So I decide to overshoot his estimation of my insanity and show him how little he really understands the psychology of Reds. Today I lead the Pax on a suicide mission into the heart of his fleet. But I don’t begin the battle. Orion does, soaring forward ahead of me on Persephone’s Howl with three quarters of my fleet. They cluster in spheres, the smallest corvettes still four hundred meters long. Most are half-kilometer-long torchShips, some destroyers, and the four huge dreadnoughts. Long-range missiles slither out from the Gold ships and from our own. Miniature computer-guided countermeasures are deployed. And then Roque’s fleet flashes into motion and the black space between the two fleets erupts with flack, missiles, and long-range railgun munitions. Billions of credits’ worth of munitions spent in seconds.
Orion shrinks the distance to Roque’s fleet as Mustang and Romulus’s ships hurtle toward the southern edge—per Io’s pole—of Roque’s formation, attempting to hit the only vulnerable place on a ship, the engines. But Roque’s fleet is nimble and ten squadrons divide from the rest, orientating themselves so their bristling broadsides face the bows of the Moon Lord ships coming up from the planet’s south pole and rake them with railgun fire. A hundred thousand guns go off simultaneously.
Metal shreds metal. Ships vomit oxygen and men.
But ships are made to take a beating. Huge hulks of metal subdivided into thousands of interlocking honeycombed compartments designed to isolate breaches and prevent ships from venting with one railgun shot. From these floating castles stream thousands of tiny one-man fighter craft. They swarm in small squadrons through the no-man’s-land between our fleet and Roque’s. Some packed with miniature nukes meant for killing capital ships. Helldivers and drillboys trained night and day in sims by the Sons of Ares fly with squadrons of synced Blues. They slash into the Society’s war-hardened pilots led by ripWings striped with Gold.
Romulus’s force peels away from Mustang’s to link with Orion, while Mustang continues toward the heart of the enemy formation, preparing the way for my thrust.
We close to three hundred kilometers, and the mid-range rail guns open up. Huge barrages of twenty kilogram munitions hurtling through space at mach eight. Flak shields plume over the entire Gold formation. Closer to the ships, PulseShields throb iridescent blue as munitions crack into them and careen off into space.
My strike force lingers behind the main battle. Soon it will become a war of boarding parties. LeechCraft launching by the hundreds. Aggressive Praetors will empty their ships of their marines and Obsidians to claim enemy vessels, which they will then keep after the battle, per rules of naval law. Conservative Praetors will hoard their men till the last, keeping them to repel boarding parties and use their ships as their main weapon of war.
“Orion’s given the signal,” my captain says.
“Set course for the Colossus. Engines to ramming speed.” My ship rumbles under my feet. “Pelus, the trigger’s yours. Ignore torchShips. Destroyers or larger are the order of the day.” The ship groans as we hurtle forward from the back of Orion’s fleet. “Escorts keep tight. Match velocity.”
We pass the artillery ships, then the four-kilometer-long Persephone’s Howl as we emerge out the center of Orion’s front with the enemy like a hidden spear, now driving into the fifty kilometers of no-man’s-land, aiming for the heart of the enemy. Orion’s ships fire chaff, creating a corridor to protect our mad approach. Roque will see what I intend now, and his capital ships drift back from mine, inviting me into the center of his huge formation as they rain fire down on my strike force.
Our shields flicker blue. Enemy munitions sneak through the chaff and punish us. We return fire. Raking a destroyer as we pass with a full broadside. It loses power. LeechCraft pour out of it to try and slip through our chaff tunnel, but our escorts shred the small craft. Still, we’re hit by the guns of a dozen ships. Red glows around our shields. They fail in stages, local generators shorting out on our starboard side. Instantly, our hull is punctured in seven places. The honeycomb network of pressurized doors activates, shutting the compromised levels of my ship off from the rest. I lose a torchShip. Half a click off bow, a full barrage of rail-munitions rake her from stem to stern, fired by Antonia’s dreadnaught the Pandora.
“Seems my sister is enjoying my ship,” Victra says.
Bodies erupt out of the torchShip’s bridge, but Antonia continues to fire on the much-smaller ship until the nuclear core of her engines implodes. Pulsing white twice before devouring the ship’s back half. The shock wave pushes our craft sideways. Our EMP and pulse shielding holds, lights flickering just once. Something huge slams into the ten-meter-thick bulkhead beyond the bridge. The wall bends inward to my right. The shape of a railgun munition stretching the metal inward like an alien baby. Our gunners rip apart the 1.5-kilometer destroyer that fired on us, loosing eighty of our railguns directly into her bridge. Two hundred men gone. We’re taking no prisoners at this stage. It’s staggering the amount of violence the Pax can deal out. And staggering the amount we’re taking. Antonia dissects another part of my strike force.
“Hope of Tinos is down,” my Blue sensor officer says quietly. “The Cry of Thebes is going nuclear.”
“Tell Tinos and Thebes helmsman to punch negative forty-five their midline and abandon ship,” I snap. The ships obey and alter course to ram Antonia’s flagship. She reverses her engines and my dying ships carry on harmlessly into space. One goes nuclear.
We’re outmatched and outgunned here in the heart of the enemy formation. Trapped. No escape. A sphere forming around us. I only have four torchships left. Make that three.
“Multiple deck fires,” an officer intones.
“Munitions detonations on deck seventeen.”
“Engines one through six are down. Seven and eight are at forty percent capacity.”
The Pax dies around me.
Roque’s MoonBreaker looms ahead. Twice the length of my ship, three times the girth. A floating military dock city eight kilometers long. With a huge crescent bow, like a shark with an open mouth swimming sideways. She retreats from us at the same pace we advance. Making sure we cannot ram her as she punishes us with her superior weaponry. Roque thought I would pull a Karnus. Try to slam into their capital ship with my own. That’s now impossible. Our engines are nearly done. Our hull compromised.
“All forward guns target their railguns and missile launchers on their top deck, carve us a shadow.” I pull up a hologram of the ship and circle the area of fire with my fingers, directing the fire as Victra gives commands to the fighter groups which we’ve held on to till now. The ripWings scream out into space. The Pax rotates to present her main gunbanks to the Colossus to open a broadside.
It doesn’t matter what we do at this stage. We’re a wolf pinned to the ground by a bear and it’s smashing our legs one by one, carving off our ears, our eyes, our teeth but keeping our belly nice and ready for a raking. My ship shudders around me. Blues rip out of sync, vomiting in the pits as the datanerves in the ships, to which they’re linked, die one by one. My helmsman, Arnus, has a seizure as the engines are shredded.