Erra:'How does it feel?'
Nomi:'Strange. I'm slightly nauseous from the sheer scope of processing reality simultaneously through all my captains.'
Erra:'You have absolutely no conditioning for this. A mild stomachache is a glowing endorsement of my finesse.'
Nomi:'I suppose I'll just have to deal with it. It's not like we have a local Jedi temple lying around.'
Erra leaned in and pressed an injector against my neck. The nausea vanished instantly, replaced by a razor-sharp clarity.
I gave her a curt nod and returned my focus to the tactical display.
Minutes ago, I was looking at twenty-three static ship holograms. Now, ghosts of probable futures bled over every single one of them.
Like the other admirals, I had my designated sector of space. My task was to break the enemy assault.
I knew an enemy warship was going to bank two entire seconds before its maneuvering thrusters vented their first thermal flare.
This wasn't fed to me by sensor operators or extrapolated by tactical algorithms. This data was pure magic.
Erra was funneling these phantoms of the future directly into my consciousness, layering them over my vision like a HUD.
The enemy Cals had already fired. One of my ships was about to be obliterated.
At this engagement range, a kinetic slug takes roughly seven minutes to cross the void. Scoring a hit under these conditions is bordering on the miraculous. That meant they fired the absolute second they reverted to realspace.
I seamlessly shifted into the consciousness of my targeted captain and hijacked his command authority.
"Evasive maneuvers! Hard bank to starboard, thirty-two degree list. Bring the bow to vector zero-fourteen."
The crew executed the order flawlessly. Still, one of the massive slugs slammed into the lateral armor plating at a high angle, ricocheting off into the void toward the planet.
The kinetic shockwave nearly sheared the armor plate clean off. A colossal gouge scarred the center of the hull. That section wouldn't survive a second impact.
The two-kilometer warship stabilized its roll and settled back into a defensive posture.
Three of Coruscant's vanguard cruisers swept right in a wide arc, attempting to exploit our flank's blind spot. Instead, they ran face-first into my flagship's reinforced frontal armor.
Coruscant's opening salvo was a blinding wave of yellow turbo-plasma. Our ablative coating flared with blinding violet fire, boiling away into the vacuum to disperse millions of joules of thermal energy.
We returned fire with a plasma volley of our own, immediately following it up with our first payload of nuclear missiles—a silent, radioactive surprise.
A cone of ionized gas erupted into the vacuum. Three deep, molten scars carved through the five-hundred-millimeter armor plate, but the interior bulkheads held firm.
Thirteen against ten.
The enemy fielded three Cals, two cruisers, two corvettes, and six frigates. Four of those frigates were dedicated torpedo boats loaded with heavy proton warheads. They lingered in the second echelon, cowering behind the battleships and masking their thermal signatures in the superheated exhaust of the main drives.
A single proton torpedo bypassing a ship's armor and striking the reactor usually resulted in instantaneous atomic vaporization. Those four Coruscant torpedo boats represented four guaranteed kills, and their admiral was simply waiting for the perfect moment to unleash them.
"Distance to their main line?"
"Three hundred sixty thousand kilometers. Relative closure rate: one thousand one hundred meters per second. We have entered effective turbolaser range."
The neural link with Erra allowed me to passively absorb some of her surface emotions.
There was a Jedi on the other side. They couldn't have calculated a Cal firing solution from that distance—it was mathematically impossible.
His presence bore down on the battlefield like a cold, suffocating weight, blanketing the entire Coruscant battlegroup. He couldn't see fragmented seconds of the future like we could, but he was enforcing a terrifying synchronicity, binding the wills of his captains into a single iron fist.
He was actively trying to read the emotional spikes of my captains, feeding real-time corrections to his gunners.
Erra began manipulating her personal holotable. She manually arranged the holographic ships into specific coordinates, dragging them forward in time based on her precognition.
According to our arrangement, this table was supposed to model the battlefield tens of seconds into the future.
"Second group... frigate two... he's diving..."
I caught her thought perfectly. In four seconds, a narrow, eight-hundred-meter corridor would briefly open between the hulls of the two Coruscant Cals. For exactly eight seconds, the bow of the second enemy torpedo frigate would be exposed through that gap.
"Adjust heading to azimuth forty-five, elevation plus three. Begin capacitor charge on the mass drivers."
The massive Gauss cannons groaned as they slowly depressed. My flagship brought its entire nose around to meet the firing solution.
Nine seconds.
The Jedi sensed the lock-on. Through our link, Erra felt a massive psychic pulse erupt from the Coruscant flagship.
Five seconds.
The blunt nose of the Coruscant torpedo frigate slid into the optical corridor perfectly.
