Ambrose’s hand left the Eclipsius’ command console. It rose to his forehead to wipe its sweat, but he found that the skin there was dry, and cold, pleasantly cooled by the thermal-regulated air of the bridge’s climate control subsystem. His fervorous breathing had evened out. From the beginning, his mind had already settled at a steely calm, but now his physical body calmed as well.
In front of him, the bridge crew operated at maximum alertness still, but the rate of their status updates was gradually thinning out as their tactical victory closed ever tighter. Things were starting to feel like just another weekly Alliance mission.
Alliance mission? For a moment, the foreign term left him stupefied. Then the memory surfaced, so vividly he almost thought it was his. Or perhaps, it was now. For some reason, all of those strange memories had been flooding into Ambrose’s mind—the memories of the world called Astraia Online. It was still outlandish, the way it sounded in his head, the mad designs of a deep simulation within a game. At the same time, however, it also felt perfectly natural.
After all, I have been playing the game for 10 years—no, I only remember it that way.
Well, that didn’t matter. For what was now around him—the steel of the bulkhead, and the flesh and blood of his crew, NPCs as they may have been before—was all existing in reality. And they all made something else that had once been unreal, real as well. In other words, the Eclipsius was a fantasy brought to the real world, bringing his own fantasy to life: giving his pathetic, weak, 14 year-old self the power to change the galaxy. The power to bind the tattered pieces of his fate that had been sundered back together.
This is all real. This isn’t a game. And I take no joy in doing what needs to be done, in delivering due justice.
The hull of First Princess Isabella’s command ship was ruptured. Her fleet, smashed. But judging by the way the remaining Warhounds were moving, she was reaching out for her single, slim chance.
“Remaining enemy ships are scrambling air squadrons. Should we scramble ours in response?” The junior officer strapped in at the sensors station—the eagle-eyed 2nd Lieutenant Anker, always the first to detect and sound off any and all threats—called out.
Upon hearing him, Ambrose’s eyes sized-up the lit dots that were spreading on the holo-screen around the positions of the enemy ships. He then brought up the ocular footage currently transmitting from the external cameras (post-processed to meaningfully display light on the visible spectrum, of course). He spied the flyers of the Primacy air force—stout wings attached to fat bodies of metal—sliding out of open hangar bays and tumbling into the fray, before circling around their mother ships in roving formations too quick for most eyes to track.
“They look to be adopting a close escort pattern. They pose no threat. Our fighters remain on standby.” Ambrose responded as steady as an even keel. Anker acknowledged Ambrose’s judgement, and turned back to the sensors console.
The Primacy ships should have considered themselves fortunate. They wouldn’t be tasting the retroburn of the Black Talons, not this day at least.
Regardless, even if those flyers did decide to directly attack them, the Eclipsius boasted a rather impenetrable array of automated point defence turrets—rapid-firing, pinpoint, laser-based gun platforms—that would atomise any small target before it got even remotely close. While it was a rarely-used tactic, their combined firepower could even tear through the hulls of small starships at close ranges.
He had such detailed knowledge of their operation, despite his feet never having even set upon this ship’s decks until a mere three weeks ago, owing to the years-worth of strange memories he now had—the hundreds of PVP combats that necessitated any decent Player to memorise the weapon stats of their own ships and their enemies’, in order to best manage their cooldowns and keep the most attacks in continuous rotation.
And his technical knowledge on weapon platform specifications did not end at point defence, far from it. Throughout the entire engagement, as his senses had taken in the torrent of live battlefield data flooding his console, subconscious calculations and information had been rapidly spinning the gears of his racing mind. Information like, for instance, the exact duration in seconds it took between the discharge of a shock barrel, to the loading and supercharging of a new galvanic shell, and finally its full voltaic priming.
Speaking of which—he didn’t even need to glance at the console readouts to know that it was about time for the next discharge cycle.
“Ready starboard shock barrels. Target: contact cluster F, tight spread—Stun and fry.”
“Aye aye, Sir!” 2nd Lieutenant Donovan, whose seat at the weapons station barely seemed to accommodate his broad shoulders, bellowed an affirmation.
On the screen, Ambrose watched a group of three Claymores lumbering towards their new defensive positions. Intermittent lights flared across their hulls as they fired behind them to cover their retreat, but he knew that most of those slow, inaccurate projectiles would miss the strafing Eclipsius, and those that did land wouldn’t even scratch the paint off.
