Blue Star Enterprises

"Grand Commander, you were correct, it was a trap," his subordinate said in surprise.

"Of course I was correct," Thesska hissed back in annoyance.

His subordinate flattened his ears and bowed his head slightly in supplication.

Thesska narrowed his eyes dangerously at the man. The bow wasn't quite enough to show true supplication, but Thesska didn't call him out on his insubordination. He knew his subordinate was testing the waters before a challenge. It was common amongst the young when their blood ran hot during a hunt. If the young fool was dumb enough to issue a challenge during the ongoing hunt, he was too stupid to let live. If he waited until the hunt was concluded, Thesska would still kill him, but he would offer the whelp some dignity in that case.

He turned his eyes away from his subordinate without showing any emotion. Internally, he was ecstatic. The humans had turned out to be a far better prey than he could have hoped for. Not only were they willing to fight, but they had tactics and could plan traps.

"Should I order the fleet forward, Grand Commander?" the subordinate asked.

If the humans had one trap, they may have others. He couldn't afford to send his entire force into a meat grinder, even though he wished he could meet the enemy head-on. Those were the whims of the young. He wasn't afraid of doing so, but he had a grander goal, one that would not be reached if the enemy managed to take out his meager fleet.

Thesska was glad his mind was augmented; it allowed him to process the question and come up with a solution before it looked like he was hesitating. "No," he replied pointedly. "Tell Commander Veshaan to take his paw and see if he can capture or destroy that command ship. This will allow him to restore his honor after he failed to make adequate repairs to his Emperor's blessed vessel."

If the commander died to a secondary trap, he would have proven to be inadequate for the task, as well as showing the human's hand. If he survived, he would regain his honor and let Thesska know if the humans had any more traps waiting for them. It was a win-win.

As his subordinate went to carry out his orders, Thesska pinged his technologue back in the human system where the gate had been.

The screen flared to life, showing an older female.

The female bowed low, her ears flattened. "Grand Commander, to what do I owe the pleasure of your call?"

"Have your efforts to establish a proper shipyard borne fruit, yet?" he asked, his tone quite a bit gentler than he used with his crew. She was, after all, a natural-born of his house and not some clone or lower caste.

"I'm afraid not, Grand Commander. The human tech base is primitive at best. The two fabrication yards you brought through have allowed me to speed up production of the human ships, but it will be at least half a cycle before we can produce proper ships. To make up for that, we are outfitting the human vessels with the Emperor's blessing. The cloning is ramping up as expected, but the accelerated aging and memory implants will ensure they have equally short lives."

Thesska curled his lip in distaste at having to outfit an inferior ship with the shielding, but he needed additional ships now, even if they were subpar. If he could show the ruling caste that he was able to finish a hunt with subpar ships and soldiers, that would only make it that much easier for him to challenge his brother for the position of Emperor.

Thesska always had multiple contingency plans in place. That's why the two fabrication yards had come through the hypergate right after he determined the system was clear of hostiles. The vessels had been hidden outside the human system because he knew the humans would come for the gate eventually.

The fact that they had given him nearly three full days to pull additional ships through was simply a bonus. It was also infuriating. If the majority of the Shican armada hadn't already departed for the border to take the long way by the Emperor's decree, he would have had many more vessels to send through the gate.

It was just another sign of his brother's ineptitude when it came to ruling.

When the humans blew up the gate and left, he signaled those ships and put his technologue to work to see if they could produce locally sourced Shican vessels. It seemed that wouldn't be the case. A half cycle would put the armada within human territory.

It would be annoying to have to manage the armada instead of a smaller strike force that could hunt more effectively without being detected, but he hoped his goal would be completed by then. If not, the full might of the Shican would make quick work of the humans and help pin down the ones protecting them. One way or another, he would have his prey.

"I don't care about the lives of some low caste clones. What about my other command?" Thesska growled softly.

"The human ships were outfitted with the sensors as you requested and are already on their way to you, Grand Commander."

