Chapter 99: Battle at the Interstellar Dock (I)

by cnwebnovels

Picking up where the last chapter left off — I had wiped out the raiders myself and taken seven of their fighter craft. I wanted to transfer credit for all of it to the sheep-like mother and daughter. The gesture only frightened them badly. Clearly, no one had ever treated them with this kind of regard before; they were so nervous their sheep horns showed through again.

I had no idea how much reward that merit would actually bring, and it meant nothing to me anyway. Better to give it to the mother and daughter who’d just been scared half to death.

The garrison captain confirmed that merit could indeed be transferred. He took down the mother and daughter’s identities, recorded their ID numbers, and told them to return to Bixian Star or HD Star to claim their reward.

I stopped concerning myself with what became of the pair after that and followed the captain to the garrison’s camp.

Yaomei Star’s garrison resembled something like Earth’s border-defense troops, and conditions were fairly bare-bones. It had a main command with several detachments, each responsible for its own sector.

Clearly, the garrison’s mission was defense first — not offense, and certainly not bandit suppression.

Which was exactly why the interstellar pirates felt bold enough to rob merchant ships in the open space beyond the planet.

What I hadn’t expected was that the garrison commander here had once served under Xuanze’s father, and he could actually sense a faint trace of Xuanze within me.

I told him I’d come to test my cosmic abilities and had no interest in ordinary combat. But if they ever ran into something truly hard to chew through, they were to call on me without hesitation. Besides, I was only a quantum projection from the Blue Planet — even dying in battle wouldn’t mean much. I’d simply wake up again back home.

The commander, a pure military man with little familiarity with the Blue Planet, seemed to take it as something more advanced even than HD Star. I didn’t bother correcting him. I only wanted him to remember to call me in when a real fight came along.

And so I spent a full seven days on Yaomei Star without a single battle to show for it.

On the morning of the eighth day, bored out of my mind, I went alone to the transfer dock for interstellar merchant ships.

Being so close to HD Star, Yaomei Star did brisk business as a transit hub. From what I’d heard, the raiders here mostly robbed for money and rarely made off with an entire ship’s cargo — so while merchant vessels took the occasional small loss, traffic through the dock had never really suffered for it.

The dock itself stunned me with its scale. The architecture alone was grand enough, but what really struck me were the sheer size of the ships coming and going — colossal things that pressed down on the senses just by existing. Next to this, Bixian Star’s own spacecraft dock looked like a toy.

Calling it a “dock” almost undersold it — a thriving marketplace had grown up around the place, full of people coming and going, with commercial towns, warehouses, and office towers ringing it on every side. Skyscrapers rose one after another, lending the whole district a buzzing energy.

I’d never seen HD Star itself, so I couldn’t say how it compared. But set against Bixian Star’s eerie quiet and sprawling biodiversity, Yaomei Star felt like a different world entirely — far livelier, far busier.

The locals here were almost all humanoid. Only the interstellar merchants passing through showed any of the stranger native forms — though even among them, taking human shape was clearly still fashionable. Most communication happened through force of consciousness rather than spoken word, which spared everyone the usual translation headaches.

I stopped into a restaurant and took a window seat on the second floor, watching the street below. It could have passed for a city on Earth.

Then, almost by accident, my force of consciousness brushed against a crocodile-headed merchant in the distance, directing a crew of bionic laborers unloading cargo at the dock. Most freight here moved through full automation, but for certain precious goods, owners still preferred to hire bionics by hand.

The instant my consciousness touched him, he reacted — whipping his head around toward me, a flicker of alarm crossing his face before he smoothed it away. That flicker alone was enough to tell me something was wrong.

So I turned my attention to his cargo containers.

Every one of them sat behind electromagnetic shielding — deliberately concealed. The goods had already cleared the dock’s electronic inspection, and yet something about them still felt off to me.

I drew my cosmic force of consciousness down into a single fine thread and pressed it into one of the containers. The seal was tight, but no seal is ever perfect — there’s always a screw hole, a hairline seam.

Since gaining my cosmic abilities, I’d learned to fuse them with mind arts, refining my force of consciousness down to something as fine and formless as water.

The moment even a sliver of it slipped through, I condensed it into a tiny avatar inside.

The container was pitch dark, but with my penetrating-wave ability, the darkness made no difference at all.

Inside — to my shock — were people. Armed soldiers, every one of them.

Bodies without souls yet installed, packed in dense, motionless rows. This single container alone held at least a hundred of them.

I understood immediately: if these were living bodies with souls intact, the dock’s scanners would have caught them without question. But separate the flesh from the sea of consciousness during transport, and the same scanners might never notice a thing.

I withdrew and checked a dozen more of the merchant’s containers — every one held the same silent ranks of bodies. Where their seas of consciousness had gone, I couldn’t yet say.

But a merchant working this hard to slip past electronic detection was clearly hiding something.

Perhaps this was an operation concealing a substantial military force. Ordinary sabotage or robbery wouldn’t call for a thousand-plus special troops. And soldiers capable of separating their sea of consciousness from their body in the first place couldn’t be ordinary rank-and-file — that took real skill to pull off.

