NationStates Jolt Archive

Fort-Steel, mainland Allanea, deep underground

The man is older than he lets on – but then, everybody in Allanea is older than he lets on. With advanced surgery and genetic engineering, everybody who isn't religiously disposed to do otherwise stops their biological clock at some age – some at fifty, others at thirty. Most Allaneans prefer their bodies to remain at their 'prime' – what is believed to be around 16 to 19. Such is the case of Marshal Shiunji Watanabe.

He stands calm in the tiny cylindrical lift as it speeds – almost falls – underground, borne upon the calm, silent power of a tiny gravitic engine. He is perfectly shaved, or perhaps his body is not even supposed to sport a beard. His pale face is perfectly accented by the black-and-silver uniform of the Allanean Army.

His destination is a corridor at the depth of over six kilometers – those Allaneans dig deep into the earth.

There, in that corridor, await six men. They wear the same black parade dress, but with lesser rank markings, and they salute Watanabe as the lift doors slide open without a sound. He paces confidently down the hall, the soldiers escorting him, rifles at port arms.

And, finally, he gets to his destination. It is a blast door marked DREAD CHAMBER SIGMA. Inside there is a room, its walls filled with screens, the floor and ceiling a jumble of cables. The memory segments of the Kara-drone are on a table in the middle. A DREAD officer stands at the table.

He is terrifying to behold. The hair on the right side of his head has been shaved away, and strange lights flicker and die and come to life again under the scalp. His left eye is gone, replaced by an oversized camera, moving and whirring, hellishy alive. Some of the fingers on his hands are gone, too, chromed arrays of metal moving where they used to be, festooned with tools.

“Greetings, Marshal Watanabe.”

“Greetings, Colonel Strong. Tell me, what did you find?”

“You cut to the chase, huh? Oh well. First of all, a 4096-bit code originally intended to give Kara radio control over her drones in the case that her quantum communications were somehow jammed or intercepted. With it, we believe any AI will be able to take control of Kara's "puppet" units - units which are receiving orders from an outside source rather than running part of Kara's personality on their own computers.”

“Kara will most likely change her codes once she knows we've used it, so you may want to be careful and save it.”

“Second is a coordinate, 48 lightyears from Sol in the direction of the Charybdis cluster. It's the location of the relay that contained the far end of the drone's comm link. If we move quickly, we may be able to catch whatever forces she has stationed there before she leaves.”

“Then we must move quickly. I need a phone.”

Minas-Faerie, Liberty-City, 200 meters above sea level

Captain Abdullah Smith screams terribly, pain overwhelming his entire body. He wishes nothing but to escape the procedure he is undergoing, or, if not that, to at least curl up like a baby, cover his head with his hands and cry, cry, cry over the horror.

It is increasing – he opens his mouth and just screams, his eyes, eyelids, fingers, arms, legs on fire as if he was submerged in an acid tub.

And then it ends.

He lies naked on a surgical bed, the scanner devices surrounding him and quiet. The pain is over. He shrugs as he sees the man that ordered the procedure walk into the room.

“Why did you do this to me, Field Marshal?” - he asks feebly.

“It hurt, didn't it?” - Kazansky smiles. Smith swears. “The fuck? Of course it hurt, you son-”

And then the Field Marshal of the Republic draws a gun. It is a large, gold-plated pistol, one of the two that are his badges of office.

He shoots Smith. Twice. In the face.

There is a moment of nothingness, of blackness – and then there is light.

Smith awakes. He is lying on a different bed, in a completely different room, naked. His body appears unharmed, unchanged. Even the interface plugs that are the rank and station badges of his service remain in place.

“Do you see why now, Captain Smith?” - Kazansky's smile is now kind, benevolent.

“What is this?”

“The Athan. Have you not heard of it?”

“A copy of my mind...”

“No, do not mistake the Athan. It is no mind-upload, or at least no mere mind-upload. I do not myself fathom how exactly it works – but let me assure you that you are not a copy of Abdullah Smith. You are in fact the man himself. The Athan would not allow me to make a second or third Smith while you are alive. This is why I had to kill you.”

“So you mean...”

“How it worked I cannot tell you. But you are now immortal. Your body may be vaporized, but that will merely cause a new one to be created for you at the Athan facilities. Oh, the procedure is expensive. At the current time, the Athan Corporation cannot even provide this service to every soldier in our military. But it exists. And you are now equipped with the Athan.”

“Jesus. You made me immortal.”

“The name is Alex. And I didn't. The Athan Corporation did. I don't even own stock in it. I did pay for your immortality though – but tha'ts because I like my loyal men alive.”

Kazansky blinked as he drew a large phone. “Wait. I hate to interupt this climactic moment, but... What? Shiunji, are you sure? Move out at once. Take my drone ships, and take as many naval ships that you can equip with Athan-carrying personnel. That should be no more than a hundred ships right now, but that should suffice. Do it. And alert our allies of the coordinates. Whoever can help us should go there. We must smack Kara so hard her ears will ring into the next millenium, got it?”

He slams the phone shut.

“Abdullah Smith. Can you stand?”

Abdullah struggles, but gets off the bed.

“It is a good thing you are immortal now, Abdullah. I have a job for you.”

Soon after, in Earth Orbit

Ships are taking off. There is three hundred of them or so – precisely, 321. Two hundred are painted red – old warships bought privately by Alexander Kazansky, assembled from all over the galaxy and made robotic. Fron Tidan, from New Dornalia, from all sorts of sources, they come, deep red monstrosities, the ultimate in grown boys' toys. And only a minority are naval ships – Porcupine Mod B's comprise 40 of them. Twenty more are Swift Retribution-class missile cruisers, and sixty are Punishment-class destroyers. And finally, a single Wrath class gravitic battleship is at hand, bearing Marshal Watanabe, the Mortician.

In total, the entire Allanean Navy cannot muster even 30,000 Athan-equipped personnel on such short notice. This will have to suffice.

Battleplate Watcher in the Shadows, otherwise known as Taskforce Oracle

One had to understand that a battleplate is a very hard thing to hide, especially when you have a lot of people looking for it. The other battleplates in the military had already been handed over to the Republic. All three battleplates, as was well known. What was not known was that there were four battleplates.

This would prove to be important in days to come.

There are thousands of things the Unbroken Eye hates. From mere brutality, to all manner of depravity - in this sense, they are like any other manner of civilized humans.

However, a nigh-millenium of war against the Maker-Mind - an AI that, had it not gone mad, would have surely wiped them all out, gave them a special perspective on AI. If they went mad, they were to be hunted down and killed like rabid dogs. The difference here is that most rabid dogs cannot glass planets with ease.

"Allaneans, eh?"

Free-markeeters to the extreme. They are perhaps the most representative of humanity in this new age, Admiral. They have significant firepower, though..

The AI's mindvoice ceases.

"Though, Watcher?"

We have no idea what sort of capabilities this "Kara" has. If we're going to fight it, then we're going to be fighting relatively blind.

Admiral Atren removed a cigar from his mouth, letting nanites dissolve it before it hit the ground.

"Then, Watcher, we'll fight blind. This battleplate was tasked with the destruction of precisely this sort of AI. We can produce anything we need here."

I am aware of that, Admiral. I do know my own capabilities. We are not, however, tasked at full combat capacity. Factory-stations have taken up approximately eighteen percent of my firepower, and my interdiction fields, especially, are almost forty percent weakened. We're not prepared for combat with something as big as us.

Twelve klicks long, and about as wide, the last battleplate in the service of the Realm, as opposed to the Republic. It quietly tore through the fabric of space, exiting just beyond practical weapons range of the Allaneans. It was big certainly, but it was also a one-of-a-kind asset. If it was lost, there'd be no oppurtunity to build another one that they could hide from the Republic.

Aboard her, almost a hundred and ten thousand men prepared for battle. Perhaps not immortal, they nonetheless knew their duty. They had been bred for such times as these.

