As early as the distant year 336 AD, the first Christmas was born on the Ancient Earth of the Origin System. On that day, people sang, mourned, and memorialized a religious mythological figure whose very existence was anyone’s guess, and from then on, they began to spread this tradition to every place touched by their culture.
By the year 4006 AD, on December 21st—theoretically the 3,671st Christmas—humanity’s footprints had long since traversed the visible starry sky. Based in the better part of the Orion Arm, they forged ahead into a distant future that had once existed only in fantasy.
—And amidst the flames, they reclaimed the blades of war.
...
In the midsection of the Orion Arm, near the Perseus Arm, a medium-sized warship from the Human Union was underway.
The bridge was unmanned. Power unit technicians moved back and forth among the crisscrossing, massive mechanical arms. The four standard-issue battery groups on the port and starboard sides were undergoing routine maintenance. In the main command center, light screens hovered as core operators performed their duties... while the five-member standard staff group and their captain looked up at the various parameters and scanning images on the screens.
After a moment, an operator suddenly looked up and shouted, "Commander, enemy forces detected!"
"I see them." The female captain’s voice was calm. "Commence Drift Raid tactics. All units, prepare."
Following a unified "Yes, Ma'am!", the entire ship received instructions from the main command center, and they quickly began preparations.
Lock seats and engineering machinery. Temporarily cease partial operations.
Don standard-issue spacesuits.
Check helmet seals and pressure stability.
Link vital sign monitors and life-support systems.
Upload all metrics to the auxiliary AI.
Distribute weapons.
Check weapons and standardize configuration to five units—that is, five magazines of ammunition.
Vent the cabins to prevent secondary crises like decompression airflow if the hull were breached.
Magnetically secure stray items.
Deactivate defense shield support systems.
Deactivate gravity maintenance systems.
Kill the main thrusters, with power unit technicians performing a rapid cooling operation.
In less than ten minutes, every light on this medium warship was extinguished from top to bottom, inside and out. Within the hull, only the fluorescent floor indicators emitted a faint glimmer, illuminating figures drifting through the interior corridors in zero gravity.
At the fifteen-minute mark, the ship deactivated its internal temperature maintenance system. It began to cool and maintain silence, softly isolating the flow of personnel between sectors. All communication was conducted through various military tactical hand signals supplemented by phrases displayed on eyepieces, further reducing the possibility of detection by the enemy.
At the forty-second minute, the ship’s cooling was complete. Small propulsion units activated, applying counter-force to the warship from multiple directions in the form of cold gas jets.
At the fifty-eighth minute, the warship officially began a relatively slow end-over-end rotation. Using this motion, it ejected nearly two hundred miniature targets from its stern, each about the size of a swaddled human infant. Before ejection, a specific force was applied to each, allowing them to drift naturally into deep space faster than the warship itself.
At exactly one hour, the warship was fully locked down. Under the bitter cold and silence, even the AI’s support mainframe ran at minimum power.
From this moment on, the modest-sized warship looked like a discarded piece of rubber, tumbling randomly through the void, drifting forward.
In this state, under any scanning technology within the Milky Way based on physical theories of the material realm, it would be temporarily classified as "space debris."
This was the "Drift" in "Drift Raid."
In normal circumstances, this tactic could be paired with intermittent distress broadcasts on specific channels, disguising the ship as a battered freighter or a lost cargo container that had encountered a space disaster to lure the enemy in.
But... under the current circumstances—
[It is a small formation of three ships. Target numbers exceed ours. Suggesting beyond-visual-range strike,] signaled a staff member who had secured himself to his seat, words appearing one by one on his optical eyepiece.
[I checked an hour ago. The guidance weapon repair process is incomplete. Using them prematurely would only result in an explosion,] the female captain replied while checking her seat’s locking system. [Our railgun range is also within their theoretical scanning radius, and they require preheating, which conflicts with the tactic.]
[Now we can only place our hopes on the ‘little gifts’,] another staff member joined the conversation.
[Check the status of all personnel locks,] the captain ordered the core operations group.
