The Fall of Cybele by Schrödinger
Admiral Archibald couldn’t believe this. They seemed to have popped out of nowhere. A thousand Leviathans… Enough to blast away every habited planet of the Empire ten times over, Archibald deliberated over the thought. But a thousand Leviathans? Archibald still couldn’t shake off the idea that this was all just a hoax. Some dream. And this huge fleet hadn’t even registered on the scanners until alpha proximity alert was triggered. By then, the enemy was already in-system. It was far too late.
As though to reassure him how real this was, a lance of photonic energy shot right through the death star. The entire moon-sized behemoth cringed under the impact. The shield went into overload within a millisecond. The ship AI reported hull breach in sector 49 through to 75, but overall structural integrity retained, for now. Archibald was thrown across the bridge. He thought he felt something wet behind his head.
Outside the porthole, Cybele slowly rotated in orbit about the F-class main sequence star. She was the crown jewel of the Empire. Her extraordinarily high crystal content attracted millions from lightyears away, who flocked to Cybele when the colony was founded 400 years ago. Today the planet remains the most densely populated, with the busiest and largest spaceport of the entire Empire. It was also the most heavily guarded. For centuries the planetary defenses has kept any raiders and hostiles at bay, and the planet has never once been fallen to enemy hands.
The dormant defenses were once again brought to life. Across the planet, these huge guns rose from their subterranean bunker, took aim, and fired. Then again. In the sky above, one of the levis exploded as its antimatter reserve leaked. The flash of brillance almost outshown the star for a single moment, then it was reduced to cinders. Well that’s one down, nine hundred and ninety-nine to go. Archibald watched with little triumph. We could never win. There were far, far too many of them. But Archibald could not retreat, not if it meant abandoning the billions of his people. And the fight was not over yet. If he was going down today, he would go down with a boom.
Outside, millions of fighters streaked, and still more were being launched from carriers everywhere. They seemed little more than mosquitoes against the massive leviathans. Their tiny laser beams glanced off harmlessly against the levis’ shields. A hundred thousand cruisers surrounded the death star in a protective cocoon, trying to fend it from any attacks. Their bolts of plasma pounded away at the levis relentlessly. Archibald saw the plasma shots charge away from the cruisers one after another, only to be stopped abruptly by a shimmering impenetrable barrier ten feet from their targeted levi. Its shield dented slightly, before re-configuring and resuming its perfect guardianship. However, occasionally one or two shots might miraculously pass through this shield. Quantum fields were distorted, and the plasma travelled through the ephemeral interstitial space. It found its target. Recent development enabled all weapons onboard ships to have the probablity to pass through any shields, no matter how tough. It utilizes the tunneling feature of quatum mechanics, exploiting the probability ampitude that exists behind high energy shields, albeit there is only a very small probability for tunneling to occur. Ion bombers and frigates deploy a similar technique, though more deliberately instead of relying on pure chance.
The TNN Ultimatus was a blaze of fury. Disruptor pulses shot out from every turret. Cannons bombarded the vast enemy warships again and again. Weapon were pushed to the limit of their capabilities, firing non-stop long before their cooldown times were reached, causing mutiple weapon stations to verge upon meltdown. Each disruptor pulse manifested an aggressive function inside one of the leviathans. The minuscule spacetime anomaly accelerated away, passing through the shield straight into the core of the warship. Seconds later, the levi began on a catastrophic implosion as light bursted out of their confinement. The radiance of the death of a leviathan was blinding. But in its place, many more came. There were too many.
The death star dwarfed every single other ship in the Imperial Armada by many orders of magnitude. True to its name, the TNN Ultimatus was also largest the Empire has ever built, representing the pinnacle of its military might. Apart from the planetary defenses. It was also the only one capable of doing direct damage to the levis, with its cannon shots cutting cleanly through their shields. He knew it, and so did the enemy. Groups of levis began to focus fire, trying to force their way through the cocoon of cruisers to reach the death star, which lay deep in the heart of the armada.
On the planet’s surface, it was a glorious sight. Random debris, half-vaporized wreckages, and pieces of once mighty starships fell from the heavens, burning, becoming enveloped in a ball of flame as they did so. And the massive planetary guns were still firing. Above, a levi offhandedly launched one of its photon blasters at the planet. The planetary gun and anything within the ten kilometre radius was instantly destroyed. A city was razed.
Archibald watched as the barrage of enemy fire tore the Imperial Armada apart. Cruisers and fighters rushed in to fill up the gaping hole to maintain their defensive formation. It was a futile attempt. The enemy had broken through. But Archiald still could not shake off the disbelieve in his mind. There was no way this huge enemy fleet could have manged to avoid detection as they were incoming. The scanners on the TNN Ultimatus was one of the best. And the thousands of hyperspatial sensors scattered around Cybele would have picked up the telltale quantum signatures of the warp drives. For them to all simultaneously break down was impossible. This was more than a mere machine malfunction.
Onboard the leviathan SS Lyallpur, Captain Ilanthe could not help but feel cowered. Before him, the death star hung majestically. It was colossal, elegant, and best of all…vulnerable. There was a little feeling of regret at having to destroy such beauty. Deep within the core of the ship, fifty milligrams of exotic matter were brought together to react. Direct mass-energy conversion was incredibly powerful, and the exotic matter was instantly turned into a trillion kilojoules of energy in its purest form. The photonic energy bursted out, travelling in a flash through the fifty thousand kilometres of vacuum that was all that separated it from its target.
Admiral Archibald never saw it coming. His accelerated thought processes never even felt anything as his body instantly superheat and vaporize. The death star was set ablaze in a titanic explosion. The unbearable energy threatened to rip open the spacetime continuum as the TNN Ultimatus was turned into the galaxy’s newest nova. Even from half a million kilometres away, SS Lyallpur’s hull buckled under the awesome radiant pressure. Its shield went into overload.
Seconds before the death star exploded, a tiny fighter was launched. The Infiltrator opened up a com-link over an ultra-secure channel. “The job is done, Imperator.” The Infiltrator reported as his fighter speed away from the death star to rendezvous with the huge levi fleet. A single scout ship, hanging in transdimensional suspension, oversaw it all. The Imperator smiled, “It was very impressive how you hacked into the death star’s scanners. Well done. I hope you’re ready for your next mission.”