Commissioned by RoyalTwinFangs
Project PHAETON
Chapter 4
-VB-
Orders came in.
He and his flight was to take down those “mobile suits” deployed by the Zeonites.
So they took off. A huge formation of Ghosts in front and the Exus in the rear sped off toward the Zeonite ships and their mobile suits while the slower capital ships and gunships moved in more slowly from behind.
Captain Sophia En, callsign Sol-1, took a deep breath from inside her Exus Mobile Armor cockpit and let it out. “Squad Alfa, we stick close until we’re in maximum engagement range, understood?” she instructed and got acknowledgements from everyone. Her flight of six mobile armors closed rank around her, forming a sharp V.
She looked down at her radar. It was getting fuzzy with a hell lot of false positives.
“Captain, my radar’s busted,” Lieutenant Voka Threesky, Sol-2, reported from her mobile armor to his right.
“Me too,” Lieutenant Samuel Eighthammer, callsign Chrome-1, chimed in.
“Seems like whatever that beam weapon was, it’s messing with our radars,” Sophia grunted. “Hold on for a moment, let me contact the carrier.” She pressed down on her radio comm button. “Saloren, this is Captain En reporting active radar interference. Can you confirm if this is true on your side, over?”
She let go. And the only response she got back was a static.
“Shit. Radio’s scrambled,” she spoke up in the command channel. “Chrome, get a ping off of the nearest Ghost.”
“Got it, captain.” A few seconds later, he replied, “I can still ping them but the comp’s reporting comm interference.”
Frowning, En did the only thing she could.
She broke out the big guns for communications.
She reached over to the side of her and flipped multiple covers and pressed down on all of the buttons. Then she flipped a switch on the radio. The radio squeaked out one final time with its static before it temporarily died.
She experimentally - cautiously, really, because she didn’t know what was going to happen - pressed down on the talk button. “Saloren, this is Squad Alfa. Radio communication is experiencing active interference. My prior attempts at radio comm were unsuccessful, and I was forced to use the subspace module. Please respond if you can hear me, over.”
Nothing.
And then something.
“We hear you loud and clear, Sol-1. We’re getting reports from the other MA squadron about this as well. Orders are to slave all of the Ghosts nearby to your command. You are not to engage the enemy in direct combat but to provide tactical oversight.”
Damn it.
“Acknowledged, Saloren. Sol-1, out.” Then she turned the radio back on so that the rest of the squad could hear this. “This is Sol-1 to all pilots of the Squad Alfa. Whatever the Zeonites did, we are experiencing significant radio interference. All of you are to switch over to subspace modules and report to your flight leader, over.”
“Understood, Sol-1,” Chrome-1 replied.
She got similar confirmations from the rest of the squad. Once she did, she switched it back to subspace module and waited.
“Sol-2, reporting.”
“Sol-3, reporting.”
“Sol-4, reporting.”
“Sol-5, reporting.”
“Sol-6, reporting.”
“This is Chrome-1, Sol-1. My flight is ready.”
“Good. Command ordered me to slave all of the Ghosts to my comp and provide oversight. I will do so. Sol-2 and Chrome-1, this means you two will be leading the flights together, over.”
“Acknowledged, Sol-1.”
“Understood, Sol-1.”
Sophia checked her flight path, radar, and the subspace overlay.
Radar was still fucked, flight path gave her at least fifteen minutes before engagement, and the subspace overlay over the radar pinged the enemy formation approaching at relatively similar speed as her Ghosts and Exuses.
And then her radar crackled again as something bright shot over her wing.
She looked up and grimaced. That was the damn laser that was fucking up her radar.
-VB-
“General, reports are the same from all over the squadron. Zeonite laser is causing EM interference,” comms officer reported.
Noctis narrowed his eyes. “Have we finished switching over to subspace modules?” he asked.
“Ongoing, sir. Estimated time to completion is seven minutes for the full squadron.”
He nodded and waited.
The subspace modules. Like many things in the Phaeton League, it too was something his father invented as an alternative to traditional electromagnetic systems. It was not a single module, but a collection of systems that ran parallel to the traditional systems equipped onto … basically everything but autonomous drones. When it was first rolled out, the league’s council were reluctant to implement it or replace all other systems with it like his father suggested.
He knew that Minovsky-derived weapons could have caused this. After all, it wasn’t as if the Phaeton League didn’t experiment with Minovsky Reactors, unlike the Earth Federation.
It wasn’t as if Zeon was the only one with spies and informants in other nations, trying to steal other nations’ technologies.
But even if he knew it, he didn’t expect it to be this thorough and widespread in its interference.
Worse, the energy barrier made it worse. The energy barrier absorbed all of the energy from the attack, but it didn’t absorb the Minovsky particles; it scattered them.
Which meant that while the powerful Minovsky-derived weapons could be defended against, it would only worsen the EM interference.
… If it wasn’t for his father’s implementation of subspace modules in the house’s private fleet, then this would have been a very bad time for him and his people. Luckily for him, it was not.
“Time to range?”
“... 40 minutes for the squadron and 10 minutes for the mobile armors and the fighters, general.”
“Got it. Keep the shields up and available and make sure every ship continuously communicates with each other. I don’t care even if it is their ship telling us and each other that their radar is jammed. At the very least, we know that they are talking to us.”
-VB-
As the seconds and minutes ticked down, both sides tensed.
As the fighters and mobiles suits and armors grew closer, cameras zoomed in and locked in.
And as the distance closed.
As the emptiness began to fill with shapes.