Soon, she received a satisfactory response: [All personnel secured.]
Good.
The young female captain nodded—now she didn't have to worry about anyone in her crew having their neck snapped or arms torn off by heavy pressure during the potential ship-wide G-force overload of combat.
Thinking of this, the young commander from the First Military Academy, "Wanhuan," wanted to sigh.
—Please. Although the "Strategy and Tactics" instructors at the academy had emphasized countless times that "situations change in an instant in actual combat, and morale drops, spy sabotage, and carelessness—which cannot be fully simulated in games or command systems—can lead a war to irrecoverable failure"...
To be honest, after seeing someone actually get their throat slit by a necklace during a 7G overload due to carelessness for the first time, she sincerely felt that compared to actual command, where some "genius" might pull a stunt at any step, she would rather spend a few more rounds pitting her wits against Lei Ting... no, she should say, against "Sun Star" in the simulation system.
Of course, with battle imminent, this wasn't a thought that required much rumination.
[If only our ship were the ‘United Victory’. Right, Captain?] Wanhuan’s adjutant, Alan, gestured animatedly beside her.
[Shut up, Alan. We don’t need you to liven the atmosphere here,] Wanhuan ruthlessly shot down his next comment.
—The "United Victory" was a true behemoth, one of the flagships of the First Legion. Legion Commander Valiana and "Sun Star" were usually stationed aboard it under normal conditions, with two other flagships even handling its combat readiness duties...
With the small scout crew under her, being able to fly this "Crater 900" was already good enough. He dared to dream of the "United Victory"?
Brother, you really are a bit too bold in your imagination!!
Wanhuan clasped her hands, silently staring at the magnified scanning monitor on her eyepiece.
In fact, once those "little gifts" were thrown out, even their own information group couldn't track their specific locations—because they didn't dare keep the signal transceivers currently issued by the Human Union on them. Those things were like bright fireworks in the "Gah" wave-scanning systems; in the early days of the war, the human side had suffered greatly because of them.
As for now, whether those "little gifts"—preset to "detect large clusters of crystals" and "detect objects around similar explosion points"—would be suddenly triggered by something else halfway...
Well, war was a gamble. If you won, you achieved victory at the smallest cost; if you lost, everyone threw their lives away together. For thousands of years, it had always been thus!
Upon successfully approaching the enemy, Wanhuan saw a massive feedback of nuclear explosions on the scanning monitor. Nearly half of the two hundred ship-borne light nuclear bombs disguised as meteorite fragments had hit their targets. The rest were adjusting their directions, striking the crystalline friends from afar for a second time.
One spherical, cluster-like ship was instantly obliterated. The other two also sustained losses. The "Gah" side was clearly shocked and enraged; they reacted quickly, firing a rain of crystal shards from their thick crystalline pillars.
These crystal shards, and the clusters themselves, were byproducts of the "Gah" condensing their psychic power. They had no life or consciousness, but when used as weapons, their hardness was more than sufficient.
In the Gah’s space combat system, this move functioned similarly to the Human Union’s point-defense cannons. Its primary purpose was to use high-frequency, high-speed kinetic strikes to intercept "explosive space junk" thrown by the enemy.
"A successful strike! Comrades, well done!" Captain Wanhuan slammed her hand on the armrest, causing the restraint rings to snap shut around her arms with a *clack*. Simultaneously, she roared: "Ignite power units! Battery groups ready, psychic mecha pilots ready, begin railgun preheating, restart power to all systems! Full ship assault!"
"Yes, Ma'am!!!"
Amidst the decisive response, the warship’s lights flickered back on with a *thrum*. The four conventional battery groups opened the hull and extended their terrifyingly massive muzzles. The railguns at the front lit up with waves of blue light like an electric surge. The main thrusters roared, venting pale blue flames that erupted violently, pushing the warship forward like a sharp sword piercing straight toward the distant enemy!
………………
…………
……
"...The above is the final record sent by the ‘Crater 900’ ship-borne AI."
