Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 45: Space Meat Grinder (Patreon)

At night, Verdis' starry sky was denser and closer than anywhere on Earth had ever been. I'd slept through the actual peak of star-shine, when the Milky Way had sliced the sky open in a blazing scatter of stars. By now the Milky Way had already sunk toward the horizon over the grey wastes, while on the right, where the Sun was due to rise, the sky had gone a soft pink, and against that backdrop, the black blots of the orbital platforms had appeared.

Verdis circled Earth along a complex, carefully calibrated trajectory, which made dawn a wildly unpredictable event for anyone who didn't understand astronomy. I understood it a little. The demons were meant to attack the moment the Sun reached forty-five degrees above the local horizon.

I stood in the middle of the wasteland Command had picked out for us, waiting for it to begin finally. After years, months, days of waiting, this beginning felt more like an ending. The last few hours had strained my nerves even tighter, and I strongly suspected that instead of an angry surge of strength I could spend on the fight, I was about to feel a useless sense of relief and go slack right as it started.

Footsteps sounded behind me, and the hottest-headed, least patient member of our squad stepped out of the temporary shelter Voss had dug. He was probably having an even harder time of it than me.

"Guests running late?" Mardal asked.

I checked the open data feed. The demon fleet was approaching at a steady warp speed.

"They could still stop at the last moment," I said.

"Oh, I hope they want to get this over with as badly as we do!" Mardal said.

"Probably. A few months in a tin can with no stops could fray anyone's nerves. However, that's only true for the rank and file. Demon officers don't deny themselves any comforts."

I switched away from the enemy-fleet tracking page to the orbital cameras aimed toward the direction of arrival. I suspected half of Earth was staring into that same starry void right now, or at our defence fleet with the actual leviathan sitting at its centre. A ship of a design unfamiliar to me looked like a clumsy flying cannon. Probably another secret project built specifically for the invasion.

The feed had no encryption and no access restrictions. For whatever reason, Command had decided, today of all days, to stop playing at secrecy. Dozens of separate transmissions had been stitched together into a single panorama: space, blackness, dotted with green markers for human ships and blue for minefields.

New footsteps sounded behind me. Zola stepped out of the shelter.

"And why aren't you two sleeping?" she asked. "It's not going to start without us."

"You think so?" Mardal asked her.

"Of course!" she said. "The second it starts, the network will erupt into such a howl there's no way to miss it. We've still got time for breakfast and tea. Especially if Jake shares something exclusive he brought back from the Federation."

I smiled and decided a little calm and focus wouldn't hurt us.

"Honestly, White Peak would suit this situation best. Mountain tea, grown at the Spirit Temple."

"Not very fancy," Zola said, pulling a face.

"But effective," I disagreed.

We went back into the shelter and took off our armour. The rest of the team woke up from the noise. Everyone tried to joke around, but the mood was closer to what you'd expect from people about to die.

Personally…

I just wanted it to be over already.

We had breakfast, drank tea, burned an hour. Two and a half remained.

An hour.

Half an hour.

Fifteen minutes.

Ten.

Five.

Two minutes, seven seconds…

We all stood outside, watching the sky and the video feed from space.

The recognition system reacted first, and red dots for enemy ships appeared ahead of the blue dots marking the mines and automated platforms. Then the cameras caught them too, and one by one, sharp, predatory ship silhouettes began surfacing in the panorama.

The nearest mines detonated, blinding the sensors without destroying the ships themselves. Behind them, the automated platforms closer to the front line opened fire. Red, yellow, and blue beams tore the newcomers apart like cardboard. Enemy ships died at an implausible rate, flaring up in short white pinpricks, one after another.

The whole thing ended in about five seconds.

"That's it?" Hale asked, surprised.

I pulled up the map tracking the enemy fleet's approach. It hadn't been destroyed. It was still advancing, a few light-minutes from Earth, but its speed had dropped to a third of what it had been.

"That was reconnaissance," I said. "The main force is likely processing the data they just gathered right now."

"Then why isn't our fleet changing formation?" Kon asked.

"Maybe they want the demons to have that data?" Zola suggested.

"Let's just hope the horned bastards don't decide to take a breather before the actual attack," Mardal grumbled, and I agreed.

The tense silence that followed didn't last long.

The panorama beyond the minefields bloomed with red dots again. This time they blurred together into one solid red sheet, thick enough to blot out the space behind it. Compared to that sheet, our forces looked like a flock of starlings against an evening sky.

"Fuuuck," Zola said quietly, but with unmistakable shock.

If Command had planned to raise civilian morale by broadcasting the battle live, they'd clearly miscalculated. I was almost certain that genuine shock had just seized billions of people simultaneously.

The automated platforms came to life, guided by soulless algorithms that knew no fear. But they didn't manage anywhere near the success they'd had against the scout fleet.

The barrel of the leviathan-cannon at the centre of our formation, behind the minefields, began to glow, as if someone were lighting a rainbow inside it.

The minefields came alive, and hundreds of blue dots that had hung silently between our fleet and the enemy's suddenly surged forward to meet the red sheet head-on.

