Zhu raised his rifle again and killed the remaining enemies in the vicinity of the gate. He then stepped back and let the tanks park themselves across from it, preparing to fire.
Zhu watched as they started bombarding the gate, blowing away chunks of it with each hit. The Guxcacul gates were tough, and the Sowir had repaired and improved them a bit after they’d taken the city. But in the end, they wouldn’t hold against the tanks’ assault.
As the tunnel walls shook, Zhu glanced at the ceiling, and yet again admired the ingenuity and skill of the Guxcacul engineers. The tunnel might have looked rough, but it was anything but. It was reinforced from all sides, so that even the detonations of Empire’s tanks against the gate didn’t compromise its integrity.
Then he felt the ground shake as the gate blew inward and dropped on the floor of the city. Tanks moved inside and immediately came under fire from Sowir turrets placed on the city’s dome ceiling. The tanks shrugged off the attacks and returned fire, blowing the turrets and the buildings on the dome ceiling apart, raining dust and rocks down on the rest of the city.
Then they moved along the entrance platform and took positions near the bridges leading to buildings suspended in the middle of the air. Then the Empire’s walkers entered, built based on Guxcacul specifications, exactly for easier movement around their cities. Zhu and his squad got onto one and held on tight as it started walking on one of the city’s pillar bridges, on its way to the next level.
Field Commander Dayo Okoro looked at the holo in his battle center, following the many battles around the planet. He was getting real-time updates from every battle via FTL comms. His forces had been pushing the Sowir on all fronts, just as the Guxcacal pushed from below. The Sowir had been unprepared to fight on many fronts at the same time, and were losing ground because of it. Already the kill count for his forces had reached 5 digits, and soon would pass into six. Although the confirmed kill count for the true Sowir was lower than what he’d expected, only around four hundred. But even with their success, there were areas where they were having difficulties.
The Sowir just had too many of their tool-soldiers available to throw at his forces, slowing down their advance and giving the Sowir a chance to set up traps. And those traps and ambushes were where most of his casualties came from. The Sowir had a very small arsenal, and very few things they possessed could actually harm his people, aside from accumulated fire and their melee weapons.
The problem was—as they had anticipated—numbers. And the Sowir could use their troops as sacrificial pawns in order to get bigger rewards. Dayo knew that this campaign would be a long one. For now, their main focus was in taking out as many Sowir as possible, as that lowered the effectiveness of their troops. If they managed to take them all out, they would have a much easier job later. Their tools couldn’t function for long without guidance, and they would turn feral and start attacking each other and everything around them.
The other problem was the Sowir food supply. According to their intel, Sowir had about three years’ worth of supplies for both themselves and their troops. Which was why Dayo had chosen to focus on attacking as many of their underground bases as possible.
His campaign rested on their ability to lower the effectiveness of the Sowir troops, which meant direct attacks on the Sowir and their supplies. His people had orders to ignore the Sowir attempts to pull them into prolonged fights with hordes of their troops, and instead focus on those troops that were clearly guided by a Sowir. This early in the campaign, killing one Sowir was worth tens of thousands of their troops.
With a flick of his hand, Dayo focused the holo on the deep underground, where the Guxcacul counterattack was taking place. They had taken the last three years while the Empire prepared and told the Guxcacul how to build FTL comms, and had them integrated into the Empire’s systems. So Dayo had real-time updates from their side as well.
The Guxcacul counterattack was very well coordinated, and while their equipment wasn’t as advanced as that of the Empire, they were a match for the Sowir. They were advancing a bit slower than what Dayo would have liked, but they were gaining ground. He saw that they had almost captured one of the Sowir bases deep underground. There was a great amount of risk for them, because they didn’t have anywhere near the number of troops as either the Sowir or the Empire, and they could be overrun far easier if the Sowir decided to amass troops and send a large force against them. But it was neither Dayo’s nor the Empire’s place to tell them that they couldn’t fight for their world.
Dayo would need to make sure to minimized the risk by taking out as many of the Sowir troops as he was able. As he started reading reports from the various fronts, he was interrupted by a comm from the fleet.
“What can I do for you, Fleet Commander?” Dayo asked.
“Our cargo ships have arrived. As soon as they place the defense platforms in orbit, I will take the fleet out of system. If there is anything else that you need, now is the time to ask for it,” Fleet Commander Bethany Jones responded.
“Of course, Fleet Commander. I doubt that we will need anything, but I will check with my people,” Dayo said.
“Very well, Field Commander. You have a couple of hours before we leave,” she said, and then ended the call with a salute.
Dayo signaled to one of his aides and sent him off to the quartermaster building on the other side of the base. With that taken care of, he returned his attention to the holo and the many battles raging across the planet.
Chapter Eleven
January; Year 36 of the Empire; Thanatos – Fleet Headquarters; Nineteen days later
Laura sat in a chair that had become uncomfortable three hours ago and listened to the presentations from the Fleet’s best scientists and engineers. They were presenting her with the new technologies that could be used for their ships in the future, based on the technology they had received from the sphere. There was surprisingly little technology on weapons and military.
As it was told to her, the People hadn’t really had a military, or a need to develop weapons. They were the oldest race in the galaxy, and their technology had been so far ahead of anyone else that any attack against them had been laughable. They had had weapons, but all of those had been energy-based weapons, far ahead of anything that the Empire could even attempt to make. It required resources and elements that they hadn’t even discovered yet. But there were other things, nonmilitary in nature, that Laura and Seo-yun hoped they could adapt and turn into weapons.
She gave out a mental sigh of relief when they reached the last item on the list.
“Energy shields,” said Ritsarni, one of Fleet’s leading scientists, but also one of the youngest.
Laura looked at him without speaking, willing him to continue.
“Ahem, well… we found blueprints for the energy shield, which we are confident we can adapt for our needs and install onto our ships,” Ritsarni said.
“We already have shimmering field technology,” Laura added tiredly. A lot of the technology they had presented to her today, the fleet already had something similar. But she knew that she shouldn’t have been surprised about that. They couldn’t really make a big jump in technology, even if they had the knowledge, because they lacked the means to build what they found in the sphere. It would take them at least ten years to reach a level where they could start utilizing some of the more advanced technologies from the sphere. At least, advanced compared to the Empire’s technology. What the People had had at the peak of their civilization was so far ahead of them that it might as well have been magic. They had the data, but they lacked knowledge and understanding. But that would come with time.