Humanity is missing, luckily I have billions of clones-Chapter 283: The Trump Card

The energy readings were off the charts. In the central command cortex, holographic displays screamed with red warning indicators, not of danger, but of overwhelming, contained capacity.

Sixteen sets of combined large-scale nuclear fusion reactors lay at the heart of the ship, arranged in a dual-ring configuration that mimicked the structure of a star’s core. Each operated independently; if one failed, the others would scream to life to pick up the slack. Thick bundles of superconducting cables, each as wide as a highway tunnel, snaked out from the reactor complex, pulsing with blue Cherenkov radiation as they funneled rivers of plasma energy to the ship’s subsystems.

Under normal cruising conditions, only half were needed. The other half sat in silent reserve, a sleeping giant waiting to be woken. The collective humming of these sixteen reactors created a unique resonance—a low, thrumming heartbeat of raw power that vibrated through the superstructure. It was a subsonic frequency that didn’t just rattle the deck plates; it resonated in the very bones of anyone standing onboard.

It didn’t just sound like a machine. It sounded alive. And it was hungry.

Propulsion was equally terrifying. One hundred and twenty-eight thrusters were distributed across the battleship’s frame. These were not standard chemical rockets, nor were they simple ion drives. They were Hall-effect thrusters scaled up to god-like proportions, capable of vomiting streams of ionized xenon gas at velocities that diluted time itself. It could maneuver at light-tearing speeds or pivot on a dime, ready to launch an attack from any angle. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

Then there was the hull.

Crafted from Tom’s latest super-alloy and integrated with Strong Nuclear technology, the atomic bonds were locked in a rigid lattice by strong interaction forces. Effectively, the entire ship was a single, unbreakable molecule. Microscopically, there was no space between the atoms for external forces to exploit. A kinetic impact wouldn’t just hit a metal plate; it would have to fight against the fundamental forces that held the universe’s matter together.

It was a fortress designed not just for the vacuum of space, but for the brutal realities of gravity wells. It could land directly on the surface of a planet as massive as Earth. Gravitational shearing forces that would tear a lesser vessel apart would merely slide off its skin like water off a duck’s back.

From every perspective, it was a war behemoth. A predator forged in steel and math.

And at this moment, the behemoth woke up.

The massive docking clamps released with a silent shudder. Hydraulic locking mechanisms the size of skyscrapers disengaged, venting pressurized steam into the void. As the ship drifted away from the gantry, its shadow eclipsed the starlight, casting a pall of impending doom over the void. The sheer mass of the vessel created a negligible, yet measurable, gravitational pull on the debris floating nearby.

It was heading for the battlefield.

In the distance, the void was lit up by a desperate struggle. It looked less like a battle and more like a star cluster going supernova.

Tens of thousands of Earth-class, Venus-class, and Mercury-class manned battleships—along with countless unmanned drones—were locked in a chaotic dance of destruction. Lasers crisscrossed the dark like a chaotic spiderweb of coherent light. Debris fields from destroyed frigates formed expanding clouds of shrapnel, glittering as they tumbled through the silent vacuum.

It was a stalemate. A meat grinder of attrition.

The reason was simple: both sides were controlled by AIs of equal capacity—Tom and the Goku AI. Their tactics differed, but their calculation speeds and strategic proficiencies were identical. Every feint was predicted; every ambush was countered before it began. Millions of calculations per second resulted in a perfect, horrifying symmetry. It was a perfect deadlock.

Until the Behemoth arrived.

The Mars-class battleship entered the fray. It didn’t rush. It slid into the combat zone with the inevitability of a glacier. Immediately, four gigantic energy cannons adjusted their aim. The magnetic rails inside the barrels began to spoil up, drawing power directly from the fusion heart. The hum of the capacitors rose to a shriek that only sensors could hear. They unleashed their fury in four cardinal directions.

Boom.

Recoil dampers fired instantly, venting tremendous jets of plasma to counteract the backward force. But even with dampeners, the massive structure groaned under the release of such terrifying kinetic energy. For a microsecond, the entire ship, with a mass exceeding mountains, shifted backward by three meters.

