She was still musing about that when alarms started sounding around her command. Red blips started appearing all around the three Legions, and lines appeared connecting them to their likely targets.
“Incoming missile fire!” the Va Sun at the sensors reported at the same time.
“Establish the net and move us above the formation,” Anessa ordered.
No one wasted time to acknowledge her orders, they just executed them. All the ships in the attack force instantly made connections, synchronizing their defensive fire. As soon as the missiles entered the range of point defense, lasers opened fire, burning and blowing them up.
The enemy missile count was high, and the missiles were powerful, only ten percent weaker than those of the Shara Daim, and more than one hundred thousand missiles came from the debris field. Anessa watched the holo and the scanners trying to find their source, but they were unable to, which meant there were either stealth ships or the missiles had been mixed in with the debris and powered down. Immediately, several possibilities went through her mind. She knew how Adrian liked to fight, never using more power than what was enough, always maneuvering his opponent into position that worked in his favor.
She realized that the debris field was never intended to cripple the Legions; he had placed only enough so that when they sent scouts, it would appear as if the danger was gone. He had placed the Legions at exactly the position he wanted them. It was a valiant effort, Anessa acknowledged grudgingly, but it wouldn’t be enough. If he had used that number of missiles against a single Legion, he might’ve had a chance of doing some damage, but with three working in concert to take down those missiles, almost nothing would pass through, and those few that did wouldn’t even drain their shields.
“Secondary launches!” the Va Sun reported a few seconds after.
Anessa watched as the first missiles died. Their evading capabilities were impressive, and she revised her conclusion: some would pass through, but still not enough. Even with the second wave coming behind it.
She watched her holo and tracked the progress of the defensive fire, when she noticed something odd. There were two types of missiles among the first volley; the majority of them gave off regular missile readings, but the sensors had a problem penetrating the shielding of a small percentage of the volley. Those strange missiles were larger than their ordinary ones, and somehow no defensive fire was directed at them. She checked the projected trajectories for those missiles and realized that they ended in space between the ships; not one was on a trajectory toward a ship. That told her why they hadn’t been targeted; the defensive fire gave priority to the missiles on direct trajectories to the ships.
The missile volley reached the Legions, several passing through the defensive fire and hitting the shield, doing almost no damage. The Bloodbringer took a hit from four missiles in quick succession and took only a 0.7% dip in their shield strength. She glanced to see if the second missile type would change trajectory now that they were inside the formation, and saw no change.
The two thousand Icarus-class missiles entered the Shara Daim formation, then their drives shut off and disengaged, leaving only the spherical canisters that were 10 meters across floating in space between the Shara Daim ships. A moment later, gas thrusters placed the spheres in a gentle spin.
Two circular holes opened on two opposite sides of the spheres, and harsh blue light shone from the openings. A second later, the powerful capacitors in the spheres started draining as intense ion beams exploded out of the spheres.
The Shara Daim formation was dense, and the Icarus missles close. The majority of the beams struck the Shara Daim shields point blank, the spin of the sphere sending the beams across multiple ships during their 3-second firing time.
The ion beams were specifically designed to punch through the shields. A large number of Shara Daim ships suddenly found themselves with their shields gone or extremely drained. Just as the Empire’s second volley arrived.
Confusion reigned among the Legions as the Empire’s beam weapon wreaked havoc among them. Ships were reporting losing their shields and some even reported damage. Bloodbringer itself had caught one of the beams for its full charge and had its shields dropped to eighty percent. But Bloodbringer was a super battleship, and they had the strongest shields out of their ships. The rest were not so lucky.
However, there was no time for them to figure out what had happened—the second volley of missiles entered their effective range. The defensive net had suffered in the confusion, as many commanders tried to evade the hellish beams. And now many of the missiles passed through to hit the ships of the Legions. The missiles seemed to be targeting those ships who had lost shields or whose shields were close to failing.
Anessa watched in horror as the first Shara Daim ship exploded.
Chapter Sixteen
Olympus Mons
The Shara Daim ships exploded as thousands of missiles struck at targets of opportunities. But soon the Shara Daim defensive fire put an end to the Empire’s attack.
“Nice targeting,” Adrian said, and Iris appeared in front of him.
“Thanks,” she said.
It was she who had used the Watchtower interface to control the missiles. Adrian could’ve done it, but she was better at going by percentages. And this was a perfect example of when an AI could be deadly. She had targeted only those ships that they had the chance of destroying with the number of missiles that had passed through the Shara Daim fire.
“That will piss them off for sure. They don’t like being used as target practice,” Adrian said.
“Yeah, but that is what you wanted,” Iris said.
“Yeah, I did. Well, it’s time for the next phase.”
Anessa read the reports. Six hundred and fifty-four ships—four hundred and ten destroyers, one hundred and eleven cruisers, one hundred and thirty-two heavy cruisers, and one battleship. The Legions had lost six hundred and fifty-four ships in a span no longer than a couple of minutes. They had not lost that much in such a short period of time for centuries, certainly not during Anessa’s lifetime. She couldn’t even remember the last time a single Legion had taken such losses, even when fighting overwhelming numbers.
Her comms chirped and Anessa turned on the privacy screen, then accepted the request from the flagship. A moment later, a livid Narrasak and a hard-looking Garaam appeared in front of her.
“What was that?” Narrasak asked furiously.
“I have never seen such a weapon,” Anessa said.
“Me neither, and the way the attack was executed was ingenious,” Garaam added, a hint of respect in her voice.
“I want their commander captured alive; I’m going to rip his heart out myself,” Narrasak said through his teeth.
“First we need to reach the planet,” Garaam said.
“Their defenses are insignificant, and that trick will only work once. We are going forward,” Narrasak said, and closed his link. Garaam remained, looking at Anessa.
“You know their commander. Should we expect more difficulties?”
Anessa took time to choose her words carefully before responding, “Before he released me, he seemed confident that they could defeat us. I disregarded his words because he is not Shara Daim, but yes, he will have more plans.”
“It sounds like you got to know him a lot more than what you let on. Is there anything that we should know about him?” Garaam said.
“He is like…” Us, Anessa almost said, but managed to stop herself. Even if Garaam was more open-minded, saying that an enemy, an alien, was equal to the Shara Daim was heretical. Yet I almost said it, Anessa thought. She shook her head and continued speaking. “He is smart. Do not trust any opening that you see, even if it appears like it was made by their mistake. He will try to manipulate you to where he wants you.”