Chapter 33
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Ivan, Mazur, Iris and Valeria flew back to Major Harold's destroyer once the gravitational fluctuations in space had begun to stabilize.
Aboard the destroyer, Major Harold watched Ivan and the others reappear on the bridge and let out a sigh, "I assume you four were behind the destruction of the mothership?"
Iris gave the Major a smile that made everyone on the bridge become charmed by her momentarily, so mesmerised they forgot to breath. Ivan and the others chuckled lightly at this, becoming a four-dimensional being had changed them greatly. In one sense of it, they could be considered as being 'more perfect', hence a beauty like Iris emerged with a natural charm that was impossible for a three-dimensional being.
"Ahem, not that it matters," Major Harold cleared his throat with a cough, inadvertently waking everyone up from their stupors.
Ivan looked at the battlefield from the perspective of the warship and couldn't help but ask, "Can you guy survive the final three minutes until reinforcements arrive?"
"We can as long as we keep focusing on evasion," Major Harold paused before continuing. "Once the reinforcements arrive, I need you four to immediately head over to Colonel Regiere's flagship. The Colonel will be expecting you, although I think she would be expecting a transport shuttle. She couldn't quite understand the you'll be flying over is you will literally be 'flying' over."
Ivan understood the reason for moving to the flagship, he chuckled to himself before saying, "If that is your resolution, I won't try to stop you. You know, if you fired photon beams onto the planet's surface, you can easily annihilate the Scalians assaulting the natives."
"We cannot, our laws prevent us from creating unnecessary casualties, and to cruelly annihilate so many innocent victims of would be morally inhuman."
"Major, you don't understand the method of killing the few to save the many. It is because there are people like you that these battles are dragged out and, in the end, more people die than if you were to have done the former."
"It is still morally wrong. They also have lives, loved ones. To heartlessly tear that away from them, it is not something I can do."
Ivan laughed derisively. "You are a soldier, Major, you have to make the best choice. What does it matter, anyway? You know you're going to die even if reinforcements come, why be so faint hearted now."
"I will die with honor, not shame," Major Harold was steadfast and said with a stern glare. "I am a soldier, but it is a good thing that you are not my superior."
Ivan clicked his tongue and didn't bother pressing the issue, but he suddenly coughed, a little blue blood spattering onto the floor of the bridge. There was more blood that was actually coughed up, but it was all in subspace and couldn't be seen by the crewmembers of the destroyer.
"You're injured?" Major Harold asked the four of them in surprise, secretly thinking to himself at the same time, 'Blue blood? He's, no, they're not human?'
"What did you expect, we were in the caught up in that antimatter explosion after all," Ivan explained, not pointing out that they were technically in subspace.
"Antimatter? Caught in the explosion?" Major Harold and the rest of the officers in the bridge had aghast expressions on their faces.
The battle concluded for the Galactic Fleet rapidly, their 72 surviving ships rapidly plummeted to 20. The Scalian wardolls had completely defeated the Galactic Fleet mechanoids and were rapidly closing in on the surviving several destroyers and battleships. They rapidly fired anti-mechanoid rounds at the incoming mass, wiping out swarms at a time, but there were simply too many.
Alarms from within Major Harold's destroyer rang one after another as the wardolls' antiparticle rifles punctured holes through the ship and compromised regions of it. It's energy shield simply couldn't keep up with the damage and seal off the breaches in time.
"Major! Radars are picking up a fleet about to arrive in hyperspace! It's Colonel Regiere's fleet!" One of the officers on the bridge hurriedly shouted in a nervous panic.
Major Harold closed his eyes in relief and a weight appeared to have been lifted from his shoulders. "Understood. Inform the crew, everyone is to evacuate to the nearest escape pod point. You all fought bravely, but in order to survive, you must escape immediately."
The orders were relayed throughout the ship and every crew member rapidly rushed to the nearest escape pod point.