Fingers closed.
And light shattered the space.
Outmatched numerically, both sides expected the Zeonite mobile suits to lose.
And as lasers streaked across space and struck the Zeonites, observers saw minimal damage. The damage was there. It was apparent. But it was minimal.
The Zeonites were surprised that the Phaetonites were using laser technology when laser scattering technology already existed. On top of this surprise was the fact that despite this technology having been already applied to their mobile suits in the form of semi-transparent coating, the Phaetonite lasers still left burns.
The Phaetonites were surprised that the lasers did minimal damage. Yes, it damaged the Zeonite mobile suits, but it was just above cosmetic damage and would need dozens of hits to apply crippling damage.
But despite this newly realized defensive advantage, the Zakus … still lost.
---
“Goddamnit, I can’t hit them!”
Lieutenant Zara tried to get a proper lock on these small and nimble fighters, but every time the firing solution locked on with the help of her Zaku’s computer, the fucking fly would make a move that should’ve killed the pilot onboard!
She also noticed something else.
The fighters. They were pulling back and forming a ball around her, raining down lasers so accurately while none of her shots were reaching them in time.
---
The Zeonites found out that their mobile suits, which relied on human commands, were simply too cumbersome. The Ghosts flew circles around the Zakus, though this limited their attack options to non-hardpoint lasers and missiles. The Ghosts and Exuses also outranged the Zakus and their machineguns, and the Zeonite machineguns did not possess the volume needed to take down the massive waves of Ghosts. A single good hit to the center would down a Ghost fighter and a full clip would result in a crippled Exus mobile armor, but therein lay the problem. Not only did Zeonite machinegun lack the volume of fire to win against a numerically superior foe, the muzzle velocity of their machineguns was far too slow against a horde of machine learned softwares of the Ghosts capable of making maneuvers that would kill normal pilots.
Worse, the Ghosts used their lasers’ unerring accuracy, the relatively slower - much slower - and less maneuverability of the Zakus to rapid fire snipe from outside the Zaku machinegun’s optimal maximum range while these autonomous fighters made trajectory calculations on the fly in the middle of combat that only the best gundam, mobile suit, and mobile armor pilots would be able to match.
---
“Lieutenant is down!” Sergeant Danielson shouted over the comms as he tried to map the battlefield.
He and the rest of the Zakus were huddled back to back in the center of the giant ball the Phaetonite fighters made around them. They were all shooting but none of their bullets were hitting anything.
---
And so, merely half an hour after the first shot, the Ghosts left the Zakus crippled and adrift while the Exuses didn’t get to participate much.
“... So why are we even here, captain?” Lieutenant Threesky, Sol-2, asked Sol-1.
Both mobile armor wings of the Saloren remained far outside the projected maximum range of the Zakus’ machineguns, and kept their flight formation while keeping to their V formation. And at the head of the formation was the captain of the mobile armors, whose mobile armor was now serving as the local Tac.Comp server for the Ghosts.
“It’s not our fault that the Zeonites brought so few of their fighters and walkers,” Sophia grumbled. “And then choose to fight us with so few.”
And this entire time that their fighters and walkers have been getting whittled away by the Ghosts, their ships continued to fire uselessly at the Saloren and other ships. Every time that beam was fired, their radar and radio, which were recovering, went right back to being useless. If it hadn’t been for the subspace modules, then they would have been deaf and painfully nearsighted. Only thermal sensors worked, but even that was heavily screwed with.
Ping.
Sophia looked down.
The Tac.Comp just reported that the enemies have been disabled.
“The Ghosts dealt with the Zakus. Anyone fancy keeping an eye on the prisoners?” No one responded. “Fine. Sol-3, Sol-4. You two are in charge of the wrecks. The general wants those walkers to study them.”
“Haaaa… Acknowledged, Sol-1.” The two veered away from the formation as the Ghosts slowly drifted away from the “wrecking ball” to form the screen again around them.
“Alright, boys and girls,” Sophia grunted. “We’re now going to engage the enemy ships -.”
“Um, captain?”
“What?”
“The Zeonites are retreating.”
“What?!” She didn’t get to shoot a single gun! Hell no, they were not -!
“Sol-1, the general is ordering the armor wings to stand down. We won the fight, over,” her subspace module hummed.
She opened her mouth and let out a dragged out sigh. “Understood, Saloren. We’ll tow the Zeonite walkers, over.”
-VB-
Garma… felt humiliated.
Not only did he fail to capture the traitors, he lost all of the Zakus entrusted to him. Once news of his double failure reached his father and siblings, they will think he’s a useless brat. He might even get demoted.
“Fucckkkkk…!” he hissed out.
What would his sister think? Would she even trust him with anything after today? Was he going to end up being … being a poster boy?
Him? A Zabi? Reduced to being a poster boy…?!
“FUCK!” he screamed as tears welled up. The heat inside his head refused to die down, and his breathing came faster.
It was all heading down the gravity well, and he didn’t know what to do.
… No, he did know what to do.
One of his ships fired without his command. They caused this entire battle to happen in the first place.
He would simply report that to his father and siblings. It was one thing for it to be a failure but it was another thing entirely for this failure to have come about as a subordinate’s action. On top of that, the Phaetonites attacked first. They must have been prepared for them!
Yes!
There were spies! There were spies aboard and back in the principality. How else could they have been right here and right then to find the traitors?!
Because there were more traitors at home.
He didn’t fail!
It wasn’t his fault.
No… no… He just needed to find the traitors.