I had underestimated the speed of the destroyers. The Raptors had burned full speed ahead, almost catching up to my cruiser in less than thirty minutes. Fifteen minutes had passed and they were already hot on my trail. They were coming at us from two different directions, the standard maneuver, but if I were to head straight for one of them, that time would be cut shorter. Maybe we would come into contact after another five minutes, or ten minutes at most.
"We have to destroy the destroyers," I muttered, not caring that I was stating the obvious. Aegis said nothing, either because she was in agreement or because she didn't know how to respond. I tracked the trajectory of the battlecruiser on another holographic screen. The Tyrant was limping slowly, much more slowly than either of its escorts, but it remained mobile and still very dangerous. I frowned. "How long will they need to repair their engines and weapons? Or do they need a dedicated shipyard or something for full repairs?"
"They can somewhat mitigate the damage, but yes, they will need to dock at a dedicated shipyard for repairs." Aegis couldn't keep the pride out of her voice in her next sentence. "The same cannot be said of our Terran ships. We are capable of self-repair. Given enough time, we can restore even the heaviest of damage through nanotechnology. We just require materials to cannibalize and transmute into the necessary components. At its height, the Holy Terran Empire was feared for its armada. We were almost invincible, rarely suffering any outright defeats. Our fleets were the reason why the myriad alien species were forced into an alliance."
"Armada, huh?" I tapped a window, watching the paths of the three enemy ships eventually intersect with the trajectory of my ship, and thought of the much larger bridge I found myself in when I was dreaming. The Templar class cruiser was impressive, to be sure, but I felt as if something was missing. Personally, I preferred battleships. The larger, the better, as impractical as it might be.
Right, didn't my brother, Tian Yang, tell me that battleships were obsolete in modern naval warfare? Destroyers now packed as much firepower as battleships in this day and age, and the contemporary capital ships were now aircraft carriers. Battleships from the second world war had been retired, with the last deployment of the major ones being during the Gulf War in 1991. No navy on Earth currently used battleships at this moment, with aircraft carriers replacing them entirely.
But that only applied to sea warfare. In space, it might be different.
"Where is the rest of this fleet?" I asked. "Where are the battleships? And if your armada was so mighty, how was your Terran Empire destroyed?"
"The Empire was not destroyed, merely sundered and scattered," Aegis replied somewhat defensively. "And our fall was mainly caused by the alien armadas outright ignoring our fleets and targeting our worlds directly. We lost trillions of civilians and suffered a crippling blow to our infrastructure. Knowing that they couldn't win in a direct combat engagement, the aliens resorted to underhanded means by indiscriminately slaughtering non-combatants. We enacted swift vengeance by annihilating their armies in return, but…the damage was done."
I suddenly recalled the dream. The Saurian fleet bombarding a world from above before being destroyed by the vengeful Terran armada in turn. And the launch of the relics from the dying planet…
"As for the Holy Terran Armada, we were scattered after the Great Cataclysm and sent to locate all the ancient technological relics launched throughout the galaxy. Without enough recruits to replenish crews from attrition and combat losses, we slowly turned into automated vessels drifting without direction. Our only directive is to wait until we locate those who have the authority to command us – identified through Soul Imprints – before reactivating and serving under you. Even so, the bulk of our military might have been dispersed throughout the galaxy. We only have a single ship in the Sol System. To be blunt, our calculations indicated that this system was of very low priority, and as such, we did not send significant military assets here."
She turned grave.
"I apologize for the miscalculation. However, the Saurians and their allies appear to share the same sentiment, for they only sent a small scouting party of three ships. Otherwise, there would be a much larger force."
"If we destroy them here, will they send more forces here?" I asked.
"Eventually. But given the vast distances across galactic space, communication is…slow. It might take their command structure years to eventually receive a transmission from them."
"That's a relief."
Sighing, I nodded. Once again, we were bound by the laws of physics. Whoever commanded these Saurians, they were at least many light years away. Whatever messages they sent, whether through radio waves or similar technologies, they were still bound by the laws of Einstein. Nothing could travel faster than light, and so it might take them years to reach their intended recipient.