"You're not going to leave, Major?" Ivan asked.
"My responsibility lies in the evacuation of the crew, I cannot leave until they do. You four should leave t-" Major Harold was cut off as an antiparticle beam compromised on of the Sol Reactors, causing it to explode and blow apart a large portion of the ship and causing the rest to violently shake.
Ivan lead Mazur, Iris and Valeria to fly out of the destroyer. He looked at the terrible state of the ship, one potion near the rear ship had disintegrate into fragments in space, some of which were falling toward the planet's surface.
Not far away from the Scalian fleet, well above the battlefield, a massive flagship, bigger than the previous Scalian mothership, appeared from hyperspace with a shimmer of light. After that, destroyers and battleships dropped out of hyperspace one after another in a seemingly endless number. The number of ships continued to grow until the fleet reached a staggering 50,000 ships.
"I understand now why they don't name their ships," Ivan said to Mazur insightfully. "There are simply too many, there is no way they could name them all."
Iris also nodded her head, but she noted the writing on the side of the massive flagship and commented, "But why does that ship have a name? The Moriarty?"
"This Colonel Regiere should have a high authority, naming a flagship shouldn't be too surprising," Mazur spoke of it as a negligible matter.
The four Celestials flew toward the Moriarty. Behind them, the remainder of the Galactic Fleet that began the encounter rapidly crumbled apart into fragments. Hundreds of thousands of escape pods were drifting in space, many of them falling toward the planet's surface along with a large portion of ship fragments. The atmosphere of the planet appeared to almost turn red from all the debris and pods falling through it, each burning red from the intense friction. Most would burn up before reaching the ground and avoid an apocalypse scenario, but the escape pods and larger fragments would still fall like small meteors.
Ivan and the others rapidly approached the Moriarty and flew straight inside it. Despite being much larger, the inside layout was relatively similar to Major Harold's destroyer, so they quickly found the bridge and appeared before Colonel Regiere.
Colonel Regiere was a woman with a cold expression, her hair up in a bun revealing her face which didn't have a single trace of make-up applied.
"Halt!" She shouted in a chilly voice while pulling a pistol out of the holster on her waist, aiming it at Ivan who was in the lead of the small group. "Who are you, how did you get here?"
"You won't believe I am a member of your crew?" Ivan asked jokingly.
"You are not wearing a Galactic Fleet uniform, I also know every single member of my crew. Also…" Colonel Regiere scrunched her brows slightly. "My crew don't walk through walls."
Ivan laughed boisterously at how strict she was and simply said, "Enough joking, you should have been notified that would be arriving after you dropped out of hyperspace? He may not look like what you have on the file, but this is Mazur Ral Vendick."
Colonel Regiere nodded her head after a brief thought and holstered her weapon. "Understood, I had not expected you to appear in… this method. I am Colonel Frederika Regiere, commander of the Moriarty with two standard fleets currently under my jurisdiction. Do you have the data on the enemy technology?"
Colonel Regiere secretly doubted the bipedal cat-like person was Mazur, as he was apparently a human specie 'Sphinx', an intellectual branch of the human race who looked like a standard human with minor differences. She however, was a human specie 'Proximus', a specie originating from an alien specie with excelling strength, observation and deduction capabilities, making her the ideal candidate to lead a fleet.
"We have all we need," Mazur blandly stated.
"Continue course of the Moriarty, reposition to fire main cannon at enemy fleet fragments without impacting planet's atmosphere," The Colonel said as she nodded to Ivan's group.
Mazur turned to Ivan and said with a sly grin, "You'll enjoy this. The Galactic Fleet's flagships are a sub-branch from my research on energy extraction from black holes. I made quite a fortune off this one at the time. Have you ever heard of virtual particles?"
Ivan frowned in thought, but eventually could only shake his head and continue watching, but Mazur was eager to boast about his work and still explained.