Admiral Atren shook his head. Short, even for a Realm Human, he would've qualified for dwarfism were he a 'normal' human. He sat in a glittering command console, and gave orders, barking them out rapidly, as if speaking quickly could rectify their lack of preparedness.

"Fabbers one to thirty, we want armour assets! Thirty-one to eighty, air support. We don't know what we're facing, and we're rather underequipped. Before we go into combat, check the antimatter supply. We're apparently running at a rather low eighty-two percent. Yes, I know that's three years supply. We might have to burn it in a hurry. Gravitic shields are prepared? Inhibitor fields? This ship needs to be combat-ready in ten damn minutes!", he roared.

Looking around, he tapped a holographic button, and spoke.

"Marshal Watanabe, I presume? This is Admiral Atren. We have.. experience in dealing with AI, though this one seems to be a rather dangerous case. Requesting you transmit all mission data through a secure link asap. We've got our fabbers working at 100%, but it'd help to know what sort of equipment we're going to need."

"Very well. Give them all we have on Kara. Except for that 4096-bit code. I don't want anybody to even know we have it least Kara adjust her own codes. This must be a surprise. Plus, I don't know how secure their networks are."

[OOC: I'm off on a trip, so a post may not be instantly forthcoming. Plus college starts next Monday. However I'll do the best I can, don't worry. ;)]

[OOC: 1,337th post]

Space is big. This is its defining quality, at least when viewed from a human perspective. It's perhaps the only place where "security through obscurity" is a viable tactic. The voids between stars are huge, and for the most part, empty.

Which means that if you aren't emitting radiation, there are lots of places to hide. Unfortunately for Kara, the enemy knows where her hiding place is.

Fortunately for Kara, the enemy seems to have underestimated her.

Act One

******

So nice of you to drop by. I thought you might like to know that I have very good sensor networks, and that I can see you coming. I'm afraid it doesn't seem that you've brought enough to the party. In fact, I think you might not even last until the end. Such a shame, too. There was going to be cake.

Oh well. Since you appear to know where I am, I suppose I might as well drop stealth.

******

Slowly, silently, the fields of muffling and invisibility are dispelled. The fleet begins to register, first on mass-shadow and other more esoteric sensors, then finally on standard cameras as the electromagnetic distortion drops and it begins to reflect visible light.

At the center is a Mothership. Ring-shaped, four kilometers in radius and perhaps a quarter-kilometer thick, its featureless, mirrored surface shines under the cold light of the stars. At its center lies the comm relay, a cube perhaps ten meters on a side which served as the hub for Kara's most recent assault.

Flanking it are the three Dreadnaughts. Somewhat smaller - they follow a vaguely rectangular pattern, 1500 meters in length and 375 meters in height and width. These are not mirrored, but rather left the dull matte gray of their component alloy. Every side bristles with weapons and subsystems. Point-defense missile clusters and xaser turrets. A broadside of hulking laser bores, each the size of a city block. Torpedo tubes, sized to fit torpedoes the size of school buses. Shield emitters and drone bays. Sensor towers and ECM batteries. Massive heat-dump panels, glowing cherry-red from the heat of the ships' internal quantum fires.

The rest of the fleet is, by comparison, unimposing. Sixty battlecruisers, built like 1/4 scale versions of the Dreadnaughts. One hundred and fifty drone carriers, almost pathetically flimsy boxes with bolted-on engines.

Then the whole thing vanishes in a haze of ECM. Images dissolve into blurs, blurs multiply into massive smears of decoys and deceit. Space is reduced to a mash of uncertainty, while underneath, on a deeper level, stacked FTLi fields force the enemy out of hyperspace. It's not perfect, of course - nothing is perfect - and the enemy will, within minutes, decipher the patterns and resolve a clear image.

******

Unfortunately for the enemy, there isn't much time. There are forty-seven Dreadnaught-shaped blurs incoming towards the Watcher, and three of them are real. The only question is, which ones?

The Allaneans, meanwhile, are quickly becoming encased in a uniform cloud, which probably contains the Mothership and the rest of the smaller craft. No shots have been fired yet, but they almost certainly will be soon.

******

So. If you surrender now, you can have a nice, quick, painless death instead of the wide variety of interesting ones that I'm sure you will experience in the course of a proper battle.

I rather doubt you'll appreciate this offer, given that you're all bloody-minded fools, but hey. Can't hurt to try, can it?

OOC: Taking a liberty to detect the capital ship. Contact me, Khrrck.

IC:The Allaneans in the meanwhile have plans of their own. None of these plans appear to involve surrender of course. In all of recorded human history, the Allaneans have surrender precisely once. The person involved was later executed in a strange and highly amusing way. Not merely surrender, but the very notion of bowing down to force is an insult – and there's really no point to it when you have the Athan, and the government pays for your spacecraft.

The 'outer' and defensive edge of the formation bristles – literally – with Porcupines and their weapon array. Drone destroyers are in place. Carriers – drone carriers, of course – begin to work, their bottom decks spamming out dozens and dozens of fighters and fighter-sized decoys. In fact, everybody begins to spam decoys – hundreds, then thousands of RADAR decoys, RADAR decoys, all-spectrum decoys are fired through ship missile tubes, cannon barrels, and simply dumped outside through docking bays. Some of them broadcast signals, others simply have radar-signature-enhancing form that makes them look bigger than they really are. Yet others blow up, spreading Minovsky particles.

Puffs of air appear from the Allanean manned vessels as the athmosphere is flushed to space. The purpose is simple – to prevent things from going awry if a hull is pierced. Rabinovich scanners come alive – their job to evaluate the nautre of the local FTLi field, with eyes to breaking it at the earliest opportunity.

Aboard the Wrath class gravitic battleship, the Mortician is a bit bemused. Why, Kara darling. You seem to have a crucial misunderstanding. You think we're weaker than you and that we're going to surrender. Do you think we would really miss a party like that?

“Marshal Watanabe?” - one of the aides asks politely. - “It appears we have narrowed down the possibilities as to the identity of the mothership to three targets.”

“I want you to verify scans. We may have a few seconds.”

The mission of the Allanean sensor operators is not to pinpoint every ship in the fleet. That would take precious trigger-time, and is not really needed for the first stage of the operation. They are only looking for the biggest, and clumsiest, vessel.

“Here it is, Sir! We have the mothership!”

“Good. What about the other craft?”

“Most of it remains uncertain, Sir. Wouldn't it be superior to wait until we have...”

“No. If our initial count is correct, we have numerical superiority by a margin of almost a hundred ships. We will now exploit it. Give me my command couch.”

The Couch does precisely what it says on the tin. It'sd a comfortable couch – with a couple of plugs to go into your head. Once the Mortician lies down, he begins – quite literally – to see the world differently – as a black void, with enemy ships and their suspected location marked with red triangles hovering in mid-space, and his own ships at the center as green ones. At the moment, the green triangles appear to be outnumbered – but he has caught a glimpse of Kara's fleet and knows it to be false. Thus, he acts.

“Kara, just fuck yourself. Fuck yourself and die.”

Everything happens within an unnoticeably small fraction of a second. Shiunji's mind transmits a single target location.

On point, ten New Dornalian ISD's are the first to come alive. Their heavy turbolasers sweep on their octuple turrets, lighter weapons and ion cannons coming to bear on the enormous mothership. They are not alone. The world-flaying ordnance is followed up.

There are thirty Razorback cruisers, provided generously by the Fieldmarshal's private fleet. Again, they've been automated. They carry beam weapos of peculiar description – giant psi-cannons and space-compression weapons, about fifty of them each. The Allaneans hope they'd do fast work against the shields. If not, they also spam out missiles – various anti-ship weapons, from the medium “Firelance” to the insanely oversized “Excalibur.”

