ShipCore [Stub]

Ides of March are Over, April’s Fool is Here



USD: On an alternate timeline

Location: Some uninhabited system


 

Alex rubbed her eyes as she woke up from the cryopod. She’d borrowed it from Elis after sending the girl away with her team in their gunship to search for other survivors. After nameless and her had destroyed the rampant Federation Drones and made everything peaceful.

With their trusty A31 Asteroid base, the wormhole generator allowed them to go wherever they wanted. She’d scouted a half dozen old Federation Systems and found massive disparity in their technology bases and populations. On the outskirts away from any of the major planets, things were poorly maintained by relatively few people.

The inner systems, by contrast, had trillions upon trillions of people, amounting to even more than the stolen Federation databases had claimed. Worse, she found that the few NAIs she met were not nice. Actually, they had tried to murder her when they realized she didn’t have the same eye color as them.

That wasn’t very friendly, so Alex had retreated to a system outside of the jump lane network. It had taken an entire decade in which absolutely nothing of note happened, but Nameless has built legion upon legion of construction bots to transform the planet into a battle planet.

That was needed, because the dictators of human space, the four PSIs, all had their own version of a battle moon. Freeing humanity from evil needed a lot of firepower!

“Nameless, is the main wormhole drive ready!?”

[Informative: Total Destruction Battle Planet Destroyer main WH drive is charged.]

“WARP TO THE CORPO PLACE!”

[Notice: Battleplanets do not warp. They enter a open wormhole created by the wormhole creation device.]

“I don’t care! GO!”

The slash through space opened, and almost immediately, TDBPD entered into the new system. Bad things happened right away as Alex failed to account for matching orbital velocities, and they entered just behind one of the habitable planets. The gravitational forces pulled the planet out of its normal orbit and sent the earthlike place hurdling towards the sun.

But the true enemy was further out, around the gas giant. Gas giants were the favorite hiding places of battlemoons because they had ample amounts of propellant to use for the massive vehicle’s magnetic confinement drives.

But that didn’t matter, because Alex pointed at the gas giant and gave the order.

“Fire the super confinement cannon! I don’t care if Thea is on the moon or not! She tried to scam me for a few credits!”

[Notice: Super confinement cannon could cause serious damage to solar system topography.]

“FIRE!!!”

The side of the planet facing Moneta’s battlemoon lit up brilliantly as the entire surface turned into molten slag from the heat of the massive particle cannon that sent the superluminal beam out into space.

Moneta was kissing her favorite High-priestess girlfriend when the alert showed exactly what was incoming. “WHAT!”

The battlemoon exploded along with the entire gas giant system as the laser blew everything to space dust.

“HAHA! GOT’EM!” Alex screamed. “NEXT!”

[Notice: Irrational Avatar behavior exhibits extreme de-socialization and anti-social tendencies. Recommendation: Find a suitable therapist.]

“Nope. NEXT! To the Solarian Federation!”

[Informative: The WH drive requires time to recharge. Please wait several hours.]

“What!? That’s going to be so BORING! I should just go back to sleep in the cryopod…”

[Notice: Hostile units are on approach. This unit estimates they are angry with their civilization having been wiped out by our presence.]

“Haha! Shoot them up! Deploy the laser belt!”

Thousands of massive laser arrays that girded the planet around the equator popped up their focusing turrets. Energy was then pumped from the planet’s core, where a complex process harvested vast amounts of energy from the pressure there. Planetary energy lashed out in a complex pattern, with massive beam diameters that made evasion impossible.

Still, the attackers had long prepared to defend the system from such devastating hostiles; it was only the sudden arrival that had caused their downfall.

Arrays of Kinetic Kill Vehicles burned out their incredibly powerful drives to accelerate their anti-matter charges toward the planet. They reached speeds approaching light so quickly that the targeting computer of the TDBPD (Nameless) couldn’t detect and fire upon them before they impacted the surface. Even when he did, matter traveling near the speed of light smashed into the TDBPD’s surface, which encouraged the crust to become even more molten.

“Why are we taking damage? NAMELESS! DO BETTER!”