"The universe may seem empty, but it is actually full of activity. Little virtual particles, the elementary particles that makeup atoms that are too small to be seen with light, are constantly being born in positive and negative pairs, instantly annihilating each other. Black holes absorb a single one of these elementary particles at the point of the event horizon due to the massive gravitational force, the other of the pair escapes back into the universe."
"What of it?" Ivan asked as he watched the view from the flagship's massive bridge, partially interested in the theory.
"Launch bulkhead! Deploy main cannon!" Colonel Regiere commanded, ignoring Ivan and Mazur's interaction.
A massive ball of solid lead, a quarter of a mile in diameter, was fired toward the center of the Scalian fleet at an incredible speed. It was imposing in size, but when compared to a warship, negligible in threat. Despite that, the Scalian Fleet began to scatter away from the ball in fear.
Mazur chucked sinisterly and said, "The excess of these leftover particles around the black hole is what is called Hawking radiation. I devised a method for not just collecting these elementary particles, but artificially manufacturing them. Do you know what happens when a massive amount of these particles are fired at matter?"
"What?"
"They merge with the atoms, but outside of the natural formation of atoms, they cannot sustain the imbalance in energy, rapidly collapsing into pure energy. It is similar to the energy in… where we live… but not as potent. That antimatter explosion was just the small energy difference between the antimatter and matter particles that collided, this turn 100 percent of the matter into energy."
Ivan began to sweat secretly when several weapons officers reported, "Main Hawking Elementary Cannon fully charged!"
"Fire!" Colonel Regiere shouted in her chilling voice.
An enormous barrel, easily a hundred times larger than that of a positron cannon, extended from the front of the ship. Violet light rings lit up along the barrel as it fired a continuous pulse of elementary particles toward the solid lead ball floating in the center of the Scalian ships. What surprised Ivan though, was that other than a faint distortion that appeared in space as the pulse passed through at the speed of light, he couldn't see anything.
Ivan remembered that Mazur mentioning that elementary particles are too small to be seen with light, so he figured this must be true even when they were grouped together.
The lead ball glowed dimly briefly before everything was suddenly engulfed by a brilliant white light. The universe appeared to be filled with nothing but white light at this moment.
It soon faded and space returned to its peaceful silence. The remaining Scalian fleet had been completely annihilated from this one attack, not a single trace of them were left, even the nearby destroyed ship fragments had vanished.
"Hey, Mazur…" Ivan began solemly.
Mazur also seemed to have a disturbed expression on his cat face. "I know, that white light. It was the same as subspace. You saw it, didn't you?"
"Yeah, they weren't annihilated by the massive energy as everyone thinks. All three-dimensional matter within range was directly broken down into energy and assimilated… Exactly the same as subspace."
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Ivan, Mazur, Iris and Valeria flew back to Major Harold's destroyer once the gravitational fluctuations in space had begun to stabilize.
Aboard the destroyer, Major Harold watched Ivan and the others reappear on the bridge and let out a sigh, "I assume you four were behind the destruction of the mothership?"
Iris gave the Major a smile that made everyone on the bridge become charmed by her momentarily, so mesmerised they forgot to breath. Ivan and the others chuckled lightly at this, becoming a four-dimensional being had changed them greatly. In one sense of it, they could be considered as being 'more perfect', hence a beauty like Iris emerged with a natural charm that was impossible for a three-dimensional being.
"Ahem, not that it matters," Major Harold cleared his throat with a cough, inadvertently waking everyone up from their stupors.
Ivan looked at the battlefield from the perspective of the warship and couldn't help but ask, "Can you guy survive the final three minutes until reinforcements arrive?"
"We can as long as we keep focusing on evasion," Major Harold paused before continuing. "Once the reinforcements arrive, I need you four to immediately head over to Colonel Regiere's flagship. The Colonel will be expecting you, although I think she would be expecting a transport shuttle. She couldn't quite understand the you'll be flying over is you will literally be 'flying' over."