Maintaining a ship’s momentum was a vital aspect of space combat, where the most minute of changes in velocity meant consuming vital power and expelling limited fuel in order to shift the millions of tons of mass that made up a ship. Such velocity adjustments didn’t occur instantly, either.
Thus, those Claymores that had completely cast away their accumulated momentum in order to switch direction, did not do so without expensive cost. The accuracy of shock barrels at long range was usually questionable at best, but now leading the slugging Claymores would be trivial.
Ambrose knew the salvo would be effective. But its effects exceeded his expectations.
In several seconds, 14 shock shells impacted the three ships on their aft and port sections. No misses. There were bright, azure flashes like lightning, instantaneously before actinic arcs of energy rippled into space. Ostensibly, little damage to their hulls was dealt.
But the lights of their gunports blinked out, their gunfire ceasing, and their thrusters extinguished abruptly like water splashed on a flame. Internally, the ships’ capacitors had catastrophically overloaded, frying the systems that depended on electrical power—which, on a starship, happened to be all of them.
The now-immobilised Claymores did not remain in their pitiful condition for long. Firing at will, the Eclipsius delivered a follow-up volley of kinetic rounds that tore through the Claymores’ weakest points with impunity, destroying them thoroughly.
The Eclipsius’ systems still lacked the relevant data on the ships of Ambrose’s universe. Despite that, strategic experience gleaned from his Astraia memories, combined with his own knowledge of the ship models employed by the Stellar Primacy’s military, allowed him to identify the ship classes just by method of quickly surveying the movement vectors, energy readings and size estimates displayed on the holo-screen. He quickly drew up a mental sitrep in his mind.
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Total enemy losses inflicted thus far: 24 Spearback-class destroyers and 9 Claymore-class battleships. Remaining forces to mop up: 6 Claymores, and…
The two relatively stationary contacts, keeping to the rear of the fleet, could only be Tabard-class auxiliary support vessels—diamond-shaped structures, each measuring 1,500 metres lengthwise, that were more mobile refit stations than actual ships. Soon, their fleet would have no more ships to repair or refuel. Destroying them would be doing no disservice.
Last to take care of was the command ship, lead dog of the Warhounds: Mauler-class battlecruiser, the SP Cerberus. First Princess Isabella herself had christened the new battlecruiser when it first entered service. Stretching 1,200 metres from bow to stern, it was actually modest by battlecruiser standards, a ship class practically defined by the hulking sizes they could reach.
But the Warhounds had never needed size. A vicious celerity had always been their forte; the speed to strike viciously, to press lines of assault before enemy fleets had time to protect their exposed napes. And the Cerberus delivered it in spades, being able to keep pace even with smaller frigates and destroyers.
Currently, that speed was being used to run away, tail tucked between its legs.
“Primary engines to 70%, come to heading zero-five-zero, declination one-one-zero.” Ambrose ordered.
“Roger!” A shrill shout came from navigation, sounded from the blonde-haired 2nd Lieutenant Philis.
Ambrose couldn’t actually feel it from the bridge, but his senses imagined the reverberating whine of the engines as they accelerated the ship to millions of kilometres per hour in ten seconds flat, without breaking a sweat.
Despite unfettered appearances, the 5,000 metre-long Eclipsius was not an ungainly giant. It wielded the monstrous propulsion of three T9 repulsion engines, and the unbridled power output of a T10 fusion reactor to feed them. That provided far more than enough thrust to get all its combined mass moving. It evoked in Ambrose’s mind the image of the finback whale of a certain planet (whose planet, he could not say for sure anymore), effortlessly gliding through the ocean currents.
Good. At this velocity, the Cerberus will stay within weapons range. I want that dog kept on a tight leash. I’ll be damned if I let Isabella get away—
“Enemy flagship heading for the asteroid field!” Anker alerted, detecting a spike in the Cerberus’ acceleration.
It was as Ambrose had worried she would do, her last and only option: moving into the cover and concealment of the asteroid field. In her command chair, he probably would have made the same call.
He would have liked to immediately impale her ship with the long-range slugs of his rail drivers. But the defensive formation adopted by her fleet, while just buying time, had bought it well—the Eclipsius had only ever had an open shot at the Cerberus during the battle’s opening moments, when its guns had been trained on the Spearback destroyers instead.