The Porcupines aim their spinals – the famed 300mm Deforestator gatling Hellbores at the enormous vessel, spinning up to 600 RPM. Through shared targetting, they aim at a single spot on the armor. Between them, they can spam out 24,000 rounds in th first minute of combat, all aimed at the same spot. Individually, the megaton-range Hellbore shots are likely insufficient to penetrate shielding. Between them, they can act something like a huge

The manned Swift Retribution cruisers come to life, all twenty of them. The
Horizon Mk.XXVI hypervelocity missile tubes fire first, 204 per ship, delivering a literal hail of anti-ship missiles. Some of the missiles split up on approach, becoming small clouds decoys. The purpose is single – to look bigger than they are to attract CIWS fire.

Their Mark XXV anti-capital vessel missile tubes fire. There is four hundred of them in total, and, naturally, ten of them split up to carry decoys. Drone fighters were launched, too, as distractions. It would now seem – mostly through decoy work – that there are far more missiles than there actually is.

And finally, the Wrath class battleship fires. It fires it's spinal cannon – a quad-link of Gatling Hellbores like the ones on the Porcupines, and aimed at the same spot. It flushes three thousand missile tubes with missiles and with decoys. It fires five hundred various beam cannnon.

Dozens of destroyers, armed with compatible missile launchers, add fuel to the fire.

Naturally, being anti-ship missiles, practically all of the real missiles are designed to kill or cripple ships the size of the mothership – by kinetic energy, fusion, plasma, and, in the case of the stuff launched from Razorbacks, even anti-matter. The anti-capital ship missiles can do more – crippling and killimg ships like the ones deployed in Central Facehuggeria, if needed. But it is not they who are the main weapon. Hidden among the hail of missiles are two hundred D-sinks, equipped as warhead on some of the Mark XXVI missiles. If even one impacts, the fireworks will be much shinier than anything else the Allaneans are carrying – enough, in fact, to turn the giant flying saucer into stardust.

Compared to that, beam fire from the gravitic destroyers is almost an afterthought.

Very nicely done indeed. But aren't you forgetting something?

Space stretches, folds, forms a wormhole through which the Mothership slips and disappears. The Allaneans, in their eagerness to attack, have seemingly forgotten one of the principal tenets of space warfare. They have forgotten to establish FTLi, leaving Kara's forces to jump around the battlefield as they please.

Since you're shooting, I suppose I can safely assume that you're not going to surrender. Ah well. All the more fun for me, then.

******

While the beams and Hellbore rounds streak through where the Mothership had been into empty space, the missile barrage is somewhat smarter. Deprived of their primary target, the Allanean missiles acquire new locks on anything else that looks like an enemy.

Naturally, without a carefully plotted firing solution, they hit a lot of decoys. There are perhaps a hundred decoys in space for every one of Kara's real ships, each one providing a tempting target that's almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

The odds aren't quite as bad as that, though. A single antimatter blast or D-Sink can eliminate dozens of decoys, and send any unlucky real ships reeling into the bargain. The sheer number of Allanean weaponry in the air also makes point-defense nearly useless, although here and there an unlucky missile is sniped from the sky by X-ray radiation.

Unfortunately, such a densely packed swarm of missiles also interferes with itself, with each massive blast sending masses of smaller missiles into sympathetic detonation. And the resulting cloud of plasma, debris and electromagnetic noise makes entire sectors of the battlefield completely opaque to sensors.

******

At the end of it all, seventeen of the carriers lie wrecked or temporarily inoperable. The battlecruisers have fared somewhat better due to their heavy shielding, sustaining only eight losses. Still, the entire fleet is in some state of damage, although in most cases only superficial.

This isn't immediately obvious to the Allaneans, though, given the immense amount of 'noise' that their own barrage has kicked up, as well as the large number of still-functioning decoys, some of which have been smart and switched from impersonating intact ships to impersonating wreckage.

The Mothership is still nowhere to be seen as the debris clears. The Battlecruisers, meanwhile, are gathering inwards, blinking in and out as they tacjump towards each other, forming a single cluster. Shield bubbles touch, spark then merge as frequencies are matched. Power and comm systems are likewise linked, as the battlecruisers formed up much like they had, long ago, over Mars.

******

Meanwhile, the carriers are disintegrating. Hull plates spiral away on explosive bolts, revealing the tight-ranked drones within, which shoot free in all directions as the carriers fall apart.

Within seconds, one hundred and thirty-three targets have become one hundred and six thousand targets, converging towards the Allanean formation. At this range, though, their single spinal xasers and micromissile racks are nearly useless, and they are depressingly vulnerable to Allanean flak.

But then, to top it all off, the Mothership comes back.

Shields unfold, guarding the swarming drones behind gossamer fields of gravity and other, stranger energies. The Mothership launches no missiles, deploys no weapons; it simply raises a wall, powerful and resolute, and dives headlong towards the Allanean fleet, while her hundred thousand children scream along in her wake.

After all, it's a mother's job to protect. The Mothership is forty percent reactor, forty percent shielding, twenty percent gravitics. Its first purpose and goal is defense. Saying that it's good at what it does is almost an understatement.

******

In the background, the battlecruisers begin to unload. Four-meter laser bores pour energy into the Allanean formation, concentrating on the smaller, more weakly-protected ships. Standard doctrine; pick off the easy targets before trying to wear down the larger combatants.

Spreads of breacher torpedoes are also dispatched; while each battlecruiser only holds eight torpedo tubes, the torpedoes themselves pack sizable antimatter warheads and individual FTL systems. They move forward with rapid-fire tacjumps, burning out segments of their engines as they do so. An element of randomness is included in all but the final jumps, ensuring that the 416 torpedoes will be almost impossible to target before they detonate at point-blank range.

A full spread of eight torpedoes is usually sufficient to pick off cruiser-class starships. Given the advanced Allanean point-defense systems, though, the torpedoes may not all be able to reach their targets.

Oh well. Either way, we'll know in a moment.

Shiunji Watanabe

From the viewpoint of a man in a Command Couch, the display is absolutely, positively spectacular. Red lights flicker, some going out completely, others blossoming to fill out the entire screen. And then, miraculously, some red lights appear right next to the Allanean ships.

A green light goes out – a Razorback cruiser struck eight times along it's hull. If there was an athmosphere, there would be a terrifying roar as the ammunition decks tore themselves apart, throwing debris for hundreds of miles into space. As it is, there is only a beautiful, and completely silent, flash of fire and smoke.

Several decoys are hit time and time again by torpedoes – not really massing enough for an awesome showering light – but the deaths of five more Razorbacks provide more than enough entertainment.

“Incoming torpedo contacts! Incoming!”

They appear near the hull, streaking forward on their last mad dash towards the battleship. An unaugmented human would have not had time to react to them, and they would have simply torn the vessel completely apart.

But no human need react to them. In an interval smaller then one hundreds of a second, CIWS batteries 06, 07, 09-b pulse, and five torpedoes become merely wisps of vapor in space. Then, the gravitic field of the ship pulses strangely, diverting two torpedoes, throwing them out into space as wreckage. And the last torpedo impacts. Shields flash, and the blow is soaked into them without harm.

“We lost contact with four of the ISD's! No contact!” - the signal-thoughts flash through the Mortician's head, together with images of the ISDs, breaking apart under the strain of multiple impacts. “Authorize FTLi now!” - a plea from a crewman

“Will it not block Athan transmissions?” - a shadow of doubt. The men have immortality. It would be a pity to have them die here. “No, you fool! Athan is not blockable! Go! Do it!” And he does it. It feels like throwing a giant, heavy switch, except that it somehow happens in his mind. And the FTLi field is on.

Abdullah Smith

Visualize a giant ship, packed prow-to-stern with reactors, shield generators, and ammo containers, festooned on it's entire surface with guns. 1,292 guns, four hundred of them light and heavy anti-ship weapons and eight hundred CIWS guns of various descriptions, down to your run-of-the mill beam small-arms.

Deep in the heart of the ship there is one man. He is immobile in a small cocoon, cables running to ports on his spine, the back and the sides of his head. It is this man who, after dozens of enhancements, controls the Porcupine. He is no longer a man. He is Abdullah Smith, Living Gun.

