Shield of the Stars stood on the bridge, staring at the display for a moment. It had been days of constant effort; pulling survivors onto orbital stations, or dropping them off at unaffected continents. Delivering whatever supplies were available. The only good part about the incident was that they didn't grow food near the capital; and with so many dead, and the farms still in operation, nobody would starve.
The bad parts, however.... He was seventeenth in line for the throne. He'd never expected to inherit anything, and now, assuming his species survived this, he would be the Emperor. He'd barely slept since then, constantly working with every asset, military, civilian, anyone he could grab, to move survivors, to move food, to re-establish power grids; his new advisors told him that they believed over ninety percent of the planet's five billion people would survive the coming months, and that if they were lucky, it could be as high as ninety-nine.
At first, he hadn't known for sure why this had happened. Then, two of the allied confederate fleets had simply turned and left, after verifying that their people on the surface had died in the impact; and the dire truth had been revealed.
His father had taken hostages among the allied fleets to ensure they remained under his control; and when his brother tried to do the same to the newcomers, they had responded violently. With those hostages dead, the 'allied' fleets had mostly left; the two-hundred some-odd ships that remained were currently helping with disaster recovery, and he wasn't sure they'd stay for the fight.
His home system had a truly enormous production capacity; they planned to, in the distant future, built a structure large enough to house trillions of people, and had been manufacturing engines and equipment for the purpose for centuries. They might only have a few thousand warships to defend the handful of systems the Empire controlled; but when the enemy advanced, they would meet tens of millions of unmanned tugs, most of which had either simple laser and projectile weapons on them, or no weapons at all.
Right now, they were mostly hidden in the enormous ring of a debris field, and would launch... alongside a cloud of debris... when the moment was right.
He kept an eye on the display. Any moment, fifteen thousand republic ships would pour into the system like a tide of death. The simulations predicted they would enter the system as a solid mass, head straight for his fleet; and if they stood and fought, be overwhelmed by a vast tide of relatively harmless attackers. But.... they'd also predicted an arrival hours ago.
The greatest concern was information security; if these tugs could be hacked into somehow, the enemy could stop them, or worse, turn them against his people.... as a result... there were over a million volunteers out there, waiting, each controlling a handful of tugs via direct beam communications. Nothing could jam them. Nothing would stop them point point defense fire... and they might not be as fast as a missile... but they were bigger and tougher.
When he saw the first icons on his display, he focused on the incoming fleet... roughly five hundred Republic warships, arriving in formation. He frowned. That was... odd. The Republic didn't like to split up like that, risk being taken in smaller pieces. He might be able to take advantage.
Over the next several minutes, they kept arriving; a few hundred here. A few dozen there. All heading for the same central point of the system...
He gave a firm nod, clenching one armored fist. "...They're split up. I don't know why... but they're split up. Order the fleet to fall into formation and advance, full speed. We're going to mop up these smaller groups before they all combine together, while we have a numbers advantage. Then, whether they turn to meet us, or just head for the homeworld... we unleash the swarm as soon as they pass by."
***
Eyeball watched the display from the bridge of the Gaze; the whole fleet, over four thousand strong, was sitting in hyperspace, watching, getting updated a minute at a time from a set of Ascension destroyers dropping communications pods in and out of reality as they watched.
The net result was that the screen was only a couple of minutes out of date; he got to watch an almost real-time view of something happening in an entirely different reality.
The Republic fleet entering; just over eleven thousand of them; from a dozen different directions, to avoid being hit by the traps Svetlana had been laying for them. The Shivan fleet moving in response; cutting off a few of the smaller fleets, and crushing them, one by one, with minimal casualties; as a result, ending with their three thousand versus around ten thousand of the Republic.
They pulled back, slowly, to the homeworld; emplaced defenses, arrays of missile buoys scattered in orbit... the place where they'd have the best shot at survival.
As a single massed formation, the Republic fleet moved in... and a few light-minutes out, the screen lit up.... as both sides started firing missiles. Millions of them, in both directions, both sides emptying every single bay they had into a single continuous wave of death... even as new signals appeared.
The Republic had to rearrange its fleet; the best ships for handling the swarm of tiny ships were those with plentiful point defenses; but those were the same ones best to face the missiles coming from the homeworld. There was no good arrangement, no nice way to handle tens of millions of projectiles swarming in on you...
Eyeball was expecting something like the Republic had pulled in the Paradise system. A smaller detachment of ships moving forward, firing off their weapons and taking out the bulk of the missiles and tugs to save the rest of the fleet; it had worked then. It was a much larger scale, but something similar could work now.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
But... he was disappointed. Well. Not really disappointed.
The Republic Fleet made a few adjustments to its formation as it approached the Shivan homeworld... but otherwise just kept going. Firing what few missiles it had left back at the oncoming swarm, the back layer of the fleet flipping to point its primary weapons in the direction of the swarm of tugs and civilian craft, millions strong... and the cloud of rock and debris they started to release when the incoming fire started; even projectiles from railguns added to the mix.
