Homestar Saga

Chapter 88: Robot Army

Yvian wondered if the Peacekeepers were as nervous as she was.

In hindsight, it was a stupid question. She already knew the machines could feel. She assumed they had the same desire to live as other sapients, and they'd been waiting for hours to engage an enemy that outnumbered and outgunned them. By a lot. Yvian wasn't even taking part in the fight, and she was scared. She doubted the Peacekeepers were any different.

She looked over the fleet one more time. Fifteen thousand capitol ships and frigates, with a smattering of Federation built fighters, a couple battlecruisers, and a single YEET artillery barge. A month ago she would have considered it an overwhelming show of force. Now it struck her as small. Inadequate. The Confed military had launched an attack with a massively larger fleet, and the pirates had turned them into paste.

"All checks complete?" Mims asked. "Is the new Node network secure?" The Peacekeepers had modified the quantum entanglement of their Nodes before bringing them back online, creating a separate network that Yvian hoped Reba wouldn't be able to access. The ships of the fleet were being flown manually, and the comms were physically disconnected from the other systems to prevent hacking.

"Yes." said Admiral Ender Zhukov. "All systems green. All units ready."

"Then let's get this party started," said the Captain. He frowned and scratched his head. "Do you think we should give some kind of speech or something?"

Admiral Zhukov didn't answer. Nor did he bother with preamble. He simply activated the comms and said, "Begin." Over fifteen thousand ships activated their jumpdrives.

"May fortune find you on the cusp of The Crunch," Yvian whispered. Lissa echoed the sentiment. They watched as the jumpdrives charged. Thirty seconds later, they disappeared in a flash of blue.

Another thirty seconds, and the fleet exited the Gate Effect. The holodisplay shifted, showing the sensor scans of the ships arriving in Tortuga. What awaited them there caught Yvian's breath.

Tortuga was a large sector, with two stars, seventeen planets, and three asteroid belts. On opposite ends of the sector were two Jumpgates. Facing the Gates at a distance of just under five hundred kilometers were the ships of the Freedom Republic. Two fleets, each six times the size of Yvian's. Roughly a third of them were from the Confederation. The rest had been built by the far deadlier humans. A single human capitol ship could destroy a Confed military fleet with it's superior speed and shield piercing MAC cannons. Twenty thousand of them waited at each Gate, along with ten thousand frigates, two thousand YEET artillery barges, and thirty thousand human fighter ships. Why in The Crunch did the humans send the pirates so many ships so soon? It had only been a month.

"Looks like they expected us," Captain Mims remarked.

"Affirmative," Kilroy confirmed. Lissa started swearing. Yvian supposed it made sense. Reba would have known when the fleet was jumped out of krog space. It wouldn't be hard for her to predict Mims would be attacking. Every day the Freedom Republic was getting more ships. Mims couldn't commission more ships of his own fast enough to make a difference. Hitting Tortuga as soon as possible was the only choice he could make.

The Peacekeepers opened fire less than a second after they'd come through the Gate. Mims had insisted the krog build his fleet with beam weapons for all the Capital ships. Yvian was beginning to see why. The enemy were well out of range for conventional cannons, but the beam weapons could hit a target at ninety thousand kilometers, and they were nearly impossible to dodge. Beams danced from one human fighter to another, the Peacekeepers targeting with inpixen speed and precision. Faster than Yvian could track, pirate ships were disabled.

The Freedom Republic responded after a few precious seconds. The entire fleet barreled forward, moving to engage the machines. While she couldn't see them on the scanners, Yvian was sure a torrent of MAC rounds were headed for her fleet, as well.