"Ah Shit."

Ah shit didn't exactly convey the true reality of how screwed they were, but at the moment he was a bit too busy to come up with anything more poetic .

Behind the Empyrean, the Arcadia defense Nexus roared silently to life, a blue nimbus against the blackness of space. Guns pivoted into place, and the sky was lit suddenly by the glowing white tails of rockets, streaking like comets through the darkness.

Adam Flexed his hand into a fist and rolled the empyrean hard to the left, just in time as a series of missiles streaked past them on the right. The ship shuttered as one of the rockets stratified their shields, but it was a glancing blow, and only served to knock them lightly off course.

Behind them, the Nexus flared brightly as the missiles impacted against the shield, erupting like sparklers in a new year fireworks show. Adam forced his hands out and down, like a wizard casting a particularly exuberant spell, and the Empyrean dropped rapidly, falling out of the line of fire just in time to avoid the salvo of missiles, energy beams and projectiles that would have impacted her shields all at once.

Though the Empyrean has its own artificial gravity, brought about by some unknown power, the laws of physics still tend to apply. You don't want to be standing just anywhere when the floor rapidly drops out from underneath you.

Adam was fine, but all around the ship, anyone who wasn't strapped in got a nasty surprise, rapidly tossed one way, and then the other before the floor dropped out from beneath them completely. For anyone in the main hub of the ship, this would have been a terrifying experience as they went hurtling towards the ceiling, or at least it would have if the Empyrean hadn't been designed for just such an occasion.

Anyone who wasn't already strapped down found themselves hauled to the floor by a .sudden increase of gravity, and held there as the ship spun around them at least until the momentum dampeners kicked in, and they were finally released to move about the ship as previously.

As soon as they dropped, Adam spun them hard right, rolling rapidly through the air, and giving Sunny a hell of a time as she tried to pilot the Empyrean's weapon systems. The ship, smarter than your average inanimate object, stabilized her view as the ship continued to spin, and Sunny let off a salvo of her own targeting multiple of the ships as they came roaring towards her.

Adam hadn't really intended to get into a dogfight in his own backyard, but that ship had sailed, quite literally, and he'd be damned if he was going to let them come even an inch closer to that Nexus.

Adam had three very good reasons not to let anyone past them, and at least a dozen more pretty good reasons.

The night sky ahead of them was lit up with a visual cacophony of orange starbursts as the defense Nexus continued with its deadly work.

Anyone who wasn't a good hand at avoiding fire was quickly pelted with missiles, their shields taking an incredible beating. One unlucky little ship, devoid of sufficient power or, piloted by an insufficient captain, erupted into a sudden nimbus of scrap metal filling the already tumultuous battlefield with another potentially deadly hazard.

Shield slit up orange as scraps of splinter and metal impacted them at high speeds.

The battlefield around him became a chessboard laid out in three distinct dimensions, but unlike in aerial combat over a planet within the atmosphere of a planet, different rules applied. There was no wind resistance, which meant no one was getting points for being streamlined. There was no gravity which meant he couldn't use the strain of g force against his opponents. Combat laid out with a strict set of geometrical rules, up, down, left right, diagonal, if you were being very creative, and arching, only if you wanted to show off.

In space, without wind resistance, ships go only where you tell them to, and in straight lines. To create curving serpentine patterns, a pilot has to intentionally create that affect by continually rotating their engines rather than relying on the way air interacts with the wings.

What ends up happening is an affect not dissimilar to a multidimensional game of foosball, back and forth, up and down.

Adam shot upward through an opening, doing his best to avoid any significant missiles, though he all but ignored the smaller projectiles.

You couldn't win them all, and now was not the time to try.

Avoiding everything would be like trying to walk between raindrops during a deluge.

He fired off the Empyrean's main energy cannons, but only at partial power. The Empyrean took her energy directly from her crew, tapping into their anima. The more people on the ship, the more powerful she was, and at max capacity, not even the blue giants were safe.

Ture to aim, two of the opposing ships were practically vaporized by his manuver.

Another ship to his left erupted as the defense nexus managed to punch through its shield. A proximity alert appeared on the viewscreen before him, coming up rapidly towards their belly. He rolled left, and whoever it was rolled with him. They spun around each other like two eagles locked in a mating dance before Adam pulled up sharply and tilted their nose downward.

