Chapter 570: Interlude (1/2)

”Bogey Gamma is shifting formation, looks like Goliath-Seven is tumbling,” Tactical Four called out.

”Biowarfare System Twelve is breaking up, looks like Leslie Neilson got a piece of its brain,” Tactical Nine added.

The massive warship shuddered as it fired it's rotating eight barrel C+ Cannon arrays in carefully staged shots. There was a slight pause between each shot, only a half second, to keep the powerful guns from warping the frame of the warship or damaging the recoil absorption system.

The system was of little note. A failed colony almost wiped out by a Precursor machine but saved at the last minute by an insane murderous lemur packed with high tech cybernetics almost six years prior was its only claim to fame. It was resource rich, however, and that made it valuable to some.

It also sat squarely in the intersection of four Niven Ring passages and six Doom Tube passages.

Which made if valuable to one side.

”Temporal Resonance Cannon shockwave incoming! ALL HANDS, BRACE FOR IMPACT!” the Captain called across the eVR of the super-dreadnought's bridge.

The other side was there to deny it to the other side, nothing more, nothing less.

With the exception of killing as many of the first side as possible.

The shockwave hit the three hundred ships of the smaller fleet, pouring over the vessels with such power that it made the battlescreens flare and sparkle. Several had paint streaks change color, nearly a half dozen shifted position by nearly a dozen miles, and one rippled and was replaced by a nearly identical ship with different hull numbers.

”Soaring Breezes has undergone temporal exchange!” Called out Tactical Five. ”Getting sitrep now.”

The Captain nodded, staring at her foe.

Nearly three hundred Autonomous War Machines, almost a hundred of the strange crystalline and battlesteel ships preferred by the enemy, and eighteen clusters of bioweapons designed for space combat and who knew what else.

She clacked her beak in irritation as one of the clusters fuzzed, spores ejected from the living creatures masking the cluster.

”Order Task Force Harrington to hit Bio-Seven with their full missile load, they're up to something and I don't want nasty surprises,” the Captain ordered, turning and looking at Com-Nine. ”I want those Webers to fire full volleys.”

The commo-tech nodded, touching his temple and relaying the message.

Space was full of howling missiles, torpedoes stealthily moving in on attack runs, light attack craft engaged in a swirling point blank knife fight, biological weapons, and the bright flashes of weaponry capable of cracking continents detonating.

An Atrekna battlecruiser took a hit amidships and broke up as the vibrational resonance torpedo shattered the majority of crystalline structures aboard the ship. The two dozen Atrekna tried to shift out but less than a third managed to reach another vessel in the scant seconds they had.

”Monitor Sandy Lives firing main guns! Targeting Goliath-Seventeen!” Com-Eleven called out.

Even at a distance of twelve thousand miles the Captain could feel the heavy guns of the monitor firing through the way it made her bone marrow shudder for a long second. On the visual it looked like space around the monitor exploded into spinning floating mirror-like fragments less than a hundred meters from the hull of the massive heavily armored and heavily armed Hamaroosa warship. The effect continued, getting further and further apart with each shattering of realspace.

An Atrekna Goliath took a barrage of superstring compressor cannon hits in the 5500mm range. The shields failed first with a bright flash, then huge divots appeared in the armor as lances of energy a thousand kilometers high erupted from the impact point. There was a bright flash and the Goliath broke apart even as more impacts blew apart the pieces.

The Atrekna onboard found they couldn't reach out, couldn't do anything, as reality itself screamed and warped around them, impossibly filled with raw malevolence, as if reality itself was mocking their deaths.

The missiles fired by thirty-eight Weber class super-dreadnoughts blew free their stealth coverings and looked around, the warbois aboard shrieking and raving, slamming their faces against the trigger covers, pressing bloody eyes to the sensors.

Nine massive spiral shelled organisms were in the middle of a vast array of complex biological creatures, all of them moving forward with rippling flagella lit by graviton energy.

The warbois shrieked with glee at the sight. The pollen, fist sized nodules that emitted random bursts of energy to shield whatever was inside the cloud, did no good with passive optical systems that the warbois crowded into to bash their faces against the lenses and scream at each other.

One set of warbois started licking their chops at what they could sense from the largest of the spiral shelled creatures.

Phasic energy. Loads and loads of phasic energy deep inside the shell, inside the rubbery tissues. Coming from twenty point sources that they could detect.

They screamed with rage, hurtling the missile pods forward, the others following them.

For the bioweapons, dwellerspawn, slavespawn, whatever one wished to designate them, their plan to spawn thousands of close attack organisms while under the cover of the spores came apart in one second as the literal millions of missile pods blew their stealth shields and went to full power on their active sensor.

Missiles were fired from the rotating magazines before the massive heavy missile was fired just prior to the body of the missile launcher getting sucked in and turned into a C+ round.

The bioweapon cloud had tens of thousands of organisms to fight with, the smallest the size of an ocean going cargo vessel.

There were millions of missile pods, which erupted into tens of millions of missiles and millions of light C+ cannon shots.

The Atrekna aboard the other ships gaped in horror as the entire bioweapon cloud vanished in the hellish glare of detonating missiles and impacting C+ shots.

Not a single Atrekna made it out and the area was converted to a slowly expanding cloud of frozen biomechanical tissue.

The captain aboard the massive battleship Klark Saved Us clacked her break grimly as she saw the icons for T-Drives light up on more than a dozen ships.

”Task Force Five Finger Death Pinch firing Tee-munitions,” Com-Seven reported.

Scream of Grief, a Hamaroosa super-dreadnought, sparkled as the guns charged and fired. The guns flashed, a ravening cascade of particles suddenly appearing, giggling and capering as they were born into existence, to rush off and join the endless dance of particles.

There was a rippling in space between Bogey-Sigma and Bogey-Gamma as the Atrekna attempted to pull in more slavespawn from one of the Doom Tubes.

”Smash the button!” the Captain snapped.

The temporal munitions and delivery platforms seeded around the system early in the battle dropped their stealth shielding and fired off. Temporal resonance charges, temporal stabilizers, Dimensional Shift Chatterers, 5D Shake and Bakers, even temporal inversion charges all went off from the scattered points in the solar system, completely bathing it in ravening out of control chronotrons that burst into existence with giggling laughter.