Chapter 996 996 First Glimpse
[Narsian Commanders, please move next to the lead two Destroyers, and we will pull you into our Warp Field to maintain maximum travelling speed here where Portals are unstable.] Max directed, hoping that they would listen.
The vessels didn't respond with a message, but they did move into position so that the Destroyers could extend their Warp Field over the Colony Ships.
Since they were so similar to Terminus, Nico already had the details of the modifications needed to bring them into the Warp Field, and the Android Destroyers had more than enough power for the task, as they had been made to sustain maximum firing rates, including a constant torpedo creation and launch schedule.
With the positioning sorted, the Colony Ships were grabbed in a Gravity Beam and locked in place while Nico led the fleet into warp, sending precise trajectories and speeds to all the vessels present.
If the current paces were kept, the speed difference would let them arrive at the Rift by the end of the day and hopefully before the Anomaly Fleet suffered catastrophic damage.
The Anomaly Defence Fleet had only minimal supplies for repair and restocking since they had left in a hurry, while Max had an entire fleet of repair and medical technicians with him.
They had flown through the Warp for three hours when the first sensor data from the Anomaly fleet made it back to them.? There were thousands of objects emerging from the rift, some of them retreating and firing back toward the rift and the rest charging forward.
[Nico, have you got an analysis for me?] Max asked.
[Working on it. Most of the retreating vessels are Darklings and Arisen, with smaller numbers of other species in their midst. On the other side, it looks like a mix of ships and small planets. Most of the ships seem to match what we saw of the Myceloids but are more advanced, while the planets are shielded in some strange barrier that our sensors can't identify.
I'm working on identifying who is on them now, as well as the rest of the vessels in the advancing fleet.]
The enemy was using entire planets as attack vessels? That was a new one. But the unidentified vessels were a great cause for concern. Max had thought that they were at least aware of the greatest threats in the region, but it looked like that wasn't the case.
The unidentified ships had a harsh and angular design to them that Max recognized as an ablative armour design intended to deflect solid projectiles. So, whatever they had been fighting in the past, they weren't completely unprepared for the fury of the Mass Drivers or the Nuclear Torpedos.
Their inability to identify the barrier around the fleet was the greatest concern, though. If he couldn't even analyze it, he couldn't [Optimize] the fleet's weapons to fight against it.
His System Functions were already on it, as were Nico's and the AI of the Colony Ship that they had just created, but so far, no real progress had been made.
According to all the sensors, it was something that shouldn't exist in reality, a mathematical impossibility, but he could see it there and the effect that it was having on the weapons of the defenders.
So, he changed his tactics. Instead of trying to analyze the impossible, he started to analyze the weapons of the Darklings and the Arisen to isolate the commonalities between weapons that actually worked against the strange energy barrier.
You didn't always have to understand how something worked to know how to destroy it. It might be crude, but it could be effective, and the System was having much better luck identifying the common elements between known weapons to identify what they could do to make their own work.
It looked like the Anomaly Fleet was going to reach battle well before he could make it to them, and he needed a bit of time to find out how to adjust their own energy weapons to match the requirements.
It took two hours, and the First Fleet was almost in combat by the time that he had enough data. The results made Max laugh out loud. Their existing Ion Cannons, which had been modified to fight the Arisen, and the Warp Field shielded Mass Driver rounds would both be effective as they were.
Max passed that data on to the fleet, hoping to give them a bit of hope before the battle started.
He was still far too distant to sense their thoughts, but the responses from the various technical departments were all positive.
An incoming message from the Valkia caught his attention. Their Commander had caught on to a strange phenomenon on the battlefield. Various ships were being grabbed by an energy field and thrown into combat within the barrier surrounding the planetoids.
Max took the chance to open their sensors to the other layer, where a similar battle was going on, but with different species supporting the Darklings and Arisen. There was also something more. Something terrible and cruel, an intelligence behind the actions, and he could feel its will surge every time another ship was thrown into close combat.
But how did he explain to the Valkia that there was a greater being directing this battle and that the phenomenon was no accident?
[Understood Valkia Commander. I have located the source of the phenomenon. It is being caused by an unknown species from the other layer of space. Open your sensors in this configuration, and you will see it.]
That was the best way. If they saw it for themselves and let the impossibility of that creature be shown in their sensors for a while, they would understand much better than any words could tell them.
The communications channels from his fleet were still silent when the First Fleet started to send out their deployment messages. They were sending the Titan Class Mecha in reinforced wings, twenty at a time, and they had just reached the lead ranks of ships in combat.
The fleet had stopped among the Darklings, who had moved to make space for the new arrivals in their defensive formation, and within a second, the first of the Titan Class units were out and firing, creating gaps in the enemy's defences that the remarkably nimble attack craft of the Darklings made sure to exploit.
It was the same as when they had fought alongside Max against the Arisen. The exact same weapons and tactics. The forethought that went into forming battle tactics without the allied species understanding what they were doing was absolutely brilliant.
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