Coeus?

Chapter 21: ~Search.~

And the great Archmages of each trait held a great gathering in Alexandria to discuss the world's future. History had taught them that with the growing numbers of people, their rivalries and wars would also grow. The mages had tried to intervene, but how do you choose for whom to fight if the reason for fighting is the same on all sides? How should they decide whom they should save and whom they have to crush? And would it ever end?

And mages were involved in all of humanity's societies, so it was just a question of time until even those who had greater powers than the rest would start to fight each other.

In the end the great Archmages decided to form the council of elders. They called magicians from all over the world to form a stable soceity that doesn't comsume itself. And so the Exodus started.

-History Exodus I

***Jupiter, Oibras Station***

***Gideon***

I fear that I might get addicted to investing time behind closed doors with a member of the other gender. Though the price which has to be paid for companionship seems to be high. By now it feels like I know the entire life of the person called Amia Jefri. She kept talking and talking and talking. Luckily she kept her mouth shut while we did it.

It was long after midnight when she finally got tired enough to let us sleep. Though she seems to be a nice person. The problem is that she doesn't know when to shut up. And I wasn't entirely sure if it was appropriate to tell her to do so.

Maybe that's the reason why she is spending her evenings in this club instead of having a real relationship. It may be hard to find a person who can put up with her apparent need to lay out every detail of her day to day life.

I slowly slide my arm out from under her head, but that's enough to wake her up. You are already leaving? It's early. I am glad that my shift always starts late.

I am afraid the dock will charge me a hefty fee if I don't clear the parking position in time. So I have to go. I answer while I get dressed.

Amia waves her hand at me. Okay. Give me a call if you are en route through Oibras again. I'll make sure that I am free. She winks at me.

Does that mean that I was good? Getting and invitation for another night means something, or not?

Don't think too much of yourself. There are worse ones, but I admit that you have endurance. She answers.

Can she read my thoughts!?

No, but it's written all over your face. And besides that it's the thing every guy is concerned about when it's his first time. She answers unashamed. In addition I've way too much experience in dates like this.

I see. So my face is betraying me again? How strange. Well, goodbye then. I'll give you a call should I be around again.

Sure. She smiles and lies down again. Apparently she intends to continue to sleep until she has to go to work.

After having collected all my stuff I leave the restaurant. Should I even call it a restaurant? No. I've to concentrate on another matter and plan my strategy. Today I'll be going to the 'Greek' node and I've to make my last preparations.

I make my way to the nearest teleportation chamber and transfer directly to my ship. Luckily short range teleports are unproblematic.

Upon stepping out of the chamber in my command module I halt and start checking the positioning of the items around the room. Everything seems to be as I left it. Even the chips on the ground are untouched. They look the same as when I dropped them carelessly in front of the teleportation chamber. I put them there as an indicator if someone entered my property.

The thing which I fear most is sabotage. It's well within my mother's capabilities to gain illegal access to my ship if she really wants to.

After I've taken my time to check everything against my memories I head to the cockpit and drop myself into the acceleration chair. Then I place a hand on the plush cat and try to relax.

After a while I connect myself to the ship and request permission to launch. Officially I am en route to the thin asteroid cloud beyond Venus to mine some materials there. In reality I'll go dark soon after launching and head for the 'Greek' node.

Even if my ship can be considered as big, it's still tiny and insignificant in the vastness of space. The station AI grants me permission and I engage the drive. By forming a gravitational anomaly in front of my ship the huge craft smoothly slips away from the station and into open space.

After accelerating for a while on my planned route I rotate the ship and watch the station with my main sensor array.

Flying blindly at my current speed isn't that dangerous since I am on a well charted freighter route. The main sensor array allows me to search a half-sphere shaped area in front of my ship for obstructions.

The one thing you don't want to happen while flying at speeds which can be measured in fractions of light speed is ramming something.

The current speed record lies at zero point six percent of light speed, which is remarkable if you think about it. Though it was an experimental vessel and the pilot burned out one of his ship's five reactors to set the record.

For that reason you want to know exactly where you are going. So while flying you want to look ahead as far as possible.

I wait until the station is just a faint echo on my lidar and radar. I am relatively sure that their vision isn't better than mine. Though they have the bigger sensor arrays.

After giving it another hour I let my ship go dark. Every ship's ability to hide itself has to meet certain standards. That means no heat or light emissions. The modern versions of camouflage technology and spells can also imitate the background of the stars. Everything for the sake of hiding ourselves from the people of Earth.

The one thing that most ships can't hide are the minor gravitational distortions from their own mass and especially their drives. But gravitational sensors luckily only work on relatively short ranges for small masses. The planets hide the smaller masses of ships. It takes a lot of precision to measure the minute changes of force which is applied to a free-floating piece of glass within the sensor array.

