Trillion was confident and angry at the same time. Her twenty minutes were up and the enemy spacecraft had sent out what she assumed were missiles towards her location.

She sent a message to Ship asking him to redirect her force towards the approaching enemy force. He was almost within real-time speaking distance.

She made a mental note to get Atlas to create a mobile version of the Starnet. If she survived, she didn’t want to be without real-time communication with Ship again.

“Maybe you should consider surrendering?” Icarus suggested.

“Show some positivity,” she snapped back.

She had spent months thinking about how to attack the Dottiens. She had thought it would be easy. But now that she had a real army to face, she wasn’t so sure. “Look, it’s going to be just as hard for them as it is for me. But I’m going to win.”

“They have bigger ships,” Icarus said.  “Run by artificial intelligences – that are presumably designed for war.”

“Yes, but my plan is to have waves of assass-ANTs arriving at the same time,” Trillion said, a little annoyed that Icarus was questioning her. “Let’s see them stopping a wave of killer ANTs all hitting at the exact same time. And I have millions of these assass-ANTs.”

“Trillion, they just need one to survive to capture you and take you off the planet. Or one rogue missile to hit you and it’s over.”

“Icarus, stop with the negativity. I’m going to win. I have to win. If not for me, then for my children who still need to be seeded.”

Doubts crept over Trillion. She started to worry whether she could survive. Her mind started going around in circles.

Atlas pulled her out of it. “Let’s focus on what we can control. Icarus can you test your knowledge of the Dottien’s language to control them? Help them defend Trillion?”

Icarus nodded teleported out made a computer appear in front of him where he typed furiously. “let’s hope this works.”

 They looked over at the screen showing the planet. It turned purple then erupted with Dottiens flying off the planet and heading towards the incoming missiles.

‘At least they’re on my side’, she thought. 

She received a message from Ship at the same time as she saw the devastation. The true war had begun. Her assass-ANT’s near the front started to disintegrate. They just turned into dust.

Atlas studied that data. “I think those are laser weapons.” He typed a few lines on his computer. “We can’t see lasers out in space, but I’m going to use the available data to visualise it.” He typed again.

They watched again as the enemy war fleet flashed red in unison. Visible lasers streaked out from every single spacecraft. Thousands of them, all at once.

The first layer of assass-ANTs were vaporised – that was 12 per cent of them, just gone. She had sent a large wave – hundreds of thousands – assuming they would make it to the enemy. Each of the enemy ships had been targeted by at least 1,000 assass-ANTs and every single one of those assass-ANTs were now gone.  

None of her ships had any kind of weapon like that.

As if her luck couldn’t get any worse. She watched as the missiles General Walker sent to her location dodged the Dottiens like they were nothing. Skipping past them. Not even engaging. Just manoeuvring out of the way like it was a practised dance.

Ten of the missiles fired their engines towards her, suddenly slowing as they each hit the ground around her spacecraft in a circular pattern. They let off an electrical pulse and the view from her ship cameras blurred.

“Atlas, do you know what that was?”

Atlas disappeared then reappeared quickly, obviously researching the answer. “It looks like you’re trapped in some sort of magnetic field. It’s technology I’ve never seen before.”