The Ascent

Chapter 16

As the fleet formed up in battle array, deserters from Rightous Ruler's fleet trickled in, providing vital information about his fleet's size, formation and movement. That's how we learned that Righteous Ruler's fleet outnumbered ours by nearly ten to one and was still growing. To deal with the size discrepancy, we had the combined Solarian/Cack fleet form up in a convex lens shape with Shines Like the Sun's flagship at the center in the forward convex portion of the lens surrounded by his elite guard. 

Circling Winds and Most Noble took positions above and below him. Sherman was in charge of the right-side formation, his fleet taking a position on the edge of the lens with Phil's fleet between him and the Cacks. Moony was in charge of the left. This formation allowed us to maximize the space occupied by the fleet and, hopefully, prevent the larger Cack fleet from outflanking us.

Once arranged, we sent the first wave of ships through the transit station. They secured the far side of the gate, including the outbound lane, which allowed us to turn the near gate's inbound lane into a second outbound lane. This cut the transit time in half and provided a moment of disorientation while watching two columns of ships move toward each other as if in a head-on collision at the ring's center. Even knowing the colliding ships would instantly appear, hundreds of light-years away, leaving another station in opposite directions didn't lessen the unease.

On the far side, we traveled about 150AU into the system under H-drive before stopping to reform the fleet and reseeded the EPR transceivers with phase-entangled particles to ensure the communication network's bandwidth was at its maximum. Having saved up the TCR generators' waste anti-matter, we proceeded across the system under heavy acceleration. It was not long before our gravimetric sensors began picking up large numbers of massive objects guarding the far gate. It appeared Righteous Ruler would fight after all.

Nearing the far transit station, we launched drone scout craft. They traveled under standard matter/antimatter reaction drives, but as they could accelerate much faster than a human or Cack body could stand, the remotely operated drones would arrive days before we did. Since they were equipped with EPR transceivers, we wouldn't have to wait for the slow speed of light to carry our reconnaissance data.

Sitting at my duty station, tapping nervously on the edge of my console, I waited online with my fellow strategic officers breathing into their audio pickups for the drones to crawl within visual range of the targets. When the first images appeared, I sat up, stunned. There were no warships.

"They're gone!" Maxwell, Sherman's strat-o, shouted into his pickup.

"Are you sure? Perhaps it's a trap." Dexter, Moony's strat-o, suggested.

"It appears every missing transit defense system has been towed to this spot," another of Smith's strat-o's said. "It's as if the Cacks had been preparing for a last stand defense of the inner worlds, but had been interrupted."

I moved one of my drones closer. "The missile racks are empty. From what I can see, all the missiles and defensive weapons systems have either been removed or hastily destroyed."

We left the drones to inspect the equipment around the transit station, but long before the fleet arrived it became clear that the Cacks had given up on defending it. It was later said that Shines Like the Sun's paid his personal oracle a fortune at this point for predicting that he would see the light of the inner sphere before he would see the enemy. 

Sunshine said that if Righteous Ruler would not do battle here, he wasn't planning to fight them at all. That was also when his friends began referring to him as The Ruler.

* * *

We traveled deep into the inner sphere for days. Everywhere we went we saw signs of the Cack fleet's passage, mostly in the form of stripped or missing space assets, but there were no signs of any defenders. Our supplies were running very low and many of our ships were struggling to maintain equipment already strained to the breaking point. Getting supplies would be very difficult without climbing down into a gravity well, and landing any sort of shuttlecraft on a planet's surface was fraught with unacceptable levels of danger. We got lucky in a couple of instances and found research or resupplying facilities hidden in asteroids. But even those had largely been stripped of anything useful.

As we traveled from system to system, never finding the enemy or the resources we needed, I began to wonder if perhaps this were all part of Righteous Ruler's plan. I suggested to Phil that Righteous Ruler might be using the very size of the Moiarchy against us. The sheer challenge of crossing this vast Moiarchy we meant to conquer, without aid or resupply, would surely either dispirit or destroy us for him. Phil thought the idea had merit and passed the idea up to Shines Like the Sun's strat-o's, but they only repeated Sunshine's belief that his brother would have to fight if he meant to rule. As far as we could tell, the Cacks believed that if he failed to launch an aggressive defense of the Moiarchy, the other nobles would fail to support his rule and it would collapse on its own.

We set a course for the Cack homeworld. Our invasion became more of a victory procession. The Cacks began declaring Shines Like the Sun's rule to all the stripped and huddled worlds we passed along the way. The fleet didn't bother with the tedious process of reforming the ships and re-seeding the communications network as we transited from system to system and as a result, the fleet stretched back in a line through three or four systems. The alert stance was dropped from FAS-Delta to FAS-Beta: danger possible, which meant that routine scans for the enemy were made and no vital combat systems were taken off-line for repairs or maintenance in case the alert stance was raised. After several days of traveling like this we straggled into a system the Cacks had selected for a temporary rest and resupply when a manned scout ship came screaming back to us broadcasting warnings on Solarian and Cack channels. "The Ruler is attacking!"

The fleet went to FAS-Gamma and the Cack warships began gathering in battle formation. Since much of the Solarian fleet lay scattered behind us, it took most of the day for the fleet to gather. Early reports from the scout craft confirmed Righteous Ruler's fleet outnumbered us ten to one.

While we returned to our lens formation, Righteous Ruler's massive fleet transited through the gate on the far side of our star system and formed a standard defensive sphere. Had they used their H-drives to go super-luminal, they would have caught us unprepared with half our ships still missing. But once they formed up, they used their gravitic drives and advanced toward us at the stately speed of light. That gave us at least ten hours to get our act together and to prepare to fight them. It also gave us ten hours to sit and worry as we watched them approach.

* * * Author's Note * * *

Thank you for sticking with this story so far.  I hope you're enjoying it.  However you feel, please feel free to leave comments.  They help motivate me to write and to improve the story.  And, as always, votes are much appreciated.

Next chapter: the shooting begins, immediately followed by disaster.