Ivan understood the reason for moving to the flagship, he chuckled to himself before saying, "If that is your resolution, I won't try to stop you. You know, if you fired photon beams onto the planet's surface, you can easily annihilate the Scalians assaulting the natives."
"We cannot, our laws prevent us from creating unnecessary casualties, and to cruelly annihilate so many innocent victims of would be morally inhuman."
"Major, you don't understand the method of killing the few to save the many. It is because there are people like you that these battles are dragged out and, in the end, more people die than if you were to have done the former."
"It is still morally wrong. They also have lives, loved ones. To heartlessly tear that away from them, it is not something I can do."
Ivan laughed derisively. "You are a soldier, Major, you have to make the best choice. What does it matter, anyway? You know you're going to die even if reinforcements come, why be so faint hearted now."
"I will die with honor, not shame," Major Harold was steadfast and said with a stern glare. "I am a soldier, but it is a good thing that you are not my superior."
Ivan clicked his tongue and didn't bother pressing the issue, but he suddenly coughed, a little blue blood spattering onto the floor of the bridge. There was more blood that was actually coughed up, but it was all in subspace and couldn't be seen by the crewmembers of the destroyer.
"You're injured?" Major Harold asked the four of them in surprise, secretly thinking to himself at the same time, 'Blue blood? He's, no, they're not human?'
"What did you expect, we were in the caught up in that antimatter explosion after all," Ivan explained, not pointing out that they were technically in subspace.
"Antimatter? Caught in the explosion?" Major Harold and the rest of the officers in the bridge had aghast expressions on their faces.
The battle concluded for the Galactic Fleet rapidly, their 72 surviving ships rapidly plummeted to 20. The Scalian wardolls had completely defeated the Galactic Fleet mechanoids and were rapidly closing in on the surviving several destroyers and battleships. They rapidly fired anti-mechanoid rounds at the incoming mass, wiping out swarms at a time, but there were simply too many.
Alarms from within Major Harold's destroyer rang one after another as the wardolls' antiparticle rifles punctured holes through the ship and compromised regions of it. It's energy shield simply couldn't keep up with the damage and seal off the breaches in time.
"Major! Radars are picking up a fleet about to arrive in hyperspace! It's Colonel Regiere's fleet!" One of the officers on the bridge hurriedly shouted in a nervous panic.
Major Harold closed his eyes in relief and a weight appeared to have been lifted from his shoulders. "Understood. Inform the crew, everyone is to evacuate to the nearest escape pod point. You all fought bravely, but in order to survive, you must escape immediately."
The orders were relayed throughout the ship and every crew member rapidly rushed to the nearest escape pod point.
"You're not going to leave, Major?" Ivan asked.
"My responsibility lies in the evacuation of the crew, I cannot leave until they do. You four should leave t-" Major Harold was cut off as an antiparticle beam compromised on of the Sol Reactors, causing it to explode and blow apart a large portion of the ship and causing the rest to violently shake.
Ivan lead Mazur, Iris and Valeria to fly out of the destroyer. He looked at the terrible state of the ship, one potion near the rear ship had disintegrate into fragments in space, some of which were falling toward the planet's surface.
Not far away from the Scalian fleet, well above the battlefield, a massive flagship, bigger than the previous Scalian mothership, appeared from hyperspace with a shimmer of light. After that, destroyers and battleships dropped out of hyperspace one after another in a seemingly endless number. The number of ships continued to grow until the fleet reached a staggering 50,000 ships.
"I understand now why they don't name their ships," Ivan said to Mazur insightfully. "There are simply too many, there is no way they could name them all."
Iris also nodded her head, but she noted the writing on the side of the massive flagship and commented, "But why does that ship have a name? The Moriarty?"
"This Colonel Regiere should have a high authority, naming a flagship shouldn't be too surprising," Mazur spoke of it as a negligible matter.
