Chapter 5

A little bit of historical trivia that I remember sticking in my head thanks to one of the world’s most awkward convention conversations, where a slightly drunk, very British man of middling years cornered me at the bar and went on an unprompted rant about ship classifications: Dreadnought wasn’t really a class of ship. There was a ship named Dreadnought, which had some revolutionary kind of armor or something that made it seem nearly invincible – again, he was very drunk and this was back in 2022. So, there were other battleships that were designed like the Dreadnought, which were then called dreadnoughts, but they weren’t actually Dreadnoughts, they were dreadnoughts.

Then sci-fi writers heard about them and everything ‘went to shite, went to bloody shite.’

Well.

Tzu Tzu Kanagoraga, Lady of Scepter II, ruler of fifteen planets and master of the greatest siege-works in the galaxy, had definitely built herself a dreadnought. The ship breaking orbit from her homeworld was a fifty kilometer long vehicle, roughly triangular in shape, and bristling with so many weapons that even from several AU away, I felt a chill run along my spine. I sat back in my chair, my brow furrowing as the dreadnought or super-destroyer or whatever the fuck you wanted to call such a ludicrous vehicle started to limp its way from low orbit to high orbit, its engines blazing brighter and brighter with every kilometer they gained – the further away from the habitable atmosphere it got, the more it could use its thrusters without risking immolating the planet beneath it.

“Okay,” I said, slowly, then turned to face Alin. “Is it just me or does that thing have some of those long ranged plasma artillery cannons?”

“Two,” Alin said, gulping. “And shield arrays, medium ranged laser cannons, rail-guns, missile batteries, an obliviation device...”

I rubbed the nape of my neck and cocked my head, letting my fancy captain’s hat tilt to half cover one eye. I thought, meditatively. In the real world, people who hadn’t known much about winning wars loved to build gigantic whatevers. Tanks, airplanes, boats. Bigger was better, right? The same held true in the strategy games that I had made my living playing and winning. But the thing was that ... in real life and in games, bigger was often a trap. One battlecruiser in Starcraft 1 cost about five or six hundred minerals and three hundred gas – I didn’t have the numbers off the top of my head because I only played Starcraft for Kerrigan’s heels.

Still, it took only, like, a handful of the much cheaper Scourge suicide fliers to blow a battlecruiser into a fine spread of pixels.

If you supported a battlecruiser tactically, it’d become a terrifying bulwark of an attack. Or if you had twelve of them. Like, if you had twelve battlecruisers, the game was already kind of over, right?

I rubbed my muzzle.

“What are we going to do?” Alin asked.

“Well,” I said. “We’re going to right click a lot.”

“I ... huh?” Alin asked, but I was already standing up and walking towards the console she used to give direct commands. She hurried over and leaned against my back, peering over my shoulder. “You know I can give those orders.”

“I know, but for this kind of thing ... actually, watch what I do,” I said, seriously. “This is what we call micro – remember? It takes a bit of practice, if we have a less high stress situation, you ... actually, I can set up some tutorials and challenges for it. Once we get the jump drive working again.” I flashed her a grin and Alin looked abashed.

“N-No, it’s okay, you can do micro,” she said.

“I’d be a pretty terrible boyfriend if I didn’t at least try and share my interests, Alin,” I said, chuckling softly. Alin practically melted.

Fuck, is the bar really that low? I thought as I started to tap buttons and click the mouse that was hooked to the interface. My fleet started to advance towards the dreadnought and its supporting ships – Lady Kanagoraga wasn’t a total moron, she had launched it with a screening force of frigates, fighter wings and battlecruisers. The only real problem was that her screening force was about a fifth the size of my fleet ... she clearly hoped that the dreadnought would make up the lack. It was already beginning to throw around its weight. Plasma shells erupted ahead of and behind and even within my fleet, fired from the aft and the belly of the dreadnought, in alternating pulses of energy that prevented the ship from being rocked out of orbit by its own recoil.

Alin, though, wasn’t looking at the screen and the dazzling light display. She was watching my hands, frowning intently as she did so.