He growled softly in satisfaction upon hearing that. The one ship he lacked when coming through the hypergate had been a tracking ship. Once those arrived, he wouldn't need to chase the human fleets like an enraged cub; he could simply follow their trail.

***

The Leviathan turned as another missile impacted the outer hull. The enemy destroyers had been reduced to ten, but the construction yard had taken a beating. Two of the outer arms had been blasted off and were corkscrewing through the small zone of cleared space, littering it with more debris. The inner hull had taken a few missile strikes, but he kept rotating the vessel to try and intercept the missiles that got past the point defense lasers.

That last one had been the first in over a minute to get through, and only because the enemy had launched a full volley at the same time, making it impossible to intercept them all.

The area he was trapped in had turned into a game of tag, with the enemy trying to close in on them, while Vitor did his best to keep them at bay, even if that meant occasionally slipping into the dense dust and asteroid clouds at the outskirts of the gas pocket.

Unfortunately, he was on his own. The rest of the fleet was still engaged in a pitched battle against the rest of the Xin fleet. They couldn't jump to his position even if they wanted to. Not while the rest of the enemy ships were disrupting gravity in the area.

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"Sir!" the sensor operator yelled in surprise. "The enemy shut down their gravity field."

"How long until we can jump?" Vitor demanded. The enemy had them cornered, so the move made no sense. He had a bad feeling.

"Computer is calculating a vector now," the pilot said as his hands worked the terminal at record speed.

Five new contacts appeared on the tactical display, a moment before his pilot confirmed the calculation had finished. He didn't need his sensor operator to tell him the ugly truth. It was too late; the enemy had jumped in reinforcements, and the field was active once again. Worst of all, the new contacts consisted of Shican ships.

"Pilot, take us straight into the asteroid field!" Vitor ordered.

Vitor turned toward weapons. "Weapons, how charged are the laser pods?"

"Twenty percent, sir."

"It'll have to do. Split them up between the remaining Xin ships and fire at their reactor section."

The enemy had completely ignored the small weapons platforms to focus their fire on the Leviathan. Hopefully, that would be their downfall.

The ship shook slightly as enemy lasers from the new Shican ships struck its hull. The kinetic impact wasn't much, but lasers were far more dangerous than the Xins' autocannons. He was also about to find out how effective the armor was against the Shican's plasma bolts. They were yet to arrive, but he was tracking them on the tactical display.

"Captain!" Weapons shouted. "One of the Xin ships is still operational after the second laser pod attack."

"Don't wait for the lasers to recharge, aim them all and fire at that ship."

Vitor's order went out just before the ship rang like a bell as plasma bolts impacted the last intact docking arm that he had rotated towards the enemy dreadnought.

Four bolts hit near the same spot, and the armor did its job, ablating away and taking the damage with it, but three more struck the same area, and the last plasma bolt flashed through the weakened armor, burning a molten trail through the substructure of the arm until it splashed against the inner armor. The inner armor held, but started to flake away from the impact.

Vitor cursed under his breath; the enemy's targeting was scarily accurate.

"Weapons, I need an update on that last ship!" Vitor said through clenched teeth as the ship rocked continuously.

"The pods are almost aligned," weapons managed to say over the noise of the ship transmitted through their sealed suits.

"Pilot, I want you to jump the moment I give you the order." While Vitor had ordered the ship toward the asteroids, that was only to throw off the enemy and make them think he was heading for the limited protection he might find there. His real goal was to jump, and the only ship still projecting the gravity field was the lone Xin vessel. If they could take it out, the preprogrammed jump should work.

"Firing!" Weapons said a moment later, followed by, "Enemy ship down."

"Jump!" Vitor yelled before weapons completely verified the kill.

He could feel the primed jump drive whine in complaint for being held at capacity for so long, but it jumped, and they weren't immediately turned into a stain across vast swaths of space, so that was something.

Vitor sent a quick update via the comm to the rest of the fleet before shutting down the comm node. It was a risk to send the report if the Shican could track the signal through the jump, but the fleet needed to know what happened.

They reappeared moments later outside the system. As soon as they did, Vitor gave an order to charge the drive again. It turned out to be the right choice. Their warp field formed just as twenty more Shican vessels appeared less than a light minute from them.

