Free Noble V: Greylancer by Hideyuki Kikuchi

away as if skipping off an invisible
     spherical surface.
    When the fleet came within three thousand kilometers of the moon, a swarm of OSB aircraft
     rose up from the surface.
    “Move to single combat maneuvers. When you’ve destroyed your target, after me.”
    A human field general typically directed operations from the rear. But a Noble of
     any mettle led his men into battle.
    The attack order was not “Forward,” but “After me.” These were Greylancer’s chosen
     words.
    Noblesse oblige —the obligation borne by humans of high birth, royalty and nobility, in return for
     their high ranking. Driven by this obligation, the Nobility always stood at the vanguard
     of their fleet. Cowards were they that shouted “Forward!” from a position of safety.
     Noble warriors simply said, “After me,” and were the first to draw weapons fire.
    And so too did the Nobility’s greatest warrior. But were not Nobles immortal? No,
     the enemy’s primary weapon was not the atomic cannon but what followed.
    The OSB fired a spread of graviton spheres. When they came into contact with Noble
     aircraft, they neutralized the antigravitational propulsion field. One after the next,
     the ion engines of the bat-shaped aircraft flamed on.
    The atomic cannon followed, destroying the aircraft. Then, as the jettisoned pilots
     plummeted through space, a barrage of stakes and steel arrows rained down to impale
     them.
    Greylancer threaded his chariot past the spheres, destroyed them as he passed, and
     closed in on the moon base.
    The feeling of movement was imperceptible in gravitational field propulsion. No matter
     how fast he spun, aside from the visual change, Greylancer was incapable of perceiving
     three-dimensional movement from within his chariot.
    “Do not fail me, rear squadron.”
    A peculiarly shaped spherical building encircled by rings came into view ahead.
    The antiproton cannons affixed on either side of the chariot poured hot beams into
     the barrier shielding the building.
    The antiproton beam was capable of vaporizing protons and all matter in existence.
    Yet the beams glanced off the barrier wall and only vaporized the unlucky OSB craft
     in the vicinity.
    It was a deadly gamble. Would the Military Bureau’s dimensional cutter on Earth be
     able to disrupt the enemy’s barrier from three hundred thousand kilometers away?
    If the cutter failed, Greylancer would fly into the barrier and be reduced to dust.
     And if the cutter were even a thousandth of a second off, Greylancer would be banished
     to another dimension.
    The Greater Noble did not flinch and pointed the chariot toward the barrier.
    Was it his split-second evasive skills he trusted? The Military Bureau’s invention?
     Or his own luck?
    The barrier tore open.
    As the chariot plunged into the white one-by-three-kilometer tear in the dimension,
     the antiproton stream reversed direction and the vortex dragged Greylancer’s craft
     down onto the lunar surface, right into the OSB’s base.
    †
    Inside the oddly shaped building there existed silver-colored automatons. Having no
     natural shape of their own, the OSB had created organic beings by forming and discarding
     body parts, then stitching the disparate anatomies together. The patchwork beings
     were designed to carry out simple tasks. In parallel, the OSBs developed new and upgraded
     incarnations of robots until finally, combining the two offspring populations, they
     perfected organisms that might best be called cybernetic beings.
    Then the protean OSBs adopted the form of their own cybernetic creations and gave
     rise to a unique civilization.
    The OSB appeared to possess a curiosity rivaling that of any other intelligent beings
     in the universe.
    It was only a matter of time before they ventured into the ocean of constellations.
     In fact, the imminent destruction of their mother planet had made the endeavor all
     but imperative. As their sun began to expand due to an abnormal nuclear fusion and