy ships.

Our side now had superior numbers, which meant that the war was coming to an end. Lola walked up to me and punched my shoulder.

“That was way too big of a risk. But it did save all those people on that station.”

I probably shouldn’t say that my biggest worry was for the shell that was on the station, but I wasn’t so callous as to not take into account the people on that station. While I didn’t think that I was a hero in any sense of the word, if the odds weren’t too bad, of course I was going to help save people.