Chapter 22

“Likewise, those same weaknesses that we must seek to avoid in our own formations must be sought and punished in the enemy fleet. Disruption of fleet formations when using coordinated shielding can result in an absolute rout of the sort our ancestors could only dream of when raining fire on a single ship of the line. With a formation disruption, shielding can be likewise disrupted. 

With shielding disrupted, there is an opportunity to bring the full focus of your fleet’s capabilities to bear against a single weakened target but also to spread that damage throughout a now-unshielded mass of closely packed ships. This is the tradeoff of coordinated shielding. A decreased risk of penetration coupled with a massively inflated risk of destruction if penetration occurs.”

—Ships of the Line, Part Two, Eyban Ghorat

Gathering together a spell, he launched a lance of blazing light straight down the throat of the Dominion. Passing down the center of the great cone of empty space that they’d left clear to hit against something vast and dark at the far end of it. A shield and a cloak in one. Hiding the Eyes, the planet, and the Nexus while also preventing anyone from gaining entry. Shadow magic of Blackstar’s making, no doubt.

It was all a trap. The Dominion fleet was a pitcher plant waiting to swallow them down and devour them. The sweet nectar of stopping the eidolons just the lure meant to make Sylvas leap in without a second thought. In firing down into that shield, Sylvas had revealed that there was a trap, and technically, the Dominion should have responded to that as its failure, but instead, they held steady. Watching. Waiting to see if Sylvas would throw himself down into the funnel, even though he knew that death was all that awaited him at the end. It was a test of his arrogance. Would he be bold enough to charge in, even knowing the trap was there, and trust in his own strength to carry him through?

Sylvas reinforced their shields and signaled the pilot to accelerate. He was arrogant enough to believe he could undo Blackstar’s shield. He was bold enough to continue his charge.

Somewhere out there, lurking amongst the endless warships, Sylvas had no doubt that Blackstar was watching all of this, smiling, but he didn’t let it affect his decision-making. This was still the correct course to pursue.

It was only with all of that done that he remembered he still had Hector on the line. “I’ll bring down the shield. You survive until we land.”

Taking down the shield should have been a simple thing for him, here in such a place of power for his affinity where gravity pulled so strongly that it distorted all of reality around it, but the spell he was trying to break was drawing on this place of power, too. It was a spell of darkness woven from threads of the deepest darkness that there was in the universe, deep in the maw of a black hole. Every advantage that Sylvas should have had here by virtue of his nature and the nature of the place, Blackstar had, too.

He launched another lance of blinding white across the void and down the spiral of Dominion ships. Forged not of the combined affinities of magic like his first, but from pure light. It sizzled as it hit the shield encompassing almost a solar system’s worth of space. So tiny as to be essentially invisible, except to Sylvas, whose full attention was locked on it so that he could decipher as much as possible from it as could be found.

They were in the last quarter of the dash towards the enemy fleet now, all of the Empyrean drawing in together behind the arrow-point of Sylvas’ attack wing. Lining themselves up to slot neatly into the empty space that the Dominion had so kindly left for them. At the exact intersecting point where all of their spellfire would collide.

“We still don’t have eyes on the alleged planet… or the alleged black holes.” Malachai’s voice came through sudden and severe, startling Sylvas and Mira out of their calculations.

“I’m working on it!” Sylvas snapped back.

“Work faster,” was all that Malachai replied before cutting off their comms.

The shield encompassing the facility and the black holes was a massive undertaking. If Blackstar had been up against literally any other force in the universe, then he’d probably have thrown it up and called it a day without even bothering to summon his fleet. Instead, he’d called up every ship that could get here and pointed them all at Sylvas like a loaded cannon. Until now, Sylvas had struggled to get a good grasp of the psychology of the man he was up against. When he was fighting eidolons, there was no mind behind their actions, no foibles that could be exploited, but he’d spent plenty of time during his training competing with people who thought they were the best, and even if he hadn’t managed to get inside their heads, he’d been able to grasp the forces that drove them well enough to be able to manipulate them. 

