Admiral Theodore's index finger is hovering on top of the send button on his console screen.
He just finished his last report and he is scheduled to send it to the Naval Headquarters. All Empire Commanders are required by the Home world's Naval Supreme Admiral to send a status report every thirty minutes whenever they are in battle.
Every single remaining captain in his fleet will have their own reports and they too will be submitting it to the Home world for review.
Once this last batch report is sent out, the Home World will know about his losses. They will find out about his failures and how he allowed all this to happen.
He is responsible for letting one of the Empire's most powerful fleet be decimated like this.
It means that this is the end of his career, or his life. The Empire does not look favourably to those who smear their image.
He still can't explain why his captains ended up killing each other. And right in the middle of a battle too. But he has to take responsibility for it now. Such is the heavy burden on his shoulders.
With a heavy sigh, he steeled his nerve and finally smashed his fingers on the send button.
.........
They are now in full retreat.
At the last status report, he only has Six hundred twenty battle ready ships left. The rest of the ships have either sustained too much damage to continue or is now completely destroyed.
They have been in constant battle with the enemy ships. The enemy is still attacking them with their hit and run tactics. Their fleet's ability to micro jump with precision is deadly to his force.
His once mighty fleet was picked off one by one. There are also those occasional rocks that mysteriously appear out of nowhere and smash into his ships.
His remaining fleet needs to get out of Earth's gravity well for their dimensional warp drives to work.
The problem is, his Flagship can now only run at ten percent of its maximum top speed.
During one of the internal battles with some of his own ships, A Royal Dreadnaught that was supposed to be protecting his Flagship from the rear, suddenly speeds up and rammed into his Flagship's main thrusters. Thankfully his other escorts were able to cause enough damage to the Dreadnaught and minimized the damage done but he is left with just his auxiliary boosters as his main propulsion
He immediately ordered his fleet maintain the same speed as his flagship and to protect him at all cost.
.........
"Admiral! The enemy fleet has appeared again. We have finally detected where they are hiding. It seems that they are using Venus's atmosphere to hide. We have observe their fleet coming out of cover and moved in different directions before warping out."
"Sound general quarters, bring the fleet back to high alert!"
A few seconds later the next wave of attacks started again.
.........
"Admiral! Captain Rashid of the Dreadnaught Menon has requested to stay behind. We lost a total of three hundred ninety eight ships on that last raid and his brother Captain Ganesh of the Battleship Trident along with sixteen other capital ships were severely damaged during the last attack. He wish to stay behind and conduct a rescue mission."
"Let him know that I'm terribly sorry for his brother but we cannot afford to lose another Dreadnaught. That is exactly what's going to happen if he stays behind."
His fleet is now down to just about six hundred ships. He can barely fight the enemy back. It seems like they've already endured more than a hundred of these attacks and there's no end to them in sight.
He checked the gravity well projection in his command console. He just need another twenty thousand miles and his remaining ships can finally initiate their warp drives to escape.
...........