Chapter 287 – To the Frontlines

Emily kneels against the asteroid below her, gasping for mana, barely paying any attention to the destruction she has wrought. She slowly forces her head up to confirm Perinith’s destruction, before finally dismissing Temporal Shield, drawing back in every scrap of energy she can through the tether linking them and soothing her painfully empty reserves. The worst of her exhaustion clears almost immediately, leaving her clearheaded and able to move freely once again. She rises to her full height and sends a small pulse of the little mana she has to spare into the recording crystal in her hand, cutting off its view through her eyes before tucking it safely back into her belt.

She looks around at the aftermath of her ambush, spotting tens of FAF allied ships in the distance heading towards her to find the source of the mass spatial disturbance. She goes to open a set of portals to recall her army into her Factory, but with her circles only just starting to refill, she only manages one.

Damn. Looks like I’m going to suffer some losses.

She prioritises the larger aircraft and specialised half-golem troops, leaving a mass of metal bodies behind. She orders them to spread out and take cover among the asteroids and drifting scrap before heading back to her waiting squadron and boarding the lead ship through the airlock.

“Get us out of here,” she commands the moment the reinforced doors shut behind her, and the cabin repressurises, saving her energy and trusting the pilots listening to the mic feeds from the airlock to pass on the message.

Emily makes her way to the communication relay as the ship shudders and detaches from its hiding place. She arrives and takes a few moments to gather herself before converting most of her regained energy to machina and connecting to the relay. She transmits two separate messages: the first targets her mechanical troops, ordering them to attack any ships that try to follow her squadron, but only with intent to destroy if they’re not flagged as part of the Heavy-blade fleet; the second targets the fleet itself, instructing them to turn back from their mechanoid targets and give chase, hoping the FAF commander in charge of the battlefield will let them pursue the unknown ships that ambushed them alone.

With her messages sent, and only ten or so minutes until the machina locking down the Heavy-blade fleet’s relays runs out, Emily drops to the floor cross-legged and begins meditating, focusing on the ambient energy filling the ship and drawing in as much as possible. Her focus isn’t broken when the ship shudders as its shields come under fire, and she doesn’t open her eyes again until the last possible moment, ignoring the likely destruction of a large portion of her mechanical army far behind.

Her mana and machina reserves are still less than ten per cent refilled, but it’s enough for now, so she lets out a stream of charge to connect with the ship and see if her gamble has paid off. Scanning through the external cameras and the common open communication frequencies, she only finds the remaining Heavy-blade ships on their squadron’s tail and breathes a sigh of relief.

“Perfect,” she mutters, a small, satisfied smile curling her lips as she reaches out with her machina to reestablish control and keep their comms quiet. “I have time.”

***

Finally, when her reserves are back to full, and they’re hundreds of kilometres from the occupied asteroid field, Emily begins the process of clearing Yorn’s loyalists from the fleet and applying Mental Lock to the rest. Unsurprisingly, several of those who were loyal to Yorn when she first checked have changed their minds after her overwhelming show of force, so Emily keeps note and lets them live for now.

After applying the final Mental Lock, Emily transmits a message back to the commander of the battlefield they fled, posing as the fleet’s interim leader. She informs them that they lost the ambushing ships, unwilling to risk claiming their capture in case they check their ID’s and recognise them as existing members of the Heavy-blade fleet, and requests permission to rejoin the rest of their fleet at another battlefield to be reassigned orders and an appropriate leader. The request is granted without any hesitation, the commander more concerned with the continued management of their defence than recovering the support of a few ships.

“We just received the go-ahead to continue on to Silvia’s fleet without restraint,” Emily declares, transmitting her voice across the fleet on a wave of machina. “Stick together and initiate a jump to lightspeed. It should only take us a month to reach them, but keep an eye out: we’re heading towards the frontlines and should be prepared for contact at any moment.”

***

Two weeks later, Emily still hasn’t heard anything from Silvia despite sending her a message to update her on her victory against Perinith. She doesn’t let the lack of contact phase her, taking the time to get to work on remodelling one of Elisime’s now-empty hangars into a new production line to refill her lost troops.

