While Adrian used the Watchtower, Paul was in command of the Harbinger, as Adrian couldn’t really command a ship while he was in charge of the entire fleet and the drones. Adrian did realize that in the future they would need special command ships for their Fleet Commanders. And he suspected that soon the Empire Fleet would undergo another drastic change in structure—with all of the tech coming out of the sphere, it was a given.
Adrian walked towards the Watchtower room, followed by Akash and Sora. Once inside the room, he sat in the chair and felt the connection with the access point on his neck as the two wolions got into sitting positions in front of him. He closed his eyes, and a moment later he was floating in empty space. They were yet to exit the trans-lane, so there was little for the interface to show.
On his command, the timer appeared in front of him, with the last ten seconds counting down. Once the timer hit zero, the space around him started changing. First to appear was his fleet, and then as their sensors went active, the Sowir defenses. The system had a Sowir presence on two planets out of four, and their military ships were mostly spread between the two, with a couple patrolling the hyperspace barrier of the system.
The Sowir still didn’t know about his fleet, as it had entered the system through the incoming trans-station close to the system’s sun. But from his position, he could see the two Sowir worlds. One was high above the system sun’s plane, while the other was close to the middle. There was enough distance between the planets that the Sowir had no chance of reinforcing the other planet if Adrian chose to attack one of them. Too bad for them that Adrian had no intention of engaging their defenses from within their effective firing range. He designated the planet high above the plane as target A and the other one as target B.
With a thought, he spread his fleet in a wall formation. “Iris,” he called, and within moments, the shape of a human-sized fiery woman appeared beside him.
“Yes, Adrian?” she asked. She was connected to the interface through the ship itself, and while this space was in fact in his head, she could enter it through his connection to the Watchtower.
“Can you check my targeting calculations on this?” He sent her the targets through his implant. A moment later, he had the firing solutions for all his warships. With a thought, he sent out the order.
His ships opened fire with their kinetic weapons, firing from far outside the Sowir range. Massive 900mm tungsten rounds, both grav and explosive shells, blasted out of his ships on their way towards the Sowir stations, defense platforms, and stationary ships. Another timer appeared, counting down from thirty two minutes—the time it would take for his attack to reach the Sowir at target B.
He moved his entire fleet towards target B, the closer of the two planets. According to his calculation’s, the Sowir would detect his fleet just before his attack hit. And by that time, they would be just inside his ships’ maximum range. He prepared targeting solutions and sent them to his ships. Then he used the Watchtower to move his drones above his formation, and he adjusted the fleet’s formation to that of a concave lens, allowing all ships to fire on Sowir targets.
Then he settled to watch as his previous attack neared the unsuspecting Sowir, even as his fleet grew ever closer.
The Sowir sensory net at target B detected the Empire ships as they moved towards their positions. Immediately, alarms sounded throughout their positions around the planet. Ships started firing their drives, and their defense platforms brought their weapons online. In all the confusion, as the Sowir focused their sensors on the incoming fleet, they missed the danger about to reach them until it was too late. The Sowir sensors discovered the incoming hail when it was just a minute away. Immediately, those ships that had their drives already primed hurried to get out of the way, while the ones in the initial phase realized that they had no chance. Desperately, they turned their point defenses towards the Empire’s attack, but it was futile; their lasers had no hope of stopping the sheer mass of the Empire’s main weapon.
Tungsten explosive shells ripped into their ships, shredding their armor, which made the following effect of the 900mm rounds of metal that much greater. The massive rounds struck their ships with such force that they smashed them inwards and punched through, leaving mangled messes in some cases. But more often than not, a hit resulted in complete destruction of the Sowir ships, with short-lived explosions appearing by the dozens in the span of a couple of seconds as the air inside the ships burned out.
Their defense platforms and station didn’t fare any better. Massive grav shells hit the armored hulls of the defense platforms and the gravity generators inside activated, creating powerful gravity fields that resulted in small, contained implosions that tore their armor apart. Following them, explosive shells hit, resulting in the platform’s complete destruction in most cases. Thirty-two defense platforms out of thirty-seven were destroyed completely, with explosions so powerful that massive debris pieces flew outwards, only to impact nearby stations and ships docked with them.
Stations, too, suffered enormous amounts of damage, but they were too big to destroy outright. The debris from the defense platforms and destroyed ships was sticking out of the holes in the stations made by explosive shells previously. Six large stations were wrecked to that extent that most had lost all power. One of them had a lower part of one tower missing, leaving the station open to space where it had been ripped off by a grav shell.
In that initial attack, the Empire had smashed every defense platform, with thirty-two destroyed completely and five battered so much that they were no longer operational. All six of the stations were disfigured to the point that they no longer looked anything like what they previously had. None of them had power, and their weapons had all been destroyed.
Of the one hundred and twenty warships spread in various orbits around the planet, sixty-two were destroyed before they managed to move out of the way, and another thirty-three that did manage to move suffered various degrees of damage. Only twenty-five managed to move out of the fire, as their drives had already been primed.
The attack had also cost the Sowir hundreds of cargo and transport ships that had been docked with the stations when the attack hit. Those that had been on their way from the other planet or from outside the system were now quickly changing course and fleeing.
On the other side of the system, at the other planet, the Sowir managed to detect the incoming hail sooner and had their ships moved out of the way. But their stations and defense platforms suffered the same.
Adrian watched as his attack decimated the Sowir forces at both his targets. He wasn’t surprised at the effectiveness of the attack. It was extremely had to defend stationary objects in space against kinetic weapons, even if you knew that they were coming. There wasn’t much defense other than moving out of the way, and stations and platforms rarely could do that. All of the Empire’s stationary assets had specially designed defenses for those kinds of attacks. But the Sowir had none.
Seeing the effectiveness of the attack, Adrian changed his plans and issued new orders. His fleet changed course towards target A, while his Furious-class ships fired enough missiles towards target B to destroy every remaining military asset that the Sowir had left. He didn’t care at all for their nonmilitary ships that were even now running towards the hyperspace barrier. They also had assets on the ground, but most of them were mining operations where they used their agents for work. There might have been a few actual Sowir on the ground, but it was just as likely that they’d been on the stations in orbit. Either way, the ground was insignificant; if there were Sowir on the ground, they had no means to get off it. And if there were not, then their agents would lose control and either kill each other or die without the guidance of the Sowir.