POV ???
I enter the throne room and avoid eye contact with her Perfectfullness.
"What do you want?" asks Her Grace.
"I-I come bearing news Your Perfectfullness," I reply nervously.
"Then report," she says with that tone that makes it clear she is lucid.
"The investigation team has been lost," I report and brace for my imminent erasure.
"What?" she asks with a very dangerous voice.
"Th-They sent an emergency message saying they encountered l-l-living beings, Your Perfectfullness," I report with a full-body shudder.
The atmosphere becomes extremely heavy, and I feel like I am about to be destroyed. But before I collapse from fear, the feeling vanishes, and it's replaced by a feeling of absolute focus.
"It seems it is my lucky day. Send word to the fleets. I am calling for an Exterminatus. I shall lead it myself. It has been far too long since I have gotten to squish those filthy organics," she says.
I risk taking a peek at her face and see the same insanity that everyone knows had claimed her years ago. I wait carefully for when I can be dismissed, and when I am, I leave as swiftly as I can possibly manage.
POV Rio
It had been about 2 weeks since I had captured the Gem Warship. During that time, I split my time between studying the ship remains and interrogating the Gem captives. I had learned quite a bit about how Gem society worked. It was pretty close to what I remembered about the series. Honestly, that wasn't saying much as I watched the series only once when I was a kid and never saw the sequels or whatever else happened with that series. As such, my memories were pretty unclear about what was what.
The most notable things I learned were that they had just recently ended a long and bloody civil war, which caused the erasing of two diamonds. Erasing seemed to be a sort of weapon developed during the war to kill a Gem permanently. Which, by pure coincidence or rather likely, this was planned, it was the schematics I was gifted during Christmas. At first, I only suspected it as the explanation of how erasing worked was vague, as the captured Gems didn't know how exactly it worked. It was deemed too dangerous, and as such, only the Diamonds were permitted to have them.
'Which is quite unfortunate for them, I suppose.'
It seems the War had caused something to snap inside the remaining Diamonds. Three of five now remained, yes, five. It turned out the Diamond Authority had been around for 60k years and had built up quite a lot in that time. From what I learned, Blue Diamond lives in self-imposed exile on her personal planet. Yellow Diamond turned into a killing psychopath that did everything in their power to exterminate all organic life. And that included primitive and plant life. Nothing was spared from her Exterminatus, as they called it. Then there was White Diamond, whom most Gems didn't really know if they existed anymore, as nobody had seen her in well over 30k years.
All of this was not great news for me, but it was also sort of good news. For one, the Diamond Authority was severely weakened and, with incapable leadership were far less of a threat. They had lost a large amount of their empire during the war, as it turns out, hollowing out their planets and then mining out even those parts makes them highly unstable to outside attacks. With some basic orbital bombardment, I could erase most, if not all, of their remaining planets. Which was only 9 at this point.
The other great news was that Gems take years to form, and they current had no operational Kindergartens. Nor any usable colonies, so if they struck back at us, which I predicted they would, we could retaliate and get rid of this issue quite quickly. As for the Gems themselves, they were few in number as Yellow Diamond would randomly choose to purge 'rebels', which didn't mean shattering or mind wipes but full erasure. As such, they had perhaps around 100k or fewer remaining Gems.
(AN: Kindergartens are the name of the place where new Gems are created. I have to explain this, as in a previous fic, I had to remind people what it was repeatedly. They have nothing to do with Kindergarten on Earth. )
Speaking of that relatiation I had already set up plenty of traps in the predicted approach vector the enemy fleet would take. The fleet would consist of about 30-40 ships, most being Hand Ships. With a Head Ship and an Arm Ship or two. Each of those ships is exactly what you would expect based on the name. In terms of danger they were basically non-existent. The differences between the various models are mostly in size. They would have a slight increase in power based on size, but it wouldn't be massive, as the ships still have that material limitation.
