War Core Wednesday, War Core 3, Chapter 35.

Chapter 35.

Another infantry mech walked off the assembly line and Captain Tran ordered the soldier operating it to the airport, continuing the plan to get at least one mech at each victory point to secure it while they built up their forces. Confirming that the last of the tier one infantry upgrades were researching and that nothing needed his immediate attention, Hugh checked back on the space battle.

Hugh had only been away for about half an hour overseeing his command post, but the space battle was already going strong. The Ssath ships were appearing at the edge of the solar system, exactly in the area that had been designated as a possible entry point by the GCA. Their enemy hadn’t waited at all, charging in as soon as they picked up the four nearby stations on their sensors. The stations launched their fighters and waited for the attack. Over two thousand starfighters poured from the stations, each carrying a pair of interceptor missiles, weapons geared toward taking down incoming missiles or enemy starfighters.

The lead ships were the Ssath frigates and destroyers, the first of which was already entering the minefield. Despite the time and the number of minelayers at their disposal, the outer edges were sparsely defended and it took a bit for the Ssath to encounter the first weapon. A mine activated, firing its anti-ship missile at close range, giving the Ssath ship it had targeted little time to engage with its point defense. Fire lashed out from the Ssath, swatting down the missile despite its surprise appearance. More ships entered the minefield and it seemed like an endless flow continued to enter the sensor range of the stations.

From what he knew, the stations had better sensors than the ships, but the structures were much larger and easier to spot than even a Ssath battleship, which meant the two sides would see each other at about the same time. More and more of the mines started to trigger, and the missiles began to register hits. A single hit might take out a frigate with a lucky hit, but the heavier ships were more resilient and a single strike could, at best, burn down shields and maybe inflict a bit of damage. It was going to be a long fight, and any incremental damage to the enemy fleet now, would pay off big dividends later in the fight. The Ssath tried to shift their approach vector, but the minefield had been sewn in a bubble around the stations, to get to their targets, the Ssath had to run the gauntlet.

Not content to sacrifice ships to simple mines, the Ssath started to launch fighters. Unlike the human ships, it seemed that any Ssath vessel of at least cruiser size carried a few fighters onboard. The cruisers might have a wing of four starfighters, but the big battleships would have a full dozen. Given the number of ships out there, the fighters started to pour into the area seeking out and destroying the mines before they did more damage.

A starfighter could trigger a mine but had to close in to do so, and even then, the missile wasn’t likely to hit the small and maneuverable craft. Instead, if the missile detected the threat of the incoming fighter and launched, internal scanners in the missile itself sought out the nearest valid target. From a longer distance, the missiles were easy to pick off, their strength was in their surprise appearance at close range, and they lacked the large saturation waves that normally were needed to penetrate a fleets point defenses.

The fighters from the four stations retaliated, charging in to engage their enemy counterparts. Outnumbered, human pilots in the combat pods controlling the ships pressed the attack. Hugh didn’t know what the Ssath world was like, but he didn’t think that they had nearly the same level of air combat experience that many of the human pod operators had. As aggressive in space and sky as the Ssath were on the ground, the human pilots tore into the enemy formations.

Missiles filled space as the fighters closed in. Despite being a tier higher than the human craft, the Ssath inside their combat pods weren’t as skilled, which gave the humans an advantage. At first, the station’s fighters were scoring kill after kill, but once their missiles were expended and what passed for dogfighting began, the superior Ssath numbers started to take their toll. The humans had no reinforcements, but more and more Ssath fighters were entering the battle every minute as the rest of their fleet entered the system.

“Did we get a count of their numbers yet, sir?” Tran asked.

“No, I don’t have any comms with stations, so we’ll have to estimate ourselves,” Hugh replied. The Ssath fleet was still appearing at the edge of the system, and it seemed that ships were arriving based on their mass, the lighter ships having entered the battle first, with the cruisers and battleships now making their appearance in greater numbers. Being a core did have advantages, and counting large numbers quickly was one of those advantages. Hugh scanned the enemy fleet, coming up with a current total that the system gladly organized in his interface.

