Chapter 390: Smog Defense
"Target them with the ion cannons, now!"
"Firing lasers..."
The massive enemy warship had just broken free of its warp bubble, and its current speed was painfully slow.
Facing the overwhelming firepower of the Deep Space, which could fire 6,000 rounds per second along with a massive barrage of lasers, it seemed like an easy target.
But the crew soon realized what the mysterious halos surrounding the enemy ships actually were: energy shields.
When the lasers struck, the shields flared brightly, completely absorbing the energy of the attack. The enemy spaceship was left entirely unscathed.
"It’s an ion shield!" one of the senior scientists shouted.
By highly confining plasma, an ion shield could absorb massive amounts of laser energy. Against this kind of defense, their few ion cannons were practically useless, only effective for swatting away smaller fighters.
The crew had braced themselves for a tough fight, but the sight of those shields made everyone realize just how outmatched their technology really was.
But there was no time for academic debates in the middle of a crisis. Fear and confusion gripped the bridge as one question echoed in everyone’s minds: What do we do now?
With their energy weapons rendered useless while the enemy’s remained fully operational, how could they possibly win?
"The shield’s absorption capacity has to have a limit," a tactical officer reasoned. "We either need a massively overpowered laser, or we switch to kinetic weapons like the railguns. An ion shield can’t stop solid mass."
"The ion cannon’s proton beams are too small; they’ll just get absorbed too," another officer replied.
The military had brainstormed various ways to defend against directed-energy weapons beforehand, as they were the fastest and most direct means of attack.
Ion shields were the theoretical ideal, but humanity’s technology simply wasn’t advanced enough yet. If they could manipulate plasma with that level of precision, controlled nuclear fusion would be child’s play.
Lacking advanced shield technology, humanity had to rely on brute-force alternatives. Thick ablative armor layered with solid nitrogen and ultra-smooth reflective hull coatings were their primary protective measures.
But there was another tactic proposed by a tactical officer—a resource-heavy but highly effective strategy known as "smog defense."
Aerosol particles can range up to 80 micrometers in diameter, with most sitting between 1 and 10 micrometers.
Lasers, however, operate at wavelengths below 1,000 nanometers, less than 1 micrometer. This means lasers struggle to bypass the dense particles, causing their energy to dissipate rapidly.
It was basic physics: the attenuation rate of lasers in thick smoke followed Lambert’s law, dropping off exponentially. The same principle applied to high-energy proton beams, which would be scattered and heavily weakened by the suspended particles.
"Fire!"
Without energy shields, humanity relied on this makeshift defense. Hundreds of specialized railgun shells packed with chemical aerosol generators were launched, detonating nearly 1,000 kilometers away from the Deep Space.
The detonations rapidly expanded into a massive, artificial nebula. As the munitions ruthlessly spewed out thick smoke, the cloud expanded until it was hundreds of kilometers thick, completely concealing the Deep Space.
Between the flashes of nuclear detonations, heavy electromagnetic jamming, and the colossal cloud of smog, the battlefield descended into total chaos.
Both sides were left flying blind, forced to rely on high-intensity, long-wave radar just to track each other.
Even if a high-yield laser or ion beam managed to pierce the fog, its power would be severely diminished, making it nearly impossible to threaten the hull of the Deep Space.
From the bridge, all the crew could see were streaks of bright light cutting through the dense cloud. The lasers scattered and reflected off the particles, rapidly draining their destructive energy.
For the moment, both sides’ directed-energy weapons were rendered entirely useless. The success of the smog defense brought a massive wave of relief to the crew, even though maintaining the cloud was burning through their material reserves at an alarming rate.
It was a staggering logistical cost. Only a massive generation ship like the Deep Space, with its enormous storage bays and deep pockets of resources, could afford to vent raw matter into space just to create a smokescreen while on the move.
Space warfare was measured in fractions of a second, far too fast for human reflexes. The ship’s artificial intelligence was directly managing the defensive countermeasures, and so far, it was keeping them alive.
With the smog cloud deployed, the pace of the battle slowed slightly. Railgun slugs traveled much slower than the speed of light; covering 600,000 kilometers would take tens of seconds, giving the AI time to calculate evasive maneuvers.