However, as she’s in the midst of putting together a large logic chip assembler, Harriet enters the workshop in an excited buzz, bouncing off the walls and shooting into Emily with a message.

‘Imminent contact/ships on the horizon/spotted them first!’

‘Good job,’ Emily praises her familiar, setting down her tools and leaving her Factory with a light tug on the anchor outside.

She heads straight for the bridge, walking in to find a tense silence hanging over the room.

“How many are we looking at?” Emily asks, drawing the pilots’ eyes to her and watching their shoulders relax immediately.

“Our sensors picked up thirty small to medium combat vessels spread out in our path while your familiar was boosting them,” one of them answers.

“We lost sight the moment she left our systems, so it could be more,” the other adds.

“Have you tried Overdriving the sensors?” Emily asks, drumming her fingers against her leg and scanning the readings on the pilots’ heads-up displays.

“Yeah, but we’re still not in range even with the boost.”

“Good, they shouldn’t have spotted us yet then unless they’re mechanoid ships: from what I’ve seen, the FAF’s tech’s no better than ours,” she explains, a plan forming in her mind as she considers setting up a Temporal Shield and dismisses the idea just as quickly. “Stick together and prepare for them to request us to drop our speed. I’m going to block their outgoing comms, just in case, and we’ll try to slip by as affiliates.”

“Weren’t we meant to pose as mercenaries?” one of the pilots questions, still relaying her orders to the rest of the fleet word for word.

“Yes, but only if we were caught out alone. This fleet technically has permission to be here if they don’t notice the extra ships, and if they do, we’re in for a fight either way.”

Emily sends Harriet back into the ship’s long-range sensor array with a blend of machina and mana under their control, instructing them to lock onto the ships they found earlier. The moment they locate them again, Emily feeds Harriet a stream of spatial mana, wasting some energy to compensate for the familiar’s lacking affinity, but locking onto the coordinates of their targets and opening a small portal for Harriet to slip through.

‘Form a barrier around those ships and parse for any outgoing signals related to us,’ Emily instructs. ‘Prioritise going unnoticed unless you notice any that could suggest a coming fight, though.’

‘Understood/on it/fun challenge!’

Emily returns to the ship’s bridge and waits for a transmission from the ships ahead as they get closer. It doesn’t take long for a connection request to pop up in the centre of the pilots’ screens.

“Warning, you are entering FAF-controlled space. Please reduce your speed to sub-FTL and submit to our verification scans,” a mechanical-sounding voice states the moment they allow the request. “Identify yourselves and state your purpose.”

“Heavy-blade Pirates, temporary FAF affiliate, fleet P,” Emily responds, silently signalling for the pilots to comply. “We’re on our way to reinforce fleet S in defensive zone FLR-03 after the loss of our commander at our previous assignment.”

Their fleet decelerates quickly, the world outside the bridge turning from a blur of stretched light to a dark expanse with only a few distant visible stars. Floating only a relatively short distance away are the ships their scans flagged up, spread apart but quickly gathering together to create a blockade directly in their path.

“Acknowledged. Approach and lower your shields.”

They slowly glide closer, dropping their defences.

‘Warning/alert/encryption/question,’ Harriet hums frantically in Emily’s head, sending over a flood of data.

Emily scans through the stream, quickly diverting all of her cores to breaking through the rudimentary encryption hiding the message the opposing fleet is trying to send out. Her cortex crackles with machina, and she tears through the data stream faster than even most mechanics could comprehend, relying on her Linguistics skill to pick apart the patterns that could decode the signal.

It only takes a few sections for the message to become clear, and what she sees has Emily click her tongue in disappointment. She opens a direct channel to the rest of her fleet, reinforcing it with a constant stream of mana to prevent the other side from doing exactly what she just did, and signals for the pilots to mute their side of the call with the defensive fleet.

