Kick the Sphere 17 (Patreon)

Kick the Sphere

Chapter 17

-VB-

“You’re not concerned?”

I looked up from where I was designing a new ship. The children found more useful tech from the Lantean database, and I was really eager to incorporate them into this next ship.

I was doing this even though I had less than two days before the pirate-disguised Comstar forces landed on Dansur.

Because the question I’ve just been asked was what I felt.

“Nope,” I replied. “It’s hard to feel concerned over interlopers when I have weapons and means they aren’t even aware of.” What I wanted to do right now was forget about people who weren’t even going to leave evidence of their existence out of documented records I’ll keep. No doubt, Comstar will have its own documentation. “What I’m worried about is not the invasion force,” I told Janice, who stuck around my side. Maybe it was because she was, among the “adult” members of our group, who had an emotional connection to be wary about an invasion while I was … not exactly the same since I got the Forge.

Invasions and raids, infrequent as they were where they lived, was still part of Inner Sphere life. If it wasn’t from Capellans, then it was from mercenaries and pirates. Just like when their city had been wrecked in my first outing in response to the raid, we have seen at least half a dozen raids in our lives.

None of those were pretty.

She was probably fearing just that. For her, a few dropships was already a heavy emotional burden. More than a dozen?

That was a source of horror for her.

I looked away from the CAD and smiled for her. “Don’t worry. They won’t even be able to land,” I told her. However, I was keeping an eye on it from the corner of my eye through the holographic displays of the Manufactory.

But I stopped when I saw her still worried face, so I explained to her how our current first line defenses worked.

---

This time, it was Sabrina’s turn to face the invaders.

However.

It grated on her nerve that while Rebecca got to experience the thrill of combat, she was relegated to being a commander.

… Well, she couldn’t be too upset about it. She got a bigger ship and better ship than Rebecca did, not that either of their ships would remain “high tech” as long as Alan continued to pump out new and exotic technologies like he did right now.

Unlike Rebecca’s boxy and utilitarian Hafrada or the clunky Hounds like the Cold, her ship was not designed and made for direct combat. However, it was a tanky beast. Alan made something called a “hex-grid energy barrier,” which was … real science fiction made into reality.

It was an energy shield.

Though invisible when it doesn’t interact with high kinetic or energy attacks, Sabrina still remembered how beautifully green the shield flared when she first saw it. Her Sentebene was beautiful and felt great.

Part of that was because of how Alan designed her ship. Unlike the Barbary, her Sentebene was the first in line of many ships to come that incorporated the pilot as one of the components of the ship.

In essence, the pilot was the ship and the ship was the pilot. Just as a cut on her skin might hurt her because her skin was a part of her, an impact on the Sentebene would hurt her. However, this also allowed her to pilot the Sentebene fluidly and fluently. She pulled off maneuvers that the Cold, a small Hound, could only pull off because of its size, despite the fact that Sentebene was six times larger than a Hound and thrice as massive as a Barbary.

Now, if it wasn’t shaped suggestively, she might have felt better…

“Captain,” the AI of the ship thrilled with a soft soprano. “The targets will be in range soon.”

“Hmm.”

She and her small squadron of seven - her Sentebene and six others including the Cold piloted by Type 64 - waited at 0.2 AUs away from Dansur right in the path of the invaders. Unlike her and her sisters’ ships, the invaders had to slow down their ships before they reached the orbit.

It was honestly a little sad to see the technological disparity between Alan and the rest of this “universe,” but then again, they were trying to kill Alan.

And Sabrina was not about to let that happen.

Well, she wasn’t going to, but the commander of their small squadron was not her but Ak-15, or Anastasia as she started calling herself.

“Orders, commander?” she radio’ed.

“... Release your drones.”

Sabrina grinned and acted.

