Proxima Centauri Oort Cloud (3)
No sooner had I issued the command than blue translucent holograms sprang up all around me. Real-time data flooded in from every direction. White had sidled up quietly and placed a battered, half-falling-apart paperback on my lap. The cover read Field Manual. For someone like me, struggling to get a handle on what the hell was happening, it was priceless intel. So I flipped it open right away.
The first thing I saw inside the cover was a sloppy scrawl: 'Blindly following the manual is rookie behavior.'
Spot on. Manuals provide the big-picture framework—you can't worship them like gospel. You've got to adapt them fluidly to the situation and the authority you've been given. Especially when things are twisting sideways like now, nothing beats quick thinking. That said, there wasn't time to sit back and pore over it page by page. So I zeroed in on the armaments section—the most critical part. A bookmark was jammed in there like a neon sign screaming important.
Opening to it, the heading hit me right away: Everest-class Battleship.
I remembered White's words perfectly. This ship I was on was the second of her class: UNSS Covenant. That meant I could piece together the basics.
But even as I scanned the manual, I felt the hull shifting beneath us. For the record, my only order had been 'fight'.
"I'll handle ship-to-ship combat, Admiral," White said in her flat, businesslike tone. "I'll report detailed status updates. You just monitor the overall battle picture and call the shots."
What the—? This felt suspiciously like I'd been relegated to a glorified screen-watcher.
Now I just stared at the displays in silence. Time to judge based on the big picture and the manual. That was my role from here on out.
A colossal ship, silently lurking amid the Oort Cloud's debris field, began to stir slowly. UNSS Covenant was emblazoned on her prow. Among all the vessels built by the UNFG, she was the grandest—and indisputably the mightiest.
The ship crept forward, sensors locked on the source of anomalous gravity waves. Gravity waves normally propagated at lightspeed, making time lags inevitable in open space. But FTL travel required plunging through inert space, a hyperspace realm where Einstein's relativity didn't apply. Even so, distortions from real-space gravity hit harder here, letting even tiny fluctuations register with exquisite sensitivity. Waves in inert space moved dozens to billions of times faster than light, turning gravity-field waveform analysis into the gold standard for pinpointing ships' positions.
Precise location fixes were tricky, and response times lagged behind radar, so electromagnetic scans ran in parallel. White, the ship's auxiliary AI, threw every sensor online to triangulate the four unidentified intruders breaching the system. Gravity waves ruled out innocent merchant traffic—no civilian ship spewed them like that.
These four were broadcasting aggressively, hunting for something. That let White nail their rough positions. Next up: radar for precision locks. Visuals took time but beat gravity scans for accuracy. She fired EM pulses at the estimated coords.
Four seconds. Round trip: exactly four. That put them two light-seconds out. Refined radar pinged the hot zones next. Long-range arrays narrowed it down. Fire-control radar followed, zeroing in.
Four seconds again—but shorter than before. They were closing on UNSS Covenant. White fed the data to the long-range laser batteries, fine-tuning positions and angles for optimal coverage. A fraction off, and batteries would fall out of firing arc. Sure, coilguns by the hundreds or missile pods by the thousands offered alternatives, but at two light-seconds, only lightspeed or near-c weapons would connect.
Now radar tracked continuously. Hostiles confirmed: one battleship, three escorts. Modest force. If they'd spotted Covenant, it'd be ten battleships minimum storming Proxima.
Laser batteries whirred to life, aligning to firing solutions. Sixteen twin 1GW mounts—eight dorsal, eight ventral—each capable of sustained beams. Proper ship attitude let all thirty-two engage the quartet perfectly.
Sustained lasers meant brutal waste heat, worse than pulsed. No massive capacitors needed, though, so they stayed compact—viable as secondaries or AA. Still, twin 1GW outputs overwhelmed even giant lenses; continuous fire capped at ten seconds. Afterward, heat-soaked radiators ejected, and scorched lenses swapped for cryocooled spares.
Laser turrets irised open. Radiators vented into the void, bloated with excess heat. Purple light gathered at muzzles. Then lasers lanced out—billions of pulses per second—aimed with exquisite math for two seconds ahead, factoring velocity, heading, angle.
White ignited the plasma drives. Firing had blown their cover. All four hostiles pivoted radars our way. Four seconds max till their combined broadsides hit. Ion engines were efficient but sluggish for evasion; plasma was the play.
Covenant surged from leisurely 15 knots to over 20 in a heartbeat. A blue laser grazed the nozzle fringe—shields tanked it, but thermal load spiked. No ejecting radiators here; cryocoolant was the only option. Shields demanded even tighter heat discipline—one melted panel, and they collapsed.
Speed topped 25 knots as the ten-second barrage ended. Glowing radiators—container-sized, trivial against her 15km bulk—spewed free from all sixteen mounts. A spectacular light show; mistaken for battle debris at a glance. Searing at 1500°C+, they bled intense IR. Decoys by design, with thermocouples and plasma thrusters for independent maneuvering—slow for weapons, perfect for fakes.
White checked hits. Incoming radar warnings dropped to one. IR sensors screamed: one ship erupting in unbearable heat. No hull could shrug that off. Sunk.
Two more showed hull-wide IR spikes—radars blinded, into emergency cooldown. Engines and shields offline till then: neutralized.
Last one flickered hotter but kept radar lock. The battleship, likely. White swung unused 1GW pulsed batteries around. Gargantuan turrets dwarfed the secondaries, dominating half the decks each.
Pulsed waste heat was milder than continuous, but gigawatt pulses demanded capacitors galore. Radiators stayed small; caps took the space. Volatility meant careful placement—hence the deck-hogging bulk. Lenses were bigger, sustained fire weaker; fatigue limited bursts to ten seconds despite rotation. Swappable, like the rest.
Pulse turret traversed, exposing its modest radiator. Even partial shields wouldn't save them—pulses punched through thin ones effortlessly. Secondaries finished radiator swaps, ready.
But the enemy battleship fired first. Beams slammed shields; load redlined in seconds. White dosed coolant, cooling slow.
Hostile twisted for evasion—but White had anticipated, gunning Covenant to 48 knots. Nearly 1.15% lightspeed.
Continuous lasers hammered her shields—upper deck's sixteen only; geometry nixed ventral. Heat piled on relentlessly. She counterfired, turrets tracking. White spun up reserve shield emitters. Threshold plummeted.
Dozens of beams lashed out. Covenant unleashed her main pulse batteries—sixteen upper lasers, ventral sidelined. Energy overwhelmed their radiators.
Three seconds post-impact: IR spiked wildly. White halted continuous fire, slewing pulses to predicted position 1.7 seconds out. Secondaries retargeted crippled escorts.
Seven seconds. Overkill for defenseless wrecks. Violet fury lit the void. Six 1GW pulses bathed her armor—it glowed on contact. Nanosecond strobes gnawed precisely. Fragments sprayed; beams bored inward.
Five seconds in: thermal runaway. Vitals hit. The two secondary-struck escorts blazed similarly.
No radars probed Covenant now. Just expanding clouds of metal particles where ships once were.