From the moment the Unrelenting’s sensors detected the emergence of an alien battleship that stretched for 1.7 kilometers, Saint Neville Magrin understood that he and his father had been utterly fooled.
“The Golden Skullers led us into a trap!”
Like blind and ignorant fools, his father had unknowingly brought his fleet close to the location of the alien battleship.
It was impossible for this to be a coincidence. The second alien ship wreckage had been a piece of bait all along. Its main purpose had been to lure Cenatus Prospecting into the perfect killzone of the newly emerged alien battleship!
The distance between the fleet and the newly emerged alien battleship was far enough that it would take melee mechs a lot of time to close the distance.
The chance that this advanced alien battleship could dictate the range of the engagement was high!
Not even the expert mechs could make a meaningful difference!
A single first-class multipurpose mech could already inflict a serious blow against the fleet!
“The enemy ship is about to open fire again!”
After taking the time to charge up and lock onto its targets, a single gun battery installed on the hull of the alien warship unleashed its might.
Even though the range was rather long for kinetic weapons, the modern transphasic armaments of the alien battleship were able to speed up their projectiles to an impressive degree, causing them to close in much faster than normal.
If space could transmit sound, the surrounding area would have been bombarded with simultaneous thunderous impact noises!
The guns of the alien battleship fired them out with such great power that the energy shields and the hull plating of the affected vessels played no role at all. They easily folded as if they were made of paper. Hull plating and structural parts deformed and disintegrated at such great speeds that the vessels peeled open like flowers!
Though the kinetic projectiles transferred a massive amount of destructive forces onto the combat carriers, they pushed forth with such great momentum that they actually drilled right through the hulls and continued to plunge deeper into space on ballistic courses!
Overpenetration!
If the main guns of the alien battleship possessed enough power to not only demolish entire combat carriers with a single round, but also have plenty of power to spare, then that meant that their effectiveness against capital ships was definitely just as threatening!
He could see and feel the thousands of bodies that had become utterly mangled and crushed after getting affected by the prodigious firepower of the alien vessel.
Neville had never witnessed brutality at this scale. The alien battleship was by far the most powerful alien warship that he had encountered in battle, and she was definitely showing that she was built to defeat other warships!
No matter whether it was a combat carrier or a fleet carrier, neither type of vessels had ever been designed with resisting battleship-grade attacks in mind!
Saint Neville Magrin could do little to prevent any of the three combat carriers from suffering a direct hit each, and that hurt him a lot.
“The alien battleship is reorienting her guns. As far as we can tell, her secondary gun batteries are beginning to target our sub-capital ships.”
“They are slower to move. Wait. It appears that her primary kinetic cannon batteries are turning to aim their muzzles at our capital ships!”
“Father!” He roared over their private communication channel. “What is the progress of your evacuation?!”
“What?!”
It was as if he was now trying to move his body around while submerged in a pool of water instead of walking around in open air.
In other words, the various ships equipped with warp drives and superdrives were unable to jump out of the effective range of the enemy battleship fast enough!
However, the battleship’s powerful warp interdiction capabilities prevented this from happening!
“Keep dispersing and accelerating as hard as possible! The range of the warp interdiction field has to be limited. As long as some of our ships can lure this battleship away from the remainder, the latter will eventually be able to warp away. Right now, we must all fight to evacuate as many of our people as possible!”
No ship was safe in the face of so much firepower. Otrus Magrin was afraid that if he commanded all of the ships at his disposal to block the line of sight to his flagship, the alien ship would just fire a missile or something that circled around and smashed the vessel he was on in a single titanic blow!
The plan worked more or less. The alien battleship didn’t seem to be able to distinguish which human starships were more important than others.
The much more numerous combat carriers on the other hand began to get peppered by highly accurate transphasic laser beams!
While the primary armament of the alien battleship was purely designed to overcome the defenses of enemy battleships by relying on brute force and little else, the secondary armament possessed a lot more finesse.
This allowed the battleship’s laser weapons to assist with taking down powerful battleships faster by employing their sustained precision to destroy critical surface modules or exploit narrow gaps in an opponent’s defenses.
Weapons designed to disable powerful battleship modules easily broke any energy shield in the way. Though the respectable hull plating of these smaller carriers were still respectable, they could hardly put up a serious resistance.
“Our entire hangar bay is melted into slag!”
“Half of the crew stationed aboard this ship have been vaporized or burned! There is nothing left of my immediate superior aside from leaving behind a pile of ashes!”
Even though thousands of mechs have already opened fire against the distant terror, the alien battleship deftly avoided most of the incoming fire by swimming through space like a playful fish with the help of her active warp drive!
Superior technology. That was it. While the Big Two mastered even more powerful tech, the indigenous alien races possessed a much greater institutional understanding of phasewater technology. It would take far too long for humanity to close this crucial gap!
Neville gritted his teeth and tried his best to channel his fury at all of the losses into his machine.
The ace pilot made an important decision.
“Are you sure?”
Otrus Magrin sounded weary. “…Fine. Just be sure to suspend your mission as soon as my flagship gets away. I do not want to lose you so soon. You still have a mission to complete.”
“I will make it back.” Saint Neville promised to both himself and his father.
