Kick the Sphere 30 (Patreon)

Kick the Sphere

Chapter 30

-VB-

The Battle of Dansur

Capellan-League Battle 

When Marik and Liao fleets jumped in, they did so unbelievably close to each other in both space and time; Marik’s dropship fleet jumped in only two days after the Liao fleet, meaning that they were within striking distance of each other with only a day and a half of travel.

Upon locating each other, Capellan and League dropship fleets immediately scrambled their aerospace fighters to engage each other. 

On the Capellan side, they didn’t see the light warships that ravaged Betelgeuse and rightfully believed that they weren’t part of their forces. Yet. So it was imperative that they destroyed the League’s fleet so that their overwhelming firepower could be used against the warships with little to no distraction. They calculated quickly that should they fight the warships with the League “reinforcements,” then they would lose the battle. 

On the League side, they saw a small armada the likes of which the Third Succession War has not seen for a very long time. Perhaps even in their entire lifetime. Dansur could be come a salient from which the Confederation could reach deep into the Ducchy of Andurien, encircle the duchy, and swallow it whole, especially if they got their hands on any technology in the black site as they believed Dansur to be. 

For the people involved, the stakes were unbelievably high, and had the reality of the situation been close to what they were imagining, then it truly would have been the battle that decided the Third Succession War. The warships and the technology to make them would have allowed Capellan Confederation to beat back both the Federated Suns and the Free Worlds League on its own. They might have possibly unified the rimward Inner Sphere under their banner. In the hands of the Free Worlds League, they might have conquered the entirety of the Inner Sphere as their massive industrial base and manpower would have had a better starting point for conquest and expansion than the limited pools of manpower and industrial output of the Capellan Confederation. 

And so the battle began.

With nuclear exchange. 

What they did not know was that none of the dropships that survived the nuclear attacks would get to land their regiments of battlemechs, armored vehicles, and infantry.

-VB-

Apollo, the Machine Son of Marris and Admiral of the Red Fleet, watched from afar inside the hulls of the battleships under his command as light blossomed in terrible spheres of nuclear fission as the humans fought a terrible battle above the Dansur Star. 

Their meager fighters rushed out in squadrons to engage their enemies and died from lasers and projectiles. Dropships, some scarred by the nuclear attack, listed and raged with their guns against the others. 

It all looked pointless to Hermes. 

To him, his father was the ultimate ruler. The man who could bring impossibilities to reality. What were these humans compared to his father? 

Even more nuclear bombs detonated and briefly lit up the void as impossibly short-lived stars. 

Apollo wondered if stars could think. What would they think about these instant stars that came and went? Would they be horrified as he was of their fight? 

Meaningless, meaningless, meaningless. 

Worse, they brought their petty war to his father’s star. 

It was worse than meaningless once he considered that. It was a sin.

He allowed them to kill each other before he finally made his move. 

“Red Fleet. Warp in.”

He flinched at the exultation of the only Zerg Leviathan as it psychically roared for everyone in the fleet to hear its excitement. It was a mistake to allow Ares to build psychically sensitive replicator components to “better detect humans.”

The Leviathan opened its maw and opened up a wormhole. Space distorted as the giant creature wielded its psychic might to tear into space, and when the wormhole stabilized, the entire fleet burst forth. 

-VB-

The Dansur Execution

Because most dropships do not have windows, the sight could only be scanned and detected by sensors aboard dropships and aerospace fighters. ASF pilots couldn’t see the new enemy aside from the centerpiece of it all.

The Zerg Leviathan, a massive creature bigger than the biggest warship ever recorded in human history. 

Some thought they were hallucinating. Others began to pray for their souls as they believed that they have stepped into the realm of some eldritch god. 

None of this mattered. 

Generals and admirals alike on both Liao and Marik fleets were quickly overwhelmed with reports of a massive fleet outnumbering them all in tonnage appearing on the edge of the battlefield. Their attempts to contact the new and exotic fleet was not met with any response. The sight of the Leviathan also shook the Capellans as a Leviathan was an impossibility. Marik fleet immediately sought to disengage as they realized that the newcomers were hostile.

None of this mattered. 

What mattered was that the new fleet was hostile, overwhelming in technological superiority, utterly alien to the humans of the Liao and Marik Fleet… and neither fleets were ready to jump out of the system because it hadn’t been long enough for their jumpships to recharge.

They were underarmed gladiators thrown into the colosseum where a lion had been waiting for them.

The first opening move of the new fleet was to allow the Leviathan to roar. 

Across space measured in thousands of kilometers, everyone heard the psychic roar of the Leviathan that didn’t need air to vibrate in their ears. Some of the weaker minds immediately collapsed with their mouth frothing and eyes rolled over, which included the general in charge of the Marik fleet. No one was spared its bone shaking roar, and shattered their discipline on the spot. 

Then the Replicators of Dansur’s Red Fleet jumped in to knife fight ranges into both fleets and tore into the dropships. Their ships, none of which were dropships though they were only slightly bigger than the Unions in both fleets, fired lasers that scythed through unshielded ships like hot knife through butter, and the return fire from the dropships and aerospace fighters were met with energy shields that completely negated their attacks. 

The initial nuclear explosions gave away to dozens of smaller explosions of dropships detonating. 

Then the Leviathan warped in and the humans realized just how big the creature was. 

At 11 kilometers, it was a giant that the humans of the Inner Sphere had nothing to compare it to. Even Star League Yardships were not that big. Even bigger than battleships. Even bigger than recharge stations. 

It was the largest living thing.

And it swam through space like a whale and opened its maw.

No one heard the screams of the damned as it swallowed entire dropships whole. 

They heard their own screams when the replicators began to infest their ships. 

The screams, sobbings, and cries of the doomed men and women of the Confederation and the League echoed in the halls and bays of the dropships as the replicators swarmed them and dragged them to their doom.

There remains nothing of the Battle of Dansur, for every warm body was biomass to fuel the zerg and every scrap of metal existed to make more of the replicator horde. 

…

Within a week of the Battle of Dansur, both replicators and zergs swarmed out of Dansur to neighboring systems.

To devour.

To grow.

To spread their father’s domain.