It didn’t help matters that the Tabards had just finished converging, their wide roof structures floating directly between him and his quarry, alongside the other surviving battleships. The Tabards made excellent shields, just like the Claymores.
Warhounds? More like ‘Guard Dogs’, he thought, slightly irritated and very impatient.
Although their metres of hull playing could no more stand up to the Eclipsius’ combined firepower as could an ant to the weight of a boot, unlike the metaphorical latter, it would take appreciable time to rip through their superstructures to get an unobstructed line of sight on the Cerberus.
But all that was fine. Ambrose had foreseen and prepared for this outcome.
“Launch smart missile pods A–H. Take out the command ship’s thrusters.”
“Aye aye, Sir!” Donovan’s bark sounded too eager, like an adult boy unwrapping a surprise birthday gift.
The smart missiles bore advanced target seeking capabilities. They would be fired out in arcs around the defending enemy formation, and then their self-guided warheads would send themselves straight into the Cerberus’ rear, crippling the large quad engines that formed the entirety of its aft section.
Donovan and his weapons technicians dutifully calculated the relevant firing solutions. Within seconds, arcing trails of smoke plumed out the sides of the Eclipsius, forming grasping fingers that acted like an extension of Ambrose’s will, reaching out ravenously for their prize, the pride of Isabella’s fleet. There were hundreds of warheads, each carrying a payload with enough destructive power to capsize a small freighter.
This ends now, Isabella. I hope you’ve got your seatbelt fastened. The ride to hell is a bumpy one.
As the ship’s commander, Ambrose kept his composure, but he couldn’t stifle a bite on his lower lip as his eyes flitted between the viewport and the holo-screen, the real world and the virtual world on the display—moving blips playing out like a video game—while he was anticipating, waiting, wishing.
This isn’t Astraia Online.
Why did he feel the need to remind himself that, why now? Those memories were not originally his. Ambrose au Stellaris had always lived in a real world, living alongside all its harsh, unsimulated realities. He had no delusions surrounding Mother’s death, nor the vengeance that he owed the wretches of Stellaris blood, chief among them being that bastard, the Third Stellaris Emperor.
But if that was the case, then why did the lifeless, shattered hulls drifting in space outside the viewport, each abstracted as a little red ‘X’ on the tactical display, not feel… real. Like the people that had been aboard were virtual avatars. That Isabella on her ship now was just a Player, and he was another, the two of them engaged in a match.
And suddenly he felt a fear, an irrational one, that the missiles he had fired would not just destroy the thrusters of the Cerberus, but envelop the entire ship in a ball of flame. But, wasn’t that what he wanted? No… he needed to cripple the Cerberus… draw out Isabella’s suffering.
Have I launched too many active missiles? It still isn’t too late to transmit the self-destruct signal—
The leading missiles of the barrage detonated, sending shockwaves and fiery fragments into space.
“Damn it!”
Ambrose couldn’t move his mouth. But Donovan had done the job for him, shouting the curses in Ambrose’s mind for all the ears of the bridge to hear.
As the missiles reached the apexes of their respective arcs—nearing the edges of the formation of Tabards and Claymores—boxy silhouettes that looked like the missiles themselves, but larger, leapt out at the fired missiles like flies to a bug zapper.
Ambrose now understood the true reason for why the Primacy ships had scrambled their flyer squadrons earlier on. The hundreds of flyers, and their pilots, were trading their lives for those on the Cerberus, intercepting the missiles with the hulls of their own aircraft. The flyers weren’t as fast as the accelerating missiles, but they had the foreplanning to intercept each projectile along its projected flight path, and they acted swiftly enough to negate the smart missiles’ built-in obstruction avoidance systems.
While it cost the Warhounds their entire air force—which their broken fleet no longer required anyway—this suicidal tactic was undoubtedly effective. They weren’t able to catch all the missiles, but they caught enough.
Behind this curtain of lethal fireworks, the Cerberus gracefully sped on. The few dozen stray missiles that managed to reach it were shot down by point defence, or absorbed by the stalwart energy shielding of the Mauler-class battlecruiser.
Hmph. So she wanted to play a game of tag, just like they used to as children, did she?
Fine. He’d play.