chapter 136
POV: Remi
The gigantic space portal loomed ahead of us. We should have already been inside, but managing so many ships and trying to get them into formation was a difficult task, especially when most of these ships didn’t seem able to hold their positions.
The yelling of the people in charge was quite humorous to hear, as every couple of minutes someone drifted too far from their assigned position. This did not bode well for what’s to come.
With the press of a button, the yelling stopped, as there were better things for me to do. We had gotten a lot of data on the ships we were about to go against. While the swarm would be problematic, the biggest problem, in fact, was the main railgun of the enemy mothership.
“Bob, is the special ammunition for the main railgun finished?”
“Yes, Captain. It took a bit of work, but I managed to do it without disrupting our factory output too much.”
“FH, please forward our idea to the command ship and see if we can get approval.”
She composed the message, I looked over it, and then it was sent.
“Lola, Sam, are you both ready? When the time comes, we’re going to need both your affinities.”
“This is exciting, Captain! It’s like in that movie you made us watch,” Sam answered, while Lola just smiled and nodded.
“Captain, do you really think we can hit such a small target from so far away? Its armour is the thickest in that location, and like our railgun, the armour closes up when it’s not firing.”
“Hitting the two-by-two-metre opening straight on would be impossible, even for us. That’s why we’re using the special ammunition Bob prepared.”
I pulled up the 3D representation of the enemy mothership and zoomed in on the centre of it, near the front.
“You see this long tunnel? This is to keep its railgun opening shielded, so only when projectiles are fired straight on could one possibly hit the railgun itself. What we’re aiming for isn’t this small target, but the edge of the tunnel.”
Bob took over, as he seemed quite excited about the next part.
“Usually, railgun ammunition is made of a very specific type of metal that isn’t too hard or too soft. If it’s too hard, it’s going to bounce too often off the armour or shields without doing any real damage. If it’s too soft, it won’t have the necessary penetrative power.
“This special ammunition is made of the softest metal we could possibly fire without compromising ballistics. But as soon as it hits that wall, most of its outer shell is going to turn into molten slag, revealing the extremely hard metal balls that are going to pound toward the railgun opening.”
“We would still need to be dead on vertically,” Lola said, which was a good criticism.
“That is true, but horizontally we would have more leeway,” Sam quickly said, clearly excited about us possibly getting the credit for disabling that railgun.
It would be in no way an easy shot, and I wouldn’t even try it under normal circumstances, as it was going to expose us a bit too much, but I think the risk is worth it, considering the reward.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Each moment of this battle was going to be recorded, with the loot share being divided amongst everyone depending on their contribution.
It would be stupid for us not to try to get as much as possible out of this fight, as we were risking our lives.
An alert message distracted me, showing that we had reached the 400 tonnes of point-defence ammunition target, which FH quickly reported.
Seventy-five percent of what we were producing was going into deep storage, so we had quite a good reserve there.
A camera view of the cargo bay showed that it was still quite empty. That’s the thing about mass versus volume: if we were to fill up our cargo bay to the brim with ammunition, the only thing we could do relatively well would be move forward.
One of the biggest advantages of ships of this size was their manoeuvrability. Each one of those railguns the mothership had could easily destroy us, but if we had over 1,000 kilometres of distance from it, we could easily dodge that attack. But not if our mass was so great that our maneuvering thrusters were unable to change our relative position fast enough.
Then the order was given. On the screens surrounding us, engine blooms sparked all around as each ship started to move forward. It was magnificent to see the huge engines that we could fit in, move forward ships with such massive frames.
We didn’t accelerate fast, but it also wasn’t slow, as each ship needed to be able to at least accelerate fast enough to enter the side dimension. Soon, we were all moving at 8G acceleration, with the battle barge already entering the space portal.
The constant data that was shared throughout the fleet cut off, but other ships took up the load, keeping everyone organised. Each ship trailed the battle barge, entering the space portal behind it, and soon it was our turn.
