Chapter 384: Suicide Squad

"Stay calm, everyone. Keep your heads..."

"Looking at the tactical data, those superluminal missiles did not target Planet Dige directly. Their objective was to annihilate our fleet, but they held back from destroying the biosphere. Striking Planet Dige risks killing the Gaia entity and if the Gaia entity dies, their entire expedition is meaningless!"

"...Their strategic objective forces them to hesitate!"

Listening to the ongoing briefing, Jason clenched his fists tightly. His expression showed no sign of relaxation.

The bridge officers understood all too well: the industrial strength of the two civilizations was simply not in the same league.

Yet the Federation did not need to fight this war head-on. Their objective was not total victory, it was survival.

All they needed was to extract the surface team, engage the Warp Drive, and jump to superluminal speed before the enemy fleet closed the gap.

Just then, an operator’s voice came over the tactical net: "Commander, Titan One and Two have reached their designated firing coordinates!"

Jason’s pulse spiked. A sliver of positive news had finally pierced the gloom.

Reciprocity was the rule of engagement: it was time for humanity to fire back.

On command, the two unmanned Titan warships holding position on the outer vector began firing their heavy laser batteries at maximum cycling frequency.

Orbital sensor satellites over Planet Dige registered intermittent strobes across the hull lattices of the two warships.

Within milliseconds, pulses of ultra-high-energy, invisible, and unobservable coherent light lanced into deep space.

Targeting an incoming superluminal fleet across interplanetary distances was purely a game of statistical probability. The two Titans maneuvered continuously along their orbital tracks, adjusting their fire to saturate the cone of highest probability along the enemy’s projected flight vector.

This conventional, light-speed barrage was far slower and less destructive than an antimatter-tipped superluminal missile. The kinetic yield of a laser strike could never rival raw antimatter annihilation.

Yet directed-energy weapons were vastly more economical and infinitely easier to scale across an orbital firing grid.

Pumping thousands of high-energy pulses per second rapidly pushed the weapon systems past their safe operational margins. The heavy emitter arrays radiated enormous thermal blooms; viewed from tens of thousands of kilometers away, the barrels glowed a cherry-red, like incandescent iron filament.

The surrounding liquid nitrogen cooling systems boiled off furiously, venting massive plumes of vapor into the vacuum to shed heat and sustain the overclocked firing rate.

This tactical exchange was like a blindfolded duel fought in turns across astronomical gulfs. The enemy had acted on month-old reconnaissance to vaporize the second moon, scoring a calculated strategic success.

Yet across those light-hours of void, the alien armada could not yet confirm whether the human mothership had perished. They would only receive confirmation once the light from the detonation traversed the distance to their sensor arrays days later.

Such extreme latency was an inherent reality of interstellar fleet warfare, a dynamic never seen in planetary conflicts, demanding absurd computing power and immense orbital networks simply to coordinate fire.

Now it was the Federation’s turn to leverage their sole actionable intelligence: the transmission coordinates extracted from the submerged listening post.

The vector model established by the astrometrics team and cross-referenced with the Gravitational Wave Arrays pointed toward the orbital plane of an uncharted star system roughly 78.8 light-years away. That star was the likely point of origin for the hostile armada.

Furthermore, it implied the enemy’s sustained Warp Drive velocities might far outstrip the Federation’s initial conservative estimates.

Even with known origin coordinates, the enemy’s exact flight corridor remained an educated guess. If the alien admiral altered course mid-transit, every petawatt of laser fire would strike empty space.

A hit was an extreme statistical outlier.

If even a single focused beam among those thousands connected across the void, the gunnery crews could count it as a miracle.

As for the beams that missed, they would drift across the cosmic dark until their energy attenuated into background noise, or perhaps strike an uncharted asteroid or alien biosphere light-years beyond.

Neither Titan carried a living soul aboard. They were piloted by automated combat algorithms, deployed on what was openly a suicide mission.

Even if both hulls were reduced to floating slag, humanity would not lose a single life.

The two Titans continued their continuous burn, drawing further away from Planet Dige and accelerating toward the outer boundaries of the star system.

To prepare for this battle, the warships had been retrofitted with composite hyperalloy plating, and their internal compartments were flooded with pressurized nitrogen gas.

