5354 The First Armada
Four armadas!
Four assaults!
Four broadcasts!
The entirety of red humanity reacted with shock after they learned about the Red Two's latest move!
Anyone with a decent amount of awareness understood how difficult it was to gather so many high-level forces while maintaining total secrecy.
It was even harder to sneak them deep within alien space. This was especially the case when two of the armadas made it all the way to the far side of the dwarf galaxy!
Even if the indigenous aliens did not master as much advanced technologies as red humanity, their mastery over space was still formidable. The phase whales and other technologically sophisticated races had developed a handful of measures that enabled them to detect human starships in FTL transit.
The core territories of alien space had become particularly difficult to sneak into due to these countermeasures!
Perhaps a lone purpose-built stealth vessel might be able to evade detection and sneak into well-defended star systems, but it was practically impossible to do this for thousands of huge and powerful warships!
Nonetheless, the mechers and fleeters had managed to do the impossible. The aliens apparently did not manage to detect the incoming armadas in advance nor made any special preparations to fortify or evacuate the Tide Stations under threat.
Ever since the Red Cabal successfully teleported the entirety of the Red Ocean to the vicinity of Messier 87, it became intolerable for the aliens to maintain their hold over these powerful facilities!
If the aliens could teleport the Red Ocean Dwarf Galaxy, they could do so again.
Neither the mechers nor the fleeters wanted the Red Cabal to retain its control over such a powerful series of devices!
Even if the existence of the Tide Stations gave red humanity hope of teleporting the Red Ocean back to the vicinity of the Milky Way, the Red Two still pressed on with this ambitious deep strike operation!
In a star system that was lit by a relatively dim red dwarf, a huge series of fortifications surrounded a moon-sized alien space station.
The Tenth Tide Station was one of the more critical nodes of the galaxy-wide alien network. Its importance was great as its elimination caused the surrounding Tide Stations to become disconnected from each other.
The Red Cabal recognized this vulnerability and stationed a large amount of troops in the star system.
Not only that, but two of its powerful ancient phase whales constantly presided over the Tide Station in order to take charge of its defense in person!
Despite littering the star system with listening devices and warp interdiction field generators, hundreds of portals appeared in the inner system at once!
The alarms just started to ring in the alien monitoring rooms as thousands and thousands of human vessels came uncomfortably close to the core alien defensive perimeter!
Only a minority of them consisted of large and formidable capital ships, but even the smaller vessels packed quite a punch due to their modern and advanced gun batteries.
The First Armada had arrived!
Perhaps the aliens stationed in and around the Tenth Tide Station never expected a human incursion to happen in one of their deepest and most well-defended strongholds. Their defensive personnel were slow to man their stations and bring their warships and installations to full combat readiness.
This granted the human intruders a decisive advantage. Every warship that emerged from the portal was in peak condition and did not suffer any accidents when they crossed into the star system.
This allowed them to immediately open fire with their hot and ready long-ranged armaments!
An abundance of missiles, laser beams and other projectiles unloaded from the RA and RF warships!
The enormous weight of fire struck many of the defensive installations that surrounded the critical Tenth Tide Station.
Even though the hardy multi-layered segmented transphasic energy shields could withstand a lot of punishment, not all of them had been brought to full power in time.
The human warships launched so many attacks that they succeeded in destroying hundreds of installations during this moment of vulnerability!
That said, the defenders of the Tenth Tide Station were not amateurs. Once they got over their surprise, they responded quickly and effectively enough, especially after their leaders got their act together.
It became a lot harder for the human warships to break down the outer defensive sphere from this direction
The majority of the armed forces stationed in this star system consisted of orvens. With the supreme technical assistance of the puelmers, the defenders quickly pulled themselves together and tried their best to reinforce the outer defensive sphere.
The Red Cabal had built three defensive spheres around the Tide Station. Each of them formed an interconnected network of defensive installations and were garrisoned by lots of mobile alien troops.
The defensive stations themselves were semi-mobile and could move to plug gaps or concentrate their power in a single direction.
The outer defensive sphere covered the largest stretches of space and was actually the weakest layer of defense.
If the Tenth Tide Station ever came under serious threat, it was the job of the outer defensive sphere to delay the enemy advance.
The longer the outer defenses lasted, the more the attackers exposed their details and expended their resources.
Many minutes passed as the warships continued to blaze their way through the outer defensive ring.
A part of the human forces participating in this grand assault focused on breaching a way forward. Another part of the human forces spread out the flanks and prevented the incoming defensive installations from surrounding the First Armada.
Not just warships, but also mechs began to appear on the battlefield!
Many of the warships employed by the Red Association were actually hybrid vessels.
Tens of thousands of first-class multipurpose mechs launched from the hangar bays of many different carriers and started to threaten the alien defenders in many different ways.
It was a lot harder for the alien defensive installations to target the smaller and much more nimble human mechs!
Even if their gun batteries managed to land a couple of blows, shield link technology prevented the formidable mechs from collapsing in an instant!