Ssath order of battle.

Frigates: 1233.

Destroyers: 1119.

Cruisers: 88.

Battleships: 12.

Starfighters: 3388.

The totals kept increasing for all ship types, with only the number of starfighters remaining stagnant as they fought with their human opponents. It was an odd and deadly dance the fighters were conducting. Being controlled by a pod and without living pilots, the small ships were only limited in their maneuvers by the strength of their hulls and the stresses put on them by their powerplants. Thrusters were placed on many of the surfaces, allowing the fighters to accelerate or bleed off velocity when needed. With missiles expended, they were battling with small plasma weapons, about the same as the fifty caliber heavy machineguns his mechs used. Despite the tough nature of their design, this was sufficient to burn through the hulls after only a few hits.

“Sir, we’ve found something that might be a resource cache,” one of the soldiers announced, drawing Hugh’s attention away from the growing space battle and back to his command post. One of the soldiers heading toward the Griffith Park Observatory had happened upon what looked like a collapsed building with several damaged mechs scattered around. They looked like normal infantry mechs, but were unarmored, smaller than even his tier zero units, and only possessed a small pistol caliber weapon on one arm.

“Good eye, soldier, I’ll get some drones over to gather them up. Everyone, keep your eyes peeled for anything like this in your line of sight. Once you’ve secured your objectives, spread out and conduct recon of your immediate area,” Hugh ordered. If there was one site with resources, there were likely others. He only had a half dozen infantry mechs produced so far, so it might be a while before they could scour the city.

While the unit cap was gone for this fight, Hugh had to work with whatever the GCA decided to give him for construction drones. They had been building since the command post went active, and so far, he had five of them. Production was much slower than normal, just like he had been warned about from the battle parameter info. He assigned all five to gather the newfound salvage. It would take them a while to haul everything back to the command post, there weren’t going to be any drop-off locations to use in this fight.

A mech reached the first victory point, the museum. Hugh waited as the capture process began. The progress was painfully slow, it appeared the GCA had added some capture weight mechanic to the process, and only a single infantry mech didn’t have much in the way of capture weight. Other mechs began to reach their destinations, and pretty soon, Hugh would have a better idea of how valuable the victory points were. The Ssath weren’t going to get to produce any new units during the battle, but Hugh was pretty sure they would get something other than cutting off Hugh from some resources if they took control of a point.

His progress percentage to the next tier increased by one when the capture process for the museum was completed. In addition, Hugh found that the victory points were going to be worth more than just a resource node for him. A prompt appeared, explaining what the victory points could do.

You have taken control of a victory point. Resource generation by your command post has increased by 10%. Progress toward the next tier of your command post has been increased by 10%.

Once secured, Victory Point locations can be upgraded to improve their defenses. The tier of your command post will determine the upgrades that are available. Each victory point will have an assigned force of 5 construction drones to build and repair the defenses that you purchase. If destroyed, the drones will be rebuilt at the victory point, but at a greatly reduced pace.

Additional options will become available at higher tiers, but you must purchase the requisite tier 1 upgrades in order to unlock them. If all of the victory points under your control research a specific upgrade or its equivalent, your command post will automatically receive that upgrade. Command post upgrades received in this manner will be built without requiring resources and will be constructed at an accelerated pace by your drones. At tier 1, you have the following options available.

1. Clear fields of fire. Demolish the first block of buildings surrounding the victory point, denying your enemy cover as they approach. This upgrade will not cost you any resources but is time-consuming and requires the use of the entire drone force while the work is being completed.

2. Internal fortification. This upgrade will add additional supports to the victory point structure as well as increase the thickness and strength of the exterior walls. This upgrade requires 250 resources.

It wasn’t much, but Hugh figured the clear fields of fire option wasn’t going to cost him anything but time at this point, so he selected it. He would do the same as the other points were captured. As for the internal fortifications, they would have to wait, his resources were needed for units. Once resources become more plentiful, Hugh was going to dig into the other options, curious about what he might unlock.