That told him two things. The Shican could track a signal through warp space, but they couldn't pinpoint the exit point as accurately. They would have to tighten up their communication protocols to prevent the enemy from locking in on fallback points.

Ten minutes later, Vitor joined the remains of the fleet. It had been battered pretty hard, leaving only forty vessels, and none of them was undamaged. His laser link pinged with a message from Char. He accepted the connection.

"Good to see you survived," the Asgardian leader said.

"It was a close one," he admitted. "I see not everyone was as lucky as I."

"Unfortunately, not, but we made the enemy pay dearly for the attempt. The Xin ships had been reduced to only a few dozen vessels when I ordered the retreat when the Shican finally joined the fight. We might have been able to take the alien bastards if our ammunition was full and our ships were undamaged, but I knew the fight was lost and chose to preserve what ships and crew we could."

While Vitor was no stranger to people under his command dying, he still found it disturbing to hear such a clinical response to so many deaths. He couldn't blame Char for her emotional detachment. She had more experience leading people in battles than he did, and she likely knew you needed to set emotions aside until the fighting was done.

He sucked up the anger he felt at Xin and the Shican and asked his next question. "What about the survivors left behind?"

Char shook her head. "The Shican will make sure there are no survivors long before we can return. We can only pray that our people go down fighting."

Vitor grimaced. Most of the Union ships hadn't been upgraded with Alex's weapons or armor for their equivalent of strike teams. They would have a hard time fighting off the normal Shican, let alone the armored and cybernetically enhanced ones.

Vitor thanked Char before cutting the connection and looking at the loss report. Once again, all of the automated ships had fallen, but the manned BSE ships pulled through. Even Kaela's modified corvette survived the fighting. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that.

They waited in deep space for their drives to cool and reset, allowing the two undamaged mobile construction yards to do some minor repairs before the fleet synced up their jump drives and headed back home. They had been deployed for nearly six months. Supplies were running low, despite the shipments of food, water, and ammunition. The enemy's supplies had to be nearly exhausted as well.

With the enemy weakened, scattered, and low on supplies, the Shican had to realize they couldn't push further into Union space. Twenty-five advanced alien vessels were enough to do considerable damage to the outlying stations, but those had been abandoned and shut down over the last few months. Even the people from Jotunheim Station had been evacuated aboard the other two mobile construction yards.

The goal was to deny the enemy easy targets, and to reach that goal, each of the Asgardian worlds was pumping out massive numbers of Alex's laser pods. Soon, each planet in the Union would add the pods on top of its existing defenses, making them impossible targets for the few Shican ships that were roaming their space. The Asgardians weren't abandoning their stations to the enemy. Each was rigged with enough explosives to destroy the entire structure three times over if the enemy set foot aboard the structures or anyone docked with the facilities without deactivating the hidden security panel.

Vitor had been surprised by the Asgardians' willingness and foresight to set up such a countermeasure, but apparently, it was common practice since the previous Shican War.

While the fleets had disengaged, nobody was foolish enough to think the aliens had given up and gone home. It's possible the Shican were simply gathering the remains of their fleet to give chase, but Vitor didn't think so, and neither did Char.

While the new Shican ships relied mainly on energy weapons instead of projectiles, they were still piloted by biological crews. They would need to eat, and all evidence suggested that the Shican's biology required more calories on average than a human, and there had been no sign of support ships arriving with them. They would have to rely on whatever infrastructure Xin had in place, which was less than ideal, but better than a fleet with an entire convoy of support ships to back it up.

Hopefully, that setback would be enough to temporarily halt their attack, because the Union needed time to recover and rebuild.

After three jumps, the BSE ships separated from the Union fleet, leaving the two undamaged Leviathans to go with Char. Vitor felt it was safe enough to finally depart and head for home since the stealth satellites hadn't picked up any sign of the enemy fleet trailing them since their encounter in Drakvold.

The Shican were likely avoiding the satellites once again, but they had to take their chance to head home, make repairs, and rearm.