We had that going for us, at least.
"By then, we should be able to amass a sizeable armada to counter whatever naval forces they send in retaliation," Aegis added. I raised an eyebrow.
"How?"
"I will explain in greater detail later, but essentially, we will be recovering the scattered ships from various systems and rallying them under your banner, Commander. For now, the priority is to survive." Aegis's tone was grim. "If you lose here, the Saurians will be free to raze your home world from orbit."
"Damn." I was dragged back to the present, my eyes scanning the various holograms. One of them displayed the clean, blue and white sphere of Earth. My family was there. Dad, mom, Tian Yang. My friends. Even Liu Zhi Yong, who all but disappeared in the chaos when the Saurian attacked me and Fu Er Dai. Hell, even Fu Er Dai – I knew people would rage at me for saving his life, but I wasn't some petty sociopath who thought death was the solution to everything.
I was going to do the right thing, whether it was an unpopular opinion or not. Too many edgelords reveled in death and violence, so absorbed in their morbid fantasies of revenge and misanthropy that they didn't realize how juvenile and childish their comments and attitudes were. No wonder people complained that the Internet was so toxic.
Toxic or not, edgy or not, Earth was still my world. And for every edgelord, there was a nice person. I was going to save everyone, not pick and choose. I wasn't a god. I didn't have the right to judge who deserves to live or who deserves to die. I wasn't an executioner. I was just a normal guy suddenly promoted to the brevet rank of Commander and doing the right thing.
"Okay, let's see. Charge straight for this destroyer and allow the other one to pursue us from behind." I turned to Aegis. "The torpedoes, can they be modified? Instead of projectiles homing in on a target, can we turn them into mines? You mentioned that we have nanotechnology. Are they flexible enough to make such alterations?"
"Yes," Aegis confirmed. "However, mines are immobile and there is a high chance that the enemy will notice us releasing them and they will enact maneuvers to avoid them. Unless your intention is to sow them as deterrence and force them to alter their trajectories?"
"No. We're going to trick them into flying straight into the mines. How do they detect mines? Visually? Heat signatures? Can they distinguish them from debris?"
"Radar scans and visual sensors," Aegis replied. "But we can minimize that by running them cold and detonating them remotely. However, they are sure to notice us launching mines, especially since their sensors are trained onto your ship, Commander."
"Don't worry. I have a plan for that." I smirked. Then I nodded toward the currently empty helmsman station. "Full speed ahead. Let's focus on destroying that destroyer ahead in a single pass."
"Roger that, Commander."
The Raptor accelerated toward us, its sleek, predatory profile gliding through the void like a shark. Or a crocodile. Fang-shaped torpedoes launched toward us, and the space between both ships was suddenly filled with exploding shrapnel and missiles when I countered with my own. Fortunately, the Raptor to our rear didn't fire any torpedoes, probably because they didn't want to accidentally hit their own allies in friendly fire.
While I authorized the launch of torpedoes, I ran several simulations, making use of the AI to run calculations for the most probable routes of the enemy and also to optimize launch vectors. Then I returned my attention to the primary target after we hurtled past the screen of torpedoes.
Both the Raptor and the Templar were spitting out ruby lasers from dozens of defensive turrets, cutting down torpedoes by the tens. A few got through, hammering into the flickering energy shields of the Templar, but the grizzled Crusader powered through, not caring of his wounds. The Raptor reeled when several torpedoes sank deeply into its scaly hide, detonating within the crenellations and hurling spinning debris and tiny bodies from the now exposed hull.
"Target those vulnerable portions with laser lances!" I ordered when we came within range. Ruby beams stabbed out, punching molten craters and deepening those already grievous wounds. The ravaged Raptor appeared to reel, shaking from the impacts before it continued to charge forward, its magma lasers readying a retaliatory volley.
Unlike that time against the Tyrant, we weren't able to wreck the Raptor's weapons, and its full complement of magma lasers struck us frontally, causing us to founder. Emergency red lights blazed on, filling the bridge with a sickly haze, and damage reports winked into windows in front of me. The shields had taken a bad hit and gone down, and a portion of our bow had been blown off. As the Templar struggled to wheel around, debris and ice crystals trailing from his damaged face, I hastily punched in the command for an already prepared order.