Moments later, blinding orbs of light flared within the cloud, the enemy was blindly firing nuclear torpedoes into the fog. The crew scrambled to replenish the smog generators, feeding massive amounts of raw materials into the ship’s cannons.
𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶
Meanwhile, damage control alarms blared across the ship as internal maintenance drones rushed to repair sections of the hull that had been clipped by the blast waves.
While the battle seemed to have settled into a tense standoff, Jason’s nerves remained pulled taut.
He was debating whether they should attempt a forced sequence start on the Warp Drive. He immediately opened a channel to the chief engineers in the engine room.
"The Deep Space hasn’t taken critical damage yet, but without the Warp Drive, we can’t retreat," Jason said quickly. "And as it stands, shooting down that spaceship is going to be nearly impossible."
An anxious voice replied over the communicators. "But the local planet’s gravitational pull is still affecting us, and even the star’s gravity is causing interference. The probability of a successful warp jump is dangerously low, Captain! If the drive overloads, we’ll be dead in the water!"
Before Jason could respond, the tactical situation shifted again.
The Deep Space began rapidly deploying waves of drone interceptors to form a defensive fighter screen.
Seeing this, the enemy warship released a massive swarm of combat drones, sending them diving straight for the human vessel.
Fortunately, this was the only enemy spaceship that had dropped out of warp near the Deep Space. The rest of their fleet consisted of medium-class cruisers.
The enemy’s other capital ships had either exited warp hundreds of millions of kilometers away, crashed into the nearby planet, or tragically plummeted straight into the star.
The medium-sized enemy cruisers lacked the power generators required to sustain ion shields.
Facing down a few dozen unshielded ships wasn’t nearly as terrifying when the Deep Space could unleash its full, devastating firepower against them. Perhaps humanity had finally caught a lucky break.
But out in the main battlefield positioned over the planet, the fight had reached a fever pitch. Tens of thousands of ships were locked in a massive dogfight across 100 million cubic kilometers of space, filling the void with countless hyper-velocity rounds.
A drone interceptor unleashed a rapid burst of railgun fire, strafing an enemy spaceship. Because the fighter was already moving at such an extreme velocity, the rounds barely needed magnetic acceleration; they were simply ejected from the cannons.
Carried by their own inertia, the solid slugs hurled forward at 6,000 kilometers per second along the fighter’s flight path.
However, a split second later, the drone was clipped by an enemy laser and violently exploded. Only a handful of its kinetic rounds managed to strike the enemy vessel.
The drones were too lightly armored and could only survive a single hit. The medium-class Leviathan ships could endure slightly more punishment, provided their engines or mainframes weren’t struck. The heavy Titan-class cruisers were meant to be humanity’s main fighting force.
Even though the alien fleet had been caught off guard by humanity’s erratic tactics, the sheer gap in technological performance and raw firepower was brutal.
It took the sacrifice of fifteen human drones just to take down a single enemy medium-class cruiser!
Of the original 10,000 drone fighters deployed, only two-thirds remained.
Thankfully, the enemy’s drone and cruiser fleets had also taken heavy losses.
This was largely because many of them had been wiped out in the opening volley of humanity’s missile phalanx, or destroyed by their own navigational failures during the chaotic warp exit.
But despite the casualties, the number of enemy targets on the front lines didn’t seem to be decreasing; if anything, the swarm was growing thicker.
The alien spaceships were continually deploying fresh waves of combat drones from their hangars.
In truth, humanity’s combat record so far wasn’t terrible, it was an achievement to be proud of. Setting aside the raw technological disparity, trading fifteen small drone interceptors to destroy a single medium-class enemy cruiser was a highly cost-effective tactical exchange.
However, when it came to capital ship warfare, humanity was severely outmatched.
On the main battlefield, the enemy still fielded eight primary spaceships. Aside from the one that had been heavily bombarded and crippled at the start of the ambush, the other eight remained entirely undamaged.
The Titan-class cruisers found their heavy lasers completely nullified by the enemy’s ion shields, and their railguns were simply too slow to hit agile ships at long ranges.
Only the drone fighters, engaging in suicidal close-quarters combat, could reliably land hits.
The alien ion shields had become an indescribable nightmare for the human fleet.