The four Celestials flew toward the Moriarty. Behind them, the remainder of the Galactic Fleet that began the encounter rapidly crumbled apart into fragments. Hundreds of thousands of escape pods were drifting in space, many of them falling toward the planet's surface along with a large portion of ship fragments. The atmosphere of the planet appeared to almost turn red from all the debris and pods falling through it, each burning red from the intense friction. Most would burn up before reaching the ground and avoid an apocalypse scenario, but the escape pods and larger fragments would still fall like small meteors.
Ivan and the others rapidly approached the Moriarty and flew straight inside it. Despite being much larger, the inside layout was relatively similar to Major Harold's destroyer, so they quickly found the bridge and appeared before Colonel Regiere.
Colonel Regiere was a woman with a cold expression, her hair up in a bun revealing her face which didn't have a single trace of make-up applied.
"Halt!" She shouted in a chilly voice while pulling a pistol out of the holster on her waist, aiming it at Ivan who was in the lead of the small group. "Who are you, how did you get here?"
"You won't believe I am a member of your crew?" Ivan asked jokingly.
"You are not wearing a Galactic Fleet uniform, I also know every single member of my crew. Also…" Colonel Regiere scrunched her brows slightly. "My crew don't walk through walls."
Ivan laughed boisterously at how strict she was and simply said, "Enough joking, you should have been notified that would be arriving after you dropped out of hyperspace? He may not look like what you have on the file, but this is Mazur Ral Vendick."
Colonel Regiere nodded her head after a brief thought and holstered her weapon. "Understood, I had not expected you to appear in… this method. I am Colonel Frederika Regiere, commander of the Moriarty with two standard fleets currently under my jurisdiction. Do you have the data on the enemy technology?"
Colonel Regiere secretly doubted the bipedal cat-like person was Mazur, as he was apparently a human specie 'Sphinx', an intellectual branch of the human race who looked like a standard human with minor differences. She however, was a human specie 'Proximus', a specie originating from an alien specie with excelling strength, observation and deduction capabilities, making her the ideal candidate to lead a fleet.
"We have all we need," Mazur blandly stated.
"Continue course of the Moriarty, reposition to fire main cannon at enemy fleet fragments without impacting planet's atmosphere," The Colonel said as she nodded to Ivan's group.
Mazur turned to Ivan and said with a sly grin, "You'll enjoy this. The Galactic Fleet's flagships are a sub-branch from my research on energy extraction from black holes. I made quite a fortune off this one at the time. Have you ever heard of virtual particles?"
Ivan frowned in thought, but eventually could only shake his head and continue watching, but Mazur was eager to boast about his work and still explained.
"The universe may seem empty, but it is actually full of activity. Little virtual particles, the elementary particles that makeup atoms that are too small to be seen with light, are constantly being born in positive and negative pairs, instantly annihilating each other. Black holes absorb a single one of these elementary particles at the point of the event horizon due to the massive gravitational force, the other of the pair escapes back into the universe."
"What of it?" Ivan asked as he watched the view from the flagship's massive bridge, partially interested in the theory.
"Launch bulkhead! Deploy main cannon!" Colonel Regiere commanded, ignoring Ivan and Mazur's interaction.
A massive ball of solid lead, a quarter of a mile in diameter, was fired toward the center of the Scalian fleet at an incredible speed. It was imposing in size, but when compared to a warship, negligible in threat. Despite that, the Scalian Fleet began to scatter away from the ball in fear.
Mazur chucked sinisterly and said, "The excess of these leftover particles around the black hole is what is called Hawking radiation. I devised a method for not just collecting these elementary particles, but artificially manufacturing them. Do you know what happens when a massive amount of these particles are fired at matter?"
"What?"
"They merge with the atoms, but outside of the natural formation of atoms, they cannot sustain the imbalance in energy, rapidly collapsing into pure energy. It is similar to the energy in… where we live… but not as potent. That antimatter explosion was just the small energy difference between the antimatter and matter particles that collided, this turn 100 percent of the matter into energy."