Even though the shield might have been enough, Blackstar had done everything else, because he was a true believer. He had spent so long studying the prophecies of the aions over the years that he had become convinced that they were accurate. That Sylvas was uniquely capable of opening the Nexus, and that therefore, he would be uniquely capable of penetrating whatever defenses had been raised around it. This was a man who prided himself on the force of his will, who was convinced in the righteousness of his cause to the point that he was willing to sacrifice any number of lives on the pyres of his ambition, but deep down, he believed that Sylvas was going to make it through all of this.

Either the plan with the fleet out here was to wear Sylvas down until he could be taken captive or to allow him to make landfall and capture him on the planet. Probably both. One didn’t become an emperor by taking chances, after all. He was absolutely convinced that Sylvas would make it to the Nexus and open it, because he had read prophecies telling him it was going to happen. 

He was trying to manipulate events so that he controlled Sylvas at that point, but he was not even considering the possibility that Sylvas might die trying to break through. He couldn’t conceive of the prophecy being wrong, or of Sylvas doing anything outside of what the prophecy foretold him doing. Having an enemy that didn’t want him dead certainly made some things easier. But having an enemy that fully expected him to slip through his defenses just because it was foretold millennia before slightly limited his ability to surprise him.

“Alright, everyone,” he spoke out loud, bringing the whole bridge crew to an abrupt and startled halt. “I’m taking full control for a moment. Find something to hold onto.”

The panicked grad students looked from him to their consoles, with only the pilot piping up to ask, “Which scenario is this?”

“I believe Mira dubbed this one ‘Put You In My Pocket’, but she came up with so many names…”

“That is the one I was afraid it was going to be, sir.” He managed a sickly grin before throwing the switch to transfer control of the whole ship over to Sylvas.

Mira sent out the alert to the rest of the fleet about the maneuver Sylvas was about to pull, and some of those wing leaders who were less accustomed to working with him did, predictably, respond with quite a bit of swearing before realizing that their comms lines were open.

“Who’s ready to do something impossible?” Sylvas asked his crew with a smile.

None of them seemed nearly as enthusiastic as Kaya would have been, but he didn’t need cheerleaders. He already knew exactly what he was doing.

With a push of gravity mana and an extra shove at the ship’s engines, the Mira’s Vengeance blinked out of real-space.

Sylvas’ attack wing proceeded along their course as the ships of the surrounding wings closed in around them, melding their shields together to provide the head of the charge, where enemy fire was most concentrated, with the maximum amount of protection. Almost immediately, things began going wrong. 

The covenant mages on the enemy ships were launching spells more powerful than any normal mage could have hoped to deflect alone, and only by redirecting them rather than confronting them directly had Sylvas been able to keep his wing completely safe. With him gone, having abandoned the field of battle, those who were left behind could do nothing more than scrabble to try and keep as many ships in the fight as they could. 

Greenmantle’s technocratic union ships had been quietly launching cables throughout the attack run, connecting all of the ships in the fleet into a single unified whole, and now, at last, that endless work came to fruition. With a whine, electricity surged throughout all of the ships, along the connecting wires, rising in intensity as the connection became more stable, and they all became encased in a crackling static of power. As spells burst through the faltering shield wall of the forward ships, they became snared in an entropic field before they could strike home. Greenmantle may have been dead, but his work was still top-notch.

The moments ticked by in Sylvas’ absence. 

The Empyrean fleet had not been informed of what he was doing, outside of the wing leaders who needed to know to be able to respond, and there was no shortage of distress over their fearless leader having suddenly blinked out of existence. He had seen what they were up against, and he had run. Dismay echoed across the comm lines as they plowed on into the endless barrage of enemy fire. 