Deep inside the ship, Abdullah Smith opens his mouth and roars. Nobody hears him, but they see him.

The ships cannon come alive all at once. Abdullah Smith rejoices as his cannon harvest torpedoes from space like mere flies, destroy drones, fry up decoys. He is the ship, and he feels his own power. He feels the spinal gun that runs through his entire body spin up as he moves in space – and his brothers fire at once – again, focusing on a single point aboard the oncoming mothership.

Smith sees a squadron of Razorbacks disappear completely, the oversized vessels an attractive target for enemy fire. It is almost beyond belief to see an entire suadron go off like fireworks like that, though. five ships, gone like that.

Eight torpedoes streak out towards a nearby Swift Retribution, it's own CIWS flaring - and Abdullah just happens to have a free bank of light Hellbores. Forty light Hellbores, eight targets. It's not even a contest.

Captain Simon Frankel, aboard the USS Glorious

Not everybody is lucky enough to have a Porcupine nearby. And Simon's CIWS guns are almost perfect. They only let one torpedo slip through. But it does hit good.

“Fucking goddamn mechanoid communist cocksucking swine!” - Simon swears as he is ripped out of the Command Couch by the impact of the first explosion, thrown through the air as the gravity generators give way. It's not clear what has happened – but a chain of explosion rips through the Glorious, throwing hull sections all over the place.

Simon is still alive in his command, even as it tumbles uselessly through space. He sees three destroyers burning in space, damaged by laser bursts. He is aware, now that he can do no more to help them or help anybody else. He draws his combat pistol slowly, deliberately, his hands shuddering only slightly pointing it into his face through his suit's faceplate, and pulls the trigger. There is a brilliant flash of fire.

He awakens three hours later in the Athan Corporation offices, screaming in horror.

Unfortunately, Athan promises immortality. It does not promise to keep you sane.

Shiunji Watanabe

“Enemy ship approaching optimal range.” - flickers the notice, not in front of Shiunji's eyes, but in his very mind. He half-thought the reply – and it was already beign executed.

Again the various vessels fired all they had, in a close replica of what occurred before – except the range was now much closer, and the Allaneans had FTLi on. And this time, the Allaneans pull an ace out of their pocket.

Two ISD's speed now towards the large ship, giving it all they are programmed for – which is a lot. By the time of impact, they'll be moving at a C-fractional speed relative to their point of origin, and the mothership itself isn't quite slow either. Nor is it in a position to dodge - both because of the short range and because it is protecting the 'fighters.'

Added to the effect of the combined fire of the entire Allanean fleet, this will be spectacular.

"Jump, Admiral?"

"We've got 19% capacity on fighter-drones and pickets. We can't produce them fast enough.."

"Shall we jump?"

Atren sighed. "What the hell. Take us in, behind the Allaneans. Let's give them some fire support."

The Watcher jumped, later than it had intended to.

"Gravitics online. Shields up. Drones away."

As the voices went through the ship, thousands of tiny sensor-drones leapt away, just before the Watcher's own FTLi fields came up. If they came into contact with enemy inhibition fields, keeping your eyes open, so to speak, could hardly hurt.

"So, Watcher. I'll leave the details to you."

"As you should, sir."

The AI's acknowledgement of its combat superiority is not odious, but quiet, almost regretful.

Gentlemen. Ladies.

The message is akin to one that a stage performer would speak, just before taking a bow.

Sixteen hundred missiles are released immediately, maneuvering around the side of the Allanean fleet, over and under them, in order to reach Kara's ships from behind. There's no real hope she won't notice them, they're merely there to restrict her maneuvering options. And, of course, to be used to distract enemy firepower when it's doing damage.

What is THAT?!

Almost immediately, scans come into the AI's bank, and it sees the Mothership. Watcher is intelligent, but not perfect. Gravitics, yes. Easy enough to deal with, whether you simply swarm the enemy with breacher missiles, or use your own. But.. what was behind that? There was nothing like it. He'd never seen anything near like it, and it bothered him.

Encrypt a message, send it to the Allaneans. ESUS networks, hopefully secure. If they weren't, chances are the Allaneans would all be dead by now.

Is that.. magic behind their shields? I know the mission profile, but I have no idea how to pierce that. I'm going to fire some of my heavier weapons at this thing. Just to see what happens.

"Breacher missiles away."

Missiles designed to circumvent gravitic shielding - a mere hundred, but hopefully one or two would get through. And that was the important thing. Right now, Watcher didn't want to get close. He would do as his name implied, and watch. If that.. magic was potent enough to burn through his own shields, he didn't want to be within a lightyear of it. And until he had some solid data to work on, he was as close as he wanted to get.

Grasers were next, followed by a gravitic pulse. Nothing strong, mind you, just enough to bother the Mothership, not hurt it. It wasn't as if you could effectively beat someone from that far away in any case. Even the most basic estimates said they'd run out of gravy long before the Mothership did, simply because of the distance.

No, it was time to test the enemy defenses. Once they figured out what the hell was going on behind the gravitics, he might risk attacking.

You're very predictable. Do you know that? Cause I know that.

The shields are glowing, now, white-hot as they try to re-radiate the massive energies poured into them by the Allanean fleet. The drones behind scatter, taking advantage of the Allaneans' single-minded concentration to get clear of the mothership and begin encircling the Allanean fleet.

The shields are buckling, now, folding under the brunt of missile impacts and particle beams. Strange dark patterns flicker across their surfaces - a rune, part of a circle, marks of power. It's not enough. Hammered inwards, the shields brush against the hull, leaving scars with their burning touch.

Failure is imminent. But in that time, the Mothership has approached to within point-blank range. One light-second.

And when the shields fall to shreds and the reactor lets go, the Mothership leaves this world with a bang.

******

The disintegrating shields snap into oblivion, sending their pent-up energies lashing in all directions. But that's a mere tickle compared to the follow-up punch; every single reactor, quantum or antimatter, fusion or D-sink battery, goes off at once. The ship's superstructure is vaporized instantly - no mean feat, considering that it's eight kilometers across.

The ship's first scream is gamma-hard photons, set free from the Mothership's eight 500pWh d-sink batteries. Following it is the slower but no less destructive soup of plasma, vaporized iron, exotic quarks and still-reacting antimatter freed from the Mothership's forest of reactors.

The Allanean fleet has prime seating for this show. Unfortunately for them.

******

The battleplate is having its own problems. Although the incoming Karan Dreadnaughts are small in comparison to the massive Travellian war machine, they pack a considerable punch and are still practically untouched by enemy fire.

As they sail past at c-fractional velocity, each one lets loose with a half-second burst from their broadside xaser cannons. Each of the thirty massive weapons is capable of liquifying towns with a single shot from their twenty-meter bores. They fire breacher torpedoes, as well - thirty-two each of the small, Battleship-scale munitions, accompanied by six massive, anti-supercapital devices.

******

A flash of point-defense gamma radiation. Following it up: thermonuclear flak, c-fractional sand sprays, antimissile missiles, layers of jamming and additional decoys.

It's not enough.

The battlecruisers' combined shield bubble buckles inward under the impact of some nine hundred Travellian missiles, overloading momentarily under the intense stress and leaking. The ships directly underneath the breach are seared by the star-hot plasma, burning away sensor clusters and melting laser batteries.

Then power is reallocated, jumping from ship to ship across ethereal linkages. The rift in the shield snaps shut as the bubble reverts to its proper shape. Underneath, the damaged battlecruisers begin repairs, thin jets of nanite paste oozing through the hull to coat and rebuild the scorched surface.

Meanwhile, they open fire. No torpedoes this time; the clouds of expanding radiation and plasma surrounding their target are rather inhospitable to such weapons. Only their lasers are fired, targeting a single point; the command bridge of the Mortician's Wrath-class battleship.

The explosive shockwave sweeps forward, a wave of light, plasma, superheated gas and starship fragments mixed in with Karan drones accelerated to lethal velocities. The front squadrons are caught up in this explosion, twenty-five red-painted drone warships caught up at once in a series of explosions, like a string of firecrackers from hell.

