NOVEL NEXT B2 Chapter 43
Angar's command to divert to the Lerig Imperial Megastation sparked defiance among the leaders of the shipper and boarding forces. Everyone wanted to head back to their own planet, Ierne.
Their grumbling peaked when a Praefectus Navis acting as the captured ship's captain, a weakling puffed up with rank, challenged him openly.
Angar fixed the man with a stare, praying he wouldn't need to spill his blood. It took only a couple of seconds before the officer's bravado crumbled, and his self-preservation kicked in.
For days, the nanite-induced pain gnawed at Angar's nerves. He refused painkillers or incapacitants, gritting his teeth through the ordeal.
He figured he owed penance for some sins overlooked, and if not, future sins he'd surely commit, bearing it as a grim necessity, a warrior's discipline.
He spent most of the journey in near solitude, sequestered in a cramped machinery-crammed room aboard the Reptiloid ship, near his collected loot.
Simo shared the room with him, though the veteran was burdened with many duties and responsibilities, and entered only to rest or relax.
Angar's focus turned inward, chasing the elusive spark of psychic power that had teased him during his clash with the Neuronaut.
It had been so close. A flicker of possibility, right there, just out of reach, almost like it wanted to manifest.
He could feel it there still, just as close, like a word dancing on the edge of his tongue, refusing to take shape.
Some small thing was missing, a key he couldn't grasp, and the failure gnawed at him, as frustrating as the nanites.
The shipper had a decent foundry, one unable to work his armor, but able to perform some repairs, and the men working it patched what they could.
Now, days later, he stood on the bridge as the shipper emerged from the Lumenstream. Through the scryer's display, the edge of arm unfolded.
Here, where the Orion Arm's outermost fringes came closest to the Rim, the Lerig Imperial Megastation stood ahead, a cluster of massive spheres, a defiant bastion against the void's endless hunger.
Military stations in fringe locations like this were a necessity, as the Old Guard held many of the sparse planets of the Rim, placing the strange Lumen Anchors imperial ships couldn't use within it, standing ready to attack.
The Holy Empire hadn't held a Rim world since the twenty-fifth century. During the Lamia invasion last century, they lost some bastions in the galactic arms closest to touching the Rim.
Four colossal constructs, two behemoths rivaling Terra's moon in girth, and two smaller outposts, danced in a celestial waltz.
Positioned beyond the chaotic swirl of the system's Kuiper-like circumstellar debris belt, at a distant 70 AU from the star's fading grasp, this quartet of stations formed a fortress.
The primary stations, each moon-sized at over three thousand kilometers in diameter, featured hollow, lattice-like shells forged from adamantine composites, carbon nanotubes, and graphene, making them far stronger than any natural world.
Their mass, a fraction of a true moon's, balanced structural might with gravitational subtlety. They orbited their common barycenter, 200,000 kilometers apart, in a stately cycle lasting 225 days, their paths carved with precision to defy the void's perturbations.
Within, for Terran stations, their vast cylindrical habitats spun at a relentless 44-minute period, their centrifugal force conjuring a steady 1g to cradle populations numbering a hundred billion or more souls apiece.
These artificial planets, layered with verdant arcologies and pulsing fusion cores, recycled air, water, and sustenance with near-Divine efficiency, their shields flaring against the cosmic rays that prowled the system's edge.
Flanking them at the L4 and L5 Lagrange points, two smaller stations hovered in gravitational harmony, each about 500 kilometers wide. These outposts, forming equilateral triangles with their titanic kin, required no thrusters to hold their place, the void's own physics anchoring them in eternal orbit.
Housing five billion each, they served as sentinels and city centers, their arrays of sensors scrying for rogue comets, their shields mirrored their larger brethren, warding off the rare but lethal debris that drifted beyond the belt.
A massive Lumen Anchor was embedded within one of these two smaller stations, providing a route from both the Perseus Arm and Sagittarius Arm to Orion, one of many such massive anchors in key locations.
The Technovex priests inside these anchors could guide qualified imperial ships through the void between arms at up to 300 to 800 light years a day, making 8,000 light year journey a two-week jaunt.
This four-body configuration was no accident. A single station, though simpler, risked all in one fragile shell, a lone catastrophe could doom every life. Two primary stations offered redundancy, their mirrored systems ensuring survival if one faltered.
The L4 and L5 outposts, stable as a papal decree, minimized energy costs, their positions unyielding against the star's faint tug at 70 AU, astronomical units equal to about 150 megameters, or 150 million kilometers.
