Forevermore Unto the Void

The War for Aetherius (part 3: Death)

1

Two Minutes to Midnight

Archimedes had known that Lethe's men would be waiting for him in the Milky Way, but he hadn't expected that Lethe would have expanded his military be enough to merit as many ships as were in front of the Gate. From his position on the bridge of the Kyrie Inferni, Lethe's defense fleet appeared as a distant wall of pinpricks of light slowly growing larger, but the ship's scopes belied the pinpricks' true nature: legions of ships arrayed against Archimedes' assault force. The first volley of fire began the instant the first of Archimedes' ships emerged from the Gate.

Even as his fleet haemorrhaged ships, Archimedes pushed his force onwards, opening fire with the fore cannons as the two armadas drew closer across the system. Lethe's forces, severely outnumbering Archimedes' began to fan out around his fleet, slowly engulfing their enemies.

The instant Archimedes recognised the pincer move for what it was, he had his ships group together and forge directly through the middle of Lehte's forces. Scores of gun decks blazing across scores of ships, the two Argus forces met in the middle of the depopulated system, Archimedes' keeping true to their course even as nearly every ship smaller than a cruiser was turned into a small star as their reactors blew under the weight of all of the hostile fire.

Embracing his reputation for sheer determination and ruthlessness in battle, Archimedes had the stragglers of his fleet open fire with their Neutronium warheads in the centre mass of the enemy fleet. The effect was instant and devastating. Clouds of neutron matter expanded at high fractions of the speed of light from clusters of Lethe's forces the instant Archimedes gave the command, turning scores of ships into little more than clouds of component atoms under the forces behind the planet-killer warheads. The salvoes' detonations turned Archimedes' few straggling ships into clouds of vapour along with Lethe's forces, but Archimedes knew that the breathing room their sacrifices had bought was more than worth it.

In the time Lethe's forces spent reeling from the assault that had punched holes all across their fleet and destroyed many of their heavy ships, Archimedes was able to rally his forces, turn them to unleash their broadsides, and scramble the boarding parties. Thousands of fighters and transport gunships flew forth from Archimedes' fleet with millions of projectiles, all ferrying a new kind of shock trooper that Lethe's men had never seen before; the transports had been filled to the brim with the deadliest soldiers Archimedes' infamous black sites had ever produced: Omega, Psi, Theta, and Sigma Strain victims that had been put through training that was only a few degrees shy of the training Archimedes had given Aeneas.

Each of the transports was dead silent as it raced across the void, narrowly weaving between railgun slugs the size of themselves, Feynman lances that cut an angry red across the void, and Aetherite rounds the size of small city blocks. All of the systems that could be turned off without killing the crew had been disabled and the engines had been retrofitted to burn as quietly as possible to give the enemy as low a chance as possible of detecting the assault squads. The creatures inside, for the soldiers that were once men could no longer be called such, were little louder than the crafts that bore them to the enemy fleet, none saying anything even as the ships wound around projectiles moving many thousands of times the speed of sound.

The target had been an obvious choice: take the largest, most well armed ship of the fleet from within and the armada will crumple around it, but that invited the risks of flying along the deadliest ship in the enemy fleet. Scores of the gunships were lost in seconds once they got near the ship, the ACLS Retribution, cut down by the point-defense batteries that registered the strike craft as small warheads.

Through the firestorm surrounding the Retribution, maybe one in ten of the gunships made it to the hangar, but that was more than enough. The instant the first of them landed, the crew inside the docks froze where they stood, the craft's colours stalling them for a few instants while the Strain victims walked from the cramped gunships.