Chapter 1586: Cold Night is Approaching

“This is Enterprise. An unknown object is identified at coordinates… It is approaching your ship at a speed of 60,000 kilometers per hour. Firing is approved, I repeat, firing is approved!”

“This is Frontier, roger that. The ship has entered level one preparedness, ammunition is being loaded…”

Inside the bridge of Frontier, the entire ship’s officers and soldiers were ready.

The images from Enterprise showed an abnormal spot behind the asteroid and they suspect it may be traces of Harmony civilization. Although this observational anomaly did appear before, they made the same decision every time.

It was better to kill one hundred innocents than to let one perpetrator go free.

Frontier, which led the charge, immediately started the secondary engine and adjusted the bow of the ship to the asteroid’s direction. Enterprise quickly moved closer to Frontier, while Judgement, which was relatively far away, began to slow down. The bow also aimed at the asteroid in the front and opened the torpedo compartment at the bottom.

“The mass projectile is loaded.”

“Capacitor charging…”

“The charge is complete!”

“FIRE!”

The gunner inside the bridge followed the command of the captain and pressed down on the touchpad without hesitation.

The white light flickered for a second, and the fifty-meter-long cylindrical mass projectile was accelerated to the limit by the magnetic coil and blasted toward the asteroid at an incredible speed. Under the effect of the conservation of momentum, the starship suddenly halted.

Even the people who stood in the bridge felt the huge recoil from the bow of the ship.

The ten-ton heavy-duty tungsten core projectile was almost the most destructive weapon on Frontier. Based on the trajectory calculation, if the projectile landed on the target, the asteroid would be torn into pieces.

Frontier Captain, Yue Dongwen’s eyes were locked on the twinkling blue dot that approached the asteroid marked in red. He had squeezed his hands so hard that his palms sweated.

Suddenly, the vector parameter next to the red dot on the star chart suddenly changed and deviated from the original orbit. Yue Dongwen’s pupils shrank slightly, and it seemed that the worm ship was equipped with some kind of battlefield scanning equipment…or organs.

The original critical strike was avoided, and the cylindrical mass projectile whizzed by the asteroid that was in front of it and hit another asteroid in the Kuiper belt, which directly blasted it into fragments.

Without any hesitation, Yue Dongwen made a decisive decision and ordered.

“Launch the starcrafts! Open the torpedo cabin!”

“ROGER!”

In the carrier hangar, pilots with helmets boarded the Stingray A-1s one after another. The starcrafts were moved by the mechanical arm into the tubular ejection runway one after another, and under the acceleration of the magnetic track, they launched one after another in the worm ship’s direction.

At the same time, on the other side of the battlefield.

Judgement, which had already prepared for firing, launched a nuclear torpedo.

In space operations, the lethality of thermonuclear weapons was quite limited because of the lack of gas shock waves. However, the engineers of Future Military modified the nuclear torpedo. They added a metal liner with strong thermal conductivity inside the warhead.

It was needless to say how powerful the high-velocity superplastic jet driven by thermonuclear weapon was…

An orange-red tail light flowed behind the engine of the nuclear torpedo.

The nuclear torpedo, with a built-in guidance function, locked onto the asteroid after two phases of accelerations and trajectory changes. It blocked all possible escape routes and directly hit the target! At the moment when this nuclear torpedo exploded, the high-velocity superplastic jet instantly penetrated the asteroid and released a terrifying amount of kinetic energy into the asteroid in a fan-shaped direction.

The asteroid with a radius of over a hundred meters started to show lava-colored cracks on the surface as if there was a thermal reaction that happened on the inside, and in the slow-motioned camera, it exploded into countless pieces.

And with the explosion of this cover, the worm ship that waved its tentacles and was hidden behind the asteroid finally revealed itself in front of everyone.

“Target is hit! Asteroid shattered!”

“The body is exposed!”

“Confirm the target is a worm ship from Harmony civilization. It is suspected to be a Harmony civilization colonization ship!”

Although the torpedo hit the target, there was no cheering in the bridge of Judgement.

Everyone knew that it was only the disguise of the worm ship shattered.

“Is this the legendary colonization ship… only so small?” Luo Hong’s gaze was firmly locked on the squid-shaped worm ship on the screen.

Hundreds of meters wide and high, if the tentacles behind the ship were fully extended, it was likely two kilometers or even three kilometers long, which would be much larger than the Seagull-class starship, but compared to the Envoy class, it was still quite fragile.

Intuition told him that if it were a Harmony colonization ship, it was likely much better than this.

But after he scanned through the star map, the radio detection system told him this was the only one.

The worm ship in front of them was the only invader!

“The firepower on the panel is ready!”

“The capacitor is fully charged!”

“FIRE!”

The right side was aimed at the worm ship, and the scale-like plates on the side armor of Enterprise popped open, followed by continuous bursts of white light, just like the stars at midnight. The small mass projectiles accelerated to the limit and whizzed towards the airspace where the worm ship was located. It almost blocked off all escape routes.

This volley lasted for a long time.

Perhaps it knew that it could no longer escape, the worm ship simply gave up meaningless maneuvers, increased its speed, and propelled in the direction of Frontier. Mass projectiles hit its front one after another, and the flesh-red armor started to peel off unknown fleshy pieces.

At this moment, the front of the worm ship suddenly turned red.

When Luo Hong saw the image on the holographic screen and a warning sign suddenly appeared in his mind. Almost instinctively, he shouted at the combat personnel in the bridge.

“STOP THE BOMBARDMENT! DEPLOY SHIELD!”

The bombardment stopped, and a light-yellow film appeared from the side of Enterprise. Almost at the same time, a red-light beam flickered suddenly and scraped by the side of Enterprise’s graviton shield.

Luo Hong began to sweat profusely when he saw the shield energy bar plummet.

If it were not for his quick response, the consequences would be unimaginable…

On the other side, two hundred starcrafts on Frontier all lifted off.

Together with the other two hundred unmanned crafts, four hundred starcrafts formed a circular attack formation at a position of 700,000 kilometers in front of Frontier and turned into a series of blue light spots that actively attacked the worm ship.

At the same time, the fleshy membrane on the side of the opposing worm ship suddenly bulged, and then burst open. Small worm ships were ejected from the flesh membrane, and under the action of an unknown driving force, they waved their slender tentacles and encountered the starcrafts of Frontier.

The distance between the worm ship and Frontier was only one million kilometers.

The two sides were already in a close-distance dog fight…