chapter 161
POV: Remi
Space combat was a curious thing. We knew that our enemies were approaching, and they might soon know that we knew that, but that didn't change the fact that both of us were quite distant from each other. This meant that before anything could start, there was a lot of waiting to be done.
However, just waiting would be stupid. “Start gathering passive information about the ships. I want to know everything they have.”
We were still doing general sensor sweeps. They weren’t as precise as directly targeting those three ships. The server processing capabilities were pushed to the limit as absolutely everyone was doing their job as best as they could.
I really needed to upgrade the ship servers so we would never run into a problem of running out of processing power.
The measurements of the ships were quickly revealed. They were still frigates, although a size bigger than us, quite close to a cruiser, but not quite. Perfect for staying unnoticed.
“I am surprised that they managed to send out anyone to look for us with the war that's going on right now,” Dean said, as he was browsing the information we had on the pirate lord.
An alert went off when the three ships started to accelerate more aggressively towards us. They were pushing nearly 38G of acceleration. They were 1821 kilometres away from us. There were eight ships in the radius of 2000 kilometres from us. Their status to us is unknown.
Everyone looked at me, waiting for my commands, but I continued to look at the screen depicting everyone around us. While these three might be acting alone, this wasn’t a certainty.
About five seconds after the three ships started to accelerate, every ship in the radius of about 5000 kilometres acted almost immediately, but absolutely every one of them was burning as hard as they could away from our location.
“Full combat burn two, steady as she goes,” my voice rang out, with everyone bracing for acceleration a moment later.
I did not have to push any buttons, but soon we were accelerating at 40G, using the best line possible with our current heading so we would be able to escape as fast as possible.
Communications lagged behind, especially because we were a decent way away from the space station.
They issued a red alert and a warning to the three ships. At least it was a strong warning, because if they engaged, the system forces would act, but that didn’t matter to us, because our fight would already be happening by that time.
But was that actually true? Even without me saying so, we were now actively scanning the ships that were approaching. Slowly, everything was revealed to us, including the many covered openings on the ships that could be used either to launch missiles or housed railguns.
FH and her AIs were in constant communication, trying to figure everything out, and I was listening in on it all. They were leaning more towards a lot of smaller railguns built into the ships, and it was soon confirmed when FH managed to find a match for the ship type we were against.
There were some big differences, which is why it took so long to find a match. These ships carried extra frontal shields built in afterwards. By the angles they were mounted, these were really strong and would be able to deflect a couple of our main railgun shots without breaking a sweat.
“Start running simulations of us trying to escape.”
My voice cut into my bond network. A moment of pause followed, which immediately turned into a lot of discussion and active simulations.
On the screen, I watched as the first solutions revealed themselves. Thanks to FH finding the base model of the ships, we now had a lot more information to go by than just observation.
For some reason, my mind was telling me that running away wasn’t the best idea. We could push our acceleration more than them, but if we did, we would also lose some of the ability to dodge the incoming railgun fire.
Simulations soon confirmed my thinking. If we ran, we wouldn’t be able to bring our main railgun to bear. Not unless we wanted to turn around every so often, which would affect our time to escape. Each simulation seemed to end similarly, with us simply being overwhelmed by distant railgun fire and eventually destroyed.
Many voices did bring up that our new weaponry should be able to do a lot of damage to their shields, but that was something we were not entirely sure of yet.
Stolen novel; please report.
Shields had a curve. If you had a shield that was strong enough to survive our main railgun shots, only our secondary turrets, the four large ones we had, would be able to do any damage to the shields. The weaker turrets would simply do nothing.
But that was going by our old weaponry.
“Captain, the enemy ships are trying to contact us.”
“Good, connect us.”
A moment later, an image of the enemy captain appeared. I would have liked to say that he was some dirty-looking, ugly pirate, but no, he was pretty well put together, with a lot of features I would compare to some fancy dog breeds. He was still humanoid. His voice followed soon.
“You have crossed the great pirate Lord Ythrel Veylith of the Veylith clan. Your only choice is death.” There was a bit of a delay in our communications because of the distance, but not too much. He did look quite arrogant.
“Captain, it looks like your girlfriend’s dad is mad,” Sam unhelpfully commented. A glare shut him up. Good, FH filtered that interaction out.
“Bold last words for someone that won’t even be able to catch us?” I said, trying not to cringe at my own words.
He started to laugh at the same time we saw all three of the enemy ships accelerate to 45G. We also saw the captain, who was sitting in his captain’s chair, grimace a bit. It was impressive that they could seem so unbothered by that acceleration.
“I see your missile ports. My ship was built to survive missile swarms. You will not be able to defeat us so easily,” I said, trying to mean every word as seriously as possible.
“You fool. We were chosen for this mission for a reason. You think we do not know what your ship is capable of? A simple-minded fool.”
Immediately on the other screens, the chances of them having missiles were now reduced to zero. Those spaceships did have multiple models; the missile version being more popular.
It would have been better if all of us were wrong and they actually had missiles, which would have made this battle easy. We would have had many choices on how to proceed.
Cutting off the communications, I solidified the plan we were going with. There was only a momentary hesitation, as the choices I was about to make would determine if we survived or not.