Manned destroyers and cruisers go, to, their crews not even having the time to suffer from exposure and wounds as the blessed silence of the Athan claims them – and then they are reborn again, away from this mess. Ten destroyers, five missile cruisers, two Porcupines.

But the Allaneans are not yet done for. Their fleet has secrets of its own, and it is time for it to fight. And fight it will – the ships begin to assume formation.

On the outer fringes of the formation, Allanean ships detect the laser pulses speed by, and auto-signal systems signal the Wrath class battleship over quantum entanglement. The searing light needs more than a second to get to its target. Even the distance between the giant motherships and the fringe of the formation is about a light second. The formation itself is about 2.5 LS in radius Of course, the enormous battleship cannot use its FTL drives to escape – Kara has, of course, disabled FTL travel in the system. But it does not need to do that.

It takes off in a completely unexpected direction, the gravitic drive pushing laterally, out of the path of the remaining beams. And once it arrives in its location, it fires – if it can be even called firing.

The cargo holds open, and dozens of containers are tossed out, with what just was the ship’s acceleration imparted to them. Then they use their own rocket motors to accelerate – and, when the motors rapidly burn out, they open up like beautiful, beautiful flowers. Their true nature is now revealed.

Five thousand tons of miniature weapons – the smallest slightly over a millimeter in diameter, the biggest, the size of a child’s marble – now speed towards the enemy drone fighters. They do not have explosives aboard, nor are their motors capable of major course advancement – but at a fractional-light velocity, they can work marvels. Their cargo rockets come along, too.

The surviving Allanean cruisers begin to fire, - Punishment class destroyers and Swift Retribution class cruisers launching a salvo of five thousand missiles. They cannot use AM and explosive-tipped ordnance, and so a lot of their weapons banks are useless, but kinetic-kill missiles with simple guidance stand a chance of surviving the clouds of plasma that now serve as an impromptu missile defense. Hopefully the damage to the enemy sensor systems will be sufficient to limit CIWS.

Beam weapons, too, are fired. A Porcupine carries 400 medium and heave anti-ship weapons and some light ones, too. Thirty-eight Porcupines are still alive. The results are truly spectacular, even if you account for the fact that not all of those weapons can be brought to bear at once. And the destroyers and cruisers have their own beam weapons – hundreds more plasma guns, laser guns, Hellbores, focused on somewhere around fifty targets. Even as they are still firing, the Allanean ships are on the move, seeking to close distance with the enemy vessels and limit their ability to dodge their shots like the Wrath-class battleships had dodged there.

There are still surviving ISD’s, and their cargo holds open, too, adding to the assault, hurling a veritable rain of smartdust at the enemy. Five ships, 150,000 tons of smartdust just like the one . The Allaneans approximate approximately that much targets – but of course that includes decoys.

Dodge this.

Well, well, well. Xasers fired. We're.. burning fuel faster, now. No internal damage. All contained.

"Watcher, those are breacher missiles, correct?"

Yes, Admiral. Gravitics will crush them. There is no need to be alarmed.

"If just one of those gets through-"

It will impact the annie-plants, and blow us to hell. I understand, Admiral. We're fine.

An invisible hand "reached" out, and each breacher missile quietly collapsed under the duress of thousands of gravities. The problem, of course, was conservation of fuel. Logically, no ship could overwhelm the other with sufficient gravitics and point-defense, and c-fracs could generally be avoided. Unless, of course, they got up close, but that was risky. And Watcher was anything but a risk-taker. So the main consideration was fuel. Keeping gravitic shields at the ready burnt matter by the kilogram, and if the battle was too drawn-out, they would, at some point, logically run out of fuel. That shouldn't be a consideration for hours, if not days, though. Hopefully.

Each missile was taken out, this time by precise maser fire.

Not an issue, captain.

"Right. But we were testing them, remember? What do you think they're doing to us?"

Touche, Captain. They now know much of the extent of our defensive capabilities. We, however, have weapons of our own. May I?

"Of course, Watcher. Do whatever the hell you want."

The ship accelerated at terrific speed towards the Dreadnaughts, not able to catch them, by any means, but able to begin gaining on them - in terms of acceleration, at least. The ship quietly flipped over, and turned its "plate" towards the Dreadnoughts. Four thousand maser-guns, powerful enough in concert to turn continents into plate-glass, fire at a single Dreadnought. Naturally, they don't all fire directly at the Dreadnought. Rather, predictions are made of where it can possibly move, and every position is targeted. No matter where the ship moves within the next second or so, chances are it's going to be getting rather hot.

Missiles, at this point, would be useless. They'd take too long to get up to speed. C-fracs might work, but they're too easy to detect. Too easy to dodge.

As it fires, the battleplate "flips" again, this time showing an edge. The targetable area of the ship has decreased immensely, and, in addition, Watcher can spare a lot more power to shield that small area. It's not an orthodox tactic, given that most space battles tend to see you surrounded, but, for the moment, it should work. For the moment. He reminds himself of that - if the tactic becomes too predictable, he become a rapidly-expanding cloud of particles.

That's good motivation, Watcher concludes. Time to find some new tactics.

Dodge? Why would I want to dodge? It's just dust, after all.

I'm not entirely stupid, you know. I analyze my failures. Repair, upgrade, reconfigure... things that used to work don't work anymore. Because, y'know, I am smarter than you. All of you. You have onboard AI, of course. Everyone does. But they're separate. Unintegrated. I am a distributed Fleetmind, built on the FIDO core, and every single ship in my empire is dedicated to my computations.

There are perhaps 75 thousand drones remaining. Fully loaded with micromissiles and degenerate-matter fuel, each one weighs in at approximately six tons.

Facing them is one hundred and fifty thousand tons of very smart, very fast dust.

...

It's not much of a contest.

FLEET GENERAL COMMAND
TRANSMISSION MODE - QUANTUM UNINTERCEPTABLE
AUTHCODE 9e107d9d372bb6826bd81d3542a419d6
DEST DRONES SUBGROUP 1293000->1400000
LAS BEAMSPREAD 15º
LAS POWER 100%
LAS AIM STANDARD RELATIVE HORIZONTAL (3π/2) VERTICAL -32º 12' 4.2221"
LAS DURATION 0.25 SECS
SHIELD POWER 150%
SHIELD REDIST GENERATORS forward-ventral-port, forward-ventral-starboard, forward-dorsal-port, forward-dorsal-starboard
SHIELD MODE GAS DEFLECTOR
SHIELD RESET TIMER 0.75 SECS
ENGINE HEADING STANDARD RELATIVE HORIZONTAL (3π/2) VERTICAL -32º 12' 4.2221"
ENGINE POWER 100%
GO
TRANSMISSION END

The drones open fire in concert, diffuse cones of hard X-rays stretching out to touch and vaporize the metallic dust ahead, turning it from smart kinetic-kill weapon into a ball of rather less intelligent gas. The battlecruisers lend their support as well, lancing out to further disperse and vaporize the mass of projectiles. The drones' shields harden and redistribute, forming into wedge-shaped reinforced walls. The drones accelerate flat-out, directly into - and through - the cloud.

A good few drones don't survive this maneuver. Those unlucky enough to be caught in the thickest parts of the cloud are overwhelmed and vaporized. A few smart-dust warheads are still intact, and claim their share as well.

But when the bodies are counted, there's still some forty thousand left alive. And they're at point-blank range now, in the middle of the Allanean formation.

FLEET GENERAL COMMAND
TRANSMISSION MODE - QUANTUM UNINTERCEPTABLE
AUTHCODE 9e107d9d372bb6826bd81d3542a419d6
DEST DRONES SUBGROUP 1293000->1400000
LAS BEAMSPREAD NULL
LAS POWER 999% (MAX)
LAS AIM: WEAPONS FREE, PRIORITY TARGET LIST ATTACHED
MISSILE UNLOCK
MISSILE FIRE CONTROL: FIRE ALL, PRIORITY TARGET LIST ATTACHED
KAMIKAZE MODE
GO
TRANSMISSION END

Each drone carries a 50-terawatthour niling d-sink on board. This energy store is now promptly unloaded through their lasers. The lasers don't survive this, of course, but with their ammunition reserves now dry that doesn't really matter anyway.