“Still getting used to sorting the noise,” I said, quietly, my eyes narrowing. There was a pretty dizzying array of information coming in from the fleet. Shield levels, hull damage, thrust values, damage and damage control reports. I had once been able to take in the same kind of information from Galactic Conquest 2 and synthesize it into a gut sense of how a battle was going ... but for this one, I had to just kinda hope and learn as quickly as I could.

On the screens, the view was balletic. Wings of fighters streaked out from both formations – mine in aggressive claw formations, while hers were in elegant delta-Vs. Tracers that marked out the firing lines of kinetics swept through space as the automated fightercraft dove and swept around one another, their contrails leaving behind glimmering arcs and curves that only slowly faded. The lighter capital ships, the frigates and destroyers, fanned out into a broad curve, trying to pierce around the bulwark of Lady Kanagoraga’s formation. Heavy plasma shots and strobing pulses of ruby red lasers carved back and forth as the battlecruisers that flanked her dreadnought opened up on my lighter pickets, blowing them apart like they were popping cans of soda.

And then half my fleet kept going up, down, left and right. They circled entirely around the bright red ‘kill zone’ of the dreadnought’s primary ship to ship weaponry and then kept going.

Lady Kanagoraga appeared on the screen in her picture and picture. “What are you doing!?” she asked.

“Flanking,” I said.

“What!?” She spluttered.

I leaned back in my seat. “It was a good play, my Lady, but, you really needed to work on the diverse fleet first. Your macro was also pretty iffy – though, I mean, you got back online faster than I expected.”

“Fuck you!” she snarled. “You cheated!”

“By building more than two factories?” I asked, my voice dry.

Her face colored, dark cheeks flushing even darker. “I’ll ... I’ll destroy your base.”

My grin was lopsided and my left ear twitched up – my right was still covered by my jauntily tipped cap. “You built a slow dreadnought-”

“Pre-dread!” she snapped.

I blinked. “Excuse me?” I asked.

“A dreadnought has a single set of armament and improved engines, this is a pre-dread style battleship with a wide range of weaponry to cover multiple situations.” Lady Kanagoraga slumped in her throne, her scowl fierce.

“Very well, you built a slow pre-dread against someone who was outproducing you.” I shook my head. “Should have kept it closer to your base. GG?”

“G ... G?”

“Good game, you can surrender before I blow everything on that planet to pieces,” I said, frowning.

Lady Kanagoraga scowled.

On the screen, my flanking forces had moved entirely around her dreadnought. Those that had remained to keep tanking shots were coming apart in a rather impressive lightshow. Beams scythed through armor, leaving bubbling contrails and tumbling, humanoid bodies of the automated robotic crew, while fighters continued to duel between the sprays of anti-strike craft weaponry coming from the back of the dr ... the pre-dread. But the flankers had broken contact and, even as I watched, the pre-dread started to very ... very ... very slowly start to turn around. But the different speeds were very clear: My ion cannon frigates and torpedo destroyers would be in orbit around her homeworld with a solid ten, fifteen minuets of free range time. That was enough time to completely wreck her infrastructure and leave me time enough to build three, four more fleets to face down her supership.

Lady Kanagoraga slumped in her seat. “I ... I’ve never lost...” She said, sounding dazed. Then she leaned on her elbow. “I ... is it bad I kind of want to see the fireworks?”

I blinked. “Won’t you be hurt?” I asked, frowning.

“Why would I be hurt?” she asked, sounding utterly baffled.

I glanced at Alin, who shrugged. She had no idea either.

“Well, if you want to watch.” I said standing up and righting my hat with my palms.

The next ten minutes were some of the most impressive bits of pyrotechnics I’d ever seen. The orbital defenses of Lady Kanagoraga’s home pulsed beams of light into space and filled orbit with missiles. My frigates knocked the missiles down and maneuvered to be between the worst of the incoming fire and my heavier ion cannon carrying ships. Those ion cannons started to punch down and the factory structures and their support network – the mines and refineries, the energy plants, and matter synth facilities, the transports between those – started to come apart in blooms of orange-white light. The bombardment took out building after building after building, leaving behind smoldering wreckage and glowing, cherry red craters.