While the human mechs did not possess as much firepower as the human warships, they were much more devious in their offensive maneuvers.
They got in close enough to prevent alien defensive installations from firing their most powerful cannons.
They intercepted reinforcements and supply ships.
They generated their own warp interdiction fields that prevented nearby alien warships from engaging their warp drives.
Some of the mechs happened to be a lot more powerful than the others. The expert mechs and ace mechs of the Red Association showcased all kinds of unique and reality-defying effects that gradually overwhelmed the alien defenders!
Deep inside the Tenth Tide Station, two ancient phase whales witnessed the entire unfold from a distance.
The Singularity Lord was the eldest and wisest among the two. He possessed the power to collapse space and create small black holes that could crush even the hardiest of substances!
Right now, the Singularity Lord was not in a hurry to leap into space and reinforce the outer defensive sphere.
The human attackers had yet to deploy their strongest assets, so the Singularity Lord saw no need to expend his energy in vain.
He understood the need to conserve as much combat power as possible in order to fight his true opponents in his best condition.
The Space Tearer understood this logic as well, but it was harder for her to suppress the desire to strike a blow against the humans.
The two ancient aliens communicated with each other in their alien language. Space itself shook as they talked with each other in the form of spatial disturbances.
The Space Tearer had made a suggestion.
The Singularity Lord reluctantly accepted it and transmitted a command.
Seconds later, many of the defensive installations that had exhibited less activity began to deploy millions of strange vehicles that demonstrated incredible speed!
These vehicles possessed warp drives of their own and quickly accelerated forward until they began to approach the many human mechs that were chipping away at the alien defenses!
"The aliens have deployed their starfighters."
"Be advised that the elite forces of the Red Cabal have already begun to replace their outdated starfighters with newer small craft that incorporate stolen human tech provided by the cosmopolitans. The new generation phasefighters are much faster and much more difficult to defeat!"
The aliens had already grown incredibly familiar with the strength of human mechs. Their best researchers had tried their best to adapt human mechs to different alien races, but failed to make satisfactory progress.
This caused the aliens to change their focus on improving their starfighters instead. With the help of the cosmopolitans, they managed to complete the development of brand new phasefighters that possessed several formidable advantages!
Their greatest asset was speed. Each phasefighter was equipped with warp drives that allowed them to elude enemy fire, prevent melee mechs from getting close and retreat in haste if necessary.
Their offensive and defensive properties were not weak either. Depending on their production cost, a phasefighter could seriously threaten a first-class multipurpose mech!
The real challenge was control. It became incredibly difficult to proficiently control the phasefighters in combat. Extensive automation was essential, but a measure of manual control was required to prevent them from getting exploited with ease.
The aliens and cosmopolitans had invested years into the development of neural interfaces that could reluctantly work on alien brains.
The orvens were the first to benefit from this breakthrough as their physiology shared the closest resemblance to human bodies!
Even though the crude alien neural interfaces were far from enough to pilot a serious mech, they were more than enough to take control over the key systems of a phasefighter!
In addition to that, the bandwidth of alien neural interfaces was so low that the orvens did not have to pay attention to genetic aptitude.
All of this served to play into the advantages of the indigenous alien civilizations.
Compared to red humanity, the native aliens not only boasted a huge population, but also controlled the majority of the resources of the dwarf galaxy!
Humanity would consider the expense put into the production of phasefighters to be incredibly expensive and wasteful!
The Red Cabal only considered it to be a relatively modest investment. There were countless orven starfighter pilots that only needed a modest amount of training to get started with phasefighters.
Even if the phasefighters still couldn't compete against first-class multipurpose mechs on an individual basis, they were still more than powerful enough to pose a threat when they had the advantage of numbers!
As the defending side, the aliens had garrisoned an enormous amount of phasefighters in the star system.
Many of them had come into contact with alien forces and began to harass the human mechs to the point where the latter could no longer complete their current missions.
The small craft of both sides became entangled with each other!
Though the phasefighters already started to suffer steady losses due to their various inadequacies, it was not hard to imagine the aliens refining their new tech further.
For now, the phasefighters did exactly what the Singularity Lord asked of them. They slowed down the human offensive and bought more time for the middle and inner defensive spheres to prepare for the coming onslaught.
As the losses began to mount on both sides, a new development took place.
Two massive portals opened up, allowing for two enormous hulls to pass through!
Every human participating in the assault on the Tenth Tide Station became encouraged by the sight of the latest arrivals.
"Our dreadnoughts have come!"
The dreadnoughts consisted of the strongest and most formidable warships built by the fleeters.
They were originally conceived as the counters of god mechs, and though the CFA shipwrights failed in their mission, the power of these immense human warships could not be denied!
The flagships of the First Armada were but two of many human warships in the field, but they somehow managed to outshine them all by their presence alone!
The Throne of Lies and the Guns of Armageddon had come to break the alien defenders.