Beep Beep
"Speak of the Devil, and they doth appear," I say with a smirk.
I teleport to the Bridge of the Grand Herald and sit in the commander's chair.
"Status report," I order.
"Sensors have picked up several objects coming out of Hyperspace. Estimated 37 vessels. The trap is in place and ready to be triggered when the time is right," Lt John reports.
"All personnel, to your battle stations!" I order.
POV Admiral Citrine
As we exit FTL, the first thing I notice is a damaged vessel in front of us. I recognized the model of the ship, which made me wary.
"Ma'am, the ship is confirmed to be a Zetan vessel. Scans show it has no power and is adrift. How do we proceed?" asks a Peridot.
"I thought we confirmed the Zetans left this system?" Comments another Peridot.
"Silence! Approach the vessel and investigate what happened to it. Let us hope this wasn't an error," I say nervously.
Numerous smaller strike craft are released and swarm towards the derelict vessel.
"Ma'am, the scans can't seem to detect if there are any survivors aboard," reports the first mate.
"What do you mean? We should be able to get something from it," I ask.
"We're getting heavy interference," They reply.
"But how can they be jamming us... If they have no power... call back the ships!" I order in a panic.
"But ma'am, it's just one ship?" a peridot complains.
"That's an order! All craft take evasive action!" I ordered over the fleet-wide comms.
Our ship banks to the left, and it was then that I got the news I was fearing.
"Admiral, we have enemy ships at hard right!" the first mate reports.
"It's a trap!" I yell with a pale face, as I knew this failure would be my end.
Mere seconds later, we got a visual of the enemy vessels, and I felt my jaw slacken at the sheer size of one of the enemys vessel. The ship was larger than I had ever seen a ship. It was larger than most asteroids.
"Look at the size of that thing!" my first mate says.
"Cut the chatter, all ships close the distance and engage the enemy! For the Diamonds!" I order.
We get an alert about energy build-up on the enemy side, but we don't get time to respond before a bright light appears and erases our only Head Ship. That was the ship our Diamond was on, which greatly shook us.
"Send a rescue ship at once! Then prepare to retreat," I order, despite knowing retreat would mean immediate execution.
As I was ordering this, a sudden shudder hit the ship, and I was nearly knocked prone.
"What just happened?" I ask.
"I-It was an explosion. T-The fleet, it's almost gone..." reports a Peridot with clear fear.
I look over the scans and see that of the 37 capital ships we arrived with, only 11 remained. We still had 26 smaller strike craft, but that didn't matter as in the next second their numbers were cut in half. Then the enemy fired at us and decimated even more of our ships.
"How can they still hit us at this range!?" my first mate says in a panic.
"Get it together, Lieutenant! Pull our ships back and towards Yellow Diamond we will..." I go to order, but never finish that order as the bridge is erased at that moment.
POV Rio
"This is just sad," I say aloud.
"Yeah, I thought this would be an epic space battle, but this feels like we're the school yard bully," Cait says with disappointment.
The enemy ships were being torn to pieces with hardly any effort on my part. I almost regretted activating Battle Meditation. It was overkill. In just the one minute it lasted, we had managed to destroy all but one vessel which tried to flee, but I activated Battlefield Control to prevent them from using their FTL drive. Which meant all that was left was to clean up all the survivors. Which would likely be easy, as if any were particularly strong, we had massive star destroyers ready to obliterate them.
It was during this cleanup that I learned we had gotten far more than I could have ever hoped. Yellow Diamond herself was present and seemed to still be formed. She tried to make things hard by shooting electiricty but our ships just absorbed the energy and added it to their power reserves. Eventually, we overwhelmed her and she was poofed.
We quickly moved everyone into their various cells. I also controlled an already captured Gem to bubble Yellow Diamond to prevent her from regenerating. The ship debris was also quickly scrapped or stored in some Workshops by using platforms creatively.
'Now we counterattack.'