Chapter 78: Inner Battle
If reading the historical records of The Error’s battle, no, campaign against the Astrons had been bad, watching it dismantle an entire division of human capital ships was a goddamn nightmare.
Derek swallowed to moisten his inexplicably dry throat, unleashed an entire laundry list of curses and cuss words just to get them out of his system, only to lean back in his chair with one fuuuuuuuuck as he dragged his hands down his face.
“We don’t know how much of our first transmission they managed to keep during the evacuation, so I’m going to resend that, and give them everything we have on safe landing spots and where we fought our way through the swarm. And that there are a whole lot more monsters on the surface that’ll go after them the second they touch down. Then … we need to figure out which parts of our emergency kits we need …”
***
It took them all five days to prepare for the arrival of the escape pods, at least the ones that could land nearby without triggering an attack.
Well, to be entirely truthful, working together, it had only taken three and a half. The rest had just been … honestly, “make-work” was probably too kind a description. It had simply felt like being entirely done after less than half the time available was pure laziness.
Though arguably doing something so unproductive to make himself feel better was just plain idiotic. At least Derek realized what he was doing, rather than needing to have someone pound his head with a (hopefully) metaphorical brick.
Because they really had gotten everything done pretty quickly, so quickly that it didn’t quite feel right to call it done. And all that really came down to one thing: [Scholar of War] was finally working as advertised… no, that wasn’t entirely true, it had been working just fine the entire time, it was just that all the previous times he’d needed it, Derek had been in rather novel situations, at least compared to the history that the [Skill] connected him to.
Asking “how do I beat an alien autonomous murder spacecraft that’s both larger and way more advanced than my ship” had earned him an answer that boiled down to a more polite version of “I dunno, you figure it out,” due to a lack of historical advice to give.