We still hadn’t gotten back confirmation that we could use our railgun to try to take out theirs, but we wouldn’t be the only ones trying. All of the battleships would also be aiming for that location, trying to disable that railgun by blasting through its armoured defence.
Hopefully, it would work, but I had a feeling that that mothership wasn’t going to allow that to happen. As we emerged on the other side, we were reconnected with the command structure of the battle barge and started getting data on our enemy.
That ship truly was massive and looked so alien. It was 5.3 kilometres long, its back was almost 4 kilometres wide, while its front was quite narrow. It was also quite flat, with some parts reaching 800 metres. It looked to be dead, but all of us knew that it wasn’t.
The current distance was nearly 11,000 kilometres. Usually, railgun distances that were impossible to dodge were under 1,000 kilometres, but that was when we were talking about nimble ships, not the huge mothership we were up against, or the hulks on our side.
There was no point in me trying to use my Sense Aura skill as it barely worked for a couple of dozen metres. There was also no point in me trying to use the mana detection device, as others were doing that, and the data was being fed to the entire fleet.
The entire fleet hadn’t even entered the portal when there was a surge of mana and electric activity in the mothership. It was like it had woken up from a sleep. We detected powerful sensors pointed our way. Then all of a sudden, the mothership started to come alive like it had sensed its prey.
I got the sense that these used to be animals that, over time, evolved into what we are seeing now. With the nature of portals, who knows when or where such creatures evolved or were made, but this particular one was now our problem to handle.
The fleet adjusted its direction as we were heading straight for it. We soon got the order to stop accelerating, as we would be drifting the rest of the way there. The mothership also started to accelerate towards us, but quite slowly.
It would be a bit of time before the battle truly began. First would be electronic warfare, although that wouldn’t work too well against this opponent, but it still should disrupt their long-range aiming capabilities. Then laser fire would follow. It would be quite dispersed at those distances, but it would still start to soften up the target.
I could feel the anxiousness of the entire fleet as we slowly continued to drift towards our target. When we reached the 6,000-kilometre mark, electronic warfare started.
When we closed in at 5,000 kilometres, two of the battleships fired their huge lasers, targeting the forward ports where the fighters would come out. They were hoping that they would be able to melt them shut before we reached close enough for them to be opened.
It didn’t take much longer after that when there was a power surge detected in the mothership. It started near the back but moved along the spine. It seemed that it was powering up its main railgun. Our ships started to do the same.
Almost all railguns fired at the same speed. There was a good reason for that, because trying to increase the speed meant the destruction of the railgun itself. There were special ships that only fired once, pushing the railguns to their very limits. They were meant to punch through capital ships or fortresses. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any.
We were given permission to use our main railgun, but it was way too early for us to so, as the distance was simply too large to get an accurate shot. That was demonstrated a couple of seconds later as the mothership’s railgun fired and missed the battle barge. And just like that, the battle properly began as the battleships, battlecruisers, and the battle barge fired back.
Not every one of our shots hit, but most did. A large portion of them simply bounced off, and the few that hit properly only left small craters. No one hit the targets they were aiming at.
The next volley wasn’t going to happen immediately after that, as right now it wasn’t the time to dump everything we had. Everyone still had to worry about overheating, and there was no point in wasting too much ammunition at such a distance.
Already, the mothership was powering up for another shot, with every other ship moving behind the battle barge once again to take shelter from the return fire. The only thing we could do right now was simply wait as we continued to drift closer.
Our sensors detected the energy dispersion, so I started counting. One, two, three, four... and then the projectile fired by the mothership hit the battle barge. It burst apart with shrapnel flying over the battle barge, some pieces hitting a battleship that had not gotten entirely back into the shadow of the battle barge
Its shields were powerful enough to survive the shrapnel. Our AIs were good enough to get accurate data on how powerful the shrapnel pieces were. Only one had enough speed and mass to punch through our shields and armour. But that was just a small piece of the original projectile that had lost a lot of its speed when it bounced.