Red tribal drums played in the belly of one of my ships, The Evening Tide, beat through the speakers in a martial rendition of the Forbidden Song. A steady undulation of defiance as we roll toward the Sword Armada. I’ve never seen a fleet so large. Not even when we stormed Mars. That was just two
rival houses summoning allies. This is the conflict of peoples. And it is appropriately massive.
Unfortunately, Roque and I studied under the same teachers. He knows the battles of Alexander, of
the Han armies, and Trafalgar. He knows the greatest threat to an overwhelming power is miscommunication, chaos. So he does not overestimate the power of his force. He subdivides into twenty smaller mobile divisions, giving relative autonomy to each Praetor to create speed and flexibility. We face not one huge hammer, but a swarm of razors.
“It’s a nightmare,” Victra murmurs.
I thought Roque would do this, but I still curse as I see it. In any space engagement, you must decide if you’re killing enemy ships or capturing them. It seems he’s intent on boarding. So we cannot slug it out with them and hope for the best. Nor can we lure his fleet into my trap from the first. They’ll muscle through it and kill the Howlers. Everything depends on the one advantage we do have. And it’s not our ships. It is not our hundred thousand Obsidians I have packed in leechCraft. It is the fact that Roque thinks he knows me, and so his entire strategy will be predicated on how I would behave.
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.