Chapter 100: Mission of Vengeance

“This feels like there should be fanfare,” Ye-in declared.

“The Bastard’s probably got ships out there in the void, listening,” Derek pointed out.

He wasn’t entirely sure just when “The Bastard” had become the term to use to describe their adversary, but he couldn’t claim it wasn’t accurate. And, apparently, the Cessid species had a sufficiently similar male-female dynamic to humanity that no one complained about just slapping the label of “him” onto humanity’s number one foe.

“Still feels wrong,” she conceded.

And, really, they might be heading off on a journey of vengeance, to pick a fight with the biggest mass murderer in the known history of all species, and what were they doing right now?

Waiting in line to use the bloody catapult, because the Navy was sending them all out at once, and the sheer number of ships being unleashed had brought this to the point where a gooddamn line had formed.

The area the Bastard had cloaked was three thousand light-years away. They needed to use every shortcut available.

But by God, the ten minutes it would take for them to get going stretched unto eternity …

He took that time to look things over one more time. Well, “things.” Mostly, he decided to carefully scan the other expedition members.

There were a fair few “civilian” ships, geared for war to a degree that equaled the Dragonfly, or even exceeded that, some exploration vessels that had been designed and built at the same time as his own ship, mercenary outfits who’d decided to take one of the rather low-paying government contracts if it’d let them spit in the Bastard’s eye … and a metric shit-ton of navy escorts.

Seventy heavy cruisers, which would be able to work on their own, both in terms of supplies and being tough enough that they were unlikely to be destroyed too swiftly to send out even a single message, which was why the bevy of light cruisers being sent along would be working in pairs, as far as Derek knew. Nearly two hundred of them.

And effectively every destroyer in the solar system would be leaving with them as well, in such numbers that, when they were all clumped up, the computer was actually having issues counting them. High three-, low four-digits.

Those were supposed to work in squadrons, but they’d still also have an issue of supplies.

With the need to have enough people for multiple shifts, those small ships had a crew of twenty each while being the same size as the Dragonfly’s original hull, while lacking the absurd number of rather expensive spatially expanded storage compartments that had let Derek’s ship carry such an absurd number of supplies.

As such, none of those small ships had the supplies for an extended scouting run.

In fact, the only reason they had logistics ships along for the ride was the destroyers. Though they’d almost certainly be left somewhere in deep space, well out of range of anything that might endanger them, with the destroyers periodically returning to pick up replacement food, fuel, and munitions.

Actually, Derek had let himself get talked into filling every single cubic centimeter not actively spoken for with whatever random crap hadn’t fit onto the navy ships, to be used to “establish logistics depots” once they arrived. Just in case shit well and truly hit the fan.

Also, they had twenty spare comm nodes aboard, just in case the Bastard had set up some kind of link-severing enchantment somewhere in his territory.

Slow as militaries and governments could be to adapt, they were not incapable of learning. And the incident surrounding The Error had sufficiently terrified the powers that be that action had been taken almost immediately.

“Kinda weird they’re sending all those escorts, though. Don’t they need those?” Atticus wondered.

“I mean, they might, but the way things are going, they’re expecting a series of capital ship duels. The only thing the smaller escorts are going to add to are the casualty numbers. And it’s not like they need them for missile defense,” Derek said. “It’s not like … fuck.”

“Hm?” Ye-in asked. “What new nightmare scenario did you just figure out?”

“I was going to say ‘it’s not like anyone would throw away two hundred and fifty battleships just to mislead us about what kinds of weapons to expect.’ No normal enemy would do that. A hive mind, though …”

“And there we go, Captain Doomsayer’s at it again!” Atticus exclaimed in a bombastic tone. “Seriously though, you should probably mention that to someone.”

Derek quickly sent Isaac a message to that effect, trusting that his brother wouldn’t let it sit in his inbox for too long.

A couple of seconds later, however, he already got a reply.

Good thought, but we were already accounting for it in our planning. Paranoia’s a widespread trait of our generation of the family.

He couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. It was as polite as that message could have been phrased, but still, it felt like there was an unwritten addendum of “you’re not the only one who can have good ideas.”

And that was a good thing, clearly, but he’d been proud of thinking of that … and then it turned out he needn’t have bothered. He should be glad he had, really; he was … urgh. Bloody hell. Feelings could be so damn irrational …

Just like that, he was back to being bored as he watched the line. There were other catapults around Mercury that they could have used, but no other system down the chain did; as such, getting access to the rest here would simply move this damn traffic jam to the next one.

A few minutes later, the Dragonfly finally slid into position and, after a brief moment of weirdness, they’d been moved fifty light-years and were staring down a second catapult. But now that they were already moving, they wouldn’t have to stop until they reached the end of the chain, three hundred light-years from Earth, ten minutes after they’d started.

“Is it just me or were there too few warships in those systems?” Derek asked. Catapults were expensive, and either placed near naval bases or in independently important systems, both of which would have merited at least some naval presence. Not necessarily capital ships if the fixed defenses were up to snuff, but a division of heavy cruisers at least.

When no one answered him, he pulled up the sensor records and threw them on the main viewscreen with a few taps of the controls.

“Holy fuck …” Atticus breathed. “Navy’s leaving them to swing …”

And wasn’t that a shitty situation?