I hit the stopwatch.
"Fire!"
The mass drivers shook the entire dreadnought, rattling the bridge with violent recoil.
Two durasteel slugs, weighing two tons each, tore through the void. The magnetic rails accelerated them to a hundred kilometers per second.
Watching the enemy formation, I finally stopped the timer.
They initiated evasive maneuvers the absolute microsecond our guns fired. That proved a Jedi was actively commanding their fleet.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
The Coruscant ships reacted in exactly thirty-six seconds. That gave me exactly what I needed to bypass the Jedi's precognition.
I could write off kinetic strikes completely. With a five-minute travel time, they could dodge them in their sleep. But the data was invaluable.
I left the Gauss cannons to cool and shifted my focus to the turbolasers. They were far more viable.
"Gunnery deck! Target lock: Azimuth twelve, elevation minus nineteen. Hold for my mark."
While feeding coordinates to my flagship, I simultaneously overrode and aligned the firing arcs of the rest of my fleet.
Phantoms of the enemy's future trajectories flashed in my vision like a fever dream, but I knew precisely which outcome was the most statistically probable.
"Fire."
Unlike the algorithmic predictions generated by targeting computers, this volley wasn't aimed at the enemy's current trajectory.
Streams of yellow plasma missed wildly, a few glancing off the armor of the capital ships. But one frigate happened to drift into the absolute worst possible place.
Heavy turbolaser fire hammered into an armor seam, ripping the hull wide open. Secondary explosions blew out the containment cap on the port torpedo tube.
The flash was indistinguishable from the birth of a new star.
Three internal proton warheads detonated simultaneously, instantly converting a four-hundred-meter frigate into an expanding sphere of superheated gas and atomized steel.
Kinetic shrapnel pelted the aft pylons of the adjacent Coruscant cruiser. The impact sheared off two of its port maneuvering thrusters, sending the warship into an uncontrolled, violent spin.
The corvette guarding the vaporized frigate lost its sensor arrays, its hull scorched and partially melted. With its point-defense turrets knocked offline, the captain panicked, throwing the ship into a desperate retreat.
"Concentrate fire on targets C-11 and C-3!"
I didn't have the luxury of manually plotting the firing solutions this time, but it hardly mattered.
The cruiser's uncontrolled spin prevented its captain from angling his strongest armor plating toward us. Several plasma bolts ruthlessly tore apart its remaining engines. Abandon ship protocols triggered immediately.
The fleeing corvette tried to hide, but a plasma bolt clipped it before the cruiser's bulk could shield it. The strike gutted the ship, leaving it a twisted, burning husk.
Thousands of escape pods ejected from the ventral bays of the dying cruiser. Its turbolasers went dead, completely abandoning any attempt at counter-fire.
The enemy was down to three Cals, one cruiser, one corvette, and five frigates.
My adjacent battlecruiser lost two entire turbolaser batteries, and three of its primary armor segments were flashing critical.
I was forced to shift our formation, moving the crippled ship out of the primary firing line before the enemy could focus-fire and eliminate it.
The enemy stopped making mistakes. We continued closing the distance, trading brutal turbolaser volleys.
Radiation alarms blared across my console. My damage control teams braced themselves as hundreds of nuclear missiles swarmed toward our line.
Even precognition was useless against a saturation nuclear strike. The corvettes and frigates simply couldn't intercept them all.
The enemy faced the exact same problem. Our own missile volley had reached their lines.
The armor on our ships was degrading rapidly. Dealing this much structural damage with turbolasers alone would have taken hours.
"All officers! Evacuate to the armored secondary bridges!"
Every single captain in my fleet echoed the order. I abandoned my station and made my way toward the heavily reinforced internal bridge.
We were entering the engagement envelope where bridge strikes were standard operating procedure.
A sharp pain spiked in my neck, and I glanced back at Erra.
"Don't thank me."
The adrenaline of the battle had completely masked a splitting migraine. But with the fresh injection coursing through me, my mind cleared instantly.
"Do we have enough potions?"
She held up a belt with five more injectors. I let out a breath, relieved I wouldn't have to worry about my tactical advantage burning out my brain.
As I relocated to the secondary bridge, the datapad in my hands ran hot, choked with a relentless stream of casualty reports and damage assessments.
My fleet was in horrific shape—the inevitable cost of an evenly matched slugfest.
Golden hulls were charred black, external compartments had been vaporized, and tens of thousands of crewmen had died in localized vacuums. Engineers in hardsuits scrambled to patch breaches, while atmospheric systems desperately vented radioactive contaminants into the void.
