“The reinforcements won’t make it in time,” Dayo stated.
“No, sir,” one of his aides said.
Dayo watched on the holo as his troops attacking one of the Sowir underground bases were overwhelmed from all sides and killed to the last man and woman. The Sowir had sacrificed two other bases with almost no struggle in order to decimate one of his taskforces. And the thing that made Dayo angry the most was that it gained the Sowir nothing. They had only accelerated their deaths. The defeat his forces suffered was a strategic win.
“I want group seven rerouted to this position here,” Dayo said, pointing on the holo. His aides moved in a flurry of activity to execute and relay his orders. “And group five here. And I want a calculation on what we need to do in order to collapse that city. We don’t have enough troops close by to take it intact with so many Sowir forces present.”
“Guxcacul built their cities well; it will be a difficult,” someone said.
“I want that Sowir force buried alive,” he said through his teeth.
“I’ll let the teams know,” his aide said.
“Get someone from the Guxcacul command on the comms, let them know that we plan on collapsing one of their cities. I doubt that they will mind, and they might have an idea on how to do it,” Dayo said, then put the whole thing aside and focused on other battles throughout the planet.
Mira sat on the foot of her mech, dressed only in her skin-suit as she ate her meal. There was no longer any danger; they had defeated the Sowir forces in this city and taken it. Now she watched as the Guxcacal troops moved around; the two forces had worked together to clear the city.
As she was relaxing and eating her gray goop, she saw a human soldier jump off the back of a Guxcacal and start walking straight for her. She frowned at him as he waved at her. Then when he came close enough for her implant to identify him, she read his name on her HUD.
“Oh no,” she said out loud.
The man removed his helmet, and Mira saw the irritating face of Sahib Adin. He grinned with that stupid face of his and called out to her, “Mira, love! It has been too long.”
Mira looked around, but she knew that there were no weapons close enough. And none of her team were anywhere near her. She glanced up, towards her mech’s cockpit, and tried to figure out if she had the time to get into it before he reached her.
She must’ve taken too much time debating, because before she knew it, he was standing in front of her.
“Mira, it is so good to finally be able to see your beautiful face. I must admit that over the years I had almost forgotten what you look like. But it was the only thing that got me through my time here, underground, with no light of a sun. It would have been better if you had responded to my messages, but I know that you are a busy lady,” Sahib said, and somehow managed to look hurt.
Mira looked at him as he gave her his puppy eyes look, and fought against giving in to him. He did look kind of cute like that, if only he didn’t talk as much. She tried to say something, but Sahib continued speaking.
Mira tried to give him a look that said she had no time for his antics, but he either didn’t see it or he ignored it. She did admit that he was attractive enough; she had never really given in to him because of the age difference between them. But now, after so much time had passed and he still pursued her, she admitted to herself that he wasn’t really as annoying as she’d thought initially. She sighed, and resigned herself to listening to him talk.
Chapter Fourteen
March; Harbinger – Sowir home system
Adrian floated inside the Watchtower interface as his fleet exited hyperspace. In front of him was the Sowir home system, with the positions of planets and moons as they believed they would be based on the Consortium data. Then his ships went active with their FTL scanners. The system had six planets in total, with about a dozen moons. The three planets closest to the sun were the smallest, and uninhabitable, as they had no atmosphere. The fourth was a planet with a toxic atmosphere, also uninhabitable, but at the time that the Consortium had last entered this system, it had had stations and facilities on its surface. The fifth planet was an inhabitable one, the Sowir homeworld. It was an ocean planet, with most of it covered in water and only a few small islands speckled about. The sixth was the gas giant, about ten percent larger than Jupiter.
As the Empire’s fleet’s sensors sent a tachyon ping, the space started to fill up from the edge of the system inwards. The fleet had come out of hyperspace on the side of the system where the gas giant and the Sowir homeworld were, as their orbits ran very close to each other and Adrian wanted the shortest route to the Sowir homeworld. He had several plans that included the gas giant, but as the interface started to fill up, he realized that his plans wouldn’t work.
Hundreds of stations started appearing around the gas giant, surrounding it completely, at least on the side that he could see, as the sensors were not that effective in seeing through planets. But he could tell that there was something on the other side of the gas giant. Then there was the number of ships, thousands upon thousands, all moving around the system and its many stations.
He noticed the area where the trans-station was supposed to be, and saw that one of the Sowir’s massive stations was there. He also saw that it was missing pieces, and had a debris cloud and dozens of ships around it. The probes they had sent had probably caused the damage as they’d entered the system. It was extremely unlikely that the Sowir station just happened to be there, so the most likely explanation was they were able to detect the trans-particles but couldn’t yet utilize them. But as they knew that his ship could, they’d moved something there to block the passage, which would have been a herculean task judging by the size of the station.
Adrian continued watching as he got a clearer picture of the system, seeing many Sowir military ships popping up in space in front of him. Numbers started appearing above the representation of the system, but he didn’t really need them; the interface poured all that information directly into his brain.
By his count, there were at least two and a half thousand Sowir warships throughout the system, and he assumed that number would climb to three thousand as some must be obscured by the planets. There were rings of shipyards around the moons of the third and fourth planets in the system, with massive towers reaching from the planets’ surfaces to the rings. Those shipyards themselves were equal to all the shipbuilding capacity the former Consortium worlds had.
“I guess we know how the Sowir matched four other races,” Adrian muttered to himself.
He kept watching as his fleet’s scanners finished, and he now had a clear picture of the system. There were still blind spots; they could see very little behind the sun, and scans behind planets or moons were inconclusive, as there was interference. But there was one strange thing that he noticed. He switched to the virtual image of the system they had made from the historical data they’d taken from the Consortium archives. He looked at it and then switched back.
“Iris,” he called.
“Yes?” Iris appeared beside him in her fiery image, only here she was human-sized.
“Do you see something strange at the gas giant?” Adrian asked.
“I do. There should be two moons on our side of the planet. The scans have detected something big behind it, but it is not where the third moon should be. The other two are missing,” she said.
Adrian nodded. “There is something around the giant that wasn’t there before—a small ring, but there aren’t enough rocks to add up to the mass of even two moons,” he said.