Star Ship Girl Era: My Shipgirls Are Too Overpowered-Chapter 106: Betrayal From Within!!?

The battle should have ended in a simple cleanup.

Instead, a strange scene appeared on Solenne’s tactical display.

One of the two surviving capital ships suddenly lost cohesion in its escort ring, not because Rhoswen had hit it again, but because several of its own smaller ships turned their guns inward and started firing at the vessels around it.

At the same time, the nearly one hundred archaeological and transport ships that had been hiding behind the combat line did not try to flee, did not try to reinforce, and did not even try to reposition. They simply stayed where they were, as if they were waiting to see who would win.

Solenne narrowed her eyes slightly as she studied the shift.

"This does not look like they are trying to escape," she said. "But instead it is a mutiny?"

Rhoswen, who was already closing on the damaged formation, spoke next over the line.

"Commander, one of the surviving capital ships is trying to contact us. Their captain says he wants to surrender."

That made Aurelian pause for half a second.

He had expected a hard finish, not this.

Still, surrender was useful, especially from a fleet like this.

"Accept it," he said at once. "Solenne, send strike craft to cover them. Lysara, remove every small hostile ship still trying to fight around that surrendering capital hull. Rhoswen, move in and have the mech board. Disarm them before anyone changes their mind."

The replies came at once.

"Understood."

Lysara’s laser batteries, which had already proven how cruel they could be to exposed hulls, began another precise firing cycle.

This time, she did not waste energy on large targets. She cut apart the smaller Kharov warships that were still trying to keep the mutiny under control, each beam taking a ship at the worst possible angle and leaving the surrendering capital ship untouched.

Solenne’s returning aircraft changed course midflight and swung over the surrendering group, creating a shield of pressure over them while her remaining attack wings kept the rest of the battlefield pinned down.

Rhoswen arrived moments later like a hammer, but this time she did not ram.

She deployed boarding frames first, then locked her ship into an angle that made it clear she could tear the surrendered vessel open if anyone inside got stupid.

The rest of the resistance collapsed quickly after that.

Of the original archaeological fleet, only one capital ship and twenty-three smaller starships remained intact enough to be worth anything, and all of them surrendered one after another once they realized the battle was truly over.

The non-combat ships were even easier.

Mechs boarded them in waves, sealed the bridges, and took control before anyone inside could organize a serious response.

Most of those vessels were barely guarded anyway, which told Aurelian quite a bit before he even questioned a single enemy.

This fleet had not been built entirely on loyalty.

It had been built on coercion.

By the time the boarding actions ended, the battlefield had become a graveyard of crippled and drifting ships.

But there were many things of value: hulls worth towing, records worth taking, and living prisoners worth interrogating.

And when the first officers who had surrendered were brought out under guard, Aurelian immediately noticed something else.

Many of them were not Kharov.

They looked far closer to human than the Kharov did, though not exactly the same. Their ears were longer and sharper, similar to those of elves he had read about in a storybook when he was a kid.

But these people did not have that holiness or aloofness; instead, they looked very tired, like they had spent a long time working for people they disliked.

Meanwhile, the dead were mostly the Kharov.

The living, on many of those ships, were not.

Aurelian had one of the surrendered captains brought to Solenne’s command deck as soon as the field was stable enough to allow it.

Before the questioning began, the man underwent a quick chip infusion. A simple linguistic bridge was enough.

Aurelian was not in the mood to speak cryptically when he had the tech to make it all easier.

Once that was done, the captain was escorted in under guard.

He was tall, pale, and composed for someone whose fleet had just been annihilated, though the strain around his eyes made it clear that composure was the only thing he still had.

He introduced himself as Vaeren.

Aurelian studied him for a second, then got straight to the point.

"You surrendered even before the battle was decided?" he said. "That was the right decision, as I am now curious as to why you did that. Now tell me why your fleet turned on itself before I had even finished destroying it."

Vaeren took a breath before answering.

"The ships weren’t really theirs," he said. "The Kharov ran the show, but the crews were mostly conquered, people. Once your ambush killed the leaders and destroyed the big ships, the crews had no reason to keep fighting for them."

His voice remained calm, but Aurelian could hear the hatred under it.

"The Kharov did not inspire loyalty. They enforced it."

That matched the battlefield.

Aurelian kept going.

"What are you?"

Vaeren did not flinch at the question.

"My people are called the Aeliri," he said. "The Kharov call us lesser auxiliaries when they are being polite, and worse things when they are not. Once, we had our own state in this region. Now we serve in fleets like this one, or in mines, or in laboratories."

That made Aurelian’s eyes narrow slightly.

As this answered a lot of questions he had in his mind.

As this explains how they were empire-builders of a brutal, inefficient kind, the type that ruled through fear and extraction until something stronger cut into them.

He let Vaeren continue.

The story that followed had information that Aurelian did not have, so he did not stop him from telling.

The Kharov did indeed control a large stretch of surrounding space, but their so-called dominion was less stable than it first looked.

They ruled many star systems and dozens of inhabited worlds, but their control was uneven, and much of it depended on local warlords, provincial fleets, and subordinate species forced to fill the gaps in their structure.

Their overall technological base had risen high enough to field many strong Tier III ships and some systems that approached Tier IV standards, but they had never truly reached a stable higher stage across the whole state.

Most importantly, they lacked the ability to construct proper stargates.

Their expansion moved through slower lanes, unstable corridors, and regional control, which meant their empire looked larger than it really was.

In practice, many distant sectors were isolated from one another, and so long as local rulers paid tribute and kept producing, the center often ignored how they ran things.

As soon as Aurelian heard this, he knew that this was not a unified star empire.

It was a brutal hierarchy held together by distance, fear, and partial technology.

Vaeren also confirmed something else.

The force that had attacked Larkspur Haven was not the full weight of some central Kharov military machine.

It had been a one-branch force under a regional power, an ambitious expansion arm among several.

Then Vaeren spoke of the neighboring civilization, the Kharov, that the Kharov hated most in this area. The details became even more useful.