In ε Eri a, Hawke has recreated the shocking image of a huge army charging in the Cold War era, using hundreds of millions of robots.
However, compared to the image of an army charging in the Cold War era, Hawke has created a more science-fictional image.
Because there is no atmosphere, the sky is dark, with countless stars shining in it, even though half of the extremely bright ε Eri system is providing light. Against the backdrop of the pitch-black universe, there are ships everywhere, ranging from a few tens of metres to tens of thousands of kilometres above the ground, battling it out in space.
Energy shells fly everywhere, hydrogen bombs explode and the glow of disintegrating and exploding spaceships can be seen everywhere.
In addition to the ships battling in space, there were also some of the ships pressed down to extremely close to the ground, these ships, bombarding the ground with energy weapons, laser weapons, nuclear weapons at their base.
This was a real carpet attack, the hundreds of ships that the Lucca civilisation had drawn out, although they could not destroy all the robots, they had very cleverly abandoned the idea of attacking the rest of the robots, and instead just made a fire coverage around the energy shield. In this way, any robot that came close to the energy shield would be wiped out.
This method temporarily stopped the approach of the robot frenzy. But Hawke soon found a way to counter it, and that was, digging tunnels at multiple locations simultaneously, far away.
Hawke commanded the mining droids as the main force and began drilling holes in the ground. The processing robots dismantled the less useful ones and used their bodies as material to reinforce the holes in the ground, while the transport robots were responsible for carrying out what was dug out.
Millions of robots worked closely together, divided into thousands of gopher groups, digging frantically in all directions over distances ranging from a few kilometres to several hundred kilometres from the energy shield. The robots that followed joined the gopher groups to speed up the work, while some continued to push forward.
Hawke knew that the droids could not break through the Lucca's fire coverage, but these droids, extremely effectively, held back the Lucca's fire, leaving them no energy or time to strike the droids digging the holes.
It was a very effective move. Hawke saw that in order to deal with the frenzied robot army, the Lucca civilization had to detach several hundred more ships, bringing the total to nearly a thousand ships, to go together to snipe the robot frenzy. This meant that the number of Lucca ships surrounding Hawk's fleet was reduced by a full sixth, greatly reducing the pressure on Hawk.
Despite such strong sniping from the Lucca civilisation, the Hawk-organised droid army pushed on tenaciously. Those mining robots were extremely professional and could even mine deposits hundreds of thousands of metres deep underground, and digging a hole a few hundred metres deep was nothing more than a trivial matter. Once the depth of the hole exceeds a hundred metres, the Luca ship is basically helpless. Because of the special geological structure of the ε Eri a, at this depth even the shock wave of a hydrogen bomb explosion could not collapse the tunnel.
Hawk's army of robots is rushing forward, targeting the force field generator inside the energy shield!
By destroying the force field generator, Hawke would be able to keep the battle at a stalemate, and if he could hold out until the ε Eri b fleet returned, Hawke would have an 80 percent chance of victory!
This situation filled Hawke with confidence of victory once again.
Hawke was pleased to see that the fastest progressing team of droids had already dug the hole in the ground to only one kilometre from the energy shield. In other words, in just five minutes, this team of robots would be within the range of the energy shield.
At that time, through this tunnel, there will be a continuous flow of robots entering the energy shield, thus destroying the force field generator. Once the force field generator is destroyed, Hawke's fleet will instantly regain 100% of its attacking power!
The attack by the Luca ships became more violent. Each explosion released extreme heat and extremely intense radiation, causing hundreds of robots to be destroyed each time. However, a thousand robots destroyed would be replenished by ten thousand robots.
The defence line organised by Lucca's ship was like a dam with a thousand holes, and Hawke's army of robots was a raging flood.
"Faster, faster ..." With victory in sight, Hawke suppressed his excitement, chanting silently as he manoeuvred the droids to speed up once more.
The hole in the ground, closer and closer to the energy shield, closer and closer.
Eight hundred meters ... seven hundred meters ... four hundred meters ... two hundred meters ...
Just when the robots were less than a hundred meters away from the energy shield, Hawk noticed that the Lucca ships suddenly made some strange movements.
There were a hundred ships that suddenly gave up their attacks on the robots and instead scattered violently and evenly around the energy shield, and then, there was a burst of extremely strong electromagnetic interference that was released.
