Chapter 387 - Far Future Ch. 97 – Swift and Fleet; Magical Space, the Final Frontier (1/2)
Warp energies crackled against necroic offsets, gravity drives realigned as the Veil shuddered and snapped itself shut, the backwash of dimensional travel momentarily keeping space swimming with imbalances and disturbances that had to settle down.
The main technorganic mother ships looked like some version of flying centipedes, swollen and fat with their loads of invaders, with fungi-like white growths scattered over slick black carapace hides that were as strong as durasteel. Secondary ships looked like extended spiders, or slowly writhing squids, or maybe stellar snails, undulating in the void. Plasma currents radiated from the legs, and the scant hydrogen in the area was sucked towards the maws of the creatures even as their scales opened up to suck in the sunlight greedily.
The torpedoes were coming in right on the edge of the rapidly shrinking area of dimensional instability. Five, four, three, two, one...
They crossed a million miles of space, and the cerevore fleet realized what was there with literally no time to react to it, even psionically.
The sky lit up with megatomic warheads, anti-matter blasts, singularity ruptures, and binding force neutralizers going off to catastrophic effect. Gargantuan space beasts were torn open and apart before their defense fields and ablative energies could marshal to resist what was hitting them, and psychic screams of beasts as large as Spires radiated for AU's through the mindscape.
”Blow the wrack.”
At Captain Tabitha's order, secondary explosions popped up all over the place, like unstable matter being set off by the gargantuan forces of the incoming torpedoes, and faded away like dying fireflies.
A mesh of nanotech particles went out, drawn to centers of gravity and mass out here in the void. Their only purpose was to stick to the hides of these things and clearly indicate their positions when scanned by sensor waves in the appropriate frequency, making hiding and cloaking tactics nearly impossible. Waves of smaller craft were already being spit out of dozens of sphincters opening in each of the motherships, and the nanotech was splatting against them, along with all the flash-frozen blood, meat, and ash from the wounded ships all around, blending into the mess.
”Go to Jam,” Captain Tabitha pointed, and gravity drives sent them falling away and spinning, their drives flaring to life, and catching the attention of the more photo-sensitive of the creatures a million miles away from them as they got free of the rock's gravity well and went to Jamspeed. The enemy fleet shifted subtly to face them, and the whole of the Widow's Bite shook as a massive wave of timeless, cold, uncaring hate swept over and past them, letting them know they had been seen and marked, and now they were being chased.
The invaders just had to get out of tactical range of one another first.
The size of the forces behind them were being uploaded into Markspace and promptly downloaded into the system-wide tactical displays, even faster than telepathic updates, and impossible to interfere with, as long as a Marked individual was there to provide the intelligence. At least two such individuals from the Goldilocks teams were working in the Signals department of every ship of the line in the system, which meant the Fleet Captains were being informed in real time better than they had ever been before.
The Rantha Protocols were being updated in real time, and orders were flying out.
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Anatolia Rantha considered the positions of all the Fleet assets in the systems, judged them, juggled them, and began to plan.
Her Talent was War Gamer, and this grand tactical battlefield is where her Talent shone the brightest. The captains and admirals of the Fleet in the system would have been incensed if they knew their maneuvers were being decided by a woman sitting in the yoga position on floor 184 of a haunted blok, surrounded by thousands of ghosts very, very curious about the sheer profoundness of the psychic ripples swirling around her, rendering her a very, very important being for what was about to happen.
It was a big step up from RTS games in her prior life, which had consumed Anatoli Ryuivov so much he was basically a vidiot living on stims and games. Now, his Talent was being put to proper use in defense of reality, instead of fleeing from it.
Three dozen Ranthas and Briggs with warlord, command, or tactical-based Talents were linked to her and helping her with the load and decision making, while also turning broad decisions and judgements into real time instructions and tactics, which the field commanders out there turned it into local orders and execution. Music was humming through the whole mess, grand and solemn, building ever-so-slowly with a terrible killing momentum.
Tremble, ohhhh oh ohhhh, Tremble, we come...
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Captain Tiffany Rantha was in command of the newly commissioned Coronal ship, the Bared Saber. It was still a cruiser, as heavier vessels were the province of the Imperial Fleet, and the Coronals were more about speed and getting to places faster, in and out, then overbearing firepower.
Except for this ship, which was full stocked with both Forsaken and Beacon psions eager and proud to serve the Coronal Knights. It had been totally redesigned to accommodate both Axiomatic and Holy Runeforms in both structure and emplacement, and even the crew that had worked on it and its components, assembling them all, had to be specially vetted by the Green and Gold. Rantha Shipyards wasn't big, but it had some very exclusive customers...
The goal of the Coronal Knights was not to hide. It was to be out there and be seen, standing between threats to the human race and humanity, letting them know that the Coronal Knights were always going to be there.
And if this time it was a Coronal Guard in charge, well, there were a lot more of them than Squires available to do the job.
Captain Tiffany Rantha was seated right on the Gravity Chair, the heart of the Gravity Drive that formed the foundation for every sublight propulsion system for basically every race known.
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Anti-gravity was a TL 9 invention, and once a society mastered it, they instantly also stumbled into the transphysics mess that was sublight travel in the Realm of the Warped.