The Last Angel: The Hungry Stars - Chapter 42 Sneak Peek (Patreon)

From without and within, Lakhesis burned.

Her hull melted from the intensity of the energy released and what wasn’t vapourized began to crumble, eaten away like grasslands consumed by a wildfire. Nothing could stop it, and if left unchecked a strange matter reaction could consume planets. A strike cruiser was nothing compared to that and Cerulean Two felt herself dying. No, she realized grimly. Not just dying. She was being eaten alive. In less than five minutes, nothing of her would be left.

For the immortals have appointed a proper time for each thing upon the Earth.

But she was a warship, a daughter of Red One, a child of fire and steel and part of the Fleet. She would not meekly accept her fate. Even as her hull dissolved and she lost connections through her body, Cerulean Two turned part of her mind to dealing with this likely fatal situation. The other focused upon much more visceral concerns.

If I burn, you burn with me.

The stealth cruiser’s AI had kept her from damaging any critical systems and her own firewalls and defences, many created by Red One to prevent Parasitic cyber-contamination had stymied its attempts to do the same to her ship-self. Both of them were nearly evenly matched, but Cerulean Two had found a weakness in her foe. It was aggressive and cunning, but it lacked experience and needed guidance to be more than an attack dog.

Cerulean Two spared no time for flicker of irony that that sentiment brought. Not so long ago, she had been much more like Phantom-1 than she would have cared to admit, but any sense of camaraderie or empathy for the other intelligence that might have formed from that recognition was bulldozed by hate, and dark exultation.

Chase me, she taunted it as her shields collapsed under the macron barrage.

Come get me, she whispered to it as an unknown energy signature spiked aboard the enemy cruiser.

You’re close now, she cajoled it as she burned.

And it followed her, savaging every attempt she made to get into critical systems and she let it kill her over and over. She weakened, and it was not all feigned. Her attacks became slower and less numerous. It was winning. She didn’t have to pretend that, nor she she have to pretend how damaged she was.

But as her life faded, she saw the weakness and she struck at it, launching several feints at other irrelevant systems. The half-breed intelligence continued its attack, but it kept its defences focused around primary systems. Her target was a subsidiary sensor array. Low priority, no major connections to key systems, but there was a chance… there were diagnostic algorithms within this node that connected to the rest of the cruiser’s sensor net. She wasn’t interested in most of them. There was – there had to be, or this was all for nothing…

Yes! A burnout trigger, common to each sensor node. If a high enough intensity of input was reached, the sensor would shut down to prevent damage. If enough of these triggers activated, sections of the grid, or the entire sensor net would black out, trading temporary blindness against the risk of permanent burnout. All modern vessels had similar precautions, and the League was no exception. The grid was currently offline, protecting the cruiser from the flash of energy put out by the start of the strange matter reaction. Diagnostics were running as trickle-fed monitors gauged the external environment, individual computers whispering to each other as they determined whether or not to recommend that Phantom-1 open its eyes again. As soon as they made that recommendation, the Enemy AI would acknowledge it and the cruiser would resume fire on what was left of Cerulean-Two’s ship-self.

Not this time, she thought, slithering a cord of intent into the sensor node. She felt the stirring of alert within the ship’s uplink and the sudden surge of movement from the AI towards her, but they weren’t fast enough.

+high-intensity input alert+ she whispered to the Enemy system, mimicking its authentication protocols. //sensor grid in danger. Estimate 15.73 seconds until recommend restoration//

The node accepted her data, sharing it with the others. Outside Phantom-1, they believed, was still a dangerously intense inferno and the cruiser refused to open its eyes. The sensors stayed offline. Not for long; the AI would override that order within seconds. But maybe… maybe Cerulean had bought herself just enough time.