Ivan began to sweat secretly when several weapons officers reported, "Main Hawking Elementary Cannon fully charged!"
"Fire!" Colonel Regiere shouted in her chilling voice.
An enormous barrel, easily a hundred times larger than that of a positron cannon, extended from the front of the ship. Violet light rings lit up along the barrel as it fired a continuous pulse of elementary particles toward the solid lead ball floating in the center of the Scalian ships. What surprised Ivan though, was that other than a faint distortion that appeared in space as the pulse passed through at the speed of light, he couldn't see anything.
Ivan remembered that Mazur mentioning that elementary particles are too small to be seen with light, so he figured this must be true even when they were grouped together.
The lead ball glowed dimly briefly before everything was suddenly engulfed by a brilliant white light. The universe appeared to be filled with nothing but white light at this moment.
It soon faded and space returned to its peaceful silence. The remaining Scalian fleet had been completely annihilated from this one attack, not a single trace of them were left, even the nearby destroyed ship fragments had vanished.
"Hey, Mazur…" Ivan began solemly.
Mazur also seemed to have a disturbed expression on his cat face. "I know, that white light. It was the same as subspace. You saw it, didn't you?"
"Yeah, they weren't annihilated by the massive energy as everyone thinks. All three-dimensional matter within range was directly broken down into energy and assimilated… Exactly the same as subspace."
Ivan, Mazur, Iris and Valeria flew back to Major Harold's destroyer once the gravitational fluctuations in space had begun to stabilize.Aboard the destroyer, Major Harold watched Ivan and the others reappear on the bridge and let out a sigh, "I assume you four were behind the destruction of the mothership?"Iris gave the Major a smile that made everyone on the bridge become charmed by her momentarily, so mesmerised they forgot to breath. Ivan and the others chuckled lightly at this, becoming a four-dimensional being had changed them greatly. In one sense of it, they could be considered as being 'more perfect', hence a beauty like Iris emerged with a natural charm that was impossible for a three-dimensional being."Ahem, not that it matters," Major Harold cleared his throat with a cough, inadvertently waking everyone up from their stupors.Ivan looked at the battlefield from the perspective of the warship and couldn't help but ask, "Can you guy survive the final three minutes until reinforcements arrive?""We can as long as we keep focusing on evasion," Major Harold paused before continuing. "Once the reinforcements arrive, I need you four to immediately head over to Colonel Regiere's flagship. The Colonel will be expecting you, although I think she would be expecting a transport shuttle. She couldn't quite understand the you'll be flying over is you will literally be 'flying' over."Ivan understood the reason for moving to the flagship, he chuckled to himself before saying, "If that is your resolution, I won't try to stop you. You know, if you fired photon beams onto the planet's surface, you can easily annihilate the Scalians assaulting the natives.""We cannot, our laws prevent us from creating unnecessary casualties, and to cruelly annihilate so many innocent victims of would be morally inhuman.""Major, you don't understand the method of killing the few to save the many. It is because there are people like you that these battles are dragged out and, in the end, more people die than if you were to have done the former.""It is still morally wrong. They also have lives, loved ones. To heartlessly tear that away from them, it is not something I can do."Ivan laughed derisively. "You are a soldier, Major, you have to make the best choice. What does it matter, anyway? You know you're going to die even if reinforcements come, why be so faint hearted now.""I will die with honor, not shame," Major Harold was steadfast and said with a stern glare. "I am a soldier, but it is a good thing that you are not my superior."Ivan clicked his tongue and didn't bother pressing the issue, but he suddenly coughed, a little blue blood spattering onto the floor of the bridge. There was more blood that was actually coughed up, but it was all in subspace and couldn't be seen by the crewmembers of the destroyer."You're injured?" Major Harold asked the four of them in surprise, secretly thinking to himself at the same time, 'Blue blood? He's, no, they're not human?'"What did you expect, we