Now, admittedly, with humanity’s population distribution being what it was, protecting anything outside the Core simply wasn’t feasible, with the overwhelming majority of humanity being concentrated in just five star systems. Going beyond that would require a several hundredfold increase in an area of responsibility accompanied by a negligible growth in budget or workforce.

The math on that checked out. That did not make it good, or humane, or something Derek could say out loud without feeling and sounding like an asshole. So he didn’t, and just nodded in silent agreement.

“They won’t have anything to worry about if we win this before the next wave,” he finally muttered. “So I guess we’d better get to it, then.”

As he spoke, mana began to pour out of him, sinking into the enchantment woven throughout the starship, space twisting and warping until the Dragonfly was torn free of the normal universe as the [Alcubierre Bubble] formed.

Three months’ travel to go. A little under three thousand light-years of distance to cross. And at the end of it, one hell of an asshole to punch in the mou- … ahem. One hell of an asshole to spy on so other people could punch him in the mouth.

Or maybe that weird golden box he’d gotten, currently sitting innocently in the bridge, with a camera pointed directly at it so they’d be alerted to any changes, would do something.

Either way, it’d be one hell of an adventure …

***

Derek glared accusingly at the holographic starmap that surrounded him.

[Call of Adventure] was supposedly capable of showing him where to go in order to have an adventure, and label the difficulty when applicable.

It was great at picking out targets when exploring space … and all it had done here was highlighting the unscryable zone they were already heading towards.

Oh, sure, the [Skill] had declared going to the shrouded area “necessary,” something he’d checked before even leaving Sol. And that was useful information, but whether that meant “there’s the bad guy” or special agent drama queen’s declaration of “whatever’s generating the shroud is worth smashing” had been correct, Derek did not know.

“So, two hundred thousand star systems to explore, across five hundred or so exploration groups. That’s … four hundred each … I mean, we’re probably not going to find our target in the absolute last place we look without some ridiculously bad luck, but that still feels ridiculous,” Derek muttered.

Of course, that was no doubt why things had been set up that way.

Alright, one last try …

Derek narrowed the display down to only showing the shrouded zone, deleted half of it. It still showed “adventure.”

So he cut it in half again.

Adventure.

Again and again, he decreased the number still shown, and what would you know, a fucking adventure was still in the cards.

Blech.

Unless he’d somehow managed to narrow things down to the exact area they were actually trying to find …

Yeah, nope, dream on.

Derek repeated the process several times, each time zeroing in on an entirely different, entirely random area. The probability that they were all valid targets was basically zero unless the enemy had so many resources that almost the entirety of the zone was important.

But that would leave humanity outclassed to the point of them basically having lost already, and honestly, that was not a consideration worth keeping in mind.

If they were screwed, they’d figure that out the hard way soon. If they weren’t, no need to destroy his or the others’ morale for no reason.

In the end, it really came down to numbers. They had to kill between ten and thirty percent of the Bastard’s bodies to destroy the hive mind, but there was a very big difference between ten percent of a million and ten percent of fifty billion.

All they knew was that the casualties at Sol almost certainly hadn’t done the hive in, and there’d been close to five million “dead” there, two hundred and fifty ships destroyed with twenty thousand bodies each. Having to have a separate body for each and every single specialist [Skill] really ballooned crew sizes beyond all reason.

Ultimately … thinking about how any battleship they faced represented a mere fraction of a percent of their enemy’s power was quite depressing ...

***

The alien battleship loomed as the Dragonfly exploded out of FTL, moving at nearly half the speed of light, railguns firing as one; the already mind-boggling velocity of the starship combined with the weapons’ acceleration turning them into projectiles capable of making even this target hurt.

Missiles burst free a moment later while the Dragonfly slewed aside, the guided weapons in space for mere moments, yet it was still enough time to target the massive gashes the railgun rounds had torn into the enemy hull …

And then the human starship ran face-first into a wall of that damnable explosive dust … still moving at nearly a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers a second.

Using absurd speed to increase the impact of projectile weapons worked both ways; unfortunately, the titanic forces unleashed by the collision cratered the stern of Derek’s ship even as it went spinning off, tumbling forward uncontrollably. It might have been survivable at that point; the enemy ship in arguably worse shape than they were … unfortunately, sheer chance put them on the same trajectory and in a titanic, eye-searing explosion, both ships vanished from the face of the universe.

“Well … that was fucking terrible,” Atticus declared as the simulation ended.

“Thank you. Very insightful,” Derek shot back.

“I mean, we should probably start by properly programming in the shield,” Mimi pointed out.

“It’s not the shields that are the problem; I think it’s the magic,” Derek said. “If I can warp space to create distance, we might be able to get clear …”

“Might.” Ye-in deadpanned. “I’m sold.”

“It’s not like the basic premise isn’t solid,” Mimi cautiously began. “High-speed ambush at the edge of the zone of interference, using the penetrator rounds to peel open the armor and firing the missiles into the gaps while we escape should work.”

And yet, for one reason or another, they’d “died” every time they’d simulated it.

Granted, the simulations had been programmed with assumptions that put the enemy capabilities on the very high end of what they might have, but “it’ll work out in the real world” was a terrible thought to rely on when your life was on the line.

But they’d figure something out. Eventually. And if they didn’t … finding out the Bastard’s secrets and spilling them to the right people would fuck him over all the same.