With this burst of intense electromagnetic interference being emitted, just in an instant, all the robots that were close to a certain range of the energy shield stopped moving, as if they had been cast with a fixation spell, and froze there.
Hawke just froze for a moment, and instantly understood. At this moment, Hawke couldn't help but curse in his heart, "Damn, how could they have found my weakness? What should I do now? What should I do?"
The communication between Hawk and the robots was taken out by the jamming, which meant that Hawk could no longer go and command these robots.
Hawke had already mastered the quantum entanglement-based hyper-range communication technology, which was not afraid of any interference, but hyper-range communication also had a significant weakness, that is, hyper-range communication, which could only do point-to-point communication, but not point-to-point communication like radio waves.
Therefore, Hawke could not communicate directly with each and every one of these tens of millions of robots, but had to go through a relay station. Hawke communicates with this relay station via point-to-point over-the-horizon communication, and the relay station communicates with the tens of millions of robots via point-to-point conventional communication.
This solution, which combines the advantages of both long-range and traditional communication, basically meets Hawke's communication requirements.
However, this solution has one weakness, and that is, if there is massive signal interference, the connection between the communication centre and the terminals will be severely affected, which means that Hawke loses control of these terminals.
The civilisation of Lucca, found a more efficient way than violent destruction. Under this means, any robot that comes within a certain range of the energy shield is rendered immobile, and naturally, it cannot continue to punch holes.
The robot frenzy scenario, failed. Hawk, the last ray of hope was lost.
In this way, the Lucca civilisation used only one hundred ships to hold off the attack of tens of millions of robots. The remaining nine hundred ships, on the other hand, immediately rejoined the war against the Hawk fleet.
The pressure on Hawke instantly increased again.
Hawke's last hope of destroying the Force Field Generator was dashed.
It seemed that Hawke's hope of gaining victory had also vanished.
"I'm not willing to give up, there must be a way! How can I be resigned to being crushed like an ant after thousands of years of long journeys to get to the ε Eri system galaxy?!" Hawk thought frantically, the usage rate of the central computer's computing power instantly increased to over ninety-five percent.
"There has to be a way, there has to be a way ..." Hawke chanted silently and began a frantic modelling exercise.
There were countless models being built and overturned one by one, and finally, one model withstood all sorts of tests and began to be constantly refined by Hawke.
In the process, Hawke saw that his own ships were being destroyed one by one. His own proud material technology, power technology, energy technology and weapon systems were as powerless as if they were paper mache in front of the Lucca ships.
Within the encirclement, only three thousand of Hawke's ships remained. These three thousand ships were surrounding the flagship London, struggling to defend themselves. On the outside, were the five thousand Lucca ships that surrounded themselves, and on the further outside, were the twenty-five thousand or so ships of their own that had come to their aid. These 25,000 or so ships, in turn, surrounded the Lucca ships.
If not for the frantic attacks of these ships, which held back most of the Lucca ships, Hawk, would have been annihilated.
Hawke did not dare to free himself from the encirclement by means of radio wave transmission. The interference from nuclear bombs, energy weapons, laser beams, particle beams and other weapons in space was so strong that Hawke was not sure he could make it through the distance. If he died not from the enemy's cannons, but from a period of radiation interference during the teleportation process, it would be a great injustice.
Hawke had a total of ten City ships. Of these, the Houston and the Philadelphia had been killed in action at the ε Eri c defences. The Tangshan and Langfang, are making an urgent return from the ε Eri b defence, but it will take some time. The Baoding is making its way back from the asteroid belt and is expected to arrive in three hours. Apart from these five, the remaining five City ships are all in the ε Eri a home base and are in the midst of a fierce battle with the Lucca ships led by Hawke.
With the Lucca civilisation's force field coverage, and the Lucca ships' far superior attack, defence and manoeuvrability, Hawke was at an absolute disadvantage.
Hawke received a signal.
"USS New York, battle dead. USS Washington, USS Chungking, USS Columbia, badly damaged."
"I can't wait for ε Eri b's ship to return to help. The way things are going, I can hold out for two hours at most. In two hours, my seat, the London, will burst into a shower of sparks and I will die in them."
"So ... ε Eri a moving plan, let's begin."