240 – COLLISION COURSE

I was lounging in my fancy command chair, with Selene standing to the side, stiff and all prim in her ravishing uniform. On a less interesti

I was lounging in my fancy command chair, with Selene standing to the side, stiff and all prim in her ravishing uniform. On a less interesting note, I also had my two Tau guests up on the bridge to watch the proceedings with me.

It was amusing to watch the Fire warrior sweat so much when he realised that the walls had ears, listening to him give his super-secret report. The way he jumped like a startled kid when I stuck my head out of the wall to give them a heads up before melting back into it was one of the best things I’d seen all week.

I had a bridge crew, all of them busy fiddling with superfluous gadgets across the bridge. They were all me though, and even wore the same face as me. I wanted to feel like a proper captain with all the buzzing chaos around them, like every kid who grew up watching Star Trek.

In truth, everything was run by mind-cores tightly bound to my prime mind, all exchanging data faster than light. Every sensor and calculation ran in my head, but I had a vibe to set here.

As it turns out, I got a bit hasty and may have once again forgotten in my excitement how goddamn slow space travel was in this dump of a galaxy. I’d need to see about yoinking or inventing a faster form of travel. Wormholes, stargates, hyperspace, whatever the fuck. Something had to work without involving the Warp.

Hell, the Necrons had it figured out already. I just had to go sniff it out. Or, improve my current Narwhal-based organic technology a bit more.

Speaking of … that’s an easy way to avoid looking like a moron.

I could tell Aun’saal was curious, now that I was paying attention. He didn’t know why I would call them here and have the bridge in pre-battle chaos when we had many hours until even the fastest ships reached missile range.

Obviously, he didn’t think of the obvious answer, which was that I was stupid.

Selene did though; she knew me too well, and that small smirk on her lips said a lot. I felt my cheeks heat up a bit at the thick amusement radiating from her, growing stronger with my rising embarrassment.

Anyway.

“They are so eager to meet us,” I said, smiling confidently as I sat up straight in my chair. It too was superfluous. I needed no command-throne to meld my mind with my ship like the silly humans. “Let’s not keep them waiting for too long. Engage the gravity engines, make a tunnel for the whole fleet.”

Aun’saal was looking even more curious, while Selene gave me a mental head-pat for masterfully avoiding looking like an idiot. Fooling an Ethereal, a bred and true politician, was something worth being proud of in my opinion.

Even if I had a lot of advantages and downright cheats. If you weren’t cheating, you weren’t trying hard enough, after all.

Narwhals usually had to slow down when they reached the gravity well of a star system. They were usually also rather limited in how they used their gravity engines. What they were doing was more like making a wave of gravity to ride on than proper tunnelling, which was what I was doing. I had also managed to get a much firmer control of the exhibited gravitational forces with my iterative improvements on the finicky organs.

Who would have known, directed experimentation with a clear goal in mind gave results much faster than the Tyranid’s ‘throw shit at the wall and let natural selection sort it out’ method.

“Aun’saal,” I said idly. “I’d appreciate it if you calmed our entourage, there is no reason to panic. I’m sure they’ve made plans carefully cultivated around the travel time, plans which I am currently ruining, but there will be no need for anything elaborate. They can just sit back and witness what it’s like having me on your side. This system should be ours before the day’s end.”

The Ethereal nodded, stepping to the side where one of my ‘clones’ — which was just a puppet driven around by an errant mind-core — helpfully linked him up with the Tau command channel.

I ignored the discussion between them, as no doubt the Tau military command is all sorts of miffed about me throwing a wrench into the gravity around their fleet. There was no point in dealing with them at the moment. They should be much more amicable once I’d showed off a bit.

The ship didn’t lurch; my control was better than that, so I could avoid a jarring transition. I would have had to use the primitive method of dragging the ship forward towards the gravity well, like the Narwhals did, for that to happen. It was barely noticeable in truth, or not at all to the basic human senses. The ship itself didn’t feel like it was travelling faster than light; it was just riding a wave of bent reality. Or something similar. The more advanced my organic tech was becoming, the less and less it could be easily explained with a basic metaphor.

We were on a collision course with the suicidal detachment of the Imperial Navy, and I watched the estimated time of their coming within missile range shrink at a rapid pace, growing quicker and quicker with every moment. I couldn’t push the gravity engine to the limit inside a star system. The gravity well was still causing me trouble, even if I was capable of working around it. At least I didn’t have to worry about debris or the errant asteroid, since I’d designed the gravity-engine to create a wedge-like distortion in front of us, which threw matter and incoming energy that impacted it to the sides.

I didn’t have Void-Shields, which could shrug off a dust-sized asteroid slamming into my ship at a substantial percentage of Lightspeed, or my ship slamming into it, in this instance. Though the former was also a worry in interstellar space, hence the wedge-thingy.

