Chapter 21

“In historical naval combat fought atop oceans, large ships had their weapons arrayed along their sides in fixed positions. To maximize their ability to defend themselves, they travelled in single file, with those side weapons exposed, and when two fleets collided, the expedient tactical option was to cut across the front or rear of that line, to focus all the fire upon a single vessel. In interplanetary combat, we deal in three-dimensional space. Our line, by necessity, cannot be a single stream of ships but must make up a formation that can both shield itself from enemy fire and return fire in any given direction. 

Yet the fundamentals remain consistent across both types of combat. Isolate the weakness of the enemy, focus all fire upon it, and ensure that they do not have the opportunity to do the same unto you. With the increased reliance on fleet-to-fleet combat on coordinated shielding, the formation and positioning of individual ships within the fleet seems to have become less pertinent. This is not the case. Not even accounting for the correct positioning and angling of your keystone shield generators, there is a vastly increased reliance on close formation organization to maximize the strength of shielding. Smaller surface areas on your formation mean reduced mana requirements for shielding, and decreased target selections for the enemy fleet.”

—Ships of the Line, Part One, Eyban Ghorat

The Dominion fleet hung ahead of them, shimmering in the night in greater numbers than the stars themselves. 

The Empyrean and its allies had gathered the full strength of what could be mustered just inside of enemy territory and found no resistance whatsoever. All of Blackstar’s might had been withdrawn to the Beast’s Eyes. It was there that he meant for the battle to be fought, and he gave not a single damn about sacrificing all of this territory to the Empyrean if it meant he got to pick the battleground.

Sylvas stood at the center of a mass of faces on the bridge of his flagship. A ship that at some point during its refurbishment had been renamed to “Mira’s Vengeance” without him being aware it.

It is a striking name.

The various faces hanging in rows around him were not the captains of the various ships in his fleet as he’d first assumed, but just the wing leaders. Everyone had their orders by this point in proceedings. Written up and mailed out by Mira after countless hours of tactical debates between everyone across what felt like the whole Empyrean. This last face-to-face meeting was just so that Sylvas could look them in the eye before asking them to die for him. Because that was what he was doing. He had sacrificed the lives of countless civilians back home by taking these ships and soldiers away from defending them against the eidolons, and now he was going to sacrifice their lives, flinging them into the jaws of the Dominion in the faint hope that it might choke.

He looked them in the eyes as he confirmed their orders. “We all know what we need to do. Now, we just need to have the courage to do it.” 

Hector piped up in the silence that followed. “Once the battle begins, the plans will fall apart. So, keep your ears open, and look after each other as best you can.”

“Staying in contact means that you can adapt as the plans change,” Malachai subtly corrected the older man’s wording.

“Can we all stop flapping our gums and go murder something?!” Kaya barked, leading to all the elves in the audience looking shocked, and all the dwarves chuckling.

“I will see you all on the ground.” Sylvas gave what he hoped was an encouraging smile and then cut off communications. 

A few faces remained, dotted around him. Kaya, Malachai, and Hector. They all drifted together in front of him. Hector flashed a wolfish grin. “Ready to make some history?”

“I think I would rather be literally anywhere else,” Malachai replied, shocking them all with his honesty.

“Tell us how you really feel, bone-boy!” Kaya brayed with laughter.

“We’re all here. We’re all ready.” Sylvas did not find Malachai’s distaste for the whole situation to be quite as funny. “Mira will keep you updated on everything as we go. I’ll see you all again at the Nexus.”

“If we make it that far.” Hector chuckled. But it wasn’t funny. None of the usual jokes were ringing true today. Sylvas had talked about not being able to protect Rania, but in the chaos of the battle to come, he wouldn’t be able to save any of them if luck went the wrong way. He opened his mouth, only to be immediately silenced.

“Shut up, stanzbuhr.” Kaya headed off anything too sentimental before he’d even formed the words.

Sylvas chuckled and cut off the comms. Just a moment later, he activated the signal to the whole fleet to proceed, glancing around at the bridge crew of inexperienced students he’d landed himself with. Some of them were decades older than him, some centuries, but none of them had a fraction of his experience. He could only hope that they’d hold together when the time came.

Every ship in the fleet had its own pilot, its own engines, its own reserves of etherium, but all of those things were resources that would be better used up once the fighting had begun. Even as the Empyrean fleet began to drift forward under their own power, it was only into the positions here on the edge of the enemy interdiction that they would be launched from. And Sylvas would be the one doing the launching.

