But slowly the Hadarak minion swarms were diminishing in that area, with their Wardens being almost completely ignored as they tried to engage but Paul kept his fleet far from them, wanting to only engage the minions. When the Hadarak ordered them back in order to blunt this tactic, Paul sent flankers around to make single strafing runs against the outer edges of the planetary growths which extended beyond the partially visible core of the planet by distance multiples of greater than 50 compared to the planet’s diameter.
Paul was trying to sever chunks off the supply lines that ran through them all, and the Wardens were too slow to intercept. Only the minions could, but to do so they had to leave the Wardens behind…and when they did Paul switched his attention to the minions…who then retreated and Paul ordered the flanking assaults again.
It was a giant chess match going on, and while Paul was winning through attrition something else was definitely up and Roger did not know what. He was still watching the Hadarak forces in his sector to see if they would move to reinforce the only battle going on at present, but so far they were holding firm as only some Warden reinforcements were being seen coming from the black hole itself. All the visible defenses were staying put and not being drawn out of position.
Then in the blink of an eye it totally shifted. One moment everything was cyclical and predictable, with Paul killing minions in exchange for a few lost drones at an insignificant rate compared to everything else here, but in numbers that would have made any observer blanch prior to the first Gateway assault…then a moment later a huge growth completely detached from the planet near the base, with a ripple of destruction traveling up it and breaking off smaller branches in random spots.
Somehow the Veloqueen had gotten all the way down to the planet and were assaulting it directly…with the mass of minions and Wardens nowhere near to help as the growth’s own Essence weaponry was being blocked by the swarms of Veloqueen acting in conjunction and swimming in and around the growths seemingly oblivious. They had open space to maneuver without the minion clouds blocking their paths, and they were doing catastrophic damage to one of the 28 primary growths out from the planet that held spawn points for Mainline warships…which was the equivalent of a shipyard…in excess of 150,000.
And those ripples were Essence weapon cascades traveling up the now detached growth, sucking the life out of the defenses in it and causing it to ‘Wither’ as the Veloqueen used a technique that backfed the Hadarak’s own Essence defenses into the Wither effect, tapping into their wells and using it to continue the ripple onward, simultaneously draining their power to defend itself with.
And with the stem now severed, no Essence could flow out from the planet to reinforce it, with the end result being that the Veloqueen maneuver had just cut a piece off of their giant biological city and isolated it from the rest…and the Veloqueen were assaulting it with virtual impunity as the minion swarms slowly turned away from Paul’s fleet and raced to get back to the planet.
At which point Roger knew Paul would up his game, and he wasn’t disappointed. Paul moved immediately and hit the retreating minion clouds full on, dropping the hammer and making them choose between the two targets…at which point their command and control system broke down and the defenders split their attention, leaving too few to counter Paul’s ships effectively while the time delay in the others arriving back at the planet would leave the Veloqueen with an easy escape vector should they choose to use it, but right now they were busy assaulting the growth and would continue to do so until forcibly stopped.
Suddenly the Hadarak did not have enough units in the field to do both due to the bad positioning, and that was when all the other Hadarak in the system began to reposition at the same time, meaning they had to have sent out an Essence burst command, probably from the Spice Lords sitting safely down in the black hole. They had the luxury of nearly instantaneous communication if they chose to use enough Essence to send it out, and it appeared they had just done so, otherwise the time lag would have been visible in the enemy’s movements across the system.
They’d just panicked, and now the rest of the Star Force fleet was going to have holes manifesting to take advantage of…and that’s how this battle was now going to go down. Roger didn’t need to ask permission or coordinate with the others. This blind combined assault was child’s play for the trailblazers and the Grand Admirals they had selected and trained, and all Roger needed was to see the opportunity arise…at which point he ordered his fleet to begin emergency jumps towards the black hole, pulling on their engines far harder than normal within a system, as he walked over to his astromech alcove and mentally detached from the command nexus interlink.
He’d have to focus to make the Borg connection to the computer system that was the astromech, for his Core would have to extend out from his body and into it, making it an extension of himself in order to augment his brain power enough to micromanage as much of the coming battle as he could, but his fleet was still too large to do that with every function on every drone and warship. His crews would handle a little bit each, with Roger giving orders about who was to