I sent word at once, through force of consciousness, to Yaomei Star’s garrison commander, telling him to send troops immediately to seal off the area and search it. Under no circumstances could soul and flesh be allowed to rejoin — otherwise this would turn into a full battle between armies.

The commander seemed caught entirely off guard; he’d never encountered anything like it. He even wondered aloud whether these might just be custom-built bionic goods, nothing worth alarm over.

His indifference surprised me. Still — I was only a guest here. If he wanted to shrug it off, that was his business. It wasn’t my home to defend.

Even so, since I’d raised the alarm, he did send a detachment — four or five hundred troops, lightly armed.

Once the detachment leader arrived, he ordered his men to gather up all the containers and brought the crocodile-headed merchant in for questioning.

I stayed at my window seat, watching it all unfold.

Just as I expected.

The merchant snapped. One strike, and the detachment leader was dead. He tore the containers open with a burst of force of consciousness, and the soulless soldiers inside — souls now arriving from some unseen source — rose in wave after wave, leaping free of their containers.

The garrison troops opened fire, and the fighting broke out in earnest.

The crocodile-headed merchant transformed on the spot and tore into the crowd, sweeping through the garrison line like a storm.

I still didn’t intervene. I only sent word again to the commander, describing exactly what was unfolding, and told him to scramble fighters here immediately to wipe the enemy out.

The fighters were slow to arrive. By the time they did, the detachment had already been all but annihilated by the container soldiers and the merchant together.

I noted that the container soldiers had taken barely any losses — a well-trained force, clearly. I just didn’t know yet what they were after.

When the garrison’s fighters finally showed up, the soldiers had already scattered, melting into the crowds of local merchants and residents. The fighters had no clean shots left and could only blow apart the now-empty containers.

The reason I hadn’t lifted a hand was simple: I’d laid out the situation and its stakes to the commander plainly enough, and he still hadn’t taken it seriously. That made it his problem to own. I owed him nothing when it came to an ordinary fight.

I’d told him from the moment I arrived — no ordinary battles. Only when the real trouble showed up.

The container soldiers soon split into small squads, seizing one department of the dock after another and driving out the administrators. Before the garrison’s main force even arrived, they’d already taken the entire dock district.

I stayed exactly where I was, up on the second floor, watching through the window without moving.

I hadn’t gone looking for trouble with any of them. What I hadn’t expected was that the merchant would come looking for me first.

Maybe it was because every other patron in the restaurant had already been chased out by the soldiers — everyone but me. Any soldier bold enough to try driving me out, I simply turned back into the lifeless body he’d started as.

Sure enough, before long, the crocodile-headed merchant walked up and studied me carefully.

“You’re not local,” he said. “And you don’t look like HD Star, either. So who exactly are you?”

“I haven’t interfered with your business,” I said. “No need for you to interfere with mine. I’m just a passerby, here to watch the show.”

“This is a war zone now,” he said. “Not a theater. You should leave.”

“No. I’d still like to know what you’re planning next. Why not tell me yourself? Tell me, and maybe I will leave.”

“Seems you think you’ve got some tricks up your sleeve,” he said. “Which is why you’re not afraid. Am I right?”

I gave a cold laugh and let the question drop.

He swept a hand, and five container soldiers surged in from behind him, guns raised, and opened fire on me. I was already prepared. Using cosmic force of consciousness — the same trick I’d used against Pu Liuqian — I redirected their aim straight back at him. He startled, tried to dodge, but he was half a beat too slow. Three of the soldiers had already fired. The other two, seeing where their shots would land, held back.

No matter how fast he moved, he couldn’t outrun a laser.

Three burn-holes punched clean through his body at once, and the pain sent him scrambling to patch himself back together with force of consciousness.

But since they’d struck first, they’d forfeited any claim to my restraint.

I’d only refused to join an ordinary fight — that never meant I couldn’t fight at all. I drove my force of consciousness straight into the soldiers’ minds and turned all five guns back on the merchant.

His body was riddled with holes in moments — useless now, beyond repair. But his force of consciousness still had teeth; he actually tried to seize my own sea of consciousness by force. I crushed the attempt almost instantly. Cut off, he turned toward his own soldiers, hunting for a new host to occupy.

Not a chance. I wasn’t about to let that happen. I drove his fleeing consciousness back with my own, forcing it back into that ruined body of his.

There was nowhere left for him to go — everyone nearby had already fled from him, and his shattered sea of consciousness couldn’t travel far in that state anyway. In the end, all he could manage to force out through his broken mind was:

“Who are you?”

“Tell me what you’re planning,” I said, “and I’ll tell you in return. I might even spare you a soldier’s body to settle into.”

But the merchant only clenched his jaw, closed his eyes — and died. Just like that.

This guy would rather die than talk, and the container soldiers likely knew nothing anyway. So I sent them along to join their dead employer.

Then I settled back at the window and kept watching.

I realized my seat gave me a clean view of the entire dock.

But my little display hadn’t gone unnoticed — a squad of container soldiers on the perimeter had spotted something and were running my way.

I simply shifted my form into the merchant’s likeness and walked down to meet them halfway.

“No need,” I said. “Everyone’s dead. Fall back to your posts.”

They turned and ran back without another word.

I couldn’t very well return to my old seat after that, so instead I made my way toward the dock’s scheduling room, curious to finally see what these people were actually after.