Back when he first learned about his gravity affinity, he was told that people like him could move entire fleets under their power alone, and now, he was so much more than he’d been back then. Mira calculated the trajectories for every ship based on their assessment of the enemy fleet’s positions and lines of fire, and he cast, funneling gravity mana through the world soul into his core and then out through his contorted eidolons into the words of the aions, no longer barking out fragmentary syllables of words long forgotten, but stringing them together into sentences of magic, each word reinforcing the other, each type of magic empowering the others. The fleet leapt forwards as his spell was completed, so fast that the Dominion couldn’t even react and start bombarding them until they were already a quarter of the way across the dead zone of space that had been set up as a killing field.

On the newly redesigned Mira’s Vengeance, there were two command circles—one in which the regular pilot was sitting, doing his perfectly competent job of steering them, and one in which Sylvas now stood. It wasn’t connected to the systems of the ship in the way a normal command circle was but to the emitters and weapons systems that covered the outside of the ship. Through the reinforced lines of etherium that Sylvas and his crew had grown and woven through the ship, he could cast directly without interference, as if the ship truly was an extension of his own body. He flung a gravity shear ahead of the ship now, protecting it, and the rest of the attack wing flying right down the center of the dead space. The center of the line. The head of the spear.

The shear was not an unnecessary precaution. Almost as soon as Sylvas had it raised, it began deflecting spells launched from the enemy fleet. The shear he’d cast was smaller than he would have liked, relying on the center of mass being targeted rather than covering the whole attack wing, but that was in no small part because he’d twisted its usual shape almost entirely back on itself. Instead of being a hemisphere that deflected any incoming shots around it, it was a contorted hat-shaped thing, with the usual hemisphere twisted out to face ahead. If the usual shear was in place, every shot it deflected would have curved off to hit another part of the fleet; instead, it was now fired back in the direction from which it had come. It was far from perfect, and most of the shots sputtered and died long before they got back near the enemy fleet anyway, but it at least meant that Sylvas didn’t have to worry that protecting himself was killing everyone else.

In space, without friction, the spell that had flung the fleet forward would continue to carry them at that speed, and while the Dominion fleet had to constantly burn fuel to avoid being dragged back down towards the Beast’s Eyes, all that Sylvas and his fleet had to do to win was fall.

He let the pull of the distant black holes’ gravity take hold of them. He encouraged it and nurtured it, empowering the gravity of the Beast’s Eyes in the same way that he’d seen Malachai flooding an area with death mana. Black holes were a curiosity as far as mana floes were concerned. Something about the process of them collapsing in under their own gravity seemed to sever what had once been stars from the interconnected universal network of magic that flowed through suns and planets.

 Sylvas had never given them too much thought, beyond the initial nightmares that anyone who encountered them as a concept had, and now here he was, feeding them power to try and drag the Dominion fleet back to its death and give his own more haste.

Walls had been raised between the Empyrean and Dominion fleets. Shields interlocking to protect them both from the other. The Dominion, hanging around their own domain indulgently, were launching a barrage of spells at the interlopers that made the firestorm that Sylvas had faced before in the Folly seem like a love tap, but with the combined powers of all their forces, all the mages across all the ships, the Empyrean fleet held steady.

“Where is it?” Hector’s voice cut through the various channels that Sylvas was connected to.

Sylvas thought that this might be an attempt to add some levity to their situation. “Where is what?”

“The Nexus? The base?” Hector was not joking, it seemed. “Where are the black holes?”

Sylvas turned his eyes to the viewer instead of just reaching out and feeling everything through his gravity sense. At the heart of the Dominion fleet, where the world that they were meant to be defending should have been seated, there was a black void. An emptiness. From the positioning of the ships and the forces being exerted on them, Sylvas could feel exactly where the black holes were, but to every other sense, he was faced with nothing but darkness.

As they reached the halfway point, the shape of the Dominion fleet’s layout became more apparent. It was a funnel, meant to drive the Empyrean down towards the black holes. Helping them get to where they wanted to be. Which meant that Blackstar had some way of stopping them from getting there that Sylvas couldn’t make out yet.

The ship rocked as they continued to close in on the void and the enemy fleet. Some spells were now exploding on impact with their shear, and to maintain its integrity and effectiveness, Sylvas was holding it too close to them to fully prevent the concussions washing over them, even if the worst of the destruction was still circumvented. Usually, Kaya would be scuttling about the ship, patching holes as they were made, but now there were these unfortunate students, subject to Sylvas’ orders. They rushed about and repaired the ship at about half the speed that Kaya could, and every so often, one of them would rush the job and be sucked out into the void of space, and Sylvas was just meant to pretend that he didn’t notice. That someone hadn’t died, just because he’d calculated an optimal shield position that meant sometimes they’d still get hit by the backwash of explosions.

As they plunged down into the funnel, heading for the planet, they’d be entirely surrounded by their enemies. It would be a simple enough task for all the various warships to simply pound them apart if their progress could be halted. 

Sylvas had to make sure that they were never halted.