Chapter 288 (2/2)
”What was that?” the Great Most High asked as the screen pulled back to show the Fury starting to break apart.
”As near as any systems can tell, it changes the charges on atomic forces, making static electrical charges attractive and nuclear attraction force repelling, it makes the atoms just come apart, but you haven't seen the rest,” Ta'anoo hit play.
”In comes the rest of the missile,” Ta'arnoo said, highlighting what should have either been destroyed by the firing of the beams or been nothing but dead junk. Instead it immediately pulsed and vanished. ”That's a pulse of some type of energy we don't really understand. It disrupts sensors,” the screen went white. ”That's the Fury exploding.”
There was silence as Ta'arnoo ended the video.
”And that, Great Most High, is why we have exactly zero orbital assets,” he finished.
”And the other Task Forces?” the Great Most High asked.
”Those that made it of the ships took heavy casualties making planetfall, over forty-percent were wiped out completely. We're the strongest, and we have slightly less than a third of our forces, no aerospace assets, limited artillery, and no ammunition beyond what was carried,” Ta'arnoo said.
”And what is the opinion of Military Intelligence regarding our efforts here to destroy the planetary shield generator?” the Great Most High asked.
Ta'arnoo said something that he had never thought, in all of his three hundred years of life, that he'd ever say.
”We have no chance. The only question is a simple one,” Ta'arnoo said.
”And what is that?” The Aerospace Most High sneered.
”How long it takes the Terrans to kill us.”
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Inside the Oort Cloud, when the Corporate Fleet dropped in, ancient subspace beacons, running on a forgotten and lost channel, stirred to life. They were clustered with ice and particle debris from the thousands of years of drifting through the cloud, using gravitatic anchors to stay in roughly the same position. They were completely indetectable unless someone knew the exact band to look upon.
A band that had been abandoned long ago.
The Corporate Fleet oriented on their targets, the different planets of the Sol System, and began sweeping down through empty space toward their targets, light seconds or even minutes between the planetary bodies. They were convinced that there could be no resistance, no unified defense.
They were wrong.
From out of the Oort Cloud was coming massive volleys of firepower. Missiles, C+ Cannons, singularity cannons, large bore maser cannons capable of frying a small moon, shoals of screaming drones, subspace resonance cannon shot, even superstring compressor cannon rounds normally fired by planetary batteries.
When the Corporate Fleet had been driving in-system, something out in the Oort Cloud had been hammering them. The drones raking the rear of the fleet, the compressor cannons blowing thirty mile wide channels of obliteration through the rear of the fleet, the missiles hammering the rear ranks by the tens of thousands.
Each group would see the fire happen and by the time the munitions reached them, with the exception of the five volleys of hundreds of C+ cannon shells, another fleet, light seconds or minutes away, was being engaged.
Kibuka was connected to his massive ship. The hull constructed entirely out of atomic bonded Losslglass, the mass tanks were still full to the brim of H3 slush taken from worlds glassed by the Mantid. He was aware of every last rivet and screw and strut in his massive ship, aware of every weapon he fired, he was every drone, his brain connected to them by arcane methods created just for him and forgotten when the technicians and scientists had died in a fury of plasma fire when a novabomb went off and wiped away the research and construction facility.
The forward third of his hull was thinly coated with the Lossglass of that facility's death.
Inside the great ship his body, ravaged by being hooked up to machines in a stasis tank and left looking like an ancient dessicated corpse, was far away and gave no clue to what filled the Immortal.
Rage.
Every ship he saw that was not Terran he hated furiously. His hate consuming him, his rage fueling the strange matter creation engines and power plants of his great ship, his wrath manifesting in flickering purple battle-screens thicker than some ships were long.
He would pump his hate into the universe, weapons roaring in the silence of space, glittering and gleaming as they reached out for a hated enemy.
They were hated for merely existing.
Kibuka could feel the empty spot inside him where once his brothers had been as he made microjumps to different parts of the Oort Cloud, to get behind the enemy forces, and fire his weapons.
Again. And again. And again.
When the Military Fleet made its drop, Kibuka had been reduced to using his extreme range firepower, and the new targets were a welcome victim to his all consuming rage. He jumped to behind the thickest of the attackers, the fleet he knew would attack Lost Terra.
He waited, letting his guns cool, his creation engines deslush, his stealth systems realign. He deployed drones by the thousand, his fragmented mind linking with all of them.
He was not like his brother, not like his fellow Immortal. Legion was all of himself. Kibuka was linked to every weapon like a true warrior should. Alike, but fundementally different.
The lead elements of the Military Fleet began moving inward, toward their targets.
Left behind were massive ships that had only a slight percentage of the Military Fleet stay behind. They were the size of the capital class of the enemy, but Kibuka's sensor did not see the massive amount of weapons the capital ships would carry.