were in the caught up in that antimatter explosion after all," Ivan explained, not pointing out that they were technically in subspace."Antimatter? Caught in the explosion?" Major Harold and the rest of the officers in the bridge had aghast expressions on their faces.The battle concluded for the Galactic Fleet rapidly, their 72 surviving ships rapidly plummeted to 20. The Scalian wardolls had completely defeated the Galactic Fleet mechanoids and were rapidly closing in on the surviving several destroyers and battleships. They rapidly fired anti-mechanoid rounds at the incoming mass, wiping out swarms at a time, but there were simply too many.Alarms from within Major Harold's destroyer rang one after another as the wardolls' antiparticle rifles punctured holes through the ship and compromised regions of it. It's energy shield simply couldn't keep up with the damage and seal off the breaches in time."Major! Radars are picking up a fleet about to arrive in hyperspace! It's Colonel Regiere's fleet!" One of the officers on the bridge hurriedly shouted in a nervous panic.Major Harold closed his eyes in relief and a weight appeared to have been lifted from his shoulders. "Understood. Inform the crew, everyone is to evacuate to the nearest escape pod point. You all fought bravely, but in order to survive, you must escape immediately."The orders were relayed throughout the ship and every crew member rapidly rushed to the nearest escape pod point."You're not going to leave, Major?" Ivan asked."My responsibility lies in the evacuation of the crew, I cannot leave until they do. You four should leave t-" Major Harold was cut off as an antiparticle beam compromised on of the Sol Reactors, causing it to explode and blow apart a large portion of the ship and causing the rest to violently shake.Ivan lead Mazur, Iris and Valeria to fly out of the destroyer. He looked at the terrible state of the ship, one potion near the rear ship had disintegrate into fragments in space, some of which were falling toward the planet's surface.Not far away from the Scalian fleet, well above the battlefield, a massive flagship, bigger than the previous Scalian mothership, appeared from hyperspace with a shimmer of light. After that, destroyers and battleships dropped out of hyperspace one after another in a seemingly endless number. The number of ships continued to grow until the fleet reached a staggering 50,000 ships."I understand now why they don't name their ships," Ivan said to Mazur insightfully. "There are simply too many, there is no way they could name them all."Iris also nodded her head, but she noted the writing on the side of the massive flagship and commented, "But why does that ship have a name? The Moriarty?""This Colonel Regiere should have a high authority, naming a flagship shouldn't be too surprising," Mazur spoke of it as a negligible matter.The four Celestials flew toward the Moriarty. Behind them, the remainder of the Galactic Fleet that began the encounter rapidly crumbled apart into fragments. Hundreds of thousands of escape pods were drifting in space, many of them falling toward the planet's surface along with a large portion of ship fragments. The atmosphere of the planet appeared to almost turn red from all the debris and pods falling through it, each burning red from the intense friction. Most would burn up before reaching the ground and avoid an apocalypse scenario, but the escape pods and larger fragments would still fall like small meteors.Ivan and the others rapidly approached the Moriarty and flew straight inside it. Despite being much larger, the inside layout was relatively similar to Major Harold's destroyer, so they quickly found the bridge and appeared before Colonel Regiere.Colonel Regiere was a woman with a cold expression, her hair up in a bun revealing her face which didn't have a single trace of make-up applied."Halt!" She shouted in a chilly voice while pulling a pistol out of the holster on her waist, aiming it at Ivan who was in the lead of the small group. "Who are you, how did you get here?""You won't believe I am a member of your crew?" Ivan asked jokingly."You are not wearing a Galactic Fleet uniform, I also know every single member of my crew. Also" Colonel Regiere scrunched her brows slightly. "My crew don't walk through walls."Ivan laughed boisterously at how strict she was and simply said, "Enough joking, you should have been notified that would be arriving after you dropped out of hyperspace? He may not look like what you have on the file, but this is Mazur Ral Vendick."Colonel Regiere nodded her head