Chapter 383: Is There Still Time?

The star blazed with heightened fury for roughly ten minutes.

It had begun with a concentrated salvo of over a hundred superluminal missiles, piercing several volatile fissures into the star’s outer corona.

Then, the self-regulating mechanisms of the stellar body asserted themselves. Under the crushing grip of its own immense gravity, the breaches were swiftly sealed by ambient plasma, a violent hydrostatic stabilization that manifested as brilliant, blinding solar flares.

After the flare subsided, the battlefield fell into an eerie, chilling silence.

The enemy had unleashed an unimaginably powerful strike to vaporize the second moon, and then ceased all further fire. The tactical situation was in an agonizingly delicate state.

The deep void of space grew quiet once more...

It almost seemed as if the catastrophic destruction of the second moon had merely been a natural cosmic anomaly. Only the drifting debris and shattered asteroid fields served as an eternal testament to the world that had existed there mere hours before.

Streams of photons faithfully recorded every detail of the apocalyptic bombardment, radiating outward across the cosmos in all directions at the speed of light.

This light would echo through the universe for aeons to come, persisting until the photons exhausted their energy across the expanse of space.

The stellar bombardment had stirred up a massive solar storm. Relativistic ionized particles were now rushing outward at hundreds of kilometers per second. It would still take several days for that plasma front to reach Planet Dige.

In approximately three days, the debris field hurled from the second moon’s disintegration would cross the 900,000 kilometers separating it from Planet Dige.

At that exact moment, the solar storm would sweep through the planetary sector as well. Planet Dige would be treated to a breathtaking celestial spectacle, a raging meteor shower coupled with brilliant, continent-spanning auroras dancing across the sky.

Yet no human would linger to admire the scenery. Everyone understood all too well that this serene calm was merely the prelude to a far deadlier storm.

The battle had only just begun!

This temporary silence was fundamentally sustained by the immense latency of cosmic communications. Due to the light-speed barrier, the enemy fleet had only observed the nuclear engagements with the Gaia entity from over a month ago, alongside telemetry showing the Deep Space anchored to the moon.

They could not possibly know that the mothership had broken orbit and repositioned hours before their strike landed.

Consequently, they had not committed to a secondary salvo.

"They will inevitably push toward Planet Dige at flank speed! However, they remain at a massive standoff distance, and their transit will take days..."

"At the very least, our Gravitational Wave Arrays have not yet registered the spatial wake of incoming hulls..."

Aboard the Deep Space, the operations hub was thick with suffocating tension. Operators hurried between workstations, while the Senior Scientists ran endless real-time calculations.

The main quantum core ran at absolute thermal limits, spinning up predictive models and generating hundreds of tactical contingencies.

The Deep Space was constantly firing its maneuvering thrusters to align with the extraction vector, desperately attempting to reel in the surface team before initiating an emergency warp jump.

If they lingered for even a moment too long, they were walking straight to their executions.

Inside the command bridge, dozens of military experts argued over the tactical implications.

"...The enemy calculated the orbital trajectory of the second moon, established a kill-box, and smothered it with relativistic fire. Is it possible they believe we’ve already been eradicated?"

"Impossible. An advanced civilization wouldn’t make such an amateur assumption! They cannot verify our destruction, and they undoubtedly have follow-up protocols prepared—we just can’t predict what they are.

The observational delay is simply too vast. Without verified real-time targeting telemetry, even they won’t waste ultra-expensive warp missiles by firing blindly into empty space."

After brief analysis, the officers reached a sobering realization: warp-capable missiles were astronomically expensive, far beyond anything the Federation’s industrial capacity could afford to manufacture.

Evaluating the situation purely through the lens of industrial reserves, humanity was being thoroughly outmatched. The sheer destructive power of a superluminal missile was enough to send a cold shudder down any tactician’s spine.

Minutes later, Jason joined the bridge council via an encrypted holographic link.

He was still strapped inside the groaning dropship, being slowly winched up through the atmosphere, but his presence stabilized the room. Beside him, Elara watched the floating holographic projections with wide, innocent curiosity, observing the crowded command center with fascinated wonder.