The demons finished off the automated platforms even faster than those platforms had finished off the scout fleet before them. Dozens, then hundreds of thin beams pierced through space, intercepting mines mid-flight. Every destroyed mine flared with a short, sharp flash, and once those flashes overlapped and merged into a single solid wall of light, the sky above Verdis grew so bright it looked as though a second sun had been lit, and my helmet activated its light filters.

A little later, an alert came through about a noticeable rise in background radiation. Still, that couldn't have lasted long.

The leviathan-cannon finished charging up and fired its first volley. A wave of multicoloured energy rolled across space towards the enemy formation, gathering up the radioactive glow, amplifying it, and hurling it back. It struck the enemy formation, and for a moment, a ragged hole opened in the solid mass of red dots.

"Yeah!" Mardal roared triumphantly, throwing a fist into the air.

But along with the enemy fleet, nearly all the mines had disappeared too, and the enemy began closing the distance, picking off the lone remaining mines as they went. Part of our fleet moved to meet them, trying to shield the leviathan-cannon. It began charging up its destructive rainbow all over again.

The fleets collided, trading beams and missiles. The enemy formation thinned surprisingly fast, though they still held the advantage.

"It's a decoy!" Hale said. "The enemy ships, at least half of them, are fakes. They don't explode; they vanish once destroyed!"

"Even so, there's a fuck-ton of them!" Zola snapped, her voice tight with nerves.

"And they're breaking through to the mega-cannon!" Mardal shouted, no joy in it at all.

The enemy fleet had indeed reformed into a wedge and was moving with inexorable precision straight toward the deadly maw of the rainbow cannon. Enemy beams struck that maw. Probably torpedoes, less visible on the overall map, were flying into it too.

A sick flash burst out of the leviathan's maw… and the structure cracked a few kilometres from the barrel. Green light poured out from the break. The crack crawled further along the hull, and the glow turned red. The whole leviathan fell apart, and the demons tried to veer off course, just as our own ships shielding the mega-cannon did, but it was too late. Waves of multicoloured distortion tore out toward the enemy wedge and, unfortunately, in every other direction too, bursting out through the cannon's cracks.

The leviathan was torn apart. The sky above Verdis brightened again, this time in multicoloured light, with no warning about radiation danger.

The enemy fleet got a fresh gap torn into it, but ours took a hit too. On top of that, where the leviathan had been, a gigantic hole had opened in our ranks, like a gateway straight to Earth, and the enemy aimed their fleet directly through it, ignoring the painful bites our fleet kept landing on their flanks. On the schematic map, it looked like a red swarm being sucked into a green ring, one that kept contracting…

Suddenly, the battle map bloomed with a whole new cluster of blue dots. Like another, far more numerous and widely scattered ring, one the enemy swarm was flying straight through.

"Mines?" Kon asked, enthusiastically.

"They're not moving, you idiot," Zola snapped.

"You shit…" Kon flared up.

"Both of you, shut up!" I barked. "Zola! Apologise! Now!"

"Sorry, nerves," Zola relented.

"Accepted," Kon replied, still stung.

I found one of the blue markers on the overall feed and zoomed in hard as far as the orbital cameras' resolution would allow.

A portal cannon. My portal cannon, or rather, its production-line descendant. Except this one hadn't fired Nuclear Penetration, or a Finger of Death. It fired a giant, goddamn bug with rocket thrusters and a nuclear bomb clutched in its legs.

The bug flew off a couple of kilometres on its own thrust. Then it stretched through space like taffy and vanished, rematerialised farther away as an explosion that tore the shields off an enemy ship. Right after that, the already-familiar Finger of Death beam cut it clean in two.

Two rings of defence, green and blue, worked like a meat grinder being fed red meat.

At one point, the red dots on the map were about as many as the blue and green combined, and then that number started to fall. The demons realised the trap only once almost their entire swarm had already been sucked into the grinder.

The tail of the swarm scattered, attacking the green ring and breaking up our ships' formation, while in the very centre of the meat grinder ships began stretching out under warp distortion in a last, suicidal bid to flee.

No ship could survive such a short, unstable jump, and most detonated before they'd even fully launched. Still, I was forced to tear myself away from the mesmerising sight. My interface bloomed with a notification:

The first results of the space battle would reach my zone of responsibility in two minutes.

The sky was already filled with fine debris, burning up just as efficiently in the thinner atmosphere as it would have in Earth's. The sky was full of fire and smoke, but genuine ‘fireballs’, large objects capable of surviving re-entry, hadn't shown up yet.

The first one appeared once I'd already pulled my attention away from the space feed. A massive chunk of an enemy ship, spinning, burning, breaking apart into separate flaming pieces along a steep trajectory that ended somewhere beyond my zone of responsibility.

Whatever landed here would have to look like a fireball flying straight at us.

"Enough sightseeing, grab your boards!" I ordered, dropping mine at my feet.

It bounced off the ground and hovered in the air, and before I mounted it, I paused to listen to how I felt.

Relief, but no fatigue, no sense of letting go. I'd gotten a pretty solid charge out of watching the meat grinder our fleet had just put the demons through.