Then I yelled, "Fire the plasma batteries! Right into that gaping hole!"
The cruiser's AI had identified a major weak point in the wounded Raptor that was first uncovered by a slew of torpedoes before being opened up by the lasers. The plasma vomited superheated matter right into the gaping hole, and for a moment, it appeared as if the two ships were linked by multiple bridges made up of bluish-white material usually found only in stars.
And then the Crusader continued plowing ahead in the void, his nose bloodied but otherwise still operating at full power. Behind us, the Raptor was rocked by secondary internal explosions before something critical within touched off and detonated. The escort ship was ripped apart by a thermonuclear blast from within, its superstructure disintegrating as it was engulfed by a blossoming nova.
"Commander, the second Raptor is catching up now!" Aegis warned. I glanced at the console and saw that the remaining destroyer was racing after us. After the blow we had taken to the face, we were spluttering and had slowed down, while the Saurian vessel was making use of its superior speed to run us down. At this rate, it would catch us in three minutes.
However, I saw the red light that marked its trajectory across the holographic screen in front of me, cutting through several icons as it charged toward the black cross shaped icon that represented my Templar. I pushed my glasses up my nose and smirked, my visual aid having slid down a little from the impact earlier.
"Excellent." I waited a few seconds until the second Raptor was fully within the tiny dots before snapping my fingers. "Detonate the mines."
The Saurian crew of the Raptor normally wouldn't have missed the mines if I had launched them conventionally, but in their recklessness, they had blundered into them, having mistaken the drifting cold devices for debris. That was why I allowed the first Raptor to hit us – though it was inevitable, I had sought to use the exchange to our advantage. When the Crusader bled debris and pieces of his prow into the void, I had deployed the modified torpedoes at the same time, the mines tumbling from their nearby bays without any power.
That was why I had run several simulations. By combining the calculations of the velocity and momentum resulting from the ejection, I had adjusted the release so that they would spread across the expanse of space that the second Raptor was estimated to pass through. They certainly wouldn't be stupid enough to cut straight through the space where their comrade had been annihilated, avoiding the plasma explosion and wreckage, but they wouldn't want to risk losing my ship and so took the shortest path possible to catch up to my Templar.
Having anticipated that, I had seeded the area with mines that still continued to drift about without power, their velocities tremendous because they had been ejected from my ship relative to acceleration.
The second Raptor didn't know what hit it.
Caught completely off guard, their defensive laser turrets didn't activate at all, and before they knew it, their ship was engulfed in dozens, almost a hundred nuclear explosions that scorched the hull clean. It was almost as if the destroyer had caught fire, blazing from stern to aft. As the void sucked out the flames, being bereft of an atmosphere where the inferno could burn, I saw that there was little left of the ship but a blackened skeleton, crumbling away into the void as dying fires continued to consume it from within. Combat data analysis popped up, informing me of the enemy's ship total incapacitation and tallying an estimated death toll. 99.998% of the crew.
Even if the ship survived, its crew most certainly wouldn't have. Not with its interior totally exposed to the brutal vacuum.
This was completely different from the Raptor suffering half a dozen isolated torpedoes impacting compartmentalized sections of the ship, which could then be partitioned off to minimize the damage. Instead, the combined fury of almost a hundred thermonuclear explosions had bathed the ship in a hellish inferno, melting hull plates and soaking its superstructure with deadly radiation. Never mind cancer, the extreme heat that saturated the ship would have incinerated any living crew and blown out delicate systems. That was assuming the circuits and electronics aboard the ship had countermeasures against electromagnetic pulses emanated from the torpedoes.
"Turn the Crusader around," I ordered, my eyes already settling on the vengeful battlecruiser bearing down on us. The wounded Tyrant hadn't given up and continued to hunt us, probably confident that we had suffered damage from dueling with its escorts. And the captain probably also wanted payback for us eviscerating his beloved ship earlier.
Fine then. We will do it your way.
A cold smile spread across my face as I watched the Tyrant approach from the distance. "Let's finish this once and for all."