Our opposition was pitiful. A single Overlord-class Battlecruiser led the charge, three cruisers and a light cruiser fanning out around it made up the bulk of their force, and another six frigates surrounded them, likely for emotional support, since they didn’t have anything that could even inconvenience me. I suppose they could assist with point defence, and add their own squadron of attack fighters into the mix, but that’s it.

The sole battleship in the system, the flagship of the Imperium’s forces, was busy burning fuel away from us, likely having plotted out the quickest route out of the gravity well to Warp Jump back to a more reinforced position. It was taking with it to other battlecruisers, and a quarter of the rest of the fleet.

My ship edged forward, detaching a bit from the formation as two massive hatches opened up on its sides. Out of it came the revised models of my own Cruisers, outfitted with their point-defence lasers and such. Their organic computers linked up, then joined with the one in my flagship in a network. The sensors had no problems even in the initial version, but the targeting arrays were a bit iffy, carried to success only by the fact that lasers didn’t really give a shit about trajectory and travel time like more mundane ammunition did.

My ships spread out, not in a horizontal wedge like the Tau behind me, but in a three-dimensional net that was primed to collapse around the Imperial fleet from all sides. It was clinched tight together for now, still having to fit inside the gravitational pull of my flagship and its gravity engine, but they should outrun the Imperial ships with little effort if I let them burn some extra bio-energy to make it so.

“Begin disengaging, we don’t need any more acceleration,” I said. “Maintain pace, and prepare to transition back to regular propulsion only.”

It was mostly for flair, and my guests’ benefit, but I liked it. What was life without some flair? Boring, that’s what.

Aun’saal looked somewhat annoyed, but I could see and feel signs of amusement and schadenfreude radiating off of him. The same reaction he had to his meeting with my pet Tau strategist. Apparently, he couldn’t get enough of it when my antics made anyone other than him freak out.

A mere half an hour was all it took for us to reach our targets. The gravity engine shut off, leaving us back in regular, unmolested space with the Imperial fleet coming within range in just another minute. I could have gotten us here faster, but having to include the Tau, I had to disperse the force of the gravity-engine across our fleet, which substantially reduced its potency. It was fast enough to freak out our unfortunate Imperial opposition, though. The news would spread that the Tau had developed an FTL technology that worked inside gravity wells.

I rolled my eyes a bit, but dismissed the annoyance. Maybe they could have managed in a century or more, but they hadn’t yet. I had thought. Whatever. They’ll learn in time who they should fear and respect.

My ships spread out, fanning out wide and aiming to come at the Imperium’s forces from all possible angles except from behind.

I could almost taste the confusion. My tactic was unconventional, and rather silly from their point of view. It should have made shooting my ships out of the sky one by one all too easy with them not covering each other, to overlap their protective fields.

If one ship’s Void Shield was under threat of popping, the ship could just take shelter behind another one if they were all arrayed in a tight formation. Plus, broadside salvoes could be even more devastating on the enemy when you had more broadsides stacked on top of each other.

It was fucking stupid. Broadsides. In space. But it sorta worked for the Imperium, and I refused to work myself up over it like some Tau might have.

I just had to take advantage of it. Which I was doing. It was nice of them to gather up into a group so I could lay into them from all sides with a combined barrage. The Void Shields would pop sooner or later. I had no doubt that I could overwhelm them all in some time, and I also had new ammunition I wanted to try, missiles I’d designed to overwhelm the Void Shields.

There was no talk, no request for a comm link, or negotiation. Not even some classical pre-battle shit-talk. They unleashed their fighters and sent out the missiles the moment my ships approached the fringe of their missile range.

Bunch of savages. Didn’t they know there was a proper way to do these things?

Selene gave me a sympathetic mental head-pat, which softened the glare in my eyes and the pout I totally never had on my lips.

Whatever. They could get blown up then.

I got started on that immediately, keeping my ships just outside their range, and taking advantage of the fact that my missiles and lasers had the range advantage.

Not a single Imperial missile made it even halfway to any of my ships, as they worked in tandem to hit every missile with two or three point defence lasers at once. They had enough of them to go around so that they could combine their efforts to make doubly sure no missile slipped by, only clipped by a laser. I couldn’t do anything by half-measures when my foes might have Fate holding their hands and guiding their missiles.

My own missiles struck true; most of them did anyway, but they weren’t having any visible effect yet. They exploded above the Void Shields, scattering scrap and shrapnel far and wide, forcing the Shields to teleport every bit into the Warp separately. Even some of the missiles that got shot down later in their flight still managed to get their payloads thrown over the Shields, which was a win in my book.