I recalibrate my own drive to smooth out my own distortions as much as possible and engage it to take me to my new destination.

Now my opponents have to practically step onto me in order to find the Coeus. But that doesn't mean that they aren't hiding themselves too, in fact I am expecting that my mother snitched on me to make it more interesting for her. Though I should have a slight advantage since I know where I have to start searching.

Then there is the fact that I don't know what's awaiting me. Since the region I am heading for doesn't have any settlements I have to expect that they have at least one ship. Otherwise the Revelation Wing wouldn't get there in the first place. Long range teleportation is kept carefully under control by the government. I doubt that they have access to it.

Probably Sadina gave me the position of the base which she used during her time with the Revelation Wing.

It could be entirely possible that it's completely abandoned or was towed away in the meantime. If it's an asteroid and was nudged slightly away from its normal path the flight coordinates which I got from Sadina are worthless and I can ready myself for a very long search. In fact it might be a good idea if I start assembling a second main sensor array.

Preferably heavily over-designed towards the use of lidar. Lidar is working similar to radar, but is using light to search the surroundings with lasers.

Emitting energy to increase the performance of my sensors is also possible, but it would be like switching on a flash-light in a dark room. Everyone would know where to shoot.

After I have given the command to the assembly line I check once more if my ship is emitting anything that could give me away, but to all of my knowledge I should be a dark spot in space. Then I lean back and do the thing which a pilot needs to be good at. Waiting.

Hours turn into days and days into weeks. On the twenty-seventh day of my crusade I finally get a faint echo while passing the indicated coordinates for the perceived two hundred and forty-seventh time.

According to my sensors it must be a well hidden ship with an active drive, but the information barrier isn't properly calibrated. This results in a slight distortion when the ship passes in front of a star. I engage my drive and follow while keeping the shadow on the edge of my passive sensors.

After a while the phantom slows down and I shut down my drive and go dark. My course is slightly off from the phantom, so I let the Coeus drift while arranging all my information gathering devices on the foreign ship.

An hour later I study the gathered information quite baffled. The Revelation Wing has a complete asteroid base and four ships docked to it.

The base is a round rock and two of the ships are normal spherical freighters. There is also a smaller cylindrical courier boat and a big hauler which is normally used to pull damaged craft or asteroids.

Probably they used the hauler to pull the station away from the coordinates which I got from Sadina. I could have searched for a few more months if the badly stealthed ship hadn't passed through the area.

Do they attack other ships from time to time and play space pirates? What else do you need a hauler for? I access my data base and search for lost ships in this region and indeed, the freighters on my screen match lost vessels.

Though they don't seem to do this on a regular basis. The ships vanished over a long period of time. I guess if they are too active, then they would alert the faceless of their presence.

Admittedly, having four private ships is nothing special, but I am dumbfounded by the fact that they have four pilots for their craft. Techno-mages are extremely logical. I discussed the reasons for aiding an organization like the Revelation Wing with my cousin Saden. The only thing we could come up with are certain forms of blackmail or indoctrination from birth. The last one was actually Saden's idea.

I am not saying that every techno-mage thinks the same thoughts, but there is simply no reason to wreck a liveable life by joining a group like the Revelation Wing.

The other possibility is that the pilots aren't techno-mages, but I doubt that. The ship I followed made a perfect docking manoeuvre. A mage with another disposition wouldn't be able to control the spell matrix for the spell amplifier that well.

I close my eyes and place the plush cat on my lap to stroke it. I wonder if going in with weapons blazing is a good idea. They must have at least some kind of countermeasures and I want to search the base to know if there are more of them.

What would captain Picard do? He would probably talk them into making peace with the government, but this world isn't Star Trek.

I could pull a Space-Pirate Captain Hancock! Blast their hulls full of holes and demand their resources. And while doing so I'll set off every trap they prepared while they were sitting out here.

No good, I want to stay alive. Going with plan B and deploying my stealth sensor drones to get a better image sounds better. I'll take a good look at the station's surroundings. I was baffled at the number of ships they have. Who says that they don't have more? A stealthed ship which is waiting to ambush any attackers is a good way to secure a big target like the asteroid base.

I let my ship drift two more times through the region and find three ships lying in ambush around the base. Unfortunately I can't get a good image of them since they are fully dark like my ship. I don't know what they are and I dislike it.

After a felt eternity of thinking about my situation I decide that I can't do much more at this point. I've taken a really long look at the situation and I doubt that my current resources can uncover anything else.

I engage my drive and form a gravitation anomaly to pull me once more through the region. My course will take me right next to one of the sentries. Then I'll take him out with the plasma cannons and point defence cannons along my ship's hull.

No matter what he is, that has to be enough to take him out. Then I'll use my torpedo tube to send one rocket at the one who is the farthest away from me. The railgun is reserved for the closer target.

