novelraw Chapter 159: The First Battle in Deep Space
Chapter 159: The First Battle in Deep Space
The initial vanguard of probes and standard missiles were merely exploratory, a probing attack meant to test the waters.
This opening salvo would give humanity its first real look at the physics of a spatial curvature field and the defensive capabilities of the Viridian vessel!
The moment the two sides engaged, the entire command center held its breath. The monitors flooded with hundreds, then thousands, of blinding white streaks of light!
The engagement occurred at a distance of one million kilometers. While the one-way signal delay was only 3.3 seconds, a round-trip command took nearly seven seconds. The Federation’s goal was simple: target the enemy’s propulsion systems.
Command knew full well that even the massive tetrahydrogen bomb couldn’t completely vaporize the 150-kilometer-wide Viridian dreadnought. Their objective was strictly tactical. If they could obliterate the main drive, the alien vessel would be crippled and adrift.
The immediate problem was that they didn’t know the exact location of the main drive. They had to use the initial probing strikes to force the ship to reveal its engine signatures, allowing them to rapidly adjust the trajectories of the incoming heavy nuclear payloads, which were equipped with onboard thrusters for mid-course correction.
Simultaneously, following Professor Hao Yu’s frantic warning, the astrophysics team had to calculate exactly how the curvature field was distorting the missiles’ trajectories.
Everyone stared wide-eyed at the main screens. The tension in the room was suffocating.
The first true battle in deep space of humanity had officially begun!
There was no deafening roar, no billowing smoke. In the vacuum of space, they only saw silent flashes of light bloom and die on the monitors, like a hyper-realistic video game.
But everyone knew the stakes. This wasn’t a game; it was an existential war. The outcome of the next few minutes would dictate whether humanity lived or died.
In a fraction of a second, the entire vanguard of three hundred reconnaissance probes and hundreds of small-yield missiles were annihilated the moment they touched the curvature bubble. To the observers, the projectiles seemed to simply melt like wax. No solid shrapnel remained; they were instantly reduced to incandescent liquid slag that rapidly cooled in the void.
The white-hot defensive beams moved with terrifying velocity, seeming to materialize out of thin air. Anything that breached the perimeter was mercilessly vaporized.
The telemetry from the surviving rear-guard probes streamed back to the Noah, confirming their worst fears.
Just as the tactical models predicted, the Viridian ship was protected by an advanced automated point-defense grid!
A wave of crushing disappointment washed over the room. Deep down, they had hoped the aliens might be arrogant enough to leave their shields down.
But they quickly forced the despair aside. The die was cast; there was no turning back now.
The first critical anomaly was flagged by the mainframe’s spatial surveillance sub-routine. While processing the explosion telemetry, the supercomputer detected that all projectiles were inexplicably deviating from their flight paths just before being destroyed.
It was as if an invisible, colossal hand was gently twisting the fabric of space itself.
The missiles and probes were traveling at speeds exceeding Mach 40. Amidst the chaotic cloud of expanding debris and blinding flashes, only the quantum mainframe could detect such a minute deviation. After failing to match the data against any known physical models, the system immediately flashed a priority anomaly alert.
But in the heat of battle... no one had time to analyze it.
Because the second wave was already impacting. The stagger between the volleys was only a few seconds. The crew could only watch helplessly.
These smaller, conventional missiles lacked remote telemetry and guidance thrusters; they flew strictly on inertia. Command couldn’t alter their paths. They could only follow their pre-programmed vectors to their fiery deaths.
This was the second probing wave: over three thousand conventional missiles and a handful of standard tactical nukes charging fearlessly into the hull of the Viridian spacecraft at Mach 40!
The command crew remained frozen, their eyes locked on the screens. No one paid any attention to the flashing anomaly alert.
Or rather, no one had the mental bandwidth to care.
Jason, Austin, Marcus, Evan, Dr. Lambert, and the others held their breath, a cold sweat breaking out on their foreheads. The scale of this engagement dwarfed anything ever seen on Earth. In this theater, multi-ton ballistic missiles were nothing but cannon fodder, and tactical nukes were treated like small arms fire!
In an instant, the starry void was illuminated by thousands of staccato flashes. Each localized detonation represented enough raw thermal energy to vaporize a city block.