In the absence of deflector shielding, layered ablative armor and nitrogen-filled voids provided the best possible passive defense against incoming directed-energy fire, as the dense gas absorbed laser penetration through thermal scattering.

The Titan-class platform was a relatively recent design, drafted and fielded within the past few years. Because of its complex modular systems, its autonomous combat AI was still in preliminary fleet testing.

Under peacetime Federation naval regulations, many critical system overrides required manual authorization by human officers.

Operating without a living crew, the automated Titans could only deploy roughly eighty percent of their maximum combat performance.

The command staff had briefly debated conscripting surviving native soldiers from Planet Dige to act as crew, but the proposal was dismissed immediately.

Bridging the ideological gulf was impossible; native survivors had no incentive to throw their lives away for human survival. Furthermore, training an alien crew to operate Federation military hardware would take months they did not have. Placing untrained natives at the consoles would be an unmitigated disaster.

Relying on combat AI remained the only viable option. Eighty percent operational efficiency under algorithmic control was far superior to panicked or incompetent conscripts.

Jason watched the remote telemetry feed of the Titans on his console. The laser arrays fired continuously at peak output for thirty minutes before automatically cycling down to prevent catastrophic barrel melting.

After cycling liquid nitrogen through the cooling loops for several minutes, the systems spooled back up and resumed their barrage.

Fire, cool, reset, fire.

Yet this sustained barrage offered no real comfort. Watching their transport being hauled up by the carbon nanotube cables, Jason felt an agonizing impatience clawing at his chest. He willed the winch to pull faster.

An hour dragged by.

The Federation poured petawatts of energy into the void, yet the sensor scopes showed nothing but blackness, as though they were shooting at ghosts. The orbital theater felt eerily silent and surreal.

Yet those salvaged coordinates were the only tactical shield standing between the fleet and total annihilation.

"Our firepower is far too diffuse," a tactical analyst remarked quietly. "The saturation grid woven by just two Titans can only disrupt their approach at best. The statistical probability of crippling a capital ship at this range is negligible."

"If only we had twenty hulls..."

Interstellar warfare was a strange, paradoxical beast. A directed-energy strike took days or weeks to traverse the orbital distance, yet the moment realspace contact occurred, the engagement was decided within fractions of a second.

It carried an eerie resemblance to the Age of Sail.

When navies were separated by horizons of open ocean, officers could dine, conduct strategy sessions, and debate doctrine for hours before an engagement.

Yet interstellar war operated on scales infinitely more brutal. The distances, velocities, and destructive yields were orders of magnitude larger.

The waiting in deep-space combat was agonizingly prolonged, yet the kinetic resolution was measured in milliseconds.

Such warfare placed a brutal psychological strain on a civilization’s endurance, situational adaptability, and crisis response.

Under remote protocols transmitted from the Deep Space, the artificial intelligence cores aboard the Titans operated under a single prime directive: Cover the withdrawal of the mothership and eliminate hostiles at all costs.

Every fusion core, drive manifold, and weapon capacitor was pushed past safe thresholds.

Sustained overclocking would inevitably cause internal component burnout.

Yet no one mourned the hardware. The Deep Space carried far heavier weapon arrays, but swinging the colossal mothership into the direct firing line was unthinkable. Humanity’s ark could not risk direct engagement.

Just as the Titans completed another firing cycle, a Senior Scientist raised a horrifying tactical deduction over the bridge link that sent a cold spike through Jason’s chest, instantly driving threat levels to critical.

"Commander, our assumptions are flawed! If the enemy has already deployed superluminal kinetic missiles, they will undoubtedly deploy superluminal drone swarms alongside them!"

"Humanity does not hold a monopoly on autonomous craft! We must prepare for autonomous relativistic attack drones burning straight into our orbital sector!"

The Senior Scientist shouted into his link.

The warning shattered Jason’s focus like ice water. Cold dread seized his spine. Without a second’s hesitation, he instructed two immediate fleet orders:

"First: authorize the Titans to release continuous saturation fire along the vector—railgun arrays, heavy laser batteries, and all sub-light nuclear torpedoes! Fire everything!"

"Second: the Deep Space initiates emergency burn immediately! Do not wait for standard docking—accelerate into orbital climb while continuing to winch our transport! Disregard the structural stress limits! We are out of time!"