Susanna’s synthesized mechanical voice was as calm as if this weren't a sacrifice.
"At the scene, we discovered a perfectly spherical vacuum zone approximately thirty thousand kilometers in diameter. It is large enough to gouge a massive basin out of an ordinary planet. The ‘Crater 900’ and its entire crew have vanished without a trace, and those two ‘Gah’ ships were likewise destroyed. We detected no traces of weapons or residual energy. Even the electromagnetic waves inside are ‘newcomers’, as if..."
"As if that spherical vacuum zone was directly ‘deleted’ from this world." Valiana’s brow was furrowed as she stared intently at the photos from the scene.
Just as Susanna said, on that battlefield floating with space debris—mostly various meteorite fragments—there existed a massive, invisible, wall-less, yet clearly visible vacuum zone.
Within it, all matter seemed to have ceased to exist...
Only at the edge of the vacuum zone did some meteorite fragments, which had been mostly sliced away in that instant, tell of the great horror that had descended, their surfaces cut as smooth as mirrors.
"...Where is ‘Sun Star’?" Valiana asked suddenly.
"..."
Susanna was silent for a moment before reporting faithfully: "According to current intelligence—which may or may not be outdated—theoretically, he should be on the other side of the Federation near Abrisak, preparing to coordinate with the Collective for a military operation against the ‘Sea Lord’."
"Abrisak... that’s far." Valiana sighed. "Seal the files. We’ll investigate this matter when he returns."
Susanna was somewhat confused—with something like this happening in the First Legion’s current patrol sector, why wasn't Valiana immediately investigating the cause further?
To be honest, this didn't fit the Legion Commander’s usual style of behavior at all.
Facing her confusion, Valiana smiled.
"Sometimes, one has to admit that they can still get hurt." She patted her left shoulder, lifting the gold-trimmed commander’s cape on that side and rolling up her sleeve to show Susanna the remains of a medical bandage stretching from her shoulder to her arm.
Susanna was shocked. "This... isn't this from that battle months ago..."
"Yes. That day, I failed to save those people and left myself with this injury." Valiana shrugged. "You see, playing it safe is necessary. My ability is primarily defensive; once I fail to defend or the shield is pierced, I can’t protect anything."
"No, that’s not it!" Susanna argued in a low voice. "At that time, your ability even enveloped the entire planet..."
A pale blue, sea-urchin-like spiked shield—its thorny, damage-reflecting surface slowly turning inward, compressing the locked enemy until they couldn't even escape... What a glorious power that was. Valiana was absolutely a top-tier combatant among A-ranks. Why was she "playing it safe" now because of an injury that wouldn't heal for the time being?!
Could it be... she had received some secret order, or knew something more?
"This is life, Susan. You always have to learn to give up ‘this’ to protect ‘that’. Now that I’ve given up the battle and glory before my eyes, naturally, I have other things I must do."
Valiana smiled, gently patting Susanna’s shoulder, producing a dull metallic echo.
Then, she turned back and issued an order: "The fleet is returning. Evacuate all residents of habitable planets within Sector 3490. We are abandoning this area and contracting our defense lines!"
***
| Chinese | English | Notes/Explanation |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| 漂流突袭 | Drift Raid | A stealth tactic involving shutting down all ship systems to mimic space debris. |
| 万幻 | Wanhuan | The name/callsign of the young female captain of Crater 900. |
| 环形山900 | Crater 900 | The name of the medium-sized scout warship. |
| 联合胜利号 | United Victory | A flagship of the First Legion. |
| 阿兰 | Alan | Wanhuan's adjutant. |
| 加赫 | Gah | A crystalline alien enemy race. |
| 瓦利安娜 | Valiana | Commander of the First Legion. |
| 苏珊娜 | Susanna | An AI or mechanical-voiced subordinate. |
| 海主 | Sea Lord | A target of a military operation (likely a powerful entity). |
| 亚布里萨克 | Abrisak | A location/system in the Federation. |
| 3490星区 | Sector 3490 | The star sector being abandoned by the First Legion. |