Together, they formed a network of resilience, each station a node in a web of shared resources, linked by laser relays and graviton-propelled shuttles that crossed the 200,000-kilometer gaps in hours, signals flashing in less than a second.
As for why these stations were 50 to 100 AU from a system's sun, beyond the circumstellar debris belt's turbulent embrace? Within a Kuiper-like expanse, comets and asteroids swarmed, their erratic paths threatening collisions that even shields might strain to repel.
Outside the belt such threats dwindled, the sparse void offering a sanctuary where impacts were rare as miracles. The star's gravity posed no challenge to the stations' mass, its orbits, save for the occasional nudge from ion thrusters, always untroubled.
But, a system's circumstellar debris belt's riches of ice, volatiles, and metals remained within reach, harvested, ensuring the cluster's self-sufficiency.
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The megastations' design was made for endurance. Their hollow shells, braced by fractal lattices, housed stacked habitats where millions of spires pierced artificial skies, each level a world of steel and green.
Fusion hearts, pulsing with the fire of captured stars, powered systems that recycled every molecule, while radiative fins cast waste heat into the void's chill.
All four bodies bristled with sensor spines and deflection arrays, their armaments poised to vaporize any errant rock or enemy's fleet.
To Angar's surprise, Lerig wasn't the Terran fortress he'd expected. Its unnerving and strangely blocky, angular design marked it unmistakably as a Gray station.
He assumed the name 'Lerig' must've come from the nearby system or its circumstellar debris belt, as it bore no resemblance to any Gray term he knew.
Even more surprising was the graveyard of ships cluttering the void in every direction.
Hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands, of shattered hulks of Gray, Terran, and Old Guard make drifted in eerie silence, their twisted frames catching the starlight.
Six super-class ships floated dead alongside at least a hundred capital-class ship carcasses.
Among them stood vessels emblazoned with Albion's heraldry, their crests marred by scorch marks and gaping breaches.
Hidetada must have summoned that world's fleet to this slaughter before leaving that system.
The megastation itself bore scars of a brutal assault. All four of its colossal spheres showed blackened gashes and pitted, sparking surfaces.
A grand pack gave battle here, responsible for this onslaught and all the destruction. And the amount and scale of destruction was nearly impossible to grasp. Six super-class ships.
The Holy Empire had won a great victory.
Towing, recovery, and scavenger vessels swarmed the debris field like carrion flies, hauling wreckage toward the station's gaping hangars or picking through the remains for salvage.
On the bridge, the crew snapped into action, their sharp voices and rapid gestures signaling the shipper had been hailed and cleared, maneuvering to dock.
Orders flew, but Angar had no desire to learn ship navigation or functions. His mind was elsewhere, on the loot stowed in a bay near a large hatch. The easily movable loot. Many war-machine corpses were packed into other rooms, and he'd sealed them with his hacking module.
The machines were stripped of weapons and what Frieden claimed were the most valuable parts, but if he could earn money from the corpses, he would. Same with the biomachinery that couldn't be removed from the organic corpses, those too sealed.
He had killed a lot of Old Guard on his own. A lot. So, he had amassed a fortune in plunder.
Unlike the Void Reapers, the Old Guard used the highest quality gear. If the Zephuros had survived, and he assumed it and Hidetada had, he stood to earn a mountain of points for each category of gear.
That was, if Old Guard items and biotech qualified. He hoped so. He had a small share of the liquid-energy stolen by Ebon Drains too, each vial worth a vast sum.
Three full squads of Ierne soldiers, already paid, guarded his loot, and awaited his orders to haul it to where it needed going. He'd wait with them.
An hour later, the ship shuddered as it docked, a light quake reverberating through the hull from landing while attached to an enemy battleship.
Angar's comm crackled to life, and Deli's familiar voice cut through the static, professional as always, but warmer than usual. "Welcome to Lerig Imperial Megastation, Sir," Deli said. "Glad to have you back with us."
Angar's brow furrowed. He leaned against a bulkhead, one hand adjusting how the helmet sat. "How'd you know I was here?" he asked, curious. "You can just connect to my comms without me knowing?"
Deli's chuckle came through. "When you're in range, you show up on my console, Sir. And we never dropped the link. I'm always connected to your comms when you're close. This is a dedicated channel."
Angar grunted. "Understood. How many…" He paused, rethinking his words, and a better way to phrase the question. "Did we lose anyone? Our crew?"
"No, Sir," Deli replied, his voice reassuring. "Not with you and Simo now accounted for. Thank the Three."