See, piloting these “prototype capsuleer” ships was weird. The ship was a part of her body so she wasn’t pressing buttons but “flexing” her mechanisms and gears like how she would move flex her biceps. In this instance, releasing the “replicator drones” slaved to her ship’s computer - and thus her brain - was like snapping her arms out and curling up her fingers into claws.

Ready to pounce and kill at command.

And in the cold and silence of space, her drones buzzed out silently out of the drone hold. Each drone looked like a caltrop than a space-worthy ship-killing automations. It made sense, though. Their jobs were not to shoot bullets or lasers.

“Strike.”

“Engaging.”

And her drones blitzed away, going from zero to a hundred in matter of one second, and sped toward the slowing dropships.

These replicator drones… their purpose was two-fold.

First, they were to kamikaze against the dropships. It wouldn’t make them explode but it would make them splatter, which was not what metals did. But replicators were more fluid than a hunk of metal, and would use that impact to spread themselves over the hulls.

Second, once they had “splattered” over the hulls, they would eat away at it.

It was boring. It was a boring way to destroy your enemies. It was cruel, slow, and boring, especially because these replicator drones could theoretically reach across the entire star system. With how tiny they were, no one would see them coming except for those who had defense systems in place specifically for these drones.

She liked to think of them as viruses.

---

“And most ship sensors are not made to detect something so small. Each replicator drone is the size of a fist,” I smirked. “But that’s where the beauty comes in. Sabrina’s Sentebene doesn’t deploy a handful or even a dozen. It deploys hundreds and has the same effect on spaceships as an old Earth disease called ebola does to the human body.”

“Ebola…?”

I showed her what ebola did to the human body.

She screamed.

---

“It’s eating me!” someone screamed as their suit came apart.

Acolyte-sergeant Zennia Marconun closed her eyes from within her own space suit.

Whatever curse that all of the dropships and their crew had been affected by upon closing in on their target, it spread quickly and mercilessly. She ignored the screams and shouts of her comrades and colleagues as their suits came apart to the already breached innards of the dropship. Their desperate choking and whimpers permeated the entirety of the broadcast channels.

She thought she was here to defeat an enemy of Comstar.

Instead she found herself waiting for her death.

She squeezed her suit’s arms as she felt her own space suit start to come apart.

When she opened her eyes, all she saw was a steadily blue’ing and breaking hull of the dropship and anything that else was remotely metallic.

Even the once pristine plastic-glass of her visor began to turn blue.

In minutes, it would lose enough structural integrity to break, leaving her to choke in the atmosphere-less halls of the dropship. That’s how most of the earlier victims died.

She thunked her head back against the hull she’d been leaning on.

“This is the worst way to go.”

No enemy. No shooting. No nothing.

A cold death more befitting the scavenger soldiers than a proud protector of humanity.

Cracks began to form on her visor.

She closed her eyes.

---

“... All ships have gone cold,” Sabrina reported what her distributed drones “felt” through their sensors. “All reactors have been shut down, and there are … no survivors.”

“Good,” AK-12 - damnit, Sabrina kept on forgetting to refer to her as Anastasia - commented emotionlessly as if over a thousand people hadn’t just died. “Though the General doesn’t need all of these materials because he can get them on his own, it won’t hurt to take them back with us, no?”

The General was the term that she and the girls used when Alan wasn’t nearby. Alan liked being called the commander or a captain, but that was too low of a title for someone in charge of an entire planet and made star system level strategical decisions.

“Nope,” she popped her lips. “My drones will finish in the next … seventy-two hours.”

“Good. Louise-” LWMMG, “-Alanna-” AK-15, “-and Karla, perform a sweep of the system before you return home. I want a thorough search.”

“Yes, commandeer,” Karla squeaked with her accent, which she probably didn’t do on purpose but nonetheless sounded cute, before she led the other two away in the Cold and the other Hounds.

Sabrina thanked Alan that he put shields on those tiny things as well. Some of the guns the locals put on their dropships and battlemechs would tear the Hounds apart with ease.

“... the General says good job.”

Ehehehe…