Once I reached the internal bridge, I was forced to rely entirely on telemetry. The sensors were borderline useless, heavily degraded by the radioactive slag coating the external hull.
At this exact moment, Erra's precognition became vastly more valuable. We were effectively flying blind.
"Distance: sixty thousand kilometers. Relative closure rate: one thousand meters per second. We have entered effective kinetic range."
"Spool up the main batteries. Target C-4!"
I didn't order the Cals to fire. The enemy response time was thirty seconds, and slug travel time was over fifty. They had plenty of time to dodge, and the Gauss cannons took agonizingly long to bleed off heat.
The enemy disagreed. They fired their mass drivers again. The six kinetic slugs followed a highly predictable trajectory; I could have evaded them even without the precognitive link. They were just burning out the operational lifespan of their coils.
The proximity made turbolasers exponentially more lethal. The void became a dense lattice of yellow energy, while another wave of nuclear warheads abandoned our silos.
At this range, artillery systems rarely missed. Armor blackened and melted away across every ship in the engagement.
A stray heavy turbolaser bolt grazed one of my frigates. The entire starboard side sloughed off in molten slag, and the bridge was annihilated.
The surviving executive officer immediately ordered an evacuation.
The larger capital ships could absorb the plasma, but every single external bridge had been wiped out. Evasive maneuvers devolved into ships simply rotating on their axes to distribute the thermal load across their remaining armor plates.
Erra was ready for my play. She was just waiting for the perfect window.
"Distance: thirty thousand kilometers. Relative closure rate: one thousand meters per second!"
They wouldn't have time to dodge this.
"Adjust heading: azimuth five, elevation plus one. Wait for the signal from my adjutant."
Through the mind-link, I ordered my captains to focus their remaining fire directly on the enemy Cals. At this range, we were almost guaranteed to cripple their Gauss cannons and render them useless.
The gunnery crews adjusted their firing solutions, waiting for Erra to drop the hammer.
"Fire."
Two kinetic slugs tore toward the enemy cruiser. Completely blind, the ship didn't even attempt an evasive maneuver.
The kinetic impact caved in the entire flank. The internal skeleton shattered under the sheer force, and the warship snapped cleanly in half.
At that exact moment, the sensors screamed. Proton torpedoes. And the precognitive flashes warned me that my flagship was squarely in the crosshairs.
"Hard turn! Azimuth one-eighty, elevation plus fifty-nine. Deploy countermeasures."
All nine of my ships triggered their electronic warfare suites. Hundreds of interceptor missiles had already been pre-launched and were waiting in the void.
The second those missiles cleared my flagship's perimeter, six colossal storage containers detonated simultaneously across our bow and flanks.
The vacuum for tens of kilometers around my ship was instantly choked by a dense, impenetrable cloud of charged particles.
We were now utterly, completely blind. But the precognition still held. I watched the battlefield through the eyes of my other captains.
The range was far too close. We didn't have to wait long.
Torpedoes began detonating erratically in the void around us. The moment they hit the particle cloud, their homing suites short-circuited and went completely rogue.
"Evasive action! Azimuth eighty, elevation minus ninety. Dump the rest of the missile payload!"
The flagship violently shifted its trajectory. A rogue torpedo merely scorched the port armor. A handful of others reacquired the lock on our dumped missiles, and we miraculously avoided a direct hit.
"Azimuth twelve, elevation minus nine. Ready the main batteries!"
I prepared to return their hospitality. Erra had already calculated the exact trajectory of the torpedo ships. She highlighted the specific frigate harboring the bastard who had been causing us so much grief.
"Fire!"
Two kinetic slugs erupted from the fog. They carved a path through the ionized interference and flew straight toward the source of the Force.
That particular frigate reacted almost instantaneously—perhaps its captain was the Jedi—but it barely mattered.
Smashing through the torpedo bays, the slugs converted the ship into a miniature sun. The oppressive sensation of my emotions being read vanished entirely. Thinking suddenly became infinitely easier.
The catastrophic explosion triggered a chain reaction, prematurely detonating a fresh volley of torpedoes. The blast caught the ordnance launching from the adjacent frigate, blowing out its main drives in a blinding flash.
My battleships capitalized on the crippled ship instantly. The concentrated fire was so relentless the frigate's crew began abandoning ship.
The enemy Cals squeezed off two shots from their surviving Gauss cannons, crippling one of my battlecruisers. But their guns were overheating now. The window for a turbolaser brawl was wide open.
Unwilling to risk his crew, the captain of my crippled battlecruiser initiated evacuation protocols.
The particle fog around my flagship finally dissipated. The hull was charred black, melting in several places, but the turbolaser batteries were already tracking the helpless remnants of the enemy frigates.