after a brief thought and holstered her weapon. "Understood, I had not expected you to appear in this method. I am Colonel Frederika Regiere, commander of the Moriarty with two standard fleets currently under my jurisdiction. Do you have the data on the enemy technology?"Colonel Regiere secretly doubted the bipedal cat-like person was Mazur, as he was apparently a human specie 'Sphinx', an intellectual branch of the human race who looked like a standard human with minor differences. She however, was a human specie 'Proximus', a specie originating from an alien specie with excelling strength, observation and deduction capabilities, making her the ideal candidate to lead a fleet."We have all we need," Mazur blandly stated."Continue course of the Moriarty, reposition to fire main cannon at enemy fleet fragments without impacting planet's atmosphere," The Colonel said as she nodded to Ivan's group.Mazur turned to Ivan and said with a sly grin, "You'll enjoy this. The Galactic Fleet's flagships are a sub-branch from my research on energy extraction from black holes. I made quite a fortune off this one at the time. Have you ever heard of virtual particles?"Ivan frowned in thought, but eventually could only shake his head and continue watching, but Mazur was eager to boast about his work and still explained."The universe may seem empty, but it is actually full of activity. Little virtual particles, the elementary particles that makeup atoms that are too small to be seen with light, are constantly being born in positive and negative pairs, instantly annihilating each other. Black holes absorb a single one of these elementary particles at the point of the event horizon due to the massive gravitational force, the other of the pair escapes back into the universe.""What of it?" Ivan asked as he watched the view from the flagship's massive bridge, partially interested in the theory."Launch bulkhead! Deploy main cannon!" Colonel Regiere commanded, ignoring Ivan and Mazur's interaction.A massive ball of solid lead, a quarter of a mile in diameter, was fired toward the center of the Scalian fleet at an incredible speed. It was imposing in size, but when compared to a warship, negligible in threat. Despite that, the Scalian Fleet began to scatter away from the ball in fear.Mazur chucked sinisterly and said, "The excess of these leftover particles around the black hole is what is called Hawking radiation. I devised a method for not just collecting these elementary particles, but artificially manufacturing them. Do you know what happens when a massive amount of these particles are fired at matter?""What?""They merge with the atoms, but outside of the natural formation of atoms, they cannot sustain the imbalance in energy, rapidly collapsing into pure energy. It is similar to the energy in where we live but not as potent. That antimatter explosion was just the small energy difference between the antimatter and matter particles that collided, this turn 100 percent of the matter into energy."Ivan began to sweat secretly when several weapons officers reported, "Main Hawking Elementary Cannon fully charged!""Fire!" Colonel Regiere shouted in her chilling voice.An enormous barrel, easily a hundred times larger than that of a positron cannon, extended from the front of the ship. Violet light rings lit up along the barrel as it fired a continuous pulse of elementary particles toward the solid lead ball floating in the center of the Scalian ships. What surprised Ivan though, was that other than a faint distortion that appeared in space as the pulse passed through at the speed of light, he couldn't see anything.Ivan remembered that Mazur mentioning that elementary particles are too small to be seen with light, so he figured this must be true even when they were grouped together.The lead ball glowed dimly briefly before everything was suddenly engulfed by a brilliant white light. The universe appeared to be filled with nothing but white light at this moment.It soon faded and space returned to its peaceful silence. The remaining Scalian fleet had been completely annihilated from this one attack, not a single trace of them were left, even the nearby destroyed ship fragments had vanished."Hey, Mazur" Ivan began solemly.Mazur also seemed to have a disturbed expression on his cat face. "I know, that white light. It was the same as subspace. You saw it, didn't you?""Yeah, they weren't annihilated by the massive energy as everyone thinks. All three-dimensional matter within range was directly broken down into energy and assimilated Exactly the same as subspace."