No matter how you put it, projectile weapons like the railgun and the plasma cannon pack a punch, but they are utterly useless for ranges over ten kilometres. My rail cannon fires projectiles with speeds at five kilometres per second. I would have to fill space with hundreds of projectiles to hit a target that engages in evasive manoeuvres.

So with other words those weapons are uncomfortable close range weapons. Getting so close to an enemy craft is very unhealthy if you intend to live a long life.

It's doubtful that it'll kill them outright, but it may give me the time to accelerate to the station and take a shot at their docked ships. One attack run is all I'll probably get, then I have to make evasive manoeuvres while dealing with the sentries.

The docked ships have to go though. I don't want them joining the battle.

When my plan is set in stone and programmed into the computer I lean back and watch it unfold. All I can do now is waiting for something unexpected to happen.

My ship slides into range of the first sentry without being found and fires a full broadside. Thanks to my ability I am able to notice a huge explosion which confirms the kill.

The rail-cannon and the torpedo tube fire. In the next moment the automated sequence starts and my chair rotates into the direction of the acceleration.

I feel blood rushing to my head and almost black out, but I manage to take a little acceleration away from the evasion sequence. The Coeus is an over-engineered monstrosity which can kill the pilot if the ship isn't handled carefully and I realize my mistake just in time to correct it.

The ship rotates to empty all close range weapons into the docked ships and the station's point defences.

Then the whole ship bucks under me and my chair snaps in yet another direction as I register a laser beam breaking the barrier spell around the Coeus and grazing over the hull of my ship. But the fast evasive manoeuvre of my ship and the rotation doesn't allow the laser beam to transfer enough energy to melt the hull.

Though I register the loss of one of the plasma cannons. I switch to the lasers and empty their energy banks into the attacker, but he escapes them the same way I did. By rotating the spherical hull of his ship he disperses the energy enough to avoid taking serious damage.

But the Coeus is more powerful than him and after a few seconds of struggling with each other his hull suddenly bloats and I notice gas escaping his ship. The rail-cannon ends his struggle as a metal projectile slams into his hull and tears the ship apart.

The pressure on me lessens as the ship turns to accelerate back towards the station. The silence of the whole fight was a little disturbing. I didn't even hear my own cannons fire as the command module is the only part of the ship which is under pressure. Next time I'll program the cockpit's speakers to add some appropriate background sounds.

But I don't have much time to dwell on missed chances as the acceleration kicks in once more and returns me to the battle zone.

The rail-cannon proved to be my most potent weapon in close engagements. While the plasma cannons took out the first sentry, the second sentry was sleeping and got hit by the rail-gun and was obliterated.

The rocket though proved to be completely useless. It wasn't fast enough and must have activated the automatic asteroid defence of sentry three, who was the farthest away on the opposite side of the station. A laser beam simply obliterated it before it could do anything.

That's why I had to fight it out with him after passing the station.

I return my attention to the docked ships and notice that all of them except for the hauler are out of the equation. The hauler is in the process of drifting away from its docking clamps and my infrared sensors inform me that there is a strong temperature change in the rear section of the two hundred metre long cylindrical spacecraft.

It seems like the fusion generator was powered down. So in other words it's currently a sitting duck. I change my course slightly to bring the station between me and the hauler while sending out a barrage of plasma bolts and a rail-gun projectile.

Under normal circumstances both weapons are useless at my current distance, but if the hauler can't evade them it's toast.

Several lasers lock onto my ship, but once again they don't have time to burn through the adaptive armour after overloading the hastily erected energy shield. And in the next moment the station is between me and the hauler.

All I get to see of the hauler's death is a bright flash and wreckage tumbling away from the station.

Too bad that Grandfather wasn't here to see this battle. He would have gone ballistic.

The rest of the battle is just a formality as I circle slowly around the station and pick off any functioning defences. Since the station is just a sitting duck I can do this slowly, not exposing myself to too much point defences at the same time.

After two rotations without spotting anything that is capable of harming my ship I decide that it's time to inform them of my presence.

I open a communication channel to the station. This is the private experimental freighter Coeus. Power down your fusion generators and prepare for being boarded.

A thought opens one of the freight compartments and a stream of automated battle sprites pours out of the Coeus. They are really stupid if you measure them by the standards of real sprites. It would be more appropriate to call them drones since the Coeus' quantum computer is coordinating them. I expect that many of them will be destroyed if the station's personnel decides to fight.

But I had a month to think about this scenario and my greatest concern was how to deal with a base full of crazed fanatics. Maybe they have dozens or hundreds of fighters over there. No way I can deal with that all by myself. Hence I ordered my manufacturing plant to build the drones.

Lots and lots of drones.

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