Sneak Peek - The Last Angel: The Hungry Stars, Chapter 10 (Patreon)

I have the rough draft for this chapter complete, which means it's time to edit and red-draft. Since it's a bit of a long one - 10 pages and ~8000 words - that will take a while, but I'm aiming to have it posted by the end of the week. In the meantime, to whet your appetite for what's to come, here's an excerpt from what's to come. Enjoy.

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Statistically speaking, shift travel was very safe. Millions of starships spent their entire operational lives trekking across the stars experiencing no (or merely minor) problems. Of course, that was cold comfort to those who ran afoul of circumstance, their starships dragged down into the endless depths of shiftspace never to be seen again, ejected across dimensional barriers as nothing more than atomic and radiation bursts or hurling themselves away from immediate destruction, only to find themselves crippled and left adrift far from any hope of rescue. Even if travel through it became safer every year, shiftspace remained even more unforgiving than the void.

Today at least, it allowed Lakhesis and its three souls to pass unharmed, if not unhindered. Moments of sensor blindness passed as the strike cruiser continued to vent away the roiling extradimensional energies that swirled and skittered around her hull, an inescapable vulnerability. Communications and sensors were blacked out, and the vessel’s own systems had to stabilize themselves after the transition back to realspace. Modern Compact vessels were blind for more than a minute and a half while older starships had to endure much longer periods of helplessness; Earth’s earliest explorers had had to deal with hours of paralysis.

Finally, Lahkesis could see again. Her sensors stretched out, engines came online and comm nodes strained into the void, already sifting through local space for any threats. Cerulean Two tasked Grace and Allyria with simulation as she went over the first influx of data. Her reversion was almost as smooth as a normal warp jump, with a positional accuracy of 76.1%. On regular FTL travel, a reversion that was accurate to 64.7% of your calculations was considered exceptional navigation. For AIs in the Confederate fleet, that same metric was only nominal. For this set of coordinates, Grace only managed a 37.8% accuracy, putting the simulated strike cruiser more than ninety million kilometers off-target and much too close to BV-03-03A-04A’s warp limit for her comfort. This time Allyria beat her by 2.7 percent, the Verrish’s tintas wriggling happily. She did her best, but the fact was that Grace had a better head for void duties than she did, so any time Allyria surpassed the human was cause for celebration (and a little bit of teasing).

“Deploying recon drones,” Leah announced. She’d entered the system well behind the seventh planet, a large violet and blue gas giant with a moderate axial tilt.

“Uplinks are online, security protocols look good,” Allyria said as she swung over to Drone Operations. There was a recon platform stationed just over the planet’s northern pole. It would be several minutes before they were close enough to contact  it, and Lakhesis had already put herself onto a course towards the world for the first check-in on this leg of their patrol. The strike cruiser was running under emissions control, keeping her engines on low thrust. The emergence point had been chosen to shield Lakhesis’s arrival from anything further in-system; if the likelihood of there being anything here was low, that did not mean non-existent.

As it turned out,  BV-03-03A-04A did have visitors.

“Contact,” Leah announced as the first of her drone’s to clear the planet’s horizon reported in. “Multiple contacts detected.”

Red markers splashed across the holo tank in the center of the command deck. Grace and Allyria both swung around. Grace spoke first as Allyria moved to the Sensor station. “What is it?”

“Multiple drive signatures, more than three hundred million klicks in-system,” the Verrish report. “They’re running hot. Looks like... five, maybe six.”

“Confirmed,” Leah replied. “Six drive wakes identified. Five have high probability of belonging to Compact military distortion drives. The sixth is anomlaous. Unknown pattern. Analyzing.” Without missing a beat, she continued. “Engaging stealth systems. Cloak operational.” There was no discernible change aboard the bridge, but the strike cruiser was now all but invisible to anything but active sensors.”

“What are we looking at? Grace inquired.

“Still analyzing,” Leah replied. A moment passed, then: “This is interesting.”

“What, what is it?”

“I don’t believe the sixth vessel is Compact,” Leah announced. “The other five vessels are attacking it.”