Ivan Kal - What War Had Wrought

“Adrian,” Tomas said, “I am sorry for keeping this ship from you. I thought that we needed to struggle, that conflict was a part of that; I didn’t want us to become dependent on this technology. But I am, as it seems, not cut out to be so ruthless. The Erasi have attacked, killed my people, even after all that we have done to prevent a war. They believe that their strength gives them the right to do as they please, and I have come to realize that perhaps they are right. Might is the only thing that matters in this universe. If you want to be safe, you need to make sure that all understand what will happen if they decide to move against you.” Tomas’s image closed its eyes. “I need you to do this. I want you to make sure that the Erasi understand exactly what they have done. The Enduring is yours. Make sure that the Erasi, and any who would follow their example, never again do something like this.” The hologram disappeared, and Isani put the device back in his pocket.

“Well…” Adrian said. Isani didn’t respond. A minute later, they reached their destination. They stepped out and onto what looked like a makeshift control room. Stations and consoles familiar to him were placed against the walls, with cables stretching from them to the center of the room. Several people were in the process of disconnecting those cables from an ornate blue-and-black chair that was made of thousands of thin, smooth branches that spiraled and melded together.

Isani walked forward. “Are you finished?”

One of the workers pulled a cable and turned to look at Isani. “Yes, this was the last one.”

“Good,” Isani said, and he turned to Adrian. “Sit there.”

Adrian walked a few steps to the chair and sat down.

“Once you put your arms here”—Isani pointed to the two armrests and two small globes that were perfectly positioned for him to rest his palms on—“you will activate the chair. What everyone who used this before you told us is that you need to focus at what you want. They only ever managed to gain the controls for propulsion, and even that was hard.”

“How does it feel?” Adrian asked.

“One of our testers said that it feels like you are sinking into the ship.”

“Here I go,” Adrian said, and put his palms on the two globes. In an instant, the world exploded inside his mind.

They had been wrong. It did not feel like sinking into the ship, it felt as if his body had been turned to liquid and was seeping into every recess of the World-ship. It kept going, stretching his body to fit everything, every part of the ship. For a moment, it threatened to overwhelm him, and then it was over—he was everywhere. Then the sensations came. He could feel everything inside the ship. He was the ship. Millions of things tugged at his attention, but he focused, calmed his mind. There was only one thing that interested him. He needed to take this ship to battle.

Almost as if the ship heard him, knowledge appeared in his mind, everything about the ship that he would need to know in order to take it into battle. The world around the ship blossomed and he saw it all, the ship’s sensors letting him see the battle in real time from so far away using sensors that neither the Empire or the Erasi had ever even conceived of. The Shara Daim ships were losing badly, and he needed to help them.

He pulled back, enough that he could open his body’s eyes and turn to look at Isani, who was studying him in consternation.

“I’m in control, and I’m taking us to battle,” Adrian said, then went back into the ship without waiting for a response.

A skim field formed around the Enduring, far more efficient than the primitive copy of the technology that the Empire used. In the blink of an eye, the massive ship entered a skim, moving so fast that the trip that took an Empire ship several minutes was over in six seconds.

The Enduring dropped out of the skim between the Erasi and the Shara Daim forces. There was no energy discharge to cripple the systems of the ships around the Enduring; the People had long ago found a way to eliminate that effect.

Adrian located Anessa’s ship immediately, and opened a channel to send her a short message. The Enduring’s computer generated a hologram of him that she would have no way of knowing wasn’t actually him. As soon as the message was off, he turned his attention to the Erasi warships. Their missiles and energy weapons were targeting his ship, and were vanishing harmlessly against his shields.

Enduring’s eight and only weapon turrets materialized around its hull. Within moments, Adrian fired. A beam of harsh light left each of the turrets, swiping across the Erasi formations, disintegrating every ship it came in contact with. It was using a far more advanced version of the weapon that the Star-Guard stations fired, a weapon that those stations needed the power of the sun to generate, and which the Enduring powered from its six singularity cores.

The Erasi ships had no chance.

Anessa watched her Legions die. She had lost almost seventy percent of her forces, and the rate at which her Legions were destroyed only increased as the difference in numbers grew. She had hurt the Erasi badly, but not nearly enough to stop their advancement into Shara Daim territory. She looked over the holo, wondering if it was time to skim her Legion out of the fight, when a new contact appeared on her holo.

A massive object had just appeared in between her and the Erasi formations. Anessa looked at it in a confusion. For a moment, she thought that it was an Erasi ship, but then the Erasi started firing at it.

“Kar Daim, we have an incoming communication from that object. It’s a video message,” Garaam told her.

“Put it on.”

The holo changed and Adrian stood before her. “Anessa, the Empire has sent reinforcements,” he said, a small smile curling on his lip. “Pull your Legions back. I promise you, the Erasi will not leave this system alive.”

Anessa looked at the frozen image of Adrian for a moment before it cleared and showed the battle again. She was about to order her crew to open a channel with the object when Erasi ships started disappearing from her holo.

Garash looked in satisfaction at the destruction of the Shara Daim ships. He relished in the carnage. He had lost more than half of his total force, but he still had enough to destroy the Shara Daim, and then turn to the Empire. The only thing he couldn’t give them was time; he needed to do it faster than they could rebuild their forces. Which would be a bit more challenging with the number of ships he had, but he would do it. He had fought wars like this one for a long time.

A new contact appeared on his holo, a massive thing that dwarfed every other ship in his fleet, even his devastator. Immediately, he realized that it could only be something from the Empire; they were the only ones that had the technology to travel in FTL through normal space. He gave the order to every single one of his warships to open fire on the object, hoping to prevent whatever the Empire had planned. Missiles were redirected, and energy beams fired, and all disappeared against the object’s shields. A large portion of his force was putting all of their firepower into it, and it was doing nothing. The amount of fire was enough that even the End of Hope’s shields would’ve succumbed by now.

And then the object fired. Beams of light and energy cut through his fleet, destroying thousands of ships with each swipe. The beam would fire for several seconds, swiping across the field of ships, before going silent, only to fire again barely ten seconds later. His ships were being destroyed, engulfed by the wide beams, and nothing that they sent against it was doing any damage.