It was her very first glimpse into modern civilization’s technology, and the sights held her in complete awe.

"...A mature interstellar civilization possesses staggering industrial wealth," Professor Hao Yu observed, his face flushed with a mixture of academic fascination and cold dread.

"Those superluminal missiles are essentially miniaturized Warp Drives wrapped around an antimatter payload."

"Our orbital sensors registered massive antimatter annihilation signatures during the blast... confirming our worst fears."

Professor Hao Yu shook his head with a bitter sigh. "It’s simply too costly. We have theorized such weapons on paper... but our industrial synthesis cannot refine antimatter in those quantities."

"To field an independent, warp-capable missile, you must possess an abundant antimatter reserve. You wouldn’t even need a standard fusion reactor to power the bubble... but the economic toll would cripple our society."

Given the Federation’s current resource constraints, engineering warp-capable kinetic weapons remained an unattainable luxury. Their antimatter refinement and containment technologies were far too rudimentary.

Furthermore, across the vast scale of interstellar warfare, the slightest micro-deviation yielded catastrophic misses. Across a distance of 0.1 light-years—over 900 billion kilometers, an expanse a sub-light civilization could never traverse in an entire era, an angular error of a single nanometer at launch would multiply over the light-years until the warhead missed its target by hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

A single nanometer is roughly the width of three silver atoms or ten carbon atoms.

Even a mature interstellar civilization struggled with precision targeting over such absurd distances.

Therefore, to strike an adversary across deep space, one required verified predictive tracks, incredibly precise telemetry, and a saturation barrage to guarantee hits through sheer numerical volume.

Superluminal missiles sounded invincible, yet they could not escape the immutable laws of targeting physics. Because the missile moved faster than light, its guidance computers were sealed inside the warp bubble, completely blind to realspace.

It could not act as a homing weapon; it was effectively an unguided relativistic bullet. Deploying it for precision strikes required stationary targets like planets or moons.

"As everyone understands, when a warp bubble collapses prematurely, the spatial rupture tears the missile apart. Flying blind at superluminal speeds means an internal sensor error could detonate the vehicle at any moment... You cannot rely on a timed fuse."

"Therefore, conventional nuclear warheads are useless; you must utilize antimatter!"

"The moment the missile’s hull disintegrates upon physical impact, the internal containment field collapses, bringing raw antimatter into direct contact with ambient mass to trigger an instantaneous secondary detonation..."

Professor Hao Yu voiced his lingering dread: "It only took one or two missiles to erase the second moon, yet over a hundred were lost to the star or sent hurtling into deep space... From a purely industrial perspective, we are outmatched by orders of magnitude..."

The officers fell into quiet murmurs, attempting to put themselves into the alien commander’s boots. "Even so, their operational doctrine makes sense..."

"The enemy presumed we were completely oblivious to their presence, so they opted for the fastest, most decisive decapitation strike available."

"They have no idea that the survivors of Planet Dige compromised their position years ago."

As the briefing continued, the initial shuttles from the surface finally docked with the Deep Space’s primary bay, where the returning crew were received like conquering heroes.

When news broke that the Gaia entity’s core had been successfully secured and was being hauled to orbit, cheers erupted throughout the corridors, as if humanity had already secured absolute victory. In many ways, it was a triumph!

They had assumed the mission was doomed, only for Jason to pull off a miracle at the absolute final second. Biologists, material scientists, and theoretical physicists were practically weeping with joy and anticipation at the prospect of studying the miraculous lifeform.

If they could execute an emergency warp jump and escape this star system... they would have won everything!

"From our current telemetry models, the information delay remains our shield... Yes, we still have a tactical window!"

Down below, only Jason’s transport remained, swaying gently as it was reeled through the upper atmosphere by the carbon nanotube cables. It would still take several hours to fully escape the planet’s gravitational well... and the crawling pace set Jason’s nerves on fire.

Yet impatience could not alter the laws of physics.