Kibuka's dead but alive mouth twisted in a sneer. A command and control ship should always appear identical to the combat ships otherwise the enemy could pick them out of formation.
His senses twitched, he flexed muscles he didn't have, he moved limbs that had never existed.
From out of the Oort Cloud screamed thousands of drones, shoals of missiles, and heavy weapon battery shots.
The Lanaktallan Military Fleet's Command and Control Grand Rear Most Highs began dying.
Kibuka didn't care about their fate.
He infused every shot, every missile, every beam, with his hate.
I just wanted to be left alone, to sleep a dreamless deathless sleep.
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The black ships of the Antaeus Fleet made the exit from Deadspace to Realspace with a roar. Realspace bulging, twisting, and finally tearing to allow the skull prowed ships of the entire Antaeus Fleet to be bloodily birthed into the realspace in the Sol System.
They had traveled for long enough that every ships sported a thick layer of deadmatter, that the prows were nothing more than screaming Terran skulls with flames in the eyes and jaws.
Bellona reached out with her senses even as she lifted up her baton. She stood on the airless show bridge of her great ship, the first and the most might, the Gloire, built in the foundries of Hateful Mars.
The Gloire had been the first ship who's entire hull and superstructure had been made entirely from warsteel. She had everything but a crew when the Mantid had attacked. In order to keep the Mantid from repurposing her, the engineers, as their last act of defiance, had destroyed the computer linkages and command/control runs near the bridge.
They had cut Gloire's throat even as the Mantid raced toward the ship.
Bellona could remember both of her rebirths. Once as Bellona the Undying Beauty, servant and apostle to the Digital Omnimessiah.
Again as an Immortal, bound to the Gloire and her dark refitting facility in place where even death had died.
She watched as one by one her children joined the Fleet Gestalt Chat.
The Missouri was last, coming through a few seconds after Steamboat Willy, her newest daughter. By the time Willy got clear of deadspace, Bellona had absorbed and analyzed the data directly around her fleet and flung out her will to her defiant children.
”OPEN FIRE!” Bellona screamed out, lowering her baton! Her skirt swirled in the vacuum of the show-bridge and her hair drifted around her.
The guns of the Black Fleet opened up on the remains of the Corporate Fleet that had been driving hard toward a refinery complex in the asteroid belt. The Black Fleet had exited right into the middle of the fleet, the mass displacement turning the Corporate Fleet vessels into little more than subatomic fog by the violence of their reentry to realspace.
Bellona could see another fleet coming with her blinded eyes and sent the warning to TerraSol System Defense even as she ordered her children to finish off the stragglers and set course for 'down' and 'outward' from Sol itself.
She ordered the guns to fire on ships she could see that had not arrived. Her children didn't question, their crews loyal and faithful.
All of the crews were at 100%. Half of her children were running with Kentai Captains, but that was fine. Plenty of psychic circuitry had been damaged in the fight with the dark ones, many templates had been damaged in the fight with the Precursor AWM's and then the new species, so running in 'safe mode' was fine with Bellona.
In the below decks of the Bismarck dozens of teenage girls loaded guns by hand, sweating as they passed the shells by hand, the multi-ton shells being passed between the girls that looked too weak to pick up a heavy book. In the gunnery stations they clenched their teeth and fired, ignoring the return fire that hammered at the shields of the great warship.
On the deck the Kentai Captain stared with eyes full of hate.
Behind her was her birthplace, TerraSol. A small part of her keel had been taken from the wreckage of the original ship from where it had lain at the bottom of a great ocean in dark and silence for centuries.
She reached out and touched her master control panel, running her fingers across it even as the great dark engines of the Bismarck drove them forward toward the newly arrived enemies.
WE ARE THE UNYIELDING HAMMER OF TERRA! VICTORY OR DEATH! Bismarck roared across the channels.
EITHER IS FINE! the rest of the Black Fleet roared in agreement.
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Legion moved his fleet to intercept the next wave, spreading out in a classic bull's head, the 'horns' of the formation made up of his faster missile wagons, the 'skull' of the formation made up of his heavy ships with their massive guns.
He didn't need the computers to formulate strategy and pass on his orders. Instead they were dedicated to analysis of the enemy's attack patterns and defensive systems.
His fast-cloning tanks and his creation engines finished replacing the torchship interceptors he'd lost as well as the fast attack bombers and he ordered them launched once each cleared preliminary checks.
He faintly heard Bellona's shrieking battlecry, he could feel Kibuka's wrath and hate emanating from the entire Oort cloud, and felt his blood run cold.
Legion knew it was going to happen.
He didn't want to hear it.
But he knew he would.
I JUST WANT LEFT ALONE!