Whether some of them would have broken and run was a moot point. Anyone who tried to leave the formation would have been picked apart in moments without the combined effort to keep up the shields, and the technocratic union’s tethers meant that pulling too far out of formation might have resulted in some sort of electrical catastrophe anyway.

The levels of dismay being expressed by those who saw Sylvas’ disappearance as a betrayal was matched only by the confusion of everyone else. They had arrived at the very edge of the system because of the interdiction that the Dominion were using to prevent travel through null-space, yet the Mira’s Vengeance had just vanished into faster-than-light travel as if there had been no spell blocking them at all. 

A few tentative attempts at teleportation spells by the more experimental crew on a few of the other Veilbohr Institute ships revealed that nothing had changed in that regard, so the confusion continued to mount as to how the hell Sylvas had done it.

The bombardment came in heavier and harder than before as they closed in with the Dominion fleet. The shields faltered and broke, and the static field between the ships became clotted with captured spells. Every time the shields fell, they were restored, but every time it seemed to take just a moment longer. They were exposed, more and more of the enemy spells sinking into the tarry thickness of the space between their ships, none of them dispersing. Just waiting for the spark that would ignite them all.

It didn’t take long to arrive. A cluster of flaming bolts rained in on one of the peripheral wings, where the Dominion had scented blood or intuited weakness, and while the shields held off the first blast, and the static field caught the second, the last one hit home, not only melting through one of the limping elvish ships, but setting off a chain of explosions that shook and rattled their way across the whole side of the formation before they could be dispelled and contained. 

The static field fell, and suddenly, every ship in the fleet was no longer flying forwards but jerking into evasive maneuvers to avoid the spells that had been dumped out of it. The tethers between them began to tangle until the ghost of Greenmantle sent out some sort of kill command, severing them all at once. The second layer of protection behind the fleet shield was gone, and there would be no bringing it back.

The smoke, such as could exist in the vacuum of space, cleared as the Empyrean fleet plunged onwards. A half-dozen ships were gone, the others in their attack wings moving into new alignments so that their section of the fleet shield could be restored.

What was left of the momentum that Sylvas had granted them from the spell that launched them into battle was now depleted as the ships shuddered forward under the ceaseless fire. 

What had been a direct bombardment from the front slowly became an attack from all sides. They had reached the Dominion’s lines and were moving down into the trap that had been laid for them. Ironfist’s voice came through on every channel, drowning out the confusion and fear. “All vessels, full speed ahead.”

It wasn’t comforting, but it at least gave the shaken faith of the fleet no time to fray any more. Moving slowly was going to get them killed.

Hector and his wing had moved up to envelop the ships that Sylvas had left abandoned, and if it seemed that the shield around them had some alligator scales, it was surely a coincidence. He was as close to the front of the dive towards the empty void as any leader amongst the Empyrean fleet could be, and while there was nothing there to see or feel, in his mind, it approached like a solid wall that they were flinging themselves directly into.

“Come on, Mr. Vail,” he growled, even as he drove the ship’s engines to new heights of straining.

As they entered the conical hollow in the enemy fleet, the gaping maw of the trap closed. From all directions, the bombardment began, until it seemed like the only part of the night that they could see was that deep darkness at the end of the tunnel. Spellfire in a kaleidoscope of colors surrounded the fleet, hammering at their shields. Making cracks that the next round of spells could slip through before they were repaired. Ships began to explode, their atmospheres briefly igniting in flame before all the air was gone, and their crunched-up hulls became hurtling tombs of dead metal.

“Come on.” Hector’s hands were shaking as he cast, again and again, throwing out reinforcement to the fleet shield every time he saw weakness in it. Catching as many of the cracks as he could reach, casting at the speed of thought.

The darkness up ahead of them seemed to open out until it filled the whole screen, dominating the bridge. Blackstar’s conjured darkness, an impenetrable wall that no spell that any one of them had thrown against it could even mark, let alone hope to break.

And then, into the darkness, there came a light.