[Informative: This unit is operating at maximum capacity. If Avatar would release the majority of computronic modules from attempting to create novel anime holovids for Avatar consumption, performance could be improved by over 200%]

“Ha! You just hate anime! There is no way we are going to be watching those stupid cowboy movies!”

There was a hiss in the command room of gas escaping a vent that almost sounded like a sigh.

[Notice: No damage penetrated internal planetary D-field. While crustal integrity of the surface is at approximately 33%, relativistic vehicles failed to penetrate any critical internals. However, some sections of the TDBPD have reduced weapons coverage. Approximately 5% of approaches within 100 million kilometers are vulnerable.]

“That’s horrible. Make us spin faster then!”

[Notice: Notice: Notice:]

“HA! You broke again! Proves that you’re faulty. Maybe I should replace you?”

A few hours later, after all life that could be detected in the system had been wiped out, Alex turned her eye to the next system.

The Ertan Republic capital fell much the same way the Corpo System’s had. When Alex arrived on the outer edge of the SOL system, all kinds of warning alarms erupted on the bridge.

“NAMELESS! WHY IS EVERYTHING FLASHING RED!”

[Notice: Multiple Battlemoons have been detected within one light second. A combined Solarian Federation and Sol Imperium force has been detected in orbit around the third planet of the system. A massive counterstrike is enroute to our position.]

“Fire the big laser!”

|Destiny unfolds|

|Laser’s wrath ignites the stars|

|Fateful symphony|

A giant glowing crater on one side of the TDBPD lit up as massive energy arrays pumped energy into a massive diamond. The power instantly incinerated the material that had covered the area in a titanic rush of flame and melted material that blasted far into the stratosphere, following along the energetic beam kilometers wide.

It struck with unerring accuracy on the nearest battlemoon’s surface, leaving a massive gouge in the surface that melted away weapon emplacements and other things.

The moon wasn’t disabled though, far from it. Immediately all the arrayed battlemoons began to return fire, and thousands of vessels joined the fray, spewing waves and waves of missiles at the TDBPD. Soon the surface was stripped bare of material under that onslaught, but the massive internal D-Field held back the titantic weaponry by solidifying a molten layer of diamond around the battleplanet’s core and main internal operating machinery.

[Notice: Outer weapon systems have been disabled. Recommend escape.]

Suddenly a message arrived, despite Alex’s frustration, and a silver-haired girl appeared on the screen.

“I am Chi Celestia Astraea Psi, defender of humanity! Whoever you are, surrender at once!”

Alex blinked at the silver-haired, fiery red-eyed girl. She was kind of cute.

But considering the circumstances, Alex decided she was on a tight schedule.

“Nameless! Fire the black-hole weapon!”

[Notice: this is a bad idea]

“I don’t care, and why did you stop using capitalization and punctuation?”

[Informative: firing black-hole cannon]

A wormhole opened, and then a black hole appeared, ripping apart the arrayed battlemoons and their entire fleet into thousands of tiny pieces.

Alex started to pat herself on the back until a new series of red warning lights appeared.

“Nameless! What is going on!!”

[Notice: Due to black hole time dilation, approximately 1000 years have passed. TDBPD has not had time to repair and is now detecting a new fleet on approach. The battle planet in the vanguard is hailing us.]

The main screen flashed to a face that Alex remembered. It was Elis!

“Elis! Hi! It’s been a long time!”

The red-haired woman looked much older than Alex remembered. Maybe she was pushing a hundred years old even.

“You promised you wouldn’t be like the Entity, but you slew trillions just like it did. You were a mistake. We should have killed you when we had the chance.”

The feed cut out, and suddenly a massive beam weapon slammed into the TDBPD. Alex watched as the damage report screen turned red, showing a black line carving itself through the D-Field and knocking a deep gouge of the magma layer out into space.

“Nameless! Get us out of here. We need to build a bigger battle planet!!”

[Informative: activating wormhole drive, destination: resource rich place far away]

“Gogogogogogo!! Also, turn on the anime generators to maximum power. I feel like it will take a while to repair!”

 


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