Free Onslaught (Rise of the Empire Book 6) by Ivan Kal

will not come to fruition; the end of the Ra’a’zani starts now. You are nothing now. Your civilization will end by our hand,” she said, and closed the channel.
    Tag’r’ron watched the empty space where the holo of the Human had been, his mind still not believing that this was happening. The rest of the room was quiet, no one saying anything, until suddenly the holo showing the Human fleet started flashing.
    “Dakar! The Humans are opening fire!”

Chapter Seven
     
    As soon as Aileen closed the link, Johanna ordered the fleet to fire. While Aileen had talked with the Ra’a’zani, she had assigned targets to her fleet. Her ships opened fire with their missiles and long-range energy weapons, and the Ra’a’zani ships and defense platforms started dying.
    “How much do you think before they are ready to talk again?” Johanna asked.
    Aileen grimaced. “They might not, but if they come to their senses, it will be after we take the orbit.”
    Johanna nodded. That had always been a possibility. “You should get ready; we will move to the surface and the next stage after we clear their defenses.”
    Aileen nodded, a bit shaken, and walked out of the command center. Johanna leaned her head to the back of her chair, and the access points on the back of her neck made connection with the Watchtower interface in her chair. Her vision changed as she suddenly found herself in space looking at her fleet. With a thought, she started sending orders to her ships.
    ***
    Force Leader Andros Venter sat in the command chair of his ship—the dreadnought Risen—and watched the holo in front of him attentively. Orders from the Fleet Commander came through the holo and Andros acknowledged them. His ship was in the front line of the fleet, leading the assault on the Ra’a’zani fleet. Half of the Ra’a’zani fleet was composed of their class 1 ships, the same class that Andros had fought at Sol, 450-meter-long patrol ships. The second most was their class 2 with 200 ships, which were about a kilometer long and equivalent to the Empire’s cruisers. Lastly, there were 30 and 20 of their largest ships, classes 3 and 4, respectively. Their class 3 fell somewhere between the Empire’s cruisers and battleships at 1750 meters in length, and their class 4 was larger than the Empire’s battleship at 2500 meters in length, but still smaller than the Empire’s dreadnoughts. All Ra’a’zani ships followed the same design, that of squashed, irregular boxes covered in small, scale-like plates.
    As Andros watched the battle and the Ra’a’zani class 1 ships dying at range, he saw their larger classes moving from the back to shield them. One of their class 4 ships moved in front of the Ra’a’zani formation, just outside of the range of Andros’s ship.
    “Move us into position and target that ship’s drives, Weapons Handler. Full spread proton beams, three seconds cycle. Prepare k-turrets one and three for fire,” Andros ordered as he highlighted the ship in question on his c-board.
    The 3000-meter-long arrowhead-shaped dreadnought moved out of the fleet’s formation, its laser point defense striking down any missile that drew close enough to the ship.
    “I have a lock,” the Weapons Handler said.
    “Fire,” Andros ordered.
    “Firing.”
    The new Empire ships were much different than those before them; they had sacrificed the sheer amount of kinetic weapons tonnage for more power. The dreadnoughts still had a much larger arsenal than the other classes, but gone were the times where they could cover the space with countless kinetic shells; there was no need for it.
    The dreadnought class possessed twenty-two heavy proton beam emitters, an upgrade of their particle beam weapons. A simple frequency shift and a particle discovered in the data from the sphere had increased the power of their weapons by 900 percent, and one side effect was that the beam was now visible to the naked eye. Each emitter was capable of holding the