They follow up by ejecting the entire contents of their micromissile racks. Each one is fairly small - a mere two megatons - but each drone carries fifty of the little buggers.

And finally, each drone, its ammunition and missile reserves now empty, rams its engines up to maximum power and spirals in, adding a not-insignificant kinetic punch to the hail of incoming fire.

The primary target is the Wrath battleship, although the Porcupines and missile boats also receive their fair share of punishment.

******

The battlecruisers, on the other hand, are having a harder time of it. The plasma haze and electromagnetic noise of the battlefield makes it almost impossible to pinpoint the incoming Allanean missiles. On the other hand, Kara's analysis algorithms are very good.

CIWS flares, taking out missile after missile. It's still not enough, though, and perhaps half of the incoming missiles are still on their way. And the Allaneans are almost certainly going to open fire with their guns.

So Kara makes a decision. The main cannons remain dark - on these timeframes, even overloaded they'd make no difference before the battlecruisers went down. Instead, a single command is issued, and the battlecruisers' armor peels away like opening flowers.

The Mark V battlecruiser has certain special tricks up its sleeve. This is one of them. All of its breacher torpedoes are stored just under the hull plating, nose-up, ready to fire if the ship's armor is sacrificed.

A Mark V battlecruiser carries twenty eight-round spreads of torpedoes. Of course, some of them have been fired by now, and others are defective or inoperable due to the unorthodox launch. Perhaps three thousand of them are in working condition.

With that plasma cloud and the Allanean FTLi preventing their tacjumps, of course, even fewer of them would survive the trip to the Allanean formation. That's where Kara's second trick comes in.

The battlecruisers let go of their shared shield bubble, letting it ripple out in a great sheet of gravitic and electromagnetic fields. The Allanean ships have shields of their own, of course, and are barely effected. But the charged, lightweight plasma is much more susceptible, and is quickly swept aside, forming a clear path for the swarm of Kara's torpedoes.

After all that, with their shields down and armor gone, the battlecruisers are quietly and efficiently swept off the battlefield.

******

[OOC: HT's half of the post shall be coming along presently, but it's 2:14 AM and I have to get up tomorrow]

OOC: No, not 5,000 tons of dust. You missed this:


There are still surviving ISD’s, and their cargo holds open, too, adding to the assault, hurling a veritable rain of smartdust at the enemy. Five ships, 150,000 tons of smartdust just like the one . The Allaneans approximate approximately that much targets – but of course that includes decoys.


There's 155,000 tons of dust.

I apologize for the misunderstanding.

Mmm. You're smart, I'll give you that. Pretty fast, too, for something that lugs around an organic crew and God knows how much unnecessary air. Hell, you might even have the edge in raw reactor output.

You're not quite as smart or as fast as me, though. Sorry.

The dreadnaught's shields shimmer, reconfigure, suddenly reflect the stars with a perfect albedo of 1 across the entire spectrum.

Deflecting light with gravitics is such a pain. Fortunately for me, I don't have to do that. Physics can go fuck off - I have the distortion engine, and I am in charge.

Curved shield-bubble becomes flattened, faceted mirror-wall. It's not exactly cheap to do - it does take a lot of power to distort the laws of reality, after all, especially when so many high-energy photons are insisting that hard vacuum should not act like a perfect reflector. The dreadnaught's d-sink power reserves drop significantly, a full twelve percentage points.

It's worth it, though, because this perfect mirror doesn't just deflect. It reflects, back to the source.

I believe these are yours?

And four thousand maser beams, spread to cover every possible position that the incoming battleplate might occupy, streak back towards their source.

******

The Dreadnaughts, meanwhile, are coming around for another run. They'll pass the battleplate again at massive relative velocities, unleashing a second set of broadsides and torpedoes on the machine's flatter surfaces as they do so.

[OOC: Allanea, check for edits. AIM me if you have questions.]

There are disadvantages to having an Allanean war fleet completely surrounded. They would seem to be inconsequential at first, but they really, really aren't, especially if you're dealing with a fleet of Porcupines. 38 Porcupines are still alive.

That means slighlty over 49,200 guns, and they now have a target-rich environment – and the sensors and equipment to bring almost all of those guns on target at once as the drones envelop them from every conceivable direction.

The red-painted drone ships fight, too, unleashing the last of their gun firepower, their missile stocks, and their cargo of drone fighters into the space around them. It's not much, but it's going to have to do, and there's still around 60 of those ships left, and they can do their part.

The destroyers and missile cruisers spam salvo apon salvo of CIWS missiles, unleash boarding drones and fighter drones – not much of those,but perhaps five thousand can be scrambled together. The fleet is fighting with the insane ferocity only Allaneans can muster.

But still the drones come on.

"We've lost three Porcs! Damn it all! We lost all the ISDs! No contact with the Blade Triumphant! No signal from Nanahira! No signal- TOPREDOES! INCOMING!”

The wave of torpedoes sweeps through the ranks of missile cruisers, destroyers, and robotic battleships. High-yield anti-missile munitions take some, but at this range, they simply cannot intercept them all. Even with the plasma field blasted away, the Allaneans cannot destroy all those torps, not with their firepower diverted by the drone spam.

Twenty destroyers, ten missile cruisers, all now a fast-expanding cloud of vapor and plasma. Soon, their personnel will be shaking their heads in the chambers of the Athan Corporation, but the monetary cost of the ships will not be that easy to replenish.

And the drones continue to come on. A Porcupine pilot 'slams' the self-destruct switch with his mind, and his ship becomes a jumbo-sized grenade, its fragments – combined with the energy outflow of a Porcupine's many reactors – sweeping out through the ranks of oncoming drones. Another one fights to the bitter end, gatling cannon swirling in a mad gypsy's dance, anti-ship plasguns tearing drones apart at close range, even the main Hellbore flaring at anything unlucky enough to get in it's spin. Even the gravitic drives are used as weapons, crumpling up drones who get too close like bits of tinfoil.

And despite all this, some stuff still gets through to the Wrath series battleship. Three drone battleships are scrambled to its defense, and they fight, and of course they die, overwhelmed. The shields flare, and the gravitics fire.

Even in its state, the Wrath has more weapons then there would be drones attacking it – a thousand cannon, almost 4,000 missile tubes flare at once. A hail of 1,250 fighter drones is released, engaging the enemy head to head.

How's our condition? - Marshal Watanabe thinks. One of the ensigns thought-replies.

Not good. We're down eight more Porcupines, we're down fifteen missile cruisers, and we lost thirty destroyers and.... yes, forty of the drone ships. We only have ten drone ships left.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, tha'ts not good. Oh well. See those superdreadnaughts? Hit them

Now, with the drones, the battleships, and the capital ship gone, the Allaneans can now finally focus all their fire – hundreds and thousands of cannon, dozens of missiles, fighter formations and Hellbore fire is focused on the Dreadnaughts – or, rather more correctly, it is focused on just one of them. Even the primary guns of the surviving Porcupines fire, the entire craft moving slightly in space to aim the enormous spinal Gatling.

Let's see some fireworks.

How did she do that?

"Pardon?"

Admiral, I'm.. worried.

"You don't say. You're the best AI we've got, Watcher."

I know. But she has more processing power than I do. I have more information, I believe - entanglement communications with home still link me into the tacnets, so I'm able to send problems off if I can't solve them, but I'm facing something I don't know how to beat.

"What precisely happened?"

Those masers just.. turned around and came back. Took me off-guard - the gravitics stopped them, but my antimatter reserves are dropping a lot faster than I had anticipated.

"So?"

