Aboard the Bosa flagship.
Piercing alarms filled the command room as Giant Stick Insects nervously issued one order after another.
"Commander, the enemy planetary fortress has locked onto our secondary flagship!"
"The attack has been launched!"
"Preliminary assessment identifies it as an antimatter cannon blast. Sixty seconds until impact!"
A complex mix of emotions flickered in the Bosa Commander's eyes: worry, panic, and a measure of doubt.
Among interstellar civilizations, a planetary fortress was a symbol of strength.
No matter what level of civilization built it, it was the most powerful weapon available to civilizations of that level!
The reason was simple.
Turning an enormous planet or moon into a giant weapon with real combat capability consumed a staggering amount of resources!
Without question, this was a symbol of a civilization's strength!
With the Lord's support behind it, the Bosa Civilization possessed a wealth of advanced technology, yet it still had no planetary fortress of its own.
Nor was this limited to the Bosa Civilization. Almost none of the vassal civilizations possessed their own planetary fortresses!
That alone spoke volumes about the power of a planetary fortress.
Unless... the planetary fortress before them was merely a showpiece, impressive to look at but useless in practice.
Such things were far from uncommon in the universe.
Among the vassal civilizations the Bosa Commander knew of alone, quite a few were attempting to build such showpieces, and several had already produced these Fake Planetary Fortresses.
Although the returns fell short of the investment, making them outright losing propositions, they could intimidate people!
In an interstellar war, deploying a planetary fortress thousands of kilometers in diameter was a silent deterrent to any hostile civilization!
Under normal circumstances, no civilization would be foolish enough to test a planetary fortress's power with its own warships.
That