“I will keep your words in mind,” Garaam said, and closed her link. Orders arrived from Narrasak, and the three Legions adjusted their formation, with the Third Legion taking the central position and Garaam’s and Anessa’s surrounding it.
Another alarm brought Anessa’s attention to the fourth planet, and the ships that were just now coming from behind it. She waited until all of them were visible and she was sure that no more were coming, and then she looked at the scans.
There were exactly 4500 ships, and all were the same size and shape: 760 meters long, 380 wide and 180 tall, shaped like boxes and smaller than her destroyers were. The scans showed them moving slowly to engage her fleet, probably intending to keep the Legions away from the planet for as long as they could.
But their enemy must’ve known that those ships couldn’t stop the Legions; not even ten of those destroyers together could stand a chance against even a single one of her heavy cruisers, not to mention the battleships. They were simply in a completely different class.
The enemy soon entered range, and both forces opened fire.
The Shara Daim ships fired their missiles just a few moments before Adrian’s drones, and dark blue proton beams reached out to smash into the drones’ shields. The drones returned fire with their less powerful laser beams. Adrian started sending orders to the drone control teams, assigning targets, choosing to focus on the Shara Daim smaller ships and those whose shields had taken a hit in his previous attack.
His drones might have been a bit smaller than Shara Daim destroyers, but they were drones and had no need for living quarters and other areas that were necessary for a manned ship. His drones also had almost twice as much firepower than the Shara Daim destroyers. They could continue to function for as long as they were receiving signals from control, and most importantly, they were expendable.
The drones were being controlled from Olympus Mons, using signals sent through both hyperspace and normal space, with thousands of signals blanketing the space to prevent any attempts at hacking the control signals. Usually the drones would have been controlled from command ships, at least in fleet actions. But the drones had been designed for system defense long before the fleets that existed now. And Warpath had built a lot of them in the nineteen years since the end of the war with the Sowir. They had been updated a bit since then, of course, but Adrian knew that they didn’t really stand a chance against the Shara Daim Legions. But then again, he wasn’t trying to simply win. He needed to make a point. He used the Watchtower interface to guide the flow of battle, using the drones to a devastating effect.
Anessa moved the Bloodbringer and her other heavy ships in front of the formation to shield her smaller ships. The enemy’s small ships were firing with laser weapons, something that the Shara Daim hadn’t been using in a long time for anything other than point defense, but they could keep those beams of concentrated light for longer periods of time on her ship’s shield, eventually overloading them. She had already lost six destroyers to the enemy ships’ lasers and missiles.
The enemy ships would coordinate their fire in order to interrupt defensive fire around a single ship, then gang up on it until it lost its shields and eventually a few missiles found their way through the defensive fire, destroying the ship. The missiles were powerful, but even her smaller ships could usually take a few hits and survive. The problem was that they also focused their lasers on the ships, weakening the hull enough for the missiles to do more damage. And the number of missiles that the enemy had fired was impressive for ships that size; already the individual ships had fired more than the loads on her destroyers and showed no sign of running out.
The Legions were winning the exchange, even though they were losing some of their smaller ships. But although the enemy was losing ships fast, they were still closing the range. She watched the movements of the enemy ships, noticing them moving in strange patterns; damaged ships would move in front of those still unharmed, and some ships would sacrifice themselves in order to give the other ships a chance to destroy one of the Legions’ ships. Anessa frowned. She looked at the scans of the enemy fleet, noticing a strangely high amount of traffic between them. She called two of the Va Sun from the communications and sensors to her.
“What am I looking at?” Anessa asked them.
“That is strange,” said the Va Sun in charge of sensors.
“It looks almost like… but no, that’s impossible, there are too many of them at the same time,” the Va Sun from communications said.
“What?” Annessa said.
“Those look like control signals, for unmanned vessels. We use them for controlling our mining crafts in asteroid belts. But, Dai Sha, to control so many of them at the same time, you would need extremely fast and powerful computers. And they can be hacked easily… but there are so many of them…” the Va Sun said.
Anessa looked at the holo and the battle, and it clicked—that was what she was seeing. The ships were smaller than her destroyers were and had more firepower. They moved to sacrifice themselves with no hesitation. That was because they were unmanned. Anessa keyed her comms to send a message to Narrasak when new alerts started appearing on the holo.
Adrian was losing drones at an alarming rate; he was already down to two thirds of their original number, with only about 3100 remaining. But he had expected that; the drones were not up to par with the rest of the Empire’s ships of the line. The drones were an older generation; they had no advanced weaponry that the other ships had, still using lasers as their main weapons. They had shields, although they were much weaker than those on the newer ships that were close to their size, simply because they didn’t have the room to put stronger energy shields in them. Their missiles were the only piece of technology that was up to par to the true fleet ships, and since they had no wasteful space, they could have larger missile loads than other ships of their size. Their purpose was not the same as that of the other ships. They were meant to be a cheap and expendable way to occupy the enemy.
But the drones had one more advantage. Unlike the newer ships that had abandoned the regular kinetic weapons that the Empire had used before, the drones hadn’t. The new-generation kinetic weapons were ship killers, single-shot monsters that had more power than their older versions. The use of kinetics had become very limited, especially now that the ships they were encountering could achieve speeds of half that of light.
But as Adrian’s martial arts teachers had once taught him, the usefulness of any weapon depends on the situation. And Adrian had just positioned the Shara Daim into a situation where the drones’ kinetic weapons could shine.
The drones closed the range. The space between the two forces was filled with missile explosions, as both sides took down the opposing missiles. Still, a lot of them passed through, mostly on the Shara Daim side. Their beam weapons destroyed the shields on his drones, and the missiles finished the work.
With a thought, Adrian opened a channel to his people at the Jupiter facility. An image of Lurker of the Depths appeared standing beside him; it was a manifestation of his mind and not a real hologram, as he was inside his own mind while using the Watchtower interface.
“Send them,” Adrian said simply.
“Understood,” Lurker of the Depths said, and then disappeared. He didn’t really say the words, but the interface used and translated his thoughts into words.