“Prepare for combat on my signal. They just tried to verify our story and questioned which of our ships should be present. They’ll notice their message never got through soon. Don’t act yet, but get your shields up the moment I say: prioritise survival over target elimination. I’ll handle it.”

Emily waits for the perfect moment as they get closer and closer to the wall of ships, and the moment five ships break away from their formation to approach and scan them, she gives the signal. Their shields shimmer back into existence in sync, and they open fire at once.

Several heavy kinetic rounds punch through the hulls of the scout ships closest to them before they can get their shields back up, and dozens of plasma beams burst against the energy barriers wrapping the fleet further back. Emily tears open space in front of the ship she’s aboard and activates Elisime’s firing sequence, sending out two railgun shots that tear through the unprepared scouts, punching clean through their hulls where she can sense the greatest source of energy within.

Both ships she hits head-on burst into balls of flame, their hulls cracking like ice and scattering in a hail of shrapnel that shreds the allies at their sides. The railguns’ projectiles keep going, slamming into the main FAF fleet’s shields, sending ripples across their surfaces, but not breaking them.

Emily tells her pilots to keep the ship steady and slips into her Factory, pouring enough mana into the opening she’s created to leave it independent whilst she activates her lightning connection before flooding the ship with mana, utilising the enhancement runes carved into its every surface. She takes her time charging her attack, trusting her fleet to follow her orders and keep themselves alive.

Once nearly half her mana is coursing through Elisime, she directs it all to the ship’s railguns, using them as makeshift compression chambers to build two crackling, azure orbs of destruction. She squeezes on the gathering mana, willing it smaller and smaller without allowing even a spark to break from their smooth surfaces. It takes nearly a minute to reduce the orbs to the size of a head, and the screeching buzz of lightning grows so loud her crew start to hear it humming in the back of their minds despite the vacuum separating them from the Factory’s opening.

Emily finally opens a small hole at the front of each orb and watches as two solid beams of compressed plasma connect with the distant ships in an instant. The lightning’s din goes completely silent, and Emily shifts the small apertures to guide the beams of plasma across the enemy fleet. The shields protecting the spacecrafts simply vanish in the face of her attack, unable to offer even a token resistance, and the beams cut through the ships’ hulls with equal ease, leaving behind nothing but thin, glowing lines that most of the Heavy-blade crew can’t even see with the distance between them.

Her attack ends as quickly as it started, less than a second between it appearing on the battlefield and then fading into nothingness, and in its wake, the opposing fleet erupts. Some ships fold in on themselves, their damaged gravity drives wreaking havoc, and others burst outward, their generators and munition supplies aiding their destruction. Not a single ship survives, and a shockwave that shakes her crew to the bones spreads from the collapsed formation as the gases from within rapidly escape.

However, Emily feels a single, weakening mana-signature left in the wreckage.

She leaves her Factory, and glances over her fleet to find not a single ship destroyed, though a few of their shields are shattered and recharging, with damage she’ll need to repair later peppering their hulls. She recalls Harriet and heads for the lone surviving mage. She pushes through the flames eating away at the dead fleet’s scraps, and finds a dense orb of metal and stone at the source of the signature. The metal on the outside is scorched black, with deep furrows that carry a faint trace of unstable space carved into it, revealing the rock beneath.

Before Emily can try to break open the protective shell, it flakes apart to unveil a single fiscushia soldier panting with exhaustion and wearing the uniform of the fleet’s commander. They’re only fifth circle and, though Emily can’t read their expression clearly, she recognises the quiet acceptance in their bug-like eyes staring back at her.

“W-what… are… you?” they ask weakly, clicking their mandibles together and using the last dregs of their mana to transfer their question.

“A Technomancer,” she replies, allowing them to satisfy their final curiosity as she places her metal palm to the crown of their head. “Don’t worry, I hold no hostility for your race and will fulfil my contract to aid you in your battle; you were just unlucky to stop us while we’re dealing with some internal crew affairs.”

A lightning-coated blade slides from her palm and punches through the mage’s carapace, frying everything within and painlessly ending their struggle.