The battlefield descended into absolute chaos. The explosions cascaded like a string of massive firecrackers, blending into a blinding, contiguous wall of light that completely obscured the target. A suffocating silence hung over the command center.
Seconds later, a terrifyingly massive flash erupted on the flank of the missile swarm. It was the Vanguard, a billion-ton-yield helium-3 heavy warhead!
Through the glare, it was impossible to tell if it had successfully struck the hull or if it had been intercepted mid-flight. They only knew it had detonated.
The sheer violence of the Vanguard’s explosion dwarfed everything else. It painted the entire missile swarm in a blinding white glare, stark against the ink-black backdrop of space, momentarily outshining the distant stars of the Milky Way. The resulting nuclear fireball rapidly expanded, consuming the surrounding vacuum before violently collapsing in on itself. Simultaneously, dozens of smaller nuclear blooms pierced the veil of light, detonating across what appeared to be the surface of the Viridian ship.
It was absolute, blinding chaos.
At this point, human eyes were useless. Only the mainframe’s graphical processing units could make sense of the carnage, frantically compiling terabytes of erratic sensor data.
Forty-eight seconds later.
The second wave was completely annihilated. The massive nuclear fireballs rapidly cooled and faded into the dark. No one knew if a single warhead had actually breached the hull.
As the light cleared, the Viridian spaceship emerged completely unscathed. It continued its relentless advance, its trajectory entirely unaffected.
The probing attacks had achieved absolutely nothing!
Jason bit his lip, his fists clenched so tightly his knuckles turned white. His calm exterior masked a raging storm of anxiety. He wasn’t the only one; everyone in the room was trembling slightly, terrified that their entire desperate plan was crumbling before their eyes.
Now... the final, devastating heavy payload was on final approach. This wave contained the remaining helium-3 warheads and the apocalyptic tetrahydrogen bomb.
They had less than an hour to parse the telemetry from the first two waves and manually adjust the trajectories of the heavy hitters.
The saturation tactic relied on a massive, condensed strike window, the final volley would last no longer than two minutes! In deep space, engagements were decided in seconds, or even milliseconds.
But right now, the Noah’s high command was paralyzed by a profound sense of shock and dread. They had run the simulations, but witnessing the reality was deeply sobering.
Watching thousands of heavy missiles and a billion-ton nuclear warhead detonate in a single minute, only to vanish like sparks in the night sent a chill down their spines.
On Earth, that amount of firepower would have physically shattered a continent. Out here, in the cold void, it didn’t even cause a ripple.
The sheer, desolate scale of the universe seemed to be mocking their primitive efforts.
As the final embers of the nuclear fire died out, space reclaimed the darkness. The only evidence of the strike was a sprawling cloud of rapidly cooling, dark red metallic slag, the pulverized remains of their missile swarm.
"Move! I want those analytics now!" Jason roared, breaking the spell.
Drowning in a flood of raw telemetry, the human operators could only rely on the mainframe’s tactical AI to parse the data. They had less than an hour, and it wasn’t nearly enough. They had to finalize the firing solutions immediately.
"The target’s engagement envelope is bound to the outer edge of the curvature bubble," the tactical officer reported, his voice shaking. "Our projectiles were intercepted approximately ten kilometers before breaching the bubble’s perimeter."
"Weapon signature... it’s a electromagnetic railguns! Or some kind of advanced electromagnetic accelerator. The intercept projectiles are moving at nearly 10,000 kilometers per second, eight hundred times faster than our missiles! That’s why they looked like continuous beams of light."
"...The interceptor rounds are micro-nuclear penetrators, detonating via kinetic impact."
"The grid’s maximum fire rate exceeds 2,000 rounds per second!"
With every new data point, the atmosphere in the room grew heavier. Jason sat frozen in his chair, his face an emotionless mask, though his stomach had plummeted to the floor.
According to the deep scans, a handful of missiles *had* managed to slip past the interceptors and penetrate the curvature bubble. But breaching the bubble didn’t guarantee a hull strike.
The telemetry confirmed the curvature bubble extended 80 to 100 kilometers out from the actual hull. That meant a missile had to survive another seven or eight seconds of flight time inside the bubble before impact.
Those seven or eight seconds were the absolute difference between the survival or extinction of the human race.