With a flat percentage increase to his resource generation for each victory point captured, his income was going to double once he capped them all. In addition to the extra resources, his research toward the next tier was getting a bump. Things were going okay here on the ground; the real question would be how much time the space stations were going to be able to buy him. Hugh turned his attention back to space watching as the Ssath fleet closed in for the kill on the four stations that represented humanity’s first line of defense. Information flowed into Hugh’s core, the GCA allowing him insight into the human weapon systems and upgrades that had been purchased by his allied cores. He couldn’t communicate, but at least he now had a better understanding of what the commanders on the scene were doing.

The human fighters had been swept from space, and given that the Ssath numbers kept increasing, Hugh wasn’t sure how many enemies they had taken down with them. A volley of missiles was launched from the Ssath fleet, over ten thousand of them homing in on the quartet of stations. Despite being out of fighters, the stations weren’t defenseless and already, a stream of interceptor missiles was heading toward the approach Ssath weapons. At this tier, it looked like each station had a dozen defensive launchers, and each second, they spit out a counter missile.

Needing a larger launching tube, the anti-ship missile launchers were fewer in number on the human stations, but each still had a half dozen of them, all of which were firing on the Ssath. The rate of fire wasn’t as fast as the defensive missiles, but they were still pumping out twenty-four every few seconds from the quartet of stations. Maneuver thrusters were also firing up, moving the stations slowly in random directions. It wasn’t much, but sitting in the same place was suicide with main gun rounds about to fly. A plasma shell or railgun bolt didn’t have a maximum range, they were only limited by the targeting systems of the ship they were mounted on. Undoubtedly, rounds were already on the way to where the stations had sat.

With the number of Ssath ships out there, Hugh figured the human anti-ship missiles would be lucky to score a hit or two before they were swatted down by point defenses, but the human command team in charge of that group surprised him. Each wave of twenty-four missiles was fired with different levels of thrust. The first had been launched with only a slow burn of the missile’s engines, while the later volleys were a bit faster, timed so they would all reach the Ssath fleet at the same time, giving them a better chance to saturate the point defenses.

Just like with the human stations, the Ssath fleet had spit out a considerable wave of defensive missiles. From what Hugh understood, the station’s weapons would be more accurate due to the station’s mass allowing it to mount much more powerful scanners and targeting arrays than you could fit on a starship. Even now, the stations ordered the attacking missiles to alter course, trying to bring them out of the detection range of the Ssath defensive missiles.

As the Ssath fleet closed in on the human stations, the minefield continued to take a toll. The field became denser, and the types of mines deadlier the closer they got to the stations. The outer minefields had been comprised of the simple, single-shot missile variety, but now the Ssath were starting to hit mines that fired a bomb-pumped laser. A small nuclear device would detonate, and the force unleashed would be focused into a beam that easily burned through shields and dug through the hull of any Ssath vessel it hit. Smaller and harder to detect than the missile-based mines, the bomb-pumped laser mines were scoring hit after hit on the lead Ssath vessels.

It was still the lighter Ssath ships, mainly frigates, that were being hammered by the minefield, but Hugh was glad for any damage they could inflict. To counter the threat, more Ssath fighters were launched, increasing the number sweeping for the mines in front of the Ssath fleet. It was then that the last type of mine that the human stations had developed went into action. These mines were focused specifically on defeating fighters and the incoming anti-ship missiles.

At a signal from the stations or relying on the passive sensor array onboard the mine, each of these new mines activated and unleashed a quartet of defensive missiles. Building only minelayers, the first line of stations had amassed an impressive number of mines and all that were in range went active. Hundreds of defensive missiles grew to thousands as more and more mines were activated. In addition, any anti-ship missile mines that were in range were also activated and fired. The enemy was about to take a pummeling, but so too were the stations, where over ten thousand Ssath missiles were headed.