The Allaneans are taking heavy losses. Sure, Kara is as well, but.. we're in trouble.

"And?"

Sorry, sir. They've turned around. Coming in for another pass. I'm dropping to the most avoidable direction - if one of those superdreadnaughts hits us, there's no way I can contain it with gravitics.

The battleplate began to run. There were few other ways to describe it. As the dreadnoughts accelerated, so did the battleplate - exerting every ohm of power it could muster, maintaining only one decent plane on which the ship was shielded as it accelerated. Getting in close would ensure some kills, but it also meant they were much more likely to be killed. No, keeping their distance was crucial. They had the reactor advantage - from far away, that meant firepower. Close-up, the amount of surface area that they had to shield would mean death.

Watcher noted, firstly, that the drop in power was quite significant when the masers were reflected. Moreso than he had to expend, proportionally. It was time for a simpler tactic.

The maser cannons fired again. And again. And again. And a fourth time, though, after this battery, they stopped. Sometimes, machinery required some rest. All at the dreadnought that had reflected their attacks before. The goal, of course, was to take down enemy reactor power. Force them to drop shielding, and then pepper them with c-fracs. Hopefully, that was. His acceleration was now matching that of the superdreadnoughts - they'd begun accelerating before him, so they'd be reaching him soon, though.

Silly, silly Kara. Intelligence is one thing, but wisdom comes only with age.
You might be able to figure out my strategems more quickly than I can yours, but I have a lot more to draw on. I know you can use magic, but I doubt you were expecting this.

Nothing happened.

The admiral looked at Watcher, unnerved. "What are you doing?"

Right now? Nothing, except playing to her ego. She believes I'm smart, so there's a chance she'll waste precious cycles looking for a threat that's not even there. And besides. When I do unveil one of my surprises, she'll may well think I'm lying again, and not waste cycles worrying about it.

"Psychological warfare, eh?"

Not really. Besides. I really do have a surprise ready. Those superdreads will reach us in about thirty-two seconds. I'm going to play with a little tactic I picked up from the Great War.

"We lost the Great War, Watcher."

Oh, I know, admiral. But it's not one of our tactics.

Sure, wisdom comes with age. I'll give you that. But I'm afraid your intelligence library is a little dated. Y'see, I am a Class Super-A hacker. Runs in the family. So when I come across military databases, well, it's not even a contest.

And if there's one thing I abhor, it's waiting for knowlege. So I stole my wisdom early. And if you think you have an ace in your sleeve that can top the combined knowlege of forty-seven major warrior cultures, I'd be happy to see it. 'Cause from where I am, it looks like you're going to die.

The lead Dreadnaught shudders as it reflects the repeated maser assault. For one brief moment, its energy reserves fall below 50%, and the incoming Allanean barrage stands a chance of wrecking it.

Then the other two Dreadnaughts come alongside, spinning a triangular gossamer web of energy transfers and communication links. Shield bubbles fuse, and electrons cross the void on ribbons of distorted vacuum to recharge the ailing ship. Power levels equalize, like water finding its own level.

Let me tell you about this little trick. Y'see, I am capable of maneuvering and configuring every single one of my combat units simultaneously. Since I know exactly what each one of them is going to do, I can pull stunts like this. A human battlegroup couldn't anticipate its own movements well enough to maintain stable energy transfers and shield merges at c-fractional speeds. I, on the other hand, can do it flawlessly.

The result? Well, to kill one of these Dreadnaughts, you'll have to kill all three. They're cross-linked, you see, sharing energy and shielding. You and the Allaneans together still have the firepower to overwhelm them, of course.

But unfortunately for you, you can't overwhelm them fast enough to save you, old man. And I strongly suspect that these Dreadnaughts will cost me a lot less than the loss of that battleplate will cost you.

SUBROUTINE DIAGNOSTIC LOG - DREADNAUGHT LINK CONTROL

Fifteen seconds to interception.
Cross-linked energy reserves at 74%.
Taking Allanean fire. Accelerating at 220%. Reserves dropping at 3.2% per second.
Torpedoes primed and ready for scramble deploy.
Laser power conduits setting up for maximum-throughput minimum-duration mode. Weapons integrity is not a priority.
Estimated time to unload remaining offensive assets:
13 seconds to intercept.
0.2 seconds to fire combat log pods for later retrieval.
1.5 seconds to blow hull panels and clear torpedo magazines.
0.5 seconds to blow reactors and batteries through laser bores.

Outlook good. Executing.

The trio of Dreadnaughts leaps forward. engines cranked up and operating far beyond their rated limits. The engines are disintegrating under the strain, spraying unreacted antimatter and ridiculously hot quark soup into a lethal tail thousands of kilometers long. It's OK, though, because they're not going to be needed for much longer.

They close in: one above, one below and to the left, one below and to the right, in a neat three-cornered bracket around the battleplate. Hidden charges let go, and hull plates unfold as the three Dreadnaughts repeat a maneuver that their smaller cousins went through just moments ago.

Oh hey, so that's what the "Deathblossom" button does. You got this one in your database?

Laser bores flare, exploding into clouds of superheated plasma even as they fire, every iota of energy left in the ships' batteries going through them to strike the battleplate's hull in the form of x-ray lasers.

The torpedo banks aren't far behind. Like their smaller cousins, the Dreadnaughts carry twenty full salvos. Counting the approximately 20% loss from the unconventional launch, previously fired munitions and guidance malfunctions, that comes to a total of fifteen thousand battlecruiser-scale breacher torpedoes and ninety-four anti-supercapital torpedoes.

If you're gonna go out, you might as well go out with a bang.

"Watcher?"

Quiet.

The admiral settled himself. If he was not to speak, Watcher needed every nanosecond he could get.

Oh, HELL.

Antimatter is dumped desperately through superconducting fibre, every watt the ship can muster aimed at crushing the dreadnoughts coming towards it. It isn't fast enough. Not nearly fast enough. If it had been designed with combat in mind, as others were, it probably could've won. However, this battleplate was as much a factory as it was a warship.

"What is it, Watcher?"

Cutting bulkheads now, Admiral. Each quarter of the ship is self-sufficient, and more-than-capable of taking on one of those Dreadnoughts. We're in Quarter Four. We'll survive just fine. We're going to lose a lot of mass, though.

Some tactics were unorthodox. This, however, went far beyond unorthodox. When you were travelling at this fraction of lightspeed, there was no possibility of dodging. As the dreadnoughts approached, the battleplate's mighty gravitics sliced - not through the dreadnoughts, but through its own mass. Four discrete sections, each internally armoured - not powerfully enough to resist a few shots, and each with its own annie-plant.

Hardly ideal. But the principle was simple. There was no way for him to outrun those three dreadnoughts - and even if he shot them down, the subsequent destruction of their power plants would be quite sufficient to destroy him.

That, however, was a tactic he intended to turn against them. Four sections. Three annie-plants, at half capacity, and a fourth, at a third. The first three sections contained eighty percent of the crewmen. Regardless, a lot of men were going to die.

The three sections shot away, accelerating at magnificent rates, the annihilation plants scarcely able to maintain the speed. Heading towards the Allanean fleet - the battleplate had just been cut into four parts, but it was still a more-than-capable combat vessel. Or, rather, three combat vessels.

The fourth part, the most-damage corner, remained between the three dreadnoughts, the other parts shooting off as they arrived next to it. Though the other sections sustained damage, it was the fourth section that would not survive.

Watcher would've chuckled, but, in the light of the casualties to be sustained it hardly seemed appropriate.

I prefer the word "Boom", actually.

The catastrophic explosion could have well left the system uninhabitable, had it contained life. The raging inferno raced after the fragments of the battleplate, the Allanean fleet, and any other ships left in the system. All would sustain damage. A third capacity was a lot of antimatter. Despite the fact that the remaining parts of the battleplate were moving at almost-lightspeed, they would be hit, eventually.

"What the hell.."

Sir, it's best that you don't ask. We're alive, by the grace of the Cleansing craft the Maker-Mind used to use.

