Of course, the reason Yu Lian still hadn't received any news from the front wasn't that their expeditionary fleet had been wiped out. By then, the combined main forces of the two expeditionary fleets gathered inside the Devil's Maze Nebula were already more than three times the Marauders' estimated total strength. And with King Soren and Admiral Connaris both being the "dig in and fight it out" type, there was almost no chance of giving the Marauder fleet an opening to exploit.
The problem was that, perhaps because this region bore traces of having been artificially altered by the ancient Enlighteners, the gravitational forces between stars fluctuated in ways that defied common sense, even though the Celestial Labyrinth had indeed collapsed. Communications and travel between star systems had been affected.
On top of that, Marauder raiding fleets really were prowling the supply routes. They couldn't always find prey, but they could always find an opportunity to destroy unmanned gravitational-wave beacons and deep-space probes. It was essentially the space-age equivalent of cutting telephone wires and chopping down utility poles.
Just how much structural damage this reckless tactic could inflict on the expeditionary army remained unclear, but it had certainly dealt a serious blow to communications with the rear. Originally, messages relayed through gravitational-wave beacons took only a little over a week to travel from the frontline headquarters to New Lushun. Now, that time had doubled, and there was even a chance they wouldn't get through at all.
There was no helping it. It was always much faster to destroy than to build. What's more, even though the Empire and the Commonwealth possessed vastly greater forces than their enemy—and the former had so many ships to spare that it could use battlecruisers as supply-convoy escorts—they still couldn't station heavy forces in every