The enormous swarms of missiles released by both sides started targeting each other as they passed; and by the time the initial pass was over, the tides of death and destruction having washed over both fleets.... the swarm of tugs persisted, in among the republic fleet. While much of the Shivan fleet was gone, and a few missiles; bomb-pumped laser weapons designed to kill starships, not ground targets; had managed to impact t he planet itself; the Republic fleet was in tatters.
He couldn't detect a single undamaged vessel in the whole mass... and finally, the Republic fleet did what it should have done earlier, except by splitting off the lighter units to do this in advance of... or behind... the fleet.
As the two fleets drew in close, and beams of energy met hull and armor on both sides, with the Shivan fleet firing laser weapons primarily; invisible in the void of space until they struck a target, providing the momentary illusion that they were firing nothing at all; the Republic fleet finally released their Pulsewave weapons; in an insane display, sending millions of ribbons of white light in every direction from hundreds of vessels. They pierced the dark teal of Republic hulls, the vibrant silver of Shivan warships, and sliced through the numerous tugs and civilian craft as if they were nothing.
As the battle drew to a close, both fleets were savaged beyond repair... and the Republic fleet, still on course for the Shivan homeworld... was unable to slow down or stop. A few of the Shivan vessels still intact enough to manuever shifted and tried to turn aside a ship here and there... but while the defenders 'won' the battle, in that only Shivan ships survived, there were barely any of them left... and their homeworld was struck by hundreds of starships, followed by a rain of debris that would likely last for days... and well past the lifespan of any survivor.
He looked at the wreckage. The ruins of the star system... and nodded slowly. "Take us in. Outside the debris fields, for now. We'll talk to whoever's in charge after we make sure there's no Republic survivors." Minimal effort, on their part, and the Republic was essentially cleansed from this sector. Ascension would build up this region to a point they could never come back.... and he could just move on. This.... didn't promise anything more than momentary excitement.
***
Shield of the Stars lay against a bulkhead inside the escape pod; one of the crew carefully applying a treatment to the stump of his left arm, severed by the escape pod hatch when he'd been tossed inside by a guardsman who himself hadn't made it. The previous day, he'd been in charge of an Empire in chaos. Now... all that was left were the colonies. Some of those colonies had been in active rebellion; their Shivan population hated by the locals they'd pressed into service; as little as fifty years ago. Which meant.... they'd probably rebel again. And this time... no troops, no backup, would be forthcoming. The only survivors of the species would be the orbital stations.
He had gone from military commander to Emperor... of a dead race.
One of his guardsmen, his silvery armor stained black with Shield's blood, gave a salute. "Emperor. We are being hailed. It's.... that Ascension fleet. And.... in far greater numbers this time. Thousands of them."
"...Put them on. I suppose they're here to gloat? Or perhaps finish us off? No matter. Lets hear what they have to say."
After a few seconds, a figure in sleek black armor, with a hand that seemed to be made of a strange red mass and a smooth, silver helmet, appeared on the tiny screen of the escape pod comm-unit. "This is Emperor Shield of the Stars. If you're here to fight the Republic, or to destroy us... either way, you're late."
~Neither, really. If you hadn't attempted to abduct one of our leaders, we would've been here to help kill the Republic fleet. Regardless. We're here for purely pragmatic purposes. In exchange for the debris field, that giant mass of dead ships floating in your system, we're offering assistance saving as many of your people as possible. I have thousands of almost completely empty ships with the life support capacity to take in millions of people, and we can leave your system in position to take care of itself when we go.~
For just a moment, Shield of the Stars considered whether his soldiers might be able to steal those empty vessels. But.... no. That would likely go even worse than the last time they'd betrayed these people. "I would be foolish not to take that bargain. The planet's ecology will take centuries to recover... but there are still many millions of survivors. Anyone you can save would be appreciated. And... I apologize for the actions of my family. They may have been from a purely pragmatic perspective the most logical approach, but they lacked the sort of morality any nation should have when dealing with equals. We treated you as if your people were inferior, and we deserve what happened as a result. I only hope our people survive to learn the lesson."
~The best way to judge anyone is by how they treat those they should view as lesser, whether they are or not.~
The signal disconnected. One of the few relatively intact Shivan vessels was en route to pick him up. They'd clone him a new arm, and he'd be back to normal in a few weeks. While his people died by the tens of millions, victims of a cascade of failures all originating with his family. Would there be anything left?
***
Svetlana studied the imagery. Thousands of drones moving out among the void, inspecting, acquiring. There would be more engines, more weapons, more mining equipment floating around out there than could easily be imagined... and over a hundred million surviving Shivans who might be saved.
She needed to ensure that didn't happen, in the long-run. She'd already sent care packages of those anti-founder viral bombs out through the gateway network; she had no idea if any had been delivered yet, but hopefully the doom of these Founder-related species as already sealed. As for these Shivans...
They were what the Republic considered a tier-1 to tier-2 species. Viral type number eighteen would have a one month span of asymptomatic carrier time on average, followed by a week of moderate symptoms and far greater spread due to coughing and shedding of disease cells, and eventually, brain damage, insanity, and death.
All she needed to do was quietly get a bit of it on some of the drones heading out to help save these people, and the work would be done, given time. A species that didn't deserve to exist would be gone, and if they accidentally spread some to the descendents in the fleet? No big deal.