Kick the Sphere 14 (Patreon)

Kick the Sphere

Chapter 14

-VB-

Before I began making more ships for the inevitable battle that was to break out, I asked myself what I wanted… no.

I asked myself what they needed. Sure, I would certainly fly at least one more ship but what other the other ships? I can’t be my entire fleet, after all.

(Unless I do something about the chakra system that seemingly doesn’t exist inside me yet seems to work anyways).

What I needed was a force of spaceships capable of atmospheric reentry and exit, combat capable against the standard dropship of the Inner Sphere, and fast enough - FTL and subluminal thrusters - to move back and forth within the same solar system within a day.

The Sphere-man in me screamed at the absurdity of it all. A spaceship that can do two of those things would be a dropship, and here I was trying to make an atmospheric-flight capable jumpship with enough firepower to burst open dropships like flies on the wall.

But me from the past(?)/alternative timeline knew better. The current me possessed better.

My “Hound-class combat freighter” was… it probably wouldn’t stand up to anything that wasn’t a civilian dropship. Even “light” military-grade dropships had enough weapons to keep my Cold at bay. However, I wasn’t going to be building another Hound-class combat freighter, which was honestly just a small freighter; it was the Starsector equivalent of a pick up truck, and it was no different here and so using it to fight a military-grade ship of any kind of … was kind of ridiculous.

I needed something either speedy enough that could keep itself out of the dropship’s weapon fire or something tanky enough to take on three dropships’ worth of combined firepower.

This … wasn’t exactly a competition, because my only choice was small and speedy. See, while I did have an infinite resource generator, that resource generator was limited in how much it could produce per day. I was also a bottleneck myself as I could only build so much. Even if I spent all of my clones and my time working on a single ship, I didn’t think that I would have something that could take on three dropships by itself.

Thankfully, I had already bought and built a Fuel Production Facility, which had produced a lot of fuel that I kept.

(Antimatter was a good source of FTL and sublight thruster fuel, and anyone who dared to suggest that I kept it around as ammunition for tactical orbital bombardment or even a stockpile for revenge saturation bombardment strike against anyone who burned my new home is a liar.)

With fuel not being an issue, I didn’t have to worry about efficiency but I did have to worry about capacity.

I had my parameters.

It was time to get to work.

-VB-

Lieutenant Colonel Charles Caggins looked at the lost planet.

When the jumpship captain told him of this system, he didn’t think that his quarry would be here. After all, if the quarry didn’t know how to come to this system in the first place, then they wouldn’t be able to, right?

Still, he needed to check out the planet and so he’d burned toward it.

And my my my… his quarry, the creator of the new FTL method, was here. His sensor officer recorded the pings of radar, magnetometrics, gravimetrics, and ladar. Someone was here and they were on the lookout for interlopers.

He didn’t bother to contact the mysterious inventor. The League wanted them alive, but that was the only mission they had. Charles knew the inventor would try to flee, so he burned toward the planet at high speed.

It would be another three days before they arrived in low orbit of the planet, though.

“Lieutenant colonel,” the sensor officer, Lieutenant Allana Adams, spoke up. “We have five signatures leaving the planet’s atmosphere. They’re burning hot toward us.”

Charles immediately brought up his feed of the ship’s sensors, and saw -.

“What the fuck?!” he hissed before thumbing the switch for the microphone built into his armchair. “This is Lieutenant Colonel Caggins to all dropships. Prepare for battle!”

“Got an image of the foremost boogie!”

The image came up on Charles’s computer, and he frowned. It looked odd. He’s never seen that particular model of fighter before.

“Size?”

“At least a heavy fighter, sir.”

He grunted.

Three dropships against … five heavy fighters. Only one of his dropships had aerospace deck rated for deep space use, and that dropship - his dropship - only had four light fighters. It wouldn’t be too big of -.

“They just jumped into fifteen clicks from our positions!”

He froze.

“What?”

“They are now at fourteen clicks and closing in fast! Orders, sir!” Lieutenant Adams asked. “Thirteen click!”

Suddenly, Charles felt a shiver run up and down his spin.

Of course. Of course the inventor would make more! Why would he simply run away to a planet within easy reach of the League if it wasn’t for the fact that most people didn’t know about this system?!

“Power up all weapons! Get the fighters out!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Twelve clicks!”

They weren’t going to get the fighters out before the boogies engaged them. He looked down at his thin datapad again and saw the second image, which made up three of the five boogies. Charles also realized that unlike his own fighters, whose weapons were all forward-facing, all of these “fighters” had rotating turrets of some kind. In a dogfight, his fighters were not going to be able to even chase them without getting shot at.