"Good," Angar said. He shifted, his armor clanking against the wall. "I've got a lot of loot. Can you pin the Zephuros' location for me?"
Deli's tone softened. "No use, Sir. The ship's in drydock for repairs. We took very heavy damage. Only me, Saint Hidetada, and Saint Thryna are still aboard. I'll pin a location for you to crate and store the loot."
"How long for repairs?" Angar asked.
"At least a week," Deli said. "Probably two."
Angar nodded. "And Ierne? The pack spared the planet? No Old Guard forces attacked?"
"Not that I know of," Deli replied. "The Saint's got his own forces headed there to secure it. Between us, Sir, he's very interested in Primordial remnants. The Old Guard share that obsession, and if they were aiming to kick off a Cataclysmic-rated event instead of just invading, I'd bet they know there's something on Ierne."
And the planet would be safe in Hidetada's grip. Same with Albion. His appointed noble ruling the world, loyal to him, key positions filled by his hand, his own off-world forces moving in.
Angar shoved the thought aside. "How long ago did you reach Lerig?" he asked. "And when did the Old Guard strike?"
"Five days back," Deli replied. "The Blightscales, the grand pack crushed here, ambushed us about fifteen AU out from Lerig. We limped in under a storm of fire, barely shielded by the station's fleets that met us halfway. The pack ignored them, hell-bent on gutting the Zephuros. We scraped into the docking bay by a miracle."
The Blightscales were a formidable but relatively minor grand pack, sworn to the Horrors of the Void, a colossal prime pack that commanded dozens of such forces, one of the three dominant ruling entities among the Old Guard Reptiloids. Its Matriarch was ancient, cold, and ruthlessly calculating.
Angar's mind churned, piecing it together. He was going to ask if the Matriarch survived. With the pack defeated and the megastation still intact, the Blightscale Matriarch had escaped, as was typical for her kind.
Instead, he asked, "How'd the battle play out? And the pack we fought first, who were they?"
"A spectacle to behold," Deli said, a spark of awe in his voice. "We were docked for most of it, licking our wounds. That chase to Lerig? Brutal. I thought we were dead a hundred times over. The battle raged three days, all four stations' defenses hammering the pack, but they kept clawing for the Zephuros in the bay for over a day. The first pack, the one your captured ship hailed from, was the Dark Depths."
Angar grunted, picturing the chaos he'd missed, wishing he could've seen it. "For the Dark Depths fight, after the Neuronaut's ship hit the Lumenstream, what happened?"
"Before that, the Matriarch escaped in one of those tube-things like Azgoth," Deli said. "The capital-class leviathan's drives were sabotaged, stranding it. That's when the Matriarch took off. Then their three battleships bolted, jumping together. We and the rest of the survivors limped here after securing the leviathan."
"Any other captured Dark Depths ships show up since?" Angar pressed.
"Just yours," Deli answered. "The other two are still missing."
Angar hoped the other ships showed up at some point, maybe at Ierne.
He'd wager Hidetada had likely foreseen it all, from the Dark Depths' ambush en route to Lerig, the Matriarch's escape alerting the Blightscales, and their furious assault and defeat here.
Deli had been in the Zephuros crew for a decade, a good source of inside information.
"Since we found the Devourer on Ierne, did Hidetada predict this whole mess?" asked Angar.
Deli chuckled wryly. "My answer to questions like that is always the same – probably." He paused, then added, "Oh, and you're expected at a victory ball in three days. You're to escort Harc. Attendance is mandatory."
Angar's brow furrowed again, his voice tinged with confusion. "A Gray victory ball?"
Deli laughed. "No, Sir. A Terran ball. All stations have sections for each species, set to their atmo and grav standards. And as a megastation, despite being military, most of the population's civilian. Has to be, to keep the place running."
"Understood," Angar said. "Where are we staying?"
"The crew's got quarters at Le Cheval Noir, a hotel bordering the nobles' district," Deli replied. "One of the highest-end luxury hotel chains in the galaxy. Our boss owns them, or a big piece of them. He wants you at the Wardens of the Ashen Veil bastion though. That's set near the naval yards, straight down the same main throughway as the Enlightened Scribe Library and the main cathedral."
Angar opened his mouth to ask why, then closed it. Hidetada wouldn't have shared his reasons with Deli. Besides, the operator was stuck on the ship while the rest of the crew got to enjoy a luxury hotel.
"Thank you, Deli," he said, glad this interaction with the operator was going better than usual.
"That's what I'm here for, Sir," Deli replied. "Kong's meeting you at the crates to collect your loot. Armor too, and anything else needing repairs."