Seamlessly, he passed over control of the main cannons, briefly, to Sunny, who took great pleasure in vaporizing their opponent.

He thought he might have heard her cackling, in so much as a Drev can cackle.

More ships were exploding now.

Left and right they were exploding as their shields began to fail. Void energy might have been powerful, but it was only the cheap knockoff version of real anima energy, made up by simply grinding up souls and squeezing them together, not dissimilar to the way that sausages are made all told.

Someone got off a lucky shot and their shields flared with bright golden light.

Adam cursed.

No matter how good a pilot you were, it was impossible not to get hit in a situation like this, but there was something nagging at him.

Another ship exploded to his right.

Who in the hell would attack him on his own turf, backed by a state-of-the-art defense nexus almost as good as what the Celzex homeworld had and maybe even a little better than what earth had. Their opponents were being chewed to bits, digested and then shat back out with near impunity.

They had to know that this was a losing battle.

Unless winning the battle wasn't the point.

Adam racked his brain, trying to figure out what this might mean, trying to fill in the missing piece of the puzzle. Another ship engaged him, this one was bigger, meaner than the others, and they exchanged fire. The other pilot was good, and their fight turned rapidly into maneuvering up and down on the X, Y, and Z axises exchanging ordinance, that is until Adam took them in a rapid arc over their opponent while Sunny slathered them with a good helping of Fuck off.

Just because most space battles took place in straight lines didn't mean it was 'impossible' to pull out a tricky manuver every now and again, and the Empyrean was well equipped.

Their main cannon got off a lucky shot and blasted a hole in their void shield, leaving an opening for Sunny to finish them off.

Adam's mind was back in the game now.

Unless the battle wasn't the point.

A distraction of course, but for what?

They couldn't attack Arcadia, that was being made very clear the longer the fight went on andthe nexus tore them to bits. This was a Kamikaze mission, and would mean nothing. There was nothing here that was capable of overloading Arcadia's shields, except maybe a supernova but that was...

Ah shit!.

If there would have been a table present to slam his head against, he would have done it. He cursed violently, first in english, but when he ran out of words, he switched to a bastardized mixture of Drev and Spanish, both languages having a significantly better structure for swearing than his own native tongue.

How could they have been so stupid!

This was an INCREDIBLE oversight the likes of which would go down in Arcadian military intelligence history as a complete and utter failure if the planet even lived to tell about it. Inside his chest, Adam's heart had gone ice cold. Fear tracked its way through his bloodstream like heroin through a vein.

Kay, Nyx, Astra

They were down there..

Adam Crossed his arms over his body, and then uncrossed them violently engaging a reckless warp sequence that could just as rapidly kill them all as it could get them to their intended destination. In an instant the world of violence around them was gone, and the simple vastness of space loomed before them, dominated by the powerful burn of

Bob.

Arcadia's star.

Sunny Cursed in surprise as did the rest of the crew, suddenly very confused.

"Captain why."

"The STAR! It's just a distraction, they are going after the star!" He shouted, "Get Avex on the line and tell him to get over here with a nexu, now!" Hopefully the Celex emperor was willing to play ball, though Adam didn't see why he wouldn't.

Now all that retained was making sure the star stayed as intended.

If he was right.

The star was huge, and looking for their opponents was like trying to find a dust moat while staring into a flashlight with a few thousand lumens.

If he was wrong, and they had other plans.... He didn't even want to think about it

But his crew trusted him, and didn't question his assurance as they began scanning the nearby area for some evidence of interlopers. When they had brought the star here, they had neglected to consider that it would become a target. They were too busy celebrating their new source of light they didn't even think to consider that most solar systems had at least rudimentary protections around their source of light, not simply because losing it would spell death for most planets, not arcadia, but in this case.

A star could be made into a really big bomb. Even at a distance from Arcadia, a supernova could easily wipe out the entirety of the artificial Bobsystem.

"Got it!" Someone shouted.

Adam followed the commands, and on his screen detected the small ship sitting as close as it could to Bob as it could without imploding , but even as he watched, the ship released some sort of pailod, which began rapid freefall into the star's gravity well.