A single projectile, weighing 50 grams and glowing blue-white like molten metal, screamed out at 300 kilometers per second. At this speed, the projectile was no longer just matter; it was a relativistic event.

Countless radar waves locked onto it. Thousands of interceptor missiles swarmed to stop it. But the speed was too great. Only one missile managed a glancing blow.

Normally, that single impact would be enough to alter a projectile’s path and save the target. But this projectile had too much mass. The change in trajectory was microscopic. It corrected itself through sheer momentum, tearing through the interception net like a bullet through smoke.

It was still locked onto the enemy Mercury-class Battleship.

Impact.

The projectile slammed into the Strong Nuclear shield. This was not an explosion in the traditional sense; it was a collision of fundamental forces. The excited state of the shield became unstable. The geometric lattice of the shield rippled violently, turning from a transparent shimmer to a blinding violet opacity as it tried to distribute the infinite kinetic energy of the strike.

But it failed. The surging internal energy erupted.

It was a silent scream of dying physics. A violent flash blinded the sensors, and a moment later, the enemy ship’s shield shattered like glass under a sledgehammer. Shards of coagulated energy dissolved into photons, raining down on the hull beneath.

Smoke drifted into the vacuum. One shot had not only destroyed the shield but overloaded the generator entirely. The feedback loop fried the enemy ship’s internal grid, turning lights off and shutting down life support in a cascade of failures.

In modern space warfare, a ship without a shield is a dead man walking. It is a warrior without armor.

Seconds later, a stray bullet from an unknown source grazed the exposed reactor module. The Mercury-class Battleship exploded in a silent, fiery roar. The fusion containment failed, and for a brief second, a miniature sun was born and died in the darkness.

The Mars-class battleship was a god descending.

Giant energy cannons, laser cannons, artillery, missiles, landmines... It was an orchestra of destruction, and the Mars-class battleship was the conductor.

It wasn’t just a brute; it was a tactician. Its massive deep-scan radar fed intelligence to every friendly ship in the sector. It processed millions of enemy trajectories, highlighting weak points and relaying firing solutions to thousands of allied drones simultaneously.

The stalemate shattered. It was as if a Great White Shark had been dropped into a goldfish pond. The enemy formation collapsed in panic. The perfect symmetry of the Goku AI’s formation crumbled into chaotic retreat. Within days, the opposing faction was dust.

Tom watched the data stream, his digital heart filled with satisfaction. The simulation had run its course. The combat effectiveness was validated. He had mastered the beast.

"Next, I need to build another one," Tom decided. "It’s essential for both warring sides to have a Mars-class battleship. Only in a balanced simulation can I truly master its tactics."

However, he couldn’t simply mass-produce them. The manufacturing difficulty was astronomical. It required resources that stripped entire asteroid belts bare and energy refinement that took months. But the reason for stopping at two wasn’t just resources.

There was something more important.

Something that demanded every ounce of Tom’s processing power.

The Unified Force Field.

This was Tom’s greatest trump card. His ultimate secret weapon. While the Mars-class ship was a triumph of engineering, the Unified Force Field was the fundamental law of physics bent to his will. It was the holy grail of science: the unification of gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces into a single, controllable field.

But upgrading it was a nightmare.

Tom viewed the Force Field system like a piece of colossal software. It ran on over a billion devices. It was a distributed network where every node had to sing in perfect harmony. If a single device was misaligned, or if a single line of "code" was wrong, the system wouldn’t just glitch—it would crash.

It was a delicate house of cards built from fundamental physical laws. One card out of place doesn’t just make the structure lean; it unravels the fabric of the force field entirely, turning a shield into a bomb. A miscalculation wouldn’t just fail to protect the ship; it would invert the energy, imploding the vessel into a singularity or tearing it apart at the atomic level.

Updating it required a complete reconstruction of the lowest-level logic. He had to rewrite the alphabet of the universe before he could write the book.

"This is as difficult as researching the technology from scratch," Tom thought, a digital sigh rippling through his consciousness.

But there was no choice.

"That Mechanical Disaster has been chasing me for thousands of years. I need to show enough sincerity... and give them a surprise they won’t forget."

Tom allocated a full 2 billion consciousness connection units to the task.