“Activate all electronic warfare countermeasures. I do not want them to be able to get a proper lock on us. Cut acceleration and turn us towards the enemy. Prepare for fully powered evasive manoeuvres. Everyone else, fire at will.”
“FH, pull from us as hard as you can. Improve the ship to your limits.” No matter who was looking at us, the fake mana battery system would hide all our other actions.
The main engines cycled down. At the same time, we were already turning to face the enemy, lining up our main railgun. Every turret AI was preparing to fire. The familiar jolt of the main railgun firing vibrated through the ship.
One and a half seconds later, we hit our target. The shot bounced off, but that was to be expected. A moment later, we were hit by returned fire from smaller railguns, but what they lacked in power, they made up for in quantity. Each of the ships had nearly eighty railguns, all of them about half as powerful as our large railgun turrets.
About 63% of them missed, most of that thanks to our evasive maneuvers and the electronic warfare. They were trying to do the same to us, but we were clearly way stronger in offense and defense in that department.
The shields were currently showing about five minutes of resistance before overheating became a real problem. No matter how good the materials were, we were still limited by how much heat we could pull away from the shield devices.
Our large turrets fired. Bolts of light streaked through space, impacting the central ship faster than the railguns. The bolts struck, with our sensors being able to confirm a lot of heat buildup. Not as much as the main railgun managed, but still a lot.
The medium turrets started to fire. We were also able to confirm that even they had an impact on the shield. That brought a smile to my face. The turret AIs didn’t stop firing, their aim ridiculously accurate.
It was easy to imagine their captain now sweating if his species sweats, as we were obviously doing a lot more damage than they thought possible.
Looking at the numbers, it was still going to be a close fight. Our damage output was good enough that in the next minute or two, we should be able to blast through the enemy command ship, but our shields were also taking a lot of hits.
They were also getting closer. While they had stopped their extreme acceleration, they were still approaching at 15G.
While this wasn’t quite close to the old age of sailing ship fights, where they got so close to each other while firing, we were still trading so much fire.
The shield AIs were doing an amazing job, constantly shifting their locations, as our sensor AIs were so good to actually be able to track the incoming railgun fire. The ship’s temperature was climbing slowly, but overall temperature wouldn’t be a problem in this fight, at least not for us.
A full firefight had only started about 30 seconds ago, but it felt like it was so much longer. Then, all of a sudden, the point defence turrets asked permission to fire at the incoming railgun shots.
This was not something that we trained for or was even a question of something that could possibly help us. They seemed to think that with the flak capability the hard-light turrets had, it should be possible to reduce the number of impacts.
“Go ahead,” I ordered mentally. All of the point defence turrets popped up, and our ship looked like a Christmas light show. At first, they were barely doing anything to help us reduce the number of impacts, but they adjusted so fast.
Just imagining what the ship currently looked like from the outside made my blood boil from excitement.
The main railgun was firing as fast as it could, with the large turrets and medium turrets firing visible bolts of light toward the enemy command ship. Now also hundreds of bolts of light every second were flying toward all three enemy ships, but stopping at about 100 kilometres away, seemingly disappearing into nothingness.
They weren’t just disappearing into nothingness as each time they dissipated, they were destroying an incoming railgun shot or were close to doing so. Incoming fire reduced constantly, but about 20 seconds later, it started to level off. Now we were only being hit by about 10% of the incoming fire.
Our shields started to cool off a bit. “Accelerate towards the enemy at 15G.” It was time to close the distance. If we got close enough, some our missiles should be able to get past their point defence, but right now they would have too much time to shoot them down.
A couple of seconds later, the left side of the front shield of the enemy command ship collapsed. Without a single word or thought from me, each turret pounced on that weakness like a vicious starving dog.
A main railgun shot pierced deep, each hard-light bolt that hit melted a chunk of the ship. It took us eight seconds to disable the ship, with basically its left side completely gone.
“Launch a salvo of missiles at both the remaining ships.” A few seconds later, while we were already turning and firing against the second enemy ship, 48 missiles were launched rapidly, all of them accelerating towards their targets.
As expected, their point defence was good, but we were now too close to each other. We lost about half of our missiles, but those explosions were strong enough to weaken both of the ships’ shields a lot.
We were lucky, as a lot of the missiles hit the right front shield of the second ship. It only took one shot from the main railgun to collapse it. Twelve seconds later and the second ship was partially disabled. It was still able to fire, but only from a couple of railguns.
“Switch target to the third ship.” Its shields had a bit of time to recover, but not enough. I was waiting for them to surrender, but they never did. When their shields collapsed, we continued to fire until the ship went dark.
Accurate point-defence fire took out the last of the working railguns of the second ship. The battle was over. We had won. It felt unreal. Did we really just win?
“Status?” I managed to say. The screen around me changed, showing that only some of the shields suffered minor heat damage. Some of the hard-light turrets did report some problems they had run into during the fight, but nothing critical. That went impressively well.
Letting out a slow breath, I absorbed our current victory. At the end there I did have to control my innate ability to not turn some of the crew members on those ships into coins.
Now would come the aftermath.