The Imperial officers weren’t panicking yet, but the Mechanicus adepts reading the sensors? Their cogitators worked quickly, calculated how long the Void Shields would hold under the current assault, and then their fleshy bits started sweating as their emotional suppressors activated to keep them stoic.

It took another five minutes, the Imperial fleet trying to close in as I kept distance with my ships — I had to push the Tau away with gravity pulses to manage that, since I doubted they wanted to get rammed or hit by a broadside and they would have gotten between me and my enemies if they stayed in place — until the Magos on the bridge spoke up, likely after running a simulation or two in his mind.

I considered just teleporting something very explosive right into the shield generators, or sending in drones to shut them down, or even just making use of the thousands of Orks I had squirrelled away in the lower decks of my ship. In the end, I decided that I could do this one battle the old school way and just bombard them into oblivion. It was working, after all. Their shields, which should have held out for hours on end, were losing power so rapidly that I’d be through in ten more minutes. There was no need to change something that was working.

Still, it made me consider whether I could come up with a type of missile that could slip through Void Shields. It’d be absolutely busted, since then I could spread those around later, and I would no longer have a monopoly on making Void Shields look utterly worthless. I could outfit roaming bio-ship squadrons with them, and they could demolish any Imperial force coming at them with ease. Point defence would still work on them, but I could make it so the shield-piercing missiles were hidden in a cloud of regular ones.

On the other hand, I would no longer have a monopoly on making Void Shields look utterly worthless.

They were pushing their engines dangerously. I could almost hear the Machine Spirits in those ships screaming as irreparable damage piled up on those ancient sub-light propulsors. The Magos convinced them that they were on a time limit, or the commander ran out of patience with my ships easily shooting all his missiles down while staying out of range of their other weapons.

“Are they really trying to ram us?” I mused aloud, seeing the Imperial force gather itself into a wedge shape, with the sizable battlecruiser leading the charge. With how fast they were coming at us, I’d have had to burn a lot of bio-energy to boost my own propulsors enough to carry this oversized ship out of the way. However, if I did that, the silly Tau behind me would get rammed instead.

I could teleport the ship and every Tau ship out of the way, but I liked the idea of wasting soul energy even less than the alternative.

My own ships tightened the net and focused fire on the battlecruiser. Its shields faltered under the heavy assault, a few missiles slipping through and blowing massive chunks out of its side. Alas, none of it was truly crippling. Not crippling enough to stop its charge, that is.

Macrocannons, few as they were on the ship’s nose, and lance batteries opened up and had little trouble hitting my ship. Not that it did much of anything. Energy-dispersion fiends combined with the hardy carapace armour I’d improved upon turned what should have scored skyscraper-sized wounds into minor scratches that closed up in seconds.

My own bio-cannons returned fire, and I wasn’t stupid enough to put 90% of my weapons batteries on the sides of my ship, so they easily outgunned the battlecruiser and the two light cruisers flanking it from either side.

The Void Shield fell when the Imperial Battlecruiser was a mere 2000 km — which was within spitting distance in space, considering the ship was coming at me at a speed of 800km/s — away. With nothing standing in the way, and with me having predicted the moment it would happen down to the nanosecond, a swarm of a thousand missiles slammed into the ship in that very moment, and it went up in a ball of fire.

The explosion was silent in the void of space, but I could hear it; my aura had seeped into every corner of the ship, and I heard its halls creak and the thundering explosion rush through its metallic skeleton. Its molten, battered corpse, what remained of the ship, still held its velocity and came at my ship.

While two of my own ships broke away from the formation surrounding my flagship and rushed to meet, the two light cruisers in a ramming match that the Imperium so seemed to like, I focused on the dead ship. The explosion had shifted its vector somewhat, so it didn’t take much of my energy to shift it some more. Gravity and pure telekinetic force slammed into the ship and sent it flying under my own, its smouldering back scratching ravines across the belly of my ship before it floated off into the darkness.

Another space hulk was added to the endless expanse of space.

The other ships had lesser Void Shield batteries, and now that I didn’t have the Battlecruiser to distract me, I could focus fire on them. They popped one after the other and were blown to shreds without even coming close to the Sovereign. Some of them were so close together that when one ship went up in a cataclysmic ball of flames and thousands of tonnes of metallic shrapnel, it all slammed into another ship’s already weakened Void Shields and dealt the killing blow to it.

A mere forty minutes after the first salvo was fired and the enemy fleet was demolished. All that was left was to clean up the stubborn holdouts and hunt down the fleeing fleet that was soon to be dead in the water.

And I didn’t even need to bring out Jeff yet. Hmmm, I think I’ll let him have a go at that Battleship; he’s been aching to avenge himself on the Imperium and give a better showing this time.