Ivan Kal - What War Had Wrought

And she had lost use of one defense station, which was probably what the Erasi had intended. The recharge time for the defense station was thirty-two hours, by which time, if she wasn’t wrong about the Erasi’s objectives, they would be gone. Now she had only two stations remaining and would need to make sure that she used them when they would be able to inflict the most damage to the invaders.

Hanaru’s fleets reached the first of the Empire’s defense platforms, and immediately they opened fire. Thousands of energy beams struck against his ships, just as he gave the order for his fleets to fire missiles. His ships flooded the space with missiles, overcoming the defense platforms’ defenses and destroying them one by one. As his ships moved forward, more and more of stations and defense platforms came into range, and the Empire’s defense fleet moved to engage from behind the defenses where they had moved to once his two fleets had retreated, and they too opened fire. The two forces engaged in a delicate balance as they each tried to get an upper hand on the other without overextending.

Hanaru glanced at the timer. There was only a few minutes left.

Several hours ago, a lone scanning drone detected unknown moving objects. Hampered by the fact that it was the only drone that detected them, it couldn’t extrapolate the objects’ trajectory or speed. The drone sent its report to the monitoring station. Seeing as there was a hostile fleet in the system, the station’s AI gave the report a low importance and put in the massive queue that was on hold until the situation in the system was resolved.

Laura paled in horror as alarms started blazing inside her control room. She watched the hologram and saw stations in orbit of Sanctuary and around the protective cover of the defenses get hit by something. Holes were open in their hulls, venting entire sections while others were ripped to pieces.

“Those are civilian stations,” someone said in horror, as several habitat stations exploded or were open to space. Laura watched helplessly, unable to do anything, because as fast as it had begun, it was over. Before she could ask what happened, more alarms sprung to life. Laura watched as objects appeared in the orbits of Sanctuary and Thanatos and started descending towards the planet and the moon. The massive defensive turrets of Thanatos swiveled and started taking down the objects that were targeting various facilities on the surface of the moon.

Ultimately, several passed through and struck against the large shield dome that protected the Fleet Headquarters, but that was the only place on the moon that had the shield; the other facilities hadn’t been equipped with one yet. Two struck at the Fleet Academy, wiping it off the surface of the moon, while the third smashed just outside the shield and destroyed the spaceport.

On Sanctuary, the situation was similar. The Olympus City defensive turrets took down most of them, but two passed through and struck the city shields, bathing the sky above the city in red. Two more had entered Sanctuary’s orbit and destroyed two research facilities on the southern continent, which had no defenses.

Laura forced her eyes from the devastation and to the Erasi fleets that were fighting the defenses and the First Fleet. Immediately she saw that they were disengaging, turning to run away. And after what they had just done, she will not allow them run away. She ordered both of the stations to move and keep the Erasi in position. There was only ten more minutes until Star-Guard One was in range.

Nair was shaken by the destruction in Sanctuary’s vicinity. The early reports suggested that the attack was executed by kinetic weapons; how they were unnoticed didn’t matter now. What did was making the Erasi pay for the people on those stations that they had slaughtered. Nair had failed in his duty to protect this system, but he wouldn’t let the Erasi leave unpunished. Their forces had already started pulling back and, if Nair was reading the patterns in their movements right, splitting into several smaller forces. The First Fleet accelerated, following the Erasi and firing their proton beams and missiles at the retreating ships, even as they were slowly gaining speed and moving out of his fleet’s range.

Then two massive stations left the skim in positions behind them, exiting close enough that one small Erasi destroyer actually collided with the station’s shields. The stations leaving the skim so close must’ve wrecked the Erasi ships’ systems, and Nair saw that he was right when the ships in the close vicinity of the stations died without even firing back as missiles and proton beams slammed into unprotected ships drifting forward.

The two stations forced the Erasi to change course and move away from the stations, which allowed his fleet to catch up. His ships fired at the Erasi, who were now trying to move above the sun’s plane, closing their ranks to weather the assault of the stations. Two of the Erasi fleets close to one of the stations turned their attention to the station, buying time for the rest to move away.

Nair’s fleet managed to close range with the back element of the retreating Erasi force, mauling them with a flurry of plasma torpedoes, proton beams, kinetic weapons, and missiles. Ion missiles knocked down the Erasi shields, and kinetic weapons finished any ship close enough to the Empire’s fleet. The stations had mauled the two fleets that were covering the rest, and hundreds of ships or their pieces floated around the stations, one of which was leaking atmosphere and had lost shields in several areas as the retreating Erasi ships poured fire into it.

Nair saw that the Erasi were about to move out of his fleet’s range again, and soon after out of the range of the stations. He ordered all his ships to reassemble into a formation and prepare their skim drives; he was not about to let them get away. He contacted the Fleet Headquarters informing them of his plan. Just as he was about to give the order, the Fleet ordered him to hold off. Before he had the chance to ask for a clarification, a bright wall of light pierced through the Erasi, sweeping through their formation. In a span of three seconds, thousands of Erasi warships, almost a fourth of their entire force, ceased to exist. Not even dust remained as proof that they had been there.

Hanaru watched in satisfaction as his plan worked. The Empire had missed his attack and all of his targets had been destroyed. Not every target, he reminded himself. He hadn’t anticipated that the Empire would have planetary shields. Those were extremely hard to manufacture, and even the Erasi only had them on the planets in the core systems. Other than that, his attack had been successful. His ships had wrecked the Empire’s system, destroying or crippling its infrastructure.

He gave the order for his fleets to split into small groups and head for the hyperspace barrier, taking shots at any target of opportunity. However, just as his fleets started moving apart, the last two of the Empire’s defense stations showed up. They exited their FTL as close to his fleets as they were able without colliding, and Hanaru saw a number of ships in two of his fleets lose controls. The phenomenon that occurred once the Empire used its FTL drives was well known to Hanaru, and one of the things he had worried most about, as he had no way of protecting against it.

The disabled ships died in minutes as the two stations opened fire, and their positions forced Hanaru to issue new orders and gather his ships into a large formation to protect them from the onslaught of missiles and weapons fire. His ships sped away as the Empire’s gravity weapon reached out and ripped ships apart.