Once enough missiles had been fired, he put target B out of his mind and focused on target A. Eighty Sowir ships were charging towards his own, in their usual suicidal manner. The eighty ships were mostly heavy cruisers, but there was a couple of battleships in their formation. With a thought, Adrian sent out orders, and one hundred Kraken-class warships pulled in front of his formation just as his Furious-class missile ships fired off missiles ahead of them.
The eighty Sowir ships saw the missiles speeding towards them and assumed the formation designed to defend against the Empire’s missiles. They moved close enough to each other for their combined defense systems to assess and provide firing solutions to their point defense. The last time that the Sowir had encountered Empire’s warships, their new system had proven very effective against the Empire’s missiles, but since then three years had passed. The Empire had upgraded their missiles accordingly.
One hundred Enforcer Mk 2 missiles speed towards the Sowir ships. As the Sowir ships opened with their point defense, the missiles engaged their evading protocols and their field generators just in time to negate the point laser fire from the Sowir ships. By the time the missiles crossed the distance to the Sowir ships, the enemy point defense had managed to take down only fifteen; the rest reached their targets and exploded against the Sowir ships’ hulls.
Fifty ships died outright. A couple more managed to survive the initial explosions, but succumbed to the secondary explosions from within their own hulls. Just as the survivors recovered, limping and damaged, the Vanguard Fleet’s Kraken warships opened up with their long-range particle cannons. Within moments, the remaining Sowir ships were eliminated. The Kraken-class warships then turned their sights on the remnants of the Sowir stations in orbit of the planet, followed close behind by the rest of the fleet. With their laser and particle weapons, the Fleet systematically reduced the stations and platforms still standing to dust.
At the second planet, target B, five hundred missiles reached the still standing Sowir stations. Without any defensive fire from the Sowir, three hundred Enforcer Mk 2 and two hundred MAHEM Mk 1 missiles reached their targets. The first to hit were the MAHEM Mk 1 missiles. Just before hitting the enemy hulls, their magnetic force generators shaped the liquid core of the missiles into a spearhead, which then punctured deep into the hull and delivered the explosives inside. The resulting explosions created vast, gaping holes in the stations, allowing the Enforcer Mk 2 missiles to get much deeper inside the stations. The result was the complete destruction of all Sowir stations.
Adrian watched as his fleet annihilated all their targets. The few surviving Sowir non-military ships were running towards the hyperspace barrier, along with a couple of their warships that hadn’t been at the planets. Adrian ordered his drones to follow them out of the system, but not engage, as his fleet regrouped and the ammo ships resupplied his other ships. He would need to wait to hear from the other two fleets before he decided what systems to hit next.
Adrian looked around him. In the Watchtower, he was floating inside a scaled-down system. He looked at the two planets and the destruction he’d wrought there. In no more than a couple of hours, he had destroyed what the Sowir had spent a hundred years to build.
With a thought, he disengaged the interface, opening his eyes to see Akash and Sora watching over him attentively. He got up, gave each of them a head pat, and then made his way to his quarters.
Chapter Seven
Third Fleet – Nuuar
The Third Fleet dropped out of trans-space at the system’s incoming trans-station. Four hundred and fifty ships—one hundred of the older Mark Two dreadnoughts, accompanied by two hundred Kraken-class dreadnoughts and one hundred Furious-class missile ships, followed by fifty auxiliaries entered the system very close to their target. Almost immediately, they were detected by the Sowir.
Fleet Commander Nair Hakeem was already in the Watchtower interface, and as soon as his ships entered the system, they started moving at his orders. He instructed the fleet to split into three taskforces. Within minutes of their arrival, the three taskforces opened fire on previously decided targets. The fleet fired thousands of shells and missiles and hundreds of particle and laser beams towards the Sowir ships, stations, and defense platforms, catching them unprepared. The Sowir managed to return fire briefly before the onslaught reached them, which meant that they had been on high alert already. They had probably received word that the Vanguard Fleet had attacked one of their systems on the opposite side of the border.
The Sowir, like the Empire, had FTL communications, but thankfully they did not possess the trans-travel technology and were forced to use much slower hyperspace. And while the trans-space was very limited in the way one could use it, it was also a huge advantage. Trans-travel allowed for ships to enter a system very close to the star, depending on where the trans-station was, as they were natural, while one could only use hyperspace a certain distance from the system’s star, which was usually in the outer reaches of the system.
But even if the Sowir had some advanced warning, they had no way of knowing where the Empire’s fleet would arrive in the system; they had no sensors that could detect trans-stations, which gave Nair a huge advantage.
The short defensive fire from the Sowir slowly waned and disappeared as the Third Fleet’s fire destroyed their defense platforms and stations. The Sowir warships were sadly able to move out of the way, and had set a course towards taskforce one. He formulated orders and sent them to the fleet.
Force Leader Altsoba Smith received the Fleet Commander’s orders through her command board, and she immediately relayed them to her crew. Altsoba’s ship, the Kraken-class dreadnought Gauntlet, changed course, followed closely behind by the rest of the taskforce she was in command of.
The turrets on her ship swiveled and targeted the incoming Sowir force consisting of some two hundred Sowir light and heavy cruisers, battleships, and even five of their dreadnought class, none of which were up to par with the Empire’s ships. Altsoba gave the order and the ships in her taskforce opened fire.
Lasers reached out and burned the Sowir ships’ hulls, forcing them into spins to dissipate the heat, but the Empire laser weapons were too powerful, with far longer firing time. The lasers burned the ships as they rolled, cutting wide stretches of their hulls apart and leaving gaping wounds. Many ships were cut in half by the fire from Altsoba’s ships; others, the ones that didn’t manage to get into rolls before the lasers burned through their hulls, had holes burned right through the ships. Then the particle beams hit and pulverized the Sowir light cruisers almost instantly with each hit.
Altsoba saw the Sowir try and get their dreadnoughts close, but she was not going to fall for that trick. The Sowir had modeled their dreadnoughts on the first dreadnought class of the Empire, with their main weapons being kinetic. But those weapons, while extremely powerful, had an obvious weakness. If you saw them coming, they were simple to evade, which was why you needed to close the range as much as possible in order to minimize the time your opponent had to react.
Altsoba sent orders for her ships to move around the Sowir at the maximum range that her ships were capable of firing their lasers and particle weapons, not giving the Sowir a chance to use their main weapons. Here and there they returned fire with their own particle weapons, but all of the Empire’s ships had the shimmering field technology now that dissipated any hit from those weapons, and the Sowir missiles were dying before even entering the inner envelope of her force. Her Mark Two dreadnoughts used their substantial capabilities to screen the entire space in front of her ships with a curtain of shells, preventing any missile from passing through.