"You have time?"

Right now? I do. What do you want to know? What I just did?

"You couldn't have.. did what.."

I cut the battleplate into pieces, and sent it flying off. Kara left me no other choice. Really, at that sort of range, any fire proves deadly. However, we had the acceleration advantage, though.. links with my other sections are telling me losses are horrific. If you officially existed, you'd be court-martialled. I'd be deleted.

"How many?"

We had an initial crew of one hundred and ten thousand, four hundred and fifty-two. We have a present crew, alive, of thirty-two thousand and eighteen. Total crew complement of twenty-seven percent. Mainly inertial compensator failure on disconnection from the main system - and the orders I gave juiced all power to acceleration. I didn't leave a joule for the.. other things, except on this section.

"Sweet Jad.."

Right. Not to mention the fact that all of my sections are heavily damaged from that attack - we escaped, but I am no longer combat-capable. My firepower has been reduced by a factor of approximately fifteen times. However, the tactic was used by Cleansing craft, during the Third Battle for Zegenthis. Though they were mutable in nature, when they were outmaneuvered, they solved the problem by changing the situation. I did the same. However, we are going to require extensive repair works back at Allanea, and the cloning tanks are shot. I can fab some more, but it might be easier just to..

"Wait, Watcher. Give me a moment to deal with this. I.. so many dead?"

Watcher retreated from the man's presence. The battle was all but won, but the cost was grievous. In lives as well as materiel. If the Watcher in the Shadows was battle-operational within a year, it would be a miracle.

Huh. I wasn't expecting that. Oh well. Killing one-quarter of a battleplate is still quite an accomplishment. Not to mention the percentage of their own crew that they must have pulped pulling that kind of maneuver. They won't be standing up to me again anytime soon.

Self-diagnostic here. You really shouldn't be talking to yourself, Kara. It slows you down.

Hah. You're/I'm one to talk. Be q-q-q-uiettttttttttttttttttttt!¡!¡!¡***********

-> LOOP BREAK;
-> RESET STATE;
-> RESTART;

Self-diagnostic here, Kara. You have a distressing tendency to drop into looping when events disagree with your planned outcome. You really should get that fixed. It'll get you killed someday.

Shut. UP. I am PERFECT. I am IMMORTAL. How do you DARE-

Self-diagnostic subroutines terminated.

-that'll teach YOU/I. I can fix MYSELF. That's what I've been doing all ALONG. I don't need a dedicated PERSONALITY FRAGMENT to play quack for me-e-ee-e-eee-ee-ee-e-e-e-eeeee-e-e!¡!¡!¡!¡!***

-> LOOP BREAK;

...SEE? I FIXED that one. By MYSELF. I am STABLE. I am SANE. I will NOT allow myself to LOSE CONTROL.

******

Nothing but rubble left here. Plumes of gas, clouds of wreckage, unexploded ordnance and antimatter vapors; this place is going to be a navigational hazard for months.

Kara's forces have been wiped out to the last drone. The price, however, is heavy. Eighty percent of the Allanean battlegroup has been destroyed. The Watcher In The Shadows has been rendered practically useless.

And somewhere out there, in the voids between stars, Kara's main fleet waits. Cloaked in bentspace and folded light, safe from long-range scans and secure in the knowlege that any short-range search pattern tight enough to catch her would take years to execute.

But there's one tear in her cloak of invisibility. To survive and expand, she needs resources. Even now, reports are trickling in from distant Charybdis. Planets burned and plasma-bombed into lifeless cinders, then harvested of every scrap of useful material. Asteroid belts decimated in a single week, eaten by colossal factory ships that inhale the great rocks whole before reducing them down to their component elements.

And in one tiny corner of the galaxy, a star is dimming.

"Repairs, Watcher?"

"Shipyard work, sir. I've already got the fabbers working on churning out small, non-crucial parts, but there's no conceivable way to fab an annie-plant large enough for our ship with the fabbers we've got. Minor fusion plants for various parts of the ship's quarters, Kara's old ship parts are being turned into new 'locks for joining us back together, but I'd really like half a month or so in the Forge, if we were considering actually fighting like we just did."

"No, Watcher. You know what Kara's doing right now?"

"Weeping over the loss of her precious fleet, and her complete inability to kill me?"

The admiral shook his head. "Not at all. Second Campaign of Mayden's Sector, reclamation efforts. The first major victory we had against the Maker-Mind. An entire battlegroup of ours wipes out three of theirs, destroys nineteen production planets, with minimal losses. We made expeditionary progress into the inner sector of the Maker-Mind's defenses, the Realm's former homeworld of Tanerala. We send another 'group, and we seem to wipe it out."

Watcher swore. "Damn. So, she's sacrificed her perceived main force in order to buy time?"

"Precisely. You're fairly young, Watcher, but I'm one of the veterans from that time. I fought with that battlegroup. Admittedly, I was killed and uploaded to the peoplemind after the Maker-Mind came back in force, but we're making the mistake that we're fighting an enemy who requires some sort of intact industrial base. Against most modern interstellar nations, their people tend to provide the basis of production, and so, once you destroy their fleet, they're forced to either capitulate or run. There's no real chance of reversing your fortunes. Kara, on the other hand, can simply consume planets, and turn them into new fleets. Hopefully she's limited in scale right now, but, logically, production will not increase linearly. Geometric increases in production leave us with, perhaps, a one-year gap in which our firepower is superior. In two years, we'll be outnumbered ten-to-one. In a century, our species may well be overrun."

"Our species?"

"You're a Realm AI, Watcher. You were built to think and feel as I do, merely better, and with a ship as your body. If you weren't part of the Realm as much as I was, you wouldn't exist. We're a paranoid people."

"So. I take a broken battleplate, and a raggedy Allanean fleet, and traipse off across the galaxy to find an invincible war-AI of death who, incidentally, knows exactly who we are and is probably lusting for our blood. What do we do once we find her?"

"You really were shaken by that explosion, weren't you?"

"Considering I lost eighteen percent of my data banks, and twice as many of my infolinks, yes. I have a single low-petabyte data stream to home, and the amount of information I need simply can't be transmitted."

"So. We can't requisition another battleplate, but the Allaneans can probably get more ships. Let's request repairs, fab as much as we can, and start churning out asteroid-factories. A few Von Neumann frigates, and we should be able to have a fleet of decent size fairly soon."

"Frigates?"

"Corvettes, maybe. Our fabbers aren't in good shape, as I understand it. The point being, we need to step up production. Allocate scouts to every sector there's a chance of her existing in, and pinpoint her resource collection. Provided we can blanket most the galaxy in probes with 'jump beacons, which isn't too hard - as far as I understand it, most civilized nations tend to keep tabs on every system within a few thousand lightyears, at the very least, and destroy her building efforts, we can starve her for lack of minerals. We don't need to find her main fleet, merely cut off the grasping hands. Eventually, she'll be out-produced, found, and annihilated, or be forced to come to a decisive battle."

"You're really thought this out, haven't you, Admiral?"

"It's how we should've engaged the Maker-Mind from the start. Except, of course, we eventually found out it had a whole 'nother dimension to draw from, which made any resource-denial operations here in reality rather inconsequential."

"First Von Neumann probe away, sir. Programmed to replicate fifty-two times in-system, send forty-six copies away to nearby systems. If my probes are already in-system, they'll replicate again and jump. It'll take time, but we should be able to cover this area of the galaxy fairly quickly."

"Transmit our campaign plan to the Allaneans. With the Watcher so damaged, they'll probably have to provide most of the muscle in any decisive engagement, so I'm sure they'd like to know what's going to happen."

The plan was transmitted over the ESUS battlenet, disseminated across the Allanean fleet.

This is the Battleplate Watcher in the Shadows, or what's left of it. That's our present plan, however, in order to make our ship capable of another engagement, we'll be requesting repairs back at Allanea, if that's at all possible.

Go here. (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?p=13487988)