“Ten clicks!”

“I want a clean alpha strike on them. Gunners and launchers, do not fire yet!”

“Seven clicks!”

“Steady…”

“Five-!”

“Steady!”

“Thr-! They are in weapon range!”

“HOLD!”

“They’re fi-”

“FIRE!”

The ship shook as a dozen turrets, guns and rockets, fired simultaneously and kept on firing.

“Enemy rockets, shoot it down!”

“Evasive maneuvers!”

“They just sped by! What the -?”

“No hit! No hi-! Dropship Centaur-VII is down! It’-! Centaur-VII lost with all hands!”

“WHAT-!?” Charles shouted in utter shock.

Then his dropship lurched side to side violently, and everything spun clockwise before he and everyone else on the bridge got their footing back.

“Lower level has been breached! Level 5 and 6 are gone!”

“Main thrusters 1 and 2 are not responding! We’re spinning!”

“The fighter bay is gone! All hands presumed lost!”

“We’re not hitting anything!”

“Level 4 is leaking air!”

“Dropship Dead Reckoning lost with all hands!”

What was happening?

“It’s their rockets! It looks like a regular rocket but it’s not!” Adams shouted as her station went haywire with … radiation alarms. “The bastards are using nukes!”

“W-?”

And then the top of the bridge’s hull caved in. Fire leaked through.

Then it was everywhere.

For a brief moment, he felt … heat. A blinding and all-encompassing heat.

Finally, it ended in silence.

-VB-

“Op success,” Rebecca intoned deeply before breaking out into giggles from aboard her Star Citizen Corsair-inspired Barbary-class missile boat.

Alan called it “a tiny ship with a lot of punch,” and she was inclined to agree with it when each of her antimatter rockets was enough to destroy one dropship each. That’s the power of one milligram of antimatter. Her Hafrada did what she was built to do: keep the irrationally violent militarists out of her new home.

The radio crackled to life. “{Boo, I wanted a shot at them!}” LWMMG bemoaned from her ship: Virginia, a “Cutlass Black”-inspired Glider-class gunship.

“Stow it, I’m the captain of the squadron!” Rebecca cackled faux-evilly. “Speaking of which, I want you and Jericho to do a sweep over the wrecks. I want to know if anyone one of them made it out of there. Who knows, we might even be able to salvage their mechs or other equipment.”

“{Why even salvage when Alan can make anything better sooner or later?}” Jericho chimed in from her own Glider-class gunship.

Rebecca knew that it was true. Hell, she knew that there was a very good chance that her brand new ship, a gift from Alan, would become obsolete once he started building the really powerful stuff he found in the Atlantean Database. He could call it Lantean for all she cared, but she was going to call it Atlantean.

“Because it’s never wrong to have more!”

“{You sound like a hoarder!}”

Gasp! “You take that back!”

After a moment, everyone in the comm channel giggled.

Personally, Rebecca was more impressed with Alan himself. Sure, the man was gifted with unexplainable superpower power to purchase more powers seemingly for no reason (which was why she called it supernatural, duh?), but he’d put actual work in a time crunch to put out five rough but still beautiful ships (beauty was in the eyes of the beholder and God, and Rebecca found her Hafrada beautiful in what it was: Alan’s personal gift to her; thus it was more beautiful than anything else in her possession right now because he didn’t need to make one just for her, but he called Hafrada hers specifically!).

Of course, everyone also knew that none of these ships were safe. All of the ships could fly, make safe atmospheric exits and re-entries, keep the atmosphere in, shoot guns and rockets, warp with faster-than-light engines, fly intuitively, and resist shear and tension the ship itself might make from turns and accelerations. All of these put together made for very fascinatingly powerful ships for their size, especially if she compared them to the “dropships,” “jumpships,” and “warships” used by the locals.

However.

None of the ships could survive sustained attacks. Alan had pushed himself hard to get the frames and basic work done but he could not make armor plates and shield generators ready in time even with the help of everyone in the company and allies. If their enemies had been proactive and known about her and her squadron’s ability to warp jump, then they might have had their fighters out and ready. That … would have been seriously bad.

But the surprise attack would remain a surprise attack for at least one more engagement.

Until then…

“VICTORY!” she shouted into the comm.

All she got was a cacophony of idiots incapable of understanding triumph.

“{Gah, lower your volume!}”

“{Holy shit, my ears…}”

“